Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: MP-Ryan on April 18, 2013, 11:06:58 am
-
I'm going to leave this here and refrain from commenting for a little while because I'm curious what sort of comments its going to generate around here:
http://mashable.com/2013/03/02/wealth-inequality/
-
That's actually the first good video regarding the whole 1% stuff
Youtube comments are quite a read as well.
-
This doesn't surprise me much. It's still higher than I thought it would be, but I was expecting a skyscraper column on the right. I'm more surprised what people's perceptions were than my own. You look at rich lists and they're full of Americans. Imagine how many average Americans combined would be required to match the wealth of one such individual, and America is full of rich people. Full of celebrities, full of tycoons. It would be interesting to compare to other countries.
Here's the Forbes 400, the top 400 richest individuals in America:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/list/
Bill Gates on the top is worth $66,000,000,000.
I have no idea how much the average American has in the bank. Imagine a whole bunch of people with $50,000 in their pockets. An easy number to work with. It would require 1,320,000 people each holding $50,000 to match the wealth of Bill Gates.
The next two people on the list are worth a combined $87,000,000,000.
In 400th place we actually have a group of people in joint 392nd. One of these individuals holds $1,100,000,000. One of these has the wealth of 22,000 of the people with $50,000.
So America has at least 400 billionaires. Probably a good deal more. They're whales and we're plankton.
-
****ing insane. The YT comments are almost as bad. Seems a lot of people have...'interesting' definitions for Communism and Socialism.
-
I'd be interested in seeing a similar comparison of wealth inequality within and between other countries.
-
Good video. I already was rather aware of how severe the wealth disparity was, but the video does a really good job of driving the point home.
Naturally, the talk turns to: is this right? If not, what can/should be done about it?
-
if we had more wars all the poor people would get drafted (and they dont even have to reinstate the draft, the benefits alone would make poor folks sign up in droves), then slaughtered, and would tilt the numbers a little to make everything look more fair.
-
Wouldn't slaughtering the top 1% make it even less inequitable? :P
-
we could do that too. but they have private security. the poor are easier to slaughter.
-
we could do that too. but they have private security. the poor are easier to slaughter.
I disagree. While they lack the defenses available to the rich, they have far greater numbers. One could easily find themselves swarmed and out of bullets rather quickly
Initially it'll be a bloodbath, the unorganized lot will scatter. The poor scare easily, but they'll be back... and in greater numbers
-
when the earth exploded and bodies burned to ashes, the leaders of men died first and common people changed... into beasts of genocide.
-
we could do that too. but they have private security. the poor are easier to slaughter.
I disagree. While they lack the defenses available to the rich, they have far greater numbers. One could easily find themselves swarmed and out of bullets rather quickly
Initially it'll be a bloodbath, the unorganized lot will scatter. The poor scare easily, but they'll be back... and in greater numbers
Basically yeah, if things get bad enough, like to the point that the lower classes will literally starve, this is what happens. See: France back in the day.
-
:blah: Nice to see this thread developing in a healthy and productive manner.
-
:blah: Nice to see this thread developing in a healthy and productive manner.
My sentiments exactly.
Surely only on HLP could a thread about the concentration of wealth among the rich turn into a thread about exterminating the poor. :rolleyes:
-
That's nuke for ya. =P
To get the thread back on track, should something be done about wealth inequality in the US, and if so which policies would be the most successful?
-
Policies? For a start, next time when you install windows on your machine consider installing linux and giving the spared 100$[or whatever it will cost] to the poor. For a start. Then talk about policies.
-
I think the big question for me is to what extent the same systems that have created such enormous inequality have also helped improve standards of living for everyone - the 'rising tide lifts all boats, though some more than others' model. I think by this point it's clear that this model is incomplete and that the enormous postwar wealth spike is linked to systems that do not consistently help the notional average American.
-
It would be interesting to know how many of those people in that top 400 list are self-made billionaires. Especially if they came from humble backgrounds.
-
I would like to see similar chart comparisons from a couple of other times in our nation's history. The time of Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Carnegie would likely reflect the current distribution while the time period after Ford and WWII might be closer to what they say should be the ideal. The only way this gets fixed is for businesses to start doing on their own what Ford and others like him did and that was to pay his workers better thus creating a stronger customer base also known as the middle class. Wages in this country have been stagnant for over 30 years now even amongst skilled and educated positions while executive and investment positions have enjoyed disproportionally huge rewards.
-
Might help if you guys stopped outsourcing to China
-
ive always said that trickle down has been replaced by trickle east.
-
I was talking about popular revolution, not exterminating the poor btw. Seems to be the historical outcome of unchecked wealth disparity.
-
But do note how a vocal portion of the poor in the US has been convinced that instituting measures to rectify this is unamerican and against their best interests.
-
I was talking about popular revolution, not exterminating the poor btw. Seems to be the historical outcome of unchecked wealth disparity.
Careful Red, the Patriot Act and the Smith Act are working against you, there.
As per the video, thank you for posting that.
I'd argue that failure to correct for frivolous legislation/court rulings and the current state of corporations are the factors causing the ugly state of the curve - social programs are not going to fix that. When you and I cannot simply decide to engage in a profitable, productive endeavor because we do not have the capital for licensure, that's bad. When I cannot get health care because the current legal environment dictates that (a.) prices charged for services become unreasonable and (b.) I must buy insurance, which may or may not be a non-governmental tax, that's immoral. When the cost of living becomes too high to be reasonable, I cannot engage in a business of my own design within an easily attainable set of requirements or a degree of security, and the only primary sources of employment I can elect to pursue may very well prevent me from engaging in successful business of my own via what may be called insurmountable competition, that might as well be criminal.
*EDIT*
For some reason, I quoted the wrong post.
-
But do note how a vocal portion of the poor in the US has been convinced that instituting measures to rectify this is unamerican and against their best interests.
Oh well yeah, it's brilliant... if you're one of the folks on top. We're not nearly to the point of violent revolution I think. Like I said in my first post, it will have to be so bad that the poor are literally going to starve, or otherwise have a greater chance of dying if they _don't_ revolt.
-
But do note how a vocal portion of the poor in the US has been convinced that instituting measures to rectify this is unamerican and against their best interests.
Oh well yeah, it's brilliant... if you're one of the folks on top. We're not nearly to the point of violent revolution I think. Like I said in my first post, it will have to be so bad that the poor are literally going to starve, or otherwise have a greater chance of dying if they _don't_ revolt.
oh goodie, better stock up on ammo.
-
But do note how a vocal portion of the poor in the US has been convinced that instituting measures to rectify this is unamerican and against their best interests.
Oh well yeah, it's brilliant... if you're one of the folks on top. We're not nearly to the point of violent revolution I think. Like I said in my first post, it will have to be so bad that the poor are literally going to starve, or otherwise have a greater chance of dying if they _don't_ revolt.
oh goodie, better stock up on ammo.
7.62 x 39mm and a **** ton of SKSs
-
But do note how a vocal portion of the poor in the US has been convinced that instituting measures to rectify this is unamerican and against their best interests.
Yep. For all my problems with the US right wing, I can't deny that they're fantastic at politics. Convincing anyone earning less than 100,000 to vote for them is an achievement - convincing very nearly exactly half the country to do it is undeniably an act of legitimate political genius.
Policies? For a start, next time when you install windows on your machine consider installing linux and giving the spared 100$[or whatever it will cost] to the poor. For a start. Then talk about policies.
Yep, that should definitely be a priority. Forget adjusting the income tax brackets to something close to the world average for developed nations, or eliminating loopholes in the same system, or overhauling corporate tax, or increasing capital gains to a sensible level, or upping the minimum wage. Your problems are primarily the result of the Windows OS.
-
i thought the u.s. right wing had basically rightshifted themselves into oblivion by chasing the tea party crazies so fervently the moderates upped and left
-
But do note how a vocal portion of the poor in the US has been convinced that instituting measures to rectify this is unamerican and against their best interests.
Yep. For all my problems with the US right wing, I can't deny that they're fantastic at politics. Convincing anyone earning less than 100,000 to vote for them is an achievement - convincing very nearly exactly half the country to do it is undeniably an act of legitimate political genius.
I understand where this sentiment comes from, but I also think it does the issue something of a disservice by over-simplifying things. Just based on the sentiments I hear from right-wing people I interact with on a daily basis, for them, it's not so much about whether or not they directly benefit of a policy, but instead about the underlying fairness of that policy as they see it. Most of them feel like people shouldn't be punished for being financially successful, with higher taxes on the wealthy constituting a "punishment" in their view. In turn, they feel like the government shouldn't be providing "handouts" (i.e. excessive social services), as in their view it devalues hard work and being able to better yourself. This ties into an underlying faith in the "American Dream," the idea that anyone in this country can start from nothing and become successful if they just work hard enough. Unfortunately, studies have shown that income class mobility in this country is currently at almost an all-time low, but that doesn't seem to have dissuaded that belief that they, too, might be making the big bucks someday. Now you may think that these views are absolute nonsense, or credit the Republican Party with spinning the issues in this manner, but I don't think it's entirely cut-and-dry.
Of course there are also more single-issue voters who make their decisions based more on social issues and don't care much about economics, but that's true for people in both parties.
-
i thought the u.s. right wing had basically rightshifted themselves into oblivion by chasing the tea party crazies so fervently the moderates upped and left
No they have become stronger than ever. When the right wing took so many hits on the federal level they shifted their focus to the state level and they have been slinging the crazy at the state level even more than they ever were on the federal level.
I think the GOP's and Tea Party's scare tactics with socialism have been masterful at leading the ignorant and stupid ranks of the poor into their camp. You would think with the collapse of the Soviet Union the big red scare card would have worn it self out by now.
Moderates are a dieing breed these days, both sides are becoming increasing more polarized and pushing them out. The right wing is just the loudest so you don't notice the increase in polarization in the left wing as much.
-
At least at the presidential level a whole bunch of these (very important) issues like income inequality are frighteningly irrelevant. You can accurately model the US political system and presidential voting base using the following model:
Team A and Team B compete for the presidency. Every election cycle we have an incumbent team and a challenger team. Team A and Team B can be treated as identical and interchangeable. For this discussion let's call Team A the incumbent.
If the economy grows during Team A's presidency, as measured by something like change in real income, give Team A a point. If the economy shrinks, give Team B a point.
If we're at war, give Team A a point.
If the incumbent president has already had a four-year term, give Team A a point.
Congrats! You've called the presidential election! This is obviously a little bit of an oversimplification - there are weights on these points - but not nearly as much as you'd think. This is why predictions that one party or the other has effectively been 'finished' at the presidential level are, so far, premature: the actual policies and issues the parties espouse don't play into the outcome of presidential races, and all it takes to put a party back in competition is a bad economic run. (Ironically, the state of the economy is pretty much outside the president's control.)
I don't know nearly as much about the legislative branch so I can't speak to it as well.
-
It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism is a pretty good book on the legislative side. Polished it off a few months ago myself.
-
i thought the u.s. right wing had basically rightshifted themselves into oblivion by chasing the tea party crazies so fervently the moderates upped and left
No they have become stronger than ever. When the right wing took so many hits on the federal level they shifted their focus to the state level and they have been slinging the crazy at the state level even more than they ever were on the federal level.
I think the GOP's and Tea Party's scare tactics with socialism have been masterful at leading the ignorant and stupid ranks of the poor into their camp. You would think with the collapse of the Soviet Union the big red scare card would have worn it self out by now.
Moderates are a dieing breed these days, both sides are becoming increasing more polarized and pushing them out. The right wing is just the loudest so you don't notice the increase in polarization in the left wing as much.
I find the Rebublican Party's fear of socialism rather amusing, considering that most of them support socialist programs... not that they'd admit it, of course. They're still right-wing overall, but in that regard they're center-left.
It really irritates me when I hear the terms "communist" and "far-right" applied to people who are very clearly neither. The former is a giant exaggeration and the latter is just stupid (the Republicans are not neo-Nazis). This type of mudslinging prevents an honest debate on policy.*
*Speaking generally. I'm not accusing you.
-
It really irritates me when I hear the terms "communist" and "far-right" applied to people who are very clearly neither. The former is a giant exaggeration and the latter is just stupid (the Republicans are not neo-Nazis). This type of mudslinging prevents an honest debate on policy.*
By the standards of just about any other developed nation, the US Republicans are pretty far-right.
-
Republicans are not Neo-Nazis. There are two axis which you can use to categorize political parties, one marks the social/fiscal side from conservatism to liberalism, the other the preferred governmental model (authoritarian to liberalism). The original Nazis were conservative and authoritarian; while the american right wing tends to be conservative in fiscal/social issues, but preferring a libertarian government (A government that governs least, in other words).
-
while the american right wing tends to be conservative in fiscal/social issues, but preferring a libertarian government (A government that governs least, in other words).
Actually, this isn't entirely true. Most of the right-wing wants a small government, but they very much want an interventionist government on certain issues. The only area where most far-right Americans appear to prefer libertarian governance is on taxation; on matters ranging from foreign policy, to immigration, to social policy, to specific issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, the right-wing actually falls largely into the authoritarian realm.
There are some interesting analyses on the Political Compass, but the plots for recent US Presidents, for example, fall well within the authoritarian/conservative (top-right) quadrant.
In general, the majority of the US populace leans well within the authoritarian sphere of politics. Populations of socialist* democratic countries (Canada, UK, Germany*, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Australia, etc) tend to lean more centrist/libertarian.
-
At least at the presidential level a whole bunch of these (very important) issues like income inequality are frighteningly irrelevant. You can accurately model the US political system and presidential voting base using the following model:
Team A and Team B compete for the presidency. Every election cycle we have an incumbent team and a challenger team. Team A and Team B can be treated as identical and interchangeable. For this discussion let's call Team A the incumbent.
If the economy grows during Team A's presidency, as measured by something like change in real income, give Team A a point. If the economy shrinks, give Team B a point.
If we're at war, give Team A a point.
If the incumbent president has already had a four-year term, give Team A a point.
Congrats! You've called the presidential election! This is obviously a little bit of an oversimplification - there are weights on these points - but not nearly as much as you'd think. This is why predictions that one party or the other has effectively been 'finished' at the presidential level are, so far, premature: the actual policies and issues the parties espouse don't play into the outcome of presidential races, and all it takes to put a party back in competition is a bad economic run. (Ironically, the state of the economy is pretty much outside the president's control.)
I don't know nearly as much about the legislative branch so I can't speak to it as well.
I knew it was too good to be true.
-
I think the big question for me is to what extent the same systems that have created such enormous inequality have also helped improve standards of living for everyone - the 'rising tide lifts all boats, though some more than others' model. I think by this point it's clear that this model is incomplete and that the enormous postwar wealth spike is linked to systems that do not consistently help the notional average American.
Not only that, but if there ain' no more "World Wars" to reset the inequality factors, then this hockey stick graph will only increase in scope, more and more and more. We will get into a point where 0.01% of the world's population controls 50% of its wealth. All in the name of freedom, no less.
-
while the american right wing tends to be conservative in fiscal/social issues, but preferring a libertarian government (A government that governs least, in other words).
Actually, this isn't entirely true. Most of the right-wing wants a small government, but they very much want an interventionist government on certain issues. The only area where most far-right Americans appear to prefer libertarian governance is on taxation; on matters ranging from foreign policy, to immigration, to social policy, to specific issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, the right-wing actually falls largely into the authoritarian realm.
There are some interesting analyses on the Political Compass, but the plots for recent US Presidents, for example, fall well within the authoritarian/conservative (top-right) quadrant.
In general, the majority of the US populace leans well within the authoritarian sphere of politics. Populations of socialist* democratic countries (Canada, UK, Germany*, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Australia, etc) tend to lean more centrist/libertarian.
According the the Political Compass, Obama is a far-right authoritarian and I'm a slightly left-wing libertarian, despite our largely identical social views (excluding drug legalization) and my lack of enthusiasm for entitlement programs (which, being far-right, he should almost certainly be more opposed to than I am). Also, being a right wing-extremist, he's probably a horrible racist imperialist dictator who believes in the inherent inferiority of the poor (a Fascist, perhaps a neo-Nazi). Does that describe him in any way?
Mitt Romney also appears to be only slightly more right-wing than Obama. Both of them (and Benjamin Netanyahu) aren't far off from Bashar al-Assad.
I always thought of it as center-left, but apparently the United Kingdom is far-right! Who knew?
I wouldn't put any stock in that scale. Those examples speak for themselves.
Also, I found the test quite lacking. It was largely "do you support these right-wing positions" rather than "which positions do you support". It looks rigged to place everybody farther to the right than they actually are.
It really irritates me when I hear the terms "communist" and "far-right" applied to people who are very clearly neither. The former is a giant exaggeration and the latter is just stupid (the Republicans are not neo-Nazis). This type of mudslinging prevents an honest debate on policy.*
By the standards of just about any other developed nation, the US Republicans are pretty far-right.
That's because by the standards of most developed nations the center is a few points to the left. America also has that problem, but to a lesser degree.
Many Republicans believe that a significant number of poor people are just lazy, which is a center-right position. The far-right view would be something along the lines of "poor people have bad genes" or "poor people are inferior because they're black". Some conservatives hold those positions, but they are far from commonplace.
Other components of far-right politics are extreme nationalism (imperialism), extreme racism (ties in to the former), and authoritarianism. The Republicans are fairly nationalist, but they have only a small-to-moderate degree of racism, and outside of issues like gay marriage, abortion, and other "family values" they're not particularly authoritarian.
-
Actually, the Political Compass quite admirably demonstrates how left-leaning public policy is largely an empty space in some of the world's largest democracies. It also doesn't plot countries, just people, so I'm not sure how you're getting the UK as far-right. Most of the current leaders of G8 and G20 countries lie in the authoritarian-conservative quadrant to varying degrees.
As for your misconception about ideology, the test plots around your reaction to ideological statements to determine how closely you align with or diverge from them.
That's because by the standards of most developed nations the center is a few points to the left. America also has that problem, but to a lesser degree.[/u]
Many Republicans believe that a significant number of poor people are just lazy, which is a center-right position. The far-right view would be something along the lines of "poor people have bad genes" or "poor people are inferior because they're black". Some conservatives hold those positions, but they are far from commonplace.
Other components of far-right politics are extreme nationalism (imperialism), extreme racism (ties in to the former), and authoritarianism. The Republicans are fairly nationalist, but they have only a small-to-moderate degree of racism, and outside of issues like gay marriage, abortion, and other "family values" they're not particularly authoritarian.
You're demonstrating a common misconception among American 'conservatives' that view themselves as moderate while the rest of the democratic world is ostensibly socialist. Everyone likes to think they're centrist, because they view the center as a moderate position where the majority of people fit in political ideology (which isn't true - the center is just the point on sliding political scales at which you reach a position equidistant from the defining outer parameters - e.g. left/right, the center is equidistant from both [theoretical] communism and fascism.) "Poor people are just lazy" isn't a center-right position, it's ignorant and bigoted philosophy that stems from Rand-inspired thinking and on a left-right scale lies far-right. The view that poor people have bad genes comes from eugenics, which has no political affiliation - that movement had common supporters among both classical liberals and conservatives.
What you're calling far-right is basically fascism, which is the EDIT: topmost-most (durr) extreme in political ideology. Far-right (in a pure L/R sense) lies about 75% of the way there from the center, and is a fairly good description of the modern GOP, while the modern Democrats fall slightly closer to the center and are best described as center-right (again, in a pure L/R sense). The United States has no major centrist political party.
In short, while it has flaws, the political compass is a much better barometer of your political views overall than your issue-based analysis. Chances are you - like most people - define your political position on a few key issues which makes you think you're conservative. Obama is painted by the media (particularly Fox and its ilk) as a 'lefty.' Both of these descriptions run counter to where your views actually lie in a political sense - Obama's can be analyzed based on his actions (he's the most conservative Democrat president the US has had in some time), while you're explicitly stated yours in the political compass test.
-
Actually, the Political Compass quite admirably demonstrates how left-leaning public policy is largely an empty space in some of the world's largest democracies. It also doesn't plot countries, just people, so I'm not sure how you're getting the UK as far-right.
That's because by the standards of most developed nations the center is a few points to the left. America also has that problem, but to a lesser degree.
Many Republicans believe that a significant number of poor people are just lazy, which is a center-right position. The far-right view would be something along the lines of "poor people have bad genes" or "poor people are inferior because they're black". Some conservatives hold those positions, but they are far from commonplace.
Other components of far-right politics are extreme nationalism (imperialism), extreme racism (ties in to the former), and authoritarianism. The Republicans are fairly nationalist, but they have only a small-to-moderate degree of racism, and outside of issues like gay marriage, abortion, and other "family values" they're not particularly authoritarian.
You're demonstrating a common misconception among American 'conservatives' that view themselves as moderate while the rest of the democratic world is ostensibly socialist. "Poor people are just lazy" isn't a center-right position, it's ignorant and bigoted philosophy that stems from Rand-inspired thinking and on a left-right scale lies far-right. The view that poor people have bad genes comes from eugenics, which has no political affiliation - that movement had common supporters among both classical liberals and conservatives.
What you're calling far-right is basically fascism, which is the rightward-most extreme in political ideology. Far right lies about 75% of the way there from the center, and is a fairly good description of the modern GOP, while the modern Democrats fall slightly closer to the center and are best described as center-right. The United States has no major centrist political party.
It classifies the EU's governments right here: http://www.politicalcompass.org/euchart (http://www.politicalcompass.org/euchart)
Conservative? I'm a center-left libertarian! (Ironically, the scale actually got that right).
The view that poor people have bad genes is Social Darwinism, which is most certainly far-right. The view that poor people are lazy, on the other hand, is not. The far-right believes in the inherent inferiority of some human beings and the right of superior individuals to dominate them. The center-right does not largely hold those views.
How, when I support less entitlements than him and hold some rightist views on their morality, am I slightly leftist while Obama is far-right? I really can't comprehend how anybody could come to that conclusion (apparently welfare capitalism is far-right).
By your definition, what would a center-left person believe? Because by any reasonable objective standard I'm more rightist than Obama and most Democrats (yet I'm somehow center-left, despite their already far-right views :confused:).
EDIT: And yes, I did describe a fascist. The 75% far-right would have to hold similar views, unless the scale is quadratic for some reason.
Also, the Political Compass says that fascist views can be held by a communist. They don't consider it to be the rightmost extreme.
-
It classifies the EU's governments right here: http://www.politicalcompass.org/euchart (http://www.politicalcompass.org/euchart)
Bad Ryan, that's a new plot that they've added. Shame on me for not checking. Regardless, not sure how they're plotting countries since they're pretty diverse and are often elected separately from how they govern, but hey, whatever they want.
The view that poor people have bad genes is Social Darwinism, which is most certainly far-right.
The view that poor people are lazy, on the other hand, is not. The far-right believes in the inherent inferiority of some human beings and the right of superior individuals to dominate them. The center-right does not largely hold those views.
Eugenics, as I've already said, has little to do with political affiliation - on the compass, it plots to the top center. Social Darwinism is a far-right (L/R scale only) policy statement, yes, but the underlying thought processes have been used by all kinds of people. The far-right often (but not always) invokes 'otherness' as a means of policy control. Race, income, ethnic background - there are all kinds of uses and they all boil down to the same tactic: in-group vs out-group. It's Fascism 101, and it's trickle-down is where that notion that poor people are lazy, common to far-right ideology, comes from. Those things might be viewed as a center-right position in the microcosm that is the US, but that's only if you look at politics based purely on a contemporary US-centric position. In a broader context, those views plot much further right than you think they do/should.
To address your edit, I have no idea why they plot Facism center-top, perhaps because of the range of economic systems used by Fascist governments. While Fascism is the most extreme form of authoritarianism, it's not typically centrist (if anything, the economic systems of Spain, Italy, and Germany in their fascist periods all leaned slightly left). I also went back and corrected a couple spots, because I realized that I was jumping between compass and typical L/R descriptions without saying so and that was confusing.
How, when I support less entitlements than him and hold some rightist views on their morality, am I slightly leftist while Obama is far-right? I really can't comprehend how anybody could come to that conclusion.
Because you're looking at this from the perspective of single-issues, rather than political position generally. Obama plots far-right because of the actions he's taken or support in governing the US as a whole - while the only tangible thing he has really done that leans leftward on the L/R axis is health care reform. However, if you look at what those reforms actually did, it still doesn't drift into the socialist realm.
I think you're confused about the axes. L/R measures economics, U/D measures level of government intervention. Your views on entitlements probably plot more on the vertical axis than the horizontal - those who support more entitlements get pushed up, those who support fewer get pushed down. Left/right focuses on wealth disparity and redistribution, and regulation of financial sectors. Laissez-faire and trickle-down economics plot right (capitalism), while socialist policy plots left. Obama has been a major friend to capitalism, but support government interventions. Judging by where you say you plot, you don't like government interventions but you're not as big a fan of capitalist policies as your President.
By your standards, what would a center-left person believe?
Ignoring the governance scale? A center-left person (e.g. between center and 50% toward communal economics models) believes in greater exercise of control over financial systems by the collective population with some wealth redistribution to address income disparity, but where economic systems are only partially controlled by the collective population.
That said, it is virtually impossible to separate the axes.
-
Much as it embarrasses me to have to link to RationalWiki, that political compass is notoriously biased (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Political_Compass#Criticism) and you probably shouldn't rely on it for serious commentary.
-
Much as it embarrasses me to have to link to RationalWiki, that political compass is notoriously biased (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Political_Compass#Criticism) and you probably shouldn't rely on it for serious commentary.
While their plots on countries and most people who haven't explicitly written the test are certainly wobbly, the fundamental premise is not a bad one, and the analysis of American politicians in particular is actually quite reasonable.
EDIT: In other words, it's a useful tool for illustration purposes.
-
The view that poor people have bad genes is Social Darwinism, which is most certainly far-right.
The view that poor people are lazy, on the other hand, is not. The far-right believes in the inherent inferiority of some human beings and the right of superior individuals to dominate them. The center-right does not largely hold those views.
Eugenics, as I've already said, has little to do with political affiliation - on the compass, it plots to the top center. Social Darwinism is a far-right (L/R scale only) policy statement, yes, but the underlying thought processes have been used by all kinds of people. The far-right often (but not always) invokes 'otherness' as a means of policy control. Race, income, ethnic background - there are all kinds of uses and they all boil down to the same tactic: in-group vs out-group. It's Fascism 101, and it's trickle-down is where that notion that poor people are lazy, common to far-right ideology, comes from. Those things might be viewed as a center-right position in the microcosm that is the US, but that's only if you look at politics based purely on a contemporary US-centric position. In a broader context, those views plot much further right than you think they do/should.
To address your edit, I have no idea why they plot Facism center-top, perhaps because of the range of economic systems used by Fascist governments. While Fascism is the most extreme form of authoritarianism, it's not typically centrist (if anything, the economic systems of Spain, Italy, and Germany in their fascist periods all leaned slightly left). I also went back and corrected a couple spots, because I realized that I was jumping between compass and typical L/R descriptions without saying so and that was confusing.
Whatever you think about eugenics (I'm not an expert on that front), Social Darwinism says that genes determine social class, and it is certainly a far-right view point.
Of course the far-right and the center-right have some similarities--they're still right-wing, after all. However, the Republicans will not be fascists until they start trying to establish a dictatorship.
Fascist governments have often used some leftist economic policies, but they possessed such extreme degrees of nationalism and far-right views on social hierarchy that they were still far-right. Except on the Compass, but that just demonstrates how completely different it is from the common Left-Right scale.
How, when I support less entitlements than him and hold some rightist views on their morality, am I slightly leftist while Obama is far-right? I really can't comprehend how anybody could come to that conclusion.
Because you're looking at this from the perspective of single-issues, rather than political position generally. Obama plots far-right because of the actions he's taken or support in governing the US as a whole - while the only tangible thing he has really done that leans leftward on the L/R axis is health care reform. However, if you look at what those reforms actually did, it still doesn't drift into the socialist realm.
Yeah, but I'm actually more capitalist than he is. Apparently I'm center-left while he's far-right. Go figure.
The term "far-right" has lost all its meaning on that Compass. Or are multicultural European welfare capitalists far-right? You tell me.
I think you're confused about the axes. L/R measures economics, U/D measures level of government intervention. Your views on entitlements probably plot more on the vertical axis than the horizontal - those who support more entitlements get pushed up, those who support fewer get pushed down. Left/right focuses on wealth disparity and redistribution, and regulation of financial sectors. Laissez-faire and trickle-down economics plot right (capitalism), while socialist policy plots left. Obama has been a major friend to capitalism, but support government interventions. Judging by where you say you plot, you don't like government interventions but you're not as big a fan of capitalist policies as your President.
Entitlements are a form of wealth redistribution using government intervention. If we separate them, the Left-Right scale now has a completely different meaning (that would explain why the Compass calls all these center-left politicians far-right). This also leads to absolutely bull**** conclusions like Obama and Romney being almost as authoritarian as Hitler and Assad. That, in and of itself, shows how badly designed this scale is.
By your standards, what would a center-left person believe?
Ignoring the governance scale? A center-left person (e.g. between center and 50% toward communal economics models) believes in greater exercise of control over financial systems by the collective population with some wealth redistribution to address income disparity, but where economic systems are only partially controlled by the collective population.
I'd actually consider that example to be far-left (75% from the center), but whatever.
The Political Compass says I'm slightly left-wing, and while I agree with that my core economic views are still capitalist.
If I compare myself to Obama I'm still more rightist than him, so either I'm far-right or he's center-left. Either way, the scale has some serious issues.
The Democrats support significant amounts of entitlement programs and the Republicans support (at least on paper) a somewhat lesser degree. No left-wing ideas?
EDIT: I may have misread that example. What degree of collective ownership are you referring to?
That said, it is virtually impossible to separate the axes.
And there lies the crippling flaw of this Compass.
-
Much as it embarrasses me to have to link to RationalWiki, that political compass is notoriously biased (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Political_Compass#Criticism) and you probably shouldn't rely on it for serious commentary.
*reads page*
and noting large discrepancies between the scores actual people get on it and the scores posted for politicians and political parties.
I thought so.
EDIT: That's probably why my libertarian friend who completely opposes entitlement programs is placed as center-right while Obama (who supports them) is far-right.
-
Apollo, you're trying to apply single-axis political thinking to a multi-axis analysis. If you're using a conventional left-right thougbht and trying to stick that on a 2-axis scale, the results are not going to make any sense - which is why you're running into all the problems that you're talking about, because you are still applying government intervention on the L/R scale. With a 2-axis graph, economic policy is separate from style of governance.
Obama very much has a capitalist policy, hence why he is right of center on an economic scale. He also believes in great levels of government intervention via entitlement programs, hence why he goes up on the authoritarian scale. You being center-left apparently illustrates that you believe in LESS government intervention than Obama, while you favour greater wealth-distribution (or less income inequality). There's no question that the exact plots on the graph are suspect, but as I said to PH, it's a useful conceptualization precisely because it demonstrates how little difference there actually is between political figures, whereas a single-axis scale tends to hide that information because social/governance issues end up confounded with economic policy.
You're confounding the issue by talking about the compass using single-axis terms, which makes the entire discussion quit confusing. On a single-axis, fascism lies to the extreme right while communism lies to the extreme left. On a compass, communism remains on the far left, but fascism lies on a spectrum across the extreme top (because fascism is not tied to any single economic policy, while it is tied to a particular form of authoritarian governance).
In terms of the views on the poor (both social darwinism and eugenics), on a pure L/R scale they lie far-right. On a 2-axis, they fall across the top but are unbound from particular economic policy.
The term "far-right" has lost all its meaning on that Compass. Or are multicultural European welfare capitalists far-right? You tell me.
Once again, it's because you're trying to take analysis from a single dimension scale and apply it to a multidimensional scale. On the compass they are (well, at least right of center; as I said before, take the plotted positions for countries in particular with a helping of salt), because the L/R scale is not bound to governance, just economics, and European welfare states ARE capitalist countries that have some level of wealth redistribution, but they aren't collectivist societies, either. The center is halfway between Pure Collectivism and Pure Capitalism; there's no question that every democracy on Earth is at least marginally closer to capitalism than collectivism.
Entitlements are a form of wealth redistribution using government intervention. If we separate them, the Left-Right scale now has a completely different meaning (that would explain why the Compass calls all these center-left politicians far-right). This also leads to absolutely bull**** conclusions like Obama and Romney being almost as authoritarian as Hitler and Assad. That, in and of itself, shows how badly designed this scale is.
Well, separating them means L/R measures only economic policy. Whether or not you think that's a bad thing is totally up to you. On the other hand, it does mean different cultures can talk within the same frame of reference. Otherwise, you end up with statements where you think "the poor are lazy" is a center-right position, where the center-right pretty much everywhere other than the US would probably take some issue with that statement.
And I disagree that Obama/Romney being as authoritarian as Assad being a bull**** conclusion. The U/D scale measures authoritarian policy without moral judgement. Obama and Romney both have just as many interventionist policies as Assad, just expressed in a different way. Indeed, it's a useful means of critique to show how a variety of different methods can all occupy the same political space.
Partisans get driven crazy by multidimensional political analysis because it doesn't mix well with their perceptions of the political landscape. A lot of people can't wrap their heads around how two or more parties that seem so different can occupy the same political space, despite wildly different ideas about methods.
Were I to plot the NDP, Liberal Party, and Conservative Party in Canada, for example, I'd place them all center-right, with the Liberals and Conservatives basically on top of each other, and the NDP slightly northwest of them, but all basically touching. If I plotted the Democrats and Republicans from the US next to them, they'd land further northeast of the Liberals/Conservatives, but basically on top of each other.
The fact of the matter is that, within democracies, mainstream parties have virtually no significant difference between them other than a few wedge policies or ideas; style of governance and economic policy diverge very little from each other. The more divergent they are, the less equal they are in terms of number of times elected. As the Democrats and Republicans have pretty similar time represented in office generally (not necessarily Presidency) - at least in the 20th century - it stands to reason that there is very little of substance that differs between them.
-
I thought this thread was about inequality and not some random internet visualizer of your own ideas.
-
Never heard of the Political Compass? (http://www.politicalcompass.org/test)
-
Why should I? I know what I believe and why I believe the things I do. I couldn't give a rat's ass on what other... ahhhh.... folks would place me on their own little tidy map of theirs. They need to build maps so they can tidy up what is strange and complex to them? Good for them, now get out of my lawn.
-
I'm a renowned politicycle economogenist and the solution to wealth inequality is 5% death, 15% taxes, and 85% finger pointing.
-
Why should I? I know what I believe and why I believe the things I do. I couldn't give a rat's ass on what other... ahhhh.... folks would place me on their own little tidy map of theirs. They need to build maps so they can tidy up what is strange and complex to them? Good for them, now get out of my lawn.
:wtf:
-
Apollo, you're trying to apply single-axis political thinking to a multi-axis analysis. If you're using a conventional left-right thougbht and trying to stick that on a 2-axis scale, the results are not going to make any sense - which is why you're running into all the problems that you're talking about, because you are still applying government intervention on the L/R scale. With a 2-axis graph, economic policy is separate from style of governance.
Obama very much has a capitalist policy, hence why he is right of center on an economic scale. He also believes in great levels of government intervention via entitlement programs, hence why he goes up on the authoritarian scale. You being center-left apparently illustrates that you believe in LESS government intervention than Obama, while you favour greater wealth-distribution (or less income inequality). There's no question that the exact plots on the graph are suspect, but as I said to PH, it's a useful conceptualization precisely because it demonstrates how little difference there actually is between political figures, whereas a single-axis scale tends to hide that information because social/governance issues end up confounded with economic policy.
Wealth redistribution is both a government intervention and an economic policy. You cannot seperate the two from each other and get results that make any sense.
I'd still like an explanation as to how my liberterian friend who favors something very close to laissez-faire capitalism is considered center-right while Obama is far-right. If pure capitalism is a far-right ideology, wouldn't he fit there?
Also, while I consider myself to be slightly left-wing, I would be considered center-right by European and perhaps American standards. In any case, I certainly support a capitalist system.
You're confounding the issue by talking about the compass using single-axis terms, which makes the entire discussion quit confusing. On a single-axis, fascism lies to the extreme right while communism lies to the extreme left. On a compass, communism remains on the far left, but fascism lies on a spectrum across the extreme top (because fascism is not tied to any single economic policy, while it is tied to a particular form of authoritarian governance).
I can sort of see that. On the other hand, the Compass's definition of left and right are so very different from the convention L/R scale that they lose their meaning entirely.
In terms of the views on the poor (both social darwinism and eugenics), on a pure L/R scale they lie far-right. On a 2-axis, they fall across the top but are unbound from particular economic policy.
True. However, most economic systems (with the exception of laissez-faire capitalism) are also political systems, because they are directed or influenced on some level by government policy.
The term "far-right" has lost all its meaning on that Compass. Or are multicultural European welfare capitalists far-right? You tell me.
Once again, it's because you're trying to take analysis from a single dimension scale and apply it to a multidimensional scale. On the compass they are (well, at least right of center; as I said before, take the plotted positions for countries in particular with a helping of salt), because the L/R scale is not bound to governance, just economics, and European welfare states ARE capitalist countries that have some level of wealth redistribution, but they aren't collectivist societies, either. The center is halfway between Pure Collectivism and Pure Capitalism; there's no question that every democracy on Earth is at least marginally closer to capitalism than collectivism.
That's what I meant. By trying to seperate out social views, the Compass warps the definitions of right and left until they lose much of their common meaning. This means that it cannot be brought into any discussion using the traditional L/R scale or definitions of freedom and authoritarianism.
Entitlements are a form of wealth redistribution using government intervention. If we separate them, the Left-Right scale now has a completely different meaning (that would explain why the Compass calls all these center-left politicians far-right). This also leads to absolutely bull**** conclusions like Obama and Romney being almost as authoritarian as Hitler and Assad. That, in and of itself, shows how badly designed this scale is.
Well, separating them means L/R measures only economic policy. Whether or not you think that's a bad thing is totally up to you. On the other hand, it does mean different cultures can talk within the same frame of reference. Otherwise, you end up with statements where you think "the poor are lazy" is a center-right position, where the center-right pretty much everywhere other than the US would probably take some issue with that statement.
I do consider it a bad thing, because economic policy, social policy, and government intervention are inseparable in some ways. Entitlement programs are all three! Gay marriage, abortion, and drug regulation are social policies that are subject to government intervention (which is not automatically authoritarian).
"The poor are lazy" is a center-right position on the L/R scale, being consistent with traditional capitalism... oh wait, that's far-right now (I'll get to that in a second).
And I disagree that Obama/Romney being as authoritarian as Assad being a bull**** conclusion. The U/D scale measures authoritarian policy without moral judgement. Obama and Romney both have just as many interventionist policies as Assad, just expressed in a different way. Indeed, it's a useful means of critique to show how a variety of different methods can all occupy the same political space.
Do they kill people who disagree with them openly? I'd consider that to be a much stronger and pervasive government intervention than anything Romney or Obama have done.
Partisans get driven crazy by multidimensional political analysis because it doesn't mix well with their perceptions of the political landscape. A lot of people can't wrap their heads around how two or more parties that seem so different can occupy the same political space, despite wildly different ideas about methods.
Many of them do occupy a similar economic space, but vary wildly in professed social views.
The fact of the matter is that, within democracies, mainstream parties have virtually no significant difference between them other than a few wedge policies or ideas; style of governance and economic policy diverge very little from each other. The more divergent they are, the less equal they are in terms of number of times elected. As the Democrats and Republicans have pretty similar time represented in office generally (not necessarily Presidency) - at least in the 20th century - it stands to reason that there is very little of substance that differs between them.
I sort of agree with you about that. Outside of social views, the Republicans and Democrats are both very, very similar (and even their social views are slowly merging).
However, when you have a system that calls the UK, Obama, and Romney far-right authoritarians while I (who hold more right-wing viewpoints than most Democrats) am considered center-left and my friend [a liberterian in the American sense (neo-liberal)] is considered center-right, you know there's a serious problem with it.
In essence, it turns capitalism into a far-right ideology by booting fascism and its horrible oppressive far-right policies out of the L/R axis and into a new U/D one. This makes it possible to classify moderate center-left welfare capitalists as right-wing extremists (which is, as I've said, inconsistent with the labeling of me and my friend as moderates).
Now, I wonder who wrote the Political Compass. What economic views could they possibly hold? Let's take a look at something from this page:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012 (http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012)
This is a US election that defies logic and brings the nation closer towards a one-party state masquerading as a two-party state.
The Democratic incumbent has surrounded himself with conservative advisors and key figures — many from previous administrations, and an unprecedented number from the Trilateral Commission. He also appointed a former Monsanto executive as Senior Advisor to the FDA. He has extended Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, presided over a spiralling rich-poor gap and sacrificed further American jobs with recent free trade deals. Trade union rights have also eroded under his watch. He has expanded Bush defence spending, droned civilians, failed to close Guantanamo, supported the NDAA which effectively legalises martial law, allowed drilling and adopted a soft-touch position towards the banks that is to the right of European Conservative leaders. Taking office during the financial meltdown, Obama appointed its principle architects to top economic positions. We list these because many of Obama's detractors absurdly portray him as either a radical liberal or a socialist, while his apologists, equally absurdly, continue to view him as a well-intentioned progressive, tragically thwarted by overwhelming pressures. 2008's yes-we-can chanters, dazzled by pigment rather than policy detail, forgot to ask can what? Between 1998 and the last election, Obama amassed $37.6million from the financial services industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. While 2008 presidential candidate Obama appeared to champion universal health care, his first choice for Secretary of Health was a man who had spent years lobbying on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry against that very concept. Hey! You don't promise a successful pub, and then appoint the Salvation Army to run it. This time around, the honey-tongued President makes populist references to economic justice, while simultaneously appointing as his new Chief of Staff a former Citigroup executive concerned with hedge funds that bet on the housing market to collapse. Obama poses something of a challenge to The Political Compass, because he's a man of so few fixed principles.
I lack the knowledge to comment on much of that, and I even agree with a few things. However, it strongly suggests that the page was written by a bunch of butthurt leftists along the lines of Cenk Uygur. Couple that with the discrepancy between the placement of politicians and that of me and my friend, and I reach a conclusion: Their "analysis" of mainstream American political parties and their candidates is simply a vehicle for them to express their anti-rightist, or perhaps even anti-capitalist agenda.
EDIT: Oh, and before you accuse me of ad hominem for those last few paragraphs, remember that a great deal of my post was devoted to explaining the fundamental problems with such a system and how it diverges so much from the L/R scale that it really doesn't mean much of anything (this debate started when you made reference to and used its classification of American politicians as a source of information).
-
(http://www.politicalcompass.org/facebook/pcgraphpng.php?ec=-7.00&soc=-3.44)
-
(http://www.timdrussell.com/images/pythonstills9467916/dennis%20moore.jpg) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLkhx0eqK5w)
"Blimey, this re-distribution of wealth is trickier than I thought."
It would be interesting to see the same kind of charts for other western nations, and see how the wealth is distributed in some of the countries with more "socialist" tendencies (like Finland and Sweden).
I have a feeling there would be similar "skew" between "ideal", "imagined" and "actual" distributions, but hopefully to different degree than in the US.
Also useful would be to compare with countries like Brazil, China, Nigeria, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, South Korea, Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and compare them to, say, Germany. Again, I have a feeling that the nominal "politics" of the country probably have FAR less connection to the actual distribution than people might think - ie. North Korea and China are nominally communist states, what kind of wealth distribution do you think they have?
-
Me:
(http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/1331/pcgraphpngo.png)
-
ie. North Korea and China are nominally communist states, what kind of wealth distribution do you think they have?
Anyone who believes that China is still a communist nation needs to update their thinking by about 30 years. :p
Seeing China on a graph like that would be interesting as an example of the effect of a very capitalist nation, not a communist one.
-
And I disagree that Obama/Romney being as authoritarian as Assad being a bull**** conclusion. The U/D scale measures authoritarian policy without moral judgement. Obama and Romney both have just as many interventionist policies as Assad, just expressed in a different way. Indeed, it's a useful means of critique to show how a variety of different methods can all occupy the same political space.
And that's how we know the discussion entered the jump-the-shark moment, that awkward place in time when someone unashamedly puts Obama, Romney and Assad in the same bag. To me that's an unequivocal evidence that such charts are complete bull****, the authors complete trolling idiots.
Could we please get back to the real discussion about inequality? Because there are very interesting things to say about what may happen when inequality goes beyond certain tipping points, there's good sci-fi material right there.
e:
It would be interesting to see the same kind of charts for other western nations, and see how the wealth is distributed in some of the countries with more "socialist" tendencies (like Finland and Sweden).
Yes, but we already have metrics of this, search for "Gini coefficient"
-
I'd still like an explanation as to how my liberterian friend who favors something very close to laissez-faire capitalism is considered center-right while Obama is far-right. If pure capitalism is a far-right ideology, wouldn't he fit there?
Because his economic views probably seem to lie further right on a traditional L/R scale than they actually do if you plot his views on government intervention separately. That said, I believe we've all already indicated that the actual plot positions that you get from taking their test are somewhat divergent from reality. I don't necessarily think their test is perfectly crafted, but I do think a 2-axis plot makes much more sense that a traditional single axis. Apparently you do not.
That's what I meant. By trying to seperate out social views, the Compass warps the definitions of right and left until they lose much of their common meaning. This means that it cannot be brought into any discussion using the traditional L/R scale or definitions of freedom and authoritarianism.
Well, yes? That's the point - L/R scales are broken. Your position on a L/R scale doesn't translate to a 2-axis scale because it measures different things.
If you have a fundamental problem with 2-axes versus one that's your prerogative. I happen to like 2-axis plots for politics precisely because it gives a much more interesting analysis than simple L/R, because simple L/R scales don't actually work to compare one country to another because social views, government intervention, and economics are all confounded into a single plot point, and what takes overriding priority depends on the person doing the plotting more than any other factor (American 'conservatives' who everyone else considers far-right will always plot themselves closer to the middle, while plotting Democrats way out in left field, despite the fact that neither is supported by an actual measurement of policy. In reality, pretty much all of the American political spectrum plots right-of-center when you use a global context.)
-
I'd love so much for people to discuss single policies on their own merits, debate just different people on what to do wrt different policies and so on, but I guess people are just too self-centered and prefer to be curious on where they supposedly are, if they are to the left, down, right, up your ass, wrt some random ill-defined and miscoordinated "map".
-
All right, go for it, say something to get the ball rolling. Or do you actually just want to complain?
-
I tried to, several times. I really think we are massively underestimating how big Inequality both *is* and *is becoming*, not only for the near future but for the less near future. Capital is increasingly more and more concentrated in very few hands, more and more managed by algorithms and "artificial intelligences". Consider the rapid development of better artificial intelligences, manufacturing robots, the death of low wage (and low-middle wage) jobs and consequent rise of unemployment (and thus a struggle for low-paid jobs, increasing the inequality even more due to econ 101...).
This is very rich material to discuss, IMHO.
-
I think education is a big issue here. As more of these low-level jobs go away, you're going to need a higher level of education to have a reasonable chance of finding a job. But then of course you can't earn the money to pay for more education, because you lack the skills and education to get a job with a decent wage, or even any job at all. Vicious cycle. So I guess the need for a better educated population is then at odds with the desire to have a more gullible and easily manipulated population. The powers that be will either have to cave and pay to improve public education (:lol:), make university more affordable (:lol:), or find some way to deal with a growing, disgruntled lower class.... which could get ugly.
Now on the other hand, I think the internet will help us fix a lot of stuff from the grassroots level. It's only going to get harder and harder to keep people in the dark, provided the SOPAs and CISPAs of the world don't get passed.
-
Education helps, my wonder is if it's enough or not.
As I see it it's a race. A race between machines learning jobs from the dumbest / more repetitive landscapes of the Jobland to the most intelligent / creative parts of it and humans developing and adapting their economies and education to the parts where human skills, interactions and creativity are still way beyond even the most polyanna AI dreamers inside Google and so on.
IF the job landscape were to "stagnate" to our present levels, the middle to low wage employment would just vanish within 10/30 years, which would mean a staggering amount of unemployment, which is the current means to distribute wealth to human beings. We may say a lot of jokes and expose the bad situation of the chinese sweatshops and so on, but this kind of economy did bring up 2 billion people out of the misery hole for the past 20 years. This could be on the verge of just *ending* outright, with chinese being substituted for US and european machines.
There is a lot of room here for outright deflationary economics, bringing some sort of Moore's Law into manufacturing and all sorts of low-skill jobs. This is dynamite for the Inequality problem. OTOH, at the other end, capital will concentrate into fewer hands, as the distances diminish to an internet click, and thus people will inevitably go for the best companies in the world rather than local (Think about "Amazoning" the entire economy).
All these points make me wonder if we shouldn't start to think other means to distribute the wealth created other than jobs. There are lots of ideas regarding this problem, and they aren't all "left-wing".
-
I think eventually we'll get to a point where we don't need everyone to work in order to keep society running and progressing and such. Of course that's a long ways off and for the time being unemployment is still a problem.
Really, the crux of the matter for wealth disparity is greed, and I don't know how the hell we can work around that. Again, education could help, like video that kicked off this thread. Get people to understand how badly they're being screwed so maybe they can vote more in their own interests or something. But still, the current status quo is so entrenched, I don't know how much awareness by itself could accomplish. We need some kind of incentive for just helping out your fellow man, but I don't know how you can make people want to do that.
-
You could well discard "greed" and still the way the system is built would create by itself the enormous disparity we are seeing. Perhaps it would be slower, but I think it would still exist. Nevermind the fact that "greed" is just ambition (which is a wonderful thing) gone somewhat off the rails. You cannot have a system that shuts down greed without shutting down drive, ambition, the urge of building something new yourself.
We need some kind of incentive for just helping out your fellow man, but I don't know how you can make people want to do that.
Create a system where the incentive is natural and self-reinforcing (positive feedback loops), or a system where redistribution of wealth provides enough to everybody not to starve themselves. The latter is inevitable, I think, if we want to save civilization as we know it.
-
Create a system where the incentive is natural and self-reinforcing (positive feedback loops)
Right, this is kind of exactly what I meant. It's just.... how?
-
Create a system where the incentive is natural and self-reinforcing (positive feedback loops)
Right, this is kind of exactly what I meant. It's just.... how?
Give them XP for things. They get a certain amount of XP for organizing a club, or time spent doing community services. People who have higher XP levels can print better things off societies 3D printers.
-
Substitute "XP" for "CASH" and you got yourself a solution. Good job.
-
It's fascinating to see how the issue of income distribution has become a simple matter of state-run redistribution out of compassion for the poor vs. rewarding ability. I suppose that ridiculous pigeonholing is useful to supporters of both the so-called free market and the statist branch of the socialist movement.
Classical liberalism in its original form focused on the difference between earned (productive) income and unearned (rent) income, arguing that the government should leave the activities that produce the former alone and aggressively intervene to curtail the latter, as all income not derived from the direct creation of wealth but from the privileged of owning a monopoly on a precious resource (land, water, the ability to create money via a bank charter) is parasitic and an impediment to growth. They advocated eliminating rent either through taxing the income away (which would include heavy taxes on land appreciation, interest payments above the breakeven level, capital gains, and inheritance, amongst other things), or outright nationalizing the monopolized resources in question and putting them in the public domain to minimize the cost of using them for everyone. With the added bonus of using those taxes to pay for public infrastructure and social services like free education. In other words, allow individuals to accumulate wealth if they're actually doing something productive, but once accumulated make it extremely difficult to impossible to use that wealth to acquire some income producing privilege. Under those conditions formerly entrenched class divisions will quickly break down into something much more fluid and shallow.
I'm not saying this is a perfect approach to the problem, with the biggest dispute being between classical liberals and Marxists as to weather entrepreneurial\managerial income is legitimate or just another kind of rent (Keynes sits on the fence when he calls capitalist income quasi-rent). But the point is that this isn't just an either-or thing; there are workable approaches to achieve both equality and freedom at the same time.
The real ideological divide is between the classical liberals, Keynesians and Post-Keynesians, and on the extreme end, socialists and anarchists, on one side, and the members of the marginalist school (today called Neo-Classicals and Austrians) along with the Fascists on the other. Read the last chapter of Keynes's General Theory, particularly where he calls for the "euthanasia of the rentier". It's something Adam Smith could have written. Keynesian economics (not the neo-classical crap dressed up as Keynes, but his real ideas) was not a rebellion against Classical economics but a continuation. Contrast that with the marginalist theories that dominate public discourse today, best defined by a line from Milton Friedman, that "there is no such thing as a free lunch." In other words, there is no such thing as economic rent, all income is earned, it's ok to tax labor and income instead of property and finance, let the banks weigh down the economy with debt so they can rake in the interest, feudalism is actually the free market, freedom is slavery, move on, nothing to see here.
-
Look Mr Vega, your comment is a good one, but somewhat facetious regarding our purposes and so on. Your point about entrepeneurial/managerial income being rent or quasi-rent is exactly the point that I am talking about.
My thought on this matter is that this "quasi-rent" will dramatically increase with the possibility of a massive concentration of capital we are already witnessing, while the "earned" income will massively diminish in proportion. This will happen due to several predictable deflationary revolutions that are already in sight, and that can be boiled down to "machines will substitute people".
Three things on the above thought. First, simple examples. Driverless cars means Driverless trucks, a whole army of driverless transportation vehicles distributing everything on our economy, it will be awesome but it will absolutely destroy a whole bunch of jobs. Taxi drivers, gone. Massive manufacturing (think Foxconn's million workers et al) will, obviously, disappear. Most mechanical jobs, puff.
Second, capital will concentrate even further with AI advances.
Third, this all happened before (the industrial revolution, etc.).
However, notice that with the last revolutions, we ended up creating what is now called by the right wingers "the nanny state", which was something unthinkable in the 18th century, and now it is considered the "Standard" except for the US conservatives.
So the question is, what kind of a "New Society" should we build given the upcoming revolutions, given the problems we are already detecting today? Or, alternatively, what kind of ****ty society will we get, if we place our bets on those who long for the "Gilded Age" of the "roaring 20s", that think that our problems are solvable if we just destroyed our governments and pegged our currencies to a shiny metal?
Contrast that with the marginalist theories that dominate public discourse today, best defined by a line from Milton Friedman, that "there is no such thing as a free lunch." In other words, there is no such thing as economic rent, all income is earned, it's ok to tax labor and income instead of property and finance, let the banks weigh down the economy with debt so they can rake in the interest, feudalism is actually the free market, freedom is slavery, move on, nothing to see here.
Yeah, I think that kind of sarcasm is earned by the Austerians. I wouldn't put Milton Friedman in such low terms (I actually think the guy was a genius), he wasn't a goldbug for instance, but the rest, yeah. And I'm from Portugal, so I know how it is like to be placed under the hands of Austerians.
-
Because his economic views probably seem to lie further right on a traditional L/R scale than they actually do if you plot his views on government intervention separately. That said, I believe we've all already indicated that the actual plot positions that you get from taking their test are somewhat divergent from reality. I don't necessarily think their test is perfectly crafted, but I do think a 2-axis plot makes much more sense that a traditional single axis. Apparently you do not.
You can't plot them separately. Entitlement programs, taxes, regulations, and socialism (excluding the anarchist variety) are, in and of themselves, government interventions. They are also economic policy. Therefore, Obama should be much farther to the left than my friend (and myself to a lesser degree). He still fits within the center-left area, of course, because neoliberalism is a fairly right-wing (far-right on that ridiculous scale) ideology.
Leftism and government intervention are, in most cases, directly proportional to each other. The Political Compass intentionally tries to seperate them so that leftists and moderate rightists can be smeared as right-wing extremists (at least, that's my take).
Well, yes? That's the point - L/R scales are broken. Your position on a L/R scale doesn't translate to a 2-axis scale because it measures different things.
If you have a fundamental problem with 2-axes versus one that's your prerogative. I happen to like 2-axis plots for politics precisely because it gives a much more interesting analysis than simple L/R, because simple L/R scales don't actually work to compare one country to another because social views, government intervention, and economics are all confounded into a single plot point, and what takes overriding priority depends on the person doing the plotting more than any other factor (American 'conservatives' who everyone else considers far-right will always plot themselves closer to the middle, while plotting Democrats way out in left field, despite the fact that neither is supported by an actual measurement of policy. In reality, pretty much all of the American political spectrum plots right-of-center when you use a global context.)
I have to question your logic in bringing the Compass into this thread. If it has no relation to conventional terminology than using it in that context is pointless.
L/R scales have some issues, but trying to seperate them into their individual components is a bad idea because many, many policies are economic, social, and intrusive in nature.
EDIT: Oh, and another thing: If the center is halfway between pure capitalism and pure collectivism, how could a welfare capitalist like myself be considered "center-left"? Wouldn't I be right-wing?
-
Look Mr Vega, your comment is a good one, but somewhat facetious regarding our purposes and so on. Your point about entrepeneurial/managerial income being rent or quasi-rent is exactly the point that I am talking about.
My thought on this matter is that this "quasi-rent" will dramatically increase with the possibility of a massive concentration of capital we are already witnessing, while the "earned" income will massively diminish in proportion. This will happen due to several predictable deflationary revolutions that are already in sight, and that can be boiled down to "machines will substitute people".
Three things on the above thought. First, simple examples. Driverless cars means Driverless trucks, a whole army of driverless transportation vehicles distributing everything on our economy, it will be awesome but it will absolutely destroy a whole bunch of jobs. Taxi drivers, gone. Massive manufacturing (think Foxconn's million workers et al) will, obviously, disappear. Most mechanical jobs, puff.
Second, capital will concentrate even further with AI advances.
Third, this all happened before (the industrial revolution, etc.).
However, notice that with the last revolutions, we ended up creating what is now called by the right wingers "the nanny state", which was something unthinkable in the 18th century, and now it is considered the "Standard" except for the US conservatives.
So the question is, what kind of a "New Society" should we build given the upcoming revolutions, given the problems we are already detecting today? Or, alternatively, what kind of ****ty society will we get, if we place our bets on those who long for the "Gilded Age" of the "roaring 20s", that think that our problems are solvable if we just destroyed our governments and pegged our currencies to a shiny metal?
Contrast that with the marginalist theories that dominate public discourse today, best defined by a line from Milton Friedman, that "there is no such thing as a free lunch." In other words, there is no such thing as economic rent, all income is earned, it's ok to tax labor and income instead of property and finance, let the banks weigh down the economy with debt so they can rake in the interest, feudalism is actually the free market, freedom is slavery, move on, nothing to see here.
Yeah, I think that kind of sarcasm is earned by the Austerians. I wouldn't put Milton Friedman in such low terms (I actually think the guy was a genius), he wasn't a goldbug for instance, but the rest, yeah. And I'm from Portugal, so I know how it is like to be placed under the hands of Austerians.
One: I hate to go all Marxist, but um, if you're going to fully automate manufacturing and stuff, you still need to find some way to pay your consumers, otherwise there's no one to buy all these wonderful goods.
The luddites said in the 1800s that machines would throw everyone out of work...didn't happen. Productivity increased and they found something else for the workers to do. That America is experiencing such a massive structural job shortage (beyond the effects of the recession) is simply because the industry was shipped overseas (which the robotics boom will hopefully bring back). I'm not saying that what you're predicting can't happen or won't eventually happen, but each time someone predicts it I'm reminded of how many times it's been wrong.
Two; Here's my counter: does capital need to be so highly concentrated now? Ignoring the fact that the current level of wealth inequality is totally unprecedented and can probably only occur in an economy totally dominated by the rentier class, I need to ask whether why you need capital concentrated in a society with such high productivity and per-capita income. You could argue it was necessary a century ago for wealth to be concentrated in such few hands so heavy industry could be built up in the first place and there just wasn't enough on hand at the time if you scattered it, but now? Is this really the most efficient arrangement?
I'll go further. For a capitalist to obtain rent from capital requires capital to be scarce relative to needs or wants. Um, if productivity keeps rising, why does that need to be true? Why can't capital be built up to the point that it ceases to be scarce? This is exactly what Keynes talked about when he advocated for the Euthanasia of the Rentier; he argued this would actually happen after enough full employment accumulation in an economy without asset price bubbles (ie, all investment goes directly to production). Of course, a few economists have pointed out that the conditions Keynes specified for this process to occur require that rent income already be zero, but still. Why do things have to develop the way you're predicting?
Just because economic development has followed certain patterns over the recent past does not mean it will continue to do so. And the nature of our society depends on and varies with its institutions more than you may think.
Three: Milton Friedman, hoo boy...where to start? I want you to find and read Debunking Economics by Steve Keen. Amongst many other things, it chronicles how Friedman and Lucas repopularized Neo-Classical beliefs about money and markets in the 1970s after Keynes had pointed out that they didn't hold up once you include the issue of an uncertain future in the model. They got around this issue by assuming that people could predict the future -literally, that was their assumption- and called this theory "Rational Expectations". Reading Keen explain each step of their reasoning is laugh-out-loud funny - it's like reading the economic equivalent of the witch burning scene in Monty Python in the Holy Grail. I hate to break it to you, but only the craziest Austrians like von Mises and Rothbard top him in the use of woo.
-
After reading Apollo, I need to correct some definitions here.
Leftist- you like equality. You might want to government to redistribute, or you might be an anarchist who wants a decentralized but egalitarian society, but as long as you want equality, you're of the left.
Rightist- Authoritarian is the usual description, but you're starting with the belief that a certain level of inequality is good, justified, or necessary. How much inequality you want is yours to decide.
Centrist - what you get called when the media wants to praise you for appearing to be in between two arbitrary points. In the center? The center of what? Where are the two extremes located? Mussolini's politics were somewhere between Hitler and Stalin. I guess that makes him a centrist! You can be in between something literally anywhere on the left-right spectrum. It means absolutely nothing. It's a marketing term. Used primarily to create the illusion of disagreement that requires a centrist to go and 'solve'.
Liberal - you think people should be free(er). You might advocate this by having the government get out of your business, or you might call for government intervention to prevent others from violating your civil and economic freedoms. You might focus on negative liberty (free from coercion) or positive liberty (free to fufill one's potential, unburdened by the cost of education, for example), but you just have to focus on freedom. Of course most people who actually take freedom seriously in this era consider both the oppressive power of the state and the oppressive power of concentrated wealth, but there's plenty of room for disagreement. Liberalism is a big tent to those who take it seriously (ie, not Democrats).
Conservative - you believe in traditional values. So, in other words, you happen to be in favor of whatever you think are traditional values. If these traditional values include say, liberty and freedom from having to subject yourself to wage labor (like say, THE PLATFORM OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS PRESIDENT), you can be a conservative and be the most ardent left-liberal at the same time.
-
After reading Apollo, I need to correct some definitions here.
Leftist- you like equality. You might want to government to redistribute, or you might be an anarchist who wants a decentralized but egalitarian society, but as long as you want equality, you're of the left.
Rightist- Authoritarian is the usual description, but you're starting with the belief that a certain level of inequality is good, justified, or necessary. How much inequality you want is yours to decide.
Centrist - what you get called when the media wants to praise you for appearing to be in between two arbitrary points. In the center? The center of what? Where are the two extremes located? Mussolini's politics were somewhere between Hitler and Stalin. I guess that makes him a centrist! You can be in between something literally anywhere on the left-right spectrum. It means absolutely nothing. It's a marketing term. Used primarily to create the illusion of disagreement that requires a centrist to go and 'solve'.
Liberal - you think people should be free(er). You might advocate this by having the government get out of your business, or you might call for government intervention to prevent others from violating your civil and economic freedoms. You might focus on negative liberty (free from coercion) or positive liberty (free to fufill one's potential, unburdened by the cost of education, for example), but you just have to focus on freedom. Of course most people who actually take freedom seriously in this era consider both the oppressive power of the state and the oppressive power of concentrated wealth, but there's plenty of room for disagreement. Liberalism is a big tent to those who take it seriously (ie, not Democrats).
Conservative - you believe in traditional values. So, in other words, you happen to be in favor of whatever you think are traditional values. If these traditional values include say, liberty and freedom from having to subject yourself to wage labor (like say, THE PLATFORM OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS PRESIDENT), you can be a conservative and be the most ardent left-liberal at the same time.
Most of what you say is correct. However, note that most leftism uses the power of the state to force a measure of equality. That's what I mean when I say they're directly proportional.
All other things being equal, a capitalist society will be freer than a socialist society.
EDIT: Oh, and a rightist who wants equality but hates government intervention more is still a rightist. A democratic state can also be right-wing.
-
After reading Apollo, I need to correct some definitions here.
Leftist- you like equality. You might want to government to redistribute, or you might be an anarchist who wants a decentralized but egalitarian society, but as long as you want equality, you're of the left.
Rightist- Authoritarian is the usual description, but you're starting with the belief that a certain level of inequality is good, justified, or necessary. How much inequality you want is yours to decide.
Centrist - what you get called when the media wants to praise you for appearing to be in between two arbitrary points. In the center? The center of what? Where are the two extremes located? Mussolini's politics were somewhere between Hitler and Stalin. I guess that makes him a centrist! You can be in between something literally anywhere on the left-right spectrum. It means absolutely nothing. It's a marketing term. Used primarily to create the illusion of disagreement that requires a centrist to go and 'solve'.
Liberal - you think people should be free(er). You might advocate this by having the government get out of your business, or you might call for government intervention to prevent others from violating your civil and economic freedoms. You might focus on negative liberty (free from coercion) or positive liberty (free to fufill one's potential, unburdened by the cost of education, for example), but you just have to focus on freedom. Of course most people who actually take freedom seriously in this era consider both the oppressive power of the state and the oppressive power of concentrated wealth, but there's plenty of room for disagreement. Liberalism is a big tent to those who take it seriously (ie, not Democrats).
Conservative - you believe in traditional values. So, in other words, you happen to be in favor of whatever you think are traditional values. If these traditional values include say, liberty and freedom from having to subject yourself to wage labor (like say, THE PLATFORM OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS PRESIDENT), you can be a conservative and be the most ardent left-liberal at the same time.
Most of what you say is correct. However, note that most leftism uses the power of the state to force a measure of equality. That's what I mean when I say they're directly proportional.
All other things being equal, a capitalist society will be freer than a socialist society.
Boy, there's a nonsense statement grounded in nothing.
-
After reading Apollo, I need to correct some definitions here.
Leftist- you like equality. You might want to government to redistribute, or you might be an anarchist who wants a decentralized but egalitarian society, but as long as you want equality, you're of the left.
Rightist- Authoritarian is the usual description, but you're starting with the belief that a certain level of inequality is good, justified, or necessary. How much inequality you want is yours to decide.
Centrist - what you get called when the media wants to praise you for appearing to be in between two arbitrary points. In the center? The center of what? Where are the two extremes located? Mussolini's politics were somewhere between Hitler and Stalin. I guess that makes him a centrist! You can be in between something literally anywhere on the left-right spectrum. It means absolutely nothing. It's a marketing term. Used primarily to create the illusion of disagreement that requires a centrist to go and 'solve'.
Liberal - you think people should be free(er). You might advocate this by having the government get out of your business, or you might call for government intervention to prevent others from violating your civil and economic freedoms. You might focus on negative liberty (free from coercion) or positive liberty (free to fufill one's potential, unburdened by the cost of education, for example), but you just have to focus on freedom. Of course most people who actually take freedom seriously in this era consider both the oppressive power of the state and the oppressive power of concentrated wealth, but there's plenty of room for disagreement. Liberalism is a big tent to those who take it seriously (ie, not Democrats).
Conservative - you believe in traditional values. So, in other words, you happen to be in favor of whatever you think are traditional values. If these traditional values include say, liberty and freedom from having to subject yourself to wage labor (like say, THE PLATFORM OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS PRESIDENT), you can be a conservative and be the most ardent left-liberal at the same time.
Most of what you say is correct. However, note that most leftism uses the power of the state to force a measure of equality. That's what I mean when I say they're directly proportional.
All other things being equal, a capitalist society will be freer than a socialist society.
EDIT: Oh, and a rightist who wants equality but hates government intervention more is still a rightist. A democratic state can also be right-wing.
No, someone who wants equality but hates government intervention is a left libertarian. Right and left have nothing to do with freedom directly. You might argue that equality is a necessary precondition for freedom, or that equality in the real world requires the government to violate our liberty, but again, that's up for discussion. The definitions are not. Left = equality, right = not equality.
Here are some more definitions for you:
Socialism- An economic system where the workers run the workplaces (especially the factories) and make all of the the economic decisions, including for investment. Notice the lack of mention of the government. Government ownership of the economy is not socialism, regardless of whether or not the government claims to own it in the people's name. State socialism is a contradiction in terms, invented by Lenin and Trotsky to legitimize their dismantling of the democratic worker organizations that sprung up in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and the concentration of all power in their own hands. The west was happy to call this socialism because it equates socialism with one of the horrors of the 20th century and not its real meaning, the democratic ownership of industry. Socialism is workers control.
Capitalism - An economic system which separates society into workers and capitalists. The capitalists are endowed with control of the physical production capital of the society and make the crucial decisions of when and what to produce by way of private investment. The funds to invest are provided by a banking sector with the power to create purchasing power ex nihilo to award to entrepreneurs, allowing the economy to (potentially, if this power to create credit is not misused to inflate the price of existing assets instead of creating new ones) grow faster than would otherwise be possible if investment were funded only by existing income. Workers are paid wages for operating the capital and (at least nominally) influence production by deciding what produced goods to purchase with their wages.
Free market - a term with any number of definitions. By the original definition given by Smith, Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, a free market is a market free of any economic rent, be it caused by government interference or by private exploitation of monopolies. They key here is that in an economy free of rent, prices fall to their floor - the cost of production, because there is no additional overhead businesses must pay to produce a good beyond the direct price of the labor and capital used in its production. The irony is that classical liberals actually believed that the government had to intervene in some way to remove rent from the equation - the only question was how to do it while minimizing the side effects to the rest of the economy.
The popular modern definition of a free market is an economy with literally no government interference. One type of overhead is eliminated, while the other is allowed to grow freely. Such a free market has never existed, ever, certainly not in western societies, which all developed with heavy state intervention (who do you think paid for the development of the first computers? Or the internet? Certainly not the private sector). However, such a definition is used as a positive strawman to justify the actual economic system in which we live, in which the development of new technologies is paid for with public funds until said technology can be sold at a profit, at which point the patents are carted off to private sector monopolies who can sell at high prices to consumers who already paid for the development costs with their tax dollars, thus ripping them off twice.
Also notice that the original definition of free market does not require the concentration of the means of production in relatively few hands, as in capitalism. In fact, a believer in the free market might consider such an arrangement hostile to the free market.
-
If you all haven't gathered this by now, if Adam Smith were alive today I am one hundred percent certain that he would be an advocate for the Occupy Movement. It attracts all kinds of radicals, but if there's one central message the movement has its that our politicians are helping the banks screw over the economy for their own benefit, which is a message any classical liberal would be happy to get behind.
-
Boy, there's a nonsense statement grounded in nothing.
Nothing other than the fact that attempts to implement socialism on any sort of a large scale have (almost?) invariably used the state's power. Look at Cuba, Soviet Russia, and all the other communist dictatorships.
(nice ad hominem there)
However, I will admit that, on paper, many socialist ideologies do advocate for a very high degree of personal and economic freedom. It's just the implementation that ends up increasing government control.
No, someone who wants equality but hates government intervention is a left libertarian. Right and left have nothing to do with freedom directly. You might argue that equality is a necessary precondition for freedom, or that equality in the real world requires the government to violate our liberty, but again, that's up for discussion. The definitions are not. Left = equality, right = not equality.
A laissez-faire capitalist who acknowledges that system's flaws but hates government intervention more is a left-winger?
Socialism- An economic system where the workers run the workplaces (especially the factories) and make all of the the economic decisions, including for investment. Notice the lack of mention of the government. Government ownership of the economy is not socialism, regardless of whether or not the government claims to own it in the people's name. State socialism is a contradiction in terms, invented by Lenin and Trotsky to legitimize their dismantling of the democratic worker organizations that sprung up in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and the concentration of all power in their own hands. The west was happy to call this socialism because it equates socialism with one of the horrors of the 20th century and not its real meaning, the democratic ownership of industry. Socialism is workers control.
That's one theoretical form of socialism. The attempts that have been practiced on a large scale in real life, on the other hand, have utilized state control of the means of production to achieve that end.
As for the "it's not socialism because it doesn't fit the democratic definition" argument, ideologies have many different forms. You can't exclude one because you don't like it.
Capitalism - An economic system which separates society into workers and capitalists. The capitalists are endowed with control of the physical production capital of the society and make the crucial decisions of when and what to produce by way of private investment. The funds to invest are provided by a banking sector with the power to create purchasing power ex nihilo to award to entrepreneurs, allowing the economy to (potentially, if this power to create credit is not misused to inflate the price of existing assets instead of creating new ones) grow faster than would otherwise be possible if investment were funded only by existing income. Workers are paid wages for operating the capital and (at least nominally) influence production by deciding what produced goods to purchase with their wages.
No major problems with that, although I question your use of the term "capitalist". Anyone who supports capitalism is a capitalist, not just a member of the upper class.
-
Boy, there's a nonsense statement grounded in nothing.
Nothing other than the fact that attempts to implement socialism on any sort of a large scale have (almost?) invariably used the state's power. Look at Cuba, Soviet Russia, and all the other communist dictatorships.
(nice ad hominem there)
However, I will admit that, on paper, many socialist ideologies do advocate for a very high degree of personal and economic freedom. It's just the implementation that ends up increasing government control.
Come on, dude. You know what an ad hominem is, right? It literally means to the man. It's an attack based on the arguer, not the argument. And I am clearly, explicitly, visibly, without any ambiguity whatsoever saying that the statement you made - not you, the statement you made - is groundless nonsense.
Which it is. This statement:
All other things being equal, a capitalist society will be freer than a socialist society.
is meaningless, and it has no grounding. No one and nothing in history has the capability to substantiate this statement, because never have 'all other things' ever remotely approached being equal.
-
Can we not delete posts anymore? Oh yeah, not the last one in the thread.
-
I'm deleting the above post - I did not intend to invoke Godwin's Law, just to provide the most extreme counterexample possible.
-
Nothing other than the fact that attempts to implement socialism on any sort of a large scale have (almost?) invariably used the state's power. Look at Cuba, Soviet Russia, and all the other communist dictatorships.
(nice ad hominem there)
However, I will admit that, on paper, many socialist ideologies do advocate for a very high degree of personal and economic freedom. It's just the implementation that ends up increasing government control.
What about the Spanish anarchists in 1936 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution)? Not without flaws, and quickly destroyed by attack from both the fascists and the Soviet-supported Marxists and Republicans, but still.
-
The relative freedom of various societies is hardly a useful topic in these discussions anyway, since nobody can pin down what freedom is. Is a society without laws 'freer' than one with laws? Superficially, maybe (that seems to be the level at which 'freedom' has been considered so far), but given freedom to act many people will freely take away the freedoms of others, whether through some antisocial action or neglect, or just by killing them. If we ban antisocial behaviors, restricting freedom, but thereby render people free from the negative consequences of those actions, have we actually expanded freedoms? How do we weigh negative freedoms versus positive freedoms? How do we weigh the distribution of freedom within a culture - is it more important for fewer people to have more freedom (as in capitalism, where it's possible to accumulate enormous capital, but probable that you won't and that your range of action will be comparatively restricted), or for everyone to have a little freedom (as in some notional leveler state, where everybody is guaranteed social services, but no one can accumulate the capital to undertake large projects)?
Is a truly anarchic society, where your risk of death by violence or misadventure is high and the infrastructure is basically nonexistent, free - given that only a narrow spectrum of actions permit your survival, and few actions at all permit you to exist in anything but a subsistence mode?
Is Omelas a free society?
-
If by "hardly a useful topic in these discussions anyway" you mean "something that we haven't been taught how to evaluate seriously by our society", then yeah.
Freedom has no meaning if isn't something that supposed to be applied universally to all. The freedom of elites over their subjects isn't freedom. If I have a gun pointed at you, I have the freedom to do whatever I want and you can't stop me. That isn't freedom - that's just might making right. Freedom as a useful concept is something created by everyone acting according to a mutual defense pact to defend each others' liberty.
And to your last question,
No.
-
Come on, dude. You know what an ad hominem is, right? It literally means to the man. It's an attack based on the arguer, not the argument. And I am clearly, explicitly, visibly, without any ambiguity whatsoever saying that the statement you made - not you, the statement you made - is groundless nonsense.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary would like to have a word with you:
ad ho·mi·nem adjective \(ˈ)ad-ˈhä-mə-ˌnem, -nəm\
Definition of AD HOMINEM
1: appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect
2: marked by or being an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to the contentions made
"Boy, there's a nonsense statement grounded in nothing." fits the first definition. It is an emotional appeal that makes no rational statement on anything.
Which it is. This statement:
All other things being equal, a capitalist society will be freer than a socialist society.
is meaningless, and it has no grounding. No one and nothing in history has the capability to substantiate this statement, because never have 'all other things' ever remotely approached being equal.
State-implemented (not anarchist) socialist policies restrict economic freedom by interfering (to good or bad ends) with the economy. This diminishes the society's average level of freedom, regardless of its overall political system.
The relative freedom of various societies is hardly a useful topic in these discussions anyway, since nobody can pin down what freedom is. Is a society without laws 'freer' than one with laws? Superficially, maybe (that seems to be the level at which 'freedom' has been considered so far), but given freedom to act many people will freely take away the freedoms of others, whether through some antisocial action or neglect, or just by killing them. If we ban antisocial behaviors, restricting freedom, but thereby render people free from the negative consequences of those actions, have we actually expanded freedoms? How do we weigh negative freedoms versus positive freedoms? How do we weigh the distribution of freedom within a culture - is it more important for fewer people to have more freedom (as in capitalism, where it's possible to accumulate enormous capital, but probable that you won't and that your range of action will be comparatively restricted), or for everyone to have a little freedom (as in some notional leveler state, where everybody is guaranteed social services, but no one can accumulate the capital to undertake large projects)?
Is Omelas a free society?
I somewhat agree with that, but my point still stands if you use the definition of "freedom from government" (I am).
Omelas? I haven't read that story.
-
Come on, dude. You know what an ad hominem is, right? It literally means to the man. It's an attack based on the arguer, not the argument. And I am clearly, explicitly, visibly, without any ambiguity whatsoever saying that the statement you made - not you, the statement you made - is groundless nonsense.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary would like to have a word with you:
ad ho·mi·nem adjective \(ˈ)ad-ˈhä-mə-ˌnem, -nəm\
Definition of AD HOMINEM
1: appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect
2: marked by or being an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to the contentions made
"Boy, there's a nonsense statement grounded in nothing." fits the first definition. It is an emotional appeal that makes no rational statement on anything.
It makes a perfectly clear rational statement on something very precise: your statement, which is groundless (it cannot be substantiated) and nonsense (it is not a logically coherent statement). I've explained why. You're free to engage with that explanation now.
e: wait, you did!
State-implemented (not anarchist) socialist policies restrict economic freedom by interfering (to good or bad ends) with the economy. This diminishes the society's average level of freedom, regardless of its overall political system.
I somewhat agree with that, but my point still stands if you use the definition of "freedom from government" (I am).
You're deplying a tautology here: state implemented socialist policies restrict economic freedom because they reduce freedom, which you define as freedom from government. Your argument is that freedom from government is reduced when the government takes actions which reduce freedom.
What I think you want to say is that when state actors declare rules that constrain the behavior of economic actors, they reduce the action space available to the society as a whole. But this only holds if the state intervention in the market doesn't actually end up expanding the action space. A great example is stock markets. Stock markets behave more efficiently without insider information. States can punish the use of insider information. This improves the efficiency of the stock market (as in the case of the Dutch East India Corporation, which had a marvelous run until its eventual collapse) and expands the action space available to both the society and its members.
In this case, state action (which you define as a reduction in freedom) actually leads to an expansion in 'freedom' (though see above for my contention that this is not a useful term).
-
I somewhat agree with that, but my point still stands if you use the definition of "freedom from government" (I am).
Oh ok, so I can imprison and enslave you, but as long as the government doesn't get involved, you're still free?
I can fool you into agreeing to a fraudulent mortgage contract, and when it goes belly up I can take your house and force you to work as my servant until you can pay the debts as stated in the contract, but as long as the government isn't involved, you're still free?
-
Dammit Battuta, reply to my posts! Me! MEEEEEeeeee!
-
I somewhat agree with that, but my point still stands if you use the definition of "freedom from government" (I am).
Oh ok, so I can imprison and enslave you, but as long as the government doesn't get involved, you're still free?
I can fool you into agreeing to a fraudulent mortgage contract, and when it goes belly up I can take your house and force you to work as my servant until you can pay the debts as stated in the contract, but as long as the government isn't involved, you're still free?
Bond markets are another great example of this. The government can create and sell bonds. This is government intervention in the market. By Apollo's definition this is a reduction in freedom. Yet the bond market allows private citizens enormous economic leverage; they can develop huge fortunes and even (as James Carville pointed out so famously) influence government behavior. The bond market is a cornerstone of capitalist society, but it's in large part about state intervention - the very stability of states as compared to corporations is what makes state bonds such important economic tools.
-
Dammit Battuta, reply to my posts! Me! MEEEEEeeeee!
See, I did! You make good points that I tend to agree with, though, and I don't think you of all people need to be informed that The Issue Is More Complex Than You Realize, which is most of what I do in GD.
e: I missed this though, this is a lot of what I was trying to get at:
Freedom has no meaning if isn't something that supposed to be applied universally to all. The freedom of elites over their subjects isn't freedom. If I have a gun pointed at you, I have the freedom to do whatever I want and you can't stop me. That isn't freedom - that's just might making right. Freedom as a useful concept is something created by everyone acting according to a mutual defense pact to defend each others' liberty.
-
It makes a perfectly clear rational statement on something very precise: your statement, which is groundless (it cannot be substantiated) and nonsense (it is not a logically coherent statement). I've explained why. You're free to engage with that explanation now.
You presented a logical argument after I replied to your first post that did not bother to explain why I was wrong ("that's a dumb argument" is not logical). It was ad hominem because, initially, you did not back it up with any logic.
You're deplying a tautology here: state implemented socialist policies restrict economic freedom because they reduce freedom, which you define as freedom from government. Your argument is that freedom from government is reduced when the government takes actions which reduce freedom.
I'd think "freedom from government is reduced when the government takes actions which reduce freedom." is rather self-explanatory.
What I think you want to say is that when state actors declare rules that constrain the behavior of economic actors, they reduce the action space available to the society as a whole. But this only holds if the state intervention in the market doesn't actually end up expanding the action space. A great example is stock markets. Stock markets behave more efficiently without insider information. States can punish the use of insider information. This improves the efficiency of the stock market (as in the case of the Dutch East India Corporation, which had a marvelous run until its eventual collapse) and expands the action space available to both the society and its members.
In this case, state action (which you define as a reduction in freedom) actually leads to an expansion in 'freedom' (though see above for my contention that this is not a useful term).
Nope. By "freedom", I simply mean absence of government intervention, which is also the definition the Political Compass uses. I'm using that definition because this argument spawned from a criticism I leveled at it.
-
It makes a perfectly clear rational statement on something very precise: your statement, which is groundless (it cannot be substantiated) and nonsense (it is not a logically coherent statement). I've explained why. You're free to engage with that explanation now.
You presented a logical argument after I replied to your first post that did not bother to explain why I was wrong ("that's a dumb argument" is not logical). It was ad hominem because, initially, you did not back it up with any logic.
I did not back it up, you're correct, but that doesn't make it an ad hominem. It makes it a statement about the merit of your statement. An ad hominem statement would be 'Boy, you're dumb' rather than 'boy, that statement is dumb'.
I'd think "freedom from government is reduced when the government takes actions which reduce freedom." is rather self-explanatory.
It's not, and that's the fundamental problem of your whole argument - you've just tautologically passed the definition of freedom on to the last word there, freedom. What if the government takes actions which expand 'freedom', such as punishing the use of insider information in the stock market?
What it seems like you want to say here is 'freedom from government is reduced when the government takes actions'.
]Nope. By "freedom", I simply mean absence of government intervention, which is also the definition the Political Compass uses. I'm using that definition because this argument spawned from a criticism I leveled at it.
My assertion is that this is an incomplete definition of freedom, groundless and nonsensical, and that any statement that incorporates it is also groundless and nonsensical.
-
I did not back it up, you're correct, but that doesn't make it an ad hominem. It makes it a statement about the merit of your statement. An ad hominem statement would be 'Boy, you're dumb' rather than 'boy, that statement is dumb'.
That's one definition, but another simply refers to substituting rational arguments for emotional ones. That accurately describes your first statement.
It's not, and that's the fundamental problem of your whole argument - you've just tautologically passed the definition of freedom on to the last word there, freedom. What if the government takes actions which expand 'freedom', such as punishing the use of insider information in the stock market?
It is, because freedom reducing actions obviously reduce freedom.
I never actually used that definition (my bad, should have pointed that out in my previous post).
What it seems like you want to say here is 'freedom from government is reduced when the government takes actions'.
In this case, I'm using the latter despite its limitations.
My assertion is that this is an incomplete definition of freedom, groundless and nonsensical, and that any statement that incorporates it is also groundless and nonsensical.
My assertion is that that definition's flaws don't matter in this particular case, because I was criticizing something that uses that it for its calculations. Therefore, I must also use that definition.
I'd also question your claim that it is "nonsensical". Incomplete, certainly, but it can still be useful when talking about political systems.
-
I did not back it up, you're correct, but that doesn't make it an ad hominem. It makes it a statement about the merit of your statement. An ad hominem statement would be 'Boy, you're dumb' rather than 'boy, that statement is dumb'.
That's one definition, but another simply refers to substituting rational arguments for emotional ones. That accurately describes your first statement.
No, it doesn't, man. It was an evaluation of the quality of your statement. That's a rational argument, and you're not going to get any interesting posts out of arguing otherwise.
It is, because freedom reducing actions obviously reduce freedom.
This isn't obvious at all. For reasons why, please consult this post. http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=84394.msg1687286#msg1687286
I'm discussing this statement:
All other things being equal, a capitalist society will be freer than a socialist society.
-
Quit bickering about ad hominem arguments. You both know full well I'd have banned anyone who made one. :p
-
Quite.
-
No, it doesn't, man. It was an evaluation of the quality of your statement. That's a rational argument, and you're not going to get any interesting posts out of arguing otherwise.
Calling an argument "nonsense" is an emotional appeal. It does not, in and of itself, explain why the argument is wrong. This tactic works fine when mixed in with logical arguments, but your first post didn't have any.
This isn't obvious at all. For reasons why, please consult this post. http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=84394.msg1687286#msg1687286
You make a good point in that post: laws that seem restrictive can actually expand freedom (in the more complex sense). However, that would prevent them from being freedom-reducing actions (if you use a less superficial definition).
This is quite interesting, and I really do think you made some good points in there. On the other hand, my original argument required me to use the Political Compass's definition.
I'm discussing this statement:
All other things being equal, a capitalist society will be freer than a socialist society.
And that statement was designed to point out a flaw in the Political Compass's scale and analysis of political figures, requiring me to use its definitions. Sure, socialist policies may expand opportunities and therefore freedom in one sense, but by the definitions of that scale they decrease it by increasing government intervention* (at least, the state-administered forms do). I'm not arguing in favor of that logic, but I have to use it in that case.
*: Although, that piece of information came from MP-Ryan, and I accepted it because it seemed the only conceivable explanation for the placement of our political figures. There is some chance it's wrong, but that would just mean their analysis of politicians is even more skewed than I thought.
-
The sentence is nonsense in the same way that "All things being equal, apples are better than oranges" is nonsense.
It's a opinion that requires such a massively detailed definition of what you are comparing, how all things can be equal, and what your criterion for better are that it is completely pointless.
-
Indeed. 'Nonsense' is not an emotional term. It means 'does not make sense'. (It even has specific further definitions in biology, as opposed to missense!)
The Webster's definition is really pretty bad, since ad hominem specifically means arguments about character or individual quality rather than the quality of reasoning.
-
And that statement was designed to point out a flaw in the Political Compass's scale and analysis of political figures, requiring me to use its definitions. Sure, socialist policies may expand opportunities and therefore freedom in one sense, but by the definitions of that scale they decrease it by increasing government intervention* (at least, the state-administered forms do). I'm not arguing in favor of that logic, but I have to use it in that case.
*: Although, that piece of information came from MP-Ryan, and I accepted it because it seemed the only conceivable explanation for the placement of our political figures. There is some chance it's wrong, but that would just mean their analysis of politicians is even more skewed than I thought.
That doesn't rescue you're argument, because you're still using some bastardized notion of what a two-axis scale is supposed to represent.
Putting aside the scale for a moment, the reason your statement that capitalist societies are freer than socialist societies is nonsense centers around three key problems:
1. You haven't define 'freedom,' except by virtue of tautological reasoning.
2. It's prefaced with the statement that "all other thing being equal," a measure which is impossible to ascribe a historical root for, as there are no possible comparators, rendering the statement nonsense from it's very beginning (*note: reasons why a L/R comparison scale is useless for cross-national/cultural/temporal comparisons generally, because the plot points are forever shifting and they're based on subjective interpretation).
3. You appear to be using economic systems as a measure of freedom of social life, when the two are not strongly correlated (e.g. China is in many ways a very successful capitalist society, economically-speaking; however, degree of social freedom from perceived negative intervention in the lives of its citizenry by the government is also very low).
-
Indeed. 'Nonsense' is not an emotional term. It means 'does not make sense'. (It even has specific further definitions in biology, as opposed to missense!)
It is an emotional appeal, because it's a loaded word that makes no attempt to explain why something is bad. "Boy, there's a nonsense statement grounded in nothing." is not a logical argument. It basically means "this is wrong because it doesn't make sense".
The Webster's definition is really pretty bad, since ad hominem specifically means arguments about character or individual quality rather than the quality of reasoning.
The term has often been used to mean both.
The sentence is nonsense in the same way that "All things being equal, apples are better than oranges" is nonsense.
It's a opinion that requires such a massively detailed definition of what you are comparing, how all things can be equal, and what your criterion for better are that it is completely pointless.
In Compass-speak the up/down axis measures government intervention. Since most forms of socialism use government economic intervention, that statement in largely correct in that particular context.
-
Indeed. 'Nonsense' is not an emotional term. It means 'does not make sense'. (It even has specific further definitions in biology, as opposed to missense!)
It is an emotional appeal, because it's a loaded word that makes no attempt to explain why something is bad. "Boy, there's a nonsense statement grounded in nothing." is not a logical argument. It basically means "this is wrong because it doesn't make sense".
That is exactly what it means, which is why it is not an emotional appeal, but instead a logical argument. 'Sense' versus 'non sense' is a logical state; A = A is sensible, whereas A = !A is not. Kara and I have both explained why more than once, now.
The Webster's definition is really pretty bad, since ad hominem specifically means arguments about character or individual quality rather than the quality of reasoning.
The term has often been used to mean both.
Incorrectly.
-
Quit bickering about ad hominem arguments. You both know full well I'd have banned anyone who made one. :p
This should have been the final word on the topic.
e: Why are we talking about the political compass in this thread instead of any of the interesting topics that came up on the first page
-
There's so much cool **** to talk about being utterly wasted in this thread that I'm tempted to start a new thread about political economy. I've been reading a bunch of books on the history of finance and the connection between state, bank, and market, and it's mind-boggling how little of the fundamental economics of the world people (myself included) actually understand.
None of the extant lay or political discourse on socialism and the role of the government in markets is ever going to go anywhere because people only recognize concepts like 'freedom' and 'competition' as buzzwords. I don't think your average American even understands fractional reserve banking.
-
That doesn't rescue you're argument, because you're still using some bastardized notion of what a two-axis scale is supposed to represent.
Putting aside the scale for a moment, the reason your statement that capitalist societies are freer than socialist societies is nonsense centers around three key problems:
My comment applies only to freedom in the scale sense, so we can't put it aside.
1. You haven't define 'freedom,' except by virtue of tautological reasoning.
I'm using freedom in the same way the Political Compass uses libertarian; that is, absence of government intervention. I have repeatedly said as much.
2. It's prefaced with the statement that "all other thing being equal," a measure which is impossible to ascribe a historical root for, as there are no possible comparators, rendering the statement nonsense from it's very beginning (*note: reasons why a L/R comparison scale is useless for cross-national/cultural/temporal comparisons generally, because the plot points are forever shifting and they're based on subjective interpretation).
It is theoretically possible for a capitalist and a welfare capitalist society to exist that, outside of economic policies and their consequences, are identical. Welfare capitalism is not a form of socialism (despite what a lot of rightists think), but it uses some socialist ideas.
These consequences would be far-reaching and pervasive, but they would not change the fact that, on paper, the welfare capitalist society would have a higher level of government intervention than the capitalist one. Since the Compass's U/D axis measures government intervention, this would make the former more authoritarian than the latter.
3. You appear to be using economic systems as a measure of freedom of social life, when the two are not strongly correlated (e.g. China is in many ways a very successful capitalist society, economically-speaking; however, degree of social freedom from perceived negative intervention in the lives of its citizenry by the government is also very low).
You have repeatedly stated that entitlements are a form of government intervention, and that redistribution is an economic policy. However, entitlements are both. They are also a common type of left-wing policy.
The Compass puts social views and views on government intervention in the same category (as it should).
That is exactly what it means, which is why it is not an emotional appeal, but instead a logical argument. 'Sense' versus 'non sense' is a logical state; A = A is sensible, whereas A = !A is not. Kara and I have both explained why more than once, now.
You did explain why, but only after I called your first post out for not explaining anything whatsoever.
A statement is not logical unless it actually explains its reasoning or attempts to disprove an opposing argument with an explanation. "Nonsense" does not, in and of itself, say anything rational or useful.
The term has often been used to mean both.
Incorrectly.
You might not like it, but that's one definition of ad hominem. Many words have more than one meaning.
There's so much cool **** to talk about being utterly wasted in this thread that I'm tempted to start a new thread about political economy. I've been reading a bunch of books on the history of finance and the connection between state, bank, and market, and it's mind-boggling how little of the fundamental economics of the world people (myself included) actually understand.
None of the extant lay or political discourse on socialism and the role of the government in markets is ever going to go anywhere because people only recognize concepts like 'freedom' and 'competition' as buzzwords. I don't think your average American even understands fractional reserve banking.
I agree that this thread has been derailed pretty badly.
-
That is exactly what it means, which is why it is not an emotional appeal, but instead a logical argument. 'Sense' versus 'non sense' is a logical state; A = A is sensible, whereas A = !A is not. Kara and I have both explained why more than once, now.
You did explain why, but only after I called your first post out for not explaining anything whatsoever.
A statement is not logical unless it actually explains its reasoning or attempts to disprove an opposing argument with an explanation. "Nonsense" does not, in and of itself, say anything rational or useful.
It says something rational and useful, which you just quoted. 'A = !A is not sense' is a rational and useful statement.
The term has often been used to mean both.
Incorrectly.
You might not like it, but that's one definition of ad hominem. Many words have more than one meaning.
It has very little to do with whether or not I like it, and everything to do with the fact that ad hominem means something, and you have misunderstood what it means. This has produced a series of dull, pedantic, uninteresting posts (on both our parts) that have prevented us from engaging with any of the really interesting topics here. Worse yet is the fact that ad hominem arguments are bad form, in debate in general and on HLP and in particular, and by accusing me of making one, you make it necessary for me to defend myself against that accusation. As long as you continue to defend your misunderstanding, you're making an argument about my quality as a debater, and, post Kara's interjection, making an argument for having me banned. You know what that's called? Hopefully the answer's clear by now.
e post fact: The dictionary entry is just wrong. There's nothing else to it; it's just a badly written definition. They ****ed it up. The wiktionary and wikipedia definitions are both much better.
I agree that this thread has been derailed pretty badly.
And the solution is right here:
Quit bickering about ad hominem arguments.
-
Apollo: Whatever your definition of ad hominem is, it is not the one we're using here. No amount of insistence on your part will change that.
This is a friendly reminder to drop that particular topic. The next reminder will not be friendly, but an actual warning.
-
It says something rational and useful, which you just quoted. 'A = !A is not sense' is a rational and useful statement.
Only in mathematics. Otherwise, you must provide additional explanation.
It has very little to do with whether or not I like it, and everything to do with the fact that ad hominem means something, and you have misunderstood what it means. This has produced a series of dull, pedantic, uninteresting posts (on both our parts) that have prevented us from engaging with any of the really interesting topics here. Worse yet is the fact that ad hominem arguments are bad form, in debate in general and on HLP and in particular, and by accusing me of making one, you make it necessary for me to defend myself against that accusation. As long as you continue to defend your misunderstanding, you're making an argument about my quality as a debater, and, post Kara's interjection, making an argument for having me banned. You know what that's called? Hopefully the answer's clear by now.
Again, the dictionary disagrees with you. Give one reason why your definitions override its definitions.
You are correct about the original meaning of ad hominem. You are incorrect about that being the only definition. Words change over time. Ghetto, vandal, and liberal all have modern meanings that are quite different than their original ones.
As long as you continue to defend your misunderstanding, you're making an argument about my quality as a debater, and, post Kara's interjection, making an argument for having me banned. You know what that's called? Hopefully the answer's clear by now.
I am questioning the quality of one of your posts, but that is not the logical basis of my argument. Therefore, I am not using ad hominem.
I am also not arguing that you be banned, because your ad hominem did not use any personal attacks.
Apollo: Whatever your definition of ad hominem is, it is not the one we're using here. No amount of insistence on your part will change that.
This is a friendly reminder to drop that particular topic. The next reminder will not be friendly, but an actual warning.
In that case this will be my last post on the subject, although I'm certainly not asking you to ban him.
-
It is astonishing how you manage to misinterpret a direct warning to you, Apollo.
EDIT: Just to be clear here: "ad hominem" means " personal attack". There is no other relevant definition of the term that is applicable here, or anywhere for that matter. An "ad hominem that does not use a personal attack" is per definition a nonsensical statement.
-
There's so much cool **** to talk about being utterly wasted in this thread that I'm tempted to start a new thread about political economy. I've been reading a bunch of books on the history of finance and the connection between state, bank, and market, and it's mind-boggling how little of the fundamental economics of the world people (myself included) actually understand.
None of the extant lay or political discourse on socialism and the role of the government in markets is ever going to go anywhere because people only recognize concepts like 'freedom' and 'competition' as buzzwords. I don't think your average American even understands fractional reserve banking.
I am very curious about the subject but am very much a laymen. I have some basic background on political science but none in economics. Do you have any recommended reading?
-
Right now I'm reading 'The Ascent of Money' by Niall Ferguson, a bit of a righty and probably a galloping racist as well. It's shallow in some areas and certainly has an ideological slant, but it's not a bad primer, and the gaps can be filled in.
-
I will also again recommend Debunking Economics by Steve Keen as a blow-by-blow about why the brand of economics taught in most universities and advocated by politicians has absolutely no connection to the real world and often embraces logically fallacious propositions as a matter of faith. To convince you of that he has to explain clearly what the basic ideas are (and how economies actually work in the real world), so it works as a great introduction to economics as well.
-
It is astonishing how you manage to misinterpret a direct warning to you, Apollo.
EDIT: Just to be clear here: "ad hominem" means " personal attack". There is no other relevant definition of the term that is applicable here, or anywhere for that matter. An "ad hominem that does not use a personal attack" is per definition a nonsensical statement.
Now come on The E, was it really necessary for you to engage in an ad hominem like that against Apollo?
[font size=5]Do I need to place trololol or sarcasm quotes in that last sentence?[/font]
I think this conversation derailed somewhat, and I wanted to get back on track by responding to mr Vega.
One: I hate to go all Marxist, but um, if you're going to fully automate manufacturing and stuff, you still need to find some way to pay your consumers, otherwise there's no one to buy all these wonderful goods.
This is the very basis of the problem. Of course! Notice however how current Austrians do not believe this: they believe that markets and economies work from the top to the bottom, the economy is supply-based, rather than demand-based. New or Post Keynesians think this is ludicrous, and we do have (unfortunately) enough evidence by now on who's right about this question, at the cost of millions of people suffering otherwise unnecessary unemployment and poverty.
The luddites said in the 1800s that machines would throw everyone out of work...didn't happen. Productivity increased and they found something else for the workers to do. That America is experiencing such a massive structural job shortage (beyond the effects of the recession) is simply because the industry was shipped overseas (which the robotics boom will hopefully bring back). I'm not saying that what you're predicting can't happen or won't eventually happen, but each time someone predicts it I'm reminded of how many times it's been wrong.
This is the most important and most interesting caveat to all of the above conversation. I also had acknowledged it in my third point (this all happened before and we are all okay now). But as I also said, those revolutions did not end employment, but they did change the nature of nations and states: the creation of the welfare state. So we can also ponder what is to come when the next revolution starts to kick ass in our economies. What kind of fundamental shift has to happen so we can still say the economy is for the better for the people and not just feudalism under a new guise.
Two; Here's my counter: does capital need to be so highly concentrated now? Ignoring the fact that the current level of wealth inequality is totally unprecedented and can probably only occur in an economy totally dominated by the rentier class, I need to ask whether why you need capital concentrated in a society with such high productivity and per-capita income. You could argue it was necessary a century ago for wealth to be concentrated in such few hands so heavy industry could be built up in the first place and there just wasn't enough on hand at the time if you scattered it, but now? Is this really the most efficient arrangement?
The question is not if it is "necessary", but rather if it is moral, if it is growing and if the trend is unstoppable. According to most capitalists, it isn't a very big moral issue, and I really do not see many things that can stop the trend. Even with a preposterous rise in wealth taxes, what drives this trend is Globalisation, concentration of means of production to the big fishes of the world, the frictionless nature of the internet and finance, AIs, etc. So even if you were right in saying it's not the most efficient status, it's possibly the most inevitable.
Three: Milton Friedman, hoo boy...where to start? I want you to find and read Debunking Economics by Steve Keen. Amongst many other things, it chronicles how Friedman and Lucas repopularized Neo-Classical beliefs about money and markets in the 1970s after Keynes had pointed out that they didn't hold up once you include the issue of an uncertain future in the model. They got around this issue by assuming that people could predict the future -literally, that was their assumption- and called this theory "Rational Expectations". Reading Keen explain each step of their reasoning is laugh-out-loud funny - it's like reading the economic equivalent of the witch burning scene in Monty Python in the Holy Grail. I hate to break it to you, but only the craziest Austrians like von Mises and Rothbard top him in the use of woo.
Ok, now stop there immediately. You'd do better than reading one book and declaring one of the most well regarded economist of the 20th century as a "joke" or something. Perhaps you'd do better to read more books than contrarian ones. Milton's work was astounding, and his monetarist views, while not entirely correct, they were mostly correct, regarding the role of the currency in the Great Depression and how the Fed could have stopped it short if it understood currency better. You should also be aware that this criticism of Milton is what was behind the quick reaction of Bernanke and co. in 2008's crash and prevented a second Great Depression despite the fact that the crash was worse. I disagree with Friedman on lots of things, but if you read a book calling his theories "quackery" then you are just being misinformed.
One more thing. While it sounds silly to say people "predict the future", that's exactly what people do everyday, and especially economic agents. This is what is the crux of the economic theories of people like Hayek and so on and you should know better. The idea is this. We all make predictions and we mostly fail about them, because predicting the future is incredibly difficult. However, when the only economic agent allowed to predict the future and plan the economy accordingly is the state, it is bound to failure, precisely because predicting what does not yet exist is pretty much almost impossible. However, if you decentralize this predicting business to free individual economic agents, they will all make somewhat different predictions, and some of them will be right, some will not. The system then rewards those who were right, giving them more capital so they can invest more than those who failed. Basic free markets' ideology. So please try not to read too much into other people's caricatures of what Friedman said.
-
I've read about three million books on economics for fun and am familiar with both sides (though I confess that the unwillingness of neoclassicals to represent the most basic facts that don't fit their preconceptions is starting to make me want to rather stab my skull with an ice pick rather than read any more of their stuff); Keen's book was merely the most specific and most detailed attack on Friedman's arguments. I can throw down with you on this if you'd like ;).
Friedman accused Keynes of building a theory on "crude psychology" (HIS WORDS) and betting on the irrationality of individuals. This is utterly false. Keynes did not ascribe market failures to irrationality. For a rational actor to make a rational decision he/she needs the information necessary to make a rational calculation. When it come to predicting the future, that information often does not exist. You can't predict what the interest rate will be in ten years and you don't even know the odds or statistical distribution of it (if such a distribution even exists). That was what Keynes meant by uncertainty as opposed to risk. But you still have to make decisions like whether to borrow to fund projects as if you could make a rational judgement as to its viability ten years down the line.
So, Keynes asks, what do rational actors do when they don't have the information needed to make a rational decision? They have to guess somehow, and usually adopt several "conventions" for doing so. Number one, they try to extrapolate the future from the present. For instance, if house prices have been rising for five years, investors project them to continue to rise if there is no available evidence to the contrary. Number two, "knowing our own individual judgement to be worthless, we endeavor to fall back on the judgement of the rest of the world, which is perhaps better informed." This is further exacerbated by the fact that businesses that are too conservative relative to the market during a boom are pressured by their shareholders to raise their profit margins up to the level of the less prudent crowd. So you can get results that look like herd thinking by starting with rational individuals, simply by adding the fact that the future is uncertain. You can look up any number of empirical studies that support this conclusion. Neoclassical economists are trained to ignore all of this. It's beat into their heads that all predictive errors are random and not systemic, and that the effect of uncertainty is negligible (if its existence even enters their minds).
However, if you decentralize this predicting business to free individual economic agents, they will all make somewhat different predictions, and some of them will be right, some will not. The system then rewards those who were right, giving them more capital so they can invest more than those who failed. Basic free markets' ideology.
You fall into this trap. The possibility of systemic error does not even occur to you. What if 90% of them are wrong, and the result is a depression which also wipes out the income of the 10% who were right?
Also, the fed was not responsable for the Great Depression. The Great Depression was caused by a debt deflation process. Distress selling and spending cuts by overindebted businesses caused a massive fall in prices which resulted in the real value of their debts rising despite repayment, which triggered further cuts in spending and price falls. This fact is blindingly obvious when you look at the US GDP and debt data from 1929 to 1933- nominal debt fell sharply, the debt/GDP ratio (which measures the ability of the economy to pay the debt) still rose because output fell more than debt. That adhering to the gold standard denied the fed the ability to try to hold off that deflation by injecting money into the banks' reserve vaults does not change the fact that it would not have worked. That money would have sat in the bank vaults while everyone frantically tried to repay their debts. The same reason that QE by Japan's central bank during the lost decade did absolutely nothing - when you have a financial collapse cause by too much private debt that cash you've created will just sit in the reserve vaults of the banks while the economy is deleveraging. The only thing that would have prevented the Great Depression would have been what prevented a depression in 1970 (run on the commercial paper market), 1975 (collapse of the REITs along with numerous bank failures), and 1990 (final collapse of the Savings and Loans industry amid the wreckage of the '87 crash), all serious financial crises that came much closer to disaster than most people remember- massive fiscal stimulus to replace the demand being removed for debt repayment by the private sector, combined with lender-of-last resort interventions by the Fed to insure that no critical financial institutions went bankrupt and liquidated.
But what do I know? I just read one book and now I think I know everything, don't I?
"In general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions." -Milton Friedman (yes, he really said that)
And don't even get me started on Friedman's theory of money.
-
I am very curious about the subject but am very much a laymen. I have some basic background on political science but none in economics. Do you have any recommended reading?
How about a common Economics 101 textbook or a iTunes U (or equivalent) course from a legit university (macroeconomics that is)? Even if you end up disagreeing with everything taught, as Mr. Vegas claims, you should at least pick up a few tools for analysis and understand where a number of academics are coming from.
(Changed Mr. Vegas "has" to Mr. Vegas "claims")
-
I never suggested that that be the only book he ever reads.
I would also recommend The Wealth of Nations and Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money but that's probably too much for a beginner to slog through.
-
Funny video I found:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrGdEwV-efs
:D