Wage Slavery? The poor are poor because....

[European Socialist Republic]

You're right, why should we care about studies by economists?

especially ones that fucked up their own economy

Because the economic crisis that hit most of the world was the fault of socialists, right?

[Vazdania]

especially ones that fucked up their own economy

Because the economic crisis that hit most of the world was the fault of socialists, right?

The world economic crisis of 2008 to 2009 can't be attributed to political parties. It was the banks' fault. FUCK THE BANKS!!!!

[The greater holy roman empire]

There are poor people because there are rich people.

cuz everything's the fault of the evil rich people.

amirite or amirite

You make it sound like money is evil. I remember a quote
" So that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or the looters who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil? ... Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into bread you need to survive tomorrow. ... Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values ... Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'"[33]
- Ayn Rand

[European Socialist Republic]

Because the economic crisis that hit most of the world was the fault of socialists, right?

The world economic crisis of 2008 to 2009 can't be attributed to political parties. It was the banks' fault. FUCK THE BANKS!!!!

So how exactly did Thomas Piketty "fuck up France's economy"?

[Neu Leonstein]

The world economic crisis of 2008 to 2009 can't be attributed to political parties. It was the banks' fault. FUCK THE BANKS!!!!

When a topic strays into an area you don't know much about, it's generally a good idea to either steer it back elsewhere, or make a quiet withdrawal. If you have the time, you could also do lots of research and make sure you can, if necessary, source every single sentence you type.

But, protip: Avoid capitalisation and exclamation marks. It draws attention.

[Brickistan]

Because the economic crisis that hit most of the world was the fault of socialists, right?

The world economic crisis of 2008 to 2009 can't be attributed to political parties. It was the banks' fault. FUCK THE BANKS!!!!

Yeah, 'cause those evil banks deregulated themselves, right?

cuz everything's the fault of the evil rich people.

amirite or amirite

You make it sound like money is evil. I remember a quote
" So that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or the looters who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil? ... Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into bread you need to survive tomorrow. ... Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values ... Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'"[33]
- Ayn Rand

Ughhh! Please don't quote Rand - it makes my head hurt...

Anyway, money might not be inherently evil (much as a weapon isn't evil on its own) but it can be used for nefarious purposes.

When used as a simply tool for exchange of goods and labour it works well. It's when people start speculating that things go wrong. Basically, America has changed from a production based economy to an investment based economy. Money - vast sums of it, in fact - is made on Wall Street, literally spun out of thin air through a variety of ponzi schemes so complex that no-one knew what would happen once the house of cards collapsed. And when it did collapse in 2008, governments throughout the western world was forced to step in and save the very same investors who had made such a mess in the first place. Allowing the banks to fall would have been absolutely disastrous.

And who ended up paying the bill? Whose houses were foreclosed? Not the rich schemers and investors. Oh no, they got bailed out, leaving the middle class to deal with the fallout...

[Lerodan Chinamerica]

Goods and services are absolutely worthless if you can't afford them.

In America, 90% of Americans living below the poverty line are richer than 90% of the world's population. Most of them own a car, a phone, have access to electricity, the Internet and many other goods and services. The 'poor' in more economically free countries are far better off than the poor in less economically free countries. Ebul capitalism has driven down the cost of goods and services to make them affordable to the common man.

As for much richer - hardly.

http://reason.com/archives/2014/01/10/i ... increasing

The cake is expanding, yes, but the vast overwhelming part of it goes to the rich elite.

So what? If the poor are benefiting from economic expansion, why should it bother you that the rich are earning more?

But it is a legitimate concern, because the trickle-up economics practised by the Federal Reserve has inflated both the price of goods and stimulated asset prices, benefitting the rich at the expense of the poor.

And mind you, expanding the cake is currently, to a large degree, done via speculation and bubbles. And those have a tendency to make the rich even richer (as they have the money to invest) while hurting the middle class (as the real wages stagnate, even drop) who cannot afford to speculate and who see an increasing amount of their money bound up in basic necessities.

My comments above on the Federal Reserve apply to this as well. Real wages have stagnated but total compensation (which is very important in America as it includes health coverage and other fringe benefits not provided by the state) has continued to rise. http://being-classical-liberal.blogspot ... ivity.html

And finally... Abolish the government...?

BWAHAHAHAHAHAH...

Wait...

You're not serious, are you?

Well you clearly don't care much about the poor or the rich rigging the game if you want a coercive institution in place whose main goal is to empower the rich for its own gain and enslave the poor man in a cycle of dependency.

Thanks, but no thanks. I don't want to live in the "dream world" of some mad an-cap where rich feudal lords rule with an iron fist over the rest. I wold like to keep the middleages where they belong - in the history books.

Well obviously you know nothing about anarcho-capitalist theory nor feudal economics. Feudalism was a system of state-sanctioned expropriation in which the king's political cronies were given land that belonged to others. Ancap theory holds that the truth of self-ownership to be absolute.

As has been so amply demonstrated over the last decade in America, we need more regulation, not less. Deregulation played a very large part in the 2008 crash and further deregulation will only make it worse.

If you want more regulation then you support corporate monopolies. The Great Recession happened because of the Federal Reserve's monetary policies and political cronyism. Deregulation did not cause the crisis; government advocacy for an ownership society and various other ill-fated pieces of law caused it.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAH...

Wait...

You're not serious, are you?

You are...?

Really...?

Look, I've lived in a social-democracy my entire life. And I can assure that that my rights aren't being repressed.

As for the "tax is theft" argument... Give me a break, will you? That has been debunked so many times now that I'm not going to bother doing it again.

Good for you, but welfare states don't pay for themselves. Taxation is indeed theft, even if I pays for things that you like it's still expropriation.

[Bezombia]

Goods and services are absolutely worthless if you can't afford them.

In America, 90% of Americans living below the poverty line are richer than 90% of the world's population.

Source please.

[Viritica]

1) Your first source is basically an opinion article.
2) >blog

1) If you had bothered reading the articles it links to... Fine.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/pers ... itain.html
"Research from Lloyds TSB International revealed that 22 per cent of millionaires are considering moving abroad in the next two years"
"Destinations like France and Spain remain popular too."

2) From an economist. With charts from the IMF.

Back.

1) Okay? You're telling me how shitty Britain is doing.
2) >blog

[Divair2]

Because the economic crisis that hit most of the world was the fault of socialists, right?

The world economic crisis of 2008 to 2009 can't be attributed to political parties. It was the banks' fault. FUCK THE BANKS!!!!

Of course it can. The banks could've been regulated by said political parties, but they were not.

[Socialist Tera]

The world economic crisis of 2008 to 2009 can't be attributed to political parties. It was the banks' fault. FUCK THE BANKS!!!!

Of course it can. The banks could've been regulated by said political parties, but they were not.

Clinton specifically is to blame for it, he deregulated banking and mortgages.

[European Socialist Republic]

1) If you had bothered reading the articles it links to... Fine.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/pers ... itain.html
"Research from Lloyds TSB International revealed that 22 per cent of millionaires are considering moving abroad in the next two years"
"Destinations like France and Spain remain popular too."

2) From an economist. With charts from the IMF.

Back.

1) Okay? You're telling me how shitty Britain is doing.
2) >blog

1) Yes, because your link was basically a British minister saying how French millionaires are leaving ebul socialist hellhole France to come to great capitalist pro-business London.

2) From an economist. With charts from the IMF.

[Viritica]

Back.

1) Okay? You're telling me how shitty Britain is doing.
2) >blog

1) Yes, because your link was basically a British minister saying how French millionaires are leaving ebul socialist hellhole France to come to great capitalist pro-business London.

2) From an economist. With charts from the IMF.

1) It was talking about French economic problems, but fine. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/economic-decline-in-france-the-failed-leadership-of-hollande-a-903732.html
2) If blogs are you standard for sourcing then this is going downhill.

[Neu Leonstein]

On the issue of bank regulations: I'm torn on these discussions. I have heard this 'regulation' point hundreds of times since 2007, which is fair enough. It was an issue.

But when I ask people to elaborate, generally they don't have a clue. They say things like 'Glass-Steagall' and so on. Again, that's fair enough - this stuff is pretty arcane. When I have criticised people for not knowing this in the past, I've copped my share of flak for expecting them know it in the first place.

I genuinely find this tricky. It's too esoteric to expect people to know much. But at the same time it turned out to have been really important, so people have a real stake in the topic.

But the reason this question matters is that it leads people down the wrong path. It's actually pretty difficult to find the smoking gun deregulation. If you can, it's only a smoking gun with the benefit of a whole lot of hindsight. It's data mining. To me, the truth of the matter is that regulators had no way of telling the future any better than anyone else. The idea that they could have avoided something that to any reasonable observer looks far, far larger than 'the banks did it' by tweaking some rules in a thick book covering MBS capital weighting methodologies seems pretty far-fetched to me. I mean, some regulators don't seem like the world's most qualified judges of such things.

Worse, criticisms of deregulation then mean people go overboard with rules addressing problems of the past. That's a bad approach (also see here, and here).

[Lerodan Chinamerica]

The assertion that the banking industry was under-regulated or that there was no regulation is an absolute barefaced lie.

Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
The Federal Reserve Board.
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Securities and Exchange Commission.
Office of the Comptroller of Currency.

Laws like the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act and the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act deregulated adjustable-rate mortgages and rolled back regulations separating investment and commercial banks, respectively, were of course significant deregulatory measures, but that did not stop the Federal Government from being very much involved in the housing and banking markets. The Clinton and Bush Administrations pushed for an ownership society through deregulatory legislation that was coupled with the guarantee of government support in the event that things went wrong. The government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac embarked on a policy of divesting mortgage lenders of the responsibility of the loans, while the Federal Reserve initiated a massive monetary expansion that pumped credit into the housing bubble beyond the point of no return.

The assertion that deregulation caused the housing bubble is probably the biggest lie of the 21st Century. The Great Recession would have likely never happened if the government did not subsidise the losses of lenders and the Federal Reserve did not exist. If banks were not regulated, then the Federal Reserve would not exist and America would have a system of free banking. There would be no legal tender laws and money would likely be backed by gold and silver.

[European Socialist Republic]

1) Yes, because your link was basically a British minister saying how French millionaires are leaving ebul socialist hellhole France to come to great capitalist pro-business London.

2) From an economist. With charts from the IMF.

1) It was talking about French economic problems, but fine. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/economic-decline-in-france-the-failed-leadership-of-hollande-a-903732.html
2) If blogs are you standard for sourcing then this is going downhill.

https://www.economy.com/dismal/outlook/ ... x?geo=IFRA
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/ ... AP20140214
http://www.pwc.co.uk/economic-services/ ... ions.jhtml

[Viritica]

1) It was talking about French economic problems, but fine. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/economic-decline-in-france-the-failed-leadership-of-hollande-a-903732.html
2) If blogs are you standard for sourcing then this is going downhill.

https://www.economy.com/dismal/outlook/ ... x?geo=IFRA
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/ ... AP20140214
http://www.pwc.co.uk/economic-services/ ... ions.jhtml

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-06/more-evidence-france-is-the-new-sick-man-of-europe
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/european-business/germany-leaves-italy-and-france-behind-in-euro-zone-recovery/article17077941/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/05/us-eurozone-economy-imbalances-idUSBREA240UQ20140305

[Lerodan Chinamerica]

In America, 90% of Americans living below the poverty line are richer than 90% of the world's population.

Source please.

I'm afraid I've lost the location of that source, but I'll notify you and this thread when I find it.

But here's one that generally confirms what I'm saying.

[Bezombia]

Source please.

I'm afraid I've lost the location of that source, but I'll notify you and this thread when I find it.

But here's one that generally confirms what I'm saying.

I'm gonna need something more than an infographic. Anyone could make their own chart in MS Word and add a "source" at the bottom to make it look legit.

[The 93rd Coalition]

Lack of education or unforeseen circumstances, like mental illness or orphaning.

[Bezombia]

Lack of education or unforeseen circumstances, like mental illness or orphaning.

So none of the following ever contribute to poverty, right?

-Coming from a poor background
-Crippling college debt
-Lack of decently paying jobs
-Chance

[Brickistan]

I'm afraid I've lost the location of that source, but I'll notify you and this thread when I find it.

But here's one that generally confirms what I'm saying.

I'm gonna need something more than an infographic. Anyone could make their own chart in MS Word and add a "source" at the bottom to make it look legit.

Especially when both claimed sources are right-wing think-tanks...

[European Socialist Republic]

I'm gonna need something more than an infographic. Anyone could make their own chart in MS Word and add a "source" at the bottom to make it look legit.

Especially when both claimed sources are right-wing think-tanks...

Makes me wonder what they define as "economic freedom".

[The 93rd Coalition]

Lack of education or unforeseen circumstances, like mental illness or orphaning.

So none of the following ever contribute to poverty, right?

-Coming from a poor background
-Crippling college debt
-Lack of decently paying jobs
-Chance

No, that's what I meant by Lack of Education. No education, no job, no money, no house, no food, no livelihood.

[Bezombia]

So none of the following ever contribute to poverty, right?

-Coming from a poor background
-Crippling college debt
-Lack of decently paying jobs
-Chance

No, that's what I meant by Lack of Education. No education, no job, no money, no house, no food, no livelihood.

You haven't even attempted to reply to anything off my list.