EPT"Skeptical Fry meme" can't tell if this is satire or a moment of clarity.
US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9370
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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please. In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
"Skeptical Fry meme" can't tell if this is satire or a moment of clarity. | ||
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
On December 01 2017 04:04 Danglars wrote: Stereotypes and deviations from them. If you’re young and not a liberal, you haven’t got a heart. If you’re old and not a conservative, you haven’t got a brain. The weird thing is Trump among millenials is it usually is an all or nothing type deal (best example here would be Doodsmack). You either hate everything he does or love him to death. I’ll give you the benefit of believing what you believe is right, if you’ll allow me the courtesy of believing what I believe is right. *Ahem* I think it’s in very bad taste to presume the extremity of views and justify “because it’s unlikely to change policies.” I might as well say Nevuk is the kind of brain-dead millennial that just goes with the flow on the far-left river. He doesn’t have enough life experience or accumulated wealth to actually have to examine what his views do to larger society. That’s basically how dumb I think it is to label somebody’s views extreme and try to psychologically examine their reasons for believing them. It doesn’t lead anywhere productive, it can break down the debate, and hurts finding middle ground. South Park had the perfect description of Millennials in last night's episode: Millennials are like a bunch of Jewish mothers. | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
On December 01 2017 02:27 Mohdoo wrote: It's not placating. It is giving them the resources they need to grow and generate more resources. It has nothing to do with the feelings of the poor. Sure, more people being happy is a good thing, but the heart of the issue for me is that it is plain and simply inefficient and dumb to let people live in poverty. We are wasting man-power by letting people live in poverty. Already shitty people get 100x worse. You and I both suffer from poor people getting worse. As purely selfish beings, we should still be motivated to vote in favor of wealth distribution for the sake of "changing the oil" of poor people. We need to keep those engines running and not let them just sit in some redneck's front yard. mohdoo gets it right here. just think: we are wasting literally hundreds of millions of high iq brains throughout the world right now. even if you only took a long term productivity and growth mindset this would be an extremely urgent problem kwark is also raising good points, although i would phrase it differently. the problem w mozoku's jejune take on investment, and w danglars/xdaunts inequality rants, is that they seem to think the only hangups for the M -> C -> M' cycle are in the first step. inequality tends to produce more barriers to accumulation in the second step of the cycle. profitability is ALWAYS more important than production for production's sake. thats so obvious i dont know why i have to even say it. look at the state of capital today. its dominated by super firms collecting near-monopoly profits, or, in the case of amazon, in the middle of consolidating complete retail market hegemony in every sector. | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
Rows upon rows of yesmen. | ||
KwarK
United States43350 Posts
I can see why someone who literally doesn't know how it works would genuinely believe that one person being rich doesn't reduce the purchasing power of a second person with less money. I just don't understand that person could also be a grown adult who lives in a capitalist country. If Danglars was arguing against condoms because he disputed that there was a link between sex and pregnancy we'd have issues. This is no different. | ||
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Sr18
Netherlands1141 Posts
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
On December 01 2017 04:38 Sr18 wrote: Isn't the idea of capatalism that it's the most effective system of increasing the total amount of wealth? So how can it be a zero sum game? Because the only people who think it's a zero sum game are the myopic ones who ignore the obvious second, third, fourth, etc order consequences of competition. | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
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KwarK
United States43350 Posts
On December 01 2017 04:38 Sr18 wrote: Isn't the idea of capatalism that it's the most effective system of increasing the total amount of wealth? So how can it be a zero sum game? Capitalism increases productivity by allowing individuals to bid on how they wish labour to be allocated. The highest bidders are deemed to be the people with the best ideas for how the labour should be allocated, because otherwise why would they pay so much. You're right that the process increases output, that's why it's good. That's why we like capitalism. What seems to have confused Danglars is that the available labour and resources being bid upon is finite. In layman's terms, let's say you and I are both trying to buy an inner city apartment. You are a CEO and the market values your labour at $1,000/hr. Having a very short commute is therefore extremely valuable to you, you would gain an awful lot of utility from that time. I am a barista and the market values my labour at $10/hr. I would also like a short commute. You offer more money than I do and you get the apartment. Productivity as a whole increases because the utility that you derive from the apartment is more than the utility that I would have derived from the apartment, which is why you were willing to pay more for it than I do. But there is still only one apartment. The market has deemed that you living in it is a better use than me living in it because you were willing to bid more, but that does not change how many apartments there are. We found the optimal use for the apartment, we did not find more apartments than we started with. Capitalism attempts to allocate the available resources in the most productive manner, but it does not make them infinite. Make sense? Again, let's say the mint printed a bunch of money and gave it to me. Would there be any more hard assets in the world? Any more available labour? Obviously not. The difference would be that I could now outbid other people. That's what is meant by it being zero sum. When one person outbids another they are redirecting the finite output of the market in their own favour, and therefore against the wishes of the other person. | ||
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Dangermousecatdog
United Kingdom7084 Posts
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KwarK
United States43350 Posts
On December 01 2017 04:40 xDaunt wrote: Because the only people who think it's a zero sum game are the myopic ones who ignore the obvious second, third, fourth, etc order consequences of competition. Do you think human labour is infinite? What about physical resources? Capitalism works by making competing parties bid for finite labour and finite resources based upon the differing values they place on their own planned use for those. Higher value represents higher utility. Higher utility correlates with higher productivity. Higher productivity creates a greater amount of wealth. But none of that means that the underlying labour and resources being bid upon are infinite. They're finite. The winner wins them, the loser loses them. That's what is meant by it being a zero sum game. | ||
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Kyadytim
United States886 Posts
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=26842887 http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=26843014 http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=26843024 Kwark explained this pretty well already, but I guess I'll take a crack at it, too. Capitalism is not unique in increasing the total amount of wealth in a system over time. Any economic system which introduces mass production and automation and invests in infrastructure increases the amount of wealth in a system over time. A system where literally all of the citizens were mind controlled via brain implants could increase wealth over time by introducing systems that allowed more to be produced with less human labor. At any given point in time, the amount of wealth in a system is finite. This is why I talked about percents of the economy. If you want to make a billionaire one billion dollars richer, that billion dollars has to come from somewhere. Someone brought up CEO bonuses, so I'll use that, too. If a company has one billion dollars to add to employee compensation, if it all goes to the CEO, that's wealth that isn't going to the rest of the employees. If that company has that billion dollars because of really good sales, that's one billion dollars of people's disposable income that other companies don't have. If some people spent from savings, then it's less than one billion dollars of disposable income that other companies don't have, but instead some banks have less money to invest in loans or whatever. Zero sum. If the top 1% have a billion dollars more, that's one billion dollars that the rest of the population doesn't have, because there are a finite number of dollars in the economy. Yes, the government prints money, but the size of the economy is still finite. When wealth increases, that means the buying power of the money in the economy has somehow increased. A good example is Ford's production line. Car prices dropped, so the total number of goods and services that could be purchased by the total dollars in the economy increased. That's the innovation that people hold up as the great good of capitalism, and it's probably true that less of that sort of innovation would happen without a strong profit motive. Just because the prices of some goods or services drops doesn't mean that everyone is getting wealthier, though. If someone's pay doesn't go up while the total cost of all the goods and services they buy goes up, they've gotten poorer. Their share of the economy has decreased. In conclusion, if the cost of producing staple goods such as food, clothing, and toiletries dropped, the poorer segment of the population would need a smaller share of the economy to meet their basic needs. However, and this is important, this isn't happening. Sure, there may be some ideal fantasy world where capitalism works out this way, but, to paraphrase xDaunt... People are intrinsically shitty and greedy, which means that wealth inequality is an issue that must be dealt with politically until we get better at cranking out virtuous citizens who don't accumulate and hoard wealth in ways that are detrimental to the economy as a whole. EDIT: Added a couple more Kwark posts to the top. | ||
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Jockmcplop
United Kingdom9754 Posts
On December 01 2017 05:01 Dangermousecatdog wrote: In the past, in the rich world as growth occured, the gains were more equally spread. Some people became billionaires, some of the children of those living in poverty became billionaires, and the standard of being poor was raised. In the last ten years it seems that as growth occured, even those who are professionals appear to be losing the living standards their parents enjoyed and the rich just gets richer and the poor get poorer. Whatever the mechanism, raising inequality is a problem. I can see where a solution to this would come from in the UK or Europe (they are suffering from the same problem to a much lesser degree). The US seems to have such a fetish for pure free market capitalism though, I honestly can't see how you could engineer a situation where more regulations were in place, where some proper social systems were put in place. There's a whole different cultural attitude that I don't really understand. | ||
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Dangermousecatdog
United Kingdom7084 Posts
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
On December 01 2017 05:02 KwarK wrote: Do you think human labour is infinite? What about physical resources? Capitalism works by making competing parties bid for finite labour and finite resources based upon the differing values they place on their own planned use for those. Higher value represents higher utility. Higher utility correlates with higher productivity. Higher productivity creates a greater amount of wealth. But none of that means that the underlying labour and resources being bid upon are infinite. They're finite. The winner wins them, the loser loses them. That's what is meant by it being a zero sum game. At any given discrete moment in time, available resources are obviously finite. However, I'm not sure why you're dwelling on the discrete moment in time when it's the long run that matters when discussing wealth generation. | ||
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Nevuk
United States16280 Posts
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KwarK
United States43350 Posts
On December 01 2017 05:17 xDaunt wrote: At any given discrete moment in time, available resources are obviously finite. However, I'm not sure why you're dwelling on the discrete moment in time when it's the long run that matters when discussing wealth generation. Great, so available resources at a given time are finite. Now let's say you and I both want the same thing. We both bid on it, and I bid more. Do we both get it, or does one of us get it and the other one lose it? I'll give a historical example. Let's say there is a finite amount of land for farming within a country. It can be used for either cash crops, such as tobacco, or for domestic food production. The people in the country are poor, whereas the people in the country where the tobacco is consumed are rich. Within a capitalist system the landowner would auction (or more likely use market projections to decide who would win a hypothetical auction) the farming capacity to the higher bidder, the tobacco consumers. This would be in line with increasing the overall utility of that land, the cigarette break to the rich is more valuable than the dinner to the poor because the rich are willing to give up greater utility, represented by currency, to obtain it. Now let's say there's a famine. The poor people are still poor, even offering all they have they are still unable to outbid the cash crops. The land is still used for tobacco. This is why wealth inequality is a factor for poverty. It is a zero sum game, the competing parties are bidding for finite capacity within capitalism. Extreme wealth inequality allows the whims of the rich to deny the needs of the poor. | ||
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WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
Isn't this just basic inflation? Money supply growth = inflation, growing wealth inequality = lowest wage growth competing with inflation rate. | ||
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Introvert
United States4866 Posts
On December 01 2017 05:24 Nevuk wrote: What do conservatives have to say about all the people who lived in pre ww2 Germany saying the current times remind them of the rise of the Nazi party? What do liberals have to say about all the people who lived in the Soviet Union saying the current times remind them of the rise of totalitarian Soviet Communism? Presumably the same thing the liberals say: they went through something so shocking and horrific that they are now overly sensitive and see it everywhere. Except a conservative would be more willing to listen to these people, so you'd have to actually present an argument, and not just toss these comments out. | ||
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Kyadytim
United States886 Posts
Republicans voting against guarantees that at least something trickles down from their trickle down economics tax plan. Not a surprise. | ||
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