US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2044

On January 20 2020 14:28 Introvert wrote:


Well to be fair, I'm not sure there's perfect overlap on "is it bad" and "it should be criminal." I think the easiest, most simplistic answer is that a "good" billionaire doesn't become one through theft but by providing a service or product that people want or need. In that sense, his compensation is "just" in that buyers have willingly paid and through various means that money has accrued to him. So he has earned it, which isn't wrong in and of itself. That much I think everyone is familiar with, and I'm sure I could somewhat predict your reply to that assertion. Perhaps it's greed that motivated him, and that would be wrong. Perhaps he hoards it and values it too much. Poor and rich alike are imperfect.

I think this is actually more fundamental and more complicated. It's not that greed is good, it's that greed is part of reality. And that doesn't even touch on what should be done were it agreed that being that wealthy was inherently bad. We can all agree, even the biggest defender of billionaires, that coming into wealth through straight up theft, lies, or fraud is bad and that wealth should be repaid.

So while I've seen it too, it's a little sad that so many understand the argument over capitalism as one of "is greed good." Anyone who has though seriously on this for any amount of time ought to be able to answer the question instantly, the definition of the word and what it describes almost require it.

I dont feel ive done well here explaining my thoughts on this, but I did want to point out that even capitalists believe that greed is bad.

We can all agree, even the biggest defender of billionaires, that coming into wealth through straight up theft, lies, or fraud is bad and that wealth should be repaid.

On January 20 2020 07:12 Introvert wrote:


I think I would be ok with that. I have a problem with using greed as a "positive force" as you put it. I assume that many of the same people who would run to "greed" are the same people who say things like "socialism is a fine theory, it just doesn't work." It's almost too easy a way out. Rather than argue for capitalism, they will just argue against socialism. I don't know that such a one-sided focus is sustainable, espeically as those societies that tried it fade further back into history. If being a capitalist meant venerating as virtue that which is vice, it would indeed be wrong.

edit: but to be clear, human fallibility is a core part of American Conservatism which if course includes a capitalist outlook. Human behavior still matters. But I wouldn't argue that greed is good. I'm probably not explaining this very well.

On January 20 2020 03:22 Nebuchad wrote:


Hi Good post.

You can make a decent argument that the real thing that's being said is that people wouldn't work hard without exploitation. If your survival didn't depend on you getting your wage, if scarcity didn't threaten you, why would you work hard to make money for your boss? But of course that's not really a message that you can rally people around, so instead you talk about society as if everyone was in the capitalist class, fighting to increase their profit and satisfy their greed, instead of talking about reality where the large majority are in the working class and just working to earn the right (/privilege?) to live in their own society.

On January 20 2020 22:59 Acrofales wrote:


1) You seem to imply that working for the right to live in society is something bad. I would say that in general, people *should* work, and that only through work do you earn the benefits afforded in society. And I am pretty much a democratic socialist, and fully believe everybody is entitled to some basic rights (including housing, food, healthcare, education), but if you drop the requirement for people to work, then essential tasks required for the basic functioning of society stop getting done. Throughout human history, scarcity has been the main driving force behind labour. For most of it, it was scarcity of food. Thankfully we can now actually produce enough of that, that food scarcity is less and less an issue (although the rate at which we are destroying our agricultural environment may bring that concern crashing back soon enough). Instead, in the developed world, food scarcity is replaced by a desire to have "stuff". You can call that greed or consumerism... and I won't deny that a large part of this behaviour is really destructive. But I don't think you're being "forced" to work because you want to buy the newest fanciest iPhone. Rather most workers in the developed world (and even in the developing world) are in the uniquely privileged position where they can actually choose what to spend their money (proxy for labour) on, rather than being "forced" to labour for food, as was roughly the case before the second half of the 20th century.

2) I also think this ties in to the discussion about "greed"... and capitalism is being blamed for the "greed" of consumerism. Capitalism and consumerism are two different things, and you can have capitalism without consumerism, although our current society is excessively consumerist. The problem is that if you replace a "capitalist" economy with a "socialist" economy, but do nothing to stop consumerism, you don't fix any of the problems in current society (except transfer some of the wealth from the capitalist class to some other people... possibly, but in practice not necessarily, distributing it more evenly). Similarly, you don't have to get rid of capitalism to get rid of consumerism. Using a market to regulate supply and demand does not require people to incessantly buy buy buy everything that is put in front of them.

3) I would like to address the idea that people are not inherently greedy. I don't think "people" is a thing. I think there are many different people, and even if the majority are not inherently greedy, the problem with most alternatives for capitalism is that they are not even robust to a *small minority* being greedy. And from research in behavioural economy we can see that there is always a small minority that will behave greedily, so any mechanism has to deal with that unfortunate reality of humanity. A lot of research is done into this when studying the "tragedy of the commons".

On January 20 2020 22:59 Acrofales wrote:


1) You seem to imply that working for the right to live in society is something bad. I would say that in general, people *should* work, and that only through work do you earn the benefits afforded in society. And I am pretty much a democratic socialist, and fully believe everybody is entitled to some basic rights (including housing, food, healthcare, education), but if you drop the requirement for people to work, then essential tasks required for the basic functioning of society stop getting done. Throughout human history, scarcity has been the main driving force behind labour. For most of it, it was scarcity of food. Thankfully we can now actually produce enough of that, that food scarcity is less and less an issue (although the rate at which we are destroying our agricultural environment may bring that concern crashing back soon enough). Instead, in the developed world, food scarcity is replaced by a desire to have "stuff". You can call that greed or consumerism... and I won't deny that a large part of this behaviour is really destructive. But I don't think you're being "forced" to work because you want to buy the newest fanciest iPhone. Rather most workers in the developed world (and even in the developing world) are in the uniquely privileged position where they can actually choose what to spend their money (proxy for labour) on, rather than being "forced" to labour for food, as was roughly the case before the second half of the 20th century.

2) I also think this ties in to the discussion about "greed"... and capitalism is being blamed for the "greed" of consumerism. Capitalism and consumerism are two different things, and you can have capitalism without consumerism, although our current society is excessively consumerist. The problem is that if you replace a "capitalist" economy with a "socialist" economy, but do nothing to stop consumerism, you don't fix any of the problems in current society (except transfer some of the wealth from the capitalist class to some other people... possibly, but in practice not necessarily, distributing it more evenly). Similarly, you don't have to get rid of capitalism to get rid of consumerism. Using a market to regulate supply and demand does not require people to incessantly buy buy buy everything that is put in front of them.

3) I would like to address the idea that people are not inherently greedy. I don't think "people" is a thing. I think there are many different people, and even if the majority are not inherently greedy, the problem with most alternatives for capitalism is that they are not even robust to a *small minority* being greedy. And from research in behavioural economy we can see that there is always a small minority that will behave greedily, so any mechanism has to deal with that unfortunate reality of humanity. A lot of research is done into this when studying the "tragedy of the commons".

On January 20 2020 12:42 pmh wrote:


But greed is its entire organizing principle. Capitalism is based on people beeing greedy,if people would not be greedy then capitalism wouldnt work at all and we would have some sort of cooperative system.
Capitalism is based on the believe in the free market,the believe that people are best motivated with monetary incentives.
And capitalism rewards that attitude like no other system so yes,greed,by the lack of a better word, (to quote a movie) is at the very core of the capitalist phylosophy.

Though money in the end is a means,it is power what drives capitalism even more so then money. Power is sort of infinite money.

On January 21 2020 01:10 Ryzel wrote:
In regards to the US specifically, it should be mentioned that the fundamental ideology of the nation is based on an absence of scarcity. It started as a seemingly endless expanse of land and opportunity, which leads directly to the idea that anyone can do anything here (the American Dream), since all the resources are there and the only thing holding you back is yourself, which of course directly leads to the ideology that “your position in life, whether good or bad, is your own fault”. The first “billionaires” like Rockefeller and especially Carnegie are exemplars of this.

Things like “greed” had a different meaning, because wealth and resources were (and for a lot of people still are) not seen as a zero sum game. “Jealous of Carnegie’s millions? Go out West and tame it for yourself!” Because of this, It’s not seen as selfish to covet money; if anything it’s a personal matter (specifically your ability to enact your will upon the world), which is why some judge the inner quality of others by their wealth. This is the mechanism by which $50 billion to $51 billion is not seen as greed.

All that being said, things are clearly not the same today. There is no new frontier to reap, we have to make do with what we have. The new “frontiers” are creating technology to help extract more natural resources from what we already have. This requires quite a different mindset (and skill set) than the homesteaders of the nations founding. Scarcity is real for the US now, which means wealth is a zero sum game, which means coveting it to extremes is now selfish/greedy.

On January 16 2020 07:15 Gorsameth wrote:
You didn't address his point tho.
If you change up who owns the industry then they become the class of people who fight against climate change regulations because they now control the industry. By changing ownership from a couple of rich people to a lot of 'poor' people your just increasing the number of people you are fighting and not reducing their power at all, they still control the industry.

On January 21 2020 02:18 Velr wrote:


Its kinda adorable that you think they would let "poor people" behave like they want. There isn't much love for "deplorables" on the left, there is pity. Thats not how you win over anyone.

I get that the left is not willing to give one more inch to the right after Bush and Trump. But the mantra of actually being for the poor people while disagreeing with tons of their dearly held believes just does not work out. I wish it would but it just doesn't.

On January 21 2020 00:42 Nebuchad wrote:


The threat is not really that you can't participate in consumerism anymore, it's more that you have a rent to pay, or even food sometimes. I wouldn't necessarily say that consuming is greedy, this sounds like a weird application of the term; I think greed makes more sense at the level of the bosses, to echo ChristianS' point about there being a difference between greed and self-interest; for example when they calculate that they can make a million more on top of their billions if they delocalize, or when they avoid taxes or lobby for tax cuts, and so on.

If your premise is that people work to live it's somewhat easy to end up with a society where people live to work. You're more of a social democrat than a democratic socialist (unless you have evolved recently, and either way that's not a critic when I say it), but even in the models of social democracy it's expected that people end up working less after a while; and that estimation was made in earlier times, now there should be even more inclination with automation kicking in. I think it's in Keynes that you find extrapolations about a 15 hour work week in 2030 (that of course won't happen now because we departed from social democracy in the 1980s and we did neoliberalism and austerity instead).

On January 21 2020 03:12 Acrofales wrote:


Well, the housing market is all kinds of fucked up, but that doesn't really have anything to do with capitalism, socialism or any other ism, but almost exclusively with urbanization and our remarkably poor adaptation to that as society. I'm not going to defend real estate owners squeezing rent from tenants, and would argue that, similar to healthcare, housing is something that is badly managed in a free market. But the underlying problem of the housing market is urbanization, which isn't driven by any ism.

In Europe, I disagree that anybody really has to work for either rent or food. Even in Spain, which doesn't have a great social infractructure, there are all manner of subsidies that will (1) keep you off the street and (2) keep you fed. It obviously won't allow you to live in the center of Barcelona, though, so if you want to live there, then yes, you have to work to pay the rent. I won't deny that despite all these subsidies there *is* a growing problem with homelessness that needs to be addressed with better institutions and help, probably including a broadening of the social aides aimed at making housing affordable. That said, if you live in a "desirable" location, rent eats up a large share of your salary, no doubt. And "food" eats up another good portion. I don't really see the problem with that, though.

The basic requirement that people contribute to their society in order to obtain better benefits does not seem undesirable to me at all. And that is the essence underlying "living to work". I do agree with you that as more and more of the "necessary" tasks are provided by automation, we can (and should) scale down the number of hours people are expected to work (and the reward for hourly labour accordingly). On the flipside of that is that we are *really* good at inventing new "necessary" tasks to be done in our society, and I am not sure we will ever truly run out of "work". And that, more than anything, is the reason that working hours sort of stagnated. The work week didn't reduce further, because we transitioned to a service industry. If we had stuck with only the production stuff that we were doing back then, we could easily have reduced work hours further... but instead we shipped those jobs off to China and opened massage parlors here.

EDIT: and yes, I know real estate moguls are exploiting urbanization and making the whole thing worse.

On January 19 2020 23:36 Nebuchad wrote:


How is it not backwards? Under capitalism you don't get the full value of your labour, under the system I described you would. You can argue that it's not feasible like you do below but you can't argue that it doesn't match the desire of profiting for your productive endeavor that you described earlier.

You can democratically decide that the low skill work of a company is worth less to the company than some other form of work, that would incentivize people not to do what you described here. It's generally not very difficult for companies to make a type of job attractive to an individual if they need it, that's not going to be an issue.

Amazon and other very large companies probably should have a managerial team since they're way too big. That managerial team should be democratically elected by the people working at Amazon. My preference is for direct democracy but I don't think we have the technology yet for it to be feasible for such a large company today. There's an argument for just breaking Amazon to be fair, for fear of monopolies, but I think that argument also applies in capitalism.

On January 20 2020 14:28 Introvert wrote:


Well to be fair, I'm not sure there's perfect overlap on "is it bad" and "it should be criminal." I think the easiest, most simplistic answer is that a "good" billionaire doesn't become one through theft but by providing a service or product that people want or need. In that sense, his compensation is "just" in that buyers have willingly paid and through various means that money has accrued to him. So he has earned it, which isn't wrong in and of itself. That much I think everyone is familiar with, and I'm sure I could somewhat predict your reply to that assertion. Perhaps it's greed that motivated him, and that would be wrong. Perhaps he hoards it and values it too much. Poor and rich alike are imperfect.

I think this is actually more fundamental and more complicated. It's not that greed is good, it's that greed is part of reality. And that doesn't even touch on what should be done were it agreed that being that wealthy was inherently bad. We can all agree, even the biggest defender of billionaires, that coming into wealth through straight up theft, lies, or fraud is bad and that wealth should be repaid.

So while I've seen it too, it's a little sad that so many understand the argument over capitalism as one of "is greed good." Anyone who has though seriously on this for any amount of time ought to be able to answer the question instantly, the definition of the word and what it describes almost require it.

I dont feel ive done well here explaining my thoughts on this, but I did want to point out that even capitalists believe that greed is bad. at least they should.

On January 21 2020 06:30 BerserkSword wrote:


You don't get the "full value of labor" under your system. Under your system all you would get is market distortion.

The masses don't know how to run companies better than businessmen, ignoring the fact that business owners also do other things like take on risk and provide liquidity.


Are you suggesting an economy planned by the electorate?

On January 21 2020 06:47 BerserkSword wrote:


Actually capitalists don't think greed is bad....at all.

Capitalists accept greed as the a general part of human nature present due to the scarcity of resources.

On January 21 2020 06:30 BerserkSword wrote:


You don't get the "full value of labor" under your system. Under your system all you would get is market distortion.

The masses don't know how to run companies better than businessmen, ignoring the fact that business owners also do other things like take on risk and provide liquidity.


Are you suggesting an economy planned by the electorate?

On January 21 2020 08:03 Vivax wrote:
The effects we have in place now are being attributed to capitalism. But that's not the root of the problem, although it originated from it.

+ Show Spoiler +

I invite you to find out what happened back then.