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I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

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Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#471

Post by nate_meurer »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #453
nate_meurer wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is not that economic surpluses don't ever exist, but that the perceived surpluses that people invoke in order to defend the present welfare state are unsustainable, and that the system will inevitably collapse without a miraculous increase in economic productivity. Debt (both private and sovereign) is literally the thing that tells us whether a society is able to pay for the things it demands. That's not an…

You appear to only be looking at the debt, and not that those debts are held by other people as assets. Do you think it's still a net negative if you add that in too?

Well yeah, it's still debt. It's still the unpaid balance of the cost of goods and services.

The essential purpose of a market for IOUs is to allow us to issue a lot more IOUs. This is critical to the industrial and technological development that has allowed us to stop living in the dirt. But liquid debt markets can also be weapons of mass destruction by allowing misallocation to compound into ruinous financial crises. Sort of like, oh I don't know, bloated, inefficient government entitlement programs funded by massive debt that can only be dealt with by a.) confiscating the labor and assets of the population by force, or b.) monetizing the debt and inflating it away, which is itself a backdoor tax on the same population.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#472

Post by nate_meurer »

kakwa_ wrote: post #417
hogehoge51 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accounting system is what ensures that we can ACCOUNT for if such a statement is true or not. It also allows us to characterize and understand how the capability to generate surplus has been distributed etc etc. There is no single lump of goods and services, or a single lump of surplus. There is an economic problem of ensuring such are created in surplus and distributed to those who need them. A surplus of lawn m…

The debt amount is very roughly proportional to the size of the economy. It's also a system that is unstable in non-booming economies, drifts over time and needs periodic resets (through revolution, debt cancelling or inflation for example). When dealing with material well-being, it makes much more sense to focus on goods and services and frame things more in the line of "would you trade a bit of wealth (smaller car…

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Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#473

Post by ibobev »

nate_meurer wrote: post #346
Telaneo wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are truckloads of perfectly good food and clothes being incinerated every day since that's somehow cheaper for the owners of capital. The excess is there. It's just not ending up in the pockets of those who need it.

Food and clothing are actually an argument against you here. Sure we waste a lot of both, and yet food insecurity is rare in the First World, and lack of clothing is pretty much the least significant part of poverty. Plus, government-forced redistribution reliably increases prices overall due to the increased costs of logistics and administration. There is no free lunch. If you want to argue your point, you have to a…

The real fiscal burdens on your society are your military spending and the interest on the debt you have already taken on.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#475

Post by inigyou »

senordevnyc wrote: post #347
inigyou wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the sky is gray. I'm not seeing the relevance of either statement.

Are you familiar with the expression “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”? Or killing the goose that laid the golden egg?

Are you familiar with "throw the helve after the hatchet" or "ride Shanks' mare"? Again, I don't see the relevance.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#476

Post by inigyou »

reverius42 wrote: post #435
inigyou wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right-libertarianism, which is incompatible with capitalism.

That's melting my brain. My understanding is that right-libertarianism and capitalism are not only compatible, they are best friends.

Right-libertarianism means a system where everyone has maximum liberty including the liberty to take away each other's liberty (as opposed to left-libertarianism where we don't have that liberty) but capitalism means a society where liberty is proportional to capital.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#478

Post by cake-rusk »

watwut wrote: post #416
AlexandrB wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare. Yes, like the 40%[1] of Stanford undergrads who have disabilities. The greatest long term impediment to what you're suggesting is folks who don't need the help taking advantage of the resource distribution. It both massively increases the costs and sours those who have to pay into the system on the whole thing leading to a backlash. If…

Yeah, disability accommodation like having single dorm room and being allowed to cook for themselves rather then using cantine. Maybe the question is why the cantine is obligatory anyway.

Is there a name for the phenomenon in which you look at something and know that there is something wrong with it but struggle to identify the problem?

I got this feeling looking at the (non)word cantine.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#479

Post by hogehoge51 »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #456
hogehoge51 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you hide something in a closed loop system such as an economy?

offshore Swiss accounts. opaque and complex corporate ownership structures. land.

you failed to answer my question.

either the activity and resource is part of an economy or not, an activity or resource that is still in the economy is not hoarded.

either thise things are in the economic system or not. swiss banking is simply another economic system, eiher it is a separate closed loop system(and not accesible), or an integrated system with flows in and out. if the money is not part of the closed loop of the economy what value does it have? (it's addition and removal simply inflates or deflates the remaining closed loop system) normal banking and currency exchange already creates and destroys money in orders of mangitude larger than private wealth.

land and hard resources are the only place i think you can hoard. it can be taken out of the economy and still maintain value, and depending on the relative holding you can influence value. but even that requires a holding cost. the holding cost is part of the broader closed loop economic system, an/or political system. you could say much of the fuedal economy was paying the holding cost for this hoarding, the advancement of the modern economic system was to build a massive integrated economy around it that made the holding cost higher and significant hoarding moslty unsustainable. (except by goverment)

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#480

Post by reverius42 »

krapp wrote: post #458
senordevnyc wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These people use “capitalism” to mean crony capitalism, oligarchy, and corporatocracy.

Those are the forms of capitalism actually practiced in the real world. As opposed to pure free market capitalism, which doesn't actually exist.

When did free-market capitalism stop being something to aspire to though?
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