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On January 05 2014 06:40 aksfjh wrote:
Automation is no new phenomenon. We've had to adapt to technological progress and workers becoming obsolete ever since the invention of the printing press. It is only different now in magnitude, but that isn't an issue. There are millions of ways people can bring value in an economy, not only through manipulation of materials into goods, but through providing services as well. As long as a great majority of people are still performing unpaid, nonspecialized work by making a good or providing a service for themselves, there is a job to be found.
The issue is really who can pay for these jobs.
Yes and no. Automation is only an exemple, a way for capitalist to maximize their profit. But still today there is a specific problem with capital as a whole : interest rate is so low that good economists forsaw a jobless recovery (why investing in labor when capital is so cheap ?).
There are also specific problem with modern technologies. For exemple, someone like D. Cohen says that we're in a O'Ring system (from the name of the piece that is responsible of the explosion of Challenger) : our technology has come to a point where small detail can have big effect to a point where compagnies are forced to pay a lot for specific individuals with high experience and knowledge in those detail (while prior to that we only invested in education overall).
Not to mention the appearance of artificial intelligence and the possibility of the complete uselessness of human overall in some years.
So yes it's an old problem, and yes a big part of our problem are direct consequence of political choices but for some economists there is a specific problem with modern technology and its impact on income distribution.
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On January 05 2014 07:04 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 06:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On January 05 2014 06:42 GreenHorizons wrote:The idea that business owners are "job creators" struck me as ridiculous the first time I heard it. If anything people in the top 20% of income earners (more egregiously the top 1%) are job killers. We know that for people to work, people have to want to consume something (food, shelter, entertainment, luxuries, etc...) Well when we look at income we see a ratio of about 1:15, when comparing the avg income of the bottom 20% to the avg income of the top 20%. Meaning the average household on top about 15x as much as a household on the bottom. On it's own, not necessarily a devastating problem for our economy... But when you breakdown the numbers and look at consumption between those same groups you can see a far more frightening picture. While taking in about 15x more than a household in the bottom 20% a household in the top 20% only consumes about 2x more (per person). So if more compensatory consumption means more jobs, than the income derived by the "job creators" would actually create far more jobs in the hands of the average Joe than it ever will in someone like Trumps bank account. So by concentrating wealth so much at the top, people are actually killing jobs (or at very best preventing jobs) not creating them + Show Spoiler +Image SourceSource Sure, but don't forget about capital goods  "Capital goods: The sector of the economy that includes capital-goods-producing businesses such as Boeing, Caterpillar and Lockheed Martin. Aerospace, defense, construction and machinery businesses make up most of the capital goods sector." Not a whole lot of individuals or households making those kind of purchases. Seeing as how I was talking about individuals/households not corporate entities your point is not really relevant. If the idea was that instead of a few handfuls of individuals having ownership of the massive corporate wealth, that those corporations be more equitably owned by the masses i.e. more aggressive employee ownership models then I think you might be able to make sense of your one-liner. But then it would still be in support of my point which I doubt is what you intended.
Corporate entities get their money from households, so there's a relationship there.
I think wider ownership is a laudable goal. Bush wanted that too, though he failed to achieve it.
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On January 05 2014 06:31 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 06:15 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:06 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 03:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:32 Yoav wrote:On January 04 2014 22:05 KwarK wrote:On January 04 2014 18:34 DeepElemBlues wrote:
some kind of wealth creator Isn't wealth creator a troll term invented to parody the way free market ideologues see the world? As in "poverty is caused by the 1% not having a great enough proportion of all the money so we need to give them more money so they can create money and jobs for us". Is there some kind of right wing reclaiming the term going on here or am I missing something? Wealth is created over time, and people create it. I won't argue it's the rich who are solely (or even mainly) responsible for this, but life, and economics, is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from an efficient, competitive economy that prevents oligopolies and monopolies from dulling competition. As is apparent to everyone, there is something broken in our current system that causes our monumental inequality, and surely middle class entrepreneurs need more help in our economy. But the super rich spending money by creating and expanding businesses is certainly a good thing. Except the super rich don't spend there money on making jobs. Gates spending money doesnt give more people work. Trump spending money doesnt give people work. How do you mean? If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people. If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it. If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... Does Trump pay out of his pocket for new hotels or does his hotel chain pay for it? Does Gates pay for a new windows out of his own pocket or does Microsoft pay for it? Additionally even the companies who spend the money will almost always spend that money regardless of tax-rates. Microsoft doesnt stop producing software because taxes went up 5%. What difference does it make whether trump pays "out of his own pocket" or a company that he controls and owns pays for it? What matters it that an entity (be it Trump or his corporation) embarks on a project to make money, and that project gives people work. This is really inarguable so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Obviously Microsoft won't stop making windows if corporate taxes go up 5%. But it makes a difference at the margin. (If you don't understand what I mean by "at the margin" please google it -- it's very important) If you raise corporate taxes, corporations will factor that in when they decide whether to embark on a new project or not. When the regulatory climate is unpredictable and unstable, companies will hesitate to spend money because even if the laws are favourable now they may change next week. If companies decide not to spend money, they either sit on their cash or they pay it out as dividends. The point of all this is that "the super rich spending their money" does create jobs -- at least if they spend it with a view to making more money for themselves. Because were talking about "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" when its not there money that makes jobs.
I'm responding to your claim that "Trump spending money doesn't give people work." I guess you're not saying that anymore... but I can't figure out what you are saying.
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On January 05 2014 07:23 ziggurat wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 06:31 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 06:15 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:06 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 03:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:32 Yoav wrote:On January 04 2014 22:05 KwarK wrote:On January 04 2014 18:34 DeepElemBlues wrote:
some kind of wealth creator Isn't wealth creator a troll term invented to parody the way free market ideologues see the world? As in "poverty is caused by the 1% not having a great enough proportion of all the money so we need to give them more money so they can create money and jobs for us". Is there some kind of right wing reclaiming the term going on here or am I missing something? Wealth is created over time, and people create it. I won't argue it's the rich who are solely (or even mainly) responsible for this, but life, and economics, is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from an efficient, competitive economy that prevents oligopolies and monopolies from dulling competition. As is apparent to everyone, there is something broken in our current system that causes our monumental inequality, and surely middle class entrepreneurs need more help in our economy. But the super rich spending money by creating and expanding businesses is certainly a good thing. Except the super rich don't spend there money on making jobs. Gates spending money doesnt give more people work. Trump spending money doesnt give people work. How do you mean? If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people. If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it. If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... Does Trump pay out of his pocket for new hotels or does his hotel chain pay for it? Does Gates pay for a new windows out of his own pocket or does Microsoft pay for it? Additionally even the companies who spend the money will almost always spend that money regardless of tax-rates. Microsoft doesnt stop producing software because taxes went up 5%. What difference does it make whether trump pays "out of his own pocket" or a company that he controls and owns pays for it? What matters it that an entity (be it Trump or his corporation) embarks on a project to make money, and that project gives people work. This is really inarguable so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Obviously Microsoft won't stop making windows if corporate taxes go up 5%. But it makes a difference at the margin. (If you don't understand what I mean by "at the margin" please google it -- it's very important) If you raise corporate taxes, corporations will factor that in when they decide whether to embark on a new project or not. When the regulatory climate is unpredictable and unstable, companies will hesitate to spend money because even if the laws are favourable now they may change next week. If companies decide not to spend money, they either sit on their cash or they pay it out as dividends. The point of all this is that "the super rich spending their money" does create jobs -- at least if they spend it with a view to making more money for themselves. Because were talking about "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" when its not there money that makes jobs. I'm responding to your claim that "Trump spending money doesn't give people work." I guess you're not saying that anymore... but I can't figure out what you are saying.
The argument is that Trump does not spend much of his money.
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On January 05 2014 07:23 ziggurat wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 06:31 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 06:15 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:06 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 03:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:32 Yoav wrote:On January 04 2014 22:05 KwarK wrote:On January 04 2014 18:34 DeepElemBlues wrote:
some kind of wealth creator Isn't wealth creator a troll term invented to parody the way free market ideologues see the world? As in "poverty is caused by the 1% not having a great enough proportion of all the money so we need to give them more money so they can create money and jobs for us". Is there some kind of right wing reclaiming the term going on here or am I missing something? Wealth is created over time, and people create it. I won't argue it's the rich who are solely (or even mainly) responsible for this, but life, and economics, is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from an efficient, competitive economy that prevents oligopolies and monopolies from dulling competition. As is apparent to everyone, there is something broken in our current system that causes our monumental inequality, and surely middle class entrepreneurs need more help in our economy. But the super rich spending money by creating and expanding businesses is certainly a good thing. Except the super rich don't spend there money on making jobs. Gates spending money doesnt give more people work. Trump spending money doesnt give people work. How do you mean? If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people. If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it. If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... Does Trump pay out of his pocket for new hotels or does his hotel chain pay for it? Does Gates pay for a new windows out of his own pocket or does Microsoft pay for it? Additionally even the companies who spend the money will almost always spend that money regardless of tax-rates. Microsoft doesnt stop producing software because taxes went up 5%. What difference does it make whether trump pays "out of his own pocket" or a company that he controls and owns pays for it? What matters it that an entity (be it Trump or his corporation) embarks on a project to make money, and that project gives people work. This is really inarguable so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Obviously Microsoft won't stop making windows if corporate taxes go up 5%. But it makes a difference at the margin. (If you don't understand what I mean by "at the margin" please google it -- it's very important) If you raise corporate taxes, corporations will factor that in when they decide whether to embark on a new project or not. When the regulatory climate is unpredictable and unstable, companies will hesitate to spend money because even if the laws are favourable now they may change next week. If companies decide not to spend money, they either sit on their cash or they pay it out as dividends. The point of all this is that "the super rich spending their money" does create jobs -- at least if they spend it with a view to making more money for themselves. Because were talking about "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" when its not there money that makes jobs. I'm responding to your claim that "Trump spending money doesn't give people work." I guess you're not saying that anymore... but I can't figure out what you are saying.
"Trump spending money doesn't give people work".
His company can spend money to make work however.
therefor "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" is bs because there not using there own money for it.
You understand it now?
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On January 05 2014 07:30 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 07:23 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 06:31 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 06:15 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:06 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 03:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:32 Yoav wrote:On January 04 2014 22:05 KwarK wrote:On January 04 2014 18:34 DeepElemBlues wrote:
some kind of wealth creator Isn't wealth creator a troll term invented to parody the way free market ideologues see the world? As in "poverty is caused by the 1% not having a great enough proportion of all the money so we need to give them more money so they can create money and jobs for us". Is there some kind of right wing reclaiming the term going on here or am I missing something? Wealth is created over time, and people create it. I won't argue it's the rich who are solely (or even mainly) responsible for this, but life, and economics, is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from an efficient, competitive economy that prevents oligopolies and monopolies from dulling competition. As is apparent to everyone, there is something broken in our current system that causes our monumental inequality, and surely middle class entrepreneurs need more help in our economy. But the super rich spending money by creating and expanding businesses is certainly a good thing. Except the super rich don't spend there money on making jobs. Gates spending money doesnt give more people work. Trump spending money doesnt give people work. How do you mean? If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people. If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it. If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... Does Trump pay out of his pocket for new hotels or does his hotel chain pay for it? Does Gates pay for a new windows out of his own pocket or does Microsoft pay for it? Additionally even the companies who spend the money will almost always spend that money regardless of tax-rates. Microsoft doesnt stop producing software because taxes went up 5%. What difference does it make whether trump pays "out of his own pocket" or a company that he controls and owns pays for it? What matters it that an entity (be it Trump or his corporation) embarks on a project to make money, and that project gives people work. This is really inarguable so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Obviously Microsoft won't stop making windows if corporate taxes go up 5%. But it makes a difference at the margin. (If you don't understand what I mean by "at the margin" please google it -- it's very important) If you raise corporate taxes, corporations will factor that in when they decide whether to embark on a new project or not. When the regulatory climate is unpredictable and unstable, companies will hesitate to spend money because even if the laws are favourable now they may change next week. If companies decide not to spend money, they either sit on their cash or they pay it out as dividends. The point of all this is that "the super rich spending their money" does create jobs -- at least if they spend it with a view to making more money for themselves. Because were talking about "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" when its not there money that makes jobs. I'm responding to your claim that "Trump spending money doesn't give people work." I guess you're not saying that anymore... but I can't figure out what you are saying. "Trump spending money doesn't give people work". His company can spend money to make work however. therefor "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" is bs because there not using there own money for it. You understand it now?
No. Do you know what a corporation is? Not trying to be condescending, I didn't really know until 2nd year law school. But a corporation is a vehicle that wealthy people use to invest money. When Trump or some other rich person embarks on a business venture, they do it through a corporation.
Corporations don't have their own money. They only have other peoples' money. So when you say "its his company not him that's spending money" I don't understand you. It's the same thing.
To the guy above who says that Trump doesn't spend much of his money -- that's probably true. A lot of businesses aren't spending money because of the crappy business climate these days.
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"Trump" (as a example for all the super rich) cant spend much of his money. It's hard for me to explain what I mean because language and such and I don't claim to understand it all but our money system is so redicoulous that banks need super rich because they need people and nations with a huge amount of debt. This is how banks make money AND this is why money even exists. If someone has money there is allways someone who has debt.
What does this mean is that the leaders of our world will allways enforce huge debt and huge wealth concentrated on a minimal amount of people.
This leads to the happenings which we witnessed in the last years: rating agencies call out someone and the taxpayer or depositor has to pay the debt because our someone is to big to fail.
We are at this absurd point where we are at the mercy of banks and rating agencies, have to pay for their gambling and cant do anything against it because our economy would suffer from it. The system is the most genius abuse that anyone could ever imagine.
Warren Buffett (4th richest man on earth):“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
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On January 05 2014 07:56 ziggurat wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 07:30 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 07:23 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 06:31 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 06:15 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:06 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 03:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:32 Yoav wrote:On January 04 2014 22:05 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
Isn't wealth creator a troll term invented to parody the way free market ideologues see the world? As in "poverty is caused by the 1% not having a great enough proportion of all the money so we need to give them more money so they can create money and jobs for us". Is there some kind of right wing reclaiming the term going on here or am I missing something? Wealth is created over time, and people create it. I won't argue it's the rich who are solely (or even mainly) responsible for this, but life, and economics, is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from an efficient, competitive economy that prevents oligopolies and monopolies from dulling competition. As is apparent to everyone, there is something broken in our current system that causes our monumental inequality, and surely middle class entrepreneurs need more help in our economy. But the super rich spending money by creating and expanding businesses is certainly a good thing. Except the super rich don't spend there money on making jobs. Gates spending money doesnt give more people work. Trump spending money doesnt give people work. How do you mean? If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people. If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it. If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... Does Trump pay out of his pocket for new hotels or does his hotel chain pay for it? Does Gates pay for a new windows out of his own pocket or does Microsoft pay for it? Additionally even the companies who spend the money will almost always spend that money regardless of tax-rates. Microsoft doesnt stop producing software because taxes went up 5%. What difference does it make whether trump pays "out of his own pocket" or a company that he controls and owns pays for it? What matters it that an entity (be it Trump or his corporation) embarks on a project to make money, and that project gives people work. This is really inarguable so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Obviously Microsoft won't stop making windows if corporate taxes go up 5%. But it makes a difference at the margin. (If you don't understand what I mean by "at the margin" please google it -- it's very important) If you raise corporate taxes, corporations will factor that in when they decide whether to embark on a new project or not. When the regulatory climate is unpredictable and unstable, companies will hesitate to spend money because even if the laws are favourable now they may change next week. If companies decide not to spend money, they either sit on their cash or they pay it out as dividends. The point of all this is that "the super rich spending their money" does create jobs -- at least if they spend it with a view to making more money for themselves. Because were talking about "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" when its not there money that makes jobs. I'm responding to your claim that "Trump spending money doesn't give people work." I guess you're not saying that anymore... but I can't figure out what you are saying. "Trump spending money doesn't give people work". His company can spend money to make work however. therefor "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" is bs because there not using there own money for it. You understand it now? No. Do you know what a corporation is? Not trying to be condescending, I didn't really know until 2nd year law school. But a corporation is a vehicle that wealthy people use to invest money. When Trump or some other rich person embarks on a business venture, they do it through a corporation. Corporations don't have their own money. They only have other peoples' money. So when you say "its his company not him that's spending money" I don't understand you. It's the same thing. To the guy above who says that Trump doesn't spend much of his money -- that's probably true. A lot of businesses aren't spending money because of the crappy business climate these days.
Your definition of a corporation is bullshit. In economy we don't see corporation like that. Your view just completly put aside the question of the distribution of profit between the people within the corporation. Your arguments have no real ground, it is true that rich people don't contribute much to the economy : you used the exemple of the hotel Trump might build, but Trump will eventually invest in such hotel only if there are valid perspective for profit, and that profit is only possible if there is a demand for the hotel.
If no people demand product, then you can build all the hotel you want you will not create any wealth (that's why economists use the concept of utility, because when you build something it is the usefulness of that thing for someone that value it and it is that process that is at the core of creating wealth). The problem with rich people is that they save so much and only invest in sector where they will maximise their profit (sector with lack of competition like monopoly) to a point where a big part of their capital does not contribute in creating any wealth. They even destroy wealth to a certain point by doing everything possible to them to continue to accumulate capital - like destroying competition.
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The National Security Agency isn't exactly dispelling the notion that it's spying on lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Sanders posed "one very simple question" in a letter Friday to the agency's director, Keith Alexander.
"Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?" the senator asked.
He specified that "spying" would include the collection of metadata (information pertaining to a phone call's time, date, length and duration), along with Internet and email history.
Source
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On January 05 2014 07:01 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 06:23 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:25 KwarK wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 03:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:32 Yoav wrote:On January 04 2014 22:05 KwarK wrote:On January 04 2014 18:34 DeepElemBlues wrote:
some kind of wealth creator Isn't wealth creator a troll term invented to parody the way free market ideologues see the world? As in "poverty is caused by the 1% not having a great enough proportion of all the money so we need to give them more money so they can create money and jobs for us". Is there some kind of right wing reclaiming the term going on here or am I missing something? Wealth is created over time, and people create it. I won't argue it's the rich who are solely (or even mainly) responsible for this, but life, and economics, is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from an efficient, competitive economy that prevents oligopolies and monopolies from dulling competition. As is apparent to everyone, there is something broken in our current system that causes our monumental inequality, and surely middle class entrepreneurs need more help in our economy. But the super rich spending money by creating and expanding businesses is certainly a good thing. Except the super rich don't spend there money on making jobs. Gates spending money doesnt give more people work. Trump spending money doesnt give people work. How do you mean? If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people. If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it. If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... I think Marx was more or less right with the wealth being created by those who put their labour in and the financier class basically just skimming off the lion's share. Now obviously investment carries risks and requires expertise but suggesting that Trump is creating the wealth generated by the profits of the new hotel in Las Vegas is ignoring the hundreds of employees who are receiving less for their labour than the client is paying for their services. The top 1% now have a record 39% of all wealth, something is going wrong and it certainly isn't going to be fixed by calling them job creators and pleading for society to make life a little bit easier for them. The "increase the size of the pie" argument ignores the fact that a small group of people are eating a bigger and bigger slice of it. Wealth is created by labour but the American ideal is the attainment of a state whereby a life of leisure can be achieved, not by the consumption of wealth preserved from earlier labour, but rather from the creation of wealth from wealth without the input of labour. The elusive "making your money work for you". This is a sickness, the money doesn't work for you, other people work for your gain while you do nothing but receive increased amounts of money which are fed back into a never ending cycle while the labour of the individual is marginalised and expendable. The financiers are not a benevolent class using their powers to create jobs for the average worker. Recent years have seen employees increasingly outsourced or replaced with machines, entire cities have been left to rot by dying industries, all justified in the name of wealth creation which never leaves the hands of the few. Political influence is for sale as campaign budgets increase year or year, public opinion becomes a commodity sold by the media and legal accountability for the actions of the rich disappears. I'm not blaming one political party for this, Bill Clinton sold Presidential pardons in exchange for donations to his wife's senate campaign for example, the disease crosses party lines. The idea that the problem is that the rich just aren't rich enough is funny until the labourers start parrotting it unironically. Interesting post. Just to clarify, I'm not asserting that financiers are benevolent. I'm not asserting that "the rich aren't rich enough". And it seems to me that you're just arguing semantics when you say "Trump is not creating the wealth, the workers are". OK ... if that's how you want to describe it ... so what? Romney said something in one of the debates that stayed with me. He said, "The rich will be just fine no matter which of us becomes president". Of course -- the rich will always be fine no matter how the laws change. I don't care about whether the rich do well for themselves or not. I care about having a society where normal people have a fair chance to make a good life for themselves. So the question then is, what can government do to help move us towards that society? When we think about this, we need to realize that high taxes, unpredictable rules, and transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor create a climate in which less wealth is created. You say that we shouldn't just focus on growing the pie. But we should also be careful not to shrink it. Why must high taxes go alongside unpredictable rules? Also why does transferring wealth from rich to the poor necessarily involve less wealth creation? I see absolutely no reason for that. The rich don't act to maximise wealth creation, they act to maximise wealth creation for them. They don't care if, for example, moving jobs overseas leaves an entire city idle as the loss of employment causes dependent businesses to fail because those are negative externalities which become the problem of society as a whole. The overall output of society may have gone down as groups of people find themselves outside the business models of the financiers but the wealth of the few has grown. Wealth is created when people engage in productive labour, redistribution stimulates and revitalises economies. It allows parents to work fewer hours and spend more time raising decent kids, it strengthens community bonds and injects capital into the local economy that creates productive labour where before there could be none. Unless you advocate the abolition of the minimum wage, working hour legislation, employee rights, workplace safety and so forth Americans are not going to be able to compete on an even playing field with Chinese people and this is only going to get worse as mechanisation replaces the Chinese. There is a surplus of American labour that capitalism has no use for, its creation dismissed as a societal externality with the associated loss of wealth not appearing on any balance sheet. Normal people are not getting a fair chance to make a good life for themselves. A great many are condemned to unemployment by a capitalist system that has discarded them. If there is more than enough pie for everyone but people are going hungry then why is the concern not making sure everyone gets fed? At the end of it all there won't be an awards ceremony with a prize for biggest pie. Likewise, the case is made that some public servant ostensibly hired for purposes of benevolence won't know enough or be altruistic enough to decide where to redistribute the money so as to "stimulate and revitalize economies." It could just as well be redistributed to the impact groups with the most political clout. Buggy-whip manufacturers unjustly impacted by the rise in cars, we need to redistribute those greedy capitalist's money to them. Big Shoes are putting cobblers out of business, we need to redistribute money to them to stimulate the economy.
Rather, the free economy engages in creative destruction, opening up new jobs as others are destroyed, outsourced, or automated. Manufacturing jobs in place of tasks done by hand. New industries never even heard of before. iPods were not invented by directive of a government agency, and now how many more people find jobs from that avenue?
Sure, locally administered welfare programs for the temporarily jobless and poor and hungry, designed to help them receive training for the next and discourage dependency. Then, grow the pie, don't redistribute the pie. We talk about wealth creators because of the discouragement confiscatory taxation has on wealth creators. Stop expanding your business, stop hiring on more employers, stop (gasp) getting financing for new ventures, because you're only allowed to keep 50cents for every extra dollar you make whereas your increased workload still burdens you. Capitalism is unique for its unparalleled capacity to inspire people to make products people didn't even know they wanted before. Wealth redistribution as wealth creation is the ticket to stagnation, fueled by envy of the rich for their wealth and jealousy for the hard worker that made sacrifices to get ahead.
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ALBANY — Joining a growing group of states that have loosened restrictions on marijuana, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York plans this week to announce an executive action that would allow limited use of the drug by those with serious illnesses, state officials say.
The turnabout by Mr. Cuomo, who had long resisted legalizing medical marijuana, comes as other states are taking increasingly liberal positions on it — most notably Colorado, where thousands have flocked to buy the drug for recreational use since it became legal on Jan. 1.
Mr. Cuomo’s plan will be far more restrictive than the laws in Colorado or California, where medical marijuana is available to people with conditions as mild as backaches. It will allow just 20 hospitals across the state to prescribe marijuana to patients with cancer, glaucoma or other diseases that meet standards to be set by the New York State Department of Health.
Source
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On January 05 2014 08:23 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 07:01 KwarK wrote:On January 05 2014 06:23 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:25 KwarK wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 03:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:32 Yoav wrote:On January 04 2014 22:05 KwarK wrote:On January 04 2014 18:34 DeepElemBlues wrote:
some kind of wealth creator Isn't wealth creator a troll term invented to parody the way free market ideologues see the world? As in "poverty is caused by the 1% not having a great enough proportion of all the money so we need to give them more money so they can create money and jobs for us". Is there some kind of right wing reclaiming the term going on here or am I missing something? Wealth is created over time, and people create it. I won't argue it's the rich who are solely (or even mainly) responsible for this, but life, and economics, is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from an efficient, competitive economy that prevents oligopolies and monopolies from dulling competition. As is apparent to everyone, there is something broken in our current system that causes our monumental inequality, and surely middle class entrepreneurs need more help in our economy. But the super rich spending money by creating and expanding businesses is certainly a good thing. Except the super rich don't spend there money on making jobs. Gates spending money doesnt give more people work. Trump spending money doesnt give people work. How do you mean? If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people. If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it. If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... I think Marx was more or less right with the wealth being created by those who put their labour in and the financier class basically just skimming off the lion's share. Now obviously investment carries risks and requires expertise but suggesting that Trump is creating the wealth generated by the profits of the new hotel in Las Vegas is ignoring the hundreds of employees who are receiving less for their labour than the client is paying for their services. The top 1% now have a record 39% of all wealth, something is going wrong and it certainly isn't going to be fixed by calling them job creators and pleading for society to make life a little bit easier for them. The "increase the size of the pie" argument ignores the fact that a small group of people are eating a bigger and bigger slice of it. Wealth is created by labour but the American ideal is the attainment of a state whereby a life of leisure can be achieved, not by the consumption of wealth preserved from earlier labour, but rather from the creation of wealth from wealth without the input of labour. The elusive "making your money work for you". This is a sickness, the money doesn't work for you, other people work for your gain while you do nothing but receive increased amounts of money which are fed back into a never ending cycle while the labour of the individual is marginalised and expendable. The financiers are not a benevolent class using their powers to create jobs for the average worker. Recent years have seen employees increasingly outsourced or replaced with machines, entire cities have been left to rot by dying industries, all justified in the name of wealth creation which never leaves the hands of the few. Political influence is for sale as campaign budgets increase year or year, public opinion becomes a commodity sold by the media and legal accountability for the actions of the rich disappears. I'm not blaming one political party for this, Bill Clinton sold Presidential pardons in exchange for donations to his wife's senate campaign for example, the disease crosses party lines. The idea that the problem is that the rich just aren't rich enough is funny until the labourers start parrotting it unironically. Interesting post. Just to clarify, I'm not asserting that financiers are benevolent. I'm not asserting that "the rich aren't rich enough". And it seems to me that you're just arguing semantics when you say "Trump is not creating the wealth, the workers are". OK ... if that's how you want to describe it ... so what? Romney said something in one of the debates that stayed with me. He said, "The rich will be just fine no matter which of us becomes president". Of course -- the rich will always be fine no matter how the laws change. I don't care about whether the rich do well for themselves or not. I care about having a society where normal people have a fair chance to make a good life for themselves. So the question then is, what can government do to help move us towards that society? When we think about this, we need to realize that high taxes, unpredictable rules, and transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor create a climate in which less wealth is created. You say that we shouldn't just focus on growing the pie. But we should also be careful not to shrink it. Why must high taxes go alongside unpredictable rules? Also why does transferring wealth from rich to the poor necessarily involve less wealth creation? I see absolutely no reason for that. The rich don't act to maximise wealth creation, they act to maximise wealth creation for them. They don't care if, for example, moving jobs overseas leaves an entire city idle as the loss of employment causes dependent businesses to fail because those are negative externalities which become the problem of society as a whole. The overall output of society may have gone down as groups of people find themselves outside the business models of the financiers but the wealth of the few has grown. Wealth is created when people engage in productive labour, redistribution stimulates and revitalises economies. It allows parents to work fewer hours and spend more time raising decent kids, it strengthens community bonds and injects capital into the local economy that creates productive labour where before there could be none. Unless you advocate the abolition of the minimum wage, working hour legislation, employee rights, workplace safety and so forth Americans are not going to be able to compete on an even playing field with Chinese people and this is only going to get worse as mechanisation replaces the Chinese. There is a surplus of American labour that capitalism has no use for, its creation dismissed as a societal externality with the associated loss of wealth not appearing on any balance sheet. Normal people are not getting a fair chance to make a good life for themselves. A great many are condemned to unemployment by a capitalist system that has discarded them. If there is more than enough pie for everyone but people are going hungry then why is the concern not making sure everyone gets fed? At the end of it all there won't be an awards ceremony with a prize for biggest pie. Likewise, the case is made that some public servant ostensibly hired for purposes of benevolence won't know enough or be altruistic enough to decide where to redistribute the money so as to "stimulate and revitalize economies." It could just as well be redistributed to the impact groups with the most political clout. Buggy-whip manufacturers unjustly impacted by the rise in cars, we need to redistribute those greedy capitalist's money to them. Big Shoes are putting cobblers out of business, we need to redistribute money to them to stimulate the economy. Rather, the free economy engages in creative destruction, opening up new jobs as others are destroyed, outsourced, or automated. Manufacturing jobs in place of tasks done by hand. New industries never even heard of before. iPods were not invented by directive of a government agency, and now how many more people find jobs from that avenue? Sure, locally administered welfare programs for the temporarily jobless and poor and hungry, designed to help them receive training for the next and discourage dependency. Then, grow the pie, don't redistribute the pie. We talk about wealth creators because of the discouragement confiscatory taxation has on wealth creators. Stop expanding your business, stop hiring on more employers, stop (gasp) getting financing for new ventures, because you're only allowed to keep 50cents for every extra dollar you make whereas your increased workload still burdens you. Capitalism is unique for its unparalleled capacity to inspire people to make products people didn't even know they wanted before. Wealth redistribution as wealth creation is the ticket to stagnation, fueled by envy of the rich for their wealth and jealousy for the hard worker that made sacrifices to get ahead.
You know all your point of view is base on chimera, an hypothetic system called "capitalism", "unique for its unparalleled capacity to inspire people" blablabla. Something that never existed and that cannot exist in the first place. That's why I rarely use the term capitalism, that's why I always feel bored when I hear or read anyone talking about "capitalism".
Creative destruction is a really interesting topic. But why do you use this idea while defending the idea of free market ? The idea of creative destruction was used by schumpeter to explain why the economy goes out of a slump, it is a concept that was used in his theory of the evolution economic, and more exactly a way for him to explain recovery after slump in relation to the existence of economic cycle - an empirical constatation.
The problem is that the idea of slump and economic cycle have never been fully explained by free marketist and it is, by itself, a proof that free market doesn't work. If the economy naturally tend to cycle with slump and recovery, and if the market is always optimal, does this mean that slump are optimal ? (and yes some economists defended this and it was wrong) Why should we not try to act and prevent the cycle from happening ? What's so important about creative destruction that we cannot do with economic policy ? Your answer to that will always be that the economic policy do more arm than good, but that is also not true empirically.
Ho but yeah, reality doesn't matter right. Let the kids die of hunger so that the population regulate itself, and let the economy create and destroy because it is the most efficient way to maximise capital accumulation.
By the way, in a "free" society the iphone would never have appeared, because there would be no incentive for such tool to appear : with no government, no private property, no money, no regulation, no pattern, etc.
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On January 05 2014 08:05 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 07:56 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 07:30 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 07:23 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 06:31 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 06:15 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:06 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 03:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:32 Yoav wrote:
[quote]
Wealth is created over time, and people create it. I won't argue it's the rich who are solely (or even mainly) responsible for this, but life, and economics, is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from an efficient, competitive economy that prevents oligopolies and monopolies from dulling competition. As is apparent to everyone, there is something broken in our current system that causes our monumental inequality, and surely middle class entrepreneurs need more help in our economy. But the super rich spending money by creating and expanding businesses is certainly a good thing. Except the super rich don't spend there money on making jobs. Gates spending money doesnt give more people work. Trump spending money doesnt give people work. How do you mean? If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people. If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it. If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... Does Trump pay out of his pocket for new hotels or does his hotel chain pay for it? Does Gates pay for a new windows out of his own pocket or does Microsoft pay for it? Additionally even the companies who spend the money will almost always spend that money regardless of tax-rates. Microsoft doesnt stop producing software because taxes went up 5%. What difference does it make whether trump pays "out of his own pocket" or a company that he controls and owns pays for it? What matters it that an entity (be it Trump or his corporation) embarks on a project to make money, and that project gives people work. This is really inarguable so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Obviously Microsoft won't stop making windows if corporate taxes go up 5%. But it makes a difference at the margin. (If you don't understand what I mean by "at the margin" please google it -- it's very important) If you raise corporate taxes, corporations will factor that in when they decide whether to embark on a new project or not. When the regulatory climate is unpredictable and unstable, companies will hesitate to spend money because even if the laws are favourable now they may change next week. If companies decide not to spend money, they either sit on their cash or they pay it out as dividends. The point of all this is that "the super rich spending their money" does create jobs -- at least if they spend it with a view to making more money for themselves. Because were talking about "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" when its not there money that makes jobs. I'm responding to your claim that "Trump spending money doesn't give people work." I guess you're not saying that anymore... but I can't figure out what you are saying. "Trump spending money doesn't give people work". His company can spend money to make work however. therefor "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" is bs because there not using there own money for it. You understand it now? No. Do you know what a corporation is? Not trying to be condescending, I didn't really know until 2nd year law school. But a corporation is a vehicle that wealthy people use to invest money. When Trump or some other rich person embarks on a business venture, they do it through a corporation. Corporations don't have their own money. They only have other peoples' money. So when you say "its his company not him that's spending money" I don't understand you. It's the same thing. To the guy above who says that Trump doesn't spend much of his money -- that's probably true. A lot of businesses aren't spending money because of the crappy business climate these days. Your definition of a corporation is bullshit. In economy we don't see corporation like that. Your view just completly put aside the question of the distribution of profit between the people within the corporation. Your arguments have no real ground, it is true that rich people don't contribute much to the economy : you used the exemple of the hotel Trump might build, but Trump will eventually invest in such hotel only if there are valid perspective for profit, and that profit is only possible if there is a demand for the hotel. If no people demand product, then you can build all the hotel you want you will not create any wealth (that's why economists use the concept of utility, because when you build something it is the usefulness of that thing for someone that value it and it is that process that is at the core of creating wealth). The problem with rich people is that they save so much and only invest in sector where they will maximise their profit (sector with lack of competition like monopoly) to a point where a big part of their capital does not contribute in creating any wealth. They even destroy wealth to a certain point by doing everything possible to them to continue to accumulate capital - like destroying competition.
Yeah if there's no demand the hotel won't be profitable... and Trump will have lost money. That should be obvious!
What isn't obvious is how you're going to redesign the system to be more equitable and yet just as good at building hotels.
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On January 05 2014 05:41 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 05:26 IgnE wrote:On January 05 2014 03:24 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On January 05 2014 03:06 darthfoley wrote:On January 04 2014 18:34 DeepElemBlues wrote:On January 04 2014 06:47 Nyxisto wrote:On January 04 2014 06:05 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
Side note - I'm not sure why you're figuring that low income / low education voters are opposed to single payer healthcare. I haven't seen that statistic. I was mainly referring to the surprisingly large group of "working class whites" that seem to root with the Tea Party or other Libertarian groups, or the Anti - Government agenda of the Republican party(which from a foreign perspective seems what they have been shifting towards). I am aware that lower income voters generally tend to favor the Democrats, but given the fact that the country is nearly split in half while the agenda of the GOP is basically putting 90% of the people at disadvantage is astonishing to me. Perhaps because the perspectives of comfortable middle-class people on the benefits of a heavy government blanket for all do not quite match up to the reality of the working poor trying to deal with the behemoth. I actually am one of those working poor, and dealing with the government on anything is about eight bitches and a half. What is promised by government and what is delivered by government "where the rubber hits the road" are two vastly different things. And it only gets worse when you're an employer or some kind of wealth creator trying to deal with the government. You guys can go on and on about how competently you do it in Europe but if that were actually true to the degree claimed, Hollande wouldn't be going all Reagan in a desperate attempt to save his bacon right now, your rich countries wouldn't be bullying the poor ones around to get their houses in order, the NHS wouldn't be treating patients like grandma and grandpa in the cheapest, most loathsome "retirement homes" in the US South, and immigration wouldn't be such a controversial issue. Sorry but it actually is true that you do eventually run out of other people's money, it actually is true that economic innovation and vitality are sapped by too much taxation and regulation, and it actually is true that the US economy is more resilient because we put less weights on it "for the common good" than Europe does. You've chosen the trade-off at a different point than the US has, and it hasn't leapfrogged you past us. Of course it is astonishing to you, when you think of economic advancement you don't look toward yourself, you look toward the government. Americans look more to themselves. And it's a laugh and a half that the "agenda of the GOP is basically putting 90% of the people at disadvantage." That is stupid. The GOP is the nationalist party, remember? What kind of nationalism is it to intend to "disadvantage" 90% of the people? "Shoot your country in the foot" nationalism? The GOP wants everybody to be as rich as they can possibly be, just like all political parties have their idealistic nonsense. Arguing that the people vote against their interest because they're ignorant or mystified or stupid never has been a winner and never will be. We live in democracies, the people decide what their interest is and if you don't like it, that's really just too bad. The GOP wants everyone to be as rich as they can be? Well, it definitely wants the rich people + businesses to be as rich as possible. Although i'm sure you'll construct some argument to say that deregulation + cutting taxes on the rich will have a great trickle down effect, especially when coupled with cuts to all the programs that support the poorer Americans. Because i'm sure that single mother who works 9-5 and is on food stamps isn't really working hard enough. I have a solution! Cut her welfare so that she has to feed her kids shittier food; THAT will motivate her to "work harder!" For anyone interested in the issues of cutting welfare: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgxxT4xpVNI It's an informative and well presented documentary that challenges the stereotype of minorities feeding off the government as the principal welfare recipients. You say people decide what their interests are? I agree. Perhaps that's why the GOP has been beaten soundly in the last two general elections. The most confusing thing about that, is that the GOP seems to have gone farther right after getting small %'s of everyone that isn't white. Hell, Al Gore even won the popular vote in 2000. What about when the GOP expands government programs like Medicare and cuts taxes for lower income people? Is that just for rich folks too? Yes. Obamacare makes insurance industry richer and lower taxes on lower brackets are just a political concession to get lower taxes on the rich. I don't think expanding Medicare makes the insurance industry richer. Nor do I remember only tax cuts for the rich being proposed.
Are you serious with this line of argument? In what world does a poltician who proposes tax cuts onlu for the wealthy get reelected? It's not even about whether low income people pay less income tax or the intentions of hardline conservatives. When you cut taxes for everyone the bottom half are the ones who take cuts in government assistance and jnfrastructure funding.
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On January 05 2014 08:50 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 08:23 Danglars wrote:On January 05 2014 07:01 KwarK wrote:On January 05 2014 06:23 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:25 KwarK wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 03:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:32 Yoav wrote:On January 04 2014 22:05 KwarK wrote:On January 04 2014 18:34 DeepElemBlues wrote:
some kind of wealth creator Isn't wealth creator a troll term invented to parody the way free market ideologues see the world? As in "poverty is caused by the 1% not having a great enough proportion of all the money so we need to give them more money so they can create money and jobs for us". Is there some kind of right wing reclaiming the term going on here or am I missing something? Wealth is created over time, and people create it. I won't argue it's the rich who are solely (or even mainly) responsible for this, but life, and economics, is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from an efficient, competitive economy that prevents oligopolies and monopolies from dulling competition. As is apparent to everyone, there is something broken in our current system that causes our monumental inequality, and surely middle class entrepreneurs need more help in our economy. But the super rich spending money by creating and expanding businesses is certainly a good thing. Except the super rich don't spend there money on making jobs. Gates spending money doesnt give more people work. Trump spending money doesnt give people work. How do you mean? If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people. If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it. If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... I think Marx was more or less right with the wealth being created by those who put their labour in and the financier class basically just skimming off the lion's share. Now obviously investment carries risks and requires expertise but suggesting that Trump is creating the wealth generated by the profits of the new hotel in Las Vegas is ignoring the hundreds of employees who are receiving less for their labour than the client is paying for their services. The top 1% now have a record 39% of all wealth, something is going wrong and it certainly isn't going to be fixed by calling them job creators and pleading for society to make life a little bit easier for them. The "increase the size of the pie" argument ignores the fact that a small group of people are eating a bigger and bigger slice of it. Wealth is created by labour but the American ideal is the attainment of a state whereby a life of leisure can be achieved, not by the consumption of wealth preserved from earlier labour, but rather from the creation of wealth from wealth without the input of labour. The elusive "making your money work for you". This is a sickness, the money doesn't work for you, other people work for your gain while you do nothing but receive increased amounts of money which are fed back into a never ending cycle while the labour of the individual is marginalised and expendable. The financiers are not a benevolent class using their powers to create jobs for the average worker. Recent years have seen employees increasingly outsourced or replaced with machines, entire cities have been left to rot by dying industries, all justified in the name of wealth creation which never leaves the hands of the few. Political influence is for sale as campaign budgets increase year or year, public opinion becomes a commodity sold by the media and legal accountability for the actions of the rich disappears. I'm not blaming one political party for this, Bill Clinton sold Presidential pardons in exchange for donations to his wife's senate campaign for example, the disease crosses party lines. The idea that the problem is that the rich just aren't rich enough is funny until the labourers start parrotting it unironically. Interesting post. Just to clarify, I'm not asserting that financiers are benevolent. I'm not asserting that "the rich aren't rich enough". And it seems to me that you're just arguing semantics when you say "Trump is not creating the wealth, the workers are". OK ... if that's how you want to describe it ... so what? Romney said something in one of the debates that stayed with me. He said, "The rich will be just fine no matter which of us becomes president". Of course -- the rich will always be fine no matter how the laws change. I don't care about whether the rich do well for themselves or not. I care about having a society where normal people have a fair chance to make a good life for themselves. So the question then is, what can government do to help move us towards that society? When we think about this, we need to realize that high taxes, unpredictable rules, and transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor create a climate in which less wealth is created. You say that we shouldn't just focus on growing the pie. But we should also be careful not to shrink it. Why must high taxes go alongside unpredictable rules? Also why does transferring wealth from rich to the poor necessarily involve less wealth creation? I see absolutely no reason for that. The rich don't act to maximise wealth creation, they act to maximise wealth creation for them. They don't care if, for example, moving jobs overseas leaves an entire city idle as the loss of employment causes dependent businesses to fail because those are negative externalities which become the problem of society as a whole. The overall output of society may have gone down as groups of people find themselves outside the business models of the financiers but the wealth of the few has grown. Wealth is created when people engage in productive labour, redistribution stimulates and revitalises economies. It allows parents to work fewer hours and spend more time raising decent kids, it strengthens community bonds and injects capital into the local economy that creates productive labour where before there could be none. Unless you advocate the abolition of the minimum wage, working hour legislation, employee rights, workplace safety and so forth Americans are not going to be able to compete on an even playing field with Chinese people and this is only going to get worse as mechanisation replaces the Chinese. There is a surplus of American labour that capitalism has no use for, its creation dismissed as a societal externality with the associated loss of wealth not appearing on any balance sheet. Normal people are not getting a fair chance to make a good life for themselves. A great many are condemned to unemployment by a capitalist system that has discarded them. If there is more than enough pie for everyone but people are going hungry then why is the concern not making sure everyone gets fed? At the end of it all there won't be an awards ceremony with a prize for biggest pie. Likewise, the case is made that some public servant ostensibly hired for purposes of benevolence won't know enough or be altruistic enough to decide where to redistribute the money so as to "stimulate and revitalize economies." It could just as well be redistributed to the impact groups with the most political clout. Buggy-whip manufacturers unjustly impacted by the rise in cars, we need to redistribute those greedy capitalist's money to them. Big Shoes are putting cobblers out of business, we need to redistribute money to them to stimulate the economy. Rather, the free economy engages in creative destruction, opening up new jobs as others are destroyed, outsourced, or automated. Manufacturing jobs in place of tasks done by hand. New industries never even heard of before. iPods were not invented by directive of a government agency, and now how many more people find jobs from that avenue? Sure, locally administered welfare programs for the temporarily jobless and poor and hungry, designed to help them receive training for the next and discourage dependency. Then, grow the pie, don't redistribute the pie. We talk about wealth creators because of the discouragement confiscatory taxation has on wealth creators. Stop expanding your business, stop hiring on more employers, stop (gasp) getting financing for new ventures, because you're only allowed to keep 50cents for every extra dollar you make whereas your increased workload still burdens you. Capitalism is unique for its unparalleled capacity to inspire people to make products people didn't even know they wanted before. Wealth redistribution as wealth creation is the ticket to stagnation, fueled by envy of the rich for their wealth and jealousy for the hard worker that made sacrifices to get ahead. You know all your point of view is base on chimera, an hypothetic system called "capitalism", "unique for its unparalleled capacity to inspire people" blablabla. Something that never existed and that cannot exist in the first place. That's why I rarely use the term capitalism, that's why I always feel bored when I hear or read anyone talking about "capitalism". Creative destruction is a really interesting topic. But why do you use this idea while defending the idea of free market ? The idea of creative destruction was used by schumpeter to explain why the economy goes out of a slump, it is a concept that was used in his theory of the evolution economic, and more exactly a way for him to explain recovery after slump in relation to the existence of economic cycle - an empirical constatation. The problem is that the idea of slump and economic cycle have never been fully explained by free marketist and it is, by itself, a proof that free market doesn't work. If the economy naturally tend to cycle with slump and recovery, and if the market is always optimal, does this mean that slump are optimal ? (and yes some economists defended this and it was wrong) Why should we not try to act and prevent the cycle from happening ? What's so important about creative destruction that we cannot do with economic policy ? Your answer to that will always be that the economic policy do more arm than good, but that is also not true empirically. Ho but yeah, reality doesn't matter right. Let the kids die of hunger so that the population regulate itself, and let the economy create and destroy because it is the most efficient way to maximise capital accumulation. By the way, in a "free" society the iphone would never have appeared, because there would be no incentive for such tool to appear : with no government, no private property, no money, no regulation, no pattern, etc. Hong Kong for an era, Singapore too. United States in its beginnings, becoming less and less true around the turn of the 20th century. Of course, France is largely in a post-capitalistic era. How's the unemployment working out for you? How about that 75% tax rate? Gerard Depardieu certainly liked it all the way to the airport. Socialism is in its heyday there. I see you've finally cured your society of its ills; congratulations! Try not to mortgage your Eiffel Tower when the new 3bil euro hike in taxes fails to keep pace with spending.
It was talked about by John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, and a host of others more than 100 years ago. It isn't the cure for never experiencing a slump, it is the quickest way back out should an economy find itself in one. Demagogues like you leap from freedom of choice to the dying kids, and it's your right to give us laughs if you choose. Oh yeah, and do us a favor and look up the prophet motive. Look up the ideas of Adam Smith on the system existing with such state structures as police force, divisions for public cleanliness of streets etc. Don't be so foolish as to mistake capitalism for anarchy. Don't be so foolish to assume societies just don't develop naturally alongside a division of labor before there were any governments.
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On January 05 2014 09:20 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 08:50 WhiteDog wrote:On January 05 2014 08:23 Danglars wrote:On January 05 2014 07:01 KwarK wrote:On January 05 2014 06:23 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:25 KwarK wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 03:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:32 Yoav wrote:On January 04 2014 22:05 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
Isn't wealth creator a troll term invented to parody the way free market ideologues see the world? As in "poverty is caused by the 1% not having a great enough proportion of all the money so we need to give them more money so they can create money and jobs for us". Is there some kind of right wing reclaiming the term going on here or am I missing something? Wealth is created over time, and people create it. I won't argue it's the rich who are solely (or even mainly) responsible for this, but life, and economics, is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from an efficient, competitive economy that prevents oligopolies and monopolies from dulling competition. As is apparent to everyone, there is something broken in our current system that causes our monumental inequality, and surely middle class entrepreneurs need more help in our economy. But the super rich spending money by creating and expanding businesses is certainly a good thing. Except the super rich don't spend there money on making jobs. Gates spending money doesnt give more people work. Trump spending money doesnt give people work. How do you mean? If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people. If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it. If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... I think Marx was more or less right with the wealth being created by those who put their labour in and the financier class basically just skimming off the lion's share. Now obviously investment carries risks and requires expertise but suggesting that Trump is creating the wealth generated by the profits of the new hotel in Las Vegas is ignoring the hundreds of employees who are receiving less for their labour than the client is paying for their services. The top 1% now have a record 39% of all wealth, something is going wrong and it certainly isn't going to be fixed by calling them job creators and pleading for society to make life a little bit easier for them. The "increase the size of the pie" argument ignores the fact that a small group of people are eating a bigger and bigger slice of it. Wealth is created by labour but the American ideal is the attainment of a state whereby a life of leisure can be achieved, not by the consumption of wealth preserved from earlier labour, but rather from the creation of wealth from wealth without the input of labour. The elusive "making your money work for you". This is a sickness, the money doesn't work for you, other people work for your gain while you do nothing but receive increased amounts of money which are fed back into a never ending cycle while the labour of the individual is marginalised and expendable. The financiers are not a benevolent class using their powers to create jobs for the average worker. Recent years have seen employees increasingly outsourced or replaced with machines, entire cities have been left to rot by dying industries, all justified in the name of wealth creation which never leaves the hands of the few. Political influence is for sale as campaign budgets increase year or year, public opinion becomes a commodity sold by the media and legal accountability for the actions of the rich disappears. I'm not blaming one political party for this, Bill Clinton sold Presidential pardons in exchange for donations to his wife's senate campaign for example, the disease crosses party lines. The idea that the problem is that the rich just aren't rich enough is funny until the labourers start parrotting it unironically. Interesting post. Just to clarify, I'm not asserting that financiers are benevolent. I'm not asserting that "the rich aren't rich enough". And it seems to me that you're just arguing semantics when you say "Trump is not creating the wealth, the workers are". OK ... if that's how you want to describe it ... so what? Romney said something in one of the debates that stayed with me. He said, "The rich will be just fine no matter which of us becomes president". Of course -- the rich will always be fine no matter how the laws change. I don't care about whether the rich do well for themselves or not. I care about having a society where normal people have a fair chance to make a good life for themselves. So the question then is, what can government do to help move us towards that society? When we think about this, we need to realize that high taxes, unpredictable rules, and transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor create a climate in which less wealth is created. You say that we shouldn't just focus on growing the pie. But we should also be careful not to shrink it. Why must high taxes go alongside unpredictable rules? Also why does transferring wealth from rich to the poor necessarily involve less wealth creation? I see absolutely no reason for that. The rich don't act to maximise wealth creation, they act to maximise wealth creation for them. They don't care if, for example, moving jobs overseas leaves an entire city idle as the loss of employment causes dependent businesses to fail because those are negative externalities which become the problem of society as a whole. The overall output of society may have gone down as groups of people find themselves outside the business models of the financiers but the wealth of the few has grown. Wealth is created when people engage in productive labour, redistribution stimulates and revitalises economies. It allows parents to work fewer hours and spend more time raising decent kids, it strengthens community bonds and injects capital into the local economy that creates productive labour where before there could be none. Unless you advocate the abolition of the minimum wage, working hour legislation, employee rights, workplace safety and so forth Americans are not going to be able to compete on an even playing field with Chinese people and this is only going to get worse as mechanisation replaces the Chinese. There is a surplus of American labour that capitalism has no use for, its creation dismissed as a societal externality with the associated loss of wealth not appearing on any balance sheet. Normal people are not getting a fair chance to make a good life for themselves. A great many are condemned to unemployment by a capitalist system that has discarded them. If there is more than enough pie for everyone but people are going hungry then why is the concern not making sure everyone gets fed? At the end of it all there won't be an awards ceremony with a prize for biggest pie. Likewise, the case is made that some public servant ostensibly hired for purposes of benevolence won't know enough or be altruistic enough to decide where to redistribute the money so as to "stimulate and revitalize economies." It could just as well be redistributed to the impact groups with the most political clout. Buggy-whip manufacturers unjustly impacted by the rise in cars, we need to redistribute those greedy capitalist's money to them. Big Shoes are putting cobblers out of business, we need to redistribute money to them to stimulate the economy. Rather, the free economy engages in creative destruction, opening up new jobs as others are destroyed, outsourced, or automated. Manufacturing jobs in place of tasks done by hand. New industries never even heard of before. iPods were not invented by directive of a government agency, and now how many more people find jobs from that avenue? Sure, locally administered welfare programs for the temporarily jobless and poor and hungry, designed to help them receive training for the next and discourage dependency. Then, grow the pie, don't redistribute the pie. We talk about wealth creators because of the discouragement confiscatory taxation has on wealth creators. Stop expanding your business, stop hiring on more employers, stop (gasp) getting financing for new ventures, because you're only allowed to keep 50cents for every extra dollar you make whereas your increased workload still burdens you. Capitalism is unique for its unparalleled capacity to inspire people to make products people didn't even know they wanted before. Wealth redistribution as wealth creation is the ticket to stagnation, fueled by envy of the rich for their wealth and jealousy for the hard worker that made sacrifices to get ahead. You know all your point of view is base on chimera, an hypothetic system called "capitalism", "unique for its unparalleled capacity to inspire people" blablabla. Something that never existed and that cannot exist in the first place. That's why I rarely use the term capitalism, that's why I always feel bored when I hear or read anyone talking about "capitalism". Creative destruction is a really interesting topic. But why do you use this idea while defending the idea of free market ? The idea of creative destruction was used by schumpeter to explain why the economy goes out of a slump, it is a concept that was used in his theory of the evolution economic, and more exactly a way for him to explain recovery after slump in relation to the existence of economic cycle - an empirical constatation. The problem is that the idea of slump and economic cycle have never been fully explained by free marketist and it is, by itself, a proof that free market doesn't work. If the economy naturally tend to cycle with slump and recovery, and if the market is always optimal, does this mean that slump are optimal ? (and yes some economists defended this and it was wrong) Why should we not try to act and prevent the cycle from happening ? What's so important about creative destruction that we cannot do with economic policy ? Your answer to that will always be that the economic policy do more arm than good, but that is also not true empirically. Ho but yeah, reality doesn't matter right. Let the kids die of hunger so that the population regulate itself, and let the economy create and destroy because it is the most efficient way to maximise capital accumulation. By the way, in a "free" society the iphone would never have appeared, because there would be no incentive for such tool to appear : with no government, no private property, no money, no regulation, no pattern, etc. Hong Kong for an era, Singapore too. United States in its beginnings, becoming less and less true around the turn of the 20th century. Of course, France is largely in a post-capitalistic era. How's the unemployment working out for you? How about that 75% tax rate? Gerard Depardieu certainly liked it all the way to the airport. Socialism is in its heyday there. I see you've finally cured your society of its ills; congratulations! Try not to mortgage your Eiffel Tower when the new 3bil euro hike in taxes fails to keep pace with spending. It was talked about by John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, and a host of others more than 100 years ago. It isn't the cure for never experiencing a slump, it is the quickest way back out should an economy find itself in one. Demagogues like you leap from freedom of choice to the dying kids, and it's your right to give us laughs if you choose. Oh yeah, and do us a favor and look up the prophet motive. Look up the ideas of Adam Smith on the system existing with such state structures as police force, divisions for public cleanliness of streets etc. Don't be so foolish as to mistake capitalism for anarchy. Don't be so foolish to assume societies just don't develop naturally alongside a division of labor before there were any governments.
You're the demagogue it seems as Mill was never a free marketist, same for Smith.
Do us a favor and read what you quote. Do you even know that Mill considered that the purchasing of wealth accumalation - your capitalism - was just a bad part of human history that was bound to end. That s why he is a choice author for leftist ecologists who seek "decroissance" - negative growth. He also theorized short term protectionnism...
Same for Smith, forget he is a philosopher, forget the long part in the wealth of nations about Smith's concern for inequalities and human condition, just remember the invisible hand.
And the US ? Free economy ? Under the hawley smoot tariff right ?
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United States42803 Posts
On January 05 2014 09:16 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 08:05 WhiteDog wrote:On January 05 2014 07:56 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 07:30 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 07:23 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 06:31 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 06:15 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:06 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 03:36 Gorsameth wrote:
[quote]
Except the super rich don't spend there money on making jobs.
Gates spending money doesnt give more people work. Trump spending money doesnt give people work.
How do you mean? If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people. If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it. If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... Does Trump pay out of his pocket for new hotels or does his hotel chain pay for it? Does Gates pay for a new windows out of his own pocket or does Microsoft pay for it? Additionally even the companies who spend the money will almost always spend that money regardless of tax-rates. Microsoft doesnt stop producing software because taxes went up 5%. What difference does it make whether trump pays "out of his own pocket" or a company that he controls and owns pays for it? What matters it that an entity (be it Trump or his corporation) embarks on a project to make money, and that project gives people work. This is really inarguable so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Obviously Microsoft won't stop making windows if corporate taxes go up 5%. But it makes a difference at the margin. (If you don't understand what I mean by "at the margin" please google it -- it's very important) If you raise corporate taxes, corporations will factor that in when they decide whether to embark on a new project or not. When the regulatory climate is unpredictable and unstable, companies will hesitate to spend money because even if the laws are favourable now they may change next week. If companies decide not to spend money, they either sit on their cash or they pay it out as dividends. The point of all this is that "the super rich spending their money" does create jobs -- at least if they spend it with a view to making more money for themselves. Because were talking about "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" when its not there money that makes jobs. I'm responding to your claim that "Trump spending money doesn't give people work." I guess you're not saying that anymore... but I can't figure out what you are saying. "Trump spending money doesn't give people work". His company can spend money to make work however. therefor "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" is bs because there not using there own money for it. You understand it now? No. Do you know what a corporation is? Not trying to be condescending, I didn't really know until 2nd year law school. But a corporation is a vehicle that wealthy people use to invest money. When Trump or some other rich person embarks on a business venture, they do it through a corporation. Corporations don't have their own money. They only have other peoples' money. So when you say "its his company not him that's spending money" I don't understand you. It's the same thing. To the guy above who says that Trump doesn't spend much of his money -- that's probably true. A lot of businesses aren't spending money because of the crappy business climate these days. Your definition of a corporation is bullshit. In economy we don't see corporation like that. Your view just completly put aside the question of the distribution of profit between the people within the corporation. Your arguments have no real ground, it is true that rich people don't contribute much to the economy : you used the exemple of the hotel Trump might build, but Trump will eventually invest in such hotel only if there are valid perspective for profit, and that profit is only possible if there is a demand for the hotel. If no people demand product, then you can build all the hotel you want you will not create any wealth (that's why economists use the concept of utility, because when you build something it is the usefulness of that thing for someone that value it and it is that process that is at the core of creating wealth). The problem with rich people is that they save so much and only invest in sector where they will maximise their profit (sector with lack of competition like monopoly) to a point where a big part of their capital does not contribute in creating any wealth. They even destroy wealth to a certain point by doing everything possible to them to continue to accumulate capital - like destroying competition. Yeah if there's no demand the hotel won't be profitable... and Trump will have lost money. That should be obvious! What isn't obvious is how you're going to redesign the system to be more equitable and yet just as good at building hotels.
Optimal hotel saturation is a reasonable end goal for capitalism but not necessarily a good one for building a just society with a happy population. They might be happier without the fear of health complications ruining them, without having to work quite so many hours a week, without being shit out of luck when it comes to finding a job if they live in the wrong area, with maternity leave (seriously, look at what the rest of the first world offers and then what the US offers), with better schools. The idea that it has to be a choice between propping up horse buggies against the car or leaving everyone to fend for themselves is absurd, you can tax people without stopping progress.
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On January 05 2014 08:23 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 07:01 KwarK wrote:On January 05 2014 06:23 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:25 KwarK wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 03:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:32 Yoav wrote:On January 04 2014 22:05 KwarK wrote:On January 04 2014 18:34 DeepElemBlues wrote:
some kind of wealth creator Isn't wealth creator a troll term invented to parody the way free market ideologues see the world? As in "poverty is caused by the 1% not having a great enough proportion of all the money so we need to give them more money so they can create money and jobs for us". Is there some kind of right wing reclaiming the term going on here or am I missing something? Wealth is created over time, and people create it. I won't argue it's the rich who are solely (or even mainly) responsible for this, but life, and economics, is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from an efficient, competitive economy that prevents oligopolies and monopolies from dulling competition. As is apparent to everyone, there is something broken in our current system that causes our monumental inequality, and surely middle class entrepreneurs need more help in our economy. But the super rich spending money by creating and expanding businesses is certainly a good thing. Except the super rich don't spend there money on making jobs. Gates spending money doesnt give more people work. Trump spending money doesnt give people work. How do you mean? If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people. If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it. If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... I think Marx was more or less right with the wealth being created by those who put their labour in and the financier class basically just skimming off the lion's share. Now obviously investment carries risks and requires expertise but suggesting that Trump is creating the wealth generated by the profits of the new hotel in Las Vegas is ignoring the hundreds of employees who are receiving less for their labour than the client is paying for their services. The top 1% now have a record 39% of all wealth, something is going wrong and it certainly isn't going to be fixed by calling them job creators and pleading for society to make life a little bit easier for them. The "increase the size of the pie" argument ignores the fact that a small group of people are eating a bigger and bigger slice of it. Wealth is created by labour but the American ideal is the attainment of a state whereby a life of leisure can be achieved, not by the consumption of wealth preserved from earlier labour, but rather from the creation of wealth from wealth without the input of labour. The elusive "making your money work for you". This is a sickness, the money doesn't work for you, other people work for your gain while you do nothing but receive increased amounts of money which are fed back into a never ending cycle while the labour of the individual is marginalised and expendable. The financiers are not a benevolent class using their powers to create jobs for the average worker. Recent years have seen employees increasingly outsourced or replaced with machines, entire cities have been left to rot by dying industries, all justified in the name of wealth creation which never leaves the hands of the few. Political influence is for sale as campaign budgets increase year or year, public opinion becomes a commodity sold by the media and legal accountability for the actions of the rich disappears. I'm not blaming one political party for this, Bill Clinton sold Presidential pardons in exchange for donations to his wife's senate campaign for example, the disease crosses party lines. The idea that the problem is that the rich just aren't rich enough is funny until the labourers start parrotting it unironically. Interesting post. Just to clarify, I'm not asserting that financiers are benevolent. I'm not asserting that "the rich aren't rich enough". And it seems to me that you're just arguing semantics when you say "Trump is not creating the wealth, the workers are". OK ... if that's how you want to describe it ... so what? Romney said something in one of the debates that stayed with me. He said, "The rich will be just fine no matter which of us becomes president". Of course -- the rich will always be fine no matter how the laws change. I don't care about whether the rich do well for themselves or not. I care about having a society where normal people have a fair chance to make a good life for themselves. So the question then is, what can government do to help move us towards that society? When we think about this, we need to realize that high taxes, unpredictable rules, and transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor create a climate in which less wealth is created. You say that we shouldn't just focus on growing the pie. But we should also be careful not to shrink it. Why must high taxes go alongside unpredictable rules? Also why does transferring wealth from rich to the poor necessarily involve less wealth creation? I see absolutely no reason for that. The rich don't act to maximise wealth creation, they act to maximise wealth creation for them. They don't care if, for example, moving jobs overseas leaves an entire city idle as the loss of employment causes dependent businesses to fail because those are negative externalities which become the problem of society as a whole. The overall output of society may have gone down as groups of people find themselves outside the business models of the financiers but the wealth of the few has grown. Wealth is created when people engage in productive labour, redistribution stimulates and revitalises economies. It allows parents to work fewer hours and spend more time raising decent kids, it strengthens community bonds and injects capital into the local economy that creates productive labour where before there could be none. Unless you advocate the abolition of the minimum wage, working hour legislation, employee rights, workplace safety and so forth Americans are not going to be able to compete on an even playing field with Chinese people and this is only going to get worse as mechanisation replaces the Chinese. There is a surplus of American labour that capitalism has no use for, its creation dismissed as a societal externality with the associated loss of wealth not appearing on any balance sheet. Normal people are not getting a fair chance to make a good life for themselves. A great many are condemned to unemployment by a capitalist system that has discarded them. If there is more than enough pie for everyone but people are going hungry then why is the concern not making sure everyone gets fed? At the end of it all there won't be an awards ceremony with a prize for biggest pie. Likewise, the case is made that some public servant ostensibly hired for purposes of benevolence won't know enough or be altruistic enough to decide where to redistribute the money so as to "stimulate and revitalize economies." It could just as well be redistributed to the impact groups with the most political clout. Buggy-whip manufacturers unjustly impacted by the rise in cars, we need to redistribute those greedy capitalist's money to them. Big Shoes are putting cobblers out of business, we need to redistribute money to them to stimulate the economy. Rather, the free economy engages in creative destruction, opening up new jobs as others are destroyed, outsourced, or automated. Manufacturing jobs in place of tasks done by hand. New industries never even heard of before. iPods were not invented by directive of a government agency, and now how many more people find jobs from that avenue? Sure, locally administered welfare programs for the temporarily jobless and poor and hungry, designed to help them receive training for the next and discourage dependency. Then, grow the pie, don't redistribute the pie. We talk about wealth creators because of the discouragement confiscatory taxation has on wealth creators. Stop expanding your business, stop hiring on more employers, stop (gasp) getting financing for new ventures, because you're only allowed to keep 50cents for every extra dollar you make whereas your increased workload still burdens you. Capitalism is unique for its unparalleled capacity to inspire people to make products people didn't even know they wanted before. Wealth redistribution as wealth creation is the ticket to stagnation, fueled by envy of the rich for their wealth and jealousy for the hard worker that made sacrifices to get ahead.
You have a cultist's understanding of how capital operates. It seeks return on investment, which is not synonymous with production. An MCM' cycle of capital expansion involving trade and production growth leads to the development of high finance as profits decrease in response to competition. In the past new cycles of capital accumulation that coincided with a true rise in productive capacity and trade were born from infusions of new resource pools and labor markets. The discovery of the Americas, the incorporation of India and China into the western economy, etc. The last time this happened was in the 20th century up to the 1970s. The problem now is that there is a crisis of overaccumulation. There simply aren't enough investment opportunities for a trillion dollars of surplus capital to keep finding a high rate of return. Production capacity and real growth worldwide have been slowing or stalled for decades. But you continue to believe in the power if liberal Capitalism to power through by selling more ipods to an impoverished world of indebted workers or "service industry" peons who serve their fellow indebted service industry workers.
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On January 05 2014 09:30 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 09:16 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On January 05 2014 08:05 WhiteDog wrote:On January 05 2014 07:56 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 07:30 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 07:23 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 06:31 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 06:15 ziggurat wrote:On January 05 2014 04:06 Gorsameth wrote:On January 05 2014 03:47 ziggurat wrote:
[quote]
How do you mean?
If Trump decides to build a giant new hotel in Las Vegas to try to make money for himself, he has to hire thousands of people to build the hotel, and the hundreds (or thousands) to manage and work in the hotel. That's a lot of work for people.
If Bill Gates decides he wants to make some new software and sell it at a profit, he has to hire people to write it.
If they decide that the regulatory/tax climate is shitty (business ventures aren't as likely to be profitable) then I guess they just keep their money in a swiss bank account. Or maybe build the hotel in Macau instead... Does Trump pay out of his pocket for new hotels or does his hotel chain pay for it? Does Gates pay for a new windows out of his own pocket or does Microsoft pay for it? Additionally even the companies who spend the money will almost always spend that money regardless of tax-rates. Microsoft doesnt stop producing software because taxes went up 5%. What difference does it make whether trump pays "out of his own pocket" or a company that he controls and owns pays for it? What matters it that an entity (be it Trump or his corporation) embarks on a project to make money, and that project gives people work. This is really inarguable so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Obviously Microsoft won't stop making windows if corporate taxes go up 5%. But it makes a difference at the margin. (If you don't understand what I mean by "at the margin" please google it -- it's very important) If you raise corporate taxes, corporations will factor that in when they decide whether to embark on a new project or not. When the regulatory climate is unpredictable and unstable, companies will hesitate to spend money because even if the laws are favourable now they may change next week. If companies decide not to spend money, they either sit on their cash or they pay it out as dividends. The point of all this is that "the super rich spending their money" does create jobs -- at least if they spend it with a view to making more money for themselves. Because were talking about "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" when its not there money that makes jobs. I'm responding to your claim that "Trump spending money doesn't give people work." I guess you're not saying that anymore... but I can't figure out what you are saying. "Trump spending money doesn't give people work". His company can spend money to make work however. therefor "reducing taxes for the rich job creators so they make more jobs" is bs because there not using there own money for it. You understand it now? No. Do you know what a corporation is? Not trying to be condescending, I didn't really know until 2nd year law school. But a corporation is a vehicle that wealthy people use to invest money. When Trump or some other rich person embarks on a business venture, they do it through a corporation. Corporations don't have their own money. They only have other peoples' money. So when you say "its his company not him that's spending money" I don't understand you. It's the same thing. To the guy above who says that Trump doesn't spend much of his money -- that's probably true. A lot of businesses aren't spending money because of the crappy business climate these days. Your definition of a corporation is bullshit. In economy we don't see corporation like that. Your view just completly put aside the question of the distribution of profit between the people within the corporation. Your arguments have no real ground, it is true that rich people don't contribute much to the economy : you used the exemple of the hotel Trump might build, but Trump will eventually invest in such hotel only if there are valid perspective for profit, and that profit is only possible if there is a demand for the hotel. If no people demand product, then you can build all the hotel you want you will not create any wealth (that's why economists use the concept of utility, because when you build something it is the usefulness of that thing for someone that value it and it is that process that is at the core of creating wealth). The problem with rich people is that they save so much and only invest in sector where they will maximise their profit (sector with lack of competition like monopoly) to a point where a big part of their capital does not contribute in creating any wealth. They even destroy wealth to a certain point by doing everything possible to them to continue to accumulate capital - like destroying competition. Yeah if there's no demand the hotel won't be profitable... and Trump will have lost money. That should be obvious! What isn't obvious is how you're going to redesign the system to be more equitable and yet just as good at building hotels. Optimal hotel saturation is a reasonable end goal for capitalism but not necessarily a good one for building a just society with a happy population. They might be happier without the fear of health complications ruining them, without having to work quite so many hours a week, without being shit out of luck when it comes to finding a job if they live in the wrong area, with maternity leave (seriously, look at what the rest of the first world offers and then what the US offers), with better schools. The idea that it has to be a choice between propping up horse buggies against the car or leaving everyone to fend for themselves is absurd, you can tax people without stopping progress.
What? Huh? I argued that you can't tax people?
Edit: really, wtf?
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On January 05 2014 09:20 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2014 05:41 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On January 05 2014 05:26 IgnE wrote:On January 05 2014 03:24 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On January 05 2014 03:06 darthfoley wrote:On January 04 2014 18:34 DeepElemBlues wrote:On January 04 2014 06:47 Nyxisto wrote:On January 04 2014 06:05 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
Side note - I'm not sure why you're figuring that low income / low education voters are opposed to single payer healthcare. I haven't seen that statistic. I was mainly referring to the surprisingly large group of "working class whites" that seem to root with the Tea Party or other Libertarian groups, or the Anti - Government agenda of the Republican party(which from a foreign perspective seems what they have been shifting towards). I am aware that lower income voters generally tend to favor the Democrats, but given the fact that the country is nearly split in half while the agenda of the GOP is basically putting 90% of the people at disadvantage is astonishing to me. Perhaps because the perspectives of comfortable middle-class people on the benefits of a heavy government blanket for all do not quite match up to the reality of the working poor trying to deal with the behemoth. I actually am one of those working poor, and dealing with the government on anything is about eight bitches and a half. What is promised by government and what is delivered by government "where the rubber hits the road" are two vastly different things. And it only gets worse when you're an employer or some kind of wealth creator trying to deal with the government. You guys can go on and on about how competently you do it in Europe but if that were actually true to the degree claimed, Hollande wouldn't be going all Reagan in a desperate attempt to save his bacon right now, your rich countries wouldn't be bullying the poor ones around to get their houses in order, the NHS wouldn't be treating patients like grandma and grandpa in the cheapest, most loathsome "retirement homes" in the US South, and immigration wouldn't be such a controversial issue. Sorry but it actually is true that you do eventually run out of other people's money, it actually is true that economic innovation and vitality are sapped by too much taxation and regulation, and it actually is true that the US economy is more resilient because we put less weights on it "for the common good" than Europe does. You've chosen the trade-off at a different point than the US has, and it hasn't leapfrogged you past us. Of course it is astonishing to you, when you think of economic advancement you don't look toward yourself, you look toward the government. Americans look more to themselves. And it's a laugh and a half that the "agenda of the GOP is basically putting 90% of the people at disadvantage." That is stupid. The GOP is the nationalist party, remember? What kind of nationalism is it to intend to "disadvantage" 90% of the people? "Shoot your country in the foot" nationalism? The GOP wants everybody to be as rich as they can possibly be, just like all political parties have their idealistic nonsense. Arguing that the people vote against their interest because they're ignorant or mystified or stupid never has been a winner and never will be. We live in democracies, the people decide what their interest is and if you don't like it, that's really just too bad. The GOP wants everyone to be as rich as they can be? Well, it definitely wants the rich people + businesses to be as rich as possible. Although i'm sure you'll construct some argument to say that deregulation + cutting taxes on the rich will have a great trickle down effect, especially when coupled with cuts to all the programs that support the poorer Americans. Because i'm sure that single mother who works 9-5 and is on food stamps isn't really working hard enough. I have a solution! Cut her welfare so that she has to feed her kids shittier food; THAT will motivate her to "work harder!" For anyone interested in the issues of cutting welfare: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgxxT4xpVNI It's an informative and well presented documentary that challenges the stereotype of minorities feeding off the government as the principal welfare recipients. You say people decide what their interests are? I agree. Perhaps that's why the GOP has been beaten soundly in the last two general elections. The most confusing thing about that, is that the GOP seems to have gone farther right after getting small %'s of everyone that isn't white. Hell, Al Gore even won the popular vote in 2000. What about when the GOP expands government programs like Medicare and cuts taxes for lower income people? Is that just for rich folks too? Yes. Obamacare makes insurance industry richer and lower taxes on lower brackets are just a political concession to get lower taxes on the rich. I don't think expanding Medicare makes the insurance industry richer. Nor do I remember only tax cuts for the rich being proposed. Are you serious with this line of argument? In what world does a poltician who proposes tax cuts onlu for the wealthy get reelected? It's not even about whether low income people pay less income tax or the intentions of hardline conservatives. When you cut taxes for everyone the bottom half are the ones who take cuts in government assistance and jnfrastructure funding.
Yes I'm serious. I don't think expanding healthcare spending and cutting taxes for middle and low income workers was secretly scam to benefit the rich...
Really, why is spending on healthcare secretly for the rich but spending on infrastructure honestly for the bottom half?
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/nrrCvhi.jpg)
