Kill the PoorFollow

This thread is mother ******* hilarious.

Except that you've (not you specifically, but people in general who believe as you do) defined standard of living in a way that automatically makes social welfare look better then it is.

You define "standards" that require that every citizen recieve X amount of food, Y amount of housing, and Z amount of education. Then you point to programs that would provide exactly that and declare them superior to a free market that may not distrubute those things in those exact proportions. But that's a contrived comparison. In the long run, overall standard of living rises more in a "gdp growth focused" capitalism then in a "standard of living focused" socialism. Always has. Always will.

You can always argue that *today* if you divvied up the wealth differently that the poor would be better off. But that falls apart as soon as you start looking at what the poor (and everyone else) will be dealing with 20, 30, or 50 years in the future. Socialism literally spends future economic growth for direct economic benefit today. By definition it'll always look better if you just look at today. And that's why that's a silly measurement.



You're applying 16th century economic concepts to 20th century economies Smash. In a land-based economy (which has been the case for most of human history), wealth is a total-sum issue. The land only produces so much, thus there is only so much wealth, and if the rich have more then the poor must have less. How we divide up wealth in those types of economies is very important.

In a modern industrialism driven capitalism, "wealth" grows as a function of investment and is largely independant of land use itself (or, more correctly can grow to vastly outstrip the productivity that land might traditionally generate). Thus, the fact that there's an "absurd" distribution of wealth is irrelevant because wealth is not a constant based on land with some maximum value, it's generated specificaly as a result of the concentration of past wealth used correctly to generate more wealth. That wealth is not taken from anyone, it's created as a result of proper use of capital. The system itself strongly encourages that wealth to be reinvested back into the system. While the poor may not gain any portion of the actual wealth generated, they most certainly benefit from the process itself.

Goods become cheaper. Goods become better. Housing improves. Quality of life improves. For everyone. This is obvious to anyone who spends half a minute thinking about it. Take a low income working class guy from 1906 and compare his standard of living to the someone making the exact same adjusted wage today. There's simply no comparison. The guy today will live in a better home, he'll have luxuries that the guy 100 years ago could not dream to have. He'll live a safer and longer life as well (universal health care or not).


You'll counter that this was the result of improvements in technology, not economics, but my point is that this is the "better goods" part of the economic argument I made above. A bunch of working class people did not get together and invent the automobile. Wealthy people did. They invested their wealth and built cars which benefited everyone. Same deal for televisions, radios, phones, cd players, computers, and cell phones (and far more things then I could list in this post).

All of those things came to be because of a capitalist economic model that allows wealth to be focused in the hands of a small number of people. Fighting to end that "absurd" distrubution of wealth will ultimately end the increases in technology and quality of life that those things bring. The wealth isn't taken from the poor. It's just a pool that exists. It's being handled by those who've shown the most capability to manage that wealth effectively to create new products and services for "the people". Insisting that we should take it away and divvy it up among everyone is an absolutely stupid idea.

You're applying 16th century economic concepts to 20th century economies Smash.

Hi. You don't understand economics *at all*. It's not that you hold a diffrent oppinion than I do and I disagree, you just don't grasp very simple fundemental concepts. Trying to discuss it with you is pointless. You simply don't have the vocabulary.

It's not your fault, mind you. You try. You google things and misunderstand them and then don't realize it and build elaborate arguments simmiliar to trying to prove focults last theorm starting with 2+2=48.

I realize your heart is in the right place, but it's just apparently beyond you. Know your limitations and just stick to repeating things you've heard other people that are simple and easy to remember.

Good luck with it. I won't be responding, just reading and chuckling.

Well I think they should attack the lower classes, er, first with bombs, and rockets destroying their homes, and then when they run helpless into the streets, er, mowing them down with machine guns. Er, and then of course releasing the vultures. I know these views aren't popular, but I have never courted popularity.
-John Cleese

Smash, why do you use bold text instead of using the quote box? Just wonderin...

Just to placate you and because this particular delision of yours ins't actually related to economic theoryh at all, I'll respond to part of your silliness:


I'm serious here Smash. How many of the things around you that make your life "better" exist wholley as a result of large amounts of wealth being accumulated into the hands of a small number of people and then directed into developing and building those very things?


None.


How many of the medical devices and techniques exist because wealthy people invested in them?


None.


Exactly how good would the socialized medical care be if in the process we eliminated that pool of wealth?


Very likely the same, possibly much improved, almost certainly fairer.


Wonderful system we'd have. Everyone would get free leaches to cleans them of the blood diseases they were afflicted with...


Hi, as ussual, all of your arguments are based on silly factless suppositions.

Let me enumerate them to make this simple for you:

1. Having most wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, and those few occasionally using that wealth to benefit society in no way correlates to society losing those benefits had that same wealth been distributed in a diffrent way. I could make equally pursuasive and yet flawed arguments about health, labor, and innovation conditions before the New Deal, and point out how increased taxes and goverment redistrubtion of wealth towards research led to many advances highly unlikely to have come out of the private sector, and how dismal a failure unrestrained capitalism had been in the early part of this century.

2. You seem to be making the assumption that overall wealth on a macro scale would inherently decrease as the result of government provided services. That's never been shown to be the case, and in fact that opposite has repeadetly been shown to be true.

3. You continue to operate on the proposterous notion that profit motive will drive the very few extremely wealthy to make beneveloent decisions that will benefit mankind rather than restraining the progress of certain research to ensure greatler long term profits. If you, as you seem to want to, allow for profit as the driving force of capitalism seperate from all social constructs, you have to at least allow for the possiblity that on occasion, it will be more profitable to make decisions that make things demonstrably worse for mankind, and there is no check against that.

good luck with your backpeadling.

I don't know where you people find the energy.

Sublimated sexual frustration, I'd wager.

Though I'm sure Gbaji will regail us with his multiple conquests of flora fauna and fowl to disuade anyone from thinking that's the case.

or smash are you trying to imply that ALL poor people beat their children, are homeless, only have 1 parent in their family?

if you are you are full of ****, but then everyone here already knows that to be true and you just proved it with your statement.

I would doubt he's doing that, since making sweeping generalizations based on your own personal experience and applying them to everyone else would be completely assinine.

Nexa

yes as a matter of fact, if they take the chances provided to them to get educated, and they go out and do not let things get in their way of earning that education then YES by all means they most certainly can.

you were the one stating that everyone pore is in that situation, not me. please keep that in mind.

and IIRC you are WHITE TOO... so are you now calling the kettle black?

looks that way.

smash i know you think you are gods answere to everything, but you are not and in this case you are wrong again like you are so many of the times you post cr4p like this.

You must have very few things around you that make your life better Smash. Are you seriously trying to suggest that you would own a car, a computer, a TV, a cell phone, and dvd player if private entities with large amounts of wealth had not invested in them?

Every single example of state industry attempting to replace private industry shows a result that causes *more* stratification of consumer luxury items, not less. The more socialized the country, the more those luxury items only exist for the priviledge few (who not coincidentally are priviledged as a result of position in the government rather then personal accomplishment)



You're kidding, right? This is a patented "Smash buries his head in the sand" argument, right? All medical devices you'll find in hospitals today were developed by private corporations. While some may have recieved funding for said research from government grants, the "for profit" nature of the business is ultimately the driving force for the development of those devices.

Someone has to actually build the device Smash. You can write a paper describing a CT scanning machine and how it might work (which is where university research typically ends), but someone has to actually pony up the money and time and expertise to build a working model and make it production usable. That is far and away the most expensive and time consuming portion of the development process. And that's where "wealth" comes in. Without a pool of wealth available for investment in new things like CT scanners and MRIs and defibulators and such, no one would ever build them. Or they might get built, but they'd be inferior in use and would rarely be changed or upraded with improvements.

You're really chasing the wrong horse on this one. Big time.



No. It would not. If we'd adopted a fully socialized medicine worldwide say 100 years ago, we'd likely have a state of medicine worldwide that would be many decades behind where it is today.

Again. Every single example we have of socialized industry shows that it produces "new" things at a significantly slower rate then the same industry when it's privatized. Because when the government is footing the bill for everything, there's no incentive to make things "better". Only competition makes things "better", since only when someone else builds a better version of what everyone's using is there any reason to switch. If new things come from one source, and that source does not have to compete with anyone, it will never see any inherent need to change. It's not that it *wont* adopt a better thing, but that it'll never spend the time and effort to make that better thing in the first place. And in the absense of that better thing existing, no one will ever know that they could recieve better medical care (for example) if they'd only allowed private industry to be a part of the process.

I can give you a really simple and obvious example of this. Look at the development of CDMA cell phone technology. Go do some reseach on this. Pay close attention to how the state run telecomm industries in Europe spent massive resources to prevent the technology from ever existing. Why? It's "better" in every single way? Simple. They'd already invested in a TDMA based system. They'd spent the money. The "new thing" would require that they spend more money changing systems to make use of the improvements in technology. It was more cost effective for those governments to try to squelch the development of CDMA then to adopt it, so that's what they did.

There is absolutely no reason to expect a different type of response from socialized industry with regards to any new technology. If the government has already spent money building their xray machines and installing them in all the hospitals, they're not going to want to have to spend more money replacing them with CT devices. There's no incentive to do that at all. Interestingly enough, the CDMA/TDMA conflict occured *because* a free market system developed something new and a largely socialized market attempted to block its adoption (and nearly succeeded). In that case you actually had a free market building "new things". What exactly do you think happens when there isn't one? Why on earth assume that an insituation that attempts to squelch any new technology that might increase it's own costs would actually come up with the new technology in the first place?

It wouldn't. And the saddest part is that the people would never know what things they might have had but don't because of it. That's the "trap" of socialized industry. You'll never know in what ways you're being hurt.



If the public didn't know that there were better ways to treat illness then leaching, why would the state of medicine ever change? There would be no demand for "new and better" medical techniques if there's no outside competive force involved. You seem to have this magical idea that the government will automatically spend money to research things to make people's lives better. The fact is that without the private industry component (and yes, even the "evil" lobbyists creating those lucrative government contracts) the government would never fund the kind of research that is required for new technological development. It just would have no reason to do so. It would instead spend all its money on providing existing services to the public and no one would be the wiser that they might have something "better" if things were done differently.




So dismal that it created such useless things as locomotives, and refridgeration, and electricity, and lightbulbs, and automobiles...

You are aware that most of the New Deal programs FDR created involved granting large government contracts to private corporations willing to take on the work, right? The New Deal used government spending to spur industry, not replace it.



First off, you need to define what "wealth" is. Wealth is the value obtained when you subtract the total amount that someone has consumed during his lifetime from the total amount he has earned. By definition, governments don't have "wealth". They have capital. They don't generate wealth either. They take it from citizens in the form of taxations.

So yeah. Overall "wealth" automatically decreases as government taxation increases. That's kind of a given. The question you really need to ask is whether the amount of "new" development and overall growth of an economy (GDP) is reduced as a function of government taxation on the wealth of that economy. And that is most definately a "yes". Everything else being equal, GDP growth changes as the inverse to the degree to which government taxes wealth within that economy. Always has. Always will. It's a pretty obvious function really. Wealth is what's used to invest in new ventures. Therefor the more wealth available, the more new ventures, and the greater the potential GDP growth as a result.

You can argue that there's a potential ceiling at which no amount of additional wealth will increase GDP, and perhaps a floor at which no amount of reduction of wealth will decrease GDP, but within the nominal range of an economy, the realtionship I've described is valid. And certainly some countries with strong governent owned industry can generate significant GDP with minimal amounts of private wealth (Sweeden comes to mind actually), but that's not the same thing. They're profiting and increasing profits (in Sweeden's case) as a result of a commodity (oil in this case) increasing in value in realtion to costs within the country itself. They aren't actually producing more. It's just that what they're producing is becoming more valuable over time at a rate outstripping inflation. That's not a good thing to base a long term economy on.



You seem to operate on the preposterous nothing that with a lack of profit motive of any kind that government will magically act benevolently to improve the quality of life for their citizens. That it'll spend money that benfits no one today so that it might improve things tomorrow. It's an absurd argument. Governments simply don't operate that way. They tax based on revenue streams available *today*. They spend based on need *today*. Anything spent for future growth or development comes out of what's left over. The very nature of a socialized system does not lend itself to spending for the long term though, since it's entirely focused on what it can provide *today*.

Private competition automatically requires that businesses invest in the future. Those that don't get run out of business as those that do produce a better good at a lower price and drive them out of the market. This is the basis of a free market. If you don't think that industry has an eye on what "the people" want, you're crazy. They absolutely have to compete for the dollars of the people. Those who provide better goods and services will recieve a larger portion of those dollars. I'm not sure why you think this doesn't work. It obviously does.


If 5 companies make cars, the people have a choice of 5 cars to buy. If they like one more then the others, that company will make more money. Thus, it's automaticaly in the interest of the companies to make a car that will appeal to the most people. The very nature of competition ensures that over time the things that most benefit the people will be developed and offered to them. Under a socialized system, only the things that the government thinks will most benefit the people will ever be developed.

The world we live in is filled with things that would never have been developed in a purely socialized industry, but have become huge in a free market. Home computers would neve have been developed by any government. Only private industry could come up with that. Same deal with cell phones. We might have TVs, but certainly not the type of cable options available to us. Cupholders in cars? Never have happened. Ipods? Not a freaking chance.

The list is practically endless Smash. We'd live in a very dull generic world without private industry driven by private wealth. We'd all drive the same model car, watch the same handful of TV channels on the same model TV, have the exact same type of phone and service in our homes, wear the same 5 styles of cloths, etc...


I for one don't want to live in that world. And I think deep down, you don't want to either. You just don't seem to be aware just how many of the things you love about the world around you exist because of private wealth.

You seem to operate on the preposterous nothing that with a lack of profit motive of any kind that government will magically act benevolently to improve the quality of life for their citizens.

I wasn't aware governments were for profit outfits. Intresting.

You see my point about not bothering to reply now, perhaps?

I submit that even you should at this point.

Sad, really. Maybe someone else who's a kindred spirit of yours will come along and translate from ham handed moron for me if you're lucky and I can respond to that.

I expect government so act benevolently to improve the quality of life for thier citizens for a lot of reasons, primarily, because it's the entire function of government.

I think that one of the biggest problems now is that American education standards are dropping. Students are graduating from High School not knowing what the parts of speech are. The difference between New York State Regents exam 10 years ago and one today is amazing.

Compare this to a country such as France where children devote most of their time to schoolwork and the grading is much, much tougher. Not that France doesn't have its own problems with the poor (I'm sure RedPhoenixxxx could comment), but still, the fact remains that the education standards in other modernized countries are higher than ours.

I'm lucky to be going to one of the top 1000 or so high schools in the country. The big difference in mine is that the students are pushed, much, much harder (yet nothing compared to other countries) and the expectations are set higher. So long as I graduate with high grades, I could go virtually anywhere. We're learning things that overcrowded inner-city high schools don't even mention. The teachers actually interact with the students directly; I could take pretty much any of my free time to get extra help in one subject or another. I have a want to succeed instilled in me, not the "couldn't care less" feeling that every other student seems to have.

While it certainly wouldn't solve everything, I think that increasing our education standards would lead to good things. High schools consider themselves lucky if students don't skip every fourth day of class. Tell me this is setting a good work ethnic for the current generation.