I would venture because he’s someone who values his independence and values the freedom of self-determination and making his own future, who has the courage to face failure or success based on his own actions, and who has the capacity and willingness to work harder and smarter than many others for the opportunity for success and wishes to be rewarded accordingly. There’s nothing wrong with being a salaried worker but it’s simply wrong to put down those who work for themselves and to attribute their financial success to some form of dishonesty.
Michael FergusonASSUMPTIONS OF GDP GROWTHBased on your assumptions that GDP will continue to expand at a 5.5% rate, and your assumption that the economy will continue to grow… You obviously have not watched the Crash Course. Or you are entirely dismissive of it without even bothering to address the issues raised by the Crash Course, despite the fact that this entire site is built around the Crash Course.
You brusquely make assertions without attempt to refute what Dr. Martenson has carefully laid out, fact by fact, statistic by statistic. On how GDP is calculated. On the crushing debt based on expected future growth from a nation that has peaked in spending and youth, demographically speaking. And on the limits on growth imposed by peak oil, peak resources of many kinds, etc.
Please, look at these chapters (preferably ALL 20 of them) before responding. The Crash Course is the basis of our discussion here. Just as you would not present a paper at a science conference without first having some familiarity with the topics all participants are grounded in, or join a group of strangers discussing something without first familiarizing yourself with their precepts, I would urge you to get familiar first. Crash Course Chapter 16: Fuzzy Numbershttps://peakprosperity.com/crashcourse/chapter-16-fuzzy-numbers Crash Course Chapter 14: Assets & Demographicshttps://peakprosperity.com/crashcourse/chapter-14-assets-demographics Crash Course Chapter 17a: Peak Oilhttps://peakprosperity.com/crashcourse/chapter-17a-peak-oilCrash Course Chapter 17b: Energy Budgetinghttps://peakprosperity.com/crashcourse/chapter-17b-energy-budgetingCrash Course Chapter 17c: Energy and the Economyhttps://peakprosperity.com/crashcourse/chapter-17c-energy-and-economy Crash Course Chapter 18: Environmental Datahttps://peakprosperity.com/crashcourse/chapter-18-environmental-dataCrash Course Chapter 19: Future Shockhttps://peakprosperity.com/crashcourse/chapter-19-future-shock
All of the Crash Course leads one to the conclusion that the future is NOT one of growth, but of economic contraction.
Without directly refuting Dr. Martenson’s theses, which are supported by facts and figures, and which the vast majority of us have come to agree upon, your mere statements are just conjecture. ASSUMPTIONS OF TECHNOLOGYTechnology may increase worker productivity, but because workers can do more with technology, technology actually reduces the need for workers to accomplish the same task. What was done by hand is done by machine. What took hours to hand-enter takes second to do now. But the primary fruits of productivity boosts do not belong to the workers. They belong to the owners of the technology.
All of economic history has taught us that. Which is why we see the extremes of income inequality that we do today, and so many people out of work. Sure, GDP and productivity per capita rises, but most of it accrues to those at the top.
While relieving workers of labor may allow them to seek other labor, that in itself makes other assumptions, primarily that there is other labor available for the redundant workers. What we see increasingly here in the United States is that the lower cost labor in other countries allows workers there to take up the work at all levels, from unskilled to skilled to highly-educated. All of this is made possible by technology - the Internet, global supply/logistics, a common language of business, etc.
I’m not a Luddite. But most definitely I know that technology is a tool useful for both good and bad - not a glorious vehicle of assured economic deliverance.
Poet
[/quote]
ao, you said it great. And while I’m very independent and that was certainly a driver, the rewards that I could get later were a big driving factor. I used to have a picture of a Jet hanging on the wall as inspiration. I’m a long ways away from ever having a Jet (not sure you can afford to fly one in the future anyway), but I’m certainly not complaining about where I’ve ended up. I can say my idea of success has changed overtime. It’s no longer the toys but more the freedom to do what I want, and to express myself how I want, and to work the way I want.
Just in the last 20 years since I started I can see the many impediments that have been put up for anyone trying to bootstrap a company the way we did. Chris has even talked about this in some of his blogs. There are so many rules and laws that you cannot do anything without being in violation of the law in some way. It kills creativity and rewards those that are firmly established. I want others to have the ability to do as I have, to push themselves to the limit. Government that steps in at the slightest problem promotes dependency - like an overprotective mother.
Damnthematrix, you really confuse me. You appear to be an independent person. You built your house the way you saw fit. You live your life the way you want. I don’t understand how someone so independent and driven can advocate taking that opportunity away from others. If your never allowed to make mistakes (and I’ve made some big ones), your never allowed to grow.
[quote=rhare][quote=Damnthematrix]
So… WHY did you do it?
[/quote]
ao, you said it great. And while I’m very independent and that was certainly a driver, the rewards that I could get later were a big driving factor. I used to have a picture of a Jet hanging on the wall as inspiration. I’m a long ways away from ever having a Jet (not sure you can afford to fly one in the future anyway), but I’m certainly not complaining about where I’ve ended up. I can say my idea of success has changed overtime. It’s no longer the toys but more the freedom to do what I want, and to express myself how I want, and to work the way I want.
Just in the last 20 years since I started I can see the many impediments that have been put up for anyone trying to bootstrap a company the way we did. Chris has even talked about this in some of his blogs. There are so many rules and laws that you cannot do anything without being in violation of the law in some way. It kills creativity and rewards those that are firmly established. I want others to have the ability to do as I have, to push themselves to the limit. Government that steps in at the slightest problem promotes dependency - like an overprotective mother.
Damnthematrix, you really confuse me. You appear to be an independent person. You built your house the way you saw fit. You live your life the way you want. I don’t understand how someone so independent and driven can advocate taking that opportunity away from others. If your never allowed to make mistakes (and I’ve made some big ones), your never allowed to grow.[/quote]
See… you know zilch about me, and then make assumptions.
In a previous life, I ran one of the most successful photographic studios in my city of ~1 million. For over twenty years. I won more awards than I can remember, and eventually became the President od the QLD division of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography.
I had a picture of a Ferrari on MY wall…
I worked my arse off, and now I regret every minute of it. Sad hey… I really wish I’d discovered this alternative lifestyle thirty years ago instead of ten. It was all bullshit… pretense and wankerism.
The debt is a fraud created by fraudsters unlawfully with us as collateral. They can be convicted of a crime, the debt dismissed and their ill gotten assets forfited. That is the bottom line!
When did I say that a person’s labour is not his own? I actually said that the government should steal LESS of that person’s labour, via reduced taxes for the middle class and poor. Then, when you start making upwards of a million dollars, your taxes go way up. Boohoo, you’ll get none of my sympathy. Oh the horror!!! 70% taxes for over a million dollars salary! You can only keep $300,000 of it?!?!?!?! How can anyone live on $300,000?!?!?! What’s the point of even lifting a finger if you can only keep $300,000 a year?!?!
I have yet to be convinced of any of that, it seems more like wishful thinking from Ludwig von Mises’ imaginary thought experiments than reality (that somehow the corrupt entities are going to bankrupt their own way out of the system??? Get real). I still can’t figure out the free market libertarians. On one hand they preach free and unregulated markets, believing that these will somehow sort themselves out on their own as some mystical equilibrium is reached. But then, as is easily predicted, the market players get bigger and bigger through unregulated consolidation (after all, it’s a free market!), until those big megacorporations lobby hard and long enough to governments until they eventually get control of them, and then they become the government, then they end all regulation, except for those regulations in favour of the megacorporations, and then the markets lose all semblance of free markets. Then the libertarians come out screaming bloody murder about how we no longer have free markets and it’s all the socialists’ fault (we are currently about as far away from socialism as you can get). It’s all the gub’ernment’s fault.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the benefits that free markets can bring in terms of price discovery (although the negative externalties must be somehow factored into this, otherwise free markets are not efficient), it’s just that free markets must be carefully regulated, or you will quickly no longer have free markets anymore.
And what is “sound money”? Gold and silver? They have a long history of abuse from bankers and the wealthy too.
When you make more than a million dollars a year, the government decides this is too much, as the representative of the people who elect it and hold it accountable (exept in cases when that government has been completely taken over by megacorporations, like the US). Now you’re not going to get any argument from me that the US government ISN’T a fascist two-party dictatorship intent on stealing your wealth, but that’s only because Americans allowed free market capitalism to run away on them and morph into fascism.
And I hope you understand, as I have pointed out, that someone who makes a billion dollars – it doesn’t matter how they made that money – is “stealing” that amount of assets away from everyone else because there are now less things left in the world for everyone else to use. “Steal” is too strong of a word though. What I mean is that labour, entrepreneurs, markets, the economy, whatever you want to call it, do not “produce” anything; what they do is TAKE IT, from the natural world. When this happens there is less resources available for everyone else to take and convert into wealth. A perfect example of this would be fishing. Shouldn’t someone who makes millions depleting fish stocks pay a very large proportion of that wealth back in the form of taxes, because now if I want to go catch those fish I can’t; they are no longer in existence. Since all fishing we currently engage in is depletive (no one produces any fish, even fish farms, since you need to feed the farmed fish 5 pounds of small food fish for every pound of big fish you “produce”), those fishermen “stole” our ability to make money ourselves from fishing.
But if there is not enough energy, food resources, or other resources left available on the planet then there is no way the little guy can succeed. That is essentially what this whole post from Chris is about (forgve me for putting words in your mouth Chris since you may disagree with me). Our economies CAN’T grow anymore! So how can the little guy succeed when he is just struggling to make ends meet? There may be a very few number of romantic rags-to-riches fairy tales to inspire everyone else who is living in poverty, but statistically, very few people can achieve this success in an economy that is no longer growing; it just isn’t possible. Unless a whole new energy game emerges, like solar energy, for example.
Then you tell me what those people are going to do with their time when the economy is no longer growing? What are they going to build? Are they going to dig ditches then fill them back in again? My 3 day work week example was purely speculative that this is how much labour would be needed to simply maintain an existing economy rather than growing it, but it’s probably around that number. Do you not agree that if continual improvements in technology allow goods to be produced with less and less labour, then shouldn’t we be realizing those advances by working less and less to achieve the same standard of living as before? SInce we must now still work as much, or more, as we always have, then where is that wealth going? Answer – it is being accumulated by the very wealthy. “Why not just not work at all?” Because there is work that needs to be done! How else are things going to be manufactured and food put on your plate? How else are you going to get money to live? You go out and work for it!
And again, I reiterate the fact that people (labour) do not produce anything. They take and transform. The problem is not that we don’t have enough “productive” workers, the problem is that the wealth they reap is not being allocated fairly, it is being stolen by the wealthy via our banker ponzi scheme, and our debt problem is forcing our “productive” labour efforts to be allocated towards promoting economic growth in order to attempt to make a return for that debt (which of course is no longer working), ie to make our economies bigger, rather than making our economies better.
Maybe, because we have an understanding of how the physical and biological world works to support our economies, and we see that there is no way that it can continue on the basis of the old outdated economic theories that have dominated thought up to now, and new ways of thinking are required? And aren’t you doing the same thing by promoting your belief in free markets? And why do you assume that I do not set an example and encourage needed change? And how do I steal from others? Isn’t the multi billionaire who pays very little in taxes the one who is concentrating wealth and stealing it from everyone else?
I worked my arse off, and now I regret every minute of it. Sad hey....... I really wish I'd discovered this alternative lifestyle thirty years ago instead of ten. It was all bullshit..... pretense and wankerism.
Is this how you made the money to afford the lifestyle you live today? Or was everything just handed to you for free? Is it pretense for people to want to do well for themselves and to be a productive member of society? Or are you saying that your lifestyle is the only one that counts, the rest of us wankers are beneath your high ideals?
I own a small business and I have never used anyone’s money to make my way. I made then reinvested my own money to help my business grow. I am proud of my business and my contribution to society by supporting 9 families. I suppose I could live in a small house, produce nothing of value to society and throw insults at hard working people over the internet if I wanted to assume I was better than everyone else. But where would that get me?
So many of you want to bash on business owners but we are the backbone of whats left of this economy. Taxing us to death just means we won’t hire or give benefits. Yes I do think I should make alot more than my employees. After all without my business their jobs would not exist and there is no way any of them would be able to do what I do or they would.
I do agree that the top 1% is out of control but don’t sitck all business owners in the same boat.
I worked my arse off, and now I regret every minute of it. Sad hey… I really wish I’d discovered this alternative lifestyle thirty years ago instead of ten. It was all bullshit… pretense and wankerism.
Is this how you made the money to afford the lifestyle you live today? [/quote]
This place owes me $150K. That's it. That's all I was worth after working 20 years for the banks and the taxman.
[quote=doorwarrior]Or was everything just handed to you for free?[/quote]
I said I worked my arse off....
[quote=doorwarrior]Is it pretense for people to want to do well for themselves and to be a productive member of society? [/quote]
That's precisely the point is it not? WHAT exactly is a productive member of society? One that consumes the planet to death? Like I used to to?
[quote=doorwarrior]Or are you saying that your lifestyle is the only one that counts, the rest of us wankers are beneath your high ideals?[/quote]
Well of course my current lifestyle is the only one that counts for ME. What you do is your business, but I don't think too many people on this site will survive the shitstorm that is coming, whereas I'm pretty confident I will. So you decide what's right, I'm over it.
[quote=doorwarrior]I own a small business and I have never used anyone's money to make my way. I made then reinvested my own money to help my business grow. I am proud of my business and my contribution to society by supporting 9 families. I suppose I could live in a small house, produce nothing of value to society and throw insults at hard working people over the internet if I wanted to assume I was better than everyone else. But where would that get me?[/quote]
Without knowing what it is you do, I can't comment.
[quote=doorwarrior]So many of you want to bash on business owners but we are the backbone of whats left of this economy. [/quote]
The economy IS the problem from where I stand.
Mike
[quote=Damnthematrix]See… you know zilch about me, and then make assumptions.
…
I worked my arse off, and now I regret every minute of it. Sad hey… I really wish I’d discovered this alternative lifestyle thirty years ago instead of ten. It was all bullshit… pretense and wankerism.
[/quote]
And what assumptions did I make? I said you seem like an independent person. You have shared info about your house and what you have done, and you have shared a bit about how you live? Exactly what assumptions did I make? Then you went off on this rant? about what you did and how successful you were and how you decided to change. This seems to make my point exactly. What I asked was how you can be independent, have done lots of things, and then seem so eager to control how others have to do things. You have advocated in quite a few threads for laws and regulations to limit peoples choices.
I’m sorry you regret your life - but at least it seems you were basically free to choose how to live it.
So which is more wishful thinking:
People will look our for their own well being.
A person (or small group of people) given power over others will act in a benign fashion.
First, show me a free market in the last 100 years? In the US and most (all?) of the world are central banks manipulating money supplies via set interest rates, printing, etc. Also, we continuously add laws and new regulation in this country by the 10’s of thousands of pages per year. Exactly how is this a free market.
But, there is no mystical equilibrium. Given a sound money (ie. one that is not manipulated - gold/silver are an example), and free exchange between individuals, each person will tend to look out for themselves. Some will make mistakes, some will be swindled, but the majority will be diligent about their money and property. Note this is a natural human behavior to protect ones family and property.
So, if you have a sound money, then when you save to buy things or to invest you are much more likely to be careful with it, because you could lose it if you make a poor choice. That is the individual will be careful with what they do with their property since they might lose their hard earned savings.
Compare that to what we have with fiat currencies. You can save all you want, but when money is freely printed and handed out to the politically connected banks and individuals, their is no one looking out for how the money is spent. It’s free after all, so you do silly things like lend it to everyone to build houses. After all you can’t lose because their is always more free money available. It’s this moral hazard created by fiat money that is the basis of the problems we see today. Then you have the government backstopping the large players from losses. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Sally Mae, FDIC, PBGC - all these entities encourage risky behavior because no one is going to pay the price, it will be distributed among the populace. This is another place we see moral hazard because it allows the “self serving” behavior to occur (a natural act) without the associated responsibility (risk).
If we had a limited government, that is a small government with limited power and not taxing the populace or printing money to hand out to the favored few, would we have lobbyists? The idea is for the power to be with the people, not the government because of the abuse. This is again a place where you are attacking the symptom instead of the root cause. Large government with lots of programs, regulations, etc result in the corruption we see today. Any time you give a person power over others you will see that power abused.
Really?
Centrally managed money system.
Government managed healthcare - ~60% of all healthcare is paid by government.
Centrally controlled education system.
…
I would say we are much closer to a socialist system than we are a true free market. Name one thing in your life not currently regulated/legislated by some government entity in the US?
Do you not understand that regulated means NOT FREE?
True, which is why you don’t want governments mandating what is used as money. You want that to be free as well. Any participants in a transaction should be free to choose their own exchange medium. That way when you have a medium being abused, participants can choose something else. Gold and Silver (or other metals) make a good system because they meet the criteria of money (see the crash course) - but the primary reason is because they cannot be created out of thin air.
The reason we have fascism is because we allow the government to make those type of decisions. When you concentrate power over others it always ends badly.
Resource depletion is a serious issue directly related to population. I don’t believe any governmental system will stop or repair damage done because of overpopulation. That includes any redistributive system which are only a band-aid for the short term. After all, what difference does it make if you overfish and share the profits, the fish are still gone. However, your fish example is a good because it shows what happens when governments interfere. Did you know most governments provide huge subsidies that encourage over fishing? Without those subsidies much of the damage we see could not occur because fish would be too expensive to exploit when the fisheries become less productive.
So now is the time more than ever we need to end the manipulations that are hiding the true costs. That includes money, subsidies, legislation etc which hide the true costs from investors and consumers. We need a free market to allocate dwindling resources to where they are most desired. Central planing also has the unfortunate side effect of limiting the number of ideas that will be tried, where as a free market may result in completely new and different approaches to the problems we face. I trust a few billion people trying many combinations to find something that works than a handful of bureaucrats.
Are you trying to tell me we don’t have enough things to be done in this country that everyone who wanted to work could? I look around and see crumbling streets, bridges, and other infrastructure. I do not know of a single business that doesn’t have more work than they can do. This is yet another problem created by government manipulation. In this case it’s minimum wage laws and welfare programs that limit the hiring that can be done by artificially restricting the number of jobs available or providing incentive not to work. After all, if you can collect unemployment benefits that pay more than you can make, why work?
When you take from someone against their will, no mater if they are rich or poor it is stealing. You can do it under the guise of government, but it’s still stealing from one person to give to another. I hope the above shows why I promote free market ideals. It’s because I believe we do not currently have a free market (and have not had since at least 1913), and that the distortions caused by government and monetary influence are the root of most of the problems we now face.
Not sure how you figure out that the wealthy don’t pay taxes. Since the top 3% pay nearly 50% of all taxes, exactly how is that paying very little? Don’t get me wrong, I believe we have system that benefits the wealthy and that’s what I would like to see changed, but as long as we have government doling out favors and limiting choices, we will continue to see the wealthy benefit.
[quote=Michael Ferguson]Lastly, if you talk to anyone in robotics, expert systems and artificial intelligence, they will tell you that there is an enormous backlog of unimplemented capability that will increase the real GDP per employee at an even faster rate in the near future.
[/quote]
I am one of those “anyone”, and you are wrong
Samuel
Exactly. Because our money is backed by debt, more and more of it is needed to insure that there is enough to pay back the principal AND interest. That accounts for the exponential growth curve.
LOL, I’ve seen it all now. This is the first of Dr. M’s threads that should be banished to the CT folder, not because of the OP, but because of the comments.
The summertime doldrums are alive and well!
JAG,
Brother - I couldn’t agree more. I don’t like flagging the everloving daylights out of all these posts, but more and more, I find that the posts around here aren’t touching open and engaging dialog, it’s regressing towards conspiratorial or political ramblings that only serve to enliven tensions. Not. Productive.
Deus X,
I’m not laughing, at the proposition, or your weak slight.
You’re making assertions, and not backing them. You don’t know the difference between a pentagonal star, the Star of David, or a Masonic star, and you’re confusing their purpose and potential symbolism.
I’m trying to do you a favor, and save you some face while you’ve got it by directing you to the appropriate venue.
When 100 bills are toilet paper, I’ll be using what I’ve stashed away for just such an occasion.
Don’t make the assumption that because I am left perplexed by your intent that I’m not aware of what’s happening.
No conspiracy needs to be present for these events unfold, and I’m of the opinion that the facts do not support a conspiracy. If you can show otherwise, do so.
If not, don’t troll by petty name calling to defend your weak arguments.
1. You cannot have a free market, good or bad, with a fiat money system.
2. You cannot have a “good” free market without individual morality and accountability. This goes for the individuals on both sides of production and consumption.
3. You cannot have morality and ethics without an agreed upon standard by which to judge.
[quote=Mark_BC][quote=Dogs_In_A_Pile]
I also think it’s complete bullshit that the government feels that other people are entitled to what I earn.
[/quote]
I think that depends on how much you make (if you make less than say $60,000 I agree with you). I also think that this debate over who works harder – union workers versus business entrepreneurs – and therefore, who “deserves” the money more, depends on how the money is made, and that of course varies widely. Unfortunately I think there is a lot of ideological baggage left behind by the free market worship that has dominated recent capitalist theories (typified in the Austrian school), which purports that no matter how the money is made, as long as it is made in the free market, then it was made legitimately, because ultimately, the free market will sort it all out and things will even out to their maximum efficiency due to the wonderful supply / demand curve (and all of its inherent assumptions which turn out to be highly tenuous). Of course this Austrian approach is overly simplistic and does not in any way acccount for externalties or energy, or the workings of any other biophysical processes underlying how economies actually work, so it’s basically false. Therefore, there is indeed a difference between a banker making money by skimming and ripping unsuspecting people off, even if it is done so in the “free market”, versus a hypothetical entrepreneur who makes money (in the free market) by devising a new gadget that improves energy efficieny by 40% and therefore he reaps monetary rewards from this as everyone buys his product.
I think it is entirely reasonable (and necessary) to presume that someone who owns billions of dollars of assets should be paying very high taxes to the government so that others can be entitled to a large portion of that wealth. In this day and age there should be no billionaires. They should be taxed back down to reality, regardless how they made that money; otherwise we have the wealth concentration problem, which in the past was addressed by outlawing “usury” (the making of interest off money, which leads to wealth concentration because the more money you have the more money you make). Usury is still banned in Muslim cultures. Economists believe that they have now solved the wealth concentration problem so that the rich can get richer, but at the same time the poor can also get richer by participating in the creation of new wealth, and this new wealth comes from a growing economy. Of course, on a real inflation-adjusted basis, our economies aren’t growing, and it seems likely that they never will again ever, on a global scale. Therefore, the littlle guy can’t make new wealth from a growing economy, because it isn’t growing anymore, but the ultra rich billionaire is still reaping profits from wealth concentration due to the very low tax burdens they pay (thanks to Reagan). So we are back at the age-old problem of usury and wealth concentration, once again! I argue that many of our current problems are also due to this, as well as resource and energy scarcity, and debt buildup. These factors are all coming together at the same tiime.
Despite what most economists believe, that wealth which is held by the billionaire was not produced by him (or her, in the case of Blythe Masters); rather, it was taken from the planet. Yes, taken. Economies do not produce wealth. They actually DESTROY wealth to a significant degree, and then they take and transform the remaining wealth into goods that we find useful, and then we create an economy around these things. Since, as Chris is pointing out, we are nearing the crunch in terms of overall resource scarcity, then that billionaire’s wealth is by definition diminishing the wealth-reaping opportunities for the rest of the population, because there are now only so many resources available to go around (as opposed to say 100 years ago when they were basically limitless, when Austrian ideology was being formulated).
But just handing blank checks over to poor people, that money being derived from the wealth taken from taxes from the billionaires, isn’t very stimulative for efficient allocation of labour resources, is it? That’s verging on communism, and we all know how that works (or, how it doesn’t work – no one has any incentive to work). So then how do we deal with the unavoidable high unemployment resulting from a cessation of economic growth (it takes much less labour to just maintain an economy rather than grow it as well). Are we to have, say, only 30% of the workforce actually working, and then those workers pay taxes to support the rest of the 70% deadbeats because there isn’t enough work available? No way, that has NEVER worked in the past and it will never work now! The solution is to reduce the work week to 3 days and the work day to 6 hours. Therefore, the remaining wealth opportunities will still be available to 90% of the workforce, and they will still have an incentive to go work (because there will be no blank checks), and there would not be massive taxes on workers because everyone would be working; taxes would be about what they are now, even less, for the average working person. Couple this with much higher taxes for high earners (the billionaires and multi millionaires), and ban usury, such that wealth concentration doesn’t get out of hand, and also ban central banking and fractional reserve banking, and again empower the government to issue its own debt-free interest-free currency, and that’s the solution! Oh, and get off oil too.
[/quote]
Mark -
Some interesting thoughts in your post - I’m still digesting.
I didn’t want to elaborate too much, but now that the thread has been yanked all over Hell’s half acre, what’s yet another direction going to matter?
What I meant in particular by my statement is that historically (my 49+ years anyway), “the government” has implemented some programs at my expense that provide very little beneficial return to me. The only benefit has been to the particular political party that is driving the programs. I make no distinction between the Republicans or the Democrats here - they both suck. For me, there’s not a whole lot of difference between Democrats, who generally create “social safety net” entitlement programs and build a nanny state mentality under the auspices of making things better when in fact all they are doing is catering to a voter base to keep them in office. The Republicans do the same thing except they enact legislation that favors the corporatocracy - and in doing so, pass the cost of such laws/programs etc. on to the middle class.
In the end, whether wealth is taken from the middle class and redistributed - downward and diluted by Democrats, or upward and concentrated by the Republicans - makes no difference. The end state sucks.
It always seems to be the middle class that gets ripped off. I certainly can’t endorse China in many ways, but economically they have an inherent advantage over us, even if they do abuse human rights. China tends to do things because they are smart and productive. In the US now, we act like abused addicts and fall for every new scheme that the two major parties promise us. In the end, really no one is better off because of all the uncertainty involved. Handing checks to poor people probably feels great for a time, but it doesn’t always incentivize learning new skills or increasing productivity. Handing out big breaks to big companies certainly has helped them lately, but they apparently still have have a desire to outsource and squeeze their workers. And they are more obsessed with lobbying than ever before. Lobbying is an “economic bad” - it does nothing to help the real economy but simply keeps the game rigged.
I’ve never really been a fan of taking money people earned and redistributing, but I do have to say that when I hear the extreme degree of wealth concentration in this country it is apparent that something isn’t right. This is not the way a truly free market would distribute wealth and it is not the way that a purely socialistic state would distribute wealth - if either of these ideals existed. What we have is essentially a government / corporate oligarchy. And since so many of the leaders are using the revolving door, there is a blurred distinction between the two. Special interests groups that funnel money downward do not have financial or legal power but have power in the sense that they can inspire voters more readily than corporations can. So they are certainly able to feast as well. By the way, the middle class is picking up the tab on this one.
The sad thing is that we are pretty much left with some basic problems that nearly everyone agrees are not getting solved. For most people any reasonable solution would be better than nothing at all.
So if the effective rate was less than 91.7%, say 70%, than the proud patriotic millionaires & billionaires oughta be even MORE inclined to pay it and get the economy rolling!
> I also think it’s complete bullshit that the government feels that other people are entitled to what I earn.
So you earned in a bubble? No help from the taxpayer-supplied infrastructure? You didn’t use the roads, you didn’t use the fresh air that gov’t regulations caused, you didn’t use the sewer systems, you didn’t use the relatively bribe-free business climate that the gov’t provides here?
LOL
Your idea of a 3-day week is perfectly sound. It is part of the reason the German economy is humming right now - they went to 4-day work weeks after re-unification.
Now Germany is so strong economically they are supporting 3 or 4 countries. On that theme, remember that China is supporting us. I guess China still has nice altruistic socialism as a system.