US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9207

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Nebuchad

Switzerland12204 Posts

November 10 2017 16:49 GMT

#184121

On November 11 2017 01:37 KwarK wrote:

Show nested quote +

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Grunseth#1990_gubernatorial_candidacy

"and he now lives and runs a cherry-growing operation in Australia" is my new "Oh my I need to get the FUCK out of here"

KwarK

United States42786 Posts

November 10 2017 17:01 GMT

#184122

On November 11 2017 01:49 Nebuchad wrote:

Show nested quote +

"and he now lives and runs a cherry-growing operation in Australia" is my new "Oh my I need to get the FUCK out of here"

*Tasmania
It's like he thought Australia wasn't remote enough.

mozoku

United States708 Posts

November 10 2017 17:06 GMT

#184123

On November 11 2017 00:41 KwarK wrote:

Show nested quote +

On November 10 2017 15:25 mozoku wrote:

On November 10 2017 13:52 KwarK wrote:

On November 10 2017 13:50 mozoku wrote:

On November 10 2017 03:34 KwarK wrote:

On November 10 2017 03:01 mozoku wrote:

On November 10 2017 00:04 KwarK wrote:

On November 09 2017 23:35 Danglars wrote:

On November 09 2017 23:11 Liquid`Drone wrote:
When the cutoff is at $11 million for a household, clearly you can still accumulate generational wealth. It's not like they take 100% beyond that either. (Tbh, I'd personally be kinda fine with that. :D Or it should probably also depend on how many beneficiaries there are, but I don't see the fairness or benefit from any individual being given more than $5 million for 'being in the same family as someone'. So maybe rather than calculating it based on the value of the estate, have the cutoff be decided by how much each recipient gets. )

I don't see the societal benefit from individuals being billionaires. I get 'they invest and create jobs', but I've never seen any compelling evidence that one individual holding 1 billion creates more, better jobs than 200 individuals holding $5 million does. (Or that there being one company valued at $1 billion is better for the economy than 200 companies worth $5 million). All the bipartisan talk about 'small business being the backbone of american economy' really doesn't seem to match up with policy geared towards benefiting small businesses (which must, naturally, come at the expense of big business). The way I see it, it's impossible to accumulate $1 billion without having massively underpaid workers helping your company thrive, and while I prefer methods like increased worker ownership or limiting CEO pay to X amounts of entry level pay over taxation as a means of redistribution, if you do allow CEOs to make 600 times entry level pay then the redistribution must be done through other means. And if people aren't taxed sufficiently during their life times, then it has to happen at death.

Everybody idealizes the meritocracy. But a meritocracy is incompatible with an aristocracy, the US can't pretend to be the former while enacting policies that benefit the latter.

The wealth you've earned and has been taxed that the government allows you to give to your children and grandchildren ...

Examining how much property individuals attain in terms of net societal benefit as compared to pay cap ... catching up on presumed inadequate taxation over their lives ... allowing CEOs to make X redistribution must be done.

I shudder to think you're probably talking in good faith here. No individuals but only servants of societal benefit, no unjust policies but only the ends justify the means, and so transparently the politics of envy but without attendant shame. I really hate to think this may be what we're headed towards.

It's the social contract that binds us together. If a man lived on an island by himself and all his possessions were crafted by his own hand I wouldn't see any reason to tax him. But within a capitalist society every rich man has become rich through the redistribution of labour from others to them. We allow capitalism to redistribute wealth because it's functionally effective for allocating resources within society but there is nothing natural about, say, land ownership. If a field in Texas is discovered to have oil underneath it it does not rationally follow that all Americans should have to collectively make the owner of the field a billionaire in order to make their commute to work.

You need to recognize that the wealth capitalism awards you is simply the product of an artificial system that was created by men to help decide whether ipods or zunes were better. The fact that an employer is willing to pay you $100,000 for your labour does not mean that the intrinsic value of your labour is $100,000, it's just a bullshit number that the system produced. If you get rid of society none of this labour has any intrinsic value, it's simply a product of a set of rules we created.

You're trying to combine two completely separate concepts, the individual and capitalist society and it doesn't work. You can't have capitalism on an island with one occupant. Taxation is part of the same book of rules that capitalism comes from, and neither makes any sense from an individualist perspective.

I don't know how you're defining "intrinsic" value, but if an employer is willing to pay me $100,000, the market value of my labor is $100,000 (assuming efficient/competitive markets). If the market values my labor more than someone else's, it follows that (again, assuming efficient/competitive markets) society's best estimate of my labor's value is more than that other person's. Should not the fruits of society's labor be distributed, in principle, proportionally to those who created it? Especially given that, for most people, the market value of the labor is--to a pretty large degree--under their control during their lifetime?

You can argue that heirs to large fortunes didn't really create the value that their fortune's create (their parents did) and I think that's fair (though there are counterarguments in favor of the estate tax as well), or that economic mobility isn't possible (I disagree), but to act like the only basis for how society's wealth should be distributed is the tyranny of the masses (who are writing the "book of rules" you're referencing--at least in a democracy) doesn't have any moral or ethical basis in favor of it.

The share of the wealth you get and the share of the wealth you created aren't well correlated. That's pretty much the point of capitalism, the underlying mechanism that makes capitalism work is people attempting to do arbitrage to take advantage of that discrepancy. If you break it down to its very simplest village level bartering, the objective is to find something that you can produce in an hour that you can trade for firewood that took two hours to chop. You perform one hour of labour, and yet you get two hours of stuff.

The mechanism relies upon disproportionate rewards to redistribute labour and direct economic activity. Clearly whatever the guy in the village was doing with his hour was the right thing to do, and other villagers may follow him until an equilibrium where 1 hour = 1 hour is restored. Arbitrage to exploit disproportionate rewards between what you contribute and what you get is the engine that drives capitalism.

By the time we apply it on a modern global perspective the difference is staggering, a ratio of thousands of manhours to one in many cases. These differences are reinforced by artificial impositions upon the ability of many people to engage in arbitrage, such as denying Mexicans the ability to sell their labour in America, and by exploitation grandfathered in by the capital class. However, the basic engine remains the same, the economic systems offers participants in the economy disproportionate rewards for directing their labour in certain ways.

The disproportionate outcome needs to exist for our society to work. We need doctors to get more than grocers to keep kids in school. But it doesn't follow that what the system outputs is what you deserve, or what you earned. It's certainly not what you created, any American can tell that the manhours of labour they consume on any given day greatly exceed the manhours of labour they performed. Deserve and earned are subjective moral concepts that aren't relevant to the mechanism, what you get is what you get.

This is literally nonsense. I barely know where to begin.

Suppose an hour's worth of labor chopping firewood produces $1 of firewood. The new guy creates $2/hr with whatever he's doing. He's twice as productive. If chooses to work the same amount of time, he gets twice as much stuff. That's literally the definition of proportional. How that's supposed to be disproportionate, I have no idea.

The share of the wealth you get and the share of the wealth you created aren't well correlated.

??? I'm pretty sure fast-food workers are creating much less wealth than software engineers, successful investors, etc. I literally can't even imagine how society would exist if this statement were true. Why would capitalism even be efficient if this statement were true? What is your definition of "well correlated"? 0.99999999999999999??

It's certainly not what you created, any American can tell that the manhours of labour they consume on any given day greatly exceed the manhours of labour they performed.

I'm not sure this is true at all. In fact, I'd lean towards not true if anything. Ever heard of an economy of scale? I work at a mega-scale tech company. I work 40-50 hrs/week, but my work influences thousands of people directly, and affects millions indirectly. Hell, the marginal cost of someone consuming my work is practically zero. Likewise, the marginal cost (in terms of other's time) of most of the stuff I consume is practically zero. That's how automation works, and is why we're fabulously wealthy compared to several hundred years ago.

Why is the bartering village using dollars? Remove the dollars, try again.

What objective system of valuation are you using to show that you're producing more value than the fast food worker from your day? Remembering of course that you're already justifying the getting more money than them by the fact that you create more value so you cannot complete the circle and use the more money to prove the greater value.

Does it matter if they're bartering in gold, wood, virgins, or dollars? It's a trade they both agree to and the principles are the same.

But I see the point that you're trying to make is that the efficient man's hour should, in principle, be worth no more than the inefficient man's hour if you don't care about productivity, and that productivity is independent of morality. However, the former statement is inherently incorrect because productivity and time are, by definition, linked, and a person's time has value in excess of that which can be determined monetarily.

To simplify, let's assume they're both chopping lumber. The efficient man can simply choose to work 1/2 hour, have the same productivity, and keep the other 1/2 hour to himself. By nature of being more efficient (and his own efficiency is surely not intrinsically amoral), he's advantaged no matter what. Suppose, regardless of compensation, he only wanted to work 1/2 hour, and wanted to spend the other 1/2 hour with his kids. Are you going to argue that society is justified in forcing him to work the full hour? Or that they should discriminate against his good fortune by paying less for his lumber in the name of "equality"?

That's certainly not a society I'd want to be a part of.

I'm not saying anything of the sort regarding forcing people to work. No part of what I'm doing is advocating for societal change or the gulag.

I'm saying that capitalism works as an effective tool for incentivising productive economic activity but that drawing moral conclusions regarding what you earned/own/deserve/created from the outcomes of a capitalist system is erroneous. It's very tempting to say "I'm paid twice as much money, therefore I earned twice as much" but what you earned is a moral judgement that capitalism makes no attempt to answer for you.

I understand what you were trying to say. The problem is that productivity and time are directly dependent on each other, so the more efficient man literally owns the extra time his productivity has created (assuming you agree he should be free to use his time as he pleases). Whether or not you redistribute his present time or his past time is irrelevant from a moral perspective. Forcefully redistributing his wealth under any circumstances is equivalent to forced labor (perhaps a very small amount of forced labor, but a nonzero amount).

Of course, everyone pretty much (including me) agrees that that if a second of forced labor at the end of a software engineer's workday can save millions of starving children (not realistic but making an extreme example to illustrate my point), it's morally justifiable to make the guy work the extra second. But the fact is it that's it's still a moral tradeoff that's being made. The software engineer has a true moral grievance (in some sense) in claiming that the arrangement is unfair to him--which stands in contrast to what you're asserting.

Gorsameth

Netherlands21709 Posts

November 10 2017 17:07 GMT

#184124

On November 11 2017 01:29 Introvert wrote:
They know it's wrong, they just feel they have no choice. Real hard to vote for Jones esp given his abortion position.

Of course low-key strat here could be vote Moore, Moore wins, Moore resigns/leaves/forced out/forfeits spot --> gov appoints new Senator.

That explains so much.
In your mind being pro-choice is literally worse then being a pedophile?

No wonder the abortion debate doesn't go anywhere when thats your moral scale.

Mohdoo

United States15690 Posts

November 10 2017 17:08 GMT

#184125

Let's say you lived in Alabama and Jones said abortion is only ok a month in or in the case of rape. Would you vote for him? What kinda abortion stance would give you an easier time voting for Jones?

Nevuk

United States16280 Posts

November 10 2017 17:11 GMT

#184126

On November 11 2017 02:08 Mohdoo wrote:

Show nested quote +

Let's say you lived in Alabama and Jones said abortion is only ok a month in or in the case of rape. Would you vote for him? What kinda abortion stance would give you an easier time voting for Jones?

Abortion : only OK when it's Moore's rapechild with a 14 year old probably wouldn't be a winning stance there.

Mohdoo

United States15690 Posts

November 10 2017 17:27 GMT

#184127

On November 11 2017 02:11 Nevuk wrote:

Show nested quote +

Abortion : only OK when it's Moore's rapechild with a 14 year old probably wouldn't be a winning stance there.

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/928821854256627712

It's really weird seeing Fox go way more Trump than McConnell/Romney/McCain. Usually when the two disagree, they find a diplomatic way to forgive Trump for being outspoken. In this case, they are directly speaking in Trump'ish ways.

Introvert

United States4773 Posts

November 10 2017 17:29 GMT

#184128

eh, story seems like it had a good chance of being true so I'd prob vote neither. The voters there are in a trash position.

My view is something like this.

http://theresurgent.com/i-dont-blame-roy-moore-voters-for-sticking-with-him/?utm_content=buffer5301c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

edit: link is weird cause I found it somewhere else

Sermokala

United States13957 Posts

November 10 2017 17:31 GMT

#184129

On November 11 2017 02:07 Gorsameth wrote:

Show nested quote +

That explains so much.
In your mind being pro-choice is literally worse then being a pedophile?

No wonder the abortion debate doesn't go anywhere when thats your moral scale.

Well when the debate is between killing babies and taking away womens right to control their own bodies common ground tends to be hard to find.

Plansix

United States60190 Posts

November 10 2017 17:31 GMT

#184130

I am normally against congress investigating a specific media outlet, but Fox news is really challenging that belief lately. In the last year they have gone off the deep end. They now seem to be a nightmare land of sexual harassment and conspiracy theorist that are just bent of making Americans hate each other.

ZasZ.

United States2911 Posts

November 10 2017 17:32 GMT

#184131

On November 11 2017 02:07 Gorsameth wrote:

Show nested quote +

That explains so much.
In your mind being pro-choice is literally worse then being a pedophile?

No wonder the abortion debate doesn't go anywhere when thats your moral scale.

I mean if one truly believes that every abortion is a murder, I could see them justifying voting for an alleged pedophile over someone who advocates for the mass murder of human life. That doesn't seem like much of a leap at all.

Artisreal

Germany9235 Posts

November 10 2017 17:39 GMT

#184132

On November 11 2017 02:32 ZasZ. wrote:

Show nested quote +

Defunding planned parenthood appears to be a GOP thing.
It's supposed that the defunding leads to more abortions due to less preservative distribution and stymied education.
Which leads to outcries by people who care a lot about the unborn life.
This is used by reps to play pied piper and rally against progressives/democrats who actually support pp before abortions.

The repubs have found a way to incite a situation that drives the believers into their ranks.
It's quite impressive and fucking hypocritical to the max.

TheTenthDoc

United States9561 Posts

November 10 2017 17:42 GMT

#184133

I mean, conservative news outlets aren't going to say he should resign because they've spent years saying most all negative articles coming out of other news outlets are fabricated character assassination attempts. Why stop now?

On a side note, it's a shame ephebophile isn't actually a word the public uses because Moore seems to be that rather than a pedophile if the allegations are true, but whatever.

WolfintheSheep

Canada14127 Posts

November 10 2017 17:45 GMT

#184134

On November 11 2017 02:32 ZasZ. wrote:

Show nested quote +

Which kind of leads right back to the commentary of caring for unborn children more than born children.

KwarK

United States42786 Posts

November 10 2017 17:58 GMT

#184135

On November 11 2017 02:32 ZasZ. wrote:

Show nested quote +

This. If you genuinely believe abortion is baby killing then it's not a high bar for your candidate to clear.

What's always confused me is that people believe abortion is baby killing but believe that their moral duty to stand against baby killing is satisfied by voting against it. I'm glad they don't engage in more direction action against the baby murder centres, but I'm not sure why they don't.

Wulfey_LA

932 Posts

November 10 2017 18:00 GMT

#184136

On November 11 2017 02:29 Introvert wrote:
eh, story seems like it had a good chance of being true so I'd prob vote neither. The voters there are in a trash position.

My view is something like this.

http://theresurgent.com/i-dont-blame-roy-moore-voters-for-sticking-with-him/?utm_content=buffer5301c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

edit: link is weird cause I found it somewhere else

Anti-left grievance && Culture War == okay to vote for monsters

I am going to come back to that piece again when Conservative Principles come up again in this thread. I have repeatedly said that Conservative Principles are really just anti-lib and Kulturkampf. Erick Erickson has kindly agreed with my thesis and laid it out as a justification for voting Republican.

EDIT: note that Erick specifically referred to Moore voters hating the people that hate Moore, and specifically used the term 'culture war'.

Moore is a fighter for these people. He purports to share their values. And all the people his voters hate happen to hate Roy Moore.

If you’re demanding the other side surrender in the culture war, don’t be surprised when they’re willing to stand with people they’d never otherwise consider in the name of protecting themselves and their families.

Plansix

United States60190 Posts

November 10 2017 18:04 GMT

#184137

On November 11 2017 03:00 Wulfey_LA wrote:

Show nested quote +

The entire argument is toothless because it can be used to justify the Democrats accepting money from Harvey Weinstein even after knowing about all the sexual harassment. Re-hashed version of BOTH SIDESSSSSSSSS

Introvert

United States4773 Posts

November 10 2017 18:06 GMT

#184138

On November 11 2017 03:00 Wulfey_LA wrote:

Show nested quote +

You only read the part of the post you wanted to. Keep up the good work. We'll continue to ignore you for the most part.

Wulfey_LA

932 Posts

November 10 2017 18:09 GMT

#184139

On November 11 2017 03:06 Introvert wrote:

Show nested quote +

You only read the part of the post you wanted to. Keep up the good work. We'll continue to ignore you for the most part.

Erick's piece isn't long. The only part I didn't mention was his various whataboutisms and appeals to hypocrisy. His appeals to hypocrisy are laughable because he is using them in a piece to justify the hypocrisy in voting for a molester like Moore.

brian

United States9620 Posts

November 10 2017 18:09 GMT

#184140

that article is unreadable. it’s almost self aware propaganda.

lol yea, with that follow up from Wulfey i’d ask you then to take one section he hasn’t now accurately summarized. because he did admittedly gloss over the endless appeals to hypocrisy the first go around.

lol its summary, a piece in defense of voting in an alleged child molestor, even assuming his guilt:

if you’re demanding the other side surrender in the culture war, don’t be surprised when they’re willing to stand with people they’d never otherwise consider in the name of protecting themselves and their families.

i might’ve been wrong in calling it almost self aware.

similar to the alabama district GOP rep, where is everyone’s PR editors? why would you ever ASSUME the guilt of the person you are trying to elect? much less assume the guilt and then prepare to defend electing him anyway. and yet it’s the left who are the real villains. not the assumed kid diddlers.

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