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That might be true for a lot of couples, but not for my parents.

They sold a house and used the profits on it to pay cash for a house that needed major repairs to make it livable. The then used more of the profit on the old house to pay for a new roof, boiler and buy top of the line appliances. 1k was taken off the price of the house by the seller's real estate agent as the heating system wasn't repaired as required by the contact on the house.

Mom didn't work and never needed to during their marriage. Dad took a pay cut when he went to work for the state and manage a new airport noise abatement program. He also was bringing in extra income working as an consultant at pay of few hundred dollars per hour.

They didn't have to pay for design and engineering plans, since my father was an architect before he became an acoustical engineer. They didn't take short cuts and lived with no walls between rooms on the first floor for years until they had jacked up an front of the house and fixed the foundation.

So now we have a house that dad's will says must be sold and the profit split equally among the 6 of us. It's filled with antiques, art work and their modern furniture collection. Several of us are working on remodeling rooms, before we move items all have agree will be ours.

Therefore the risk was very small and they made sure their children would inherit from their investments. One thing they didn't do is coddle us when we fell on hard times. Some of the money in the will comes from investments my grandparents made. It may not be a lot of old money, but it's a nice little nest egg that kept the last few generations, from becoming a burden on their children.

They pressure me to go back to work, while loaning me money for rent a few times to keep my girls from being homeless. Once they learn my doctors said I was disable, they gave me emotional support, but didn't risk the money they had saved for their old age to supporting me and my deadbeat brother. While he will get his share of the inheritance, he is prohibited from living in the house and is often homeless or in jail. We expect he'll blow it on drugs and beer quickly.

I will have my share put in an trust fund to cover medical expenses and be content to have a few nice antiques and a few of the modern teak furniture in my livingroom.

Then you've probably saved at least one month's worth of mortgage payments and are good for 3+ months anyway.

I must say that I agree with most of Varrus's thoughs here. I crossed out the sections I don't agree with but for the most part I think he has it right.

I don't see a reason to say nasty things about Ash and you would have had my full support if it wasn't for the comments about it being all the Dem's fault and calling Ash lazy.

The problem here is it takes a simplistic partially correct solution, and tries to make it apply to all situations by bashing into a wall with a tire iron.

Increasing productivity and improving systemic processes does in fact create greater total wealth.

But I'd wager you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who wasn't mentally incompetent to say that encouraging this is bad.

The place where this gets mangled is when you apply these supply side economic ideas to zero-sum systems. Wealth is not a limited system. Money is.

Manipulating the stock market creates a lot of money, but creates no wealth.
Running a Non-profit that runs medical clinics creates a lot of wealth but not a lot of money.

We run into issues when we have a system where it's in the best interests of a society to maximize wealth, where its in the best interest of the individual to maximize money, thereby increasing their share of that wealth. The goal seems simple, to attempt to remove the disconnect between the two, but it necessitates some mechanism whereby all parties in the system feel the effects of wealth creation or destruction. And that's tough. It can't be solved by a simplistic solution, as evidenced by both radical capitalism and radical communism.

The pie is finite. In fact it is artificially manipulated to remain finite.

I also think that what many predictions about a system without runaway capitalism, as made by varrus and by gbaji, fail to take into account is the advancement of technology. I happen to believe that there will come a point in human future-history where the basics (food, water, shelter) will no longer be things which it is necessary to work quite so hard to obtain. If this becomes true, the entire capitalist system becomes mostly obsolete. The vast majority of components of the capitalist system involve the controlling, processing, transportation, and selling of resources turned into consumables.

Let's imagine, for a moment, that the "replicator" from Star Trek were a real device. This device, while far beyond current science, is within the realm of possibility to create. The way it functioned was to store a large bank of component particles (recycled trash, for example), break them down, and reconstruct them into usable items, including food and spare parts.

While, again, this is beyond our capabilities now, it's conceivable that there will be a point in the future where such a device can exist. What happens to farms, factories, shipping industries, supermarkets, stock brokers, etc that all rely on the food industry, if suddenly everyone can make whatever food they want from waste material?

Suddenly the only food-related industry required is replicator maintenance. What happens to all that infrastructure? It's all unnecessary. Money is worthless, because everyone can get anything they need from a replicator. A large replicator could produce building materials and other component parts for any item imaginable.

So if material goods are no longer an issue, what else is there? Energy.

But there are also abundant sustainable sources of energy on Earth as well. Solar, wind, and other forms of clean energy could fuel the world, easily, if the infrastructure for these energies were ever built.

So all of capitalism would die, and the only services anyone would ever need to provide is repair for energy systems and replicators.

I dunno where this was heading, but I think about it often. It's a sort of mind exercise. What would people do if they no longer had to work to obtain the essentials, or indeed to obtain even luxuries (there would be no such thing as a luxury anymore)?

The thing is, is that our society has put so much self value in cash money that there are many, many corporations of people that have a huge priority to make sure that systems like this fail. People will constantly be in the position of money loss if infrastructure advances toward this point, and those people, who already have more money than any of us who stand to benefit, will push these opportunities down.

This happens every day.

Money is evil.

Well, in a way. The first effect was an enormous increase in the need for cheap labor, which led to the boom in slavery. This, of course, was ultimately due to a failure in ethics... but money so often does lead to a failure in ethics. Unconstrained capitalism, not to put too fine a point on it, encourages and rewards ill treatment of other human beings.

No, everything he says is still stupid. People might not go against everything he said if he didn't make everything an absolute.

Absolutes force people to make wrong decisions.

yes. There's only one side to this coin

Except in private christian colleges where they are doinitrite? Right?

Qualified judgments are no less judgments, nor need they be any less provocative, than absolute judgments are. A qualification, a shade of gray, a nuance, need only define what you are judging with specificity, so you can judge it with the same amount of accuracy, but lots more precision. The part of your statements which are foolish are not your endorsements/condemnations of some moral behavior, but the scope of them.

For example: "that's what they're teaching in colleges and it's wrong" Is a judgment that I would agree with, if you bothered to properly specify your scope. I've had professors who discourage making ultimate calls about the value of books/papers/theories and I think that the classes are worse off because of it, but the milquetoasts are certainly not as pervasive as you might be insinuating.

Seriously, you can specify without having to give up your conviction.