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Post by
pezz
I don't know if this blog can be read without an Economist subscription, but here you go:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2012/03/hitler-and-dalai-lama
The TL;DR or had to subscribe;DR, as the case may be, is that the official Chinese press has Godwined the Dalai Lama.
Post by
557473
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
204878
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
gamerunknown
sales tax was your inclusion in the debate, not mine. If the poor are spending all of their money on food, clothes, etc. then they're not paying sales tax. If they're spending a significant portion on non-essentials, then they're not as badly off as you're suggesting.
The point is that the dogmatic maxim of the Republicans' is that tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs. I introduced sales tax to point out that income tax is only one form of revenue for the government. It was part of a wider point addressing the principle of currency: that money is only useful in circulation as a means to access different resources. If government withdraws currency from circulation, limiting transactions (not just physical currency), then limiting their withdrawal of currency from circulation is ideal. However, I don't think it's been demonstrated that public expenditure is worse for society than private expenditure, nor that the rich create any more jobs by having more capital than the poor. Currency cannot "trickle down" further than the poor, nor do the poor "save" more than the rich. Their expenditures will create market demands that will be responded to and the corporations that do respond will be taxed.
if someone could make $15/hour without working for another person, why don't they?
Because in a capitalist society, property rights are sovereign and rent is endemic.
I imagine that labor by itself should be able to make that if the owners of the means of production are redundant. Unless, of course, the value of the person's labor increases when he performs that labor upon certain machinery and/or materials.
Actually, currency has undergone a few transmutations. At first, it was roughly simple to compare: average socially useful labour could be simply compared to the equivalent in gold (then fiat money and now debt). Machines do not increase the value of an individuals labour, they divide it into more products. If one person could previously spin 6 pounds of linen in an hour and a machine arrives that allows them to produce ten times as much, each pound of linen has a tenth of the value as it had previously.
If the person requires a specific location to operate from (that needs to be paid for), materials to work with and machines upon which to perform the labor, in order to make it worth whatever it's worth, then is sounds like they need the resources of the person who is providing these things in order for that to work. If the person needs to actually sell the product to make it possible, then they need advertising done so that they don't saturate their local circle of acquaintances and then have no way to continue to make money from the product (not in all cases, but in products without a high replacement rate this would be true). So if the one person pays for all of the tools, expenses, etc. so that the second person can perform the labor, and that same person loses all of the investment if it doesn't go well while the second person moves on and finds another job, then it does seem to be kind of a joint effort, no?
This is why I mentioned constant capital, which is an entirely separate concern from the valorisation of labour and surplus labour.
The difference between what the labor is worth to the owner and what the laborer is being paid is what the laborer trades in order to not have to buy any of the materials he's working on, not have to worry about multiple facets of the business, and not have to be at any financial risk if the business isn't successful.
The heads of corporations have limited liability anyway should their corporation collapse. Though institutional collapse is prevented as much as individual failures are mocked. Also, I remember reading about a union's offer to pay asking price for an abandoned factory that was rejected. The factory owners would have to be nuts to even consider it anyway, it'd be like giving David Petraeus a seat in the National Assembly of People's Power. Y'see, in a union/democratically run factory, the decisions as to marketing and logistics would rest on the workers. The workers could also determine how profits were apportioned, rather than swearing a blood oath to their shareholders.
You ask why cut programs that save lives- what I said was if we don't restructure the programs so that they don't keep driving the national debt up, they're going to collapse and a lot more people will die when we have no ability to give them anything.
To be fair, you didn't provide any evidence that healthcare programs would collapse (as other countries with public healthcare programs provided for by the government and paid for by tax have far lower per capita costs). You also didn't provide any alternatives to government run programs paid for by tax, nor did you support the premise that taxing lower income households would be necessary to prevent these programs collapsing. I don't see why healthcare would collapse before the military either, national security has an outlay of $881bn/a.
In truly communist countries, where means of production have been centralized and taken out of private hands, the people have a much poorer quality of life than in capitalist countries. But they're all equally miserable, so that's progress, right?
This is a strawman of my position. I was never advocating for centralisation, I was advocating for worker's control. That means current employees are at least consulted for business decisions and can set the terms of the contracts for their managers, rather than the other way around. Industries under worker control can then compete among each other, with welfare below minimum wage provided for the former employees when industries naturally collapse. Amartya Sen goes into this
here
.
And I know that having to pay $20 to see the doctor, and having that service available for the rest of your life and your children's lives, is better than seeing him for free for 10 years, and then dying in the street because the government doesn't have access to the money to pay for anything to stock the clinics, or to pay people to staff them.
Where has this ever occurred? The one example I can think of where a system of healthcare collapsed was in the former USSR during the shift to capitalism and male life expectancy declined sharply as a result.
Here
is what is actually occurring right now.
But the point is I feel it's my responsibility to take care of it, and no one else's.
In an economy based on the principle of collecting interest on infinite growth in a finite system, there are those that will inevitably succumb to debt. The combination of situational and dispositional circumstances worked in your favour, but it is impossible for them to work in all. One account does not lend credence to the system as a whole. Was there ever a point in your life where you were unemployed and uninsured? What would a debilitating, though temporary illness have meant then?
1) Have you ever had a job? Do you know what it means to work to live?
No and no.
2) Have you ever actually researched the number of social programs and money available in the US for people who are low income, or for people in general?
No.
Post by
ElhonnaDS
1) So you are using it to argue a point with me that I never made? Because I can't remember where I wrote that the wealthy needed tax cuts. I said they needed to still have some incentive to continue to fund projects, but not that they were paying too much now. See my earlier statement about you arguing with what you expect me to say rather than what I said.
2) Again with the rhetoric. No "This is a solid, tactile reason why they don't make it, that has nothing to do with someone else providing their resources." Just a catch phrase meant to deflect the question, and vaguely infer that there is something sinister about someone owning something big.
3-4) I'm confused if you understand the concept of labor and worth. A person's labor is not worth some magical number from the sky. It's worth whatever the items they can create in that time are worth, or the price people will pay for a service. If a lamp costs 3 dollars in materials, and takes an hour to make by hand, and you sell it for 12 dollars, then your labor was worth 9 dollars for you. If you spend the same hour making a quilt that's worth 5 dollars more than the materials, then that hour was worth 5 dollars.
If someone in one hour can make 25 lamps, which then can each be sold for $12, then amount that he is producing during that time is more, and it is worth more money.
That person could make $9 an hour at home doing it by hand, plus have to invest a portion of their own funds in buying the materials. If they work on a machine that costs $500,000, they could earn $225/hour, but they would then need to save up $500,000 for that machine, so it would take years for that to be worth it for them. If they go to a business owner, and work on their machine, the business owner can pay them $15 an hour, which is more than they could make without the machine, and then the rest of that can help pay off the machine that the person working couldn't afford to buy, and then will go to make a profit for the person who was willing to buy the big machine.
5) I don't think a democratically run company would run as smoothly as you think. You'd be asking for people who had little or no schooling to make decisions about how to market, vs. people who went to school to understand marketing. They'd make joint decisions about how to keep the books, rather than people who went to school for accounting. The fallacy with the group decision-making that you're touting is that you's assuming the decision that everyone agrees upon is going to be the best one. There are reasons for a division of labor, and that people go to school for years to understand how certain things work. It's so they can make informed decisions. You'd want to replace informed decisions with popular decisions. I saw that once- it was called SOPA.
6) But worker control doesn't take into account that someone had to create what they now want to control. Someone had to take a risk, and put personal money and resources into building something. Now, you think that everyone who was drawing a wage from that building deserves to see the benefit rather than the people who created it. It sounds nice and equal to everyone who didn't have to put forth the effort, or take money out of their pocket to build it.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel future machines and building would then be built, if the reward for spending personal money on creating new business ventures is that people take it from you cause it's not fair? How do you propose people continue to create industry? Will all of these workers voluntarily put in the money they need for new parts, investment in new ideas, etc?
7) I know finance, and I know that in order to buy things and pay people, you need money. The cycle of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul that we're in will only last so long, before the gap becomes so large that the income won't match even the interest on what we owe. And as we default on loans, or start paying later and later, out credit lines dry up. And everything we do right now is on borrowed money. If we stop having access to it, then it won't be a matter of streamlining non-essential programs, or working towards systems that are sustainable. It will be clinics open with no supplies, because we can't order them. It will be police forces on strike because we can't pay them. If we stop being able to pay our bills, as a country, then the things we pay for will stop working.
Also, I think we need to stop spending across the board. We need to cut military spending, we need to cut special interest business spending, we need to cut pork belly spending to curry favor with people's voters by putting up monuments. We need to cut spending everywhere. It's not a comparison of whether social programs are more wasteful than military- it's the idea that we need to stop spending like there's no limit on how much we can borrow.
8) There have been a number of times I was both employed and uninsured, and there were a few months I was unemployed and uninsured. If I had been badly hurt, a hospital would have been legally required to treat me regardless of my ability to pay. I then would have had to pay them back, but as long as I was making regular payments (even if they weren't as much as they would like), they couldn't do much more to me than send bills.
And, since we've come full circle to medical issues, can I ask why you keep asking me about the medical industry, when I already established pages ago that I thought it needed to be centralized to keep the prices from being jacked up, because human lives depend on it. It will be much easier for you to try and make a point about me being wrong when you don't use an example that I have already stated I agree with. Again with the making classic rhetorical arguments, instead of arguing against the things I'm actually saying.
Technically, if we took this argument to be in relation to my actual statements about how medical care would be covered, you would be asking how I would deal with the hardship of being several hundred dollars in debt due to the costs of the much more reasonably priced medical care that the government provides. And my response is "I'd get a job and pay it off."
9) This explains so much. So...you've never had to lift a finger to provide for anyone else, or yourself, your entire life- it's all been taken care of by others. And you sit in judgement of people who aren't taking care of others enough for your taste...
10) This also explains so much. How can you take the hard line stance that we don't spend too much on social programs, or that they are all necessary, when you have no idea what they are, how much we spend, or who they go to?
Post by
MyTie
I think all this a huge distraction. The point isn't the healthcare. The point isn't socialism. The point is that the government is deciding whether the constitution allows the federal government to require people to purchase something.
Post by
MyTie
Obama open mic
with Russian President regarding European missile defense:This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.Why would he be opposed, even in private, to a European missile defense? Why would he not want Europe to be protected from Russian ICBMs? It's so counter-intuitive that it seems he knows he has to hide this from the Americans or risk losing reelection. Why would he do something not in the best interests of America? I just don't understand this president.
Post by
gamerunknown
So you are using it to argue a point with me that I never made? Because I can't remember where I wrote that the wealthy needed tax cuts. I said they needed to still have some incentive to continue to fund projects, but not that they were paying too much now.
In context:
That means that almost half of the people voting on the laws have no personal stake in increasing the taxes, and contribute nothing to the social programs they want the government to provide. It really is a free ride for them.
Many of the people who are paying taxes feel that it's not fair for them to be contributing to government programs they won't use when the people using them don't contribute anything to the government.
I brought up Pete Peterson. Do you have any examples of people saying that they feel their personal tax level is appropriate, but that it should be applied to others as well? Do you have any information about how much that will raise? I also made the point that if a lower proportion of the lower income taxes goes on luxury goods, then higher taxation will have a more significant effect on their quality of life.
No "This is a solid, tactile reason why they don't make it, that has nothing to do with someone else providing their resources." Just a catch phrase meant to deflect the question, and vaguely infer that there is something sinister about someone owning something big.
It really isn't. Can you go into your neighbours garden and grow crops to sell? No. Because of property rights. The same principle prevents you from walking into a factory, using the machinery there to produce something, then taking that item away from the factory to sell. It's like saying that people don't have to pay taxes if they don't want to - they'll just end up in jail for tax avoidance.
I'm confused if you understand the concept of labor and worth. A person's labor is not worth some magical number from the sky. It's worth whatever the items they can create in that time are worth, or the price people will pay for a service. If a lamp costs 3 dollars in materials, and takes an hour to make by hand, and you sell it for 12 dollars, then your labor was worth 9 dollars for you. If you spend the same hour making a quilt that's worth 5 dollars more than the materials, then that hour was worth 5 dollars.
Really requires reading Capital, where products are broken down into constant and variable capital. Part of variable capital is wages, part of it is surplus labour which is given as a gift to the owners of the means of production.
I don't think a democratically run company would run as smoothly as you think. You'd be asking for people who had little or no schooling to make decisions about how to market, vs. people who went to school to understand marketing. They'd make joint decisions about how to keep the books, rather than people who went to school for accounting. The fallacy with the group decision-making that you're touting is that you's assuming the decision that everyone agrees upon is going to be the best one. There are reasons for a division of labor, and that people go to school for years to understand how certain things work. It's so they can make informed decisions. You'd want to replace informed decisions with popular decisions. I saw that once- it was called SOPA.
Right, if you think that bills that are quashed by representatives in Congress are "popular decisions". The division of labour is a completely independent question to worker control, it refers to the synchronocity of production in a society where there is perfect liberty to choose occupations. It's far more efficient to cooperate in that manner in manufacturing, but Adam Smith warned against performing a few simple operations, lest workers become "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become...". In other words, focusing on production qua production, ignoring one's own health or the ramifications of production on society. As for the workability of allowing an ignorant population to vote: it's merely a democratic principle.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel future machines and building would then be built, if the reward for spending personal money on creating new business ventures is that people take it from you cause it's not fair? How do you propose people continue to create industry? Will all of these workers voluntarily put in the money they need for new parts, investment in new ideas, etc?
Don't see why not. There are already worker owned factories in Spain, they're just not worker managed. If wages were more equitably distributed, then credit unions would become much more powerful.
And, since we've come full circle to medical issues, can I ask why you keep asking me about the medical industry, when I already established pages ago that I thought it needed to be centralized to keep the prices from being jacked up, because human lives depend on it.
Well, I'd like to see how a centralised health industry could be run on anything other than taxes.
This explains so much. So...you've never had to lift a finger to provide for anyone else, or yourself, your entire life- it's all been taken care of by others. And you sit in judgement of people who aren't taking care of others enough for your taste...
Was going to anticipate this ad hominem, but I predicted that you'd already claim I was arguing rhetorically.
Edit:
The point is that the government is deciding whether the constitution allows the federal government to require people to purchase something.
Which is only the point a decade and a half after the Republican party came up with the idea in the first place. If they weren't opposed to the idea of universal healthcare in any fashion, individual states would not have taken it to court.
Post by
557473
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
MyTie
Which is only the point a decade and a half after the Republican party came up with the idea in the first place. If they weren't opposed to the idea of universal healthcare in any fashion, individual states would not have taken it to court.
This is not a R vs D issue, dude.
Post by
ElhonnaDS
It's getting too long to quote point for point, and I have to finish up some work before I go home, so I'll address, again, the medical issue and a few more points then go do something productive.
I said that a lot of the pricing the medical industry has nothing to do with material and labor costs, and a lot to do with research costs, and artificially inflated pricing. When I proposed government involvement, it was to provide those items and services at a reasonable cost- meaning the payment of the cost, by patients, would fund them. Taxes would be needed to set up the facilities initially, but after that they would sustain themselves, and not continue to add to the deficit.
A lot of the other points- I think your idea that any right to property, even on an individual basis, somehow violates other people's rights, is so alien that I can't even begin how to start. If you buy all the supplies and do all the work to prep your home garden to grow food, then why does someone else have as much right to plant there as you? It's like you can't fathom the idea that if someone made something, or worked for something, they have more right to it than the person who didn't. That nothing is ever earned, and no one has any responsibility to help support themselves. I don't even know how to argue with that. I don't want to try.
And I don't think it's ad hominem to say that someone who wants people to be responsible for providing others with as much as they can, and not as much as those people have earned, seems to be sort of hypocritical when they themselves provide nothing for themselves or anyone else. It's actually the basis for much of my counter argument- that people who don't have to work to live won't.
I will just say that I am not against providing for those with less, or who don't have the ability to provide for themselves. I am against the idea that the fact that other people CAN afford to provide for you means that it somehow absolves you of the responsibility to provide anything for yourself. If you can provide 80% of what you need, and society has to fill in the other 20%, I can understand that. If you look at society, and say "with as much as you work, and as much as you make by investing in other people's work, you make enough money that you could pay for everything I need, and it wouldn't break your bank. Therefore, I think you should be paying for me, and then I don't have to work," then you're a parasite.
Post by
334295
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
334295
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
204878
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
gamerunknown
So you would rather go to Cuba for a crucial life saving operation than the US? Seriously?
Strawman. Cuba has the same healthcare outcomes as the US. I've never been to Cuba, but I had an abcessed tooth in the US and it cost $200 for a dentist's appointment. My sister dislocated her shoulder in the US and it cost $75 for the GP we visited to reset it.
What breaks the numbers down is at the bottom in the US health care is terrible, but for most people it's fine. Our poor drag us down. So instead of trying to re-engineer the entire system why don't they just do something to improve the poor? Like free clinics for people under certain income levels etc.
People under certain income levels receive Medicaid or Medicare or something like that already. Costs are staggeringly high. In the UK, all general hospitals are provided with taxpayer cash and people can choose (if they have the money) to get insurance or go to a private surgery if they want higher quality care or reduced waiting times.
I think your idea that any right to property, even on an individual basis, somehow violates other people's rights, is so alien that I can't even begin how to start.
That's a strawman of my position. I said that property rights were the fundamental basis for a Capitalist society. That's a position that would be acceded by any economist, right or left. In pre-frontier America, it was impossible to find wage labourers. Where an individual could be autonomous and provide the means of subsistence for themselves and their family, they had no desire to work for another. Land was a form of "Commons", granted for any use one saw fit (unless one was native to it, of course). Once property rights asserted themselves and an individual could not build their own house without breaking the law, industrialisation became possible. That's not necessarily a bad thing: it engendered cooperation between labourers in a factory. However, in a Capitalist system where the profits are accumulated by the managers, it led to a pretty large disparity in wealth.
Post by
Squishalot
I think all this a huge distraction. The point isn't the healthcare. The point isn't socialism. The point is that the government is deciding whether the constitution allows the federal government to require people to purchase something.
The way Australia deals with the situation is to prescribe a levy for those who don't have private health insurance. The cost of the levy is fairly similar to the cost of taking up health insurance after subsidies. In that respect, you avoid the constitutional issues whilst obtaining decent insurance take-up rates, but without quite getting to 100% coverage. That, however, is mainly because our levy only applies to people earning over $X. I think if the levy applied right down to the last person, take-up rates would be significantly higher.
Again - did you have any thoughts on this?
Also, to be clear, it's not the government deciding, it's SCOTUS deciding.
Post by
MyTie
I think all this a huge distraction. The point isn't the healthcare. The point isn't socialism. The point is that the government is deciding whether the constitution allows the federal government to require people to purchase something.
The way Australia deals with the situation is to prescribe a levy for those who don't have private health insurance. The cost of the levy is fairly similar to the cost of taking up health insurance after subsidies. In that respect, you avoid the constitutional issues whilst obtaining decent insurance take-up rates, but without quite getting to 100% coverage. That, however, is mainly because our levy only applies to people earning over $X. I think if the levy applied right down to the last person, take-up rates would be significantly higher.
Again - did you have any thoughts on this?
Also, to be clear, it's not the government deciding, it's SCOTUS deciding.
I don't care to discuss the issue further. Not that you don't have points, but I just find it hard to analyze your words because of my lack of interest.
Post by
Squishalot
I don't care to discuss the issue further. Not that you don't have points, but I just find it hard to analyze your words because of my lack of interest.
I'm confused - you're interested in the government's SCOTUS action to require you to purchase something, but not an alternative arrangement that would still end up providing incentive for you to purchase it via taxation alternatives instead of fines?
Ignoring the healthcare example, my main point is that the constitutional issues of requiring people to purchase <X> can essentially be circumvented through taxation measures. Is that something you don't want to discuss?
Post by
MyTie
Is that something you don't want to discuss?
Maybe I'm just tired, but all I see in your post is "blah blah blah government blah blah blah government blah". Just ask me some other time.
Post by
134377
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
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