General Discussion

Originally posted by Sharajat

Originally posted by Lustmord

Originally posted by Lustmord 

But back on subject, I have a good job, healthcare and 401k.

I worked hard 40 hours a week for what I have. Explain to me why I should have to pay taxes to support people who refuse to work.

If their job doesn't offer healthcare, why can't they find a different job? Even Walmart offers healthcare.

Why can't they pay $200 per month to get private healthcare?

Children are already covered, so why does it have to be free for the loser adults?

 

 

Still waiting for a reply.

Okay, despite the fact I'm feeding a racist, here we go:

Your taxes do NOT just support people who do not work.  The largest single chunk of your taxes goes to protecting your fat ass from people who would happily kill you.  If you don't like that, I suggest you go tell one of those government paid leeches with an M-16 exactly how little you need them.  My feeling is that because they're good  people they won't actually beat the snot out of you.  Everyone near you, on the other hand...

Why should you offer welfare?  Well, lets consider the effects of a society that doesn't.  Even ignoring the human effects of allowing people to starve to death (those sorts of callous societies don't last long or do well, in the long run) there are a lot of negatives to having a large class of unemployed who will literally do ANYTHING to get the food and housing they need to survive.  That's more or less why they instituted debtor's prison back in the day.  So, you're paying for it one way or the other.

Second, consider the nature of poverty.  The only difference between a poor black child and you or your kid (assuming anyone stomachs you long enough to breed, and hell, Mississippi is proving that stupidity, meanness, and racism can sustain itself long after Darwin would like all those people dead) is an accident of birth.  The single MOST valuable thing that humanity has ever produced, and ever will produce, is human thought.  Great thinkers have given us back thousands of times the cost of their upbringing.  If even one Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla, or Albert Einstein is saved from poverty, the net impact to human civilization is a great step forward in wealth and knowledge.   This is net value to our society.

Third, our healthcare system.  The US healthcare system is vastly inefficient.  With the most expensive healthcare system in the world, we are behind many public healthcare systems that spend a lot less.  If your suggestion is that each person pay $200 to insurance companies, why not send that to the government?  EVIDENCE suggests that they will be more efficient and less wasteful with it than megacorps.  Public healthcare is more fair, more logical, and better.

Your shortsighted attitude ignores the fact that you rely on a network of people to survive.  Growing and supporting that network benefits everyone.  Back when people were self-sufficient and didn't need to help others, they lived in mud huts.  Don't think this is a coincidence.

 

Hey Lustmord, still waiting for a reply. 

Originally posted by Fishermage

Please don't chop up my words.

Are food costs spiralling out of control? Are people cryng for universal food service? no. That proves my point.

I'm not saying anything is that simple. Socialism however, to the extent that it is used anywhere, fails. The more socialistic, the worse things are. That works everywhere at all times and all places, without exception.

I decided that the private sector is better because in every place in every country in the history of earth, and we have hundreds of examples, it's better every time.

The reason the entire world isn't capitalism is because only socialism keeps the people at the top on top, and that's what we have, more and more socialism, and more and more oligarchies taking control. Capitalism is a threat to the rich and powerful, so it is being killed by them wherever they can kill it.

As far as successful socialist countries there are NONE. The on;y successful countries are capitalist countries, and they all have mixed economies, parasites that they support with the wealth produced by capitalism. The more capitalistic they are, the better they are doing -- and in some sense the more socialism they can support -- like a successful family can support the ne'er do well brother.

The problemwith the private mercanary argument is, that MIGHT work, but we HAVE a constritutional liberal society, so I want to move forward from there. If we were starting out fresh I'd be willing to experiment with private security firms, but i like how the rule of law and constitutionalism evolved and feel it is best to stick with that UNTIL we start forming interpplanetary economies -- then we can experiment with full anarcho-capitalist systems. For now that is unrealistic. I am a pragmatist.

Capitalism as we know it definitly comes from government and rule of law and constitutionalism. I love all of that. I am not an anarchist. I am a liberal.

In the united states land came from government distribution of it -- again, the product of a liberal constitutional order. I know it came from government. I am a believer in liberal democracy, just not socialism.

 

 

Why not?  You're responding point by point just like me.  The only thing that chopping up the post does is make it easier for the reader to understand which point a given section is responding to.  If you want to do it this way, fine, but if I have to waste time clarifying something to you that would have been obvious otherwise, I'm going back to section by section.

You must be aware of the differences between food and healthcare/education as commodities.  Food has finite demand and requires relatively low skilled labor, to name a couple of differences.

I suppose it's too much to ask for you to back up your claims about the relative success rates of the two systems.  Actually, your claims are in a way unfalsifiable, since you'll attribute any success in a country to market elements and blame any failure on the government.  However, could you at least try to explain the mechanism by which this phenomenon occurs?

What is a government besides a large, powerful corporation?  What is a corporation besides a small government?  What is so different about their natures that you have absolute faith in the success of one and the failure of the other?

In fact, if you have the kind of free market that allows monopolies and makes them the only thing between a worker and starvation, they have basically as much power as a government.  Perhaps more than a democratic government, since they're not accountable to the voters.  So what's so different about them that makes them superior?

If capitalism was the magic national panacaea you claim it to be, I'm sure most leaders would embrace it.  It would be much better to be the leader of a rich, advanced, and successful country than a poor and dying one.  Even if only a minority of leaders went this way, the socialist countries would not have survived in the more warlike eras. 

I think you're being rather inconsistant with your terminology.  One minute the US and Europe are socialist, the next they're capitalistic with mixed economies?

So why is security different than any other industry?  You've been insisting this whole time that the private sector always does everything better than the government, why not put it in charge of defense, if you're so sure?  Why is there any doubt that it would work better, when you have none when it comes to other industries?  You're basically saying you want to use the less effective option out of tradition.

So if you acknowledge that wealth began with the government re-distributing stolen land, isn't property itself force?  The only thing that makes a piece of creation yours and not someone else's is if you have the force to keep them off it.  You didn't make that land, you didn't buy it from the creator, only force makes it yours.  This doesn't mean anything in the real world, of course, but philosophically, I don't see how taking the use of land away from others is any less theft than taxation.

You're really setting up a false dichotomy with capitalism vs. socialism.  It is, like I keep saying but you refuse to acknowledge, like arguing whether it's better to have modern medicine or an immune system.  You can have both.  They're not necessarily at odds with each other. 

Would it ever be a rational economic decision for anyone but the government to build large scale infrastructure?  A road and highway network benefits almost everyone, but only a little bit in the short term.  As I see it, it's not worth the investment unless you directly benefit from everyone else's success, the way the government does through taxation. 

Just out of curiosity, would you be in favor of putting an end to road building and maintenance?   Repealing child labor laws?  Anti employment discrimination laws?  Getting rid of the FDA?

This doesn't have much to do with this discussion, but I think it's pretty demonstrably false that everyone has the same opportunity regardless of class.  Yes, once in awhile you see someone from a poor family get rich, but the vast majority of the poor stay poor, and the rich tend to say rich.  If it was truly equal, wouldn't the background of each social class contain proportional numbers of rich and poor? 

Originally posted by Impacatus

Originally posted by Fishermage

Please don't chop up my words.

Are food costs spiralling out of control? Are people cryng for universal food service? no. That proves my point.

I'm not saying anything is that simple. Socialism however, to the extent that it is used anywhere, fails. The more socialistic, the worse things are. That works everywhere at all times and all places, without exception.

I decided that the private sector is better because in every place in every country in the history of earth, and we have hundreds of examples, it's better every time.

The reason the entire world isn't capitalism is because only socialism keeps the people at the top on top, and that's what we have, more and more socialism, and more and more oligarchies taking control. Capitalism is a threat to the rich and powerful, so it is being killed by them wherever they can kill it.

As far as successful socialist countries there are NONE. The on;y successful countries are capitalist countries, and they all have mixed economies, parasites that they support with the wealth produced by capitalism. The more capitalistic they are, the better they are doing -- and in some sense the more socialism they can support -- like a successful family can support the ne'er do well brother.

The problemwith the private mercanary argument is, that MIGHT work, but we HAVE a constritutional liberal society, so I want to move forward from there. If we were starting out fresh I'd be willing to experiment with private security firms, but i like how the rule of law and constitutionalism evolved and feel it is best to stick with that UNTIL we start forming interpplanetary economies -- then we can experiment with full anarcho-capitalist systems. For now that is unrealistic. I am a pragmatist.

Capitalism as we know it definitly comes from government and rule of law and constitutionalism. I love all of that. I am not an anarchist. I am a liberal.

In the united states land came from government distribution of it -- again, the product of a liberal constitutional order. I know it came from government. I am a believer in liberal democracy, just not socialism.

 

 

Why not?  You're responding point by point just like me.  The only thing that chopping up the post does is make it easier for the reader to understand which point a given section is responding to.  If you want to do it this way, fine, but if I have to waste time clarifying something to you that would have been obvious otherwise, I'm going back to section by section.

You must be aware of the differences between food and healthcare/education as commodities.  Food has finite demand and requires relatively low skilled labor, to name a couple of differences.

I suppose it's too much to ask for you to back up your claims about the relative success rates of the two systems.  Actually, your claims are in a way unfalsifiable, since you'll attribute any success in a country to market elements and blame any failure on the government.  However, could you at least try to explain the mechanism by which this phenomenon occurs?

What is a government besides a large, powerful corporation?  What is a corporation besides a small government?  What is so different about their natures that you have absolute faith in the success of one and the failure of the other?

In fact, if you have the kind of free market that allows monopolies and makes them the only thing between a worker and starvation, they have basically as much power as a government.  Perhaps more than a democratic government, since they're not accountable to the voters.  So what's so different about them that makes them superior?

If capitalism was the magic national panacaea you claim it to be, I'm sure most leaders would embrace it.  It would be much better to be the leader of a rich, advanced, and successful country than a poor and dying one.  Even if only a minority of leaders went this way, the socialist countries would not have survived in the more warlike eras. 

I think you're being rather inconsistant with your terminology.  One minute the US and Europe are socialist, the next they're capitalistic with mixed economies?

So why is security different than any other industry?  You've been insisting this whole time that the private sector always does everything better than the government, why not put it in charge of defense, if you're so sure?  Why is there any doubt that it would work better, when you have none when it comes to other industries?  You're basically saying you want to use the less effective option out of tradition.

So if you acknowledge that wealth began with the government re-distributing stolen land, isn't property itself force?  The only thing that makes a piece of creation yours and not someone else's is if you have the force to keep them off it.  You didn't make that land, you didn't buy it from the creator, only force makes it yours.  This doesn't mean anything in the real world, of course, but philosophically, I don't see how taking the use of land away from others is any less theft than taxation.

You're really setting up a false dichotomy with capitalism vs. socialism.  It is, like I keep saying but you refuse to acknowledge, like arguing whether it's better to have modern medicine or an immune system.  You can have both.  They're not necessarily at odds with each other. 

Would it ever be a rational economic decision for anyone but the government to build large scale infrastructure?  A road and highway network benefits almost everyone, but only a little bit in the short term.  As I see it, it's not worth the investment unless you directly benefit from everyone else's success, the way the government does through taxation. 

Just out of curiosity, would you be in favor of putting an end to road building and maintenance?   Repealing child labor laws?  Anti employment discrimination laws?  Getting rid of the FDA?

This doesn't have much to do with this discussion, but I think it's pretty demonstrably false that everyone has the same opportunity regardless of class.  Yes, once in awhile you see someone from a poor family get rich, but the vast majority of the poor stay poor, and the rich tend to say rich.  If it was truly equal, wouldn't the background of each social class contain proportional numbers of rich and poor? 

I am in awe!  You sir have the logic that a Vulcan would envy...if they were permitted to show envy that is.

Originally posted by Impacatus

Originally posted by Fishermage

Please don't chop up my words.

Are food costs spiralling out of control? Are people cryng for universal food service? no. That proves my point.

I'm not saying anything is that simple. Socialism however, to the extent that it is used anywhere, fails. The more socialistic, the worse things are. That works everywhere at all times and all places, without exception.

I decided that the private sector is better because in every place in every country in the history of earth, and we have hundreds of examples, it's better every time.

The reason the entire world isn't capitalism is because only socialism keeps the people at the top on top, and that's what we have, more and more socialism, and more and more oligarchies taking control. Capitalism is a threat to the rich and powerful, so it is being killed by them wherever they can kill it.

As far as successful socialist countries there are NONE. The on;y successful countries are capitalist countries, and they all have mixed economies, parasites that they support with the wealth produced by capitalism. The more capitalistic they are, the better they are doing -- and in some sense the more socialism they can support -- like a successful family can support the ne'er do well brother.

The problemwith the private mercanary argument is, that MIGHT work, but we HAVE a constritutional liberal society, so I want to move forward from there. If we were starting out fresh I'd be willing to experiment with private security firms, but i like how the rule of law and constitutionalism evolved and feel it is best to stick with that UNTIL we start forming interpplanetary economies -- then we can experiment with full anarcho-capitalist systems. For now that is unrealistic. I am a pragmatist.

Capitalism as we know it definitly comes from government and rule of law and constitutionalism. I love all of that. I am not an anarchist. I am a liberal.

In the united states land came from government distribution of it -- again, the product of a liberal constitutional order. I know it came from government. I am a believer in liberal democracy, just not socialism.

 

 

Why not?  You're responding point by point just like me.  The only thing that chopping up the post does is make it easier for the reader to understand which point a given section is responding to.  If you want to do it this way, fine, but if I have to waste time clarifying something to you that would have been obvious otherwise, I'm going back to section by section.

You must be aware of the differences between food and healthcare/education as commodities.  Food has finite demand and requires relatively low skilled labor, to name a couple of differences.

I suppose it's too much to ask for you to back up your claims about the relative success rates of the two systems.  Actually, your claims are in a way unfalsifiable, since you'll attribute any success in a country to market elements and blame any failure on the government.  However, could you at least try to explain the mechanism by which this phenomenon occurs?

What is a government besides a large, powerful corporation?  What is a corporation besides a small government?  What is so different about their natures that you have absolute faith in the success of one and the failure of the other?

In fact, if you have the kind of free market that allows monopolies and makes them the only thing between a worker and starvation, they have basically as much power as a government.  Perhaps more than a democratic government, since they're not accountable to the voters.  So what's so different about them that makes them superior?

If capitalism was the magic national panacaea you claim it to be, I'm sure most leaders would embrace it.  It would be much better to be the leader of a rich, advanced, and successful country than a poor and dying one.  Even if only a minority of leaders went this way, the socialist countries would not have survived in the more warlike eras. 

I think you're being rather inconsistant with your terminology.  One minute the US and Europe are socialist, the next they're capitalistic with mixed economies?

So why is security different than any other industry?  You've been insisting this whole time that the private sector always does everything better than the government, why not put it in charge of defense, if you're so sure?  Why is there any doubt that it would work better, when you have none when it comes to other industries?  You're basically saying you want to use the less effective option out of tradition.

So if you acknowledge that wealth began with the government re-distributing stolen land, isn't property itself force?  The only thing that makes a piece of creation yours and not someone else's is if you have the force to keep them off it.  You didn't make that land, you didn't buy it from the creator, only force makes it yours.  This doesn't mean anything in the real world, of course, but philosophically, I don't see how taking the use of land away from others is any less theft than taxation.

You're really setting up a false dichotomy with capitalism vs. socialism.  It is, like I keep saying but you refuse to acknowledge, like arguing whether it's better to have modern medicine or an immune system.  You can have both.  They're not necessarily at odds with each other. 

Would it ever be a rational economic decision for anyone but the government to build large scale infrastructure?  A road and highway network benefits almost everyone, but only a little bit in the short term.  As I see it, it's not worth the investment unless you directly benefit from everyone else's success, the way the government does through taxation. 

Just out of curiosity, would you be in favor of putting an end to road building and maintenance?   Repealing child labor laws?  Anti employment discrimination laws?  Getting rid of the FDA?

This doesn't have much to do with this discussion, but I think it's pretty demonstrably false that everyone has the same opportunity regardless of class.  Yes, once in awhile you see someone from a poor family get rich, but the vast majority of the poor stay poor, and the rich tend to say rich.  If it was truly equal, wouldn't the background of each social class contain proportional numbers of rich and poor? 

Chopping up words breaks what people say into little out-of-context bits, and destroys meaning.

|Food is as infinite a demand as healthcare; everyone wants more/better food and the desire is insatiable.

The relative success rate of the two systems: the wealthiest societies on earth throughout all of history are the most market-oriented ones. How would you like me to back up a basic fact. America is richer than Europe, and is getting less so as we get more socialistic -- Europe, which was near bankrupt in the socialist 90s, instututed market reforms and started growing again. THEY learned from the failures of socialism -- we have not.

Look at Asia. Compare taiwan to China over the decades. China was bankrupt UNTIL they started mixing capitalis with their socialism.

Look at old east/west germany -- the difference was stark.

Look at states within the united states. the lower taxes the less government -- the higher growth.

open borders helps as well. Wherever the liberty index is higher, wealth is greatest.

just go spend some time on the Cato institutes site, or read any one of the hundreds of books on the subject. NO ONE makes an effective case for socialism -- but there are liteally hundreds maybe thousands of studies which show markets work.

Now a corporation is a socialist entity within a capitalist society, IF by corporation you mean a government created entity that limits the liability of owners. Again, that is a bad thing within the good thing of capitalism, and I agree, corporatism is a bad thing -- it is in fact anopther form of socialism -- a type of socialism known as fascism to be precise,

MORE socialism is not an effective means to solve socialistic problems -- in fact hostory shows it exacerbates the problems. regulating the corporate systems leads to one of two things -- it tends to kill the smaller businessman, because it raises the fixed cost of doing business, or causes the company to leave the country or state fgor less regulated pasutes, thus hurting the people more.

IN fact today companies are leaving the socialist United States to go to the less socilaist countries, countries which used to me more socialist than us but as socialism has grown here, are now comparatively less socialist and more market-oriented.

Th reason leaders don't embrace capitalism is because they want POWER. No matter how rich a society is, if you don't have a big government, you don't have power. These folks need socialism to keep the power they crave. Wealth doesn't interest them.

Now the beginning of all systems were force, and we are moving away from that,. THAT is evolution, towards greater and greater liberty. YOU are advocating moving backward, toward LESS liberty. I feel that is wrong, even though all societies began with corecion. That is no reason to continue using FORCE as our means of dealing, when something better,  like liberty and free markets have been discovered.

I am not setting up a false dichotomy -- we are talking about GREATER and LESSER liberty within mixed economies. You need to note the context in which I was speaking. When comparing the US with France for instance, or energy industry is less socialistic than theres but both are socialistic.

that being said in some ways they are also both capitalistic, depending on the context. What I am saying in each instance is I believe a more market approach is always better than a socialistic (force) approach, and I believe that history has shown that that is the case.

now to talk about large scale infrastructures. Private industries do it all the time, as do governments. I am however, a pragmatist, and I am more than willing to accept some socialism with my capitalism for what is known as public goods, but to make that the RULE for society fails every time.

I'm not an absolutist on any of these things, I just favor the market in all of them> capitalism produces such enormous wealth it can always handle the drag a little bit of socialism creates. It's still better for the market to do it, but if people like socialism better in some of those things, it doesn't do much harm.

In things like health care it is a killer though, as we are seeing as it rapidly east up the budgets of Europe, as our SS system has done.

As to those red herrings of getting rid of various government agencies, I certainly think eventually all those things could be gotten rid of, or done in a better way. Child labor laws are a fascist response to simply not allowing children to contract, and that should end the issue of child labor. Employment doscrimination laws should certainly be gotten rid of in that they are a complete violation of the rights of owners. It claims that someone has a right to demand a job from someone which is horrible. The FDA is probably the worst way possible to deal with the issues it adresses -- that should have been the legislator's place, not the executive, so yes, do away with it.

Why should everyone have the same opportunity? Socialism doesn't make it so either -- in fact, socialism tends to freeze things wher they are and create LESS oportunity for everyone. But I don't se why everyone should have the right to demand "opportunity" from others. I just believe that free markets create the most opportunities for all, and again, there have been hundreds of studies and books done. Spemnd some time at the cato Institute, or some Friedman, or some Mises.

Socialists don't have nearly the body of work that prove any of their schemes have worked. Actually, the vast majority of poor stay proor because they are the ones who get the most socialism. The system is designed that way. read some Thomas Sowell on that. he shows that BEFORE all the government programs blacks and the poor were MORE upwardly mobile than they are now under the current socialist systems we have in place.

I never said I believe in equality, so not sure why you bring that up. I favor liberty, not equality. If liberty is your goal, you get more quality than if it is not. If equality is your goal, you tend to lose both liberty and equality.

Again if you want me to back these things up I'll be happy to recommend a few dozen books. What books do you know that demonstrate that socialism is better?