Re: Are liberals dumber than conservatives?
royls_at_telus.net
Date: 08/24/04
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Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 22:20:21 GMT
On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 19:20:30 GMT, bw@barrk.net (BlackWater) wrote:
>On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 18:33:28 GMT, royls@telus.net wrote:
>
>>On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 11:26:11 GMT, bw@barrk.net (BlackWater) wrote:
>>
>>>On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 01:44:39 GMT, "sinister" <sinister@nospam.invalid>
>>>wrote:
>>>
>>>>E.g. I'm a liberal,
>>>>and I'd spend less because I'd stop throwing so many greenbacks down the
>>>>military rathole.
>>>
>>> It's not a 'rathole' IF it puts an end to people dropping
>>> airliners and such on our heads.
>>
>>Does it look likely to do that? Or to provoke more of it?
>>
>>> We've been dumping "free money" on the poorest 10% for
>>> decades now and their situation has only become WORSE.
>>> Now THERE was a waste.
>>
>>We have dumped far more free money on the richest 1%, and the waste
>>was even more egregious.
>
> Really now ?
Yes.
> Open the blinds and take a look around. You live in the
> #1 richest, most powerful, most all-around libertine
> nation on earth - nirvana for industry and finance alike.
> Seems that top 1% have been busy little beavers after all ...
Nonsense. It's the productive who have been busy, not the rich.
>>At least the poor spent most of the dough on
>>food, clothing and shelter.
>
> Beer, heroin, gambling and crack ... while their children
> starve in squalor.
Some have, of course, and I don't defend giving money to the poor for
doing nothing any more than to the rich. But the fact is, the rich
also squander a lot of the money society gives them for doing nothing,
and they get much more of it. The main difference is that their
children starve because they are anorexic, not because their parents
blew all their money at the track.
>>The rich spent it on ever more and better
>>ways to rob the rest of us.
>
> They're not robbing anybody.
They have government to do that part for them.
>You're just mad because
> they're more clever with a dollar than you are.
I know some of them, and they are generally "clever with a dollar,"
but that's not what I'm mad about. I object to the fact that the
system rewards their cleverness without that cleverness having to
translate into any contribution to society. IOW, it's the fact that
their cleverness is bent towards being successful parasites, con-men,
grafters and especially rentiers that bothers me.
>>>Yea ... we don't
>>> need no stinkin' employers - the govt can just
>>> hand out more "free money", right ?
>>
>>Ah, don't look now, but if the richest 1% weren't being given so much
>>more free money than the poorest 10%, the productive 89% in the middle
>>might be better able to employ each other.
>
> Medium-sized businesses are OK so far as they go, but
> there's an economy of scale associated with BIG biz,
> not to mention the international clout that comes with
> "bigness".
Big business wouldn't have to be owned by the idle rich if the
productive weren't being robbed to subsidize them.
> So your plan is to shoot the "rich" and divvy up their
> assets amongst a larger number of not-quite-so-rich ?
No. Just stop giving them money in return for no contribution.
> Hmmm ... what happens when one of the not-quite-so
> types starts to do better than the others ? Shoot them
> as well ?
It's not the fact that some people have more -- even a lot more --
than others, but rather that they continue to _get_ so much more (and
so much of it tax-free or tax-advantaged) in return for no
contribution whatsoever. I have no objection to the rich, as long as
their income is commensurate with their contributions to production,
and not just their privilege of pocketing economic rents.
>>After all, farmers don't
>>need landowners in order to grow crops; they just need the land and
>>people who want to buy the food they grow.
>
> The land BELONGS to somebody -
Uh, and exactly how did it come to "belong" to them, hmmm? They
certainly didn't produce it. But the only way to rightfully own
something is by producing it, or by trading consensually for what
someone else produced. As land and natural resources can _never_ be
produced by human labor, there is no way for anyone ever to acquire
rightful ownership of them.
> unless you plan to shoot
> all land-owners too and divvy up the acreage.
Why would we have to shoot the landowners to free the land from their
control, unless they insisted on maintaining the system of plunder
they currently benefit by? We didn't have to shoot the slave owners
to free the slaves from their control. Well, not all that many of
them, anyway...
And as to divvying up the acreage, that would make about as much
sense, and represent about as much progress, as divvying up the
slaves.
>They recently
> did that in Zimbabwe.
Right. The white landowners refused to give up their privileges in
favor of justice, with the predictable result. History proves over
and over again that the privileged prefer to perish in blood and
flame, and watch their children slaughtered before their eyes, rather
than give up being the beneficiaries of injustice.
>It's a total disaster now.
Whereas before, it was only a disaster for the non-landowners...
>Instead
> of an economy with a spine, it's now an economy of small
> little jellyfish being crushed under their own weight.
It is certainly a disaster, from which people like you will
unfortunately draw the exactly wrong lesson.
>>Same with all other
>>producers and the natural resources they need to be productive. The
>>rich don't do anything to create those resources, and they don't buy
>>much of the products.
>
> a) They often OWN the land the resources come from.
But neither they nor any previous owner _produced_ that land or those
resources. Therefore they do not rightly own them. Their ownership
of the land and resources is a government-created privilege, like
owning slaves.
> b) They put tremendous amounts of money and effort
> into building the infrastructure to extract the
> value from the land.
That is a contribution, and earns a rightful return. But owning the
land is not a contribution, and the return to it is not rightful. The
land would be there, just the same, even had the owner never existed.
>>They just charge the productive a fee to use the resources
>
> If they finally get rich enough then yes, they sit
> back, enjoy their wealth, and charge "rent" to those
> who want to exploit their land and/or industries.
The industries are a contribution _from_them_ (or someone they
ultimately paid for creating them). The land is not. Please try to
understand what that implies.
> Sounds good to me.
Ask the erstwhile Zimbabwean landowners how good it is, in the long
run.
>>and use that unearned income to get control of even
>>more resources.
>
> Acquisition is bad ? Sounds industrious to me. Get
> more, build more, earn more (and EMPLOY more).
Rent seeking is not industrious. It's not productive. It contributes
nothing. Charging others a fee to use the natural resources they need
to be productive is not "employing" them. It's exploiting them.
> Instead of dissing the "rich" in fit of green-eyed
> jealousy, why don't you put in the effort to BECOME
> one of them ?
That would make me one of the exploiters. So? Ask the Zimbabwean
landowners how much that means in the long run.
>Not easy ? Well ... I guess those
> worthless "rich" people had to put in a LOT of effort
> somewhere along the line after all.
Yes, rent seeking is work. It just isn't productive.
>Amazing how they
> object when nasty little kommies to come along and
> try to STEAL the fruits of their labors.
The land is not the fruit of their or _anyone_else's_ labor.
> "If you build it, kommies will come along and say
> you don't deserve it" - doesn't sound like much of
> an incentive for anyone to do anything.
Nobody had to or did or could build the land or other natural
resources the rich get richer by owning.
> Communism - a theoretical socioeconomic system wherin
> everybody is equally poor, miserable and oppressed.
And nothing to do with the community recovering, for its own purposes,
the natural resource rents that it creates.
FYI, the most famous proposer of this remedy for economic and social
problems, Henry George, rightly termed Marx an "addle-pated
sheepshead." Marx returned the favor by calling George the
"last-ditch defender of individualistic capitalism." If you don't
understand why Marx said that, you probably don't know enough to be
commenting on this issue.
-- Roy L
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