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On December 11 2013 17:47 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On December 11 2013 16:52 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 15:03 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 12:58 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 12:18 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 07:31 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 05:50 Danglars wrote:
[quote]
Our current president marks a departure from the belief in American exceptionalism. He'll mince words, all right, but the point is clear.
[quote]
I'm not the best guy to sell the principles of liberty and freedom (really, individual sovereignty) to a society increasingly disillusioned with them. I want opportunity for all, but hold the minority view of how to achieve this in this forum. The majority holds that some liberties and some freedoms specifically must be forfeited to an extent with the goal of achieving societal goods. The primary ones coming up here are an improvement in the plight of the poor, the environment, a sense of fairness, and a notion of equality. Simultaneously, big businesses are subject to distrust, and suppose levels of federal government and government bureaucrats to largely have trustworthy aims (subjected to analysis, I have no doubt a reasonable reader will find this to be true. See posts Walmart/Pharmaceutical Company evils followed by others governed by the generalized supposition that bureaucrats are not just throwing money at the problem.)
The heralds of American Unexceptionalism have a firm grasp on government right now, if you ask me. Not a very popular government at all, either. Equality of opportunity is nothing but a fiction in a society with vast wealth inequality. As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because On December 09 2013 15:08 IgnE wrote:On December 09 2013 14:37 xDaunt wrote:[quote] Who says that there has been an increase in structural unemployment since 2008 when the market turned? This report to Congress says that the current high rate of unemployment is predominantly cyclical. And no, I'm not saying that "laziness" is what resulted in people losing their jobs to begin with. What I am saying is that people who legitimately are good workers (and want to work) seem to have no trouble getting employed when they lose their jobs for reasons outside of their control. How many of you have actually had to hire a new employee or otherwise dealt with these issues from the perspective of the employer? It's a real pain in the ass. There are so many people out there who are just lousy workers. The good ones are really hard to find, because they all have jobs. It's fine for you to say that about professionals with "marketable" skills but when was the last time you were an aging senior who lost his job and pension trying to find some new employment? Or a young recent college grad trying to get experience and develop the expertise you say will find determined individuals a living wage? It's news to me that most people on UI for 90 weeks are established professionals with expertise who are just too lazy to get a new job. Seniors and On December 09 2013 15:04 IgnE wrote:On December 09 2013 12:53 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
[quote]
I don't think we can dictate an agreement, but we do have lots of leverage. We're a great customer, and they have to buy dollar assets anyways. IP is silly. Rent-seeking capitalists trying to propertize ideas. evil capitalists. You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Dismissing you quickly has little to do with my own internal critical method does it? Are you saying something I've never heard before? Or do you want me to put words in your mouth and then shoot it down so you can scream "straw man" at me? I'm simply replying to your inane comment that you idolize "freedom" so long as "freedom" is defined as being stuck with whatever random lot you drew in the birth lottery. What an empty yarn you spin. Freedom for those born in poverty is hardly freedom at all. But god forbid everyone be given a base standard of living, because that would harm their delicate "will to succeed" and act as an anchor on "freedom." You have so much criticism for anything and everything about letting individuals pursue their separate interests. I expand on American exceptionalism and the ideas running contrary to it. You retort by embodying every stereotype of the everlasting critic. Who are these angels that will stand up to your ... but seniors
but evil capitalists
but inequality? As long as these are governments made up of humans to govern humans, I'll settle for less than utopia. And you'll settle for what, exactly? The days when you can no longer pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? The moral of the story is you can't trust the system. I'm sure you have in mind something that outperforms what you deem "meagre opportunities." I mean, even as you ignore that what was middle class luxuries yesterday are reachable by the bottom quintile today. I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? On December 11 2013 13:19 xDaunt wrote:On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. The whole premise here is retarded. Inequality in outcome doesn't necessarily mean that there will be a "damnation" of a large percentage of people as you describe. Hell, being "poor" in this country certainly is a far cry from whatever you're intending to describe. Where else are poor people fat and have flat screen TVs? What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? This will never happen because most people lack either the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons in the system. That doesn't mean that they won't live happily and be able to provide for themselves and their families. Wow, do both you and Danglars really think that it's not so bad to be poor in America today? Really? Is that your response?: "It's not so bad to be poor, at least you can have a flat screen television (well, I think you can, at least that's what they tell me)." You are so disconnected from reality. "Fat poor people clearly have enough food, otherwise they wouldn't be fat, therefore their life can't be so bad." You are caricaturing yourself. So the hypothetical is a hypothetical. What is your point? You seem to be saying, "this will never happen, and moreover, it doesn't matter what kind of a world would result, because people suck and deserve their lot." Your refusals to answer aren't really that surprising. You would rather not think about the surplus labor force, worldwide, that you are condemning to wage slavery in the name of capital accumulation. That disintegrates the fairy tale. On the one hand you say that not everyone will be damned to poverty. On the other hand you say that "most" people lack the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons (implicitly: therefore, they deserve to live in shitty housing, eat shitty food, rack up debt, and always be on the verge of financial disaster, while watching reality tv on their flat screen). But! you say. But! they can still live "happily and provide for themselves and their families." This is simply untrue. ![[image loading]](http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/pgjqtvytj02vwwjjpgduvw.gif) You both seem to lack serious empathy and understanding about what it actually means to be poor in this country if you don't think it is unjust that one of the single most important factors in determining someone's earnings is the income of his or her parents. All this may sound a bit impressionistic. But more and more evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much “stickier” than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978 found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter. Source.If you think it's gotten better since 2004, you are living in a dream world. ![[image loading]](http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/131209100348-economic-mobility-620xa.png) Source.
In 2001, Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, recalculated income heritability matching census data to Social Security data, which allowed him to compare parent-child incomes over a greater number of years. He found that income heritability was more like 50 to 60 percent. Mazumder later recalculated Solon’s PSID-based findings applying a more sophisticated statistical model and found that income heritability was about 60 percent. Then, in a 2004 study, Mazumder approached the question from a different angle, examining the correlation in incomes among siblings, using longitudinal survey data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That put income heritability at about 50 percent. “The sibling correlation in economic outcomes and human capital are larger than the sibling correlation in a variety of other outcomes including some measures of physical attributes,” Mazumder wrote. Most strikingly, he found that income among brothers actually correlated more closely than height and weight. I am less the master of my fate than I am of my body mass index.
Source.Maybe you guys are just uninformed. Or maybe you think that this incredible heritability, an attribute totally out of someone's control, is alright, so long as we preserve the freedom to hold onto the wealth you have accumulated and are free in the future to continue accumulating more wealth. At least, that is, if you are the privileged minority with the wealth to begin with. You can't value individual sovereignty and try to both lift some people up, and take some people down. That's not individuals making choices, that's the state coming in and saying "you've done too much, let me take some." What is free about that? What's free about you deciding when someone has too much? What's wrong with children getting their parents money? What's free about taking private property from people and telling them "no, you can't decide where that goes, we do." You assume that all wealth comes at the expense of someone else. That the rich are only rich because everyone else is a sucker or unable to overcome their own circumstances. This is of course historically false, but climbing to the top is rare. Do people do easy things or hard things? Easy, obviously. So why are you surprised it's so unbalanced? Do you actually think if everyone started off even that they would all end even? + Show Spoiler +The whole thing is good, but is really relevant around 1:50. Moreover, I don't understand the view that more bureaucrats or laws help anyone. Government collusion with large corporations is one reason we are where we are. The fewer people in control, the worse it gets. They will, as you seem to desire, impose their morality on everyone else. It is wrong for you to have this much! Things will never be fully equal, they may not even be close to equal. But let the cream rise to the crop, don't squash some so that others are brought up. Don't subsidize those who are not willing to do the work. Some are in very deep ruts, it's true. But don't tinker with the whole society just for that. No "fundamental transformation" is necessary. This is why no one here will ever agree. The values are different. You clearly don't value individual sovereignty as much as you value the ever elusive state of "equality." This is why no one will change their mind. Edit: I obviously support some rules, don't get the idea that I want nothing but cave men running around. You are jumping to a false conclusion. It's not like I'm advocating a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. I'm advocating a system wherein the actual socio-economic starting point for everyone maximizes their personal sovereignty by providing an equitable, solid base (I'm not inclined to put a number on it, but let's just say a middle-class position). That is the only way to actually ensure a kind of equality of opportunity that matters. I do not think everyone will "end even." But the object of life is not to have the highest wealth accumulation score. No one is worth a billion other people, even if those people are Somalis, rural Chinese, or whatever. Likewise, I am advocating a system that makes it difficult or impossible to accumulate as much wealth as the 300 richest Americans have accumulated. Despite what you think, the planet is finite, and there are a finite amount of resources. It's unethical and obscene that the richest people in this world have as much as they do, while the poorest people in this world start with nothing. Starting with nothing is equivalent to an economic, intellectual, and social maiming. And the butcher is the liberal regime. You are sacrificing billions of people to the meat grinder, now, and in the future, and your argument is, "well they aren't being productive enough, they just need to tighten their belts and work harder at FoxConn." On December 11 2013 15:12 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 Livelovedie wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 07:31 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 05:50 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 03:24 KwarK wrote:
American exceptionalism. They're too free to be constrained by facts. Our current president marks a departure from the belief in American exceptionalism. He'll mince words, all right, but the point is clear. I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.
President Barack Obama I'm not the best guy to sell the principles of liberty and freedom (really, individual sovereignty) to a society increasingly disillusioned with them. I want opportunity for all, but hold the minority view of how to achieve this in this forum. The majority holds that some liberties and some freedoms specifically must be forfeited to an extent with the goal of achieving societal goods. The primary ones coming up here are an improvement in the plight of the poor, the environment, a sense of fairness, and a notion of equality. Simultaneously, big businesses are subject to distrust, and suppose levels of federal government and government bureaucrats to largely have trustworthy aims (subjected to analysis, I have no doubt a reasonable reader will find this to be true. See posts Walmart/Pharmaceutical Company evils followed by others governed by the generalized supposition that bureaucrats are not just throwing money at the problem.) The heralds of American Unexceptionalism have a firm grasp on government right now, if you ask me. Not a very popular government at all, either. Equality of opportunity is nothing but a fiction in a society with vast wealth inequality. As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because On December 09 2013 15:08 IgnE wrote:On December 09 2013 14:37 xDaunt wrote:On December 09 2013 14:18 HunterX11 wrote:On December 09 2013 14:04 xDaunt wrote:
[quote]
Unless you're talking about seriously depressed regions, anyone who is a hard worker can get a job if they want one. Hell, people who are really good at whatever they do professionally will always find work one way or another. And I'm not talking about shit jobs at McDonald's or Walmart, either. Part of my job is to deal with people who have shit happen to them. Without exception, those who are legitimately hard workers and who aren't completely compromised (like some of my brain injured clients) have no problem finding work and getting hired. On the other hand, I also have clients who are lazy, and they, unsurprisingly, have trouble getting employment or staying employed. Things aren't so bad that determined people can't find work. Are you saying then that increases in structural unemployment are caused by a mass increase in laziness? Even if they were, shouldn't we do something about that more than just telling people to get tougher? Who says that there has been an increase in structural unemployment since 2008 when the market turned? This report to Congress says that the current high rate of unemployment is predominantly cyclical. And no, I'm not saying that "laziness" is what resulted in people losing their jobs to begin with. What I am saying is that people who legitimately are good workers (and want to work) seem to have no trouble getting employed when they lose their jobs for reasons outside of their control. How many of you have actually had to hire a new employee or otherwise dealt with these issues from the perspective of the employer? It's a real pain in the ass. There are so many people out there who are just lousy workers. The good ones are really hard to find, because they all have jobs. It's fine for you to say that about professionals with "marketable" skills but when was the last time you were an aging senior who lost his job and pension trying to find some new employment? Or a young recent college grad trying to get experience and develop the expertise you say will find determined individuals a living wage? It's news to me that most people on UI for 90 weeks are established professionals with expertise who are just too lazy to get a new job. Seniors and On December 09 2013 15:04 IgnE wrote:On December 09 2013 12:53 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On December 09 2013 12:40 Livelovedie wrote:On December 09 2013 12:20 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
[quote]
What does Europe have to do with the TPP? Regardless, I don't see how your argument makes sense. We pay countries for the things we buy from them. They don't deserve extras like free IP on top of it. Meant TPP, my apologies. You made it seem like the US has leverage to dictate the agreement, but I don't see how they do. So your ultimatum makes no sense. I don't think we can dictate an agreement, but we do have lots of leverage. We're a great customer, and they have to buy dollar assets anyways. IP is silly. Rent-seeking capitalists trying to propertize ideas. evil capitalists. You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Removing freedom from some can create a more free society in general. Unless you feel that freedom to be coerced is in fact freedom. The devil's in the details when you speak of a "more free society in general." I mean, let's appoint angels that will deem which of society need sacrifice their freedom for the whole. Otherwise, I'm more concerned that the ruling class will pick based on political considerations. (May I also suggest slightly tongue-in-cheek that every person here would stand at attention and say, "I am not the one that needs to sacrifice freedom") On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 12:58 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 12:18 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 07:31 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 05:50 Danglars wrote:
[quote]
Our current president marks a departure from the belief in American exceptionalism. He'll mince words, all right, but the point is clear.
[quote]
I'm not the best guy to sell the principles of liberty and freedom (really, individual sovereignty) to a society increasingly disillusioned with them. I want opportunity for all, but hold the minority view of how to achieve this in this forum. The majority holds that some liberties and some freedoms specifically must be forfeited to an extent with the goal of achieving societal goods. The primary ones coming up here are an improvement in the plight of the poor, the environment, a sense of fairness, and a notion of equality. Simultaneously, big businesses are subject to distrust, and suppose levels of federal government and government bureaucrats to largely have trustworthy aims (subjected to analysis, I have no doubt a reasonable reader will find this to be true. See posts Walmart/Pharmaceutical Company evils followed by others governed by the generalized supposition that bureaucrats are not just throwing money at the problem.)
The heralds of American Unexceptionalism have a firm grasp on government right now, if you ask me. Not a very popular government at all, either. Equality of opportunity is nothing but a fiction in a society with vast wealth inequality. As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because On December 09 2013 15:08 IgnE wrote:On December 09 2013 14:37 xDaunt wrote:[quote] Who says that there has been an increase in structural unemployment since 2008 when the market turned? This report to Congress says that the current high rate of unemployment is predominantly cyclical. And no, I'm not saying that "laziness" is what resulted in people losing their jobs to begin with. What I am saying is that people who legitimately are good workers (and want to work) seem to have no trouble getting employed when they lose their jobs for reasons outside of their control. How many of you have actually had to hire a new employee or otherwise dealt with these issues from the perspective of the employer? It's a real pain in the ass. There are so many people out there who are just lousy workers. The good ones are really hard to find, because they all have jobs. It's fine for you to say that about professionals with "marketable" skills but when was the last time you were an aging senior who lost his job and pension trying to find some new employment? Or a young recent college grad trying to get experience and develop the expertise you say will find determined individuals a living wage? It's news to me that most people on UI for 90 weeks are established professionals with expertise who are just too lazy to get a new job. Seniors and On December 09 2013 15:04 IgnE wrote:On December 09 2013 12:53 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
[quote]
I don't think we can dictate an agreement, but we do have lots of leverage. We're a great customer, and they have to buy dollar assets anyways. IP is silly. Rent-seeking capitalists trying to propertize ideas. evil capitalists. You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Dismissing you quickly has little to do with my own internal critical method does it? Are you saying something I've never heard before? Or do you want me to put words in your mouth and then shoot it down so you can scream "straw man" at me? I'm simply replying to your inane comment that you idolize "freedom" so long as "freedom" is defined as being stuck with whatever random lot you drew in the birth lottery. What an empty yarn you spin. Freedom for those born in poverty is hardly freedom at all. But god forbid everyone be given a base standard of living, because that would harm their delicate "will to succeed" and act as an anchor on "freedom." You have so much criticism for anything and everything about letting individuals pursue their separate interests. I expand on American exceptionalism and the ideas running contrary to it. You retort by embodying every stereotype of the everlasting critic. Who are these angels that will stand up to your ... but seniors
but evil capitalists
but inequality? As long as these are governments made up of humans to govern humans, I'll settle for less than utopia. And you'll settle for what, exactly? The days when you can no longer pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? The moral of the story is you can't trust the system. I'm sure you have in mind something that outperforms what you deem "meagre opportunities." I mean, even as you ignore that what was middle class luxuries yesterday are reachable by the bottom quintile today. I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? Surely, you must realize that being for "removing poverty and disadvantage" is like saying you're for apple pies and motherhood. It's your views on how this should be accomplished and by whom that will make or break your views on personal liberties. If you'll pardon me, but many presidents and political parties of all stripes and colors have said exactly what you say now. I'm against injustice and for freedom. It's their means of achieving this that's in question. The question is if utopia is unachievable (your chief gripe about equality of opportunity), and my preference is meager in this or impossible in that, then what structures would you erect to outperform what I have just described? Criticism is fine and dandy in my book, provided deep down that critic has thought through his own positions and believes them superior, and is furthermore willing to defend them. I can't go much farther in the other issues. You reject the proposed causes, and you deny your opponents any empathy with the poor (as has echoed from leftist demagogues from one generation to the next). Maybe I may side with Franklin, who wrote In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety .Please link your sources from the United Kingdom Gallup-Heathways so we know this is not a poll conducted of UK Income Groups -- particularly when it divides up income groups in pounds As I said, sometimes doing nothing is the appropriate answer to a system of ongoing violence. A Bartlebian repudiation can have more effect than reactionary outbursts of irrational violence, especially when the direction out is not clear. But you believe in magic and fairy tales, while rejecting other solutions out of naked greed. The evidence of the last 30 years shows that the current system leads to more of the same. Worsening inequality. Lower socio-economic mobility. Decreasing freedom. One starting point would be providing a minimum income to people that would lower the floor and improve opportunities for the bottom quintile or quartile. Instead you say that that would disincentivize people from working at Arby's. You willingly throw away the brains of millions, if not billions of people, by having them spend their days doing menial tasks for pennies, because it's more efficient for the accumulation of capital (at least in the short term). Liberalism is a meatgrinder that chews up individual subjective experiences of life and spits out profit for the capitalist. What might happen if we truly offered equality of opportunity to as many people as possible by ridding them of the extreme stresses and strains of wage slavery, where people's labor is simply a commodity to be bought and sold for the lowest price possible? If you think this is the best there is, you lack imagination. As a side note, the American colonies in the 18th century were much more egalitarian than now. I know you love the sacred Founding Fathers but it's a bit ridiculous to take it seriously when they violently took land from the indigenous peoples here before them. It's nice to talk about freedom for the white man when you are plundering resources and turning land you found into your own property. Please tell me how circumstances back then, where you had a thousands miles of continent to steal to your west, are in any way applicable to now? But yes, I concede the indigenous folks weren't efficiently using their resources and land for the accumulation of capital. I'm about to go to sleep, so I am not going to argue particulars with you. Moreover, I contend that you do Show nested quote +advocate "a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. Some people just ARE harder workers, some just ARE more driven.
Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others.
In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son.
The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular.
The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field.
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On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On December 11 2013 17:47 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 16:52 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 15:03 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 12:58 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 12:18 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 07:31 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
Equality of opportunity is nothing but a fiction in a society with vast wealth inequality. As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because On December 09 2013 15:08 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
It's fine for you to say that about professionals with "marketable" skills but when was the last time you were an aging senior who lost his job and pension trying to find some new employment? Or a young recent college grad trying to get experience and develop the expertise you say will find determined individuals a living wage? It's news to me that most people on UI for 90 weeks are established professionals with expertise who are just too lazy to get a new job.
Seniors and On December 09 2013 15:04 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
IP is silly. Rent-seeking capitalists trying to propertize ideas. evil capitalists. You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Dismissing you quickly has little to do with my own internal critical method does it? Are you saying something I've never heard before? Or do you want me to put words in your mouth and then shoot it down so you can scream "straw man" at me? I'm simply replying to your inane comment that you idolize "freedom" so long as "freedom" is defined as being stuck with whatever random lot you drew in the birth lottery. What an empty yarn you spin. Freedom for those born in poverty is hardly freedom at all. But god forbid everyone be given a base standard of living, because that would harm their delicate "will to succeed" and act as an anchor on "freedom." You have so much criticism for anything and everything about letting individuals pursue their separate interests. I expand on American exceptionalism and the ideas running contrary to it. You retort by embodying every stereotype of the everlasting critic. Who are these angels that will stand up to your ... but seniors
but evil capitalists
but inequality? As long as these are governments made up of humans to govern humans, I'll settle for less than utopia. And you'll settle for what, exactly? The days when you can no longer pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? The moral of the story is you can't trust the system. I'm sure you have in mind something that outperforms what you deem "meagre opportunities." I mean, even as you ignore that what was middle class luxuries yesterday are reachable by the bottom quintile today. I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? On December 11 2013 13:19 xDaunt wrote:On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. The whole premise here is retarded. Inequality in outcome doesn't necessarily mean that there will be a "damnation" of a large percentage of people as you describe. Hell, being "poor" in this country certainly is a far cry from whatever you're intending to describe. Where else are poor people fat and have flat screen TVs? What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? This will never happen because most people lack either the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons in the system. That doesn't mean that they won't live happily and be able to provide for themselves and their families. Wow, do both you and Danglars really think that it's not so bad to be poor in America today? Really? Is that your response?: "It's not so bad to be poor, at least you can have a flat screen television (well, I think you can, at least that's what they tell me)." You are so disconnected from reality. "Fat poor people clearly have enough food, otherwise they wouldn't be fat, therefore their life can't be so bad." You are caricaturing yourself. So the hypothetical is a hypothetical. What is your point? You seem to be saying, "this will never happen, and moreover, it doesn't matter what kind of a world would result, because people suck and deserve their lot." Your refusals to answer aren't really that surprising. You would rather not think about the surplus labor force, worldwide, that you are condemning to wage slavery in the name of capital accumulation. That disintegrates the fairy tale. On the one hand you say that not everyone will be damned to poverty. On the other hand you say that "most" people lack the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons (implicitly: therefore, they deserve to live in shitty housing, eat shitty food, rack up debt, and always be on the verge of financial disaster, while watching reality tv on their flat screen). But! you say. But! they can still live "happily and provide for themselves and their families." This is simply untrue. You both seem to lack serious empathy and understanding about what it actually means to be poor in this country if you don't think it is unjust that one of the single most important factors in determining someone's earnings is the income of his or her parents. All this may sound a bit impressionistic. But more and more evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much “stickier” than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978 found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter. Source.If you think it's gotten better since 2004, you are living in a dream world. Source.
In 2001, Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, recalculated income heritability matching census data to Social Security data, which allowed him to compare parent-child incomes over a greater number of years. He found that income heritability was more like 50 to 60 percent. Mazumder later recalculated Solon’s PSID-based findings applying a more sophisticated statistical model and found that income heritability was about 60 percent. Then, in a 2004 study, Mazumder approached the question from a different angle, examining the correlation in incomes among siblings, using longitudinal survey data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That put income heritability at about 50 percent. “The sibling correlation in economic outcomes and human capital are larger than the sibling correlation in a variety of other outcomes including some measures of physical attributes,” Mazumder wrote. Most strikingly, he found that income among brothers actually correlated more closely than height and weight. I am less the master of my fate than I am of my body mass index.
Source.Maybe you guys are just uninformed. Or maybe you think that this incredible heritability, an attribute totally out of someone's control, is alright, so long as we preserve the freedom to hold onto the wealth you have accumulated and are free in the future to continue accumulating more wealth. At least, that is, if you are the privileged minority with the wealth to begin with. You can't value individual sovereignty and try to both lift some people up, and take some people down. That's not individuals making choices, that's the state coming in and saying "you've done too much, let me take some." What is free about that? What's free about you deciding when someone has too much? What's wrong with children getting their parents money? What's free about taking private property from people and telling them "no, you can't decide where that goes, we do." You assume that all wealth comes at the expense of someone else. That the rich are only rich because everyone else is a sucker or unable to overcome their own circumstances. This is of course historically false, but climbing to the top is rare. Do people do easy things or hard things? Easy, obviously. So why are you surprised it's so unbalanced? Do you actually think if everyone started off even that they would all end even? + Show Spoiler +Moreover, I don't understand the view that more bureaucrats or laws help anyone. Government collusion with large corporations is one reason we are where we are. The fewer people in control, the worse it gets. They will, as you seem to desire, impose their morality on everyone else. It is wrong for you to have this much! Things will never be fully equal, they may not even be close to equal. But let the cream rise to the crop, don't squash some so that others are brought up. Don't subsidize those who are not willing to do the work. Some are in very deep ruts, it's true. But don't tinker with the whole society just for that. No "fundamental transformation" is necessary. This is why no one here will ever agree. The values are different. You clearly don't value individual sovereignty as much as you value the ever elusive state of "equality." This is why no one will change their mind. Edit: I obviously support some rules, don't get the idea that I want nothing but cave men running around. You are jumping to a false conclusion. It's not like I'm advocating a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. I'm advocating a system wherein the actual socio-economic starting point for everyone maximizes their personal sovereignty by providing an equitable, solid base (I'm not inclined to put a number on it, but let's just say a middle-class position). That is the only way to actually ensure a kind of equality of opportunity that matters. I do not think everyone will "end even." But the object of life is not to have the highest wealth accumulation score. No one is worth a billion other people, even if those people are Somalis, rural Chinese, or whatever. Likewise, I am advocating a system that makes it difficult or impossible to accumulate as much wealth as the 300 richest Americans have accumulated. Despite what you think, the planet is finite, and there are a finite amount of resources. It's unethical and obscene that the richest people in this world have as much as they do, while the poorest people in this world start with nothing. Starting with nothing is equivalent to an economic, intellectual, and social maiming. And the butcher is the liberal regime. You are sacrificing billions of people to the meat grinder, now, and in the future, and your argument is, "well they aren't being productive enough, they just need to tighten their belts and work harder at FoxConn." On December 11 2013 15:12 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 Livelovedie wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 07:31 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 05:50 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 03:24 KwarK wrote:
American exceptionalism. They're too free to be constrained by facts. Our current president marks a departure from the belief in American exceptionalism. He'll mince words, all right, but the point is clear. I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.
President Barack Obama I'm not the best guy to sell the principles of liberty and freedom (really, individual sovereignty) to a society increasingly disillusioned with them. I want opportunity for all, but hold the minority view of how to achieve this in this forum. The majority holds that some liberties and some freedoms specifically must be forfeited to an extent with the goal of achieving societal goods. The primary ones coming up here are an improvement in the plight of the poor, the environment, a sense of fairness, and a notion of equality. Simultaneously, big businesses are subject to distrust, and suppose levels of federal government and government bureaucrats to largely have trustworthy aims (subjected to analysis, I have no doubt a reasonable reader will find this to be true. See posts Walmart/Pharmaceutical Company evils followed by others governed by the generalized supposition that bureaucrats are not just throwing money at the problem.) The heralds of American Unexceptionalism have a firm grasp on government right now, if you ask me. Not a very popular government at all, either. Equality of opportunity is nothing but a fiction in a society with vast wealth inequality. As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because On December 09 2013 15:08 IgnE wrote:On December 09 2013 14:37 xDaunt wrote:On December 09 2013 14:18 HunterX11 wrote:
[quote]
Are you saying then that increases in structural unemployment are caused by a mass increase in laziness? Even if they were, shouldn't we do something about that more than just telling people to get tougher? Who says that there has been an increase in structural unemployment since 2008 when the market turned? This report to Congress says that the current high rate of unemployment is predominantly cyclical. And no, I'm not saying that "laziness" is what resulted in people losing their jobs to begin with. What I am saying is that people who legitimately are good workers (and want to work) seem to have no trouble getting employed when they lose their jobs for reasons outside of their control. How many of you have actually had to hire a new employee or otherwise dealt with these issues from the perspective of the employer? It's a real pain in the ass. There are so many people out there who are just lousy workers. The good ones are really hard to find, because they all have jobs. It's fine for you to say that about professionals with "marketable" skills but when was the last time you were an aging senior who lost his job and pension trying to find some new employment? Or a young recent college grad trying to get experience and develop the expertise you say will find determined individuals a living wage? It's news to me that most people on UI for 90 weeks are established professionals with expertise who are just too lazy to get a new job. Seniors and On December 09 2013 15:04 IgnE wrote:On December 09 2013 12:53 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On December 09 2013 12:40 Livelovedie wrote:
[quote]
Meant TPP, my apologies. You made it seem like the US has leverage to dictate the agreement, but I don't see how they do. So your ultimatum makes no sense. I don't think we can dictate an agreement, but we do have lots of leverage. We're a great customer, and they have to buy dollar assets anyways. IP is silly. Rent-seeking capitalists trying to propertize ideas. evil capitalists. You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Removing freedom from some can create a more free society in general. Unless you feel that freedom to be coerced is in fact freedom. The devil's in the details when you speak of a "more free society in general." I mean, let's appoint angels that will deem which of society need sacrifice their freedom for the whole. Otherwise, I'm more concerned that the ruling class will pick based on political considerations. (May I also suggest slightly tongue-in-cheek that every person here would stand at attention and say, "I am not the one that needs to sacrifice freedom") On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 12:58 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 12:18 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 07:31 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
Equality of opportunity is nothing but a fiction in a society with vast wealth inequality. As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because On December 09 2013 15:08 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
It's fine for you to say that about professionals with "marketable" skills but when was the last time you were an aging senior who lost his job and pension trying to find some new employment? Or a young recent college grad trying to get experience and develop the expertise you say will find determined individuals a living wage? It's news to me that most people on UI for 90 weeks are established professionals with expertise who are just too lazy to get a new job.
Seniors and On December 09 2013 15:04 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
IP is silly. Rent-seeking capitalists trying to propertize ideas. evil capitalists. You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Dismissing you quickly has little to do with my own internal critical method does it? Are you saying something I've never heard before? Or do you want me to put words in your mouth and then shoot it down so you can scream "straw man" at me? I'm simply replying to your inane comment that you idolize "freedom" so long as "freedom" is defined as being stuck with whatever random lot you drew in the birth lottery. What an empty yarn you spin. Freedom for those born in poverty is hardly freedom at all. But god forbid everyone be given a base standard of living, because that would harm their delicate "will to succeed" and act as an anchor on "freedom." You have so much criticism for anything and everything about letting individuals pursue their separate interests. I expand on American exceptionalism and the ideas running contrary to it. You retort by embodying every stereotype of the everlasting critic. Who are these angels that will stand up to your ... but seniors
but evil capitalists
but inequality? As long as these are governments made up of humans to govern humans, I'll settle for less than utopia. And you'll settle for what, exactly? The days when you can no longer pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? The moral of the story is you can't trust the system. I'm sure you have in mind something that outperforms what you deem "meagre opportunities." I mean, even as you ignore that what was middle class luxuries yesterday are reachable by the bottom quintile today. I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? Surely, you must realize that being for "removing poverty and disadvantage" is like saying you're for apple pies and motherhood. It's your views on how this should be accomplished and by whom that will make or break your views on personal liberties. If you'll pardon me, but many presidents and political parties of all stripes and colors have said exactly what you say now. I'm against injustice and for freedom. It's their means of achieving this that's in question. The question is if utopia is unachievable (your chief gripe about equality of opportunity), and my preference is meager in this or impossible in that, then what structures would you erect to outperform what I have just described? Criticism is fine and dandy in my book, provided deep down that critic has thought through his own positions and believes them superior, and is furthermore willing to defend them. I can't go much farther in the other issues. You reject the proposed causes, and you deny your opponents any empathy with the poor (as has echoed from leftist demagogues from one generation to the next). Maybe I may side with Franklin, who wrote In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety .Please link your sources from the United Kingdom Gallup-Heathways so we know this is not a poll conducted of UK Income Groups -- particularly when it divides up income groups in pounds As I said, sometimes doing nothing is the appropriate answer to a system of ongoing violence. A Bartlebian repudiation can have more effect than reactionary outbursts of irrational violence, especially when the direction out is not clear. But you believe in magic and fairy tales, while rejecting other solutions out of naked greed. The evidence of the last 30 years shows that the current system leads to more of the same. Worsening inequality. Lower socio-economic mobility. Decreasing freedom. One starting point would be providing a minimum income to people that would lower the floor and improve opportunities for the bottom quintile or quartile. Instead you say that that would disincentivize people from working at Arby's. You willingly throw away the brains of millions, if not billions of people, by having them spend their days doing menial tasks for pennies, because it's more efficient for the accumulation of capital (at least in the short term). Liberalism is a meatgrinder that chews up individual subjective experiences of life and spits out profit for the capitalist. What might happen if we truly offered equality of opportunity to as many people as possible by ridding them of the extreme stresses and strains of wage slavery, where people's labor is simply a commodity to be bought and sold for the lowest price possible? If you think this is the best there is, you lack imagination. As a side note, the American colonies in the 18th century were much more egalitarian than now. I know you love the sacred Founding Fathers but it's a bit ridiculous to take it seriously when they violently took land from the indigenous peoples here before them. It's nice to talk about freedom for the white man when you are plundering resources and turning land you found into your own property. Please tell me how circumstances back then, where you had a thousands miles of continent to steal to your west, are in any way applicable to now? But yes, I concede the indigenous folks weren't efficiently using their resources and land for the accumulation of capital. I'm about to go to sleep, so I am not going to argue particulars with you. Moreover, I contend that you do advocate "a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. Some people just ARE harder workers, some just ARE more driven. Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others. In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son. The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field.
Also, steel mills, textile factories and other manual labour intensive industries in developed nations didn't shut down because people weren't working hard enough. It's because multinationals can pay less for the same amount of work in China, Vietnam, or some other low wage country.
This suddenly put hard-working people out of a job... and saying this is simply because they clearly weren't working hard enough is complete nonsense (and claiming they should work for Chinese wages in the US is equal nonsense).
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Hard Work is a God like any other when people worship it above considerations for the plight of actual people. At the end of the day, the notion that bad shit happens to the good and bad alike is very uncomfortable, so pray harder to Hard Work and hopefully it won't be true.
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On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:
Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others.
In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son.
The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular.
The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field.
Have you never worked a day in your life with other people? It is simply a self-evident truth that some people work harder than others.
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On December 12 2013 04:09 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:
Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others.
In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son.
The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular.
The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. Have you never worked a day in your life with other people? It is simply a self-evident truth that some people work harder than others.
Do you read english ?
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On December 12 2013 04:06 farvacola wrote:
Hard Work is a God like any other when people worship it above considerations for the plight of actual people. At the end of the day, the notion that bad shit happens to the good and bad alike is very uncomfortable, so pray harder to Hard Work and hopefully it won't be true.
Hard work obviously isn't going to guarantee anything to anyone (nothing is guaranteed), but it sure as shit improves one's chances at success.
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On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On December 11 2013 17:47 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 16:52 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 15:03 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 12:58 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 12:18 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 07:31 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
Equality of opportunity is nothing but a fiction in a society with vast wealth inequality. As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because On December 09 2013 15:08 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
It's fine for you to say that about professionals with "marketable" skills but when was the last time you were an aging senior who lost his job and pension trying to find some new employment? Or a young recent college grad trying to get experience and develop the expertise you say will find determined individuals a living wage? It's news to me that most people on UI for 90 weeks are established professionals with expertise who are just too lazy to get a new job.
Seniors and On December 09 2013 15:04 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
IP is silly. Rent-seeking capitalists trying to propertize ideas. evil capitalists. You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Dismissing you quickly has little to do with my own internal critical method does it? Are you saying something I've never heard before? Or do you want me to put words in your mouth and then shoot it down so you can scream "straw man" at me? I'm simply replying to your inane comment that you idolize "freedom" so long as "freedom" is defined as being stuck with whatever random lot you drew in the birth lottery. What an empty yarn you spin. Freedom for those born in poverty is hardly freedom at all. But god forbid everyone be given a base standard of living, because that would harm their delicate "will to succeed" and act as an anchor on "freedom." You have so much criticism for anything and everything about letting individuals pursue their separate interests. I expand on American exceptionalism and the ideas running contrary to it. You retort by embodying every stereotype of the everlasting critic. Who are these angels that will stand up to your ... but seniors
but evil capitalists
but inequality? As long as these are governments made up of humans to govern humans, I'll settle for less than utopia. And you'll settle for what, exactly? The days when you can no longer pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? The moral of the story is you can't trust the system. I'm sure you have in mind something that outperforms what you deem "meagre opportunities." I mean, even as you ignore that what was middle class luxuries yesterday are reachable by the bottom quintile today. I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? On December 11 2013 13:19 xDaunt wrote:On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. The whole premise here is retarded. Inequality in outcome doesn't necessarily mean that there will be a "damnation" of a large percentage of people as you describe. Hell, being "poor" in this country certainly is a far cry from whatever you're intending to describe. Where else are poor people fat and have flat screen TVs? What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? This will never happen because most people lack either the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons in the system. That doesn't mean that they won't live happily and be able to provide for themselves and their families. Wow, do both you and Danglars really think that it's not so bad to be poor in America today? Really? Is that your response?: "It's not so bad to be poor, at least you can have a flat screen television (well, I think you can, at least that's what they tell me)." You are so disconnected from reality. "Fat poor people clearly have enough food, otherwise they wouldn't be fat, therefore their life can't be so bad." You are caricaturing yourself. So the hypothetical is a hypothetical. What is your point? You seem to be saying, "this will never happen, and moreover, it doesn't matter what kind of a world would result, because people suck and deserve their lot." Your refusals to answer aren't really that surprising. You would rather not think about the surplus labor force, worldwide, that you are condemning to wage slavery in the name of capital accumulation. That disintegrates the fairy tale. On the one hand you say that not everyone will be damned to poverty. On the other hand you say that "most" people lack the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons (implicitly: therefore, they deserve to live in shitty housing, eat shitty food, rack up debt, and always be on the verge of financial disaster, while watching reality tv on their flat screen). But! you say. But! they can still live "happily and provide for themselves and their families." This is simply untrue. You both seem to lack serious empathy and understanding about what it actually means to be poor in this country if you don't think it is unjust that one of the single most important factors in determining someone's earnings is the income of his or her parents. All this may sound a bit impressionistic. But more and more evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much “stickier” than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978 found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter. Source.If you think it's gotten better since 2004, you are living in a dream world. Source.
In 2001, Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, recalculated income heritability matching census data to Social Security data, which allowed him to compare parent-child incomes over a greater number of years. He found that income heritability was more like 50 to 60 percent. Mazumder later recalculated Solon’s PSID-based findings applying a more sophisticated statistical model and found that income heritability was about 60 percent. Then, in a 2004 study, Mazumder approached the question from a different angle, examining the correlation in incomes among siblings, using longitudinal survey data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That put income heritability at about 50 percent. “The sibling correlation in economic outcomes and human capital are larger than the sibling correlation in a variety of other outcomes including some measures of physical attributes,” Mazumder wrote. Most strikingly, he found that income among brothers actually correlated more closely than height and weight. I am less the master of my fate than I am of my body mass index.
Source.Maybe you guys are just uninformed. Or maybe you think that this incredible heritability, an attribute totally out of someone's control, is alright, so long as we preserve the freedom to hold onto the wealth you have accumulated and are free in the future to continue accumulating more wealth. At least, that is, if you are the privileged minority with the wealth to begin with. You can't value individual sovereignty and try to both lift some people up, and take some people down. That's not individuals making choices, that's the state coming in and saying "you've done too much, let me take some." What is free about that? What's free about you deciding when someone has too much? What's wrong with children getting their parents money? What's free about taking private property from people and telling them "no, you can't decide where that goes, we do." You assume that all wealth comes at the expense of someone else. That the rich are only rich because everyone else is a sucker or unable to overcome their own circumstances. This is of course historically false, but climbing to the top is rare. Do people do easy things or hard things? Easy, obviously. So why are you surprised it's so unbalanced? Do you actually think if everyone started off even that they would all end even? + Show Spoiler +Moreover, I don't understand the view that more bureaucrats or laws help anyone. Government collusion with large corporations is one reason we are where we are. The fewer people in control, the worse it gets. They will, as you seem to desire, impose their morality on everyone else. It is wrong for you to have this much! Things will never be fully equal, they may not even be close to equal. But let the cream rise to the crop, don't squash some so that others are brought up. Don't subsidize those who are not willing to do the work. Some are in very deep ruts, it's true. But don't tinker with the whole society just for that. No "fundamental transformation" is necessary. This is why no one here will ever agree. The values are different. You clearly don't value individual sovereignty as much as you value the ever elusive state of "equality." This is why no one will change their mind. Edit: I obviously support some rules, don't get the idea that I want nothing but cave men running around. You are jumping to a false conclusion. It's not like I'm advocating a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. I'm advocating a system wherein the actual socio-economic starting point for everyone maximizes their personal sovereignty by providing an equitable, solid base (I'm not inclined to put a number on it, but let's just say a middle-class position). That is the only way to actually ensure a kind of equality of opportunity that matters. I do not think everyone will "end even." But the object of life is not to have the highest wealth accumulation score. No one is worth a billion other people, even if those people are Somalis, rural Chinese, or whatever. Likewise, I am advocating a system that makes it difficult or impossible to accumulate as much wealth as the 300 richest Americans have accumulated. Despite what you think, the planet is finite, and there are a finite amount of resources. It's unethical and obscene that the richest people in this world have as much as they do, while the poorest people in this world start with nothing. Starting with nothing is equivalent to an economic, intellectual, and social maiming. And the butcher is the liberal regime. You are sacrificing billions of people to the meat grinder, now, and in the future, and your argument is, "well they aren't being productive enough, they just need to tighten their belts and work harder at FoxConn." On December 11 2013 15:12 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 Livelovedie wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 07:31 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 05:50 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 03:24 KwarK wrote:
American exceptionalism. They're too free to be constrained by facts. Our current president marks a departure from the belief in American exceptionalism. He'll mince words, all right, but the point is clear. I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.
President Barack Obama I'm not the best guy to sell the principles of liberty and freedom (really, individual sovereignty) to a society increasingly disillusioned with them. I want opportunity for all, but hold the minority view of how to achieve this in this forum. The majority holds that some liberties and some freedoms specifically must be forfeited to an extent with the goal of achieving societal goods. The primary ones coming up here are an improvement in the plight of the poor, the environment, a sense of fairness, and a notion of equality. Simultaneously, big businesses are subject to distrust, and suppose levels of federal government and government bureaucrats to largely have trustworthy aims (subjected to analysis, I have no doubt a reasonable reader will find this to be true. See posts Walmart/Pharmaceutical Company evils followed by others governed by the generalized supposition that bureaucrats are not just throwing money at the problem.) The heralds of American Unexceptionalism have a firm grasp on government right now, if you ask me. Not a very popular government at all, either. Equality of opportunity is nothing but a fiction in a society with vast wealth inequality. As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because On December 09 2013 15:08 IgnE wrote:On December 09 2013 14:37 xDaunt wrote:On December 09 2013 14:18 HunterX11 wrote:
[quote]
Are you saying then that increases in structural unemployment are caused by a mass increase in laziness? Even if they were, shouldn't we do something about that more than just telling people to get tougher? Who says that there has been an increase in structural unemployment since 2008 when the market turned? This report to Congress says that the current high rate of unemployment is predominantly cyclical. And no, I'm not saying that "laziness" is what resulted in people losing their jobs to begin with. What I am saying is that people who legitimately are good workers (and want to work) seem to have no trouble getting employed when they lose their jobs for reasons outside of their control. How many of you have actually had to hire a new employee or otherwise dealt with these issues from the perspective of the employer? It's a real pain in the ass. There are so many people out there who are just lousy workers. The good ones are really hard to find, because they all have jobs. It's fine for you to say that about professionals with "marketable" skills but when was the last time you were an aging senior who lost his job and pension trying to find some new employment? Or a young recent college grad trying to get experience and develop the expertise you say will find determined individuals a living wage? It's news to me that most people on UI for 90 weeks are established professionals with expertise who are just too lazy to get a new job. Seniors and On December 09 2013 15:04 IgnE wrote:On December 09 2013 12:53 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On December 09 2013 12:40 Livelovedie wrote:
[quote]
Meant TPP, my apologies. You made it seem like the US has leverage to dictate the agreement, but I don't see how they do. So your ultimatum makes no sense. I don't think we can dictate an agreement, but we do have lots of leverage. We're a great customer, and they have to buy dollar assets anyways. IP is silly. Rent-seeking capitalists trying to propertize ideas. evil capitalists. You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Removing freedom from some can create a more free society in general. Unless you feel that freedom to be coerced is in fact freedom. The devil's in the details when you speak of a "more free society in general." I mean, let's appoint angels that will deem which of society need sacrifice their freedom for the whole. Otherwise, I'm more concerned that the ruling class will pick based on political considerations. (May I also suggest slightly tongue-in-cheek that every person here would stand at attention and say, "I am not the one that needs to sacrifice freedom") On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 12:58 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 12:18 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 07:31 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
Equality of opportunity is nothing but a fiction in a society with vast wealth inequality. As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because On December 09 2013 15:08 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
It's fine for you to say that about professionals with "marketable" skills but when was the last time you were an aging senior who lost his job and pension trying to find some new employment? Or a young recent college grad trying to get experience and develop the expertise you say will find determined individuals a living wage? It's news to me that most people on UI for 90 weeks are established professionals with expertise who are just too lazy to get a new job.
Seniors and On December 09 2013 15:04 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
IP is silly. Rent-seeking capitalists trying to propertize ideas. evil capitalists. You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Dismissing you quickly has little to do with my own internal critical method does it? Are you saying something I've never heard before? Or do you want me to put words in your mouth and then shoot it down so you can scream "straw man" at me? I'm simply replying to your inane comment that you idolize "freedom" so long as "freedom" is defined as being stuck with whatever random lot you drew in the birth lottery. What an empty yarn you spin. Freedom for those born in poverty is hardly freedom at all. But god forbid everyone be given a base standard of living, because that would harm their delicate "will to succeed" and act as an anchor on "freedom." You have so much criticism for anything and everything about letting individuals pursue their separate interests. I expand on American exceptionalism and the ideas running contrary to it. You retort by embodying every stereotype of the everlasting critic. Who are these angels that will stand up to your ... but seniors
but evil capitalists
but inequality? As long as these are governments made up of humans to govern humans, I'll settle for less than utopia. And you'll settle for what, exactly? The days when you can no longer pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? The moral of the story is you can't trust the system. I'm sure you have in mind something that outperforms what you deem "meagre opportunities." I mean, even as you ignore that what was middle class luxuries yesterday are reachable by the bottom quintile today. I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? Surely, you must realize that being for "removing poverty and disadvantage" is like saying you're for apple pies and motherhood. It's your views on how this should be accomplished and by whom that will make or break your views on personal liberties. If you'll pardon me, but many presidents and political parties of all stripes and colors have said exactly what you say now. I'm against injustice and for freedom. It's their means of achieving this that's in question. The question is if utopia is unachievable (your chief gripe about equality of opportunity), and my preference is meager in this or impossible in that, then what structures would you erect to outperform what I have just described? Criticism is fine and dandy in my book, provided deep down that critic has thought through his own positions and believes them superior, and is furthermore willing to defend them. I can't go much farther in the other issues. You reject the proposed causes, and you deny your opponents any empathy with the poor (as has echoed from leftist demagogues from one generation to the next). Maybe I may side with Franklin, who wrote In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety .Please link your sources from the United Kingdom Gallup-Heathways so we know this is not a poll conducted of UK Income Groups -- particularly when it divides up income groups in pounds As I said, sometimes doing nothing is the appropriate answer to a system of ongoing violence. A Bartlebian repudiation can have more effect than reactionary outbursts of irrational violence, especially when the direction out is not clear. But you believe in magic and fairy tales, while rejecting other solutions out of naked greed. The evidence of the last 30 years shows that the current system leads to more of the same. Worsening inequality. Lower socio-economic mobility. Decreasing freedom. One starting point would be providing a minimum income to people that would lower the floor and improve opportunities for the bottom quintile or quartile. Instead you say that that would disincentivize people from working at Arby's. You willingly throw away the brains of millions, if not billions of people, by having them spend their days doing menial tasks for pennies, because it's more efficient for the accumulation of capital (at least in the short term). Liberalism is a meatgrinder that chews up individual subjective experiences of life and spits out profit for the capitalist. What might happen if we truly offered equality of opportunity to as many people as possible by ridding them of the extreme stresses and strains of wage slavery, where people's labor is simply a commodity to be bought and sold for the lowest price possible? If you think this is the best there is, you lack imagination. As a side note, the American colonies in the 18th century were much more egalitarian than now. I know you love the sacred Founding Fathers but it's a bit ridiculous to take it seriously when they violently took land from the indigenous peoples here before them. It's nice to talk about freedom for the white man when you are plundering resources and turning land you found into your own property. Please tell me how circumstances back then, where you had a thousands miles of continent to steal to your west, are in any way applicable to now? But yes, I concede the indigenous folks weren't efficiently using their resources and land for the accumulation of capital. I'm about to go to sleep, so I am not going to argue particulars with you. Moreover, I contend that you do advocate "a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. Some people just ARE harder workers, some just ARE more driven. Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others. In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son. The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field.
I already addrssed that. No, hard work does not necessarily lead to success. Nor does poverty necessarily lead to failure. I already admited that it's hard to succeed. And because it's hard, fewer people are going to actually do it. But this is true whether everyone starts off even or they don't. The hard working, driven people are going to gather wealth and power, and the less inclined or less caring will not. And thus, it makes sense that the children of the wealthy are more likely to be wealthy or more sucessful (by whatever metric), etc. My point was in saying that A) this is not a bad thing, B) big fat government can't fix it, (it actually makes it worse by letting the powerful set the rules) and C) government should not take upon itself some moral duty to equalize everything- both for ideological reasons (what do we value as a society and individuals) and for practical reasons.
Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular.
And yet, the mindset of the left is to try and govern individual behavior. You must buy this, you can't buy that, etc. You are right- it's really complex, so stop trying to control it!
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On December 12 2013 04:10 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 04:09 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:
Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others.
In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son.
The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular.
The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. Have you never worked a day in your life with other people? It is simply a self-evident truth that some people work harder than others. Do you read english ?
Apparently not very well. I missed that one.
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On December 12 2013 04:11 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 04:06 farvacola wrote:
Hard Work is a God like any other when people worship it above considerations for the plight of actual people. At the end of the day, the notion that bad shit happens to the good and bad alike is very uncomfortable, so pray harder to Hard Work and hopefully it won't be true. Hard work obviously isn't going to guarantee anything to anyone (nothing is guaranteed), but it sure as shit improves one's chances at success.
Prove it.
On December 12 2013 04:12 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 04:10 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:09 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:
Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others.
In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son.
The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular.
The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. Have you never worked a day in your life with other people? It is simply a self-evident truth that some people work harder than others. Do you read english ? Apparently not very well. I missed that one.
I never said hard working people did not exist, I said that there are no direct link between the work you put in something and the wealth you end up with.
On December 12 2013 04:11 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:On December 11 2013 17:47 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 16:52 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 15:03 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 12:58 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 12:18 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:
[quote]
As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because
[quote]
Seniors and
[quote]
evil capitalists.
You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Dismissing you quickly has little to do with my own internal critical method does it? Are you saying something I've never heard before? Or do you want me to put words in your mouth and then shoot it down so you can scream "straw man" at me? I'm simply replying to your inane comment that you idolize "freedom" so long as "freedom" is defined as being stuck with whatever random lot you drew in the birth lottery. What an empty yarn you spin. Freedom for those born in poverty is hardly freedom at all. But god forbid everyone be given a base standard of living, because that would harm their delicate "will to succeed" and act as an anchor on "freedom." You have so much criticism for anything and everything about letting individuals pursue their separate interests. I expand on American exceptionalism and the ideas running contrary to it. You retort by embodying every stereotype of the everlasting critic. Who are these angels that will stand up to your ... but seniors
but evil capitalists
but inequality? As long as these are governments made up of humans to govern humans, I'll settle for less than utopia. And you'll settle for what, exactly? The days when you can no longer pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? The moral of the story is you can't trust the system. I'm sure you have in mind something that outperforms what you deem "meagre opportunities." I mean, even as you ignore that what was middle class luxuries yesterday are reachable by the bottom quintile today. I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? On December 11 2013 13:19 xDaunt wrote:On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. The whole premise here is retarded. Inequality in outcome doesn't necessarily mean that there will be a "damnation" of a large percentage of people as you describe. Hell, being "poor" in this country certainly is a far cry from whatever you're intending to describe. Where else are poor people fat and have flat screen TVs? What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? This will never happen because most people lack either the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons in the system. That doesn't mean that they won't live happily and be able to provide for themselves and their families. Wow, do both you and Danglars really think that it's not so bad to be poor in America today? Really? Is that your response?: "It's not so bad to be poor, at least you can have a flat screen television (well, I think you can, at least that's what they tell me)." You are so disconnected from reality. "Fat poor people clearly have enough food, otherwise they wouldn't be fat, therefore their life can't be so bad." You are caricaturing yourself. So the hypothetical is a hypothetical. What is your point? You seem to be saying, "this will never happen, and moreover, it doesn't matter what kind of a world would result, because people suck and deserve their lot." Your refusals to answer aren't really that surprising. You would rather not think about the surplus labor force, worldwide, that you are condemning to wage slavery in the name of capital accumulation. That disintegrates the fairy tale. On the one hand you say that not everyone will be damned to poverty. On the other hand you say that "most" people lack the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons (implicitly: therefore, they deserve to live in shitty housing, eat shitty food, rack up debt, and always be on the verge of financial disaster, while watching reality tv on their flat screen). But! you say. But! they can still live "happily and provide for themselves and their families." This is simply untrue. You both seem to lack serious empathy and understanding about what it actually means to be poor in this country if you don't think it is unjust that one of the single most important factors in determining someone's earnings is the income of his or her parents. All this may sound a bit impressionistic. But more and more evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much “stickier” than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978 found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter. Source.If you think it's gotten better since 2004, you are living in a dream world. Source.
In 2001, Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, recalculated income heritability matching census data to Social Security data, which allowed him to compare parent-child incomes over a greater number of years. He found that income heritability was more like 50 to 60 percent. Mazumder later recalculated Solon’s PSID-based findings applying a more sophisticated statistical model and found that income heritability was about 60 percent. Then, in a 2004 study, Mazumder approached the question from a different angle, examining the correlation in incomes among siblings, using longitudinal survey data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That put income heritability at about 50 percent. “The sibling correlation in economic outcomes and human capital are larger than the sibling correlation in a variety of other outcomes including some measures of physical attributes,” Mazumder wrote. Most strikingly, he found that income among brothers actually correlated more closely than height and weight. I am less the master of my fate than I am of my body mass index.
Source.Maybe you guys are just uninformed. Or maybe you think that this incredible heritability, an attribute totally out of someone's control, is alright, so long as we preserve the freedom to hold onto the wealth you have accumulated and are free in the future to continue accumulating more wealth. At least, that is, if you are the privileged minority with the wealth to begin with. You can't value individual sovereignty and try to both lift some people up, and take some people down. That's not individuals making choices, that's the state coming in and saying "you've done too much, let me take some." What is free about that? What's free about you deciding when someone has too much? What's wrong with children getting their parents money? What's free about taking private property from people and telling them "no, you can't decide where that goes, we do." You assume that all wealth comes at the expense of someone else. That the rich are only rich because everyone else is a sucker or unable to overcome their own circumstances. This is of course historically false, but climbing to the top is rare. Do people do easy things or hard things? Easy, obviously. So why are you surprised it's so unbalanced? Do you actually think if everyone started off even that they would all end even? + Show Spoiler +Moreover, I don't understand the view that more bureaucrats or laws help anyone. Government collusion with large corporations is one reason we are where we are. The fewer people in control, the worse it gets. They will, as you seem to desire, impose their morality on everyone else. It is wrong for you to have this much! Things will never be fully equal, they may not even be close to equal. But let the cream rise to the crop, don't squash some so that others are brought up. Don't subsidize those who are not willing to do the work. Some are in very deep ruts, it's true. But don't tinker with the whole society just for that. No "fundamental transformation" is necessary. This is why no one here will ever agree. The values are different. You clearly don't value individual sovereignty as much as you value the ever elusive state of "equality." This is why no one will change their mind. Edit: I obviously support some rules, don't get the idea that I want nothing but cave men running around. You are jumping to a false conclusion. It's not like I'm advocating a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. I'm advocating a system wherein the actual socio-economic starting point for everyone maximizes their personal sovereignty by providing an equitable, solid base (I'm not inclined to put a number on it, but let's just say a middle-class position). That is the only way to actually ensure a kind of equality of opportunity that matters. I do not think everyone will "end even." But the object of life is not to have the highest wealth accumulation score. No one is worth a billion other people, even if those people are Somalis, rural Chinese, or whatever. Likewise, I am advocating a system that makes it difficult or impossible to accumulate as much wealth as the 300 richest Americans have accumulated. Despite what you think, the planet is finite, and there are a finite amount of resources. It's unethical and obscene that the richest people in this world have as much as they do, while the poorest people in this world start with nothing. Starting with nothing is equivalent to an economic, intellectual, and social maiming. And the butcher is the liberal regime. You are sacrificing billions of people to the meat grinder, now, and in the future, and your argument is, "well they aren't being productive enough, they just need to tighten their belts and work harder at FoxConn." On December 11 2013 15:12 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 Livelovedie wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 07:31 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 05:50 Danglars wrote:
[quote]
Our current president marks a departure from the belief in American exceptionalism. He'll mince words, all right, but the point is clear.
[quote]
I'm not the best guy to sell the principles of liberty and freedom (really, individual sovereignty) to a society increasingly disillusioned with them. I want opportunity for all, but hold the minority view of how to achieve this in this forum. The majority holds that some liberties and some freedoms specifically must be forfeited to an extent with the goal of achieving societal goods. The primary ones coming up here are an improvement in the plight of the poor, the environment, a sense of fairness, and a notion of equality. Simultaneously, big businesses are subject to distrust, and suppose levels of federal government and government bureaucrats to largely have trustworthy aims (subjected to analysis, I have no doubt a reasonable reader will find this to be true. See posts Walmart/Pharmaceutical Company evils followed by others governed by the generalized supposition that bureaucrats are not just throwing money at the problem.)
The heralds of American Unexceptionalism have a firm grasp on government right now, if you ask me. Not a very popular government at all, either. Equality of opportunity is nothing but a fiction in a society with vast wealth inequality. As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because On December 09 2013 15:08 IgnE wrote:On December 09 2013 14:37 xDaunt wrote:[quote] Who says that there has been an increase in structural unemployment since 2008 when the market turned? This report to Congress says that the current high rate of unemployment is predominantly cyclical. And no, I'm not saying that "laziness" is what resulted in people losing their jobs to begin with. What I am saying is that people who legitimately are good workers (and want to work) seem to have no trouble getting employed when they lose their jobs for reasons outside of their control. How many of you have actually had to hire a new employee or otherwise dealt with these issues from the perspective of the employer? It's a real pain in the ass. There are so many people out there who are just lousy workers. The good ones are really hard to find, because they all have jobs. It's fine for you to say that about professionals with "marketable" skills but when was the last time you were an aging senior who lost his job and pension trying to find some new employment? Or a young recent college grad trying to get experience and develop the expertise you say will find determined individuals a living wage? It's news to me that most people on UI for 90 weeks are established professionals with expertise who are just too lazy to get a new job. Seniors and On December 09 2013 15:04 IgnE wrote:On December 09 2013 12:53 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
[quote]
I don't think we can dictate an agreement, but we do have lots of leverage. We're a great customer, and they have to buy dollar assets anyways. IP is silly. Rent-seeking capitalists trying to propertize ideas. evil capitalists. You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Removing freedom from some can create a more free society in general. Unless you feel that freedom to be coerced is in fact freedom. The devil's in the details when you speak of a "more free society in general." I mean, let's appoint angels that will deem which of society need sacrifice their freedom for the whole. Otherwise, I'm more concerned that the ruling class will pick based on political considerations. (May I also suggest slightly tongue-in-cheek that every person here would stand at attention and say, "I am not the one that needs to sacrifice freedom") On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 12:58 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 12:18 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:
[quote]
As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because
[quote]
Seniors and
[quote]
evil capitalists.
You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Dismissing you quickly has little to do with my own internal critical method does it? Are you saying something I've never heard before? Or do you want me to put words in your mouth and then shoot it down so you can scream "straw man" at me? I'm simply replying to your inane comment that you idolize "freedom" so long as "freedom" is defined as being stuck with whatever random lot you drew in the birth lottery. What an empty yarn you spin. Freedom for those born in poverty is hardly freedom at all. But god forbid everyone be given a base standard of living, because that would harm their delicate "will to succeed" and act as an anchor on "freedom." You have so much criticism for anything and everything about letting individuals pursue their separate interests. I expand on American exceptionalism and the ideas running contrary to it. You retort by embodying every stereotype of the everlasting critic. Who are these angels that will stand up to your ... but seniors
but evil capitalists
but inequality? As long as these are governments made up of humans to govern humans, I'll settle for less than utopia. And you'll settle for what, exactly? The days when you can no longer pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? The moral of the story is you can't trust the system. I'm sure you have in mind something that outperforms what you deem "meagre opportunities." I mean, even as you ignore that what was middle class luxuries yesterday are reachable by the bottom quintile today. I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? Surely, you must realize that being for "removing poverty and disadvantage" is like saying you're for apple pies and motherhood. It's your views on how this should be accomplished and by whom that will make or break your views on personal liberties. If you'll pardon me, but many presidents and political parties of all stripes and colors have said exactly what you say now. I'm against injustice and for freedom. It's their means of achieving this that's in question. The question is if utopia is unachievable (your chief gripe about equality of opportunity), and my preference is meager in this or impossible in that, then what structures would you erect to outperform what I have just described? Criticism is fine and dandy in my book, provided deep down that critic has thought through his own positions and believes them superior, and is furthermore willing to defend them. I can't go much farther in the other issues. You reject the proposed causes, and you deny your opponents any empathy with the poor (as has echoed from leftist demagogues from one generation to the next). Maybe I may side with Franklin, who wrote In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety .Please link your sources from the United Kingdom Gallup-Heathways so we know this is not a poll conducted of UK Income Groups -- particularly when it divides up income groups in pounds As I said, sometimes doing nothing is the appropriate answer to a system of ongoing violence. A Bartlebian repudiation can have more effect than reactionary outbursts of irrational violence, especially when the direction out is not clear. But you believe in magic and fairy tales, while rejecting other solutions out of naked greed. The evidence of the last 30 years shows that the current system leads to more of the same. Worsening inequality. Lower socio-economic mobility. Decreasing freedom. One starting point would be providing a minimum income to people that would lower the floor and improve opportunities for the bottom quintile or quartile. Instead you say that that would disincentivize people from working at Arby's. You willingly throw away the brains of millions, if not billions of people, by having them spend their days doing menial tasks for pennies, because it's more efficient for the accumulation of capital (at least in the short term). Liberalism is a meatgrinder that chews up individual subjective experiences of life and spits out profit for the capitalist. What might happen if we truly offered equality of opportunity to as many people as possible by ridding them of the extreme stresses and strains of wage slavery, where people's labor is simply a commodity to be bought and sold for the lowest price possible? If you think this is the best there is, you lack imagination. As a side note, the American colonies in the 18th century were much more egalitarian than now. I know you love the sacred Founding Fathers but it's a bit ridiculous to take it seriously when they violently took land from the indigenous peoples here before them. It's nice to talk about freedom for the white man when you are plundering resources and turning land you found into your own property. Please tell me how circumstances back then, where you had a thousands miles of continent to steal to your west, are in any way applicable to now? But yes, I concede the indigenous folks weren't efficiently using their resources and land for the accumulation of capital. I'm about to go to sleep, so I am not going to argue particulars with you. Moreover, I contend that you do advocate "a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. Some people just ARE harder workers, some just ARE more driven. Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others. In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son. The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. I already addrssed that. No, hard work does not necessarily lead to success. Nor does poverty necessarily lead to failure. I already admited that it's hard to succeed. And because it's hard, fewer people are going to actually do it. But this is true whether everyone starts off even or they don't. The hard working, driven people are going to gather wealth and power, and the less inclined or less caring will not. And thus, it makes sense that the children of the wealthy are more likely to be wealthy or more sucessful (by whatever metric), etc. My point was in saying that A) this is not a bad thing, B) big fat government can't fix it, (it actually makes it worse by letting the powerful set the rules) and C) government should not take upon itself some moral duty to equalize everything- both for ideological reasons (what do we value as a society and individuals) and for practical reasons. Show nested quote +Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. And yet, the mindset of the left is to try and govern individual behavior. You must buy this, you can't buy that, etc. You are right- it's really complex, so stop trying to control it!
The problem is, as I said, that the distribution of the wealth created is a political matter. If you don't actually do something about it, the strong will feast on the weak and take all the wealth for them. And history has proved this time and time again.
Saying that without rules the fox will not eat the chicken is dumb. The state, it is true, do make it worse sometime. That's why the weakest need to take control of it, that's called the dictature of the proletariat.
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On December 11 2013 17:47 Introvert wrote:
[...]Some people just ARE harder workers, some just ARE more driven.[...]
I always like how people like you make it sound(not only because of that quote) that everyone who advocates a reasonable distribution of wealth is basically a communist and wants to get rid of free markets.
I mean, the numbers are just ridiculous. In the US, 1% of the population owns 40%(!) of the whole American wealth( for Europe it's about 20-25% on average). That basically means the wealth hundreds of millions of people have worked for over decades went into the pockets of a few people. In Germany 50% of the population are in debt or don't have any wealth. I find it simply astonishing that while some people are owning helicopters and golf yards other people work eight hours a day for 45 years and basically don't even own a car.
I'm not saying everyone should earn the same amount of money, but at least it would be a start if people wouldn't get insanely rich by just having money and then using it to create practically infinitely more money. Or inventing something and then putting a patent on it for the next 50 years so basically every kind of competition is off the table.
A performance based society is a great thing, but we're currently not living in one. Statistics on how much your success is related to where you're born have been posted a thousand times in this thread already. Also reality shows that you're not getting any closer to it by removing regulations or less government. (example: The US)
Sure "big" governments can be bloated and corrupt, but especially the smaller Scandinavian countries show that you can have a lot of government involvement, for example in form of high taxation and much government spending, without living in some kind of communist/socialist dystopia.
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On December 12 2013 04:12 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 04:11 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 04:06 farvacola wrote:
Hard Work is a God like any other when people worship it above considerations for the plight of actual people. At the end of the day, the notion that bad shit happens to the good and bad alike is very uncomfortable, so pray harder to Hard Work and hopefully it won't be true. Hard work obviously isn't going to guarantee anything to anyone (nothing is guaranteed), but it sure as shit improves one's chances at success. Prove it. Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 04:12 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 04:10 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:09 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:
Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others.
In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son.
The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular.
The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. Have you never worked a day in your life with other people? It is simply a self-evident truth that some people work harder than others. Do you read english ? Apparently not very well. I missed that one. I never said hard working people did not exist, I said that there are no direct link between the work you put in something and the wealth you end up with. Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 04:11 Introvert wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:On December 11 2013 17:47 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 16:52 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 15:03 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 12:58 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 12:18 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
Dismissing you quickly has little to do with my own internal critical method does it? Are you saying something I've never heard before? Or do you want me to put words in your mouth and then shoot it down so you can scream "straw man" at me? I'm simply replying to your inane comment that you idolize "freedom" so long as "freedom" is defined as being stuck with whatever random lot you drew in the birth lottery. What an empty yarn you spin. Freedom for those born in poverty is hardly freedom at all. But god forbid everyone be given a base standard of living, because that would harm their delicate "will to succeed" and act as an anchor on "freedom."
You have so much criticism for anything and everything about letting individuals pursue their separate interests. I expand on American exceptionalism and the ideas running contrary to it. You retort by embodying every stereotype of the everlasting critic. Who are these angels that will stand up to your ... but seniors
but evil capitalists
but inequality? As long as these are governments made up of humans to govern humans, I'll settle for less than utopia. And you'll settle for what, exactly? The days when you can no longer pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? The moral of the story is you can't trust the system. I'm sure you have in mind something that outperforms what you deem "meagre opportunities." I mean, even as you ignore that what was middle class luxuries yesterday are reachable by the bottom quintile today. I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? On December 11 2013 13:19 xDaunt wrote:On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. The whole premise here is retarded. Inequality in outcome doesn't necessarily mean that there will be a "damnation" of a large percentage of people as you describe. Hell, being "poor" in this country certainly is a far cry from whatever you're intending to describe. Where else are poor people fat and have flat screen TVs? What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? This will never happen because most people lack either the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons in the system. That doesn't mean that they won't live happily and be able to provide for themselves and their families. Wow, do both you and Danglars really think that it's not so bad to be poor in America today? Really? Is that your response?: "It's not so bad to be poor, at least you can have a flat screen television (well, I think you can, at least that's what they tell me)." You are so disconnected from reality. "Fat poor people clearly have enough food, otherwise they wouldn't be fat, therefore their life can't be so bad." You are caricaturing yourself. So the hypothetical is a hypothetical. What is your point? You seem to be saying, "this will never happen, and moreover, it doesn't matter what kind of a world would result, because people suck and deserve their lot." Your refusals to answer aren't really that surprising. You would rather not think about the surplus labor force, worldwide, that you are condemning to wage slavery in the name of capital accumulation. That disintegrates the fairy tale. On the one hand you say that not everyone will be damned to poverty. On the other hand you say that "most" people lack the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons (implicitly: therefore, they deserve to live in shitty housing, eat shitty food, rack up debt, and always be on the verge of financial disaster, while watching reality tv on their flat screen). But! you say. But! they can still live "happily and provide for themselves and their families." This is simply untrue. You both seem to lack serious empathy and understanding about what it actually means to be poor in this country if you don't think it is unjust that one of the single most important factors in determining someone's earnings is the income of his or her parents. All this may sound a bit impressionistic. But more and more evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much “stickier” than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978 found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter. Source.If you think it's gotten better since 2004, you are living in a dream world. Source.
In 2001, Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, recalculated income heritability matching census data to Social Security data, which allowed him to compare parent-child incomes over a greater number of years. He found that income heritability was more like 50 to 60 percent. Mazumder later recalculated Solon’s PSID-based findings applying a more sophisticated statistical model and found that income heritability was about 60 percent. Then, in a 2004 study, Mazumder approached the question from a different angle, examining the correlation in incomes among siblings, using longitudinal survey data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That put income heritability at about 50 percent. “The sibling correlation in economic outcomes and human capital are larger than the sibling correlation in a variety of other outcomes including some measures of physical attributes,” Mazumder wrote. Most strikingly, he found that income among brothers actually correlated more closely than height and weight. I am less the master of my fate than I am of my body mass index.
Source.Maybe you guys are just uninformed. Or maybe you think that this incredible heritability, an attribute totally out of someone's control, is alright, so long as we preserve the freedom to hold onto the wealth you have accumulated and are free in the future to continue accumulating more wealth. At least, that is, if you are the privileged minority with the wealth to begin with. You can't value individual sovereignty and try to both lift some people up, and take some people down. That's not individuals making choices, that's the state coming in and saying "you've done too much, let me take some." What is free about that? What's free about you deciding when someone has too much? What's wrong with children getting their parents money? What's free about taking private property from people and telling them "no, you can't decide where that goes, we do." You assume that all wealth comes at the expense of someone else. That the rich are only rich because everyone else is a sucker or unable to overcome their own circumstances. This is of course historically false, but climbing to the top is rare. Do people do easy things or hard things? Easy, obviously. So why are you surprised it's so unbalanced? Do you actually think if everyone started off even that they would all end even? + Show Spoiler +Moreover, I don't understand the view that more bureaucrats or laws help anyone. Government collusion with large corporations is one reason we are where we are. The fewer people in control, the worse it gets. They will, as you seem to desire, impose their morality on everyone else. It is wrong for you to have this much! Things will never be fully equal, they may not even be close to equal. But let the cream rise to the crop, don't squash some so that others are brought up. Don't subsidize those who are not willing to do the work. Some are in very deep ruts, it's true. But don't tinker with the whole society just for that. No "fundamental transformation" is necessary. This is why no one here will ever agree. The values are different. You clearly don't value individual sovereignty as much as you value the ever elusive state of "equality." This is why no one will change their mind. Edit: I obviously support some rules, don't get the idea that I want nothing but cave men running around. You are jumping to a false conclusion. It's not like I'm advocating a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. I'm advocating a system wherein the actual socio-economic starting point for everyone maximizes their personal sovereignty by providing an equitable, solid base (I'm not inclined to put a number on it, but let's just say a middle-class position). That is the only way to actually ensure a kind of equality of opportunity that matters. I do not think everyone will "end even." But the object of life is not to have the highest wealth accumulation score. No one is worth a billion other people, even if those people are Somalis, rural Chinese, or whatever. Likewise, I am advocating a system that makes it difficult or impossible to accumulate as much wealth as the 300 richest Americans have accumulated. Despite what you think, the planet is finite, and there are a finite amount of resources. It's unethical and obscene that the richest people in this world have as much as they do, while the poorest people in this world start with nothing. Starting with nothing is equivalent to an economic, intellectual, and social maiming. And the butcher is the liberal regime. You are sacrificing billions of people to the meat grinder, now, and in the future, and your argument is, "well they aren't being productive enough, they just need to tighten their belts and work harder at FoxConn." On December 11 2013 15:12 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 Livelovedie wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 07:31 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
Equality of opportunity is nothing but a fiction in a society with vast wealth inequality. As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because On December 09 2013 15:08 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
It's fine for you to say that about professionals with "marketable" skills but when was the last time you were an aging senior who lost his job and pension trying to find some new employment? Or a young recent college grad trying to get experience and develop the expertise you say will find determined individuals a living wage? It's news to me that most people on UI for 90 weeks are established professionals with expertise who are just too lazy to get a new job.
Seniors and On December 09 2013 15:04 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
IP is silly. Rent-seeking capitalists trying to propertize ideas. evil capitalists. You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Removing freedom from some can create a more free society in general. Unless you feel that freedom to be coerced is in fact freedom. The devil's in the details when you speak of a "more free society in general." I mean, let's appoint angels that will deem which of society need sacrifice their freedom for the whole. Otherwise, I'm more concerned that the ruling class will pick based on political considerations. (May I also suggest slightly tongue-in-cheek that every person here would stand at attention and say, "I am not the one that needs to sacrifice freedom") On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 12:58 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 12:18 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
Dismissing you quickly has little to do with my own internal critical method does it? Are you saying something I've never heard before? Or do you want me to put words in your mouth and then shoot it down so you can scream "straw man" at me? I'm simply replying to your inane comment that you idolize "freedom" so long as "freedom" is defined as being stuck with whatever random lot you drew in the birth lottery. What an empty yarn you spin. Freedom for those born in poverty is hardly freedom at all. But god forbid everyone be given a base standard of living, because that would harm their delicate "will to succeed" and act as an anchor on "freedom."
You have so much criticism for anything and everything about letting individuals pursue their separate interests. I expand on American exceptionalism and the ideas running contrary to it. You retort by embodying every stereotype of the everlasting critic. Who are these angels that will stand up to your ... but seniors
but evil capitalists
but inequality? As long as these are governments made up of humans to govern humans, I'll settle for less than utopia. And you'll settle for what, exactly? The days when you can no longer pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. On December 11 2013 12:31 IgnE wrote:
Let's do a thought experiment:
Let's assume everyone is born and raised with the strong, sensible work ethic of Danglars and xDaunt. Everyone avoids crime, graduates from high school (goes to college? not sure if you guys think everyone has to go to college to succeed or not), works hard, and shows up early to whatever job they can get (McDonalds or equivalent for the bottom 20%).
1) can everyone find full time employment?
2) can everyone find a fulfilling job?
3) can everyone eventually find financial security (how do you want to define this? house? family? debt?)
4) can every single person work their way up from mcdonalds to something like high-level management (i'm not really sure what you two aspire to do with your life or what you think is worthwhile, other than accumulating things and being free from taxes)?
5) will there be less inequality or will the floor of the bottom quintile somehow reach what we would consider "middle class" today?
I get the feeling that you two don't really understand that implicit in your system is the damnation of a large percentage of people to toil, poverty, and unhappiness, and that this is an always already condition of the system. What do you really think would happen if everyone took advantage of the (meagre) opportunities you both assume exist for every single person? The moral of the story is you can't trust the system. I'm sure you have in mind something that outperforms what you deem "meagre opportunities." I mean, even as you ignore that what was middle class luxuries yesterday are reachable by the bottom quintile today. I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? Surely, you must realize that being for "removing poverty and disadvantage" is like saying you're for apple pies and motherhood. It's your views on how this should be accomplished and by whom that will make or break your views on personal liberties. If you'll pardon me, but many presidents and political parties of all stripes and colors have said exactly what you say now. I'm against injustice and for freedom. It's their means of achieving this that's in question. The question is if utopia is unachievable (your chief gripe about equality of opportunity), and my preference is meager in this or impossible in that, then what structures would you erect to outperform what I have just described? Criticism is fine and dandy in my book, provided deep down that critic has thought through his own positions and believes them superior, and is furthermore willing to defend them. I can't go much farther in the other issues. You reject the proposed causes, and you deny your opponents any empathy with the poor (as has echoed from leftist demagogues from one generation to the next). Maybe I may side with Franklin, who wrote In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety .Please link your sources from the United Kingdom Gallup-Heathways so we know this is not a poll conducted of UK Income Groups -- particularly when it divides up income groups in pounds As I said, sometimes doing nothing is the appropriate answer to a system of ongoing violence. A Bartlebian repudiation can have more effect than reactionary outbursts of irrational violence, especially when the direction out is not clear. But you believe in magic and fairy tales, while rejecting other solutions out of naked greed. The evidence of the last 30 years shows that the current system leads to more of the same. Worsening inequality. Lower socio-economic mobility. Decreasing freedom. One starting point would be providing a minimum income to people that would lower the floor and improve opportunities for the bottom quintile or quartile. Instead you say that that would disincentivize people from working at Arby's. You willingly throw away the brains of millions, if not billions of people, by having them spend their days doing menial tasks for pennies, because it's more efficient for the accumulation of capital (at least in the short term). Liberalism is a meatgrinder that chews up individual subjective experiences of life and spits out profit for the capitalist. What might happen if we truly offered equality of opportunity to as many people as possible by ridding them of the extreme stresses and strains of wage slavery, where people's labor is simply a commodity to be bought and sold for the lowest price possible? If you think this is the best there is, you lack imagination. As a side note, the American colonies in the 18th century were much more egalitarian than now. I know you love the sacred Founding Fathers but it's a bit ridiculous to take it seriously when they violently took land from the indigenous peoples here before them. It's nice to talk about freedom for the white man when you are plundering resources and turning land you found into your own property. Please tell me how circumstances back then, where you had a thousands miles of continent to steal to your west, are in any way applicable to now? But yes, I concede the indigenous folks weren't efficiently using their resources and land for the accumulation of capital. I'm about to go to sleep, so I am not going to argue particulars with you. Moreover, I contend that you do advocate "a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. Some people just ARE harder workers, some just ARE more driven. Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others. In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son. The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. I already addrssed that. No, hard work does not necessarily lead to success. Nor does poverty necessarily lead to failure. I already admited that it's hard to succeed. And because it's hard, fewer people are going to actually do it. But this is true whether everyone starts off even or they don't. The hard working, driven people are going to gather wealth and power, and the less inclined or less caring will not. And thus, it makes sense that the children of the wealthy are more likely to be wealthy or more sucessful (by whatever metric), etc. My point was in saying that A) this is not a bad thing, B) big fat government can't fix it, (it actually makes it worse by letting the powerful set the rules) and C) government should not take upon itself some moral duty to equalize everything- both for ideological reasons (what do we value as a society and individuals) and for practical reasons. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. And yet, the mindset of the left is to try and govern individual behavior. You must buy this, you can't buy that, etc. You are right- it's really complex, so stop trying to control it! The problem is, as I said, that the distribution of the wealth created is a political matter. If you don't actually do something about it, the strong will feast on the weak and take all the wealth for them. And history has proved this time and time again. Saying that without rules the fox will not eat the chicken is dumb. The state, it is true, do make it worse sometime. That's why we the weakest need to take control of it, that's called the dictature of the proletariat.
When you increase and centralize power, history is pretty clear as well: People suffer and/or growth is stifled. Despite the whining about big business, we are living in a time with an amazing amount of the world out of poverty. The state didn't do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an anarchist, the state has some role, but it should be minimal.
Increasing the size of the state doesn't make it more noble or more virtuous, it does the opposite. The difference is while corperations can "abuse" people by paying them "too little" or what have you, government has the force and power of the law, combined with with the moral superiority they derive from being elected "by the people." This (AND the curruption from monied interests) make things worse. You know the saying- "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
I'm saying it's a dog eat dog world- trying to change it from the dogs jaws to the cat's claws is at best a useless idea, and at worst a bad idea, especially when the cat gets to set the rules. \
|
What do you mean prove it? It's self-evident. Here's one very simple example. All things being equal, people who work harder in school tend to get higher grades, which increases their opportunities for better paying jobs.
|
On December 12 2013 04:29 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 04:12 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:11 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 04:06 farvacola wrote:
Hard Work is a God like any other when people worship it above considerations for the plight of actual people. At the end of the day, the notion that bad shit happens to the good and bad alike is very uncomfortable, so pray harder to Hard Work and hopefully it won't be true. Hard work obviously isn't going to guarantee anything to anyone (nothing is guaranteed), but it sure as shit improves one's chances at success. Prove it. On December 12 2013 04:12 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 04:10 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:09 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:
Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others.
In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son.
The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular.
The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. Have you never worked a day in your life with other people? It is simply a self-evident truth that some people work harder than others. Do you read english ? Apparently not very well. I missed that one. I never said hard working people did not exist, I said that there are no direct link between the work you put in something and the wealth you end up with. On December 12 2013 04:11 Introvert wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:On December 11 2013 17:47 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 16:52 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 15:03 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 12:58 Danglars wrote:
[quote]
You have so much criticism for anything and everything about letting individuals pursue their separate interests. I expand on American exceptionalism and the ideas running contrary to it. You retort by embodying every stereotype of the everlasting critic. Who are these angels that will stand up to your ...
[quote]
As long as these are governments made up of humans to govern humans, I'll settle for less than utopia. And you'll settle for what, exactly? The days when you can no longer pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
[quote]
The moral of the story is you can't trust the system. I'm sure you have in mind something that outperforms what you deem "meagre opportunities." I mean, even as you ignore that what was middle class luxuries yesterday are reachable by the bottom quintile today. I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? On December 11 2013 13:19 xDaunt wrote:
[quote]
The whole premise here is retarded. Inequality in outcome doesn't necessarily mean that there will be a "damnation" of a large percentage of people as you describe. Hell, being "poor" in this country certainly is a far cry from whatever you're intending to describe. Where else are poor people fat and have flat screen TVs?
[quote]
This will never happen because most people lack either the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons in the system. That doesn't mean that they won't live happily and be able to provide for themselves and their families. Wow, do both you and Danglars really think that it's not so bad to be poor in America today? Really? Is that your response?: "It's not so bad to be poor, at least you can have a flat screen television (well, I think you can, at least that's what they tell me)." You are so disconnected from reality. "Fat poor people clearly have enough food, otherwise they wouldn't be fat, therefore their life can't be so bad." You are caricaturing yourself. So the hypothetical is a hypothetical. What is your point? You seem to be saying, "this will never happen, and moreover, it doesn't matter what kind of a world would result, because people suck and deserve their lot." Your refusals to answer aren't really that surprising. You would rather not think about the surplus labor force, worldwide, that you are condemning to wage slavery in the name of capital accumulation. That disintegrates the fairy tale. On the one hand you say that not everyone will be damned to poverty. On the other hand you say that "most" people lack the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons (implicitly: therefore, they deserve to live in shitty housing, eat shitty food, rack up debt, and always be on the verge of financial disaster, while watching reality tv on their flat screen). But! you say. But! they can still live "happily and provide for themselves and their families." This is simply untrue. You both seem to lack serious empathy and understanding about what it actually means to be poor in this country if you don't think it is unjust that one of the single most important factors in determining someone's earnings is the income of his or her parents. All this may sound a bit impressionistic. But more and more evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much “stickier” than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978 found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter. Source.If you think it's gotten better since 2004, you are living in a dream world. Source.
In 2001, Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, recalculated income heritability matching census data to Social Security data, which allowed him to compare parent-child incomes over a greater number of years. He found that income heritability was more like 50 to 60 percent. Mazumder later recalculated Solon’s PSID-based findings applying a more sophisticated statistical model and found that income heritability was about 60 percent. Then, in a 2004 study, Mazumder approached the question from a different angle, examining the correlation in incomes among siblings, using longitudinal survey data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That put income heritability at about 50 percent. “The sibling correlation in economic outcomes and human capital are larger than the sibling correlation in a variety of other outcomes including some measures of physical attributes,” Mazumder wrote. Most strikingly, he found that income among brothers actually correlated more closely than height and weight. I am less the master of my fate than I am of my body mass index.
Source.Maybe you guys are just uninformed. Or maybe you think that this incredible heritability, an attribute totally out of someone's control, is alright, so long as we preserve the freedom to hold onto the wealth you have accumulated and are free in the future to continue accumulating more wealth. At least, that is, if you are the privileged minority with the wealth to begin with. You can't value individual sovereignty and try to both lift some people up, and take some people down. That's not individuals making choices, that's the state coming in and saying "you've done too much, let me take some." What is free about that? What's free about you deciding when someone has too much? What's wrong with children getting their parents money? What's free about taking private property from people and telling them "no, you can't decide where that goes, we do." You assume that all wealth comes at the expense of someone else. That the rich are only rich because everyone else is a sucker or unable to overcome their own circumstances. This is of course historically false, but climbing to the top is rare. Do people do easy things or hard things? Easy, obviously. So why are you surprised it's so unbalanced? Do you actually think if everyone started off even that they would all end even? + Show Spoiler +Moreover, I don't understand the view that more bureaucrats or laws help anyone. Government collusion with large corporations is one reason we are where we are. The fewer people in control, the worse it gets. They will, as you seem to desire, impose their morality on everyone else. It is wrong for you to have this much! Things will never be fully equal, they may not even be close to equal. But let the cream rise to the crop, don't squash some so that others are brought up. Don't subsidize those who are not willing to do the work. Some are in very deep ruts, it's true. But don't tinker with the whole society just for that. No "fundamental transformation" is necessary. This is why no one here will ever agree. The values are different. You clearly don't value individual sovereignty as much as you value the ever elusive state of "equality." This is why no one will change their mind. Edit: I obviously support some rules, don't get the idea that I want nothing but cave men running around. You are jumping to a false conclusion. It's not like I'm advocating a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. I'm advocating a system wherein the actual socio-economic starting point for everyone maximizes their personal sovereignty by providing an equitable, solid base (I'm not inclined to put a number on it, but let's just say a middle-class position). That is the only way to actually ensure a kind of equality of opportunity that matters. I do not think everyone will "end even." But the object of life is not to have the highest wealth accumulation score. No one is worth a billion other people, even if those people are Somalis, rural Chinese, or whatever. Likewise, I am advocating a system that makes it difficult or impossible to accumulate as much wealth as the 300 richest Americans have accumulated. Despite what you think, the planet is finite, and there are a finite amount of resources. It's unethical and obscene that the richest people in this world have as much as they do, while the poorest people in this world start with nothing. Starting with nothing is equivalent to an economic, intellectual, and social maiming. And the butcher is the liberal regime. You are sacrificing billions of people to the meat grinder, now, and in the future, and your argument is, "well they aren't being productive enough, they just need to tighten their belts and work harder at FoxConn." On December 11 2013 15:12 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 Livelovedie wrote:On December 11 2013 11:34 Danglars wrote:
[quote]
As I said, forfeit freedoms in pursuit of a notion of equality. Because
[quote]
Seniors and
[quote]
evil capitalists.
You have a penchant for dismissing things out of hand and quickly too. I suppose you have your own theory about how to preserve a level of opportunity in society, or do you say that none should exist? Removing freedom from some can create a more free society in general. Unless you feel that freedom to be coerced is in fact freedom. The devil's in the details when you speak of a "more free society in general." I mean, let's appoint angels that will deem which of society need sacrifice their freedom for the whole. Otherwise, I'm more concerned that the ruling class will pick based on political considerations. (May I also suggest slightly tongue-in-cheek that every person here would stand at attention and say, "I am not the one that needs to sacrifice freedom") On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 12:58 Danglars wrote:
[quote]
You have so much criticism for anything and everything about letting individuals pursue their separate interests. I expand on American exceptionalism and the ideas running contrary to it. You retort by embodying every stereotype of the everlasting critic. Who are these angels that will stand up to your ...
[quote]
As long as these are governments made up of humans to govern humans, I'll settle for less than utopia. And you'll settle for what, exactly? The days when you can no longer pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
[quote]
The moral of the story is you can't trust the system. I'm sure you have in mind something that outperforms what you deem "meagre opportunities." I mean, even as you ignore that what was middle class luxuries yesterday are reachable by the bottom quintile today. I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? Surely, you must realize that being for "removing poverty and disadvantage" is like saying you're for apple pies and motherhood. It's your views on how this should be accomplished and by whom that will make or break your views on personal liberties. If you'll pardon me, but many presidents and political parties of all stripes and colors have said exactly what you say now. I'm against injustice and for freedom. It's their means of achieving this that's in question. The question is if utopia is unachievable (your chief gripe about equality of opportunity), and my preference is meager in this or impossible in that, then what structures would you erect to outperform what I have just described? Criticism is fine and dandy in my book, provided deep down that critic has thought through his own positions and believes them superior, and is furthermore willing to defend them. I can't go much farther in the other issues. You reject the proposed causes, and you deny your opponents any empathy with the poor (as has echoed from leftist demagogues from one generation to the next). Maybe I may side with Franklin, who wrote In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety .Please link your sources from the United Kingdom Gallup-Heathways so we know this is not a poll conducted of UK Income Groups -- particularly when it divides up income groups in pounds As I said, sometimes doing nothing is the appropriate answer to a system of ongoing violence. A Bartlebian repudiation can have more effect than reactionary outbursts of irrational violence, especially when the direction out is not clear. But you believe in magic and fairy tales, while rejecting other solutions out of naked greed. The evidence of the last 30 years shows that the current system leads to more of the same. Worsening inequality. Lower socio-economic mobility. Decreasing freedom. One starting point would be providing a minimum income to people that would lower the floor and improve opportunities for the bottom quintile or quartile. Instead you say that that would disincentivize people from working at Arby's. You willingly throw away the brains of millions, if not billions of people, by having them spend their days doing menial tasks for pennies, because it's more efficient for the accumulation of capital (at least in the short term). Liberalism is a meatgrinder that chews up individual subjective experiences of life and spits out profit for the capitalist. What might happen if we truly offered equality of opportunity to as many people as possible by ridding them of the extreme stresses and strains of wage slavery, where people's labor is simply a commodity to be bought and sold for the lowest price possible? If you think this is the best there is, you lack imagination. As a side note, the American colonies in the 18th century were much more egalitarian than now. I know you love the sacred Founding Fathers but it's a bit ridiculous to take it seriously when they violently took land from the indigenous peoples here before them. It's nice to talk about freedom for the white man when you are plundering resources and turning land you found into your own property. Please tell me how circumstances back then, where you had a thousands miles of continent to steal to your west, are in any way applicable to now? But yes, I concede the indigenous folks weren't efficiently using their resources and land for the accumulation of capital. I'm about to go to sleep, so I am not going to argue particulars with you. Moreover, I contend that you do advocate "a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. Some people just ARE harder workers, some just ARE more driven. Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others. In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son. The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. I already addrssed that. No, hard work does not necessarily lead to success. Nor does poverty necessarily lead to failure. I already admited that it's hard to succeed. And because it's hard, fewer people are going to actually do it. But this is true whether everyone starts off even or they don't. The hard working, driven people are going to gather wealth and power, and the less inclined or less caring will not. And thus, it makes sense that the children of the wealthy are more likely to be wealthy or more sucessful (by whatever metric), etc. My point was in saying that A) this is not a bad thing, B) big fat government can't fix it, (it actually makes it worse by letting the powerful set the rules) and C) government should not take upon itself some moral duty to equalize everything- both for ideological reasons (what do we value as a society and individuals) and for practical reasons. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. And yet, the mindset of the left is to try and govern individual behavior. You must buy this, you can't buy that, etc. You are right- it's really complex, so stop trying to control it! The problem is, as I said, that the distribution of the wealth created is a political matter. If you don't actually do something about it, the strong will feast on the weak and take all the wealth for them. And history has proved this time and time again. Saying that without rules the fox will not eat the chicken is dumb. The state, it is true, do make it worse sometime. That's why we the weakest need to take control of it, that's called the dictature of the proletariat. When you increase and centralize power, history is pretty clear as well: People suffer and/or growth is stifled. Despite the whining about big business, we are living in a time with an amazing amount of the world out of poverty. The state didn't do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an anarchist, the state has some role, but it should be minimal. Increasing the size of the state doesn't make it more noble or more virtuous, it does the opposite. The difference is while corperations can "abuse" people by paying them "too little" or what have you, government has the force and power of the law, combined with with the moral superiority they derive from being elected "by the people." This (AND the curruption from monied interests) make things worse. You know the saying- "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." I'm saying it's a dog eat dog world- trying to change it from the dogs jaws to the cat's claws is at best a useless idea, and at worst a bad idea, especially when the cat gets to set the rules. \
It's not true that it do worse. There are objective facts that shows that, for exemple, with a higher marginal taxation rate, inequalities are lessen.
It's also quite sad for me that some people argue that, because it is a dog eat dog world, we should not do anything. I find valor in trying out, even if the result is null, and doing nothing, refusing to see more in humanity than what meets the eye, is insatisfactory.
On December 12 2013 04:30 xDaunt wrote:
What do you mean prove it? It's self-evident. Here's one very simple example. All things being equal, people who work harder in school tend to get higher grades, which increases their opportunities for better paying jobs.
It's self evident if you refuse to actually think a little. Having good grades and working "hard" are two completly different things. Do you count taking care of your sisters and brothers as work ? Do you consider working on your own desk the same kind of work as to working in the living room ? Having a private teacher ? Being supported by your familly ? Talking the same language at school and with your parents ? Having parents who teach you to be interested and read since early age ?
And having good grades actually don't necessarily result in a good job. Having social capital (a network) is almost as important for exemple.
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On December 12 2013 04:26 Nyxisto wrote:Show nested quote +On December 11 2013 17:47 Introvert wrote:
[...]Some people just ARE harder workers, some just ARE more driven.[...]
I always like how people like you make it sound(not only because of that quote) that everyone who advocates a reasonable distribution of wealth is basically a communist and wants to get rid of free markets. I mean, the numbers are just ridiculous. In the US, 1% of the population owns 40%(!) of the whole American wealth( for Europe it's about 20-25% on average). That basically means the wealth hundreds of millions of people have worked for over decades went into the pockets of a few people. In Germany 50% of the population are in debt or don't have any wealth. I find it simply astonishing that while some people are owning helicopters and golf yards other people work eight hours a day and basically don't even own a car. I'm not saying everyone should earn the same amount of money, but at least it would be a start if people wouldn't get insanely rich by just having money and then using it to create practically infinitely more money. Or inventing something and then putting a patent on it for the next 50 years so basically every kind of competition is off the table. A performance based society is a great thing, but we're currently not living in one. Statistics on how much your success is related to where you're born have been posted a thousand times in this thread already. Also reality shows that you're not getting any closer to it by removing regulations or less government. (example: The US) Sure "big" governments can be bloated and corrupt, but especially the smaller Scandinavian countries show that you can have a lot of government involvement, for example in form of high taxation and much government spending, without living in some kind of communist/socialist dystopia.
But that's a matter of opinion. I don't value a closed wealth gap because that's a rediculous metric to use by itself. As has happened in American history, when things go well, the rich get really rich and the poor just get richer. I don't see the problem with this. Maybe it's because I don't care about becoming rich, or I don't really envy those who are, but I don't want to take from someone else because I decided something was "too much".
Moreover, I think it should be pointed out that, at least in this country, there are big lobbies for differnet interests, and they use their money to work against their competitors. That's corruption, and it's only going to get worse as the state gets bigger. You actually think the business men will stay away from the lawmakers and vice versa? When has that ever been true?
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On December 12 2013 04:35 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 04:29 Introvert wrote:On December 12 2013 04:12 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:11 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 04:06 farvacola wrote:
Hard Work is a God like any other when people worship it above considerations for the plight of actual people. At the end of the day, the notion that bad shit happens to the good and bad alike is very uncomfortable, so pray harder to Hard Work and hopefully it won't be true. Hard work obviously isn't going to guarantee anything to anyone (nothing is guaranteed), but it sure as shit improves one's chances at success. Prove it. On December 12 2013 04:12 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 04:10 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:09 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:
Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others.
In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son.
The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular.
The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. Have you never worked a day in your life with other people? It is simply a self-evident truth that some people work harder than others. Do you read english ? Apparently not very well. I missed that one. I never said hard working people did not exist, I said that there are no direct link between the work you put in something and the wealth you end up with. On December 12 2013 04:11 Introvert wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:On December 11 2013 17:47 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 16:52 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 15:03 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:[quote] I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers. But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? [quote] Wow, do both you and Danglars really think that it's not so bad to be poor in America today? Really? Is that your response?: "It's not so bad to be poor, at least you can have a flat screen television (well, I think you can, at least that's what they tell me)." You are so disconnected from reality. "Fat poor people clearly have enough food, otherwise they wouldn't be fat, therefore their life can't be so bad." You are caricaturing yourself. So the hypothetical is a hypothetical. What is your point? You seem to be saying, "this will never happen, and moreover, it doesn't matter what kind of a world would result, because people suck and deserve their lot." Your refusals to answer aren't really that surprising. You would rather not think about the surplus labor force, worldwide, that you are condemning to wage slavery in the name of capital accumulation. That disintegrates the fairy tale. On the one hand you say that not everyone will be damned to poverty. On the other hand you say that "most" people lack the brains or the work ethic to be anything more than peons (implicitly: therefore, they deserve to live in shitty housing, eat shitty food, rack up debt, and always be on the verge of financial disaster, while watching reality tv on their flat screen). But! you say. But! they can still live "happily and provide for themselves and their families." This is simply untrue. You both seem to lack serious empathy and understanding about what it actually means to be poor in this country if you don't think it is unjust that one of the single most important factors in determining someone's earnings is the income of his or her parents. [quote] Source.If you think it's gotten better since 2004, you are living in a dream world. Source.[quote] Source.Maybe you guys are just uninformed. Or maybe you think that this incredible heritability, an attribute totally out of someone's control, is alright, so long as we preserve the freedom to hold onto the wealth you have accumulated and are free in the future to continue accumulating more wealth. At least, that is, if you are the privileged minority with the wealth to begin with. You can't value individual sovereignty and try to both lift some people up, and take some people down. That's not individuals making choices, that's the state coming in and saying "you've done too much, let me take some." What is free about that? What's free about you deciding when someone has too much? What's wrong with children getting their parents money? What's free about taking private property from people and telling them "no, you can't decide where that goes, we do." You assume that all wealth comes at the expense of someone else. That the rich are only rich because everyone else is a sucker or unable to overcome their own circumstances. This is of course historically false, but climbing to the top is rare. Do people do easy things or hard things? Easy, obviously. So why are you surprised it's so unbalanced? Do you actually think if everyone started off even that they would all end even? + Show Spoiler +Moreover, I don't understand the view that more bureaucrats or laws help anyone. Government collusion with large corporations is one reason we are where we are. The fewer people in control, the worse it gets. They will, as you seem to desire, impose their morality on everyone else. It is wrong for you to have this much! Things will never be fully equal, they may not even be close to equal. But let the cream rise to the crop, don't squash some so that others are brought up. Don't subsidize those who are not willing to do the work. Some are in very deep ruts, it's true. But don't tinker with the whole society just for that. No "fundamental transformation" is necessary. This is why no one here will ever agree. The values are different. You clearly don't value individual sovereignty as much as you value the ever elusive state of "equality." This is why no one will change their mind. Edit: I obviously support some rules, don't get the idea that I want nothing but cave men running around. You are jumping to a false conclusion. It's not like I'm advocating a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. I'm advocating a system wherein the actual socio-economic starting point for everyone maximizes their personal sovereignty by providing an equitable, solid base (I'm not inclined to put a number on it, but let's just say a middle-class position). That is the only way to actually ensure a kind of equality of opportunity that matters. I do not think everyone will "end even." But the object of life is not to have the highest wealth accumulation score. No one is worth a billion other people, even if those people are Somalis, rural Chinese, or whatever. Likewise, I am advocating a system that makes it difficult or impossible to accumulate as much wealth as the 300 richest Americans have accumulated. Despite what you think, the planet is finite, and there are a finite amount of resources. It's unethical and obscene that the richest people in this world have as much as they do, while the poorest people in this world start with nothing. Starting with nothing is equivalent to an economic, intellectual, and social maiming. And the butcher is the liberal regime. You are sacrificing billions of people to the meat grinder, now, and in the future, and your argument is, "well they aren't being productive enough, they just need to tighten their belts and work harder at FoxConn." On December 11 2013 15:12 Danglars wrote:On December 11 2013 14:42 Livelovedie wrote:
[quote]
Removing freedom from some can create a more free society in general. Unless you feel that freedom to be coerced is in fact freedom. The devil's in the details when you speak of a "more free society in general." I mean, let's appoint angels that will deem which of society need sacrifice their freedom for the whole. Otherwise, I'm more concerned that the ruling class will pick based on political considerations. (May I also suggest slightly tongue-in-cheek that every person here would stand at attention and say, "I am not the one that needs to sacrifice freedom") On December 11 2013 14:42 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
I have nothing against freedom. I highly value personal sovereignty. I value it so highly that I want to maximize it for every individual by removing liberty-reducing factors like poverty and disadvantage. Yes, this comes at the cost of disproportionate, unearned, and unjust, wealth disparities that are largely a product of inherited advantages, luck, and/or systemic force multipliers.
But your criticism is that I am only a critic. I have no answers for you. As Badiou would say: "better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent." If your best argument is that I don't have all the answers, then so be it. Your continued participation and advocacy for the current system sustains the immense systemic violence inherent in the current neoliberal, free-market capitalist world order. What do you expect of me, really? Either I have a roadmap to utopia, or I must be complicit in your violent regime? Surely, you must realize that being for "removing poverty and disadvantage" is like saying you're for apple pies and motherhood. It's your views on how this should be accomplished and by whom that will make or break your views on personal liberties. If you'll pardon me, but many presidents and political parties of all stripes and colors have said exactly what you say now. I'm against injustice and for freedom. It's their means of achieving this that's in question. The question is if utopia is unachievable (your chief gripe about equality of opportunity), and my preference is meager in this or impossible in that, then what structures would you erect to outperform what I have just described? Criticism is fine and dandy in my book, provided deep down that critic has thought through his own positions and believes them superior, and is furthermore willing to defend them. I can't go much farther in the other issues. You reject the proposed causes, and you deny your opponents any empathy with the poor (as has echoed from leftist demagogues from one generation to the next). Maybe I may side with Franklin, who wrote In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety .Please link your sources from the United Kingdom Gallup-Heathways so we know this is not a poll conducted of UK Income Groups -- particularly when it divides up income groups in pounds As I said, sometimes doing nothing is the appropriate answer to a system of ongoing violence. A Bartlebian repudiation can have more effect than reactionary outbursts of irrational violence, especially when the direction out is not clear. But you believe in magic and fairy tales, while rejecting other solutions out of naked greed. The evidence of the last 30 years shows that the current system leads to more of the same. Worsening inequality. Lower socio-economic mobility. Decreasing freedom. One starting point would be providing a minimum income to people that would lower the floor and improve opportunities for the bottom quintile or quartile. Instead you say that that would disincentivize people from working at Arby's. You willingly throw away the brains of millions, if not billions of people, by having them spend their days doing menial tasks for pennies, because it's more efficient for the accumulation of capital (at least in the short term). Liberalism is a meatgrinder that chews up individual subjective experiences of life and spits out profit for the capitalist. What might happen if we truly offered equality of opportunity to as many people as possible by ridding them of the extreme stresses and strains of wage slavery, where people's labor is simply a commodity to be bought and sold for the lowest price possible? If you think this is the best there is, you lack imagination. As a side note, the American colonies in the 18th century were much more egalitarian than now. I know you love the sacred Founding Fathers but it's a bit ridiculous to take it seriously when they violently took land from the indigenous peoples here before them. It's nice to talk about freedom for the white man when you are plundering resources and turning land you found into your own property. Please tell me how circumstances back then, where you had a thousands miles of continent to steal to your west, are in any way applicable to now? But yes, I concede the indigenous folks weren't efficiently using their resources and land for the accumulation of capital. I'm about to go to sleep, so I am not going to argue particulars with you. Moreover, I contend that you do advocate "a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. Some people just ARE harder workers, some just ARE more driven. Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others. In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son. The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. I already addrssed that. No, hard work does not necessarily lead to success. Nor does poverty necessarily lead to failure. I already admited that it's hard to succeed. And because it's hard, fewer people are going to actually do it. But this is true whether everyone starts off even or they don't. The hard working, driven people are going to gather wealth and power, and the less inclined or less caring will not. And thus, it makes sense that the children of the wealthy are more likely to be wealthy or more sucessful (by whatever metric), etc. My point was in saying that A) this is not a bad thing, B) big fat government can't fix it, (it actually makes it worse by letting the powerful set the rules) and C) government should not take upon itself some moral duty to equalize everything- both for ideological reasons (what do we value as a society and individuals) and for practical reasons. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. And yet, the mindset of the left is to try and govern individual behavior. You must buy this, you can't buy that, etc. You are right- it's really complex, so stop trying to control it! The problem is, as I said, that the distribution of the wealth created is a political matter. If you don't actually do something about it, the strong will feast on the weak and take all the wealth for them. And history has proved this time and time again. Saying that without rules the fox will not eat the chicken is dumb. The state, it is true, do make it worse sometime. That's why we the weakest need to take control of it, that's called the dictature of the proletariat. When you increase and centralize power, history is pretty clear as well: People suffer and/or growth is stifled. Despite the whining about big business, we are living in a time with an amazing amount of the world out of poverty. The state didn't do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an anarchist, the state has some role, but it should be minimal. Increasing the size of the state doesn't make it more noble or more virtuous, it does the opposite. The difference is while corperations can "abuse" people by paying them "too little" or what have you, government has the force and power of the law, combined with with the moral superiority they derive from being elected "by the people." This (AND the curruption from monied interests) make things worse. You know the saying- "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." I'm saying it's a dog eat dog world- trying to change it from the dogs jaws to the cat's claws is at best a useless idea, and at worst a bad idea, especially when the cat gets to set the rules. \ It's not true that it do worse. There are objective facts that shows that, for exemple, with a higher marginal taxation rate, inequalities are lessen. It's also quite sad for me that some people argue that, because it is a dog eat dog world, we should not do anything. I find valor in trying out, even if the result is null, and doing nothing, refusing to see more in humanity than what meets the eye, is insatisfactory.
Like I just said, I really don't care about the "equality gap." I don't really understand the left's obsession with it. If everyone gets richer, then why try to change the whole system so broadly. Clearly SOMETHING about the system works. Who knows how much innovation has been stifled or delayed by overbearing rules.
I'm arguing that life is not and cannot be utopia, thus we should use this fact and work around it, instead of trying to achieve ultimate harmony. When you shoot for something that is untainable, you just make a mess along the way.
Anway, I should really get back to my math hw....
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Outside right-leaning groups are firing back at Speaker John Boehner after he attacked their intentions and questioned their commitment to conservative principles on Wednesday.
"Speaker Boehner's real problem here isn't with conservative groups like FreedomWorks, it's with millions of individual Americans who vote Republican because they were told the GOP was the party of small government and fiscal responsibility," Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, said in a statement.
Kibbe went on: "Once again Republicans, led by John Boehner, are working with Democrats to increase spending yet again on the taxpayers' tab while promising 'savings' down the road. We know how this movie ends. How can leadership credibly promise spending cuts later, after agreeing to a plan that rolls back the sequester savings promised two debt increases ago? There's a predictable pattern here."
At a press conference Wednesday, a visibly angry Boehner said conservative groups who oppose the two-year budget deal stuck by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) are "using our members and they're using the American people for their own goals. This is ridiculous." Moments earlier, during a closed-door meeting, Boehner told House Republicans that the well-funded and influential organizations "aren't acting out of principle, and they're not trying to enact conservative policies. They're using you to raise money and expand their own organization," he said, according to a source in the room.
FreedomWorks -- along with the like-minded Club For Growth, Heritage Action and Americans For Prosperity -- began speaking out against the budget deal, based on reports about what was in it, before it was officially announced Tuesday. They all oppose the final agreement and are pushing lawmakers to vote against it. In response to Boehner's remarks, the groups made clear they would carry on with their fight.
Source
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Sounds like Boehner is tired of members of his party play puppet for corporations. Sadly for him he has no real power as has been proven time and time again so he is powerless to stop it.
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On December 12 2013 04:42 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 04:35 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:29 Introvert wrote:On December 12 2013 04:12 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:11 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 04:06 farvacola wrote:
Hard Work is a God like any other when people worship it above considerations for the plight of actual people. At the end of the day, the notion that bad shit happens to the good and bad alike is very uncomfortable, so pray harder to Hard Work and hopefully it won't be true. Hard work obviously isn't going to guarantee anything to anyone (nothing is guaranteed), but it sure as shit improves one's chances at success. Prove it. On December 12 2013 04:12 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 04:10 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:09 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:
Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others.
In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son.
The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular.
The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. Have you never worked a day in your life with other people? It is simply a self-evident truth that some people work harder than others. Do you read english ? Apparently not very well. I missed that one. I never said hard working people did not exist, I said that there are no direct link between the work you put in something and the wealth you end up with. On December 12 2013 04:11 Introvert wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:On December 11 2013 17:47 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 16:52 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 15:03 Introvert wrote:[quote] You can't value individual sovereignty and try to both lift some people up, and take some people down. That's not individuals making choices, that's the state coming in and saying "you've done too much, let me take some." What is free about that? What's free about you deciding when someone has too much? What's wrong with children getting their parents money? What's free about taking private property from people and telling them "no, you can't decide where that goes, we do." You assume that all wealth comes at the expense of someone else. That the rich are only rich because everyone else is a sucker or unable to overcome their own circumstances. This is of course historically false, but climbing to the top is rare. Do people do easy things or hard things? Easy, obviously. So why are you surprised it's so unbalanced? Do you actually think if everyone started off even that they would all end even? + Show Spoiler +Moreover, I don't understand the view that more bureaucrats or laws help anyone. Government collusion with large corporations is one reason we are where we are. The fewer people in control, the worse it gets. They will, as you seem to desire, impose their morality on everyone else. It is wrong for you to have this much! Things will never be fully equal, they may not even be close to equal. But let the cream rise to the crop, don't squash some so that others are brought up. Don't subsidize those who are not willing to do the work. Some are in very deep ruts, it's true. But don't tinker with the whole society just for that. No "fundamental transformation" is necessary. This is why no one here will ever agree. The values are different. You clearly don't value individual sovereignty as much as you value the ever elusive state of "equality." This is why no one will change their mind. Edit: I obviously support some rules, don't get the idea that I want nothing but cave men running around. You are jumping to a false conclusion. It's not like I'm advocating a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. I'm advocating a system wherein the actual socio-economic starting point for everyone maximizes their personal sovereignty by providing an equitable, solid base (I'm not inclined to put a number on it, but let's just say a middle-class position). That is the only way to actually ensure a kind of equality of opportunity that matters. I do not think everyone will "end even." But the object of life is not to have the highest wealth accumulation score. No one is worth a billion other people, even if those people are Somalis, rural Chinese, or whatever. Likewise, I am advocating a system that makes it difficult or impossible to accumulate as much wealth as the 300 richest Americans have accumulated. Despite what you think, the planet is finite, and there are a finite amount of resources. It's unethical and obscene that the richest people in this world have as much as they do, while the poorest people in this world start with nothing. Starting with nothing is equivalent to an economic, intellectual, and social maiming. And the butcher is the liberal regime. You are sacrificing billions of people to the meat grinder, now, and in the future, and your argument is, "well they aren't being productive enough, they just need to tighten their belts and work harder at FoxConn." On December 11 2013 15:12 Danglars wrote:[quote] The devil's in the details when you speak of a "more free society in general." I mean, let's appoint angels that will deem which of society need sacrifice their freedom for the whole. Otherwise, I'm more concerned that the ruling class will pick based on political considerations. (May I also suggest slightly tongue-in-cheek that every person here would stand at attention and say, "I am not the one that needs to sacrifice freedom") [quote]Surely, you must realize that being for "removing poverty and disadvantage" is like saying you're for apple pies and motherhood. It's your views on how this should be accomplished and by whom that will make or break your views on personal liberties. If you'll pardon me, but many presidents and political parties of all stripes and colors have said exactly what you say now. I'm against injustice and for freedom. It's their means of achieving this that's in question. The question is if utopia is unachievable (your chief gripe about equality of opportunity), and my preference is meager in this or impossible in that, then what structures would you erect to outperform what I have just described? Criticism is fine and dandy in my book, provided deep down that critic has thought through his own positions and believes them superior, and is furthermore willing to defend them. I can't go much farther in the other issues. You reject the proposed causes, and you deny your opponents any empathy with the poor (as has echoed from leftist demagogues from one generation to the next). Maybe I may side with Franklin, who wrote In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety .Please link your sources from the United Kingdom Gallup-Heathways so we know this is not a poll conducted of UK Income Groups -- particularly when it divides up income groups in pounds As I said, sometimes doing nothing is the appropriate answer to a system of ongoing violence. A Bartlebian repudiation can have more effect than reactionary outbursts of irrational violence, especially when the direction out is not clear. But you believe in magic and fairy tales, while rejecting other solutions out of naked greed. The evidence of the last 30 years shows that the current system leads to more of the same. Worsening inequality. Lower socio-economic mobility. Decreasing freedom. One starting point would be providing a minimum income to people that would lower the floor and improve opportunities for the bottom quintile or quartile. Instead you say that that would disincentivize people from working at Arby's. You willingly throw away the brains of millions, if not billions of people, by having them spend their days doing menial tasks for pennies, because it's more efficient for the accumulation of capital (at least in the short term). Liberalism is a meatgrinder that chews up individual subjective experiences of life and spits out profit for the capitalist. What might happen if we truly offered equality of opportunity to as many people as possible by ridding them of the extreme stresses and strains of wage slavery, where people's labor is simply a commodity to be bought and sold for the lowest price possible? If you think this is the best there is, you lack imagination. As a side note, the American colonies in the 18th century were much more egalitarian than now. I know you love the sacred Founding Fathers but it's a bit ridiculous to take it seriously when they violently took land from the indigenous peoples here before them. It's nice to talk about freedom for the white man when you are plundering resources and turning land you found into your own property. Please tell me how circumstances back then, where you had a thousands miles of continent to steal to your west, are in any way applicable to now? But yes, I concede the indigenous folks weren't efficiently using their resources and land for the accumulation of capital. I'm about to go to sleep, so I am not going to argue particulars with you. Moreover, I contend that you do advocate "a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. Some people just ARE harder workers, some just ARE more driven. Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others. In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son. The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. I already addrssed that. No, hard work does not necessarily lead to success. Nor does poverty necessarily lead to failure. I already admited that it's hard to succeed. And because it's hard, fewer people are going to actually do it. But this is true whether everyone starts off even or they don't. The hard working, driven people are going to gather wealth and power, and the less inclined or less caring will not. And thus, it makes sense that the children of the wealthy are more likely to be wealthy or more sucessful (by whatever metric), etc. My point was in saying that A) this is not a bad thing, B) big fat government can't fix it, (it actually makes it worse by letting the powerful set the rules) and C) government should not take upon itself some moral duty to equalize everything- both for ideological reasons (what do we value as a society and individuals) and for practical reasons. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. And yet, the mindset of the left is to try and govern individual behavior. You must buy this, you can't buy that, etc. You are right- it's really complex, so stop trying to control it! The problem is, as I said, that the distribution of the wealth created is a political matter. If you don't actually do something about it, the strong will feast on the weak and take all the wealth for them. And history has proved this time and time again. Saying that without rules the fox will not eat the chicken is dumb. The state, it is true, do make it worse sometime. That's why we the weakest need to take control of it, that's called the dictature of the proletariat. When you increase and centralize power, history is pretty clear as well: People suffer and/or growth is stifled. Despite the whining about big business, we are living in a time with an amazing amount of the world out of poverty. The state didn't do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an anarchist, the state has some role, but it should be minimal. Increasing the size of the state doesn't make it more noble or more virtuous, it does the opposite. The difference is while corperations can "abuse" people by paying them "too little" or what have you, government has the force and power of the law, combined with with the moral superiority they derive from being elected "by the people." This (AND the curruption from monied interests) make things worse. You know the saying- "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." I'm saying it's a dog eat dog world- trying to change it from the dogs jaws to the cat's claws is at best a useless idea, and at worst a bad idea, especially when the cat gets to set the rules. \ It's not true that it do worse. There are objective facts that shows that, for exemple, with a higher marginal taxation rate, inequalities are lessen. It's also quite sad for me that some people argue that, because it is a dog eat dog world, we should not do anything. I find valor in trying out, even if the result is null, and doing nothing, refusing to see more in humanity than what meets the eye, is insatisfactory. Like I just said, I really don't care about the "equality gap." I don't really understand the left's obsession with it. If everyone gets richer, then why try to change the whole system so broadly. Clearly SOMETHING about the system works. Who knows how much innovation has been stifled or delayed by overbearing rules. I'm arguing that life is not and cannot be utopia, thus we should use this fact and work around it, instead of trying to achieve ultimate harmony. When you shoot for something that is untainable, you just make a mess along the way. Anway, I should really get back to my math hw....
Everyone isn't getting richer... people everywhere in the world are experiencing increases in quality of living... because time passes. Funny how people in the 21st century are experiencing a massive increase in quality of living over the people of the 20th, similar to the one that people of the 20th experienced over the 19th. From this truly groundbreaking discovery you have made the assumption that the poor are somehow able to combat this process. You are correct. They have two methods of doing so:
1. Wealth redistribution (in the modern era done through taxation)
2. Revolution
Arguing against higher taxation on people with high income / capital gains is stupid. People at a low income are taxed at a low rate because they reap the work and income of one person. People at a high income should be taxed at a progressively higher tax rate because they reap the work and income of hundreds and thousands of people.
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On December 12 2013 04:42 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 04:35 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:29 Introvert wrote:On December 12 2013 04:12 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:11 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 04:06 farvacola wrote:
Hard Work is a God like any other when people worship it above considerations for the plight of actual people. At the end of the day, the notion that bad shit happens to the good and bad alike is very uncomfortable, so pray harder to Hard Work and hopefully it won't be true. Hard work obviously isn't going to guarantee anything to anyone (nothing is guaranteed), but it sure as shit improves one's chances at success. Prove it. On December 12 2013 04:12 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 04:10 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:09 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:
Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others.
In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son.
The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular.
The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. Have you never worked a day in your life with other people? It is simply a self-evident truth that some people work harder than others. Do you read english ? Apparently not very well. I missed that one. I never said hard working people did not exist, I said that there are no direct link between the work you put in something and the wealth you end up with. On December 12 2013 04:11 Introvert wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:On December 11 2013 17:47 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 16:52 IgnE wrote:On December 11 2013 15:03 Introvert wrote:[quote] You can't value individual sovereignty and try to both lift some people up, and take some people down. That's not individuals making choices, that's the state coming in and saying "you've done too much, let me take some." What is free about that? What's free about you deciding when someone has too much? What's wrong with children getting their parents money? What's free about taking private property from people and telling them "no, you can't decide where that goes, we do." You assume that all wealth comes at the expense of someone else. That the rich are only rich because everyone else is a sucker or unable to overcome their own circumstances. This is of course historically false, but climbing to the top is rare. Do people do easy things or hard things? Easy, obviously. So why are you surprised it's so unbalanced? Do you actually think if everyone started off even that they would all end even? + Show Spoiler +Moreover, I don't understand the view that more bureaucrats or laws help anyone. Government collusion with large corporations is one reason we are where we are. The fewer people in control, the worse it gets. They will, as you seem to desire, impose their morality on everyone else. It is wrong for you to have this much! Things will never be fully equal, they may not even be close to equal. But let the cream rise to the crop, don't squash some so that others are brought up. Don't subsidize those who are not willing to do the work. Some are in very deep ruts, it's true. But don't tinker with the whole society just for that. No "fundamental transformation" is necessary. This is why no one here will ever agree. The values are different. You clearly don't value individual sovereignty as much as you value the ever elusive state of "equality." This is why no one will change their mind. Edit: I obviously support some rules, don't get the idea that I want nothing but cave men running around. You are jumping to a false conclusion. It's not like I'm advocating a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. I'm advocating a system wherein the actual socio-economic starting point for everyone maximizes their personal sovereignty by providing an equitable, solid base (I'm not inclined to put a number on it, but let's just say a middle-class position). That is the only way to actually ensure a kind of equality of opportunity that matters. I do not think everyone will "end even." But the object of life is not to have the highest wealth accumulation score. No one is worth a billion other people, even if those people are Somalis, rural Chinese, or whatever. Likewise, I am advocating a system that makes it difficult or impossible to accumulate as much wealth as the 300 richest Americans have accumulated. Despite what you think, the planet is finite, and there are a finite amount of resources. It's unethical and obscene that the richest people in this world have as much as they do, while the poorest people in this world start with nothing. Starting with nothing is equivalent to an economic, intellectual, and social maiming. And the butcher is the liberal regime. You are sacrificing billions of people to the meat grinder, now, and in the future, and your argument is, "well they aren't being productive enough, they just need to tighten their belts and work harder at FoxConn." On December 11 2013 15:12 Danglars wrote:[quote] The devil's in the details when you speak of a "more free society in general." I mean, let's appoint angels that will deem which of society need sacrifice their freedom for the whole. Otherwise, I'm more concerned that the ruling class will pick based on political considerations. (May I also suggest slightly tongue-in-cheek that every person here would stand at attention and say, "I am not the one that needs to sacrifice freedom") [quote]Surely, you must realize that being for "removing poverty and disadvantage" is like saying you're for apple pies and motherhood. It's your views on how this should be accomplished and by whom that will make or break your views on personal liberties. If you'll pardon me, but many presidents and political parties of all stripes and colors have said exactly what you say now. I'm against injustice and for freedom. It's their means of achieving this that's in question. The question is if utopia is unachievable (your chief gripe about equality of opportunity), and my preference is meager in this or impossible in that, then what structures would you erect to outperform what I have just described? Criticism is fine and dandy in my book, provided deep down that critic has thought through his own positions and believes them superior, and is furthermore willing to defend them. I can't go much farther in the other issues. You reject the proposed causes, and you deny your opponents any empathy with the poor (as has echoed from leftist demagogues from one generation to the next). Maybe I may side with Franklin, who wrote In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety .Please link your sources from the United Kingdom Gallup-Heathways so we know this is not a poll conducted of UK Income Groups -- particularly when it divides up income groups in pounds As I said, sometimes doing nothing is the appropriate answer to a system of ongoing violence. A Bartlebian repudiation can have more effect than reactionary outbursts of irrational violence, especially when the direction out is not clear. But you believe in magic and fairy tales, while rejecting other solutions out of naked greed. The evidence of the last 30 years shows that the current system leads to more of the same. Worsening inequality. Lower socio-economic mobility. Decreasing freedom. One starting point would be providing a minimum income to people that would lower the floor and improve opportunities for the bottom quintile or quartile. Instead you say that that would disincentivize people from working at Arby's. You willingly throw away the brains of millions, if not billions of people, by having them spend their days doing menial tasks for pennies, because it's more efficient for the accumulation of capital (at least in the short term). Liberalism is a meatgrinder that chews up individual subjective experiences of life and spits out profit for the capitalist. What might happen if we truly offered equality of opportunity to as many people as possible by ridding them of the extreme stresses and strains of wage slavery, where people's labor is simply a commodity to be bought and sold for the lowest price possible? If you think this is the best there is, you lack imagination. As a side note, the American colonies in the 18th century were much more egalitarian than now. I know you love the sacred Founding Fathers but it's a bit ridiculous to take it seriously when they violently took land from the indigenous peoples here before them. It's nice to talk about freedom for the white man when you are plundering resources and turning land you found into your own property. Please tell me how circumstances back then, where you had a thousands miles of continent to steal to your west, are in any way applicable to now? But yes, I concede the indigenous folks weren't efficiently using their resources and land for the accumulation of capital. I'm about to go to sleep, so I am not going to argue particulars with you. Moreover, I contend that you do advocate "a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. Some people just ARE harder workers, some just ARE more driven. Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others. In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son. The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. I already addrssed that. No, hard work does not necessarily lead to success. Nor does poverty necessarily lead to failure. I already admited that it's hard to succeed. And because it's hard, fewer people are going to actually do it. But this is true whether everyone starts off even or they don't. The hard working, driven people are going to gather wealth and power, and the less inclined or less caring will not. And thus, it makes sense that the children of the wealthy are more likely to be wealthy or more sucessful (by whatever metric), etc. My point was in saying that A) this is not a bad thing, B) big fat government can't fix it, (it actually makes it worse by letting the powerful set the rules) and C) government should not take upon itself some moral duty to equalize everything- both for ideological reasons (what do we value as a society and individuals) and for practical reasons. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. And yet, the mindset of the left is to try and govern individual behavior. You must buy this, you can't buy that, etc. You are right- it's really complex, so stop trying to control it! The problem is, as I said, that the distribution of the wealth created is a political matter. If you don't actually do something about it, the strong will feast on the weak and take all the wealth for them. And history has proved this time and time again. Saying that without rules the fox will not eat the chicken is dumb. The state, it is true, do make it worse sometime. That's why we the weakest need to take control of it, that's called the dictature of the proletariat. When you increase and centralize power, history is pretty clear as well: People suffer and/or growth is stifled. Despite the whining about big business, we are living in a time with an amazing amount of the world out of poverty. The state didn't do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an anarchist, the state has some role, but it should be minimal. Increasing the size of the state doesn't make it more noble or more virtuous, it does the opposite. The difference is while corperations can "abuse" people by paying them "too little" or what have you, government has the force and power of the law, combined with with the moral superiority they derive from being elected "by the people." This (AND the curruption from monied interests) make things worse. You know the saying- "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." I'm saying it's a dog eat dog world- trying to change it from the dogs jaws to the cat's claws is at best a useless idea, and at worst a bad idea, especially when the cat gets to set the rules. \ It's not true that it do worse. There are objective facts that shows that, for exemple, with a higher marginal taxation rate, inequalities are lessen. It's also quite sad for me that some people argue that, because it is a dog eat dog world, we should not do anything. I find valor in trying out, even if the result is null, and doing nothing, refusing to see more in humanity than what meets the eye, is insatisfactory. Like I just said, I really don't care about the "equality gap." I don't really understand the left's obsession with it. If everyone gets richer, then why try to change the whole system so broadly. Clearly SOMETHING about the system works. Who knows how much innovation has been stifled or delayed by overbearing rules. I'm arguing that life is not and cannot be utopia, thus we should use this fact and work around it, instead of trying to achieve ultimate harmony. When you shoot for something that is untainable, you just make a mess along the way. Anway, I should really get back to my math hw....
Except most people aren't getting richer, let alone everyone:
Year Weekly Earnings (1982-84 dollars)
1972 $341.73 (peak)
1975 $314.77
1980 $290.80
1985 $284.96
1990 $271.10
1992 $266.46 (lowest point; 22% below peak)
1995 $267.17
2000 $285.00
2005 $285.05
2010 $297.79
2011 $295.49
2012 $294.83 (still 14% below peak)
Source
The good news in all this: wages overall are up since the recession’s start. The bad news: They’re down from the end of 2008, broadly flat over the past decade, and on an inflation-adjusted basis, wages peaked in 1973, fully 40 years ago. Apart from brief lapses, like in the late 1990s, wages have been falling for a generation.
Source
I wouldn't care about the equality gap either if people's basic needs (healthcare, education, etc.) were met in our society, but they manifestly are not.
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On December 12 2013 05:04 Mercy13 wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 04:42 Introvert wrote:On December 12 2013 04:35 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:29 Introvert wrote:On December 12 2013 04:12 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:11 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 04:06 farvacola wrote:
Hard Work is a God like any other when people worship it above considerations for the plight of actual people. At the end of the day, the notion that bad shit happens to the good and bad alike is very uncomfortable, so pray harder to Hard Work and hopefully it won't be true. Hard work obviously isn't going to guarantee anything to anyone (nothing is guaranteed), but it sure as shit improves one's chances at success. Prove it. On December 12 2013 04:12 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 04:10 WhiteDog wrote:On December 12 2013 04:09 xDaunt wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:
Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others.
In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son.
The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular.
The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. Have you never worked a day in your life with other people? It is simply a self-evident truth that some people work harder than others. Do you read english ? Apparently not very well. I missed that one. I never said hard working people did not exist, I said that there are no direct link between the work you put in something and the wealth you end up with. On December 12 2013 04:11 Introvert wrote:On December 12 2013 03:48 WhiteDog wrote:On December 11 2013 17:47 Introvert wrote:On December 11 2013 16:52 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
You are jumping to a false conclusion. It's not like I'm advocating a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. I'm advocating a system wherein the actual socio-economic starting point for everyone maximizes their personal sovereignty by providing an equitable, solid base (I'm not inclined to put a number on it, but let's just say a middle-class position). That is the only way to actually ensure a kind of equality of opportunity that matters.
I do not think everyone will "end even." But the object of life is not to have the highest wealth accumulation score. No one is worth a billion other people, even if those people are Somalis, rural Chinese, or whatever. Likewise, I am advocating a system that makes it difficult or impossible to accumulate as much wealth as the 300 richest Americans have accumulated. Despite what you think, the planet is finite, and there are a finite amount of resources. It's unethical and obscene that the richest people in this world have as much as they do, while the poorest people in this world start with nothing. Starting with nothing is equivalent to an economic, intellectual, and social maiming. And the butcher is the liberal regime. You are sacrificing billions of people to the meat grinder, now, and in the future, and your argument is, "well they aren't being productive enough, they just need to tighten their belts and work harder at FoxConn."
[quote]
As I said, sometimes doing nothing is the appropriate answer to a system of ongoing violence. A Bartlebian repudiation can have more effect than reactionary outbursts of irrational violence, especially when the direction out is not clear.
But you believe in magic and fairy tales, while rejecting other solutions out of naked greed. The evidence of the last 30 years shows that the current system leads to more of the same. Worsening inequality. Lower socio-economic mobility. Decreasing freedom.
One starting point would be providing a minimum income to people that would lower the floor and improve opportunities for the bottom quintile or quartile. Instead you say that that would disincentivize people from working at Arby's. You willingly throw away the brains of millions, if not billions of people, by having them spend their days doing menial tasks for pennies, because it's more efficient for the accumulation of capital (at least in the short term). Liberalism is a meatgrinder that chews up individual subjective experiences of life and spits out profit for the capitalist. What might happen if we truly offered equality of opportunity to as many people as possible by ridding them of the extreme stresses and strains of wage slavery, where people's labor is simply a commodity to be bought and sold for the lowest price possible? If you think this is the best there is, you lack imagination.
As a side note, the American colonies in the 18th century were much more egalitarian than now. I know you love the sacred Founding Fathers but it's a bit ridiculous to take it seriously when they violently took land from the indigenous peoples here before them. It's nice to talk about freedom for the white man when you are plundering resources and turning land you found into your own property. Please tell me how circumstances back then, where you had a thousands miles of continent to steal to your west, are in any way applicable to now? But yes, I concede the indigenous folks weren't efficiently using their resources and land for the accumulation of capital.
I'm about to go to sleep, so I am not going to argue particulars with you. Moreover, I contend that you do advocate "a society that forcibly takes from the rich and gives to the poor, at regular intervals, in an on-going and continuous fashion by some Big Brother, bureaucrat-laden government. Some people just ARE harder workers, some just ARE more driven. Can we stop with this fraud already ? In our society, being the US, France or whatever, there are no objective ground on which you can say that "harder workers" actually accumulate more wealth than others. In fact we have statistical proof that social mobility is a myth, and that most of the rich are rich from father to son. The most amazing thing about all that is that it is even denying, from my perspective, what actually is "creating wealth". There is a reason why the hypothesis that people are paid at the marginal productivity is nothing but theorical : it is denying the fact that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity of ONE person because the economy is a collective work. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. The distribution of the wealth created by the economic activity has nothing to do with the economy, work or whatever : it is a political matter, resolved by a balance of power between social groups who have different positions in the social field. I already addrssed that. No, hard work does not necessarily lead to success. Nor does poverty necessarily lead to failure. I already admited that it's hard to succeed. And because it's hard, fewer people are going to actually do it. But this is true whether everyone starts off even or they don't. The hard working, driven people are going to gather wealth and power, and the less inclined or less caring will not. And thus, it makes sense that the children of the wealthy are more likely to be wealthy or more sucessful (by whatever metric), etc. My point was in saying that A) this is not a bad thing, B) big fat government can't fix it, (it actually makes it worse by letting the powerful set the rules) and C) government should not take upon itself some moral duty to equalize everything- both for ideological reasons (what do we value as a society and individuals) and for practical reasons. Yes, creating wealth is the result of a variety of people to a point where it is very difficult to actually measure the participation of someone in particular. And yet, the mindset of the left is to try and govern individual behavior. You must buy this, you can't buy that, etc. You are right- it's really complex, so stop trying to control it! The problem is, as I said, that the distribution of the wealth created is a political matter. If you don't actually do something about it, the strong will feast on the weak and take all the wealth for them. And history has proved this time and time again. Saying that without rules the fox will not eat the chicken is dumb. The state, it is true, do make it worse sometime. That's why we the weakest need to take control of it, that's called the dictature of the proletariat. When you increase and centralize power, history is pretty clear as well: People suffer and/or growth is stifled. Despite the whining about big business, we are living in a time with an amazing amount of the world out of poverty. The state didn't do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an anarchist, the state has some role, but it should be minimal. Increasing the size of the state doesn't make it more noble or more virtuous, it does the opposite. The difference is while corperations can "abuse" people by paying them "too little" or what have you, government has the force and power of the law, combined with with the moral superiority they derive from being elected "by the people." This (AND the curruption from monied interests) make things worse. You know the saying- "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." I'm saying it's a dog eat dog world- trying to change it from the dogs jaws to the cat's claws is at best a useless idea, and at worst a bad idea, especially when the cat gets to set the rules. \ It's not true that it do worse. There are objective facts that shows that, for exemple, with a higher marginal taxation rate, inequalities are lessen. It's also quite sad for me that some people argue that, because it is a dog eat dog world, we should not do anything. I find valor in trying out, even if the result is null, and doing nothing, refusing to see more in humanity than what meets the eye, is insatisfactory. Like I just said, I really don't care about the "equality gap." I don't really understand the left's obsession with it. If everyone gets richer, then why try to change the whole system so broadly. Clearly SOMETHING about the system works. Who knows how much innovation has been stifled or delayed by overbearing rules. I'm arguing that life is not and cannot be utopia, thus we should use this fact and work around it, instead of trying to achieve ultimate harmony. When you shoot for something that is untainable, you just make a mess along the way. Anway, I should really get back to my math hw.... Except most people aren't getting richer, let alone everyone: Show nested quote +Year Weekly Earnings (1982-84 dollars)
1972 $341.73 (peak)
1975 $314.77
1980 $290.80
1985 $284.96
1990 $271.10
1992 $266.46 (lowest point; 22% below peak)
1995 $267.17
2000 $285.00
2005 $285.05
2010 $297.79
2011 $295.49
2012 $294.83 (still 14% below peak) SourceShow nested quote +The good news in all this: wages overall are up since the recession’s start. The bad news: They’re down from the end of 2008, broadly flat over the past decade, and on an inflation-adjusted basis, wages peaked in 1973, fully 40 years ago. Apart from brief lapses, like in the late 1990s, wages have been falling for a generation. SourceI wouldn't care about the equality gap either if people's basic needs (healthcare, education, etc.) were met in our society, but they manifestly are not.
The system I'm advocating isn't in place though, only strange versions of it. (Which still cause the worldwide poverty rate to fall.) The past 100 years has been dominated by progressive thought and government. Look where we are. The war on poverty? Failed (considering the $$ sunk into it). Medicare? Going broke. Social Security? Going broke. You can't honestly use what we have now as a critique of the conservative position, because this is nowhere close to it. One of the reasons that your hated fat cats are so powerful is precisely because you have increased the government's authority and role in the economy and people's daily lives. You don't think I'm merely advocating the status quo, do you? The closer this system moves towards total government control, the worse it gets.
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