NationStates

Valrifell wrote:

Torrocca wrote:






Ah, I see somebody's getting on-board the Socialist train of thought. :3

Deep down, everyone's a socialist.

People who deny this just don't like the color red.

We could use more blue Socialist flags, to be fair. If red's meant to be the color of the blood of the workers, then blue can be the color of the water that we're mostly made up of.

It's been shown time and time again that societal cohesiveness, happiness, productivity, and economic growth is most tied to lower levels of inequality. No developed society should have such deeply embedded inequality as in, say, my own country, as it is detrimental to everyone, especially those who need the social mobility.

Hacks like Cowen shove this drivel out for the sole reason of trying to tell Middle America, "hey look, when policies come around that solely benefit the rich, you guys will some day benefit, I pinky pinky promise!"

It's horseshit at best, malicious all around.

LiberNovusAmericae wrote:

Salandriagado wrote:
Seems to me that he's more of a literal feudalist pretending to be any kind of Libertarian at all.

This strikes me more of kleptocracy than feudalism.

Kleptocratic oligarchy. Sounds like it could be made into a fun game: Monopoly but it's complicated and yet somehow it's much easier to win!

It's not really a question of inequality being "good", but that it is inevitable.

Valrifell wrote:
Ah, I see somebody's getting on-board the Socialist train of thought. :3

Deep down, everyone's a socialist.

People who deny this just don't like the color red.[/quote]
I like the color red, but not socialism. I believe we should give the workers enough money to keep them almost happy while encouraging them to get a better job. I don’t think the state should heavily intervene, they should just protect the interests of the people, which includes not having extreme poverty or the death of the bourgeois.

Hammer Britannia wrote:GM is a classical liberal LARPing as a RIght-Libertarian, pay no mind to him.

The main difference between the two are the levels of sanity.

The Galactic Liberal Democracy wrote:

Valrifell wrote:
Deep down, everyone's a socialist.

People who deny this just don't like the color red.

I like the color red, but not socialism. I believe we should give the workers enough money to keep them almost happy while encouraging them to get a better job. I don’t think the state should heavily intervene, they should just protect the interests of the people, which includes not having extreme poverty or the death of the bourgeois.

You can't just "get better jobs". There's always gonna be a need for menial and manual labor. Stuffing everyone into a white-collar position because those pay more would wreck society.

Salandriagado wrote:

Great Minarchistan wrote:One can argue that such system gave lead to the Industrial Revolution. Manufacturing has an exorbitantly high barrier of entry for societies where the average income is just about enough to get by without starving -- therefore allowing for the wealthy to pile up capital will eventually kickstart industrial development, which leads to generalized economic improvements for people.

Notice that the improvements came later, when the money stopped being ridiculously concentrated at the top. The early stages of the industrial revolution, where the money was heavily concentrated at the top, were unmitigatedly shite for everybody except the people at the top.

Which is my point. The Industrial Revolution, along with the policy I proposed, have their benefits focused on the long-run. Which is a desirable thing unless if you're expecting to live only for a decade or two more.

Torrocca wrote:Maybe peddle something that's worth the time to argue against, instead of this dogmatic NeoFeudalist bullshittery you're currently trying to peddle to embolden the pockets of the bourgeoisie.

Given that most people are posting comments that are at least loosely related to the argument, the low-effort issue is with you buddy.

Spindle wrote:I mean, a lot of it is about making sure everyone's producing at the highest level possible and making everything more efficient. Things like allowing poorer families to stay healthy so that they can work for longer and pushing people into higher skilled jobs so they can be more productive. Dismissing it on the basis that it's just consumerism seems a touch reductive, to be entirely honest.

The intent of workers doesn't make anyone wealthy if they don't have the human capital necessary to do it.

Spindle wrote:Lottery winners is a true point but it is also a deflection. For subsidisation of the rich to create actual trickle-down effects they'd need to be spending generously and not trying to extract all the value physically possible from the people who work for them, which is the exact opposite set of behaviours to the ones which got them into wealth. It would generate more wealth total but it wouldn't reach the people at the bottom - a more workable method might be to make personal economics a compulsory part of school curriculums? Who knows.

Not really. Under the current scenario the proposal is already workable.

Spindle wrote:True, but even that graph isn't particularly great for showing workers not get progressively more and more fucked. It's still quite happily trending downwards even if you stop it at the 2002 peak, and if you include the 2002 crash it looks like we'll be reaching a nice 50% skimmed off. That's just the way capitalism is - if you can minimise costs by paying people less you do, and if you let the wealthy concentrate that wealth further they will use it as leverage to fuck everyone else over. It isn't a nice truth, but that's just the way it do be when the system has to encourage and fetishise competition the way capitalism does.

I hope you read my comment on it. Part of the decline (estimated at ~1/3rd of it, enough to bend the mild decrease into effective stabilization) can be addressed by correcting the figures on proprietors' income, rather than interpolating it. The bulk of it since the early 00s coincides a lot with the huge surge in unemployment ever since the dotcom crash.

Torrocca wrote:
You can't just "get better jobs". There's always gonna be a need for menial and manual labor. Stuffing everyone into a white-collar position because those pay more would wreck society.

We could replace stupid and pointless jobs like doing a repetitive tasks at a fast food restaurant and instead try focusing in pushing the poor into more useful manual labor and raising the wages for those jobs more than others.

Salandriagado wrote:But still vastly inferior to a computer.

Cybersyn would gladly prove you wrong. Needless to say, if computers were that good at management they'd be splattered all over the place. They aren't simply because while they act as nice data crunchers and daytrading bots, they can't substitute the intuition of businessowners -- proven rather important at decision-making, since 40% of the CEOs still say that a major part of their decisions are guided by intuition.

Salandriagado wrote:So, given that, why should we funnel all of the money to people who are going to be entirely outmoded in the mid-to-near future?

Because robots are overestimated (or humans that are underestimated?). For instance, despite the vilification of accounting as an easy-to-automate field, the number of employed accountants has doubled over the last 20ish years, and in fact their share of employment as a % of all jobs has increased.

Salandriagado wrote:

Great Minarchistan wrote:While it'll probably not work in middle income levels, it'd mathematically work in very poor countries and first world nations as explicited in the spoiler.

You clearly have precisely no knowledge of mathematics. Kindly stop name-dropping it in a vain attempt to make your bullshit sound more legitimate.

You clearly have precisely no skills at reading. If you had you'd notice that it's indeed feasible instead of flinging shit at me.

The Galactic Liberal Democracy wrote:

Torrocca wrote:
You can't just "get better jobs". There's always gonna be a need for menial and manual labor. Stuffing everyone into a white-collar position because those pay more would wreck society.

We could replace stupid and pointless jobs like doing a repetitive tasks at a fast food restaurant and instead try focusing in pushing the poor into more useful manual labor and raising the wages for those jobs more than others.

Or we could just do Socialism and make work democratic for everybody.

Torrocca wrote:

The Galactic Liberal Democracy wrote:We could replace stupid and pointless jobs like doing a repetitive tasks at a fast food restaurant and instead try focusing in pushing the poor into more useful manual labor and raising the wages for those jobs more than others.

Or we could just do Socialism and make work democratic for everybody.

Yes, employ those who have no suitable skills into ditch digging! Truthfully a valuable field!

Salandriagado wrote:

Great Minarchistan wrote:
And the government is arguably one of (if not the) largest capital holders in the modern society.

You realised that you just started advocating state-led socialism, right?

At worst, it's no worse than redistribution to the poor.

Great Minarchistan wrote:

Salandriagado wrote:
You realised that you just started advocating state-led socialism, right?

At worst, it's no worse than redistribution to the poor.

And at best, it actually has a positive exponential return value. It still may be immoral, though, as any transfer of wealth without consent is theft.

Torrocca wrote:
Or we could just do Socialism and make work democratic for everybody.

Socialism and democracy are two different things.

The Galactic Liberal Democracy wrote:

Torrocca wrote:
Or we could just do Socialism and make work democratic for everybody.

Socialism and democracy are two different things.

This, and socialism is very rarely if ever democratic.

This proposition only benefits the poor if it were ensured that these subsidies were used in ways to benefit the poor, instead of just being used to make more profits for the rich ( further automation, personal savings, buying out smaller businesses, etc. ) - which was exactly what we saw with reganomics. The average American worker is, at present, more productive now than he has ever been. Yet, despite his vast increase in productivity, he has seen nearly stagnate wages. The overwhelming majority of his newly generated wealth is going to the upper echelons of society - far from what is equitable or fair.

Why not give Americans a more equitable share of the wealth which they create instead of passing it through a middle man without the consent of the tax payer? A more wealthy public would be able to better fund their own education, business ventures, be able to take occasional vacations, not have to worry about paying for essentials like gas or food, afford their own health care, be more charitable, and a plethora of other great reasons!

Give the common man a more equitable share of his own money, and his standard of living ( the nation as a whole as well ) will increase dramatically.

Joohan wrote:This proposition only benefits the poor if it were ensured that these subsidies were used in ways to benefit the poor, instead of just being used to make more profits for the rich ( further automation, personal savings, buying out smaller businesses, etc. ) - which was exactly what we saw with reganomics. The average American worker is, at present, more productive now than he has ever been. Yet, despite his vast increase in productivity, he has seen nearly stagnate wages. The overwhelming majority of his newly generated wealth is going to the upper echelons of society - far from what is equitable or fair.

Why not give Americans a more equitable share of the wealth which they create instead of passing it through a middle man without the consent of the tax payer? A more wealthy public would be able to better fund their own education, business ventures, be able to take occasional vacations, not have to worry about paying for essentials like gas or food, afford their own health care, be more charitable, and a plethora of other great reasons!

Give the common man a more equitable share of his own money, and his standard of living ( the nation as a whole as well ) will increase dramatically.

You're aware that this plan would end up in having a share of the added wealth (est. at 30%) trickling down in the form of added income to the bottom 99%, right?
Needless to say, total compensation's stagnated since the 2000s, as has productivity. Rather fair deal then, I'd say.

Great Minarchistan wrote:

Salandriagado wrote:
Notice that the improvements came later, when the money stopped being ridiculously concentrated at the top. The early stages of the industrial revolution, where the money was heavily concentrated at the top, were unmitigatedly shite for everybody except the people at the top.

Which is my point. The Industrial Revolution, along with the policy I proposed, have their benefits focused on the long-run. Which is a desirable thing unless if you're expecting to live only for a decade or two more.

Except that the thing that made it better was the money ceasing to be concentrated. Your proposal would keep the money concentrated, thereby prolonging the shit bit indefinitely.

Great Minarchistan wrote:

Spindle wrote:I mean, a lot of it is about making sure everyone's producing at the highest level possible and making everything more efficient. Things like allowing poorer families to stay healthy so that they can work for longer and pushing people into higher skilled jobs so they can be more productive. Dismissing it on the basis that it's just consumerism seems a touch reductive, to be entirely honest.

The intent of workers doesn't make anyone wealthy if they don't have the human capital necessary to do it.

Because expenditure at the bottom of society doesn't work its way up incredibly fast. See, I can make pithy economic observations too!

But of course, I understand your implied point - after all, its the rich who invest back into capital. And I mean, aside from a diatribe about concentration of wealth and how that's mildly terrifying, they don't invest their money into it, do they? In fact, they don't re-invest significant portions of the money their companies make either. This is why they are wealthy, you see.

Great Minarchistan wrote:

Spindle wrote:Lottery winners is a true point but it is also a deflection. For subsidisation of the rich to create actual trickle-down effects they'd need to be spending generously and not trying to extract all the value physically possible from the people who work for them, which is the exact opposite set of behaviours to the ones which got them into wealth. It would generate more wealth total but it wouldn't reach the people at the bottom - a more workable method might be to make personal economics a compulsory part of school curriculums? Who knows.

Not really. Under the current scenario the proposal is already workable.

Y'know if I've just called out a deflection and then make a point another, deflecting again is probably bad right? Like, it's literally the first portion of this segment, before I go into the part where rich people don't behave the way you model them. If that's a point you don't want to engage with then you're welcome to not have to, but you need a mode of disengagement which isn't pointing elsewhere and saying "look at that". Even if it's just to say "I disagree but can't find sources to support that viewpoint", you feel me?

Great Minarchistan wrote:

Spindle wrote:True, but even that graph isn't particularly great for showing workers not get progressively more and more fucked. It's still quite happily trending downwards even if you stop it at the 2002 peak, and if you include the 2002 crash it looks like we'll be reaching a nice 50% skimmed off. That's just the way capitalism is - if you can minimise costs by paying people less you do, and if you let the wealthy concentrate that wealth further they will use it as leverage to fuck everyone else over. It isn't a nice truth, but that's just the way it do be when the system has to encourage and fetishise competition the way capitalism does.

I hope you read my comment on it. Part of the decline (estimated at ~1/3rd of it, enough to bend the mild decrease into effective stabilization) can be addressed by correcting the figures on proprietors' income, rather than interpolating it. The bulk of it since the early 00s coincides a lot with the huge surge in unemployment ever since the dotcom crash.

I'm just gonna put something out there, just saying "correct this" doesn't actually make the thing say what you want it to - that's something a lot of flat earthers realise when they try to correct footage of the earth taken from edge-of-atmosphere flights and find that when on the ground the horizon looks concave. In this situation, the concave horizon is googling "BEA calculated labour share" and finding a City University of Hong Kong paper and a US Bureau of Labour Statistics notification piece on how the labour share is actually declining. And look, I get that you might be an economic genius but if you just say "well the horizon is flat if you correct it" I kinda am gonna want evidence beyond your word. Appeal to authority only works if you are appealing to an authority.

totally depends on what we're talking about being un "equal". diversity is the nature of reality.

the problem is using this as an excuse to deny anyone opportunities for the gratifications of creating and exploring.
nor to intentionally make some lives more insecure then others.

having to indenture yourself to money to indenture yourself to a piece of land before you're allowed to build a shack for yourself out in the woods to live in, is not freedom.

LiberNovusAmericae wrote:

The Galactic Liberal Democracy wrote:Socialism and democracy are two different things.

This, and socialism is very rarely if ever democratic.

Who cares, democracy isn't the most important thing anyways, nor is it always the best solution.