Recognizing control as an important moral value leads to the question of what system of rights—what set of laws and policies—would best secure this important form of control for everyone, since everyone counts morally. It may seem to industrialists that an unregulated market provides the greatest freedom, because regulation and taxation reduce their ability to do what they want. But as I have mentioned, an unregulated market leaves many workers with little control over some important aspects of their lives, and their liberty also matters morally. So an argument appealing to the moral importance of control over one’s life must take both of these facts into account, along with others.
If we ask what conditions are most important for having meaningful liberty—meaningful control over one’s life—in a modern society, one of the first things that comes to mind is education, which enables one to understand one’s choices and to acquire the skills needed to pursue them, including the skills needed participate in the market economy. A second important factor is a strong social safety net, including unemployment benefits, which enable people to plan responsibly for having a family despite the uncertainties of employment in an efficient market economy. Neither of these is part of the “low taxes and limited government” program normally favored by libertarians. Perhaps a revised libertarianism might incorporate these policies, along with other measures needed to give meaningful liberty to all.
On October 20 2011 09:50 sermokala wrote: This thread really went downhill in the last 10 pages. It makes me sad to see that it went down to this.
I don't think it has gone completely down hill. There are a lot of people with a lot of extreme viewpoints as to why the movement is useless or a waste of time, or dangerous, but that is precisely what one would expect as the movement permeates deeper into our collective consciousness-- you get establishment clawbacks and attempts to delegitimize it.
Recently a friend of mine related a complaint she heard from a campus-town liberal-progressive academic Democrat against the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that has spread like wildfire across the United States in the last two weeks. The liberal OWS critic compares the new movement unfavorably with the mass protests that broke out in Madison, Wisconsin last February and March. She says that the Madison actions were principled, “adult,” highly organized and clearly focused on a specific winnable and concrete agenda – defeating right-wing Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s effort to strip public sector unions of their collective bargaining rights. The Wisconsin activists “knew what they were about.”
By contrast, the critic argues, OWS is “unfocused,” aimless, uncoordinated, and, well, “childish.” The critic thinks that the young occupiers in her home town (Iowa City) and across the country are looking for “an excuse to party,” “camp out,” and generally make a freaky spectacle of themselves. “They don’t know what they’re about, what they want.”
She has not attended a single Occupy Iowa City event or meeting.
Well, sorry, but I have witnessed and participated in a number of occupation movement sites, actions, and meetings in New York City, Chicago, and Iowa City. I see the new protest movement in a very different and more positive light and frankly as much, much better than the Madison protests, in which I also participated.
Hard Work
The charge that they are bunch of partying slackers is off base. There’s fun and entertainment in the people-occupied zones, of course. There should be: they are essential ingredients of any popular movement culture worth a damn, and they always have been! Still, the occupiers I have met in all of the above locations are putting in a remarkable, even heroic amount of hard work on the many difficult tasks involved in building, sustaining, and expanding their movement: maintaining safe and sanitary occupation sites, interacting with civic authorities to stay in public compliance and avoid eviction, developing community outreach and media strategies, providing for homeless and hungry people who have come to their site for assistance, soliciting and processing outside support, maintaining a treasury and bank account, planning and holding workshops, marches, and other events; printing flyers, leaflets, and other educational and promotional materials; monitoring developments across the country and the world, and much, much more. Since the occupation movement is dedicated to a detailed and respectful, democratic and participatory decision-making process, they put a significant amount of hard work into their nightly General Assembly sessions, where group actions and principles are discussed and chosen in a careful and egalitarian way that is inspiring to behold. It’s a lot of work. And while the movement is in fact quite youthful, there are more than just a few mature adults, middle-aged and even seniors showing up to behold and participate in the new movement.
Nothing Vague
The charge of no clear focus is also incorrect. It is true that the occupation movement has taken its time – and shows some reluctance – to articulate specific and detailed policy demands. But this is the smart way to go. As the veteran U.S. radical activist and writer Michael Albert recently counseled OWSers from Ireland: “it is the arena of activism that schools [the deepest] insights...When the chattering media hounds demand demands…ignore them. Amass support. Find your collective pulse. Only then generate demands in accord with that collective pulse.”
And the new movement is hardly aimless. There’s nothing remotely mysterious about the target of its anger. It is clearly and unambiguously upset over and opposed to the many sided deadly and authoritarian control that the nation’s rich, corporate, and elite financial Few – “the unelected dictatorship of money” (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson) – exercised over American and global economic, political, cultural, and personal life. There’s nothing all that vague or difficult to understand about the focus of their ire as articulated in their Declaration of the Occupation of New York City: “We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies….We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments.” The Declaration’s list of grievances against corporations includes the following:
“They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process….”
“They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.”
“They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.”
“They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.”
“They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ health care and pay.”
“They have sold our privacy as a commodity.”
“They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.”
“They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through control of the media.”
“They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.”
“They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.”
A young New York City activist named Yotam Marom recently responded eloquently on AlterNet to the charge of unfocused directionless-ness. “It’s not that we don’t have demands.” Marom writes; “it’s that we speak them in a different language. We speak them with our struggle. Our movement is made up of people fighting for jobs, for schools, for debt relief, equitable housing, and healthcare. We are resisting ecological destruction, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. We are doing it all in a way that is participatory, democratic, fierce, and unwavering. There is nothing vague about that.” Further:
“We want a political and economic system that we all actually control together, one that is equitable and humane, one that allows for people to self-manage but act in solidarity, one that is participatory and democratic to its core. We want a world where people have the right to their own identities, communities, and cultures, and the freedom from oppression and constraint. We want a world with institutions that take care of our youth, our elderly, and our families in ways that are nurturing, liberating, and consensual. We want a world in which community is not a hamper on individual freedom, but rather an expression of its fullest potential…If that’s not a clear enough statement of demands for you, CNN, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“…We are not aimless; we simply speak a different language – a language of mutual respect, participation, self-management, and action. We make our demands in this language that screams we are here for the long-run, that our goal is not merely reform, that our vision is deep and radical, that we will not be bought off or co-opted, and that we are prepared to struggle in order to win not only those gains we can pronounce not but also those we can’t even fully articulate yet….”
Albert is right to note that “we all know broadly where it will aim” – for a future of good jobs, fair distribution, increased social justice and security, greater democracy, reduced imperial expense and a peace dividend, enhanced housing, infrastructure, and education. “The details will emerge from the participants, as consciousness and solidarity climb,” Albert notes.
Ultimately, many OWSers want a world turned upside down. With good reason: the current top-down world controlled by “the one percent” and its profits system is slipping into terminal environmental catastrophe accompanied by endless war, horrifying authoritarianism, and shocking mass inequality and misery. The rich are destroying the Earth and annexing the future, holding the rest of us – the 99 percent – hostage to a hopelessly stunted, soulless, narcissistic and totalitarian vision of life and human nature. They are crucifying humanity on a cross of greed and power.
“The Enemy is a System”
As many occupiers know, there’s no shortage of good progressive and radical policy ideas to rollback and indeed (of ultimate interest to me) to collapse the rule of the corporate state and the top 1 percent and replace it with a much more genuinely democratic and participatory form of political and socioeconomic existence. There’s nothing mysterious about the numerous and interrelated proposals to check the plutocratic rule of the rich and its coordinators and ultimately to replace that rule with genuinely popular, self-determining governance. As Noam Chomsky once observed, “One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: ‘they present solutions and I don't like them.’”
What’s been lacking on the left has been the power to put our many policy ideas into practice. And the biggest thing required at present to grow that capacity is the development of an independent social movement with the energy, structure, and determination to challenge the standard top-down corporate-managed game of politics and force progressive policy change and more – societal restructuring – from the bottom up. The fluid, eclectic, diverse, and remarkably democratic new occupation movement is doing more than anything in recent historical memory to light the spark of such mass movement politics.
It has been able to do this largely because it has had the brains and courage to – in the words of the black radical commentator Glen Ford – “call out the enemy’s name and address: finance capital, Wall Street.” At the risk of sounding too negative, let’s acknowledge that getting the right and real enemy is a critical prerequisite for building a movement that matters. As Ford recently argued, the new movement could collapse tomorrow and it would have already done us the great service of identifying the real danger to freedom democracy at home and abroad: the hyper-parasitic financial super-elite, the people with real wealth and power, NOT the usual scapegoats (Muslim extremists, Latino immigrants, urban criminals, welfare mothers, union thugs, abortion doctors, gay marriage proponents, and radical professors, to name a few) that the upper 1 percent has long used to keep Americans diverted, divided, and confused.
But the new peoples’ movement challenges more than finance capital and Wall Street. The intimately related but bigger enemy is capitalism. A sign held by one young female protestor at a recent OWS march in New York City displays a single word written three times on a cardboard poster: “System, System. System.” I was instantly reminded of a remarkable passage from the Winter Solider testimony of a young American Iraq War and occupation veteran Mike Prysnor, who said the following in December of 2009, 11 months into the “hope and change” presidency of the Empire’s New Clothes Barack Obama:
“I threw families on to the street in Iraq only to come home and see families thrown on to the street in this county in this tragic, tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis. I mean to wake up and realize that our real enemies are not in some distant land. They’re not people whose names we don’t know and whose culture we don’t understand. The enemy is people we know very well and people we can identify. The enemy is a system that wages war when it’s profitable. The enemy is the CEOs who lay us off from our jobs when it’s profitable. It’s the insurance companies who deny us health care when it’s profitable. It’s the banks who take away our homes when it’s profitable. Our enemy is not 5000 miles away. They are right here at home. If we organize with our sisters and brothers we can stop this war. We can stop this government. And we can create a better world.”
The enemy is a system that concentrates ever more wealth and power in the hands of an upper 1 percent that currently owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of Americans. That top hundredth owns more than a third of the United States’ wealth and a larger share of its elected officials – Democrats as well as Republicans – while the bottom 40 percent owns nothing (well, 0.3 percent of the nation’s private wealth) and a record-setting 46 million Americans now struggle to live below the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level.
The Kids Struck a Chord
The new movement’s isn’t about to collapse tomorrow, since it identifies and resists a class and an ethos of greed that is deeply unpopular with the preponderant majority of Americans. A vast swath of survey data shows that the American public is well to the left of both of the nation’s reigning business parties. As Kevin Young recently noted on ZNet, “The public is fiercely distrustful of corporate power and thinks that workers should have far more income, workplace protections, and political influence than they do. Strong majorities believe that the government has a responsibility to ensure that everyone has access to food, education, and health care. On tax and spending issues, polls have repeatedly confirmed that majorities favor large cuts to the military budget, higher taxes on the wealthy, and government stimulus spending to create jobs; this trend holds true for polls from the last two months. Yet public disgust with the unrepresentative nature of US politics and what Edward Herman and David Peterson call ‘the unelected dictatorship of money’ is sky-high. One 2010 poll from the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that an astounding 81 percent of the US public thinks that their country ‘is pretty much run by a few big interests.’”
Among the 50 percent of Americans who consider themselves familiar with the OWS protests, 79 percent think the gap between rich and poor is too large in the U.S.; 68 percent think the rich are under-taxed; 73 percent favor raising taxes on millionaires, and 86 percent think Wall Street and its lobbyists enjoy excessive influence in Washington.
No wonder that just three weeks into OWS, a TIME poll found that 54 percent of Americans had a “very favorable” (25 percent) or “somewhat favorable” (29 percent) view of the movement. OWS is considerably more popular among Americans that the fake-populist so–called Tea Party, a top-down creation of right wing business and Republican elites that dominant corporate media sold as a genuine independent and anti-establishment citizens’ movement.
Beyond Wisconsin and the Democrats
The OWS NYC Declaration’s statement of concern over corporate control of politicians per se is very important, I think. The Wisconsin struggle and its offshoots in Ohio and Indiana were inspiring and impressive. They helped inspire the current new radically democratic populist wave. They contained seeds of something far more radical and far-reaching (my favorite protest sign in Madison read “Governor Walker You Have Awakened a Sleeping Giant: The Working Class”). But let’s be honest about their geographic and ideological limits. When I told one New York activist dressed up as a greedy billionaire that I’d seen similarly clad street thespians protesting the anti-union policies of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in Madison last March, he was quick to make a perceptive and critical distinction between OWS and the wonderfully welcome Wisconsin rebellion earlier this year. “The Wisconsin thing was shut down out of subordination to the Democratic Party and the union bosses,” he said. “They got angry, understandably, because a crazy right wing Republican governor was going after their power. And so they put a lot of people in the streets and in the Capitol building and it was really cool. But then it was like ‘thanks a lot for all that direct action and people power, now you all need to go home and help us recall Walker and those nasty Republican senators and get some Democrats back in office. Enough with all that scary direct action. Get out of here. Run along now. That was fun, but it’s time to get serious and focus on elections.’ And you know what? They all pretty much went home. Never mind that the Democrats, including Obama, are also going after public sector wages and unions, and also take money from the big banks and corporations. This thing here is different. It’s about the whole system, which is run by and for the rich whether they’ve got Republicans or Democrats out front. We aren’t going home.”
Even Wisconsin was a top-down affair and all-too captive to the Democrats at the end of the day.
Most of the occupiers I have met know that Democrats from Obama down to MoveOn.org (currently working to channel the movement’s anti-Wall Street energies into anger at the Republicans) are captive to the moneyed class. They get it that Democrats are the other wing of the corporate-controlled one-and-a-half party system in the United States, where “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business” (John Dewey). Unlike the 2008 Obama campaign and the 2009-2010 “Tea Party,” and to a much greater degree than the Wisconsin rebellion, OWS is a really grassroots and independent, anti-establishment movement. It is much more powerfully inoculated against liberal and electoralist co-optation than the Madison uprising. Its growing base of participants is not going to be easily pushed off their laser-like focus on corporate and financial power by the standard elite game of partisan distraction and divide-and-rule. Their movement has learned its lessons from the fake-progressive Obama HOPE and CHANGE ascendancy, followed by the in-power “betrayals” of NOPE and CONTINUITY. It knows that American “democracy” is no less crippled by the dark cloud of big money and corporate rule when Democrats hold nominal power than when Republicans do. It grasps that real progressive and democratic change can only come from an epic bottom-up peoples’ fight with concentrated wealth and power – a fight that goes to the economic root of social, environmental, and political decay. It knows in its bones that (to quote Howard Zinn) “it’s not about who’s “sitting in the White House” (or the governors’ mansion or the congressional or state-legislative or city council office) at the end of the day: it’s about “who’s sitting in,” marching, demonstrating, occupying, and (last but not least) organizing on a day-to-day basis beneath and beyond the masters’ “personalized quadrennial [electoral] extravaganzas” (Noam Chomsky’s term). It knows also that real and lasting change of a desirable nature involves radical-democratic, bottom-up restructuring of natural and socioeconomic existence – of humanity’s relationship to itself and nature. More than simply imagined, the restructuring required is test-run and modeled in the remarkable OWS decision-making process, replicated each night in hundreds of nightly General Assembly meetings in people-occupied spaces across the country.
To some degree, then, OWS is less continuous with Madison than it is with the remarkable workplace occupation that took place at the Republic Door and Window plant on the North Side of Chicago in December of 2008. Also chanting “They Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out,” that exceptional rank-and-file action targeted taproot capitalist institutions – an absconding firm and its finance-capitalist backer/banker. It all-too-briefly raised fundamental questions about class, ownership, finance, and power beneath and beyond the partisan divisions of the masters’ one-and-a-half party system. The fact that corporate Democrats rather than corporate Republicans held elective office in Chicago (or that a fake-progressive corporate Democrat “from Chicago” had just been elected to the White House) did not deter them even slightly in their direct action struggle, which also (like OWS and Madison) won rapid widespread approval around the country.
The “kids” of Zucotti Park in New York City, College Green Park in Iowa City and countless other occupied zones across the U.S. know what they are about. They have struck a radically democratic populist chord that resonates with tens of millions across the restrictive red-blue map of U.S. political geography. They are walking to some extent in the footsteps of the great British radical Gerrard Winstanley and his band of 17th century Diggers by insisting that we plow deeper into the economic and institutional roots of modern inequality and oppression to imagine and act on the possibility of a better world turned upside down, beyond the rule of the wealthy Few and their filthy profits regime. But whereas Winstanely struck the soils of revolutionary London at the birth of a bourgeois order that had only begun to conquer and reorganize the world, to miraculously harness the species’ productive potential on a previously unimaginable scale, the occupiers who have planted themselves in the belly of the global economic beast in New York City’s financial district are challenging a rotten, purely parasitic late-capitalist system that has nothing left to offer but death and destruction- a descent into an at once Huxlean and Orwellian Hell in which life for the majority becomes ever more (to quote the 17th century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes) “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
What are your standards for whether something "works" or "doesn't work"? When you say that a society where the main currency is cookies and the worker and CEO both earn the same amount of cookies "simply does not work", are you implying that what we have now DOES work? Because I don't really see the contrast.
Whether or not you advance through merit, that's what determines if a social system works or not.
First, that says nothing.
mer·it/ˈmerit/ Noun: The quality of being particularly good or worthy, esp. so as to deserve praise or reward.
You see, merit is completely arbitrary. So which merit are YOU talking about?
We might define merit by how far up the corporate ladder have you climbed and how much money you've made. It can also be determined by how many enemies you've killed in battle. Or how many children you've given birth to. Or how much food you've gathered for the last month. Or how much honor have you brought to your clan and/or family. All of these are real world examples, by the way.
Ultimately it depends on what society values the most. Every social system is based on some form of advancement through merit. So then EVERY system works - and this is true because every system does, in fact, function. It's those values that differ and determine whether a system functions in a way which is beneficial to many, or in a way which is beneficial to select few (regardless of manner in which they are "selected").
The consensus is that a system that is inherently beneficial to many is preferred. We know this because systems that did not have this quality (or at least failed to create the illusion that they do) were overthrown down to the last one - usually quite violently too.
On October 20 2011 08:09 Pillage wrote: The whole system of advancing by merit falls apart when you can simply vote to advance yourself. That's what I was trying to point out. It's that system that falls apart, unless you consider your example which is essentially a communist society where everyone is equal across the board.
That's a fallacy - you can't vote to advance yourself. In order for that to happen, MANY people have to agree with you, and MANY people have to vote for the same thing. If that happens, it's no longer you "voting yourself up", it's the majority of people in a community deciding something is wrong and fixing it - so that it works in the favor of said majority. Which is the basic mechanic of democracy and the fundamental principle of our society.
It would also be the most normal thing in the world if the corruption, media brainwashing and individuals that hold a great deal of power and zero social responsibility didn't stand in the way. But they do stand in the way, which is why there's all this itch to remove them as soon as possible.
On October 20 2011 08:09 Pillage wrote: Their rights in society may be equal, but their utility to the company can be miles apart.
This is exactly why the society (and the government at its helm) is always supposed to be above the private sector. To enforce that people be treated as human beings, and not rated by their utility and discarded when necessary.
On October 20 2011 08:09 Pillage wrote: For more money. Greed is an insatiable entity. Otherwise if they're that unhappy they can seek work elsewhere.
I wish I read this part first, I wouldn't have bothered writing all the other shit then. -_-
This really is becoming more like arguing with religious people over their beliefs at this point.
mer·it/ˈmerit/ Noun: The quality of being particularly good or worthy, esp. so as to deserve praise or reward.
You see, merit is completely arbitrary. So which merit are YOU talking about?
We might define merit by how far up the corporate ladder have you climbed and how much money you've made. It can also be determined by how many enemies you've killed in battle. Or how many children you've given birth to. Or how much food you've gathered for the last month. Or how much honor have you brought to your clan and/or family. All of these are real world examples, by the way.
Ultimately it depends on what society values the most. Every social system is based on some form of advancement through merit. So then EVERY system works - and this is true because every system does, in fact, function. It's those values that differ and determine whether a system functions in a way which is beneficial to many, or in a way which is beneficial to select few (regardless of manner in which they are "selected").
The consensus is that a system that is inherently beneficial to many is preferred. We know this because systems that did not have this quality (or at least failed to create the illusion that they do) were overthrown down to the last one - usually quite violently too.
Are you really that bad at reading in between the lines? You know how western society works. And frankly, I don't like alot of your examples because they are silly methods for measuring merit in our culture.
Merit in the western world = Success in the present / past (How you interpret this is up to you.)
I'm not even going to elaborate anymore, because you're grasping at straws trying to pick my argument apart when I'm sure that you have a good understanding of what merit is in the western world. And frankly, I don't have the time to explain what I think it is, because that would take forever.
That's a fallacy - you can't vote to advance yourself. In order for that to happen, MANY people have to agree with you, and MANY people have to vote for the same thing. If that happens, it's no longer you "voting yourself up", it's the majority of people in a community deciding something is wrong and fixing it - so that it works in the favor of said majority. Which is the basic mechanic of democracy and the fundamental principle of our society.
It would also be the most normal thing in the world if the corruption, media brainwashing and individuals that hold a great deal of power and zero social responsibility didn't stand in the way. But they do stand in the way, which is why there's all this itch to remove them as soon as possible.
The point I was trying to make was that even if you have an opinion regarding something, you can still recruit X people to your cause and Fuck over whoever you feel like just because you have numbers on your side. That's the ugly flaw of democracy, the clueless mob can do whatever it wants, regardless whether or not the decision is correct. That's the point I was trying to make.
This is exactly why the society (and the government at its helm) is always supposed to be above the private sector. To enforce that people be treated as human beings, and not rated by their utility and discarded when necessary.
I will not argue the necessity of safety nets like food stamps. Unemployment benefits however, are a different story. Frankly some people just can't make it in the professional world, and it's kind've irritating that they can't support themselves and depend on me and you to save their asses when the shit hits the fan.
wish I read this part first, I wouldn't have bothered writing all the other shit then. -_-
This really is becoming more like arguing with religious people over their beliefs at this point.
I'm sorry if you cant cope with the fact that greed has helped propel society forward since the bartering system ended. It's human nature, and it's not going away anytime soon, whether you like it or not.
"And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you." - Nicholas Klein, 1918 Trade Union Address
What would your alternative be to unemployment benefits? That people who get laid-off lose their home, possessions and go to the street where there chances of getting back on track reduce dramatically?
Don't be so afraid of helping others out, one day it might be you in need of help, and if it isn't? You've had a good run through life and don't need to be so bitter.
On October 20 2011 14:37 Scrimpton wrote: @ Pillage,
What would your alternative be to unemployment benefits? That people who get laid-off lose their home, possessions and go to the street where there chances of getting back on track reduce dramatically?
Don't be so afraid of helping others out, one day it might be you in need of help, and if it isn't? You've had a good run through life and don't need to be so bitter.
I'm not bitter, just frustrated.
To tell you the truth I can't think of anything of the top of my head to replace them. I just think there's alot less incentive to hurry the f up and find a new job when the government is feeding you money. This is especially true amongst the poor IMO, because the benefits they receive are probably analogous to their old salaries, and they don't feel extreme urgency to find a new job because their standard of living didn't radically change.
Meh there are several legitimate concerns about the economic system we have so its understandable that people would be unhappy. For one the ration of ceo compensation to median compensation is has exploded to like 10 times the ratio in the 70s. To say that ceo's are 10 times as effective today as they were 40 years ago is absurd. There is most likely way too close of relationships executive board members and ceo's. You hear quite often about a ceo who had per performance at his company after only a few years serving there being let go with a large compensation package.
The government bailed out banks rather than letting them fail as well as several large companies (general motors comes to mind) which completely goes against capitalism. Picking the largest companies and having the government prop them up is not capitalism, its socialism. You cant reap all the rewards when things are going well and then expect the government (aka everyone's tax dollars) to bail you out when things go poorly without backlash.
@pillage Perhaps if it was possible for the person to get a job that would give them more money then unemployment would they would search for a job but why work a shitty job for 8-12 hours a day and get payed only a little bit better?
You also say greed is the major motivator for all people making progress or choosing a job when you ignore job satisfaction a person can get. Greed is not happiness as well, look at denmark very high tax rate very low variation between it's top earning and it's bottom earners and it's ranked high on a world happiness index. And what would be the low hanging fruit to why that is, it's because they have less to worry about, you want to go to college? Well that's payed for infact you pull salary when you go to college, no need to worry much about retirement or healthcare bills etc. It's not necessarily a happier place in general it's just that denmark has helped to remove worries from people.
Greed isn't the reason for scientific advancement, people who do science at that level aren't thinking about money unless it's funding. So the only way greed is valid in that sense of progress is that greedy people want to make profits off other's findings, so then those findings would be made other wise it's just a matter of funding research.
Why the hell should we worry about the debt right now? American debt has a negative interest rate! People want to PAY the US government to loan it money. Moreover, long-term, it is the Democrats, not the Republicans, who have offered serious solutions to the debt problem. A solution that doesn't even consider tax increases is not a serious solution
This is like saying any solution to getting my credit card debt that doesn't include a pay raise isn't a serious solution. Raising taxes in a stressed economy is dumb. Raising taxes is also a very short sighted way to get money. And when we are talking about getting rid of debt on the massive scale we have to, raises taxes in general turns out to be just plain moronic because you're not getting rid of it anytime soon.
I also can't take seriously any financial solutions from a party that goes against what economists are saying somewhere between 90 and 100% of the time. As long as Democrats cling to keynesian economics, no one with a brain is going to take them seriously.
I'm getting tired of these arguments comparing the national debt to credit card debt. There are significant differences which are shown through more complex mechanisms than a single family using credit cards will ever have to deal with. It's very doubtful you could even skillfully balance a small business account if you equate all debt to credit card debt.
Also, Keynesian is the only widely used evidence-based economic model we have. Nobody with a valuable education is going to follow the Austrian magic economy.
It has no evidence for it, that is the problem. I'll give you three good guesses as to what happened when the stimulus was passed, and the first 2 don't count. You also very much lack fundamental economic thinking, if you are to say that decisions on debt magically change because of who is handling it.
You can't say we have what we have right now thanks to 'free markets' because there are no free markets. Well, they have them in Somalia and that's why Somalia is fucked. Every industrialized country was industrialized through government spending. Never was a country industrialized through free markets. It just didn't happen. And considering how many countries are industrialized already, I doubt it will ever happen. Now maybe this is because free markets just can't exist because there will always be established power against it. Maybe free markets do fine in industrializing a nation. But what use is something that can't exist?
On October 20 2011 15:23 semantics wrote: @pillage Perhaps if it was possible for the person to get a job that would give them more money then unemployment would they would search for a job but why work a shitty job for 8-12 hours a day and get payed only a little bit better?
You also say greed is the major motivator for all people making progress or choosing a job when you ignore job satisfaction a person can get. Greed is not happiness as well, look at denmark very high tax rate very low variation between it's top earning and it's bottom earners and it's ranked high on a world happiness index. And what would be the low hanging fruit to why that is, it's because they have less to worry about, you want to go to college? Well that's payed for infact you pull salary when you go to college, no need to worry much about retirement or healthcare bills etc. It's not necessarily a happier place in general it's just that denmark has helped to remove worries from people.
Greed isn't the reason for scientific advancement, people who do science at that level aren't thinking about money unless it's funding. So the only way greed is valid in that sense of progress is that greedy people want to make profits off other's findings, so then those findings would be made other wise it's just a matter of funding research.
You should probably read the aforementioned link too. Kinda deals with the science fraud that is government funding it. Also, as far as your jobs comment, there is plenty of well paying jobs out there RIGHT NOW. They may not be what you went to college for, but you want a job that pays well right? Linemen are in such a demand because so many have retired the past 5 years that the ones that are left are making like 100-150k a year because of the crap ton of overtime they're getting paid for. In other words, people are going off to college unnecessarily for no real reason (only like 20% of jobs need a college education to begin with) other than they think it gets them a better paying job. Getting out of college to not be able to find a job in whatever field they went to school for, and then complaining about how much debt they have. The utility company practically educates you for free on how to do the job they need people to do, and people aren't taking up on it because they apparently are either lazy or think it below themselves to run power lines. After all, i went to college!
On October 20 2011 12:09 Pillage wrote: The point I was trying to make was that even if you have an opinion regarding something, you can still recruit X people to your cause and Fuck over whoever you feel like just because you have numbers on your side. That's the ugly flaw of democracy, the clueless mob can do whatever it wants, regardless whether or not the decision is correct.
This isn't an "ugly flaw" of democracy, this is the CORE CONCEPT of democracy. The idea is that if you have the backing of the majority of people, the decision IS correct. It's a tool for people to exert direct control over issues that get out of hand.
When you strip down all the unnecessary layers of modern implementation of democracy, this is what remains. It is the original idea, it's really the only thing that matters in a democracy.
If you have a problem with this, then democracy isn't what you really want.
On October 20 2011 12:09 Pillage wrote: I will not argue the necessity of safety nets like food stamps. Unemployment benefits however, are a different story. Frankly some people just can't make it in the professional world, and it's kind've irritating that they can't support themselves and depend on me and you to save their asses when the shit hits the fan.
Do you really think you control your fate to the extent that you can be confident in your ability to get yourself out of anything? Are you really going to give up your own power and control over the system because you think that you or somebody close to you will never need it? How delightfully naive.
Yes, some people just can't make it in this environment (even though they've got the education and ability to work). This doesn't mean they're no longer people and should be demoted to some sort of a lesser status in society and only given enough aid to ensure their bare survival. You may as well just kill them then, that's even cheaper, isn't it?
If you live in a society, you share your fate with others who live in it as well. There are really only two viable options you have here: help and sustain those people indefinitely, or contribute to improving the conditions for those people to get a job and a normal life.
Look, I don't believe in the nation state. I would call myself a libertarian socialist. But the fact remains all countries industrialized because of government spending. This doesn't mean it can't theoretically happen with a free market. It just shows that in practice it just doesn't happen. The free market isn't a solution to anything besides getting as much profit as possible. And that isn't what we need. Free markets are great at what they do. They just don't do much. I agree with all the arguments and logic generally made by free market advocates. It is just that you have to impose social justice in some way. Doing that and keeping a free market free are hard to do.
Free market people don't claim free markets cause social justice. They also don't care about it. It is not important for them. That's why they can advocate free markets. They just dodge the issue.
I also don't believe in nation state governments that try to manage and direct economies for the sake of economic growth. I do still believe public money probably has to be used for public goals which is what will disrupt a free market. But there are many goals that would justify making the free market function less well.
It's kinda funny reading the responses of the last page or two.. The situation is changing so rapidly that I do not have any pretense of what to expect in the next month.
Yesterday, the banks were moving large piles of shit across their spreadsheets. Moving them in the taxpayers direction.
Story in on Rueters, Bloomberg, ect Federal Reserve seems to be twiddling thumbs about this one.
EDITOR'S ALERT: Holy Bailout! Federal Reserve Now Backstopping US$75 Trillion of Derivative Trades ... That's the headline over at the Daily Bail (no relationship to us) reporting on a Bloomberg wire that "Bank of America Corp. ... has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits..." It brings the Fed closer to the target that we have set in previous articles of US$100 trillion. That's what we long-ago estimated the bailout would eventually cost the American taxpayer, and apparently this day is rapidly approaching. In fact, since there is perhaps US$750 trillion in notional derivatives, the total is virtually limitless should the Fed actually have to step in.
You can't say we have what we have right now thanks to 'free markets' because there are no free markets. Well, they have them in Somalia and that's why Somalia is fucked. Every industrialized country was industrialized through government spending. Never was a country industrialized through free markets. It just didn't happen. And considering how many countries are industrialized already, I doubt it will ever happen. Now maybe this is because free markets just can't exist because there will always be established power against it. Maybe free markets do fine in industrializing a nation. But what use is something that can't exist?
On October 20 2011 15:23 semantics wrote: @pillage Perhaps if it was possible for the person to get a job that would give them more money then unemployment would they would search for a job but why work a shitty job for 8-12 hours a day and get payed only a little bit better?
You also say greed is the major motivator for all people making progress or choosing a job when you ignore job satisfaction a person can get. Greed is not happiness as well, look at denmark very high tax rate very low variation between it's top earning and it's bottom earners and it's ranked high on a world happiness index. And what would be the low hanging fruit to why that is, it's because they have less to worry about, you want to go to college? Well that's payed for infact you pull salary when you go to college, no need to worry much about retirement or healthcare bills etc. It's not necessarily a happier place in general it's just that denmark has helped to remove worries from people.
Greed isn't the reason for scientific advancement, people who do science at that level aren't thinking about money unless it's funding. So the only way greed is valid in that sense of progress is that greedy people want to make profits off other's findings, so then those findings would be made other wise it's just a matter of funding research.
You should probably read the aforementioned link too. Kinda deals with the science fraud that is government funding it. Also, as far as your jobs comment, there is plenty of well paying jobs out there RIGHT NOW. They may not be what you went to college for, but you want a job that pays well right? Linemen are in such a demand because so many have retired the past 5 years that the ones that are left are making like 100-150k a year because of the crap ton of overtime they're getting paid for. In other words, people are going off to college unnecessarily for no real reason (only like 20% of jobs need a college education to begin with) other than they think it gets them a better paying job. Getting out of college to not be able to find a job in whatever field they went to school for, and then complaining about how much debt they have. The utility company practically educates you for free on how to do the job they need people to do, and people aren't taking up on it because they apparently are either lazy or think it below themselves to run power lines. After all, i went to college!
The day publicly funded research dies is the day that the neutrality of science dies. How much do you trust corporate-funded research as to health, safety and environmental effects? When should the public be alerted to the possible risk of certain medication? Who will fund ecological studies? The link you have provided is complete and utter trash that worships only the "free market".
EPT![[image loading]](http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/644/29361510150349881259487.jpg)
