The Rich get a little less RichFollow

It's not a tangent. You are completely full of ****. That's your answer.

It's a yes or no question Anna.


And yes. It's a tangent. You want me to insist that I didn't lie. Then demand you quote where I lied, then spend the next page and a half arguing that what I said wasn't a lie, perhaps even quoting the definition of the word "lie" along the way. Meanwhile, you avoid asking the yes or no question I asked.


Can you stop being childish please? It's a simple question. Either what I said accurately represents your view of wealth and "the rich", or it does not. Do you like the idea of the rich being less rich and do you believe that this would benefit the poor? Heck. You can break that into two questions if you want.

I think you do. I stated this. Someone questioned me on it. I'm just asking you to verify of deny that this is your position on the rich. Given that you started this thread about that very subject, I'm unclear why you're so hesitant to give a straight answer to this question.

The choice is the exact same you self-delusional ****: nothing at all. Refusing to buy a product from a private business is not having that product. When the product is necessary for you to live, you do not have a choice in any practical capacity to refuse. You are dependent on someone for getting it, whether that is your employer or the government. There is no choice involved unless you choose to die.



Of course not. It has an interest in making people poor for other reasons, explicitly so that those who are already dependent on you remain dependent on you. Then you provide them with "charity" to keep them just barely prosperous enough to keep giving you more money; they will be grateful and never bother biting the hand that feeds them, through low paying jobs, handouts, etc, because the alternative is to die. You don't have a choice where you get sh*t unless you have the means to look for it elsewhere. Once you have the means to look for it, you don't need to anymore. Fancy that.



Certainly. If this difference in degree were real, it would be significant. If unicorns were real, heathcare would be obsolete. If airships were real, the automotive industry would be obsolete. If tahumaturgy was real, I would never want for warmth. Unfortunately, those, as this, are totally imagined.

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You know, I don't agree with you a lot, but I do ask you a ******** of clarifictory questions when you are being unclear. See, I'm already a liberal, but I at least try, really hard, to make sure that I know what you're saying. Now you are an exceedingly slippery fish, and I've never seen you commit to an argument, but even on every occasion in which I've asked you to clarify, you don't. It gets tiresome, after a while, so forgive me for skipping a step in which you aren't going to participate anyway.

Edited, Aug 27th 2009 10:03pm by Pensive

Um... But that's a natural requirement of life. That's like the argument (which you made IIRC, so I suppose this shouldn't surprise me) that being "forced" to work your own land to grow your own food so you don't starve to death is a reduction of liberty.

There's a massive difference between having a choice of providers for a product, and having just one. Can we agree on that? I've explained this repeatedly in the past as well. It's not about "perfect liberty". It's about "the most liberty we can have". I clearly have more liberty if there are a dozen different companies selling food nearby than if there is only one. Thus, I'm more "free" if there is a healthy competition in the food market.

If the government charges me to provide "free food" to everyone, I'm being forced to pay for the food whether I eat it or not. On the level that money is a placeholder for property, then my liberty is being infringed right there. But when we expand this to the secondary effects on the market, we see that this produces a lack of competition, and leads us down to the "least liberty" result of having one provider (or one provider for most people).




We're talking about business right? Business has no interest in making people poor. See. It only makes money when people buy its stuff. If everyone is poor, how are they going to make their profits? The government may or may not have an interest in making people poor in order to control them. Big business absolutely does not. Business wants as large and wealthy a middle class as possible. They want people with disposable income who will buy their products.




Ok, Mr Wizard. Explain to me where the business gets the money to provide their products for free to all those people? It's a ludicrous supposition Pensive, and you've got to be realizing it by now. What you are describing is something the government might have a desire to do (cause it's not bottom line driven). But it's absolutely the opposite of what private business wants to do.



Sounds like you're still describing the government. Sure. There's the old "company store" model. But, as I said before, the check to that is government intervening to prevent such situations. How do you do this if it's the government engaged in that behavior? That's why we should prevent government from being a player in the market to as great a degree as possible. The potential for abuse is massive.



Yup. Sounds an awful lot like someone living on government entitlement, doesn't it?



Why do you assume it's not real? Gee. Our entire government is designed from the bottom up to include checks on it's own power. There's a hint there somewhere...



You're kidding! I clarify. Over and over and over and over and over... you get the point. The problem is that you either fail to understand what I've said, or you refuse to believe it.

I'm not "slippery" at all. I state exactly what my position is. In great detail, and with great volumes of examples, cases, and explanation. I can't fathom how you could possibly think that I don't commit to a position. You, on the other hand, play the "I'm not making an argument" game all the time.


We see most in others, that which we know to be in ourselves.

Oh, we absolutely can, the problem is that for every essential of life industry that I can think of, there is something very close to a monopoly already. I'd rather put that in the hands of the government who might just be doing it for power than someone who opted to make that business from scratch, who is certainly doing it for power.

Flip the coin anyway you want it - I'd rather have our peoples-elected government making society-impacting decisions and risk the possibility that they may become greedy bastards, rather than a corporation making the decisions with the hope that they'll do 'the right thing'. I think we agree that the corporations bottom-line is it's bottom-line.

Honestly, I don't care if there is a public health care option, I only care that the health care industry is fixed and that basic health care is available to all. If the public option is the most efficient way to do that - well, so be it. A national health care program is not going to make the US a socialist nation - hopefully just a healthier nation.

Edit - maybe we weren't talking health care here. ...it's late. night.

Edited, Aug 28th 2009 7:58am by Elinda