Trickle Down?Follow

Imagine you're only goal in life is to see your offspring not have to endure the struggles you've experienced. To do this you build your net worth to a million. Now according to you the parents have no right to leave what wealth they created to their children. Instead you suggest stealing that money, at the point of the govn gun, and distributing it to someone else because you think they're more worthy of that money. Can't you see how this will kill any drive a person might have to create something special with the hopes that their children can live a more comfortable life? How in the world can this be good for freedom? Don't get me wrong I'm all for everyone paying their fair share, which incidentally I believe could happen through the fair tax plan.

Do you think spending 1 trillion on government projects is the key to stimulating a free market economy? Do you think it's the private citizens or the government that makes this country great?

I think we all want equality of oppurtunity but stealing someones hard earned money to support someone else just isn't the way.

Obama has already said this trillion dollar spending package won't stimulate the economy. H*ll most of the money isn't going to be spent for another 2yrs, incidentally during an election year. Obama is looking to spend more in the first couple of months than was spent during the entire Iraq war. Weren't all you Democrats telling us for the last 8yrs how much the war in Iraq was going to bankrupt this country? Where's the outrage? Where's the concern? I guess now that it's money being spent to buy future elections for the Democrats it's acceptable.

Most of the wel-fare receipients i've known haven't benefitted or even thought about changing their behaviour because the government is supporting them. So now we're in a position of trying to determine who should get how much. Mind you we're talking about someone elses money. Smasharoo is right about one thing; a million dollars isn't what it used to be. Generally speaking i've found that those who've earned their way into that top tax bracket are more responsible with money than some of my blue collar friends who have tendencies towards drinking and procreation. The thought that we're asking our government to take money from a successful family to support bad behaviour is mind boggling.

I know Smasharoo will proclaim that they're only going to take from people that make so much. In my opinion that's nothing more than a rationalization to excuse bad behaviour.

Edited, Feb 1st 2009 11:29pm by dupeeconqr

Most of the wel-fare receipients i've known

Most people just say "mom". No need to be so formal.

If they gain value as a result, why shouldn't I?

Let's examine this another way. Why should you get to gain the benefit of the shovel without spending the effort/money to obtain one for yourself? Presumably, I had to spend money (the fruit of my labor) to obtain that shovel. But since I did that, you think you should get to use it for free?

Why is that? And what happens when everyone waits for the other guy to buy a shovel so they can use it for free? It should be really really obvious why it's not only fair for the guy who owns the shovel to charge others to use it, but economically necessary (on the large scale) for him to do this to some degree.

Because I'm trying to get you to understand my answer rather than just providing one by fiat. I could just say "Because it's mine", but that's not very useful, is it? I could even say "Because the constitution protects my right to property", but it likely wouldn't help you either. You're demanding that I explain the concepts my argument is based on over and over while refusing to support yours with anymore than repeated insistence that you are right and I am wrong.

Kinda hard to take you seriously if you wont even attempt to defend your position...



Two reasons:

1. Because I own it. I spent the money for it. I should be the one to benefit from it. You could have purchased your own, but chose not to.

2. Because it has great value to you. I'm going to answer with a question again, so be prepared: Why should you gain some significant value when I'm the one who paid the price? If by borrowing my shovel, you gain some benefit, shouldn't I get to partake of that?




Don't get caught up in the example. It could just as easily been an example in which you want to build a new irrigation system for your backyard, but feel that I should provide the tools. It need not be a "shovel" in the first place. That's just an example about lending/investing money. The point is that you want to use something of mine that will provide you with value (but not me), but don't want to have to recompense me for it. So I pay for the shovel, but you get to benefit from it. Does that seem fair?



Because ownership of property is how we manage scarcity. If there aren't enough shovels in the world for everyone who wants or needs one, there has to be some mechanism to decide who gets one. We could have some authoritarian government tell us who gets to use one when, or we could determine it based on who "spends" the most for them.

We'd all like to live in a big house on the beach, but there aren't enough houses on the beach for everyone to live in one. Ergo, there has to be some mechanism to decide who gets to live there, and who doesn't. We can rail against the unfairness of "the rich" getting to live in the best houses, but overall the economic system rewards those who produce value to others (in a variety of forms). Money is the measurement of that productiveness, and is the best way to allow those participating in the economy to sort out who gets the nicest homes and whatnot.



The problem with your argument against capitalism is that you haven't presented an alternative way of doing things that is better. If determining who gets what by allowing those who earn the most within the economic system to have the best choices available to them isn't good enough, then what is?

What you're doing is comparing something you don't like to a perfect, yet undefined alternative. If Capitalism isn't perfect, then we shouldn't use it. But that's not really how we should make decisions. Nothing is perfect. We should use the "best" system to determine who gets what. And capitalism (technically we're talking about free-market mechanics at this point) is by far the best method for dividing up the goods and services within an economy. If you want to make an argument for some alternative, by all means do so...



I'll also point out that a common failing with communist theory (which is what you're espousing if you are actually opposed to private ownership of property and the rights that go along with them). It attacks the free market because the free market "rewards greed" and the accumulation of wealth over time. But those ideas fail to show why those produce a worse result than the alternative, and also fail to recognize that "greed" is just as prevalent in a society in which you've removed all private property.


Think it through. When you insist that you should be able to use my shovel to benefit you without paying me anything for it, aren't you being greedy? Remember, payment (money) is a placeholder for labor in this context. You want me to expend the fruits of my labor buying a shovel so that you can use it without having to do anything at all. That's greedy, IMO. Your arguments don't come from a place of enlightenment. They're just greed painted in a different color. Poor people are no less greedy than wealthy people, but communists (and socialists) love to pretend that they are and that somehow if we only shared everything equitably, the world would be a better place. The reality is that the primary factor used to push these agendas is not some kind of high social consciousness, but plain greed. They sell communist ideas to the poor purely by promising the poor that they'll get more than they do now.


And that's greed at work. Every poor person who supports such ideas does it exactly because he wants to be able to use the goods and services that others worked for without working for them himself.

Edited, Feb 2nd 2009 8:45pm by gbaji

Is your mom a MILF?

Tautologies sure are tautological.



You're right. You did pay the price, and it's unfair for other people to take away your labors from you. However, the better question to ask is, "Why did I pay for this shovel?" Wouldn't a much more efficient endeavor be having a neutral mediator (the community-at-large as represented through a state) purchase as many shovels as are necessary for all participants, as to maximize gains? Or is mutual benefit not the name of the game for capitalism?



The community, given appropriate representation, is not an authoritarian government; in fact, it's exactly the opposite of any such definition (the Soviet Union was state-capitalist: fascist in every aspect other than conservative populism). If there aren't enough shovels in the world for everyone who needs one, the proper solution would be to allocate shovels to whatever purposes will generate the most benefit to everyone, never excluding one specific group for greater benefit.

We'd all like to live in a house. Some people don't live in houses, don't know if you've noticed. Why should resources be used toward giving someone a very ostentatious mansion instead of giving the homeless everywhere adequate living quarters? I don't disagree with markets for distributing purely consumer goods (they are very good at such!), but for people everywhere, they just don't do the job of keeping the majority of us out of squalor.

Edited, Feb 2nd 2009 10:28pm by BizzaroStormy

First off, there will never be a way to give every single group the most greatest benefit. In every case there will be some who receive greater benefit or disadvantage from the situation. You can't have winners without losers.

The major issue here is who decides who should be the winners and who should be the losers in those interactions. If you have an elected governmental body, you run into the issue of benefit kickback, where those "winners" end up being the same people who voted for them. In addition, regardless of who is making the decisions, when all of those interactions are overseen by a large bureaucratic body, you get bogged down with inefficiency, causing waste, lack of speed or corruption in varied amounts of each, depending on the setup of the body.

If you decide it makes more sense to go with a bodiless, impartial entity which is based on the value that people attribute to those items, you end back up with a value based monetary system, the most familiar being the one used in capitalism.

I didn't say there wouldn't be disproportionate advantages and disadvantages between people (it's a necessity if you were to install something like this, in fact), so why are you saying this if not to discredit the idea that you can make advantages uniform throughout the community?

Also, prove your claim that bureaucratic bodies are necessarily more bloated, inefficient, and corrupt than private corporations.

Edited, Feb 3rd 2009 12:59am by BizzaroStormy

bizzarostormy,

I'm not going to get into a socio-political discussion. Ask yourself this; if you work for something is it just that the government come in and steal what you've worked for because it thinks someone else can use that something better than the person who earned it in the first place?

The answer is obvious to anyone who believes in the concept of private property.