100 replies to this topic

[Catamount]

Nick Makiaveli, on 18 February 2012 - 05:02 PM, said:

See what I hate most about you is now that you've calmed down, you make good points. I don't always agree with them, but you obviously aren't some empty-headed liberal.

Well believe me, I know more than a few of those (but in fairness, I know more than a few empty headed people from most political backgrounds).

That's why I'm frustrated with politics. You get this false dichotomy between the far left, who intrude with government where greater society doesn't need it, and the far right, who think there should be no government. Too few exist between.

Can't I love my space program and civil rights?!

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What I hate about passing laws that apply to the here and now is they take on a life of their own. Remember a while back when they finally repealed the phone tax? You know the one that only applied to rich people to pay for the Spanish-American War?

That tax has been repealed and reinstated a bunch of times. It gets targeted a lot when opposing taxes is popular, and in hard times for budgets, gets reinstated, but I'll get to that.

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So when it comes to hate crimes, we have laws proposed about specific jobs.

That you'll have to elaborate on more before I could comment. Could you be more specific?

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Also, didn't we just have another round of Creationism in schools debate?

Ugh, the creationism weirdos...

Yeah, you get those people who pipe up over trying to put creationism in the classroom all the time, but never gain traction.

Even if they did, they wouldn't be allowed to remove evolution, and even then, there would be fairly strict limitations on what could be taught. For instance, if a public school began teaching the Bible as science, it would violate the 14th Amendment, go to court, and laws would be changed. As it is, pretty much all efforts at putting any kind of creationism or intelligence design in the classroom have failed, almost everywhere.

The reason they've failed is because the courts are pretty strict on this point. Just look at the specific cases.

http://en.wikipedia....cation_programs

Every effort to even specifically teach intelligent design has been ruled unconstitutional. The only efforts that have even withstood even legal scrutiny are things like the Louisiana law, which only makes very weak, very tepid statements about "teachers helping students with the confusion of controversial issues", and even that's creating a firestorm.

Even if Kansas could have gotten their laws past the courts, and we know they wouldn't have because of every other case on the subject, you'll note what happened: the voters eventually shot it down. Governing laws by public opinion, and constraining what they can do doesn't just work in theory, but in practice.

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To me that is proof of the slippery slope. We pass laws, so it makes it easier to pass more laws. First it was a tax on automobiles, now we have license plates, road taxes, gas taxes, "wheel" taxes, etc. I'm sure they will come up with a battery tax once electrics become popular and no one will blink an eye. Each generation grows up thinking the way things are is the way it always was.

You make a fair point, and I do partly agree, but going back to the phone tax, consider the other side of that.

Taxes get unpopular when they're really not needed; we have a big anti-tax movement here, and that's good to have people be skeptical, but this just isn't the late 90s anymore. States aren't shoveling money from huge surpluses back at people.


The simply reality is that right now, budgets are hurting, badly. They really have been for about a decade. Were the climate different, and states facing huge surpluses, we'd probably be screaming to get rid of complicated taxes, but K-12 schools are starving, public employees are getting laid off, college tuition is getting hiked (15% for Appalachian State last year; trust me, that hurts), roads aren't being maintained, or even properly treated in the winter, police forces are starving out officers for pay and still can't hire enough, and it's because of a combination of economic crisis and bottomed out income taxes, for almost everyone. So states find ways to get the money to survive, since they can't seem to with traditional taxes. I've seen a lot of new off the wall fees and taxes come in during this period.

It's a dysfunctional system, with a lot of cognitive dissonance, but that's the fault of the fact that there just isn't enough money in the economy, for the public or anyone. Again, this is a matter of public opinion, for which there seems to be, again, an odd cognitive dissonance. People get up in arms over changes to income taxes to pull in more revenue, yet a cut to sales taxes here in NC is proving to be relatively unpopular, because people understand that what's an insignificant reduction in the price of goods (a few cents off most purchases) has come at the cost of their childrens' schools going bankrupt.


In short, half the problem is that we can't seem to figure out what we do and don't want for taxes and spending in the first place.



Beyond that, however, would we even want to simplify and concentrate taxes, even if things were simple?

Isn't a pluralistic tax system really advantageous? I mean, sure, some taxes, like gas taxes, cause as many problems as they solve, as they mostly hit the poor, but beyond that, taxing a variety of things for revenue, instead of just jacking one tax through the roof, means you collect money pluralistically, so you collect it from everyone, instead of slapping just one group. That doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.

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How many people have ever stopped to think what existed before govt. welfare? How did roads get built and maintained before the govt owned them all?

Roads aren't exactly a welfare program, but to answer your question, they didn't get built before governments. The first roads that I know of were natural, and largely already there, consisting of using rivers in Egypt for travel. Egyptians didn't much care for traditional roads, iirc, since their entire civilization was just dotted along the Nile anyways.

After that, however, you start getting the first real road systems, which is really what you care about, not individual roads.

The first that I know that we know the builders of were in Persia and Rome, and both were vast systems built by the government. The Persian roads were constructed under the direction of Darius I, and the Roman roads were construct by and for the military to move troops around, much like the US Superhighway System was in the 1950s.


So yeah, roads have been government operated for about as long as roads have existed in any significant way, and really, does it surprise you?

What other body would have the centralized power to operate a road system? Certainly it's not something you could do effective with the private sector; could you imagine trying to build a vast system of roads by COMMITTEE?! That's effectively what you'd have if you had a whole bunch of different private people trying to build roads. You'd never be able to agree on how to set it all up. Then you'd have problems of responsibility for maintenance, different standards for materials and width, and FORGET having an agency out there who'd be willing to map it all (not quite so easy before satellites, or even automobiles). Even if you could find a private agency who'd map it all, you'd probably have competing companies paying them off not to include the other guys' roads, so that they could profit from theirs.

It'd just be a mess. So yeah, roads? Pretty much always governmental, and always have been.

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I will go down swinging because I truly believe if people were well adjusted we would only need a handful of laws. Pretty much whittle away the chaff from the 10 commandments and done.

Majorities help in votes, but not arguments


Believe it or not, there are many, including myself, who agree with you. However, it's not just as simple as removing all the laws and expecting people to behave. We've lived in societies with few laws, and what happens is that powerful people use that dearth of power to become powerful and abuse others because nothing stops them anymore.

However, with sufficient human advancement, this shouldn't be the case, and many futurists have suggested as much.


The idea of a society where people are so universally decent, and non-foolish, that we don't have to restrict behavior, is one I'd like to see. In the here and now, we don't have such a system, so without laws, things would just fall apart, plain and simple, however, we do both agree on one thing: The key to attaining such a system is for society to start putting more emphasis on personal responsibility, which isn't going to happen if government keeps trying to dictate every little thing we do down to the day to day minutiae. That has to stop.

Edited by Catamount, 20 February 2012 - 10:17 AM.

[GaussDragon]

Catamount, on 20 February 2012 - 10:16 AM, said:

That's why I'm frustrated with politics. You get this false dichotomy between the far left, who intrude with government where greater society doesn't need it, and the far right, who think there should be no government. Too few exist between.

Can't I love my space program and civil rights?!

Amen. Political polarization seems to contribute to the rejection of all that lies in that increasingly vast chasm known as the 'the middle'. This dichotomy is easy to sell and by vilifying the other side, proponents of this dichotomy are encouraging 'manichaeism' which doesn't really do anyone any good.

Catamount, on 20 February 2012 - 10:16 AM, said:

Taxes get unpopular when they're really not needed; we have a big anti-tax movement here, and that's good to have people be skeptical, but this just isn't the late 90s anymore. States aren't shoveling money from huge surpluses back at people.

The simply reality is that right now, budgets are hurting, badly. They really have been for about a decade. Were the climate different, and states facing huge surpluses, we'd probably be screaming to get rid of complicated taxes, but K-12 schools are starving, public employees are getting laid off, college tuition is getting hiked (15% for Appalachian State last year; trust me, that hurts), roads aren't being maintained, or even properly treated in the winter, police forces are starving out officers for pay and still can't hire enough, and it's because of a combination of economic crisis and bottomed out income taxes, for almost everyone. So states find ways to get the money to survive, since they can't seem to with traditional taxes. I've seen a lot of new off the wall fees and taxes come in during this period.

It's a dysfunctional system, with a lot of cognitive dissonance, but that's the fault of the fact that there just isn't enough money in the economy, for the public or anyone. Again, this is a matter of public opinion, for which there seems to be, again, an odd cognitive dissonance. People get up in arms over changes to income taxes to pull in more revenue, yet a cut to sales taxes here in NC is proving to be relatively unpopular, because people understand that what's an insignificant reduction in the price of goods (a few cents off most purchases) has come at the cost of their childrens' schools going bankrupt.

It floors me that so many people are in arms over repealing taxes that only affect the highest income earners. I'd say a good portion of the tea partiers are not in the top income bracket (Koch brothers aside). In fact, the latest legislation helped the middle class by reducing the payroll tax. Sure it's redistributive but it's trying to bring tax levels back to what they were in the late 90's back when we USA had *gasp* surpluses. Does no one remember that? I like Ron Paul because he's genuine, and he's not afraid to take positions that are unpopular with the base however completely gutting the government wouldn't do much good for consumption levels, which the US economy runs on. I'd like to deficit reined-in too, but you can't do it overnight. How is it that so many people have forgotten that most of the debt the US has right now was thanks to slashing taxes while paying for an expensive war on credit and also the signing of Medicare Part D (an entitlement program). Basically, the US and Southern Europe have high debt levels for different reasons, but none of it was really investment spending. The US frittered it away on an expensive war, and the Mediterranean economies frittered it away on vote-buying measures that didn't contribute much to GDP (and they're chronically uncompetitive).

I'm half-tempted to post my rant on the current state of the US economy that I posted on a friend's facebook wall 6 months ago but it'd swell this post more than it has already.

Long story short, I liked Bush Sr, he was a pragmatist. So was Clinton. Bush Jr, was not. He more or less took fiscal sensibility and threw it out the window.

Catamount, on 20 February 2012 - 10:16 AM, said:

Isn't a pluralistic tax system really advantageous? I mean, sure, some taxes, like gas taxes, cause as many problems as they solve, as they mostly hit the poor, but beyond that, taxing a variety of things for revenue, instead of just jacking one tax through the roof, means you collect money pluralistically, so you collect it from everyone, instead of slapping just one group. That doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.

I think what Nik is missing in terms of all these taxes is that like roads, a lot of these things didn't exist 100 years ago, and a lot of them have externalities. The tax on a lot of these things is often to compensate for side-effects that their usage has on the broader society or environment that are not easily quantified. It's like your point about having exotic pets, it's a pre-payment system for the eventualities of cost that some of these things inevitably incur after they've been used. I don't like creeping taxation either, but the reason we've had creeping regulation, is because society and the marketplace are more complex place now than they have ever been. For a lot of these kinds of taxes I use a sort of inelasticity/elasticity test: If something is highly inelastic and all people need to consume it, I'm nominally more against the taxation of it, if something is more elastic, and therefore have more choice in whether or not they want to purchase it, they have less room to complain about the additional externality-based tax on it (admittedly though this is simplistic, and many inelastic goods get taxed to all hell like energy).

Catamount, on 20 February 2012 - 10:16 AM, said:

What other body would have the centralized power to operate a road system? Certainly it's not something you could do effective with the private sector; could you imagine trying to build a vast system of roads by COMMITTEE?! That's effectively what you'd have if you had a whole bunch of different private people trying to build roads. You'd never be able to agree on how to set it all up. Then you'd have problems of responsibility for maintenance, different standards for materials and width, and FORGET having an agency out there who'd be willing to map it all (not quite so easy before satellites, or even automobiles). Even if you could find a private agency who'd map it all, you'd probably have competing companies paying them off not to include the other guys' roads, so that they could profit from theirs.

This is why 'fire companies' (which used to be private) were expropriated by the state. You'd have one building on fire, but the first fire company to arrive realized that the building on fire wasn't one of their customers, so they'd let it burn... only to sit and wait and watch the fire spread to other buildings and get way out of control. Some things are so critical to society that they don't operate very well in a commercial environment.

Catamount, on 20 February 2012 - 10:16 AM, said:

However, with sufficient human advancement, this shouldn't be the case, and many futurists have suggested as much.

You a fan of Kurzweil or Toffler by any chance?

Edited by GaussDragon, 20 February 2012 - 12:34 PM.

[GaussDragon]

Whoops, quoted myself instead of editing the last post.

Edited by GaussDragon, 20 February 2012 - 12:33 PM.

[Insidious Johnson]

Cur, on 14 February 2012 - 04:09 AM, said:

This summs it up perfectly.

The "powers that be" are getting desperate.

The push for censorsihp to stop anything but controlled media/information the last few years has been insane.

You're also a terrorist for having more than 3 days supply of food in you're house. The whole thing was designed to ensure 99% of the population could be considers a terrorist and detained without question whenever they want.

You should look into FEMA camps also. for so called shelters/aid and organisation centres in the event of terrorist attack or natural disaster, they seem to resemble prison camps quite well. camers up the ********, huge barbed wire fences designed keep people in rather than out, most buildings have no windows, and the ones that do are coverd with metal bars , oh, 90% of the FEMA centres are located directly on a train track too. heh.

fun times ahead when theres a political uprising and martial law is enacted in a last try to retain power rather than let someone like Ron Paul win and take away their control over the populace.

He's now Ron Paul's VP candidate. I hope they win. There is not a dime's worth of difference between Reps and Dems. End the two party sucker system!

[Catamount]

Hey Gauss, what's up

Yeah, I definitely agree about polarization. Facts are hard enough to grasp on many issues with an open mind, as there's just so many things to know that are civically relevant. It means that people tend to make up things and then cling to them, and since no one talks to each other anymore, we get more and more entrenched in ideologies.

It also means we don't draw good ideas from each other anymore. I think David Brin has it right when he says it's not about left vs right anymore, not really, so much as about entrenched ideologues vs flexible pragmatists.

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It floors me that so many people are in arms over repealing taxes that only affect the highest income earners. I'd say a good portion of the tea partiers are not in the top income bracket (Koch brothers aside). In fact, the latest legislation helped the middle class by reducing the payroll tax. Sure it's redistributive but it's trying to bring tax levels back to what they were in the late 90's back when we USA had *gasp* surpluses. Does no one remember that?

Or how about the 1950s and 60s, when the highest marginal tax rates were 70-90%, and the government was hyperinvesting in research, education, and infrastructure?

Those were some of the most successful decades in our history. The economy was booming, and for the first time in human history, we accomplished something that was inconceivable before: we took the pyramid-shaped wealth distribution that had prevailed for fifteen thousand years and we replaced it with an effectively diamond-shaped distribution, with the majority of people centered in a very comfortable middle, with a minority on both the top and bottom.

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I like Ron Paul because he's genuine, and he's not afraid to take positions that are unpopular with the base however completely gutting the government wouldn't do much good for consumption levels, which the US economy runs on. I'd like to deficit reined-in too, but you can't do it overnight.

Not to mention the loss of all our national parks, the protections for endangered species that have brought back every recovered species in our nation's history, our entire federal education system, and if we really followed Paul's logic, you could kiss both NASA and the entire USAF goodbye (yes, by Paul's legal logic, the USAF is unconstitutional).

I like Paul, in a way, saw him talk a few times in NH, always thought he at least believed what he was saying, but he's very narrow-sighted.

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I think what Nik is missing in terms of all these taxes is that like roads, a lot of these things didn't exist 100 years ago, and a lot of them have externalities...

Hmm, you make some good points; that's an interesting way of looking at it.

I don't like generalization, but in general, I think I agree with everything you're saying.

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This is why 'fire companies' (which used to be private) were expropriated by the state. You'd have one building on fire, but the first fire company to arrive realized that the building on fire wasn't one of their customers, so they'd let it burn... only to sit and wait and watch the fire spread to other buildings and get way out of control. Some things are so critical to society that they don't operate very well in a commercial environment.

You know, this is interesting, because I have made the exact same argument before.

The private market is great for many goods, but it's very bad at marketing necessities, and competition doesn't help.

If a company sells an HDTV, they're going to compete to make it better than the next guy, but there's another, more powerful force, that makes them good and cheap: I can opt out of buying HDTVs.

If the whole market isbad, I don't have to take part. It's just like with SSDs a few years ago. Competition didn't change that that were all savagely overpriced. However, that has changed because most people didn't buy them, period.


Imagine a police force, however. Oh, sure, my family would be able to afford the good protection; my parents are decently well off. Imagine many people, however, who could only afford the "basic" package. Just imagine the scenario, with some poor person locked in a room somewhere while an armed burglar or murderer is in their home, waiting for 15 minutes just so that "Steven from Ohio" can tell them that home invasion is only covered in the Premium Plus package, and demanding a credit card number to upgrade as the poor person's life hangs in the balance.

You can't go to another policy company, because

A.) They probably have a monopoly in the area (like cable companies)
and
B.) The other police companies will exploit you just as badly, because they know no matter how bad the service gets, you need them

Health insurance has demonstrated this problem. Competition is useless, because all the companies know that the industry has people over a barrel, so they all basically just exploit everyone the same way. No company is going to break ranks and not do it, because then they'd be lowering their own profits, not just their competitors'.


This is why some goods just aren't conducive to sale on the private market.

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You a fan of Kurzweil or Toffler by any chance?

I'm afraid I'm only very vaguely familiar with the first of them, and not familiar with the second

[Nick Makiaveli]

When I talked about laws/jobs/crimes I was referring to what I forgot was a local initiative to have special laws for assaults on nurses.

As to roads, the US had private toll roads back in the day. The point I failed to make was that when the govt didn't build them, people made their own or made them as an investment. No that system wouldn't support what we have now, but then again who knows what would have developed if the govt hadn't stepped in.

For example, did you know it's illegal for FedEx or UPS to carry a letter? Sure they can transport a piece of paper with writing on it, but not if it's in an envelope. That's why you have to put it in that flat box that just looks like a large cardboard envelope if you want to "ship" it. Because legally it is a box, and that makes it a package, and they are allowed to deliver packages. Obviously it's because the PO can barely survive with little competition, so god forbid anyone tries to take over. Yes I know with out them many people would only get mail once a week etc, but really if it's important then overnight it.

As to taxes and govt budgets, you are talking to a employee who hasn't had a raise in 3 years due to that. Oh and my dept got passed over for "reclassification" while others didn't so now a HS degree and some clerical experience gets you the same pay scale I have now. I could actually go to work as a asst. to the chief's secretary and get bumped up a pay grade now. Gotta love IT. But yea I get ya on taxes moving in cycles etc. What's that old quote about democracies being doomed when the people realize they can vote them selves stuff?

Bush Jr. was a *****. As to the taxes on "rich people" a lot of BS gets tossed around. Buffet paying less than his secretary for example. True. If you mean he pays a lower RATE. Then again unless something horrible happens between now and when I give up looking for more deductions, I will pay a lower rate than Romney. But Romney will, of course, pay much more in actual taxes than I will. FTR it's looking like our tax bill on income will be around 8K. So I have a dog in this hunt. I don't have any actual income from investments (all retirement stuff) but I don't want to see the capital gains tax raised even if it would primarily affect wealthy people. Since many hundreds of years from now when I can retire, I don't want any investments I have that fall under that to get eaten up.

What I am trying to say is basing taxes on whether someone is rich etc is class warfare. That is wrong. Make it a flat tax and done. Add in a few standard deductions and move on. Wouldn't be rocket surgery to use the existing IRS to handle people with special circumstances. IE massive medical bills etc you apply for a audit and they approve or deny it. Doesn't have to be some 400K pages of crap and worry about who made more etc etc. Poor people wouldn't pay squat. The rest of us would.

Also, I didn't mean earlier or now that we should just scrap the current system and put up something different tomm. I do think we need to start working on sustainable changes now. Forget the environment, we will kill ourselves off before that gets to be a problem. Work on a sustainable govt first. Along the way we just might stop being stupid and realize we can be selfish and save the world. Once they lick the battery replacement issue, hell yea I want a electric car. Save me a ton in gas costs, and saving the world is a nice bonus!


**edit**
I was jumping around and just now noticed the bit about Ron Paul's logic saying the USAF is unconstitutional? I think I missed something. As to the State Parks, I think they should be handed over to a organization that will hold them as is in perpetuity. I forget the legal term, but it can be done. IE the Sierra Club would own the park legally, but couldn't develop it and even if they sold it, the new owners couldn't either. That way the land is safe, but the people paying for it would be the people who care about it.

Edited by Nick Makiaveli, 20 February 2012 - 04:06 PM.

[Watchit]

If you actually look at the flyers they link to in the article, "knowing the constitution" isn't even there as a "suspicious activity". RT just added that themselves. Seriously RT is full of crap.

[Catamount]

Nick Makiaveli, on 20 February 2012 - 04:02 PM, said:

When I talked about laws/jobs/crimes I was referring to what I forgot was a local initiative to have special laws for assaults on nurses.
As to roads, the US had private toll roads back in the day. The point I failed to make was that when the govt didn't build them, people made their own or made them as an investment. No that system wouldn't support what we have now, but then again who knows what would have developed if the govt hadn't stepped in.

Sorry for the delayed response, was busy.

You can already tell what a private road would be like. Since it's not funded through taxes, either you'd have to pay a toll at each one (imagine doing that for every street?!), or you'd pay the company a subscription, but then, there'd be multiple companies, so you'd have to pay multiple subscriptions, but that's a lot of manpower to enforce not allowing anyone on your road the moment they don't either hand you a $1, or show you their "subscription card". Today, you could fast-pass that with computers, but not for most of history, and you'd still have manpower problems (that's a much more complex system to maintain), plus the cost of building toll stations on basically ever road, plus you'd still have the problem that you'd have to subscribe to ever road provider over a pretty broad area.

Furthermore, it would be unfair, to consumers and other businesses, because businesses are on roads, so a customer would have to do business with a road provider to also do business with, say, a mechanic. How is that fair? That basically amounts to a private tax on me visiting a mechanic. That's at least as bad as any governmental system.

Okay, maybe it's possible that some magical system would evolve, and sure, if companies solved all these problems, and were more efficient than government, they'd have a system equal to or better than public roads, but, to borrow from Peter Hadfield, that's rather like saying that if the Rockefeller Center turned into a banana split, ice cream would run all over Fifth Avenue. Of course that's what would happen, and yes, it's technically possible, but do we have any evidence that it's likely? We don't.

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For example, did you know it's illegal for FedEx or UPS to carry a letter? Sure they can transport a piece of paper with writing on it, but not if it's in an envelope. That's why you have to put it in that flat box that just looks like a large cardboard envelope if you want to "ship" it. Because legally it is a box, and that makes it a package, and they are allowed to deliver packages. Obviously it's because the PO can barely survive with little competition, so god forbid anyone tries to take over. Yes I know with out them many people would only get mail once a week etc, but really if it's important then overnight it.

Actually, that's not the reasoning at all. The Post Office can compete with the private industry just fine; their parcel service is essentially superior in every respect (yes, I do know that; I send things out and to here on an almost daily basis, and I've used each carrier, sans DHL, dozens, if not hundreds of times). Their prices are better, their shipping is faster, they take better care of packages, and they deliver on Saturdays. This is in addition to the fact that USPS is often doing some of UPS/Fedex's work for them, because they can hand a letter to USPS to deliver to a PO Box (the private guys can carry letters, they just can't deliver them to PO boxes).

I'll tell you why the letter law is in place: there's an unequal cost/benefit for a company to deliver to certain areas. My house, for instance, costs the USPS a lot to deliver to. It's not profitable for them. With the monopoly lifted, what tends to happen is that private companies then go and suck up all the lucrative contracts, mailing where it's profitable, while leaving other places to rot. USPS would have to take in government funding to be able to afford to only deliver to the non-profitable areas not covered by private companies. Oh, sure, USPS could win some of the lucrative contracts too, but they'd only get some, and they'd have to take up all the non-lucrative ones.

So in essence, that tangible effect is that you'd be paying more taxes, so that UPS and Fedex could make bigger profits, in effect meaning you'd be paying taxes as a new subsidy for the private carriers. Sounds rather backwards, doesn't it? See how things can be more complicated than they appear on their face? That's why practice > theory.

Now, I'm not saying the monopoly is a perfect solution, or that there aren't other solutions, but the point is you're oversimplifying why this is done. The law is in place because postal service is a sticky issues that's very tough to manage effectively. It's not a simple matter of "everything would be the same without the laws; USPS just can't compete"; it's not nearly that simple.

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As to taxes and govt budgets, you are talking to a employee who hasn't had a raise in 3 years due to that. Oh and my dept got passed over for "reclassification" while others didn't so now a HS degree and some clerical experience gets you the same pay scale I have now. I could actually go to work as a asst. to the chief's secretary and get bumped up a pay grade now. Gotta love IT.

Wait, you're a public employee?

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But yea I get ya on taxes moving in cycles etc. What's that old quote about democracies being doomed when the people realize they can vote them selves stuff?

Don't people already do that?
I think that's the idea of democracy; we all vote ourselves stuff on other peoples' dime, which is why a majority rules system is important, and it's even more important to protect minority rights, but the latter only goes so far.

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What I am trying to say is basing taxes on whether someone is rich etc is class warfare. That is wrong. Make it a flat tax and done.

A.) There is no right and wrong, remember? Those are arbitrary, subjective concepts. The real question is, "how does society do its job best", which is a utilitarian question, and once that would revolve around giving the most people the most benefits. Technically, there right and wrong, they're just dependent on the meaning of the word, and the systematic view used, so you have to define what wrong means before you can use it meaningfully. In other words, you have to explain why something is "wrong".

B.) You do realize that making taxes a flat rate, if you did it honestly, would effectively make a more progress tax system than we have now?


There is absolutely precedent for taxing the rich more. You can use politically charged phrases like "class warfare", but what one chooses to call a principle is irrelevant, and the term is strictly for propaganda purposes, intended to slap the word "warfare", an inherently negative word, on a principle, so as to attack it without actually discussing it. What we call it is so irrelevant, that I could call it class chocolate ice cream , and it would make no difference to the discussion, except that now I've done the opposite with propaganda, and attached a positive term

So yeah, class chocolate ice cream ™, as I said, has plenty for precedent. Rich people get rich because of society, far more than off their own hard work or brilliance (60% of one, 40% of the other?). Afterall, most hard working, intelligent people in Guyana end up far worse off than even the average dumb, lazy person working a dead-end job here. Our bare-bottom is much higher than their upper average even, because we're an advanced society, where even being poor, and I mean genuinely poor, still nets more than being comparatively well off does in many nations, and not because of welfare (that plays a part, but welfare or no, I could live better on an $8/hour job, genuinely, with no other assistance than many people in many places).

So because the rich get rich off of society, or more specifically, off of society's investments, which people tend to make more and more usage of as they get higher and higher up on the economic ladder, they owe bigger returns on those investments.

At least, that's how it is in theory, but as I said, I care more about practice. I don't care if something is deemed "fair", under an arbitrary ethics system, I care about how society works under such systems.


Under systems of low government regulation, and high wealth stratification, society has always functioned worse. We tried that experiment twice in our history, and it lead to horrible human suffering, oligarchical control over government, lack of economic mobility or opportunity, lack of any significant social advancement, and both times, it ended in economic collapse, first in 1893, and then in 1929.

By contrast the most successful years, by far, coincided with a relatively flat social structure (with wealth focused in the middle), very high taxes on the rich, and hyper-investment in science, education and infrastructure.

Quote

Also, I didn't mean earlier or now that we should just scrap the current system and put up something different tomm. I do think we need to start working on sustainable changes now.

Where applicable, and tangibly beneficial, absolutely.

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Forget the environment, we will kill ourselves off before that gets to be a problem.

You're talking to a third year ecology major here. Unless we kill ourselves in the next 50 years, we're have problems aplenty (actually, technically climatic change and ecosystem damage have already caused problems for us, for instance, see Lobell et al 2011). EDIT: I can't insert a link there for some reason; here is the paper: http://www.sciencema...science.1204531

Besides, I'm a utilitarian. I don't care what species is subject to suffering; suffering in any sentient species is "wrong", if you will, or put in better terms, an intrinsically inferior state to one in which said suffering is not occurring (you know how I hate the terms "right" and "wrong", unless they're very narrowly defined).
So frankly, I think the slow death of thousands of highly sentient species is a rather reprehensible situation, and I find the position would be one that would be difficult to deal with in any ethical system that isn't arbitrarily human-centric.

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Along the way we just might stop being stupid and realize we can be selfish and save the world. Once they lick the battery replacement issue, hell yea I want a electric car. Save me a ton in gas costs, and saving the world is a nice bonus!

As has been said, some day, human individuals and groups of all levels will evolve to a point of self-regulation without the need for external laws. Of that I have no doubt.
There is no evidence, however, that we are capable of such a system today, and such systems have tangibly failed in our very recent past. I do agree on one point, however: We should move toward such a system. Fostering, not just personal responsibility, but logic and scientific reasoning, emphasis on education and awareness, intellectual flexibility, altruism, and a forward-looking attitude, as inherent qualities to our species, at all levels of organization, from the individual, to the global (and in time, interstellar, intergalactic?) society, will eventually, slowly, but inevitably, allow us to reach a point when humans are not only free, but use that freedom to the overall betterment of the universe.

Edited by Catamount, 23 February 2012 - 11:36 AM.

[Catamount]

Quote

I was jumping around and just now noticed the bit about Ron Paul's logic saying the USAF is unconstitutional? I think I missed something.

Ron Paul is a strict constructionist, who believes that the only powers of government are those strictly outlined in the Constitution, and denies the implied powers that were a great part of the very reason the Constitution was authored.


So look at powers on Congress for a moment


So, military:

To "Raise"/"Maintain" basically means to appropriate funds for, obviously.

Can Congress raise and maintain an army? Yep, it says so right there.

Can Congress raise and maintain a navy? Yep, it says so, right there.

Can Congress raise and maintain a United States air force? Nope, there is no power enumerated for that.

You could argue that "air force" would fall under the army clause as general military, but "navy" is given its own enumerated power, and the USAF is not part of the Army; they are their own independent branch of the US Military. The USAAF would have been tenuous at best, but raising and maintaining the USAF is clearly not explicitly enumerated as a power of Congress in our 1787 document here.
Ron Paul, again, does not believe in powers outside of those explicitly enumerated.

Ergo, the USAF is illegal, according to Ron Paul.

So is NASA (say bye to half of our consumer technologies and a good chunk of our research). So is the National Science Foundation (say bye to most of our scientific research left after NASA dies). DARPA is questionable at best (say bye to whatever scientific research was left after the NSF went away). You know, I don't think it's intentional on Paul's part, but there's an irony here, that the guy who denies that basic governing science of climatology, and evolution, would quickly do away with all our scientific research, after he was done making the departments of Interior and Education vanish into thin air (offering absolutely no replacement for their functions).

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As to the State Parks, I think they should be handed over to a organization that will hold them as is in perpetuity. I forget the legal term, but it can be done. IE the Sierra Club would own the park legally, but couldn't develop it and even if they sold it, the new owners couldn't either. That way the land is safe, but the people paying for it would be the people who care about it.

Here and elsewhere, there seems to be three fundamental premises on which you operate, and I do not believe that their are either axiomal, or logically follow from anything discussed here.

Namely, your fundamental premises seem to be:

Premise 1.) All government is bad, automatically. Any function done by the public, even just managing a space program, or a park, is bad, no matter what

Premise 2.) If you eliminate any function from government, those functions will automatically be picked up by a private entity

Premise 3.) Said private entity from premise two would necessarily do an equal or better job than any public entity would or could

Conclusion: Any and all government should be eliminated


The first is subjective; it can neither be supported, nor refuted, on any objective grounds which I'm aware of. Public ventures have been tangibly good and bad alike, so there's no evidence of any intrinsically beneficial or detrimental nature to them.


The last two are simply contrary to all evidence. The second has already been discussed to an extent. There is no evidence that any function not carried by government will otherwise be carried out. Many things didn't happen until government took them on, and stopped happening when government stopped doing them. There is also no evidence that any function dropped by government would be done better even if it was picked up by any business or NGO. Take NASA, for instance. NASA's budget has never exceeded the operating income of many single, large tech companies (for instance, Apple), and for most of their history, they've had less money annually than even the quarterly money for operation of said companies, yet NASA has returned more science, and more practical technology than ANY entity in the history of our nation, including any private entity.

So here's what it boils down to: why shouldn't government do these things? It's clear we need laws, because people misbehave right now without them, but what about public services? One can't demonstrate they'd be done without government, let alone done equally well or better, so why shouldn't government do them?

Edited by Catamount, 23 February 2012 - 11:29 AM.

[Nick Makiaveli]

**edit** Sorry for taking 6 months to respond. Life and all that. Kept jumping in to check the news and popped back out. **edit**

Well unless Ron Paul has said flat out it is illegal and needs to be disbanded forthwith, I think it's a stretch to imply he did. Heck, if he's right, then he's right and it is illegal. So obviously we need an amendment to cover future technologies and done.

As to the government being bad, most things they do, they do poorly. Remember I work for a metro govt. It's like a baloney factory, you never want to eat baloney again.

As to the private sector picking stuff up, if there is a need for it, people will pay and therefore someone will do it. Mail for example. I doubt people in the boonies would have 6 day a week service from a private company unless they paid extra for it. So they pick up the mail in town like at a PO Box. Would be as normal as what we have today if that is the way the world worked.

NASA has done wonderful things. Again, there are private ventures looking to get into space and while they are piggyback on NASA developed technology, again if there was a need/desire to go into space, people would go there. Richard *something* of Virgin.....he is big on getting into space. I think he would be working on it even without NASA. Again, if the world was completely different, it would be normal.

Quote follows (I'm tired so taking the lazy way out)
So here's what it boils down to: why shouldn't government do these things? It's clear we need laws, because people misbehave right now without them, but what about public services? One can't demonstrate they'd be done without government, let alone done equally well or better, so why shouldn't government do them?
/quote

The only way I can demonstrate is to create a society in which these things are given a chance to develop. But here goes...did the Wright brothers have government funding? Private toll roads did exist and did so in the US. Point being, many things we take for granted today came directly from govt. investment in research. Others developed because someone saw a need and filled it. Can you honestly say that if the PO went bankrupt and for some reason the govt said we're done, that private companies wouldn't jump in?

Also, you do know private companies do this kind of work all the time? The city where I live has outsourced the Juvenile Booking to a private company. The sheriff runs the adult side. (this is a Metro area FTR). The city tow-in lot is being outsourced on March 1. CCA is a huge private prison company. Isn't most highway paving and such done by private companies? Point being, there is money to be made, so companies sprung up to get a share. I think this would apply whether the govt had traditionally done this or not.

Edited by Nick Makiaveli, 26 February 2012 - 05:30 PM.

[Catamount]

Nick, your point of view has the same problem as before, I think: You're theorizing from your armchair about how a hypothetical society should work, offering statements often directly contradicted by all evidence.

Quote

As to the government being bad, most things they do, they do poorly. Remember I work for a metro govt. It's like a baloney factory, you never want to eat baloney again.

Since 1958, NASA has filed 6600 patents. IBM, a larger entity, with more money to work with, has filed only ~5800 in twice that amount of time, and IBM holds the record for the private sector. NASA also doesn't solely develop and sell technology like IBM; this is a secondary function to space exploration, and they still outstrip IBM with less money!

I'm sorry, but you've offered no evidence that "most" of what government does is done poorly, and examples to the contrary are easy to find. NASA, for example, is more efficient than any private entity in history. It's not just NASA either. The NSF does a very efficient job too; so does DARPA. These agencies give us technologies and science that it never even occurred to the private sector to pursue, and while you rag on the PO, you overlook the fact that they give better service for less money, even where they do compete with the private sector (parcels). I know; I use UPS and USPS weekly, and there's no contest in pricing or services.


Furthermore, government performs many roles better for reasons outside of efficiency. Many private entities are efficient, but it's at the expense of society or their own customers, because corporations aren't out for society's benefit like society itself is.

If I had a dollar for every time the private sector was responsible for nearly bringing society to its knees just in US history alone... well I'd have like $5, but still. This idea that every time a government touches something, society runs worse, while it runs better every time a private entity touches it is just pure and utter fallacy.

Quote

NASA has done wonderful things. Again, there are private ventures looking to get into space and while they are piggyback on NASA developed technology, again if there was a need/desire to go into space, people would go there. Richard *something* of Virgin.....he is big on getting into space. I think he would be working on it even without NASA. Again, if the world was completely different, it would be normal.

Except that it's taken the private sector years to catch up to where NASA is, and they still haven't. All the evidence suggests that were it not for NASA, we'd have taken longer to get into space than we did, and so our space-based technologies would be less advanced.

Quote

As to the private sector picking stuff up, if there is a need for it, people will pay and therefore someone will do it.

Again, maybe in some hypothetical society that doesn't really exist, but history contradicts you here. Right now, in the research area, there are many areas of technology completely stagnating in the private sector that are only being furthered by either NASA or DARPA.

I think you forget how invention works. Things get invented because there's a need to invent them, but even if society doesn't have a pressing need, society can still benefit. Society didn't need the Internet; it came about because smaller groups needed the technology, and uses for it were discovered.


Right now, there are countless technologies that exist ONLY because a group like NASA, or the military needed it. Society had no reason to pursue those avenues previously, but now we enjoy many benefits from those technologies. They save lives, they make society run better, they add convenience, and there's no evidence we'd have them without government. Oh, sure, some of them would have come along, eventually, but would all of them be here as soon? Obvious the answer is no, because the private sector was making no effort to pursue these technologies.


That's why the private sector took so long getting into space. Do you think this is some kind of computer game where we can look ahead 20 years and say "Aww, yeah, I want global communication and weather forecasting satellites! Let's do the research to get there!". No, it isn't. We had no idea what the potential for space was, and there was no commercial reason to go there. We didn't discover commercial reasons to go into space until we were already there.

Quote

The only way I can demonstrate is to create a society in which these things are given a chance to develop. But here goes...did the Wright brothers have government funding? Private toll roads did exist and did so in the US. Point being, many things we take for granted today came directly from govt. investment in research. Others developed because someone saw a need and filled it. Can you honestly say that if the PO went bankrupt and for some reason the govt said we're done, that private companies wouldn't jump in?

But we have essentially tried such a societal setup, twice. It ended up in disaster both times. Also, you either didn't mention the stated problem that's always existed with private carriers in mail, namely that they cherry pick lucrative contracts and leave non-lucrative contracts to rot, leaving people in less densely populated places (a good chunk of the US) to rot without service.


This is why we discussed that some goods and services just do not get handled by the private sector well. That model just does not handle them well, plain and simple.


Again, your problem is that you just assume the private sector would automatically do every beneficial job done by government, better, if government didn't do it.

I'm sorry Nick, I don't care how well that works out in your head, the evidence just isn't there. In fact, the evidence is exactly to the contrary.

I know you just assume all public ventures are automatically evil, and should automatically all be dismantled, because they're intrinsically bad, and harm society to have them, but the corporeal world just doesn't work like that.

I'm sorry, but at the end of the day "we should just get rid of everything public, because it's public" isn't an argument. Public programs benefit us, and there's no reason to abolish things that benefit us.

Quote

Also, you do know private companies do this kind of work all the time? The city where I live has outsourced the Juvenile Booking to a private company. The sheriff runs the adult side. (this is a Metro area FTR). The city tow-in lot is being outsourced on March 1. CCA is a huge private prison company. Isn't most highway paving and such done by private companies? Point being, there is money to be made, so companies sprung up to get a share. I think this would apply whether the govt had traditionally done this or not.

Except that you forget that it's still the public who pays for it. Outsourced public work is still public work.

Besides, you're not suggesting having a few things turned over to private industry; you want no government, despite being unable to offer any evidence that the private sector would pick up all government functions that are beneficial, let alone that they'd do as well (which isn't a slight against you; that evidence frankly just doesn't exist, because the evidence says the exact opposite).

Quote

Well unless Ron Paul has said flat out it is illegal and needs to be disbanded forthwith, I think it's a stretch to imply he did. Heck, if he's right, then he's right and it is illegal. So obviously we need an amendment to cover future technologies and done.

I saved this for last, because it's on a different topic.

First, Ron Paul doesn't need to explicitly say it; it follows right from his own stated logic.

More importantly, he's not right, because the government is not limited to a narrow interpretation of enumerated powers. They never have been, since the Constitution was implemented, and they never will be. That is just how our system of laws works.


Lastly, again, evidence contradicts you here, because the system you describe is EXACTLY the system we had under the Articles of Confederation. What happened was that every time a new problem came up, it required a huge majority and a convoluted process to fix it, and so this system you suggest nearly tore the nation apart. We'd have to sign in dozens of new Constitutional Amendments to this system, and at the end of the day, they'd just end up granting the same powers anyways. What advantage does that system confer over just letting the people decide? Do you have that little faith in Democracy?

Moreover, the system you suggest concentrates power even MORE, not less, because it means that every time a new problem comes up, the decision to create a new amendment to fix it can be shot down by a small minority of the US, by way of the process of ratifying amendments. Why would you want to concentrate power more, make the system less democratic, and have a few wield power over the many, by making it so that only the few who didn't want new governmental roles/powers could override the majority?



I don't care who makes society run, because, as I'm sure you know and I've said many times: I just care that society runs. As far as I'm concerned, suggesting that anything public is bad because it's public is about tantamount to me saying my Geography professor is bad because she has brown hair; it's irrelevant to the point of whether she teaches well, and there's nothing demonstrable about having brown hair that intrinsically makes her less able to teach. On the same token, there's nothing about a public venture being a public venture that makes in unable to work, that's been demonstrated.



Also, as a final point, you keep saying that in many cases, there's no evidence specifically answering the challenges I've offered, but that if we just made society into some sort of anarchist construct, suddenly everything would just work great, but the problem is that that's just not a falsifiable claim (aside from the fact that we HAVE tried a significant portion of what you've suggested, and it's caused disaster).

I mean, isn't that claim kind of like me claiming that if everyone in the US stood on their heads for ten years, that money and skittles would rain from the sky?

I understand what you're saying, you want to give this setup a try, and you think it'd work great, but look at history here, and look at our society today: There are just many cases where government has done things that every bit of information we have says the private sector would not have done as well, or at all, in absence of government.

Sure, there are places where government's role should be reduced or eliminated, but just reflexively hating all government, and thinking that the public should never, ever, undertake any action, under any model besides the free market, under any circumstances... I mean, isn't that kind of extreme, especially given how well some public ventures have worked out? If government's doing it well, and there's no evidence the private sector would do better, the logical course of action would seem to be to not dismantle a well-working system

(and just so we're clear on how utilitarian I am, if you can show me evidence that skittles and money will pour from the sky, I must just suggest standing on our heads )

Edited by Catamount, 27 February 2012 - 05:25 AM.

[Nick Makiaveli]

Frigging forum can't count and Word is fubaring my post

Ok try again...




screw it. gone over it line by line, did a search for number of tags etc and it's right, the forum is wrong, so I'm done.

Edited by Nick Makiaveli, 27 February 2012 - 03:15 PM.

[Catamount]

Nick Makiaveli, on 27 February 2012 - 03:05 PM, said:

Frigging forum can't count and Word is fubaring my post

Ok try again...




screw it. gone over it line by line, did a search for number of tags etc and it's right, the forum is wrong, so I'm done.

if you're getting the quote tag error; split the post up; it's basically the forum's way of telling you you exceed the word count limit

[Trogusaur]

I'm surprised you guys haven't demanded payment for every essay response you write!

My thoughts are that no matter what happens, the people are no longer the majority. Voice is measured in dollar bills nowadays, and that is how it will continue to be. Note how Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News, for example. As bigoted and ridiculous that news station's statements are, it nevertheless generates an enormous impact on how every person perceives politics. Stations like Fox bring out the vocals from either parties, liberal and conservative alike, and cause many to make irrational conclusions just to show the other "side" to be false. In this way, Fox (and by extension, Murdoch) has found a way to widen the gap between ideals and influence Americans of all upbringings think in streamlined, narrow-minded ways. How was this all achieved? Money. Lots of it.

Note how Congress currently has a 10% approval rating. How on earth did those buffoons get into office in the first place, you ask? It certainly wasn't us. Perhaps it was the millions of dollars each puts into campaigns, including propaganda, negative ads, and under the counter PACs? With all the financial support from other members, the party-indoctrinated caste can afford to have a voice, unlike the rational, true middle class politicians who are never heard.

Regardless, it is a natural thing for things to go from a state of order to one of disorder. This idea is normally applied to physics, but it also holds true here. Every nation in the position of power in the past has fallen or slumped off the #1 spot for an enormous variety of reasons, but they nevertheless have fallen, one by one. America is no exception. I am willing to bet that as things progress in this nation, things will continue to get much worse. Not to be a negative Nancy, but the gap between the rich and poor has been widening since day 1 of the United States of America. The system initially put in place, as all others in other nations, was not perfect, and fell too easily exploitable to those in power. Contrary to popular belief, there never was an equal playing field here, and there certainly never will be.

However, I believe that hope is not yet lost. Being a Christian, I view all of this political turmoil with eyes of fascination. Look at all the social reform going on in America! Gender roles are being reversed, gay marriage (really don't feel like discussing, just noting this) is that much closer to being realized, and the legal system is now challenging laws ordained by biblical doctrine. Never before has a society deemed it acceptable to kill an infant before childbirth and (the nation) been allowed to exist as long as it has. Never before have women played such a prominent role in a huge society such as ours (note: again, this is merely an observation, by no means am I saying it is a bad thing). Never before has America allowed its rulers to detain a person without Habeas Corpus so openly (looking at you Military Commissions Act), or censored intellectual property so vehemently (SOPA was just a diversion from his big brother, ACTA, which was passed by the UN five years ago anyway. Not only does it impose the same restrictions, it also prevents the sale of certain medicines).

Yet another war has broken out between Israel and a Muslim country, and this time nuclear power is involved. Furthermore, America has decided it wants no part in assisting our allies, and I would not be surprised if we outright turned on them in the near future. In Jerusalem, there is talk of an effort to rebuild the Holy Temple! These are truly revolutionary times for society as a whole, and as time progresses, these changes are also fulfilling many prophecies found in Scripture. Revelation may not be quite as far away as one would expect.

Well, that is my take on what is going on in today's world. Although a bit off-topic from what those above me posted, this entire thread changes topic each page. Feel free to comment on (or butcher) what I have said here, and I appreciate if anyone took the time to hear me out

Edited by Lord Trogus, 28 February 2012 - 09:57 AM.

[Catamount]

Lord Torgus, if you're suggesting that America has lost is position as the world's sole "superpower", then I think we crossed that bridge about a decade ago. We still have the biggest military, but that doesn't mean what it used to, and we're socially less advanced than most of our peer nations, in many respects. We have a higher wealth disparity, and a burgeoning poor that's resulted in plenty of hardship and suffering, and given us nothing in return. Businesses are getting more powerful, and having more say in our nation. In addition, we're slumping on the environment. Species are dying, biodiversity is falling apart, and it's affecting sentient species the world over, human and non-human alike.
I think the US has pretty much faded to the background as just another western nation. We threw our special place in history to the wind doing exact what Nick is suggesting, not to rag on him, but we through social investment to the wind as a society, and just assumed people would pick up the slack privately; instead our society rotted, because we've spent three decades thinking it's evil for society to do anything as a society (read: as the public), because this "everything public is bad" approach has basically driven our society into the ground.

We're just another western nation, no longer special, except that we're now a more troubled western nation than our peers, with a society that tangibly functions vastly worse, in most respects. Oh, sure, civil libertarianism has remained strong, and kudos to us for that; it's the one thing we have over other nations. However, we've treated our society as a dichotomy, between "overbearing government with no bounds" (like Europe), and "NO government/public ventures of any kind". We had the rare chance to have our cake and eat it, to have the liberties that make America such a free and competitive place for the people, and to have all the social advancement in other nations, by creating a system of high wages and great public services that has worked out so well in many nations (look at Australia, for instance! MY GOD, that nations runs well!). Instead, we embraced the first half of such a great system, and eschewed the second half, so we have all the liberties from society, but none of the functioning of society, because Koch et al have convinced us that all laws and public ventures are bad, and that corporate profits should trump all other concerns. In short, they've convinced us that the needs of the few, outweight the needs of the many, pushed my Murdoch et al (who have now just been brought up on yet MORE criminal charges) as a relentless message that has pervaded all levels of our now-dysfunctional society. "Culture War" they call it.


Culture War, however, is much more than just attacking the very notion of society; it's attacking everyone who might disagree with them, and point out the flaws in the system they promote, who might, as I do, judge the issue through empiricism and utilitarianism. So the "Culture War" now extends to scientists, ever the thorn in the side of oligarchs and oppressors who rule by ideological oppression. That's why, according to these people, "all scientists are corrupt grant whores pushing the left wing agenda of the 'academic elite'" ("except when they agree with us"!). Fought on the battlefields of climate change and evolution, the right-wing attack items of choice (now that smoking and ozone depletion are no longer options for them), they summon armies of loud-mouth known-nothings to relentlessly distort these areas of science, along with smaller-scale attacks on everything from ecology to vaccinations, as a broad war on science.

These are well-chosen battlegrounds. Climate change and general ecology undermines propertarianism (since I can now destroy your property from affar), evolutionary science is seen as a deterministic attack on the particular brand of extreme religion peddled by these people (and frankly, it is, because the logic cuts down their own logic), vaccinations are a matter of public trust in the accomplishments of science; the areas of science they attack are no accidents.
And it's not just science, this war extends to all forms of intellectualism and professionalism, which are branded evil, corrupt, and part of a giant liberal conspiracy, to which they offer "family values" and folksy "common sense" as alternatives.

Basically, one of the biggest pillars of Culture War is to attack “all the people who know stuff”, and intellectualism in general. Isaac Asimov once described it thus:

Quote

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

The whole point is to undermine any grounds on which one can object to the extreme ideology they push.



So yes, our society is falling part, and while I've got no love for either political side, our tangible problems, today, pretty much just stem from one side, since it's vastly more vocal and extreme than the other.




Consider this, though, Torgus:


Even as our nations falls off in many respects relative to the rest of the world, things are still better than they've ever been, in most respects.

Our wealth disparity and oligarchical control may be objectionalble, but they pale in comparison to the Guilded Age. Gender and racial equality are better than they've ever been. And while our wealth disparity is worse than it was in the 1960s, it's still better than it was for the entire 19th century, or pretty much any time since the New Deal. In addition, Gay Rights show more than a simply liberties movement, it shows a society that, despite the poisonous efforts of Culture War, is still willing to abandon superstition and illogicalness, and irrationality, to logically think out the best course of action, to decide that based on reason, and evidence. "Nature does it in virtually every intelligent species (it's even socially central to many species), and it causes no demontsrable social harm" we say "so why not?". We've also shot down creationism in the classroom, pretty much permanently. On average, despite Culture War's objections to "liberal academia", we are also more educated than ever before. And while we inflict gross harm upon our environment, to everyone's detriment, we take stronger efforts than ever before to address it.


Even as the rest of the industrialized world outruns the United States in most societal respects, things are still looking up here, overall. Our wealth dispartity is a hickup, not a trend. Go back in history, and we've still progressed hugely, progress even our current problems have essentially no chance of undoing.


So troubles we may have, but the United States, and even moreso much of the rest of the world, are still on an inexorable trend towards progress.

Edited by Catamount, 28 February 2012 - 10:08 AM.

[GaussDragon]

I may re-enter this debate but there's a lot of points to address. In the meantime, we can all have fun with this http://www.nytimes.c...hoices=cvlk08p0

[Coconut]

Said by someone who is smarter than I am:

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it. You don't multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn't first take from somebody else. Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don't have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don't get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

[Nick Makiaveli]

Coconut, on 01 March 2012 - 12:38 PM, said:

Said by someone who is smarter than I am:

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it. You don't multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn't first take from somebody else. Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don't have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don't get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Yea what he said.

As to the novel I couldn't get to take, I did break it up and one section kept getting the too many tags error, even though it was like two short paragraphs and I dissected it for errors.

Long story made short.

@Catamount Your argument that I can't prove things would be better etc is just as invalid as me saying it would be. Neither of us has seen our ideas implemented in a true fashion. Even in the bad old days when Ayn Rand's ideas seemed to be the order of the day, govt still got involved, people hadn't been raised to live in that society, so it was the Old Guard trying New Ideas.

Not saying we would ever have a clean slate to work with. Just that we should work slowly toward people being responsible for themselves, and away from the govt taking over everything. Just like your wild notion that Ron Paul wants to wipe out the AF. Let's say it is illegal. Then the solution is obviously to amend the Constitution to make it legal. No need for a massive change etc. In the same way I am not advocating stopping Welfare in fell swoop.

Coconut's post is very true. Taxes, no matter how needed, are still a burden on those who work, and a unearned boon to those who don't. I have no issue with helping those who need it, but any system will be gamed by criminals. Yes that means I think that people who sit on their butts and collect welfare since they don't want to work are criminals. Leeches for damn sure. Granted, today's economy makes it hard to change, and so again, not saying to make drastic and immediate changes.

Greece. The whole Euro Zone for that matter. That will be us if things don't change. The only other option is to keep increasing taxes, which has to stop at some point. I think we've seen the stimulus didn't exactly work, so taxing more will not stimulate the economy. Even if it did, then we would either have to tax the golden goose to death or borrow the money. Since we never pay it back, that just increases the interest load which means we need more revenue.

As to Asimov's quote. He's right. Yet both sides like to claim the intellectual high ground as a basis for being right. The difference between the Right and the Left is the Right says it proves that people should take care of themselves and if they can't then they have to rely on the charity of others. The Left says it proves that they are responsible to make sure people are taken care of, and thus it is their moral imperative to force others to help the needy.

I don't believe this country was founded so that people who declare themselves smart would have the right to tell other people what to do.

[CrashWizard]

The more I hear about how powerful the government wants to be; the more I'm glad my parents introduced me to the prop-comic Gallagher when I was young.

Times are changing, but there's still hope.

Fight on, fellow Mech Warriors!

[Catamount]

Alright, megapost coming...

Coconut, on 01 March 2012 - 12:38 PM, said:

Said by someone who is smarter than I am:
You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it. You don't multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn't first take from somebody else. Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don't have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don't get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Well let's go through that, line by line:

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You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it.

Well since no one is actually suggesting this, I guess that's not a problem

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You don't multiply wealth by dividing it.

Of course you do! We've been doing it for CENTURIES! It's called a positive sum game, welcome to modern society.

The entire birth of modern society was going from all the wealth and power being concentrated into a tiny group, while the vast majority of society's potential talent went to waste, to a system which produced a more flatter social structure and a move away from monarchs and oligarchs, and after more than a thousand years of no progress under the former system and ten thousand years of little progress before that, what has been the result of taking all the king's wealth and power? Now we ALL live better than those kings!

This system, which this quote claims doesn't work, has caused more human progress in the past 500 years, than was seen in all of the last 15,000 years prior. Even in modern society, we've functioned best with high taxes on the rich, and high public spending on investment in projects for society. That approach coincided with the most successful decades in American history. We functioned WORSE by having highly stratified wealth, and highly deregulated business, creating, not only a system in which more people were tangibly worse off, but a system that collapsed on itself, twice.

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Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn't first take from somebody else.

Okay, that's rather axiomal, and not exactly universally bad, since society's have always tangibly functioned that way since inception, and the system has always worked (whereas a system without this feature has never worked).

Let's see how that impacts society.

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Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving.

That's not true. If one only thinks in terms of the individual, as one side of our political discourse always insists on doing, then the logic holds.

But we aren't a collection of disparate individuals, we're an interconnected society. Whoever uttered this quote apparently didn't understand that. In the real world, where we are part of this society, money given out to the disadvantaged isn't an act of mercy, forced upon the rich for the benefit of the poor. Anyone who frames it like this doesn't understand how society works.
What it is is an investment, made to ensure opportunity, and enable economic mobility, and in turn, better contributions to society. So what does the "working" man "receive"? Well said system is what's responsible for giving him a society that functions so well in the first place. Were it not for that system, his society wouldn't work anywhere near as well, and that harms him as much as anyone. Remember, we're all richer than medieval kings; that means the descendents of those kings, even no longer as royalty, STILL live better than they otherwise would have, because that wealth is now being used to maximize the contribution being made by the maximum number of people.

So not only does our person "receive", but ultimately he gets back far more than he gave up (or put more accurately, that sector of society gets back more than it gives up). Again, welcome to positive sum games.

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The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don't have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don't get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Hmm, that would be a tragedy, but since that's never been the result of our system, I'm not sure what the point of saying it is.

In fact, the quote is wrong here. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for a global flood of molten chocolate to sweep over the countryside, drowning everyone is sweet, scalding, gooey goodness, and that's been the observed result of our system just as many times as what's being suggested here: 0.

Nick Makiaveli, on 02 March 2012 - 07:17 AM, said:

@Catamount Your argument that I can't prove things would be better etc is just as invalid as me saying it would be. Neither of us has seen our ideas implemented in a true fashion.

That's not true.

I've seen an inexorable trend towards "my ideas", if you will, in many places, and every time a society implements what I suggest, it runs tangibly better (a fact I can't take can't take credit for; they're not really my ideas).

Those who propose my way of running society are completely backed by the empirical evidence of history that society tangibly runs better, when society operates on the principles we outline, and frankly, runs tangibly worse when they move towards the principles you outline.


It's not just history, either. Look at our peer nations. Look at Australia right now. By your standard, Australia is a socialist cesspit, with $14/hour minimum wage, and government allowances for college students (cold cash, every month, no strings attached), and universe health care. You know what? Australia runs GREAT!

In EVERY SINGLE TANGIBLE RESPECT that I can possibly think of, Australia runs better, economically, than the United States. More people have greater opportunity and a better standard of living here (since only a tiny, tiny fraction of our populace has their quality of living), and their system is presently running much more smoothly than our system, to the extent that their economy is actually growing right now, amidst the recession. There is no way in which people, on average, are better here, than there, in an economic sense.


Contrary to what you're asserting, I don't have a "complete" or "true" set of ideas, because I don't have all the answers, and I don't claim to. What I do have is evidence that when society's trend in a certain direction, the tangible societal effects trend towards greater benefit for more people. Likewise, when society trends away, more people tangibly end up worse off.

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Coconut's post is very true. Taxes, no matter how needed, are still a burden on those who work, and a unearned boon to those who don't.

Whether it's "unearned" is a subjective argument. I would argue that if such economic opportunity is usually utilized by the poor for economic mobility, used an as investment to allow them and their children to make greater economic contributions (because let's face it, serfs just aren't that useful), that they ARE absolutely earning the right to that investment by society.

But it's neither here nor there.

The real question is: are they a burden no those who work, ultimately? Well if they were, that would mean the net effect of all taxes would be a bad one on society. Evidence does not support you here, Nick. Our own history and our peer nations show that society runs better, not worse, under a more progressive economic system, and not just a little better, either. So taxes, and redistributive policies in general, are not a ultimately burden, because they return more than they take from society.

As I said, I have no absolute notion of a perfectly optimal set of solutions economically, so I can't say where such a system is best-balanced, or at what point you go too far with taxation and redistribution, a point that no doubt exists, BUT, as society's trend towards that system, the benefits trend upward.

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I have no issue with helping those who need it, but any system will be gamed by criminals. Yes that means I think that people who sit on their butts and collect welfare since they don't want to work are criminals. Leeches for damn sure.

They are criminals. They're breaching the social contract of society giving them that money, by not using it as an investment and offering returns (by going and becoming productive), but as you say, any system will be gamed by criminals, regardless of what it is and who runs it.

Edited by Catamount, 14 March 2012 - 07:21 AM.