81–90 of 393 posts
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Yeah, that certainly sounds like an issue of race and not of class. I guess in racially homogenous societies wealthy people don’t get any preferential treatment by police in any way whatsoever.
They're inexorably linked in this country. That shouldn't even need to be pointed out.
FYI the neighborhood is Kalorama in DC, where a lot of diplomats and high-level government officials live. Maybe the agents didn't want one of the neighbors to call the director of the FBI to have them chewed out for "making the neighborhood look bad", which is not an impossible thing to happen there considering who the neighbors are. I imagine if you're an FBI field agent, the last thing you want for your career is…
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> people in the neighbourhood are politically influent, that's why they are treated that way, not because they are rich When (and where) is there a difference? What neighborhoods are there where rich people reside who have no more social or political influence than people living in The Projects?
An FBI director makes less than 200k, and will be very politically connected and influential; an engineer making that much probably has as much political influence as people living in the projects. Money can buy political influence, but that's beyond the reach of lower echelon of wealthy.
The same is going to be true of a lot of people living in Kalorama - they're on "personally know the President" level of political influence or they work directly for someone who does.
It's the neighborhood where Obama lived after his term ended. It's where Ivanka Trump and Jared Kuschner lived during Trump's presidency. That kind of thing.
It's a little different than a standard affluent neighborhood of doctors and lawyers and executives that you might find in any random city in the US.
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Capitalism ideally means ideal free markets, free of distortion. Starting with market distorting money from birth by definition... distorts markets.
A mere change in market equilibrium doesn’t constitute a market distortion.
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That's not true. Significant amounts of lobbying and palm greasing happen in person, explicitly off of cell phones. It's not a coincidence that all of the companies that receive massive amounts of federal government money have headquarters around DC.
Yes, and if you move the capitol all of that moves with it. You literally admitted that those headquarters are located for the purpose of in-person meetings, not a love of DC. So unless the location you intend to move the capitol to is top secret, it's irrelevant.
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We have cases of just regular-ass police in the US breaking through the door, shooting the family dog and dragging people out in their underwear. Wrong guy? Whoops. Sorry. No reimbursement.
Well, when there is reimbursement (via lawsuits) it is the city that pays for it. The police should be self-insured, backed by their pension fund. They are granted incredible power with no real accountability.
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While I agree with the Soviet part (or any political system for that matter) I doubt the pro capitalist generalization would stand to scrutiny: > At least in capitalism you become rich by providing value to other people. One could easily find examples that counter these points. I doubt pyramid schemes (think Madoff's schemes) or crypto scams are the only counter-examples possible. These more often than not come from…
Yes, the point of capitalism is that people can do that, but shouldn't. And it should work in tandem with whatever social system that's set up, (justice, laws, morals, ethics, etc) Pyramid schemes steal a great amount of wealth, and should be regulated. Regulated capitalism is the good thing. The thing is, pyramid schemes aren't run by the state (or shouldn't be) and you don't have a gun to your head forcing you to p…
The "shouldn't" isn't very relevant here though. People shouldn't do that under a communist system either, and yet it happens under both.
> I almost feel like "unregulated capitalism" is just a straw man argument that others get tricked into trying to defend.
I wish it was a strawman, unfortunately libertarians who promote this kind of capitalism (which to be clear isn't all libertarians) are a prominent political group whose members include many elected officials!
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> At least in capitalism you become rich by providing value to other people. You become rich by capturing value. Often times, as Silicon Valley and its investors like to remind the world, a lot of value is also being provided so it is indeed a win-win. But you don't become rich by providing value.
True. However, there are two points worth making: 1. The purpose of many laws and regulations that support capitalism is to make it very difficult to capture value without creating it. (When compared to a world without these laws.) 2. It's generally much easier to capture value that you create than to capture value that others create. The result is that there's a massive incentive to create value for others, and a gr…
I think that's probably true in general, but that over the course of ~100 years of capitalism the edge cases where this isn't true have been exploited sufficiently that it's starting to become a big problem. The clearest illustration of this being real estate. There are a lot of people getting rich by doing nothing other than buying and holding onto to real estate, often at the expense of others being able to make use of that resource.
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Capitalism ideally means ideal free markets, free of distortion. Starting with market distorting money from birth by definition... distorts markets.
A mere change in market equilibrium doesn’t constitute a market distortion.
America is much more racist than you think, and if you don't think so, you should probably talk to more POC.
I think that America is much more classist than one may think if one is distracted by the disproportionate cultural focus on racism.