631–640 of 961 posts
Correction: The Fed's policies have taken $50T of wealth from the Bottom 90%. When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich. Most importantly, when the Fed decides to print money ad nauseam, they create massive asset inflation, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. T…
> It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education. Huh? Literally everybody grasps this. This is the most widely parroted mainstream narrative about the economy right now on the internet. Hell, you can't throw a rock at the Wall Street Journal (conservative) or the New York Times (liberal) without hitting a sentence that mentions wealth inequality brought on by fed policy. For further…
That may be the case but traction on this narrative was near zero if not negative even say two months ago. "Inflation? The poor are in debt, so it's good for them right? Lel"
More importantly the professional pundit class (neoliberal economists like krugman) and even the socialist-adjacent MMT theorists do NOT see things this way and push hard for policies that while well meaning will likely result in stealing even more from the working class. The media of course feeds off of this class so it may (finally) be part of the "internet discourse", it's not part of the "mainstream discourse".
> In an instant, wealth inequality will start shifting the other direction, and valuations will fall
No, if you understand the mechanism of how inflation steals from the labor class, you would know that "it doesn't work that way". It is not an "instant reversal" of wealth inequality, except for if the crashes brought out by the interest rate hikes are accompanied by not bailing out the wealthy, and we all know how the track record on that has been going.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if you intended to, but despite the hand-waviness this sounds like you’re making an argument for a return to hard currency...
Because I am fairly pro market but read enough mainstream economics to know that government paper retaining value more than private assets is much more of a distortion than said paper gradually losing value towards its intrinsic value of nothing. The thing is, stable money that predictably loses value is a great thing to have for the economy as it allows people to negotiate contracts and conduct business in a predict…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The taxes were already accounted for, my claim is on top of what you already contributed. Not according to you, as you view taxes as inherently illegitimate. Though if you have a Patreon or GoFundMe to validate your claim then by all means. > Its all very simple, if you don’t give them what they want, they threaten you at first and then they come take what they want. If you don't wear clothes, you'd be arrested for…
> Not according to you, as you view taxes as inherently illegitimate. Though if you have a Patreon or GoFundMe to validate your claim then by all means. I’m responding to taxes the way you responded to my request for some of your surplus. You’re asserting you already paid taxes, you don’t get to decide how much tax you pay. > If you don't wear clothes, you'd be arrested for public indecency. I concede that laws requi…
Neither do you, let's get this proposal to the legislature.
> I concede that laws requiring clothing are akin to taxation in that one group of people imposes their values on another group without their consent.
Perhaps the same can be said of all laws.
> I disagree with you that taxation is necessary for society.
It's voluntaryism, then. The onus is on you to advance an alternative model and light a candle, rather than just calling taxation theft and cursing the darkness.
> If someone can articulate a coherent vision of a property-less society, others are welcome to join them.
As with taxes.
> In essence, they don’t have a problem with property, but with certain people’s ownership of certain things because they would rather that other people own those same things.
Not so with Proudhon, the originator of the phrase. His take was that those who owned those properties had no right to the wealth generated by those properties if the labor was undertaken by others. That is, rentier wealth via property was theft.
> I now saw that Bruenig's use of Proudhon's phrase "property is theft" made perfect sense from the perspective of an evolutionary theory of morality when "property" is defined as ownership by people who do not work yet become wealthier than the people from whom rent is collected.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/201902/is-p...
Correction: The Fed's policies have taken $50T of wealth from the Bottom 90%. When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich. Most importantly, when the Fed decides to print money ad nauseam, they create massive asset inflation, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. T…
Isn't it strange that that's true? Why does jealousy stop at national borders? Why not more local borders? Why not people you personally know? Why not the whole world?
> America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90% Wealth is not a zero-sum game. If I take two lines of code and put them together, I've created something of value that I might be able to sell. Wealth is created all the time out of thin air. It might take the form of an innovative new technology, open source code, or even art. It might be because you bought raw materials and built a house, and the subsequent value of…
The top 1% changes a lot. Most people don't stay in the top 1% for many years in a row. Many people below the 90th percentile benefit from the growth of the top levels when they have their brief time in the top 1%.
This is simply wrong. Most people are unlikely to reach top 1% for income in any one year of their lifetime. The top 1% for wealth is even a much higher bar to reach: you need to hold over $10 million. People ain't moving in and out of that bracket very often.
As a Sheikh once said 'My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Lamborghini, his son will drive a Lamborghini, but his son will ride a camel'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Democratic control of the economy.
That would be absolutely terrifying. The economy we have now is due to experts tinkering. Allowing the masses, who can't organize their own lives, to attempt to organize the economy will lead to more deaths and misery than the current system. Would you want a democratically elected airplane pilot with no training?
The kind of sentiment you are expressing is directly antithetical to having any kind of real democracy.
If you've ever met the people in power, many of them are quite dumb. It's easy to listen to experts (or not) and give commands. How often do you hear that executives don't know what's happening in their companies but the people on the line know exactly what to do but were not consulted seriously?
To answer your question about airline pilots, I would probably accept (and in fact do, the FAA) a system designed by what is allegedly a democracy. Usually people don't have direct popular elections for technical positions, but design rules in consultation with people familiar with the field. If the voters were in fact other airline personnel, a direct election could be viable though I would require some qualifying criteria (e.g. people with XXXX hours of flight time).