Trickle Down?Follow

You lost it at "for the good of everyone". Centralized bodies are certainly more effective at allocating resources, but they tend to fail miserably at doing it in a way that is either fair or beneficial for a whole society over time.



I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.



I love how a thing which is the cornerstone of western concepts of liberty becomes a "critique" in your mind. Private ownership of property is what makes liberalism liberalism. Without it, you have authoritarianism. I'm not arguing that authoritarian regimes can't be "good". History is filled with the names of well loved monarchs. But that's ignoring the whole "essential liberties" bits of what is supposed to be our core beliefs about societies.



Sigh. Because the objective is not to be "fair" or "efficient", but to promote the maximum amount of liberties to each citizen. A system in which we take everything from everyone and put them in small prison cells to work hard labor for their entire lives is both fair and efficient. Is that what you want? If not, then your criteria is incorrect and needs to be changed.

When did the pursuit of efficiency become more important then the pursuit of happiness?



Except that all such bodies do become corrupt over time, typically in direct proportion to the amount of control and power they can wield. You want to hand them more control and power. See how that's a problem?

Edited, Feb 3rd 2009 6:35pm by gbaji

Uh, okay. How? Do you not like the FDA, or the public education system? What of roads?



The opposite of authoritarianism is libertarianism, actually: government constructed from below, instead of imposed from above. I don't consider myself to be a Liberal because of those reasons, so I don't know what your argument is about, here.



What is the "maximum amount of liberties"? What does this even mean? Why is it beneficial for a society to not work together? You need to explain these. And no, labor prisons are neither fair nor efficient. Why would an entire society choose to imprison itself? Nonsensical.



Ah, yet more truisms. No, I don't believe that "power corrupts", I believe that these organizations are stocked from the get-go with corrupt people who have given themselves the power to eliminate accountability for their actions.

Edited, Feb 3rd 2009 8:28pm by BizzaroStormy

Infrastructure and regulation is certainly fine. Funding education is a nice benefit for the people, and I do happen to think that in this case, it's worth it. I would prefer we fund education and not the "public school system". I'm a fan of school vouchers in this case. IMO we should either be simply funding education or not at all. The abomination that has become the public school system is a nice example of why government shouldn't really be put in charge of providing any direct services to the people.



My argument is that our nation was founded on the principles of classical liberalism. Which has, at its core, the idea of the protection of private property rights. The argument is that without the right to own property (and I don't mean just land here) the citizenry has no power within the social structure and therefore cannot construct that "bottom up" system of government. Their other rights will be steadily removed from them over time until they're just serfs working on the government's plantations.

The associated argument is that a government system formed with these ideals will result in one in which the people have the most liberties. That's why it's called liberalism. Unfortunately, the term (and related "libertarianism") has been taken over by modern "liberals", who use the language to make it appear as though they are anti-authoritarian, but in fact pursue a very statist agenda. In modern US terms, the kinds of things you argue for are "liberal".

I'll also point out that it's odd that you dismiss this as something you "don't know what your argument is about", but this is the cornerstone issue to understand. If you don't understand the relationship between ownership of private property and liberty, then you'll never understand why a conservative would support capitalism. You've decided that property has no value in society and are done at that point. I'm challenging that assumption. That's why it's relevant.



It means that each individual is bound by the least amount of rules and requirements possible. A simple definition of liberties is that they are things you can do without having to ask for permission. So, the more things you can do without someone else having to be involved, the more liberty you have.

Do you see how government assistance programs do not provide liberty? Do you also see how taking away property in the form of taxes also reduces liberty? Do you even understand why liberty is important? Or are you ok living in a world where your overlords tell you what to do and when to do it?



False dilemma. You're assuming that having "maximum liberty" would mean that society would not work together. It's an interesting re-wording of the issue, because it implies you do understand why this is wrong, but have chosen wording to make it appear less so.

To answer your question though: Of course it's beneficial for a society to work together. But it's even more important that they be free to choose to work together rather than being forced to do so by their government. This is no different than my bit about the shovel. It may be a good thing for me to lend my shovel to my neighbor, but it should always be my choice to do so. When you take that choice away, the act of lending the shovel becomes meaningless from an ethical perspective, but I've lost my freedom in the process.

You're putting the end ahead of the means. How and why I share my shovel with my neighbor is more important than whether I do or not. Liberals tend to miss this distinction. It's the same as why it's important to win a war before sending the troops home, or that we earn our livings rather than have them given to us. Simply waving government power around to make things the way you want them is never as good as going through all the steps to get there naturally. You guys seem to love to skip all the steps along the way...



Of course they're efficient. You can get everyone doing exactly what they should be doing instead of what they'd rather do. You can reduce costs for housing dramatically. It is efficient in exactly the same ways that the government taxing money from the rich and handing out free food to the poor is. It accomplishes the goal with the least number of intervening steps and does so without any regard to the freedoms and rights of the people involved.



Good question. And one I ask every single time someone argues that the world would be a better place if only we eliminated wealth and private property and used the government to make sure that everyone got what they needed.

You ask this, yet propose building society into a prison. Sure. It doesn't have bars of metal, but it's still a prison. When you take away people's choices, they are in prison just as surely as a man in a cage.




Wow are you naive! If you create positions of power, people who want to use power will tend to gravitate to them. That's the way power corrupts.


It's irrelevant either way. At some point, someone who would use the power for their own ends will come along and take that power. That's why our system has checks and balances. And one of them is the system of rights built into the Constitution. You're proposing an authoritarian government and imagine that it would do only what is best for everyone. Give it total control and it'll make good choices and everyone will benefit. Right up until someone decides to use that total power for their own ends. And eventually, someone will.


How do you not see this? By what mechanism do you suppose this wont happen? Wishful thinking? Lol...

Edited, Feb 3rd 2009 9:13pm by gbaji

The Right wing posters on the NY Times boards are raising up a storm, over the fact that Obama wants to limit the pay of CEO's that work for any company that accepts government funds to $500,000 and any bonus on top must be in the form of Stocks.

Lots of Rants that they'll go work somewhere else, or how they'll no longer be able to afford $7000 a month for their Manhattan apartments.

I think they can well afford a pay cut and move into cheaper housing. They are lucky to still have a job, since their job performance surely isn't that great or they wouldn't be asking the government to bail them out now.

I already took a 20% pay cut to save two of my employees. And if I lost several billion dollars or even the same ratio at my job, I'd be glad to still have it.

False. Saying is easy. Proving is harder.

The truth is that there has been a massive advertising campaign by the Left to make you think this. And it's obviously working...

Neither he nor I mentioned cost. A assume coverage is the more important figure since that assumes cost is accounted for.

I want to readdress something you wrong Yoss:



Absolutely incorrect. How many times do I have to keep saying that focusing on the "distribution" of "wealth", "goods and services", etc is wrong before you get that this *isn't* the measuring stick by which I'm measuring things. I was talking about "standard of living". I'm comparing how well a person lives their life today versus how well a person in the same economic situation fared in the past. If that standard increases over time, then that person's standard of living has increased. Kinda obvious, but you seem to keep getting confused.


You keep insisting that we should look at all the "stuff" in an economy, then look at how it's divvied up among the people and use that as our way of measuring things. This is a common argument made by modern Liberals. When you hear talk about distribution of wealth, or the "gap between rich and poor" this is what it's about. My point is that this is the wrong measurement to use. We should instead be looking at improvement for each economic position over time. Because measuring a percentage of the whole doesn't tell us how much we started with. I think it's kinda obvious that if you and I share a dollar equally, we're both worse off than if we share a hundred dollars, but I get $80 and you get $20. A Liberal will blindly declare that in the second situation, the "poor" person only has 1/5th of the wealthy person, while ignoring that he's 40 times better off than both the two people sharing equally in the first case.


Let me give you another example:

Imagine you and I are stranded on a Desert Island. When we first start out we have very little, but we both have the same amount. We've each got a small hut, a few fish each, and some simple objects we've made out of local materials. Let's pretend that we work out a system where each person gets to keep whatever fish he catches, but the other person can trade labor for fish if he's short that day. Let's also imagine that for some reason I'm much better at catching fish than you.

10 years go by. Your hut is now twice the size it used to be, is much sturdier, with a very good roof. You've got plenty of fish to eat each day, and many times more useful items made over the years. However, due to our primitive capitalistic system, I've gained the benefit of more labor spent on my stuff, so I've got a hut that's a veritable mansion, with multiple levels, and a swing that goes over the lagoon. I've got a vast collection of objects built over the years we've been there.

By every measurement, I'm the rich guy and you're the poor guy, right? But your standard of living has clearly gone up anyway, right? You have more of every single thing you had before. By a liberal measurement of things, you are "worse off" because before you had 50% of the wealth, and now you have much less. But by any sane measurement, you are actually better off.

Ah. But you could argue that had we divided things up equally, I might have a smaller hut, but you'd have a larger one. And we'd each have the same amount of "stuff". That would be more fair, right? We'd still both be better off than when we first started out. And you *might* be right (but I don't think so). Here's where the argument of capitalism comes in. If I hadn't charged you labor for fish, you might not have built as many things as you did, and I might not have fished as much as I did. I had the profit motive to go out and get enough fish each day for both of us instead of just enough for me exactly because I knew that by providing you fish, you'd do some labor for me in return.

The argument I'm making is that had we not adopted a form of capitalism, you'd have gone hungry more often, and instead of both of us having a quantity of stuff equal to half of what we have now, we'd instead both have the more "minimal" amount you have today. We'd have done just as much improvement as was needed over time, but no more. In other words, our total productivity was increased over time as a result of applying capitalism to the process. By simply sharing everything, we'd both have the same amount of stuff, but we'd collectively have less of it.


That is the crux of my argument about capitalism. The fact that the wealth is not evenly divided is more than made up for by the fact that there is more wealth created over time. The poor still gain, just not as fast as the rich. Both benefit. In a system where division of wealth is the objective, what will tend to happen is that the poor don't gain anything. We simply eliminate the wealth at the top. The wealth they would have held is wealth from increased productivity. But when you take away the profit motive, that productivity disappears as well. Everyone loses out relatively speaking.


This is why it's absurd that you keep insisting that I argue my point as though division of wealth is important to me. It's not. Quite the opposite in fact.



I said "steadily growing standard of living". I suppose the issue here is one of granularity. I tend to look at this over decades. Certainly, if you look year to year, you'll find dips and drops in standard of living. That's not what I was talking about, and the examples I gave should have clued you in that I meant over a longer period of time.

I'll also point out that the great depression affected many nations similarly and somewhat regardless of the degree of free market policies they used. I could actually argue that tight market policies tended to aggravate the economic woes of those afflicted, but that would be a totally different topic. I would invite you to "go read it", and take note of the economic tactics taken by different countries and which ones worked and which didn't.



You are looking too closely at the issue and missing the forest for the trees. You're labeling "growth" with direct goods and services. That's not really correct. Again. I'm looking longer term. Let's take your cancer example:

In Capitalism, companies with a profit motive to develop treatments for cancer have done so, and the child has a chance to obtain the medicines and treatments which may save him.

In less capitalism, those medicines and treatments weren't developed, so the child has no chance to live regardless of how well divided or "free" the medical care is.


You're looking too short term. You're looking only at how "this years" goods are divvied up, and concluding that it would be better to divided it up equally. But you ignore the effect this has over time. The pie gets relatively smaller, and advancements in science, medicine, and the cost reduction for those things and other consumer goods occur more slowly.

Under a perfectly divided economy, in a hundred years, the relative cost to provide the treatment to that child (if one exists which can save him) will be relatively the same). Under capitalism, in a hundred years, the poorest child can be cured with an over the counter pill costing maybe an hours worth of labor.


Do you understand my position yet? Because every post you've made so far indicates you still don't get it.

Edit- Nope. Don't care enough to continue this.

Edited, Feb 5th 2009 12:48pm by baelnic