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Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action. |
On January 11 2018 22:21 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2018 21:08 TheDwf wrote:What had they promised? No immigration at all from non-EU countries? "Remigration". Zero migration plus remigration of anyone who migrated illegally. It may not be much of an increase. It's still the total opposite of what they promised.
I guess their true bosses—employers—are the reason why this change happened. 
Just like the 12-14 billion euros per year they (both parties) wanted to save have become 2.5 billion over the next years and 4% (FPÖ)/10% (ÖVP) of the voting base being able to initiate a referendum have become ~14% on not-CETA, not-ÖXIT, not-budget and only from 2022. Also, expectetly "no Hartz 4" in Austria has survived the elections by only a few months.
Yes to democracy... but not too much! For the dreaded demos does not always vote as it should!
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And accomplish what?
No one is getting rich off of farming.
Cutting subsidies will only result in higher food prices which really really hurts the poor.
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More likely it makes farmers go bankrupt and you start importing more cheap food.
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If the goal is to help the poor, farming subsidies might just be the worst tool imaginable, while hurting the very poor in third world countries.
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Well the idea is that relying on food import from outside is a security risk. The whole point of agricultural subsidies is to maintain some kind of independence in production - without them and without trade barriers, it would not make much sense to grow stuff in most of Europe, where workforce is expensive, land scarce and climate harsh in one way or another. The question is how much does it work and how much sense it makes when then whole sector is dependent on other imported externals such as oil for the machines, but it is somewhat reasonable. Re-starting abandoned agriculture could be brutally expensive - the subsidies also work to keep the land from being overrun by bushes and stuff.
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we import pretty much anything from oil, microchips to electricity to medicine and as you're saying machinery. We'd probably not even get food from A to B without imports. This always seemed like the 'survival bunker in your backyard' logic to me. If it comes to the point where you need to rely on food security you're likely screwed anyway. Japan imports like half of its food and is in a much more stressful geopolitical position than Europe.
The only people who profit from farming subsidies are rich a small minority of farmers in Europe while it screws the developing world. And the only reason they exist is basically lobbying work.
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My guess is that another big reason for farming subsidies is the knowledge that if food prices start rising and food shortages happen, people get angry and start revolting.
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Well that is a little exaggerated. We do import all sorts of things, but most of them are not as time critical to the bulk of the population as food is. And we still have a lot of manufacturing installed and working within Europe, including cars and heavy machinery, steel etc... If we ever stopped getting chips from Asia, we have a couple of years to put ourselves together and we have a lot of know-how present as many specialized things are produced in Europe, we just lack the mass-production means. And even if smartphones got really expensive, it's still very much different from people dying from hunger. Europe is quite populated, you know.
And how is that screwing the developing world? Do we somehow owe them buying food from them or what?
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I would prefer to not import low quality shitty German and Eastern European food. I prefer my food tasty and local.
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you're still free to buy it, I just don't see why other people should pay for it (the point of subsidies)
I prefer my food tasty and local.
socialism in the 21st century
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On January 12 2018 02:27 Nyxisto wrote:
you're still free to buy it, I just don't see why other people should pay for it (the point of subsidies)
I don't believe in money coinciding with a liberal labour market value, so with the current capital system in place I always see a point of people with lots of monetary achieved wealth paying for the demands of others. Though you obviously have a point that an income based tax systems may are not good at achieving that, since they tax the derivative of wealth and not so much wealth. Otherwise I would be completely with you on that. If you establish liberal payment systems in which I know how the money was created instead of the faceless, anonymous money that is probably the equivalent to a bunch of rotten tomatoes from 50-years ago that some rich guy put aside and which has no labour equivalent now, then yes, we can talk about "not paying for others".
A few other points as to why:
- Eco friendly farming is not competitive without subsidies but with the lax regulations on pesticides the EU has. Change the second part and you may have a point here.
- Subsidies work as rural investments. Lower Austria can't just devalue their Euro to stay competitive. It would have to go the same route that Greece had to go, suddenly devalue their labour. Chances are that we get mass migration to cities if you just cut agricultural spending.
On January 12 2018 02:27 Nyxisto wrote:socialism in the 21st century
Not really. 21st century socialism is that I have to pay state debts that I didn't make, didn't vote for and that I know profit the rich. It is that I have to accept money that was created in a labour process 50-years ago and which since has been completely devalued, but given the socialist capital instituions like the state and the banks are guaranteeing for its value for as long as you don't put it on the market where it would inflate the system, I cannot identify it. All I see is capital prices rising and rising and rising, because that's how they store it.
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Movement of the rural population into the cities is more of a feature than a bug. Rural populations are very costly for society overall, especially ecologically. In Germany there is a chronic lack of physicians in rural areas because the population is old and doctors are a scarce resource, probably not much different in Austria or any other aging society. Everything is car-powered which is an environmental disaster, you have few children per school, long commutes to work (which has really bad psychological effects, too. Reducing commute time is one of the easiest ways to improve life quality), elderly care is problematic and so forth.
This is a general problem of the 'local' movements, they are far from environmentally or socially friendly and they do not scale at all. There is lots and lots of hidden costs in this type of life financed by people in the city (poor and middle-class alike) paying high taxes for it.
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On January 12 2018 01:58 Simberto wrote:
My guess is that another big reason for farming subsidies is the knowledge that if food prices start rising and food shortages happen, people get angry and start revolting.
This is a very reasonable point. Historically food shortages are the most disruptive and dangerous forms of shortages a nation can experience. Especially if they are protracted. Having a functioning farming industry and food production industry is pretty much the back bone of modern civilization.
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On January 12 2018 03:17 Nyxisto wrote:
Movement of the rural population into the cities is more of a feature than a bug. Rural populations are very costly for society overall, especially ecologically. In Germany there is a chronic lack of physicians in rural areas because the population is old and doctors are a scarce resource, probably not much different in Austria or any other aging society. Everything is car-powered which is an environmental disaster, you have few children per school, long commutes to work (which has really bad psychological effects, too. Reducing commute time is one of the easiest ways to improve life quality), elderly care is problematic and so forth.
This is a general problem of the 'local' movements, they are far from environmentally or socially friendly and they do not scale at all. There is lots and lots of hidden costs in this type of life financed by people in the city (poor and middle-class alike) paying high taxes for it.
Nothing that goes against the will of a person is a feature, unless it serves the freedom of others. Just because in your personal pricing system you believe something is more "economical" doesn't mean that other people don't want to live differently. And just because some of our social interactions can be measured in money, doesn't mean you can measure all of it in it. If you don't want to be intervined with people living in rural regions, you should disconnect your society from them, not bind yourself together economically and then tell them what they can or can't do "because money".
You obviously have a point when talking about ecology in some of the points you make. On the other hand, there are many reasons why rural life is rather ecological or can be if done right. You can have personalized energy systems (solar power on every roof), you have space for wind power, you can use wood for heating purposes.
Quickly searching for studies I haven't found much conclusive proof for either thesis. I would guess eco-efficient city life would beat the shit out of eco-efficient rural life. But thing with efficiency is, it's usually not there because it is a question of cost and whether you have the personal freedom to change the things around you. And city life is usually really shitty and costly in that regard, while it is rather simple to change things if you have your own house and garden.
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Wow, Big J, that's a big turn around from your opinion that income is the most important part of quality of life. What happened? Did you fall in love?
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On January 12 2018 21:48 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
Wow, Big J, that's a big turn around from your opinion that income is the most important part of quality of life. What happened? Did you fall in love?
I would say wealth is, not income and I would say only you can use your personal pricing system to measure what wealth is to you. To get what you want you usually need human interaction, for that you need rules and enforcement that guarantee that you can't interfere with the freedom of others. With a hard property and capital system in place with inheritance that means you usually need lots of money (unless you are just happy with others controlling everything and you not being able to participate because of the property system), yes, if that is what you want to hear.
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Update on the situation in Poland, from my perspective.
I think PiS (Poland's ruling party) just secured winning the 2019 election with a constitutional majority. They keep delivering on their campaign promises (social programs, fighting corruption, hard stance on immigration) and actually reacting to public opinions instead of ignoring them until the election season (they dropped a few proposed laws when it became clear the public won't like them), but it wouldn't be as easy as it is if the rest of our political theatre wasn't so awful. PiS has no competition on the right and their recent cabinet reshuffle should win them a lot of votes from the center, thanks to the removal of nearly all unpopular ministers (foreign relations, defense, environment, healthcare) and replacing them with calm, boring faces. Meanwhile, the liberal camp continues their neverending cycle of meltdowns, peaking this week with multiple pants on head retarded decisions, which I'm going to describe below. It's almost unthinkable how terrible our liberal parties became after Doland Tusk ditched the country to become the president of European Council. PiS doesn't even have to do anything, the liberals are ruining their image on their own.
This week (and it's just friday) had one huge PR victory of the ruling camp (cabinet reshuffle) and three major fuck ups of the liberal camp consisting of two centrist parties and whatever is left of our political left.
First meltdown: A Sore Loser
+ Show Spoiler +Former leader of the smaller centrist party - Ryszard Petru can't accept his defeat and keeps attacking the new leader in his interviews. He was even barred from participating in the party's press conferences because he kept interrupting his colleagues. Petru created the party and was supposed to be our Macron (young guy associated with economy and fresh ideas, while actually representing the old establishment), but his short career could be summed up with "how not to run a party". This monday, he's decided to make his own press conference and invite "everyone from the opposition" to participate in his genius project, humbly named "Petru's plan", which is supposed to be about creating an alternative to the political program of the ruling party.
The move was widely ridiculed, his party's image weakened, and the public perception of the opposition as a camp with no vision was reinforced (they do have their programs, they're just bland, sort of like what Schulz offered to Germans, you can't win over the undecideds with such things).
Second meltdown: Abortion Circus
+ Show Spoiler +Remember the (fake) news about Poland banning abortion from 2016? That conflict ended with no legal changes (atm abortion is illegal unless the mother's life is in danger, the fetus has medical defects or the pregnancy is a result of rape), as the parliament realized the additional limitations proposed by the pro-life NGO were too harsh and the people didn't want them. Well, this year the project came back in a milder form, they only want to disallow aborting kids with serious medical defects (they call it "eugenic abortion"). Obviously, the prolifers want to ban all kinds of abortion, but I'm confident the final version will only ban abortions on fetuses likely to have disabilities most of us consider "livable" like Down's syndrome.
Why am I talking about it in this context? Because, just like in 2016, there was a second abortion law proposed - a liberalization supported by the center-left. The project didn't last long in the parliament, it was rejected in its first reading, but what's most surprising about it, is that it was rejected thanks to the votes or abstentions from MPs of the two liberal parties. There was no party discipline in PiS, and some of their MPs like the Supreme Leader Kaczyński voted to keep both projects in the works, so there was a real chance to keep the liberalization hopes alive. To make sure it will happen, the leaderships of the liberal parties declared party discipline, and it backfired. Conservative members of these parties didn't like it and voted with their conscience or abstained, which lead to the rejection of the project and furious reactions from left-wing personalities.
It was stupid to declare party discipline in a vote over such a delicate matter as abortion, and incredibly stupid to do that while knowing there are conservative minds in your parties. Besides presenting themselves as willing to force others to act against their conscience, they also made themselves look like they can't get anything done, which is a recurring theme ever since their poorly managed protests against the judical reforms started.
Third meltdown: Abortion Circus 2: Electric Boogaloo
+ Show Spoiler +This deserves a separate point because the aftermath of the vote is a masterpiece of political incompetence.
The bigger liberal party (PO) decided to kick 3 of their MPs who voted with their conscience. It's a terrible move because the party tries to portray itself as a center-right/conservative/christian democracts, so a lot of conservative minded people who don't like the radical methods of PiS supported them, which helped in keeping the party as the second biggest in the country (PiS has ~40%, PO ~20%). Another reason why the move was dumb was that both the party leadership and the kicked MPs are parliamentary vetarans, so there was no reason to expect the latter to start voting contrary to views they actively represented in their previous terms.
The smaller liberal party is close to imploding. It was clear the party leadership is drifting toward the left since months, and that's almost rational, considering PiS and PO dominate the right and center-right "markets". "Almost" is an important word here, because they started their drift after the elections. Earlier, they presented themselves as economically liberal and socially neutral, so a lot of top candidates (and soon-to-be MPs) happened to be socially conservative (this is one of the examples of "how not to run a party" by R. Petru). Nearly half of their MPs abstained from the abortion vote, one of those left the party yesterday, which makes him the 5th MP to that in this term. Three of the party's left wing threw a tantrum and suspended their membership.
It's hard to lose when your opponent isn't trying to win.
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You are mostly right sans one thing. We dont have liberal parties in Poland, at least not in parliment. In so called liberal parties around half of MPs are conseravtives. Our political spectrum is divided along the "status quo was OK" vs"status qou was NOK" lines not conservatives vs liberals.
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Are you talking about liberals in the European sense or US?
I can't really think of a country with a real liberal (libertarian) party. It's usually socially conservative + economically liberal Vs Socially liberal + economically socialist.
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EPT
