171–180 of 242 posts
"I think the propaganda of "The Communists" has been drilled into the American public so solidly" You mean the part where communists murdered 100 million people in the last century? That "propaganda"?
Ron here is saying we shouldn't kill startups (what PG calls "creating wealth"), we should instead fight against practices that actually take money from the poor and give to the rich (what PG calls "zero-sum games"). After reading PG's article, I got the impression that he wants the exact same thing as Ron does. What's there to argue?
PG even has a paragraph in his essay that is almost equivalent to the title of the article:
> There are lots of things wrong with the US that have economic inequality as a symptom. We should fix those things. In the process we may decrease economic inequality. But we can't start from the symptom and hope to fix the underlying causes.
"I think the propaganda of "The Communists" has been drilled into the American public so solidly" You mean the part where communists murdered 100 million people in the last century? That "propaganda"?
Do you think modding this down is going to make those 100 million corpses go away? 'Cause it isn't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zizek phrased it kind of nicely once, in a way that stuck with me. He probably borrowed from somewhere, and I'll continue to lossily reproduce whatever the sentiment was, but it goes something like this. How is it possible that we are completely and utterly optimistic about breaking all sorts of physical barriers, like landing on Mars, and reusing rockets, and communicating worldwide via little handheld microcomputer…
The standard left wing complaint is that billionaires don't have enough lavish parties, but instead reinvest their wealth in new productive capacity. See, e.g., Picketty, Krugman, or anyone favoring stimulus directed at the bottom of the income distribution. Do you dispute this? As for erasing class distinctions, consider the possibility that we already have. Imagine telling a person in 1915 about the world today; th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could always dissolve the legal concept of the publicly owned corporation and only allow employee owned corporations. Thats actually less government, because right now we have a government that has to write and enforce laws for both forms of business.
Exactly, simple rule changes like that could radically alter society. Not that I agree or disagree, but that example does support the main point, the rules matter and can be changed.
Less drastically you could make employee/consumer owned businesses dramatically more tax advantaged giving them an economic edge and then just seeing what happens. Might turn out awful but its certainly possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can absolutely avoid it. Inequality was so much less in the 1950s/1960s and we still had police and property. The disconnect here is that property rights are "more guidelines than actual rules", they are quite literally "made up". It used to be that keeping a black person out of your store was a "property right", until we decided it wasn't, and then we got rid of that one. It used to be that preventing airplanes…
"Inequality was so much less in the 1950s/1960s" To a first approximation every single person on the planet had far less in the 1950s/1960s. "Equality" sucks if it means that everyone is equally impoverished.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took me years to realize that economics isn't physics - and it isn't ruled by physics-like laws. Instead, economics is governed by laws created by our society. And what we think of as "free market" is really just norms of trade which are created by our society. There is no reason why the bulk of the billions taken-in by WalMart should go to the Walton family while their employees live on food-stamps - that is just…
Do you believe in property rights? Having a legal/police system to catch people who forcebly take property? Using trade to exchange property? This is the core of our system. And that system will always generate inequality. Not necessarily a bad thing. You can have laws to take the edge off inequality generated, but at the core of the system you can't really avoid it.
Mr. Garret quotes Sanders: > The reality is that for the past 40 years, Wall Street and the billionaire class has rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the wealthiest and most powerful people of this country. I am rather puzzled that this idea gets so much traction. Does anyone really believe that if only the rules weren't "rigged" local shops and businesses would be able to compete against Wal-Mart a…
It took me years to realize that economics isn't physics - and it isn't ruled by physics-like laws. Instead, economics is governed by laws created by our society. And what we think of as "free market" is really just norms of trade which are created by our society. There is no reason why the bulk of the billions taken-in by WalMart should go to the Walton family while their employees live on food-stamps - that is just…
Professor Mark Blyth has a very good summary of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWbkPezgtU
The problem for economics as it's become very mathematical
and technical is that the intrinsic beauty and rigor and appeal
of the models themselves have become an attractor - something
that research gravitates towards. [...] There is a great attraction
in these types of models; they create a world of equilibrium,
a world of stability almost by accident - they are just a consequence
of the model, and it's a beautiful and seductive world.Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The socialized promised lands of Scandinavia are highly regressive. No, they aren't. Regressive means that the rich pay less, percentage-wise, than the poor do.
Did you even read the link I gave?
Krugman's other reference has a broken link but his text does not sound like your claim either.
But in the big picture, income transfers do seem to be more favoured in strong welfare states than progression in the tax system. The US has a mongrel system with EITC because you get a "negative income tax" by social criteria (basis of which are quite 1950's...) - it's more like a social transfer in many respects than a tax progression.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you believe in property rights? Having a legal/police system to catch people who forcebly take property? Using trade to exchange property? This is the core of our system. And that system will always generate inequality. Not necessarily a bad thing. You can have laws to take the edge off inequality generated, but at the core of the system you can't really avoid it.
Clearly the parent does not believe in property rights when they believe unskilled non-differentiated labor should be rewarded with above market rates by force and at the expense of Walmart's shareholders. That individuals believe government should be directed at investors who risk their property to create wealth in order to take by force that property to redistribute it is perhaps the most offensive sentiment. > The…