The iPhone is doomed, and Spain as well
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@morbiuswilters said:
...
However, I've lived lots of places, including some very poor areas, and I haven't seen a $90 office visit for at least a decade. I don't know where the fuck you live, but it's fucking rock-bottom for office visits, I'll tell you that much.And yeah, he's getting $220. That's why I said it costs $220. What the fuck is with you people assuming you're the first people who have ever heard of something like an EoB?
I live in a relatively high cost of living area, and I just pulled up an EOB from April. The Doctor billed OFFICE VISIT, Code 99213 for $95. The insurance made him write it down to $72.98. They paid $58.38 (80%) and I paid $14.60 (20%). In a previous life I worked in medical billing, and there are different codes for different levels of visits. Maybe your doctor is just committing billing fraud by billing for a more complex visit?
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@flabdablet said:
Easiest way to find unconstrained free markets is to look for places where the rule of law is ineffective in regulating and taxing trade; examples that instantly come to mind are the diamond trade in various African states, the drug trade in Central America, the international arms/security/surveillance trade, and the Icelandic investment banking system.If you can find three examples of unconstrained free markets that are not leading (or have not lead, historical examples are fine) to socially destructive concentration of wealth and power, please do share.
I don't understand how those are unconstrained. I guess we're working with different ideas of "unconstrained." Your idea seems to be, "stuff that's all against the law already, so nobody cares about the laws and is willing to kill others to keep making money." I'm pretty sure that wasn't what FrostCat was trying to say, and since you seem relatively proficient in English, I suspect that neither did you, but good job with the pedantic dickweed strawman.
I suspect FrostCat was thinking more along the lines of: A market based on voluntary transactions. Probably "constrained" by laws and the appropriate enforcement against theft and fraud or other forms of coercion but also enforcing private contracts.
For some reason, you seem think that people who don't want the government to tell us what sort of lightbulbs to use are anti rule of law. I don't know where you got this idea, but you'd have more fruitful exchanges if you stopped thinking that. Every time someone brings up free markets, you start thinking about organized crime and other criminal sort of activity. This doesn't make any sense to the rest of us.
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@boomzilla said:
For some reason, you seem think that people who don't want the government to tell us what sort of lightbulbs to use are anti rule of law. I don't know where you got this idea, but you'd have more fruitful exchanges if you stopped thinking that.
Mostly it's because you lot spend a hell of a lot of time and eloquence complaining about being "punished" by taxation and never bother to mention your lighting-based resentments until it's time to wheel out another straw man.
@boomzilla said:
Every time someone brings up free markets, you start thinking about organized crime and other criminal sort of activity. This doesn't make any sense to the rest of us.
And every time somebody starts a discussion on the merits of this or that taxation policy, or this or that spending policy, in comes the right wing bloviation army with the usual motherhood bleatings about the divine magic of the Invisible Hand, none of which shows any evidence of having actually read and understood Adam Smith.
You preach piously about The Free Market as this wondrous shining holy thing that would feed, clothe and satisfy us all with perfect fairness and equity if only Bad Evil Government would get all its tiresome red tape out of the way and let it work its magic. Then you hang a bit of shit on the poor to make it quite clear that you're all for Good Old Fashioned Hard Work and that you actually believe it has something to do with the acquisition of significant wealth. It's tedious, predictable, kindergarten-level, unhelpful and boorish, and sometimes (to my shame) I simply can't resist responding in kind.
Market-based economies do perform better, and result in a better standard of living, than command economies. Nobody disputes this. But to present Government as the natural enemy of the Free Market, as you so consistently do, is just Fox-addled bullshit.
I do understand that your own government is sub-par in many respects, largely because your deeply flawed Constitution has set it up in such a way that its various branches can be relied upon to fight unproductively amongst themselves while the billionaires get on with running your country, and I sympathise. It must be awful to live in such a shithole, and yet feel some kind of duty to defend its honour (which it no longer has, having totally pissed it away in Vietnam and Nicaragua and Chile and Afghanistan and Iraq). So you just keep on ragging on "occutards" if that's what it takes for you to feel better. Those of us who live in the more civilized corners will continue to snicker about you behind our hands. Oh, sorry. I wasn't supposed to let you know we do that.
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@flabdablet said:
@boomzilla said:
For some reason, you seem think that people who don't want the government to tell us what sort of lightbulbs to use are anti rule of law. I don't know where you got this idea, but you'd have more fruitful exchanges if you stopped thinking that.
Mostly it's because you lot spend a hell of a lot of time and eloquence complaining about being "punished" by taxation and never bother to mention your lighting-based resentments until it's time to wheel out another straw man.Eh, what?
@flabdablet said:
You preach piously about The Free Market as this wondrous shining holy thing that would feed, clothe and satisfy us all with perfect fairness and equity if only
Bad Evil Government would get all its tiresome red tape out of the way and let it work its magic."Perfect fairness and equity." I'm damned sure I've never used those words to describe what I think. No one could even tell you what they mean. What I generally try to say is that it will feed, clothe and satisfy us better than any other system.
@flabdablet said:
Then you hang a bit of shit on the poor to make it quite clear that you're all for Good Old Fashioned Hard Work and that you actually believe it has something to do with the acquisition of significant wealth. It's tedious, predictable, kindergarten-level, unhelpful and boorish, and sometimes (to my shame) I simply can't resist responding in kind.
I'm going to try to unwind this pile of nonsense. But first, I have no clue what you're talking about with respect to hanging a bag of shit. Possibly my observations that some people are stupid or unmotivated to improve themselves? Do you think there aren't people like that?
You seem to be saying that hard work has no relation to the acquisition of significant wealth. I suspect you don't think this, but for the purposes of this thread, I'll assume you meant what you said (like I did previously with respect to redistribution). I guess you are thinking that some people got lucky in life or used force or connections or other unseemly ways of getting wealth. I've never denied this, and have said it myself, many times. Still, most people don't have those connections, and if we all don't get super lucky, of course. But most of us can apply ourselves to something productive. Natural talents and other factors necessarily mean that some will be able to do more productive, lucrative, rare and in demand things. All things being equal, however, the guy that works harder tends to get more.
But even a dullard without particular talents can live a life (in a place like the US) where he is fabulously wealthy and productive by historical standards. You can compare him to the zillionaire CEO and get angry, but try comparing him to a 17th century French peasant or most people in Cuba. It's not the redistribution or food inspections that made westerners rich. It's allowing them to profit from their own enterprise.
Maybe the problem is that you think that one person having wealth means that another must have lost some. This can be literally true, like in your redistributive scenario, but it should be obvious that this isn't true in a place where people are creating things and providing services.
@flabdablet said:
I do understand that your own government is sub-par in many respects, largely because your deeply flawed Constitution has set it up in such a way that its various branches can be relied upon to fight unproductively amongst themselves while the billionaires get on with running your country, and I sympathise.
Where do you think I live? In fact, I'm in the US, where our Constitution provides several measures to prevent chucklehead politicians from running the country. True, they've been watered down and are increasingly just ignored. The scariest thing is a "productive" government, and I wish ours were less so.
@flabdablet said:
It must be awful to live in such a shithole, and yet feel some kind of duty to defend its honour (which it no longer has, having totally pissed it away in Vietnam and Nicaragua and Chile and Afghanistan and Iraq).
TDEMSYR. Yeah, we screwed the pooch on Vietnam by letting Teddy Kennedy and the other fellow travelers get us to throw the war. Nicaragua? The only thing I can think of is the Contras thing. Chile? An Allende supporter, eh? I'm seeing a pattern...I guess FrostCat was right to suspect you of being a Marxist. Afghanistan and Iraq? Admittedly, we bungled the post-Saddam Iraq transition, and I doubt there is a way to get Afghanistan to settle down. But how did we "piss away" any honor there?
@flabdablet said:
So you just keep on ragging on "occutards" if that's what it takes for you to feel better.
Mocking and the occasional imprisonment is the only rational response to them. It's not that it makes me feel better, but what else is there to do?
@flabdablet said:
Those of us who live in the more civilized corners will continue to snicker about you behind our hands. Oh, sorry. I wasn't supposed to let you know we do that.
What? People can't shut up about how much they hate us. When they're not trying to move here, at least. You don't really say, but the context of this post seems to say that being civilized is about having a government that can make up its mind and act decisively to right all the wrongs caused by people making their lives better. If that's the new definition, then I don't want to be civilized.
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@boomzilla said:
@flabdablet said:
Stop their benefits - they're clearly not bothered about looking for any work.So you just keep on ragging on "occutards" if that's what it takes for you to feel better.
Mocking and the occasional imprisonment is the only rational response to them. It's not that it makes me feel better, but what else is there to do?
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@flabdablet said:
Market-based economies do perform better, and result in a better standard of living, than command economies. Nobody disputes this. But to present Government as the natural enemy of the Free Market, as you so consistently do, is just Fox-addled bullshit.
Sorry..I missed responding to this before, but it's probably best in its own reply. First, let's recall a very basic tenet of a free market: It's based on volutary, mutually beneficial exchanges among individuals.
The antithesis of this is to create exchanges based on forceful coercion. When the government acts to prevent private parties from doing that, government is a friend to the free market. When the government uses its own monopoly on the legitimate use of force to coerce transactions, it is the enemy of the free market. Examples are taxes and other regulations.
Of course, this doesn't mean that we should have no taxes or regulations. Only an anarcho-capitalist would say this. Though they have a lot of interesting and worthwhile ideas in ways to replace many roles that governments typically fill. Some of these coercive actions may reduce the freedom of the market but improve the condition of those participating in the market. I would say the most commonly agreed upon actions involve things like road building and national defense (though there are plenty of crazies who want no public role in either!).
In the US, we have a government that is clearly out of control. So many rules and regulations have come into being that no one can keep track of even a tiny fraction of them. Most people probably break multiple laws / regulations every day, without knowing it. Ignorance of the law is no defense against breaking one. So we have a situation where people are unwittingly committing violations all the time. And a prosecutor or regulator can almost always find something to prosecute, but uses his discretion. Or the President may decide to just not enforce a law at all. This is the opposite of the rule of law.
In the abstract, I would not say that the government is the natural enemy of the free market, and I've said as much in the past, referring to the fact that certain institutions are required for a successful society (again, I'll refer people to Why Nations Fail as a very interesting look at this sort of thing--you can read the blog, especially the early posts to get a feel for the sort of thing found inside the book). In practice, however, governments both modern and ancient have been enemies of the free market. Yeah, I rail on about governments, because they've gone so far overboard, and I apologize if I've given the appearance of wanting to get rid of all government, but I have said explicitly otherwise, and this appearance is just Gruaniad-addled bullshit.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Yeah, you guys almost sound more fucked than we are. Of course, in many US states you can use your EBT card (food stamp card) at ATMs. Somebody did a study and found that a surprising percentage (or not that surprising, if you aren't thick) of ATM withdrawals were done at strip clubs and liquor stores.
Oddly enough, the only people I know on food stamps are strippers. And EBT cards aren't purely just for food stamps. They're also for any sort of general government cash payment. (In some states, you can even get child support payments collected by the government paid through an EBT card to the custodial parent).@morbiuswilters said:
Now, if I ran the program, you'd get 50lb bags of rice, 20lb bags of dried beans, and some fresh, cheap vegetables to balance things out. And that's all. If you were physically capable of labor and worked less than 50 hours per-week, you would have to do 8 hours of community service per-month to compensate society for the free food. People who need the food would have it and people who are scamming the system would suddenly decide that maybe it isn't such a good deal any more.
Have you ever read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"? That's exactly how welfare used to work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You only got aid if you prove that you "deserve" it. The problem there is that it can be pretty hard to define what "deserving" means. And it usually boils down to the determination of the sort of stick-up-the-ass power-tripping petty bureaucrat who thinks that having premarital sex means you should die. So people who were otherwise hard-working, decent people wouldn't get help, their kids would starve in the streets, crime was high, and the world was generally an unsightly place. All because maybe Dad doesn't like to go to church every day. Or Mom is a single mother. Point being, shit sucked and we've on from there. Going back to shit that we've already acknowledged to have sucked isn't really a good idea. Might as well build some workhouses and go back to that hmm? Really make em work for that meal.
And yet people STILL scammed the system. Criminals would sign up dead people, foster parents with "clean" records would round up dozens of kids to collect benefits for and cram them into horrific living conditions. Politicians would siphon funds away. People will always cheat the system, you can't ever really stop it. You can only choose how expensive the siphoning will be. Personally, I don't a give a fuck if some idiot spends his $200 a month welfare check on a new TV. At least it means that the price of Walmart's stock will go up. What I care about is if *I* have enough money left after taxes to buy my own TV. And since my portion of that guy's TV is maybe 2cents or some other miniscule fraction of my overall tax bill, he can have it as long as it also keeps me from stumbling over homeless people and starving kids on my way to work.
Also, if you're talking about the MODERN (post 1996) welfare state, most states these days have included some sort of work requirement. Which often ends up being a way for companies to get lower cost labor from a labor pool that has no alternative. I.E. the friends and campaign sponsors of the politicians in charge of the program will often pay less than minimum wage for jobs that would normally have a more competitive wage because they know that the workers will have to take the undercompetitive pay since they are being referred by the work-assistance program and turning down the job will end their benefits.
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@boomzilla said:
the context of this post seems to say that being civilized is about having a government that can make up its mind and act decisively to right all the wrongs caused by people making their lives better. If that's the new definition, then I don't want to be civilized.
To my way of thinking, being civilized is about having a government that can make up its mind and act decisively to right wrongs caused by people making their lives better in ways that harm other people. If that's not also your definition, stay the hell away from my civilization.
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@boomzilla said:
free
When I hear people rave about the free market and less government, I usually frown, since I know what's actually meant is the freedom of the powerful to trample whoever gets in the way of filling up their wallet, which you'll agree is the opposite of "voluntary, mutually beneficial exchanges among individuals".
Crying about taxes and the like is something I always interpret first and foremost as "boo hoo now it's so hard to exploit my workers wahhhh big government is restricting my FREEDOM", and the reason for this is, quite frankly, the ones who don't exploit workers and want to run happy companies and a healthy, social business with fair wages are employers who don't complain about taxes in the first place.
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@flabdablet said:
@boomzilla said:
the context of this post seems to say that being civilized is about having a government that can make up its mind and act decisively to right all the wrongs caused by people making their lives better. If that's the new definition, then I don't want to be civilized.
To my way of thinking, being civilized is about having a government that can make up its mind and act decisively to right wrongs caused by people making their lives better in ways that harm other people. If that's not also your definition, stay the hell away from my civilization.
Mostly. I would cut out the clarification about "making their lives better." And I'd keep the righting and the wronging simple. I'm not sure why you think I would think otherwise.
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@flabdablet said:
To my way of thinking, being civilized is about having a government that can make up its mind and act decisively to right wrongs caused by people making their lives better in ways that harm other people. If that's not also your definition, stay the hell away from my civilization.
@boomzilla said:
The antithesis of this is to create exchanges based on forceful coercion. When the government acts to prevent private parties from doing that, government is a friend to the free market. [...] Of course, this doesn't mean that we should have no taxes or regulations. [...] Some of these coercive actions may reduce the freedom of the market but improve the condition of those participating in the market.
Selective quoting makes it look like we agree in principle.
As usual, it comes down "which areas" and "how much" and since these are hard questions, we prefer to paint people as "the evil/ignorant other".
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@boomzilla said:
I'm not sure why you think I would think otherwise.
Because you used words like "scientifically illiterate occutard". Just saying.
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@PJH said:
@boomzilla said:
@flabdablet said:
Stop their benefits - they're clearly not bothered about looking for any work.So you just keep on ragging on "occutards" if that's what it takes for you to feel better.
Mocking and the occasional imprisonment is the only rational response to them. It's not that it makes me feel better, but what else is there to do?
OK, three things. I'll take this opportunity to expand on my statement, since there are people reading this who can't see the obvious:
Mocking
The occupy folks had a good idea: "Business and government collusion is bad!" But then they proposed to make it all worse by suggesting the solution to this was to give government more power, which just increases the incentives for collusion.Imprisonment
The vandalism / public defecation / rapes / etc, of course.
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@dhromed said:
@boomzilla said:
free
When I hear people rave about the free market and less government, I usually frown, since I know what's actually meant is the freedom of the powerful to trample whoever gets in the way of filling up their wallet, which you'll agree is the opposite of "voluntary, mutually beneficial exchanges among individuals".
Please define "trample," as that's not what I'm advocating at all. I would equate "trample" with the people lobbying for special laws and rules to benefit them, or at least cause harm to their competition. This is usually bigger corporations / organizations (unions) colluding with government at the expense of smaller outfits that don't have the resources or the organization to prevent or at least manage the effects.
@dhromed said:
Crying about taxes and the like is something I always interpret first and foremost as "boo hoo now it's so hard to exploit my workers wahhhh big government is restricting my FREEDOM", and the reason for this is, quite frankly, the ones who don't exploit workers and want to run happy companies and a healthy, social business with fair wages are employers who don't complain about taxes in the first place.
I call BS. I've known plenty of people who like running a happy, healthy business, paying good wages and treating people well who also complain a lot about taxes. Especially in smaller businesses, where the owners / management are working closely with employees, they become like friends or even family. I can't see how low taxes make it easier to exploit workers. Both workers and the owners get more money when their taxes are lower, given the same revenues, etc. I suppose removing certain types of regulations could do so, but you shouldn't pretend that the enforcement, etc, is cheap or has no unintended consequences.
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@dhromed said:
@boomzilla said:
I'm not sure why you think I would think otherwise.
Because you used words like "scientifically illiterate occutard". Just saying.
Oh, well...the Occupy people are idiots, so that insult is straight forward. The scientifically illiterate is for people saying things like "keep out of my vagina!" when talking about restrictions abortion, because, see, the pregnancy may have come in through the vagina, but that's not where the pregnancy really happens. I know they're just using that word because it sounds edgier and catchier than uterus, but it still makes them sound stupid.
The other day, I came across an article that talked about the most dangerous places in the US for women to live. As a husband and a father with a daughter, I was interested in this information, thinking these were perhaps places with lots of rapes or something. Nope. Just more hyperventilating about minimal restrictions on abortion.
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@boomzilla said:
Both of those things make abortion sound involuntary, like there are just people going around punching random pregnant women in the uterus.Oh, well...the Occupy people are idiots, so that insult is straight forward. The scientifically illiterate is for people saying things like "keep out of my vagina!" when talking about restrictions abortion, because, see, the pregnancy may have come in through the vagina, but that's not where the pregnancy really happens. I know they're just using that word because it sounds edgier and catchier than uterus, but it still makes them sound stupid.
The other day, I came across an article that talked about the most dangerous places in the US for women to live. As a husband and a father with a daughter, I was interested in this information, thinking these were perhaps places with lots of rapes or something. Nope. Just more hyperventilating about minimal restrictions on abortion.
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@boomzilla said:
Sorry..I missed responding to this before, but it's probably best in its own reply. First, let's recall a very basic tenet of a free market: It's based on volutary, mutually beneficial exchanges among individuals.
The antithesis of this is to create exchanges based on forceful coercion. When the government acts to prevent private parties from doing that, government is a friend to the free market. When the government uses its own monopoly on the legitimate use of force to coerce transactions, it is the enemy of the free market. Examples are taxes and other regulations.
Of course, this doesn't mean that we should have no taxes or regulations. Only an anarcho-capitalist would say this. Though they have a lot of interesting and worthwhile ideas in ways to replace many roles that governments typically fill. Some of these coercive actions may reduce the freedom of the market but improve the condition of those participating in the market. I would say the most commonly agreed upon actions involve things like road building and national defense (though there are plenty of crazies who want no public role in either!).
/me cautiously sniffs at what appears to be rational discourse, decides to take it at face value
Couple of things often missed about the operation of free markets.
The "voluntary, mutually beneficial exchanges among individuals" wording gives the principle a warm and fuzzy glow that makes it sound like an absolute good. But for that to be the case, the individuals involved would need to be rational i.e. acting in their own best interests. While economic theory generally does assume rationality, it's not necessarily true in practice. If I voluntarily exchange money for meth, I am quite probably not acting in my own best interests: the benefit on my side is fleeting and largely illusory, and in fact I have just made my self less rich in order to do myself harm.
Also, market transactions have a context. If I have a hole in the ground and you have waste to dispose of, you could give me some money for the service of disposing of your waste, which enriches both of us. As a direct consequence of my participation in that transaction and a pile of others like it, I now have a strong incentive to set fire to all the waste in my hole to make room for more and keep my business afloat. Which kind of sucks for everybody downwind and downstream, but as long as my customers don't live there I have no economic reason to care about that.
My point is that market freedom is but one aspect of the way a society operates, and that increased market freedom does not in and of itself guarantee an improvement in social conditions. This is why I object to using loaded terms like "friend" and "enemy" to describe relations between markets and governments. If we're going to talk sensibly about this stuff I'd rather we stuck to using more neutral terms like "constraint" and "regulation" and discuss the actual real-world effects of specific instances of these.
I'm also not particularly convinced that "individuals" has to be there in the definition of a free market. I think "parties" works equally well, and doesn't push the discussion toward the kind of "no such thing as society" craziness that made Margaret Thatcher such a socially destructive leader.
With that in mind: I think there's a good argument for the view that taxation more resembles a "voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange" than an exchange "based on" forceful coercion. Sure, there's an element of "nice little free market you have here - it would be a shame if something were to happen to it" but it seems to me that there's a fundamental difference between J. Random Thug doing that and a properly constituted democratic government doing it.
The point of having a government is to help maintain the social conditions that make trade feasible in the first place, by looking after our common interests. It may well be that what's good for the individual is indeed not so good for the collective, so the amount each of us contributes toward the upkeep of that government needs to be set according to a collective idea of fairness, not an individual one. And society is a complex beast, and there are a hell of a lot of edge cases, so that collective notion of fairness pretty much has to turn out to involve more rules than Morbs pulling "ten or twenty percent" out of his arse and calling it Job Done and some people aren't going to like it much. Sucks to be them, I guess.
@boomzilla said:
In the US, we have a government that is clearly out of control.
If Tony Abbott leads the Coalition to victory at our next election, I fear we will too. Even so, ours is unlikely to get anywhere near as dysfunctional as yours. I'm not convinced that the Australian populace is actually any better educated or more politically engaged than yours, but we have a number of things working in our favour that you don't.
First, we're not so hung up on insignificant "freedoms" as to threaten our basic liberty, which means there's no real resistance to the compulsory voting we have here. You guys have election outcomes determined largely by which of your nearly identical parties can motivate more of its supporters to get off their arses on election day; we always have very close to 100% voter turnout because the Electoral Commission threatens us with some pissy little fine if we don't show up at a polling station to get our names marked off, and once we're there we might as well vote.
Second, we also have a tradition of minority parties occasionally acquiring the balance of power and shaking things up a bit, which is e.g. how we got our current carbon tax. We don't have an Electoral College, and we run a Westminster system so the relationship between the legislature and the executive tends to be a lot less busted than yours and the executive's accountability rather more fine-grained.
@boomzilla said:
In practice, however, governments both modern and ancient have been enemies of the free market. Yeah, I rail on about governments, because they've gone so far overboard, and I apologize if I've given the appearance of wanting to get rid of all government, but I have said explicitly otherwise, and this appearance is just Gruaniad-addled bullshit.
You might want to look around a bit more. I don't know whether you've noticed Australia's economic performance post-GFC, but it's actually been pretty decent. Some of that is ongoing fulfilment of pre-GFC mining orders into China, but to a large extent our lack of serious unemployment has been due to prompt and very nearly big enough Keynesian stimulus applied for a few years starting around 2008. Even so, our debt level as a percentage of GDP is minuscule compared to either yours or Yurrp's. Once the global slump lifts a bit, we're pretty much certain to be amongst the first back into surplus.
If the Coalition happens to be in power when that happens, as seems likely given the Murdoch press's successful white-anting of the present Labor Government, it'll be tax cuts all round, not increased spending on stuff like schools and hospitals and public transport. Road yes - the big end of town likes roads.
We also have essentially sane non-partisan public servants in charge of the money supply, which helps a lot.
You might also want to ponder the idea of the GFC being the predictable and predicted outcome of the eighties "greed is good" fashion for deregulating and selling off every fucking thing and the failure to treat the Californian energy crisis as a foretaste of bigger storms to come. This will give you a clue about where those of us who remain suspicious of "small government good, big government bad" are coming from.
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@flabdablet said:
The "voluntary, mutually beneficial exchanges among individuals" wording gives the principle a warm and fuzzy glow that makes it sound like an absolute good.
Fair enough. I don't argue that people always act in their true best interests, whatever that is. But I trust those people, in general, to have a better idea about it than someone else. Meth is an extreme example, but what about buying marijuana? Alcohol? Probably, those of us who partake would be better off if we simply avoided. But consider American Prohibition of liquor and our War on Drugs and all of their perverse consequences. That stuff might be worth it to keep meth or heroine away from people, but it seems clear that it isn't for alcohol, and I think probably for marijuana, too.
@flabdablet said:
With that in mind: I think there's a good argument for the view that taxation more resembles a "voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange" than an exchange "based on" forceful coercion. Sure, there's an element of "nice little free market you have here - it would be a shame if something were to happen to it" but it seems to me that there's a fundamental difference between J. Random Thug doing that and a properly constituted democratic government doing it.
In theory, the government acts with the consent of the people (anyway, that's a fundamental tenet of the American Revolution, and pretty well accepted in modern, free countries). It's interesting to note that the mafia developed in Sicily as feudal Italy went away, and people needed someone to enforce security and so forth. But let's imagine that a properly constituted government passed some laws that added lots of taxes and rules (to be named later!) but the people who passed it into law never even read it. I suppose there's some element of consent there, but certainly not informed consent.
@flabdablet said:
If Tony Abbott leads the Coalition to victory at our next election, I fear we will too.
I don't get this at all. What's to bad about Tony Abbot that will lead to out of control government? Can you give me some real policy examples? Your Labor party seems generally to be the party of more government, just like our Democrats. Now, our Republicans are the party that says they want less, and generally cause less of it than the Democrats, but still more. I have a similar impression of the Coalition.
@flabdablet said:
We also have essentially sane non-partisan public servants in charge of the money supply, which helps a lot.
It also helps that your money supply isn't important enough to be the tail that wags the dog. There just aren't enough of you or enough of your money to matter in the same way. This is one of our problems, in that there's not enough externally enforced discipline. I think the Fed is pretty non-partisan and I'm not convinced that they aren't sane. But they have some perverse incentives and waaaay too much power.
@flabdablet said:
@boomzilla said:
In practice, however, governments both modern and ancient have been enemies of the free market. Yeah, I rail on about governments, because they've gone so far overboard, and I apologize if I've given the appearance of wanting to get rid of all government, but I have said explicitly otherwise, and this appearance is just Gruaniad-addled bullshit.
You might want to look around a bit more. I don't know whether you've noticed Australia's economic performance post-GFC, but it's actually been pretty decent. Some of that is ongoing fulfilment of pre-GFC mining orders into China, but to a large extent our lack of serious unemployment has been due to prompt and very nearly big enough Keynesian stimulus applied for a few years starting around 2008. Even so, our debt level as a percentage of GDP is minuscule compared to either yours or Yurrp's. Once the global slump lifts a bit, we're pretty much certain to be amongst the first back into surplus.
I wouldn't brag too much your growth. I consider the US' growth anemic over this period. I'm not sure which word to use for Australia, but decent ain't it.
< href="http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth">
@flabdablet said:
You might also want to ponder the idea of the GFC being the predictable and predicted outcome of the eighties "greed is good" fashion for deregulating and selling off every fucking thing and the failure to treat the Californian energy crisis as a foretaste of bigger storms to come. This will give you a clue about where those of us who remain suspicious of "small government good, big government bad" are coming from.
I have pondered it and found it wanting. I think the elimination of Glass-Steagall is what most people think of as both deregulating and a cause of the meltdown, but there was a lot more regulation put into place and the stuff that really caused the problems weren't affected by GS, and the stuff affected by GS tended to survive and/or not need bailouts. You're oversimplifying and getting a lot wrong about California and energy. So, my clue is pretty much unchanged: It's not that you're ignorant, but that you know so much that isn't so.
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@flabdablet said:
You might also want to ponder the idea of the GFC being the predictable and predicted outcome of the eighties "greed is good" fashion for deregulating and selling off every fucking thing and the failure to treat the Californian energy crisis as a foretaste of bigger storms to come. This will give you a clue about where those of us who remain suspicious of "small government good, big government bad" are coming from.
See, it's shit like that makes people think you have no fucking idea what you are talking about.The GFC wasn't caused by deregulation in the 80s. At best, you could point to the 1999 Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, but even then you run into the problem that the cause of the GFC was the selling of securities backed by mortgages. Which was always legal, and had nothing to do with Graham-Leach-Bliley. What did in fact cause the GFC, by making the selling of mortgage-backed securities profitable in the first place, was federal policy explicitly written to make it easier for people to get home loans. And that should give you a clue as to where the people saying "it's better to leave it up to the market than try to force change through regulation" are coming from.
You also run into the simple truth that a great deal of the "good times" of the turn of the century came from deregulating markets. Yeah, 2008 sucked ass. But 2001-2008 wasn't half bad. Nor was 1994-2000.
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@flabdablet said:
Thanks for the rice and beans you gave me yesterday. I took them back to where I've been sheltering under this bridge, but a bunch of frat boys came by last night and pissed on my face and kicked the shit out of the bags, and when I turned up to work at the sweat shop the guy threw me out because he said I stunk of piss. He already owes me five C's for the four months I've been there already but I don't think he's gonna pay, and his brother works for the police and told me not to make trouble. Help a brother out?
Give me a break. The people who sleep under bridges are winos. They don't work and they would immediately trade their rice and beans for booze.
The people who get food stamps in the US have huge flat-screen TVs, free government housing, 500 channels of cable and shiny, new Escalades. Look, you clearly don't know the first thing about poor people in the US.
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@boomzilla said:
I live in a relatively high cost of living area, and I just pulled up an EOB from April. The Doctor billed OFFICE VISIT, Code 99213 for $95. The insurance made him write it down to $72.98. They paid $58.38 (80%) and I paid $14.60 (20%). In a previous life I worked in medical billing, and there are different codes for different levels of visits. Maybe your doctor is just committing billing fraud by billing for a more complex visit?
It's a plain old office visit. And the doctor himself isn't billing, he's part of large clinic. Like I said, I haven't seen a sub-$100 office visit for a decade, and I've lived in several places.
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@Snooder said:
Have you ever read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"? That's exactly how welfare used to work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You only got aid if you prove that you "deserve" it. The problem there is that it can be pretty hard to define what "deserving" means. And it usually boils down to the determination of the sort of stick-up-the-ass power-tripping petty bureaucrat who thinks that having premarital sex means you should die. So people who were otherwise hard-working, decent people wouldn't get help, their kids would starve in the streets, crime was high, and the world was generally an unsightly place.
You are a bigger idiot than I thought if you believe a fucking thing Upton Sinclair wrote. What's more, welfare didn't this poverty; prosperous free markets did.
@Snooder said:
Point being, shit sucked and we've on from there.
Shit still sucks. Besides, claiming shit is better because of welfare shows such a stunning lack of intelligence I don't know how to respond. It's like you don't even comprehend history or cause-and-effect.
@Snooder said:
And yet people STILL scammed the system. Criminals would sign up dead people, foster parents with "clean" records would round up dozens of kids to collect benefits for and cram them into horrific living conditions. Politicians would siphon funds away. People will always cheat the system, you can't ever really stop it. You can only choose how expensive the siphoning will be. Personally, I don't a give a fuck if some idiot spends his $200 a month welfare check on a new TV. At least it means that the price of Walmart's stock will go up. What I care about is if I have enough money left after taxes to buy my own TV. And since my portion of that guy's TV is maybe 2cents or some other miniscule fraction of my overall tax bill, he can have it as long as it also keeps me from stumbling over homeless people and starving kids on my way to work.
So your attitude is "Fuck them, got mine". Unlike you, I actually give a shit about poor people and don't want to relegate them to a fucking permanent underclass.
@Snooder said:
Also, if you're talking about the MODERN (post 1996) welfare state, most states these days have included some sort of work requirement.
No they don't, you are full of shit. You can collect food stamps, Medicaid and Section 8 without lifting a fucking finger.
@Snooder said:
Which often ends up being a way for companies to get lower cost labor from a labor pool that has no alternative. I.E. the friends and campaign sponsors of the politicians in charge of the program will often pay less than minimum wage for jobs that would normally have a more competitive wage because they know that the workers will have to take the undercompetitive pay since they are being referred by the work-assistance program and turning down the job will end their benefits.
Which, to a not retarded person, would be a clear argument against the welfare state. Yet somehow you don't see this. I blame your mother for drinking and smoking crack while she was pregnant with you. All of the prostitution probably didn't help, either.
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@dhromed said:
since I know what's actually meant is the freedom of the powerful to trample whoever gets in the way of filling up their wallet
Where the fuck are you getting this idea? At least in the US, it's the government that does the trampling, dipshit.
@dhromed said:
Crying about taxes and the like is something I always interpret first and foremost as "boo hoo now it's so hard to exploit my workers wahhhh big government is restricting my FREEDOM"
Huh, I didn't know boomzilla and I were sweatshop owners. And here I was, thinking I was complaining because of the millions of hard-working people who work their fingers to the bone and HAVE FUCKING LESS THAN THE PEOPLE ON WELFARE. DO YOU THINK THAT'S FAIR, YOU FUCKING RETARD? I'd like to hear your rationalization for why it's okay to hurt hard-working people in order to pay drug addicts and fat, entitled, ignorant pieces of shit to suck down TV and Coca-Cola.
Here's another thing: rich people don't pay taxes. And I don't mean in some loopholes kind of way. I mean that the reason people are wealthy is because of some value they bring to the economy. You can raise their taxes, but they can just demand more money for their services, and they will get it. All you're doing is passing on the cost to the people who can least afford it. The welfare state UN-FUCKING-DENIABLY hurts the poor and middle class and benefits those who have political influence and money. If you knew ONE FUCKING THING about economics, you might realize this. If you paid one bit of attention to the world around you, instead of living in some ignorant bubble, you might know this. Idiot.
@dhromed said:
the ones who don't exploit workers and want to run happy companies and a healthy, social business with fair wages are employers who don't complain about taxes in the first place.
You are so fucking stupid.. it's unimaginable. The truth is, it's the good employers who are run out of business by high taxation. It's the unscrupulous assholes who are empowered. You really don't know the first fucking thing, do you?
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@flabdablet said:
You might also want to ponder the idea of the GFC being the predictable and predicted outcome of the eighties "greed is good" fashion for deregulating and selling off every fucking thing and the failure to treat the Californian energy crisis as a foretaste of bigger storms to come.
What the fuck are you talking about? The 2008 meltdown was simply the natural outcome of government-supported credit bubbles which popped. In the late 90s it was tech. In 2008 it was tech and housing. This time it will be tech, housing, universities and defense. The meltdown was the only sign of a healthy, functioning market because people finally realized that they'd been living a debt-fueled, government-built lie.
And the California energy crisis? You mean the one caused by California refusing to build power capacity and having to rely on imports of electricity? Or do you mean the Enron scandal (Jesus, are you so hard-up for shit to fling at the wall that you have to go back to that?) Because everything they did was 100% approved by government regulators. 100%.
Now, see, a not-retarded person might look at this and conclude "Wow, government regulation doesn't stop stupid shit from happening, and it only gives people a false sense of security and it insulates people from the consequences of their actions because those actions were approved by the regulators." But you clearly are not a not-retarded person..
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@boomzilla said:
I wouldn't brag too much your growth. I consider the US' growth anemic over this period. I'm not sure which word to use for Australia, but decent ain't it.
This is why GDP is not a particularly useful metric. I would say Australia is doing better than the US, but it has nothing to do with their government programs and solely has to do with the fact that they weren't caught up in the debt bubble like the rest of the developing world. However, they're caught up in the currency wars now, and very dependent on Asia for trade, which will ultimately fuck them over good.
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@flabdablet said:
but to a large extent our lack of serious unemployment has been due to prompt and very nearly big enough Keynesian stimulus applied for a few years starting around 2008.
Ha ha ha, oh god, you really are an ignorant little shit, aren't you? (Hint: the US and Europe have had far, far more Keynesian "stimulus" than Australia.. We are still undergoing massive Keynesian stimulus, in fact. How the fuck can you be so ignorant?)
@flabdablet said:
Even so, our debt level as a percentage of GDP is minuscule compared to either yours or Yurrp's. Once the global slump lifts a bit, we're pretty much certain to be amongst the first back into surplus.
Ha ha ha! Oh God, you crack me up. For one, you are very dependent on Asia for trade. This is going to fuck you. Two, having very little debt is hardly a benefit. Sure, having high debt is bad, but it's not like Europe and the US are going to pay it off. We're just going to end up defaulting on the whole thing, one way or another.
The truth is, you're still far too dependent on external economies to do well when the shit hits the fan. And with your welfare state and (ha ha!) Keynesian "stimulus", you're going to be feeling the pain, too.
The real funny part will be when China gets desperate in the face of its collapsing economy and decides to start a war with you guys. Now, this may not happen, of course, but China's likely to start a war with somebody when its economy collapses, and Australia is actually a very good target: lots of land and natural resources; insular so it's easy to fight and no risk of neighboring countries getting dragged in; and weak defenses. The only thing going for it is that the UK and US wouldn't be very happy about such a war, but I don't know if they'd be willing (or able) to do much to stop them.
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@morbiuswilters said:
The real funny part will be when China gets desperate in the face of its collapsing economy and decides to start a war with you guys. Now, this may not happen, of course, but China's likely to start a war with somebody when its economy collapses, and Australia is actually a very good target: lots of land and natural resources; insular so it's easy to fight and no risk of neighboring countries getting dragged in; and weak defenses. The only thing going for it is that the UK and US wouldn't be very happy about such a war, but I don't know if they'd be willing (or able) to do much to stop them.
That would require a lot of changes from the status quo. China's blue water navy is no where near ready for something like that. They might have a chance taking Taiwan, but that's a short ride, and they've been focusing their capabilities on that sort of fight. If it's resources and territory they want, why not go to Siberia?
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@morbiuswilters said:
Now, if I ran the program, you'd get 50lb bags of rice, 20lb bags of dried beans, and some fresh, cheap vegetables to balance things out. And that's all. If you were physically capable of labor and worked less than 50 hours per-week, you would have to do 8 hours of community service per-month to compensate society for the free food. People who need the food would have it and people who are scamming the system would suddenly decide that maybe it isn't such a good deal any more.
I agree in principle, but I think you are a little too restrictive. I'd add fruit along with the vegetables, bread and other cereals (meaning grains, not prepared breakfast cereals) to the rice, and limited amounts of dairy and inexpensive meats as alternative protein sources. Balanced nutrition (even for those with allergies to some protein sources), reasonably palatable, but still spartan enough to be not "such a good deal any more."There is also the issue of "people who need the food," but are homeless and have no access to facilities to cook the food they are given. Bread, fruit and some vegetables can be eaten without cooking (given that the bread is already baked when given to the needy), but rice and beans are pretty much useless to someone who cannot cook them.
Arguably, the homelessness is a separate problem and should be solved separately, but it does affect the nutrition problem. Since we are talking about governement programs*, and the government rarely responds quickly to anything other than, perhaps, violent attack, it is likely to take some time to get the homeless person into a living situation with access to cooking facilities, the nutrition assistance needs, somehow, to accomodate this. Of course, in reality, being governement programs, the programs will each have their own bloated bureaucracies, unable to efficiently run their own program, much less able to coordinate with the other one.
*If you are running a privately-funded program, as long as you are treating people fairly, and not, say, requiring sexual favors in exchange for food, you set the rules. Give whatever you want to whomever you think deserves it.
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@boomzilla said:
That would require a lot of changes from the status quo. China's blue water navy is no where near ready for something like that.
China's already been building up its navy. I think the economic collapse they're now undergoing is going to see them doing some big Keynesian stimulus with regard to their military forces. How long do you think it would take to crank out enough ships to take on Australia? Keep in mind that the Aussies aren't a military superpower, have no nukes and the Chinese don't put a high value on the lives of their citizens in the first place.
Hell, China has a surplus of young men. Young men who, due to their misguided One Child policy, will never have a female mate or the hope of marriage. They have tens of millions of them and those boys are dangerous. Young men with no economic prospects and no romantic prospects? Those are the kind of people who overthrow regimes. China would send them off to die in war just to get rid of them.
Now I'm not saying Australia is where it's going to be, but let's look at other targets:
India: nukes
Siberia (since you mentioned): nukes
South Korea: US presence
Taiwan: would start a pissing match with the US
Japan: might start a pissing match with the US. Also, despite their historical dislike of nukes, Japan could probably build a working nuclear bomb in a few months. They have uranium, they have highly-skilled technicians, reactors, nuclear engineers, manufacturing.. And while Japan may dislike nukes, they'll dislike invasion and the rape of their women by the Chinese even more. So Japan's a bad target.
Australia: Large land mass; insular so it's less likely to drag other countries into the war (or give neutral countries where an insurgency can operate from); lots of resources; militarily a cake walk.You're also ignoring that while reaching Australia would require a blue water navy, it's not the other side of the world. It's basically in China's sphere of influence, anyway, and the economic ties between the two are already quite strong. Now while you could say that gives China a disincentive to do anything to the Aussies, that only holds true if China is doing well. Since it's economy is sliding into the shitter, it only means that that closeness will breed contempt and arguments over the other side "Not doing enough" or "Not playing fair".
shrug I don't pretend to know the future. But based on history and conditions, I'd say Australia is a decent target. (That doesn't mean they won't also go for, say, Vietnam or Afghanistan. But those would be relatively easy for the Chinese to conquer, so I'm assuming they'd still have lots of military might left over.)
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@HardwareGeek said:
I agree in principle, but I think you are a little too restrictive. I'd add fruit along with the vegetables, bread and other cereals (meaning grains, not prepared breakfast cereals) to the rice, and limited amounts of dairy and inexpensive meats as alternative protein sources. Balanced nutrition (even for those with allergies to some protein sources), reasonably palatable, but still spartan enough to be not "such a good deal any more."
Yeah, I wasn't meaning my list to be exhaustive, but just a guideline. But I'd give beans and soy as protein, no meat. They don't need it and if they want it they can work for it.
@HardwareGeek said:
There is also the issue of "people who need the food," but are homeless and have no access to facilities to cook the food they are given.
Soup kitchens. Besides, the people on the street aren't on food stamps, so this doesn't apply. They get meals from soup kitchens, volunteers or by panhandling. But even people on the street don't lack access to food, they just spend all of their resources on booze. You can give them fruit and bread, and they might even eat a little of it, but mostly they'll just trade it for booze.
@HardwareGeek said:
...it is likely to take some time to get the homeless person into a living situation with access to cooking facilities, the nutrition assistance needs, somehow, to accomodate this.
There are already homeless shelters. Or are you talking about apartments? Because that doesn't work. They just trash the places, rip up everything they can sell, rip out the wire so they can sell the copper, then "rent" it out to drug dealers and prostitutes. All so they can buy smack/booze/meth/crack/scratchoff tickets. shrug There really isn't a lot you can do.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@boomzilla said:
That would require a lot of changes from the status quo. China's blue water navy is no where near ready for something like that.
China's already been building up its navy.Yes, but it's been mostly focused on invading Formosa, right off their coast. They'd need to invade a lot of other places to get their stuff close enough to get sufficient forces to Australia. And the people in the way are scared enough of China that they're interested in becoming allies of Japan.
@morbiuswilters said:
Australia: Large land mass; insular so it's less likely to drag other countries into the war (or give neutral countries where an insurgency can operate from); lots of resources; militarily a cake walk.
They are a major US ally. We'd go apeshit. Just like Japan and South Korea, they're under our nuke umbrella and naval and whatever else protection.
@morbiuswilters said:
shrug I don't pretend to know the future. But based on history and conditions, I'd say Australia is a decent target. (That doesn't mean they won't also go for, say, Vietnam or Afghanistan. But those would be relatively easy for the Chinese to conquer, so I'm assuming they'd still have lots of military might left over.)
I think our closeness to Australia protects them from China, but maybe Medicare dooms Australia (and the poor saps between them and Asia) in a few decades. But maybe some former Soviet Republics? They've been investing heavily in Africa...maybe they make a play there? We'd issue a strong statement about Vietnam, I'm sure, but what's there that's worth taking? Shrimp farms? I'd love to see them invade Afganistan...proving they learned nothing from British, Soviet and American experiences there.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Yeah, I wasn't meaning my list to be exhaustive, but just a guideline.
@morbiuswilters said:Now, if I ran the program, you'd get 50lb bags of rice, 20lb bags of dried beans, and some fresh, cheap vegetables to balance things out. And that's all.
Sounds exhaustive to me.@HardwareGeek said:
There is also the issue of "people who need the food," but are homeless and have no access to facilities to cook the food they are given.
Soup kitchens. Besides, the people on the street aren't on food stamps, so this doesn't apply. They get meals from soup kitchens, volunteers or by panhandling. But even people on the street don't lack access to food, they just spend all of their resources on booze. You can give them fruit and bread, and they might even eat a little of it, but mostly they'll just trade it for booze.
@morbiuswilters said:
There are already homeless shelters.
True, but the demand exceeds the supply.@morbiuswilters said:
Or are you talking about apartments? Because that doesn't work.
Yeah, I was thinking of, not necessarily apartments, but something longer-term than shelters. However, you raise good points. I guess I was thinking of the "deserving" poor – unemployed but looking for work, or even working but can't afford the deposit to get into an apartment – and assuming the low-life scum had already been filtered out of the system; notnecessarilya valid assumption.@morbiuswilters said:
scratchoff tickets
Don't even get me started on that rant!
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@morbiuswilters said:
There are already homeless shelters.
Ungodly things happen in shelters. Ask Ben.
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What about things like baby formula and diapers? Or daycare so a single mother has some chance at actually earning an income.
I'm willing to believe there are welfare freeloaders, perhaps even many freeloaders; but I don't actually believe the majority of recipients are just lazy deadbeats and scumbags.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Snooder said:
And yet people STILL scammed the system. Criminals would sign up dead people, foster parents with "clean" records would round up dozens of kids to collect benefits for and cram them into horrific living conditions. Politicians would siphon funds away. People will always cheat the system, you can't ever really stop it. You can only choose how expensive the siphoning will be. Personally, I don't a give a fuck if some idiot spends his $200 a month welfare check on a new TV. At least it means that the price of Walmart's stock will go up. What I care about is if I have enough money left after taxes to buy my own TV. And since my portion of that guy's TV is maybe 2cents or some other miniscule fraction of my overall tax bill, he can have it as long as it also keeps me from stumbling over homeless people and starving kids on my way to work.
So your attitude is "Fuck them, got mine". Unlike you, I actually give a shit about poor people and don't want to relegate them to a fucking permanent underclass.
Well yeah, because unlike you I'm actually a realist and I know that no matter what we do, poor people are fucked. Whether we give them free shit, or withhold the free shit in some paternalistic parody of altruism, lazy people with no talent will always be lazy and talentless. They already ARE a permanent underclass and always have been, and that's not about to change any time soon. The best we can do is try to keep it from being race/ethnicity based. Which is probably a healthier attitude to take than the liberal hippy who thinks that taking money from rich people will somehow magically make people not lazy or not talentless. And is definitely FAR healthier than the sort of nut who thinks that starving people will also magically do the same thing. At least the hippy's heart is in the right place, if misguided. Your type are just assholes on top of your idiocy.
@morbiuswilters said:
@Snooder said:
Also, if you're talking about the MODERN (post 1996) welfare state, most states these days have included some sort of work requirement.
No they don't, you are full of shit. You can collect food stamps, Medicaid and Section 8 without lifting a fucking finger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Work_Opportunity_Act Note that one of the major provisions is a requirement that recipients must begin working after recieving aid for two years. Which, since a lot of state programs depend on federal funding results in the state programs having a reciprocal work requirement. You really have absolutely no idea what the real world is like, do you? Do you just parrot everything you hear on Fox News, or do you prefer Rush Limbaugh's soothing brand of bile and bigotry?
@morbiuswilters said:
@Snooder said:
Which often ends up being a way for companies to get lower cost labor from a labor pool that has no alternative. I.E. the friends and campaign sponsors of the politicians in charge of the program will often pay less than minimum wage for jobs that would normally have a more competitive wage because they know that the workers will have to take the undercompetitive pay since they are being referred by the work-assistance program and turning down the job will end their benefits.
Which, to a not retarded person, would be a clear argument against the welfare state. Yet somehow you don't see this. I blame your mother for drinking and smoking crack while she was pregnant with you. All of the prostitution probably didn't help, either.
And where exactly did I say I was a fan of the welfare state? Look, paying poor people so that they keep out of my way kinda sucks. But since it's the lesser of several evils that includes bums acosting me on the street, pickpockets stealing my shit on every street corner, illiterate assholes fucking up my order at McDonalds, irritating sob stories in the news about some kid dying of starvation in the street, and Europeans snickering every time I go on vacation I'd rather just pay the fucking tax. And hey, if every so often someone gets helped, that's good too. Then I can feel good about helping others while being just as selfish and narcissistic as ever. My point isn't that welfare is the bee's knees. It's that requiring people to "work" in order to get aid doesn't really solve any problem and creates a host of new ones.
Also, really, yo' mama jokes? Get some new material brah.
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@joe.edwards said:
What about things like baby formula and diapers? Or daycare so a single mother has some chance at actually earning an income.
Single mothers (which are not the same as widows) are like Roosevelt or Obama - they somehow managed to get good PR as heroes fighting against an impossible economical situation while they are actually themselves at the root of the problem.
A few interesting figures from the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators:
@US Department of Commerce said:
Children raised by single mothers represent:
- 63% of youth suicides
- 70% of teenage pregnancies
- 71% of adolescent substance abuse
- 80% of prison inmates
- 90% of homeless or runaway children
Interesting point: it has been demonstrated that the large majority of single mothers who give up babies for adoption come from a more privileged background (higher education, better salary). It has also been demonstrated that adopted children are statistically less likely to end up in jail or homeless than children raised by single mothers.
So no, I would not say that giving money to single mothers is economically or socially a wise approach. Subsidizing single mothers is like putting retarded kids in regular classrooms "so they can belong" while everybody is slowed down.
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@Ronald said:
@joe.edwards said:
What about things like baby formula and diapers? Or daycare so a single mother has some chance at actually earning an income.
Single mothers (which are not the same as widows) are like Roosevelt or Obama - they somehow managed to get good PR as heroes fighting against an impossible economical situation while they are actually themselves at the root of the problem.
A few interesting figures from the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators:
@US Department of Commerce said:
Children raised by single mothers represent:
- 63% of youth suicides
- 70% of teenage pregnancies
- 71% of adolescent substance abuse
- 80% of prison inmates
- 90% of homeless or runaway children
Interesting point: it has been demonstrated that the large majority of single mothers who give up babies for adoption come from a more privileged background (higher education, better salary). It has also been demonstrated that adopted children are statistically less likely to end up in jail or homeless than children raised by single mothers.
So no, I would not say that giving money to single mothers is economically or socially a wise approach. Subsidizing single mothers is like putting retarded kids in regular classrooms "so they can belong" while everybody is slowed down.
The problem being that you can't really stop single mothers from existing. Shit will always happen. People will be dumb, condoms will break, boyfriends will fuckoff, husbands will die. Hence, the need for some sort of program to do as much as we can to alleviate the things that make being a single mother such a shitty prospect for the kids. Cause having a bunch of criminals running around is bad for everyone.
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@morbiuswilters said:
And here I was, thinking I was complaining because of the millions of hard-working people who work their fingers to the bone and HAVE FUCKING LESS THAN THE PEOPLE ON WELFARE. DO YOU THINK THAT'S FAIR, YOU FUCKING RETARD?
Of course it's not fair. That's why a basic income should be something every citizen receives as of right. Plasma TV, beer and cheetos for all!
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@flabdablet said:
That's why a basic income should be something every citizen receives as of right.
I can't tell if you're sarcastic.
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@dhromed said:
@flabdablet said:
That's why a basic income should be something every citizen receives as of right.
I can't tell if you're sarcastic.Given his posting history, I don't think so. I guess he missed the brief discussion of this on the BAD IDEAS THREAD:
@boomzilla said:
AU$30,000 guaranteed income
This one is particularly amusing. The author is pretty clueless, and so are many commenters. Some of the useful idiots try to flesh out how such a scheme would work to get undesirable jobs completed, and end up recreating some combination of feudal villeins and Maoist Cultural Revolution like that was a good thing.
The level of self absorption and cluelessness of supporters of such a thing is just mind blowing. @TFA said:"Imagine the creativity, innovation and enterprise that would be unleashed if every citizen were guaranteed a living. Universal income provides the material basis for a fuller development of human potential."
I suppose it could work if we could survive on robot slave labor or Start Trek like replicators that worked. I encourage BIEN supporters to hold their breaths in anticipation.
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@Snooder said:
@Ronald said:
@joe.edwards said:
What about things like baby formula and diapers? Or daycare so a single mother has some chance at actually earning an income.
Single mothers (which are not the same as widows) are like Roosevelt or Obama - they somehow managed to get good PR as heroes fighting against an impossible economical situation while they are actually themselves at the root of the problem.
A few interesting figures from the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators:
@US Department of Commerce said:
Children raised by single mothers represent:
- 63% of youth suicides
- 70% of teenage pregnancies
- 71% of adolescent substance abuse
- 80% of prison inmates
- 90% of homeless or runaway children
Interesting point: it has been demonstrated that the large majority of single mothers who give up babies for adoption come from a more privileged background (higher education, better salary). It has also been demonstrated that adopted children are statistically less likely to end up in jail or homeless than children raised by single mothers.
So no, I would not say that giving money to single mothers is economically or socially a wise approach. Subsidizing single mothers is like putting retarded kids in regular classrooms "so they can belong" while everybody is slowed down.
The problem being that you can't really stop single mothers from existing. Shit will always happen. People will be dumb, condoms will break, boyfriends will fuckoff, husbands will die. Hence, the need for some sort of program to do as much as we can to alleviate the things that make being a single mother such a shitty prospect for the kids. Cause having a bunch of criminals running around is bad for everyone.Statistics show that widows (6% of single mothers) are a different segment than the others; children of widowed women tend to fare better than children of single mothers (I guess life insurance has its perks). Divorced mothers account for about 35% and it's safe to say that this is a gray area.
However 60% of single moms enter this role willingly, having declined aborption (stats unknown) and adoption (less than 1% of single mothers choose to give up the child). With extremely high odds that their children will end up in a bad socio-economic situation and multiple studies showing that children given up for adoption at birth experience no suffering or emotional traumatism from the process, women who decide to "tough it up" are either misguided or simply don't put the interest of the child above other, less noble motivations (such as not being lonely or looking for happiness outside of themselves).
The Western civilization has been plagued by a politically correct image of women and mothers as selfish saints but the reality is far more ugly. Ask any guy who went thru a bad divorce; women can often hide ugly motivations behind "the good of the children" (just like men can hide lust behind that "need to unwind from pressure at work" when they go to the strippers or have an affair).
Every year there are 150,000 adoptions in the USA; less than 10% of those involve babies given up at birth by single mothers. And there are 1 million mothers who choose to raise their kid instead of giving them up. Discard the HIV/crack/fetal alcohol syndrom babies and this still means that as a society we let 700,000 kids get fucked up by a terribly small chance at finding happiness while we "import" over 100,000 babies from other countries because we have available, capable parents who can't have children of their own. Yet we put single mothers on a pedestal and we even consider subsizdizing their hubris. This is beyond stupid.
I'm not saying that the state should force women into giving up their kid but offer them $5000 to do so and we'll see their true colors, plus it will be pocket changed compared to what their fucked up kids would end up costing to the society.
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@dhromed said:
@flabdablet said:
That's why a basic income should be something every citizen receives as of right.
I can't tell if you're sarcastic.
I can't, either.
Also, I need to apologize for losing my temper with you. I know you mean well and I really should not let myself get so angry.
But it's hard. It's hard to see your mother work 50 hours a week and barely be able to make ends meet. It's hard to see her providing therapy for abused, neglected children who have been sexually, physically and psychologically abused, and whose parents are the same welfare-cheating scum you are trying to defend. It's hard to see her spend her own money to buy them small gifts, things that spark their interest and creativity and give them hope that maybe something good and decent exists outside of their hellish existence, while their parents get thousands per-month in free aid from the government and would never bother trying to do something like that for their own children.
It's hard to see these people driving around brand new cars, having brand new iPhones and flat-screen TVs when my mother, who has to try to see that these people's kids are taken care of, can't afford any of that. It's hard to hear the stories of good kids growing into puberty and starting to adopt the abusive, criminal existences of their parents. Starting to rape other children. Starting to steal from the weak and defenseless. Getting pregnant and 14 and being inducted into the welfare system to begin their own descent into hopelessness.
And it's hard to hear people like you defending all of this. Making it out like these are all noble poor people who have been somehow hurt or oppressed by the rich, instead of the truth which is that these people have been aided in abetted in their lifestyles by a government which rewards them for acting this way and punishes them for trying to be self-sufficient or working for a living. It's not the rich people or the middle class or a free market which has caused this. And it's not that the welfare state invented neglect and cruelty, of course. But it's only making it easier to be that way.
Meanwhile it's the working class and middle class people who are being plundered to support these atrocities. And I'm certainly not trying to say that all poor people are bad or all rich people are good. Nor that there aren't people who legitimately need government support. But leftists always want to drag out the handicapped or the mentally ill or those truly unable to work as an example of the kind of people who will be hurt by reforming welfare. But the truth is, people who actually need welfare make up maybe 1 in 100 of those who receive it. Maybe less.
And the really horrible, depressing thing is that when welfare is reformed, those are the people who are cut loose. Because in the perverse calculus of government bureaucracy, it makes more sense to keep on the cheats because they're a more vocal voting bloc. They're the ones who will scream bloody murder if you try to get them to get off their fat ass and get a job. So the people who truly need help are either cut loose or they are affected by across-the-board cuts, just so the 99 scumbags can keep scamming the system. And the scumbags are doing okay, because they have extra income from illicit activities or doing a little work on the side for cash under the table.
So to hear you defend this angers me. To hear you suggest that people are cold-hearted or greedy because they think the system needs to be torn down to the foundation and reformed dramatically is very insulting.
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@boomzilla said:
Yes, but it's been mostly focused on invading Formosa, right off their coast. They'd need to invade a lot of other places to get their stuff close enough to get sufficient forces to Australia.
China still has a sizeable command economy, lots of natural resources and tons of expendable people. I think if they set their sights on it, it would only take a few years to build up thousands of ships and stage an invasion. And as long as they avoid going nuclear, what the hell is the US going to do? Start a nuclear exchange with China over Australia?
@boomzilla said:
They are a major US ally. We'd go apeshit. Just like Japan and South Korea, they're under our nuke umbrella and naval and whatever else protection.
Well, I'm assuming this is after a major economic collapse, at which point the US government is going to have a hard enough time managing an orderly descent into poverty and chaos at home. At that point, defending practically any foreign nation is going to seem quaint.
And, sure, they're under our "nuke umbrella", but I doubt the US would even be willing to resort to nukes now if China invaded Australia or Japan, let alone after an economic calamity. South Korea's advantage are the tens of thousands of US troops stationed there, which would dissuade any action in the Korean peninsula. And as I said, Japan could go nuclear in short order (in fact, it wouldn't surprise me if somewhere the Japanese government had a plan for just such a contingency.)
@boomzilla said:
But maybe some former Soviet Republics?
Maybe. My thinking is China doesn't want to piss in Russia's tea.
@boomzilla said:
We'd issue a strong statement about Vietnam, I'm sure, but what's there that's worth taking? Shrimp farms?
The economic gain isn't from conquest but from simply fighting the war in the first place. It would allow them to stabilize their economic production and assert control over their citizens and whatever countries they invade. It would get rid of those surplus men who will be without jobs and without wives.
@boomzilla said:
I'd love to see them invade Afganistan...proving they learned nothing from British, Soviet and American experiences there.
I think they could succeed, if only because they'd be far more brutal than even the Soviets were willing to be. What's more, they'd have dramatically different goals than the US. We were fighting an ideologically-driven war to democratize and liberalize Afghanistan. China would merely seek dominance and access to Afghanistan's mineral resources. They wouldn't have our weaknesses: a fickle populace at home that shies away from death tolls. Truth is, we weren't even losing that many soldiers in Afghanistan, even at the peak. More than the US would tolerate, sure, but China could easily lose a few thousand a year to insurgency and not care. (In fact, as I've pointed out, that's actually a hidden benefit since it disposes of some of their surplus population of unemployed, unwed men.)
A Chinese occupation of Afghanistan would look very different. We tried to build schools, hospitals and a democratic government. China would simply secure the mineral resources and kill anyone who caused trouble. The US had the problem of insurgents bombing the buildings we constructed, terrorizing villages and assassinating officials in the nascent democratic government. China would have a much easier war to fight.
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@morbiuswilters said:
I need to apologize for losing my temper with you. I know you mean well and I really should not let myself get so angry.
Apology accepted, and it's refreshing to see nuance and reasoning replace bloviation and personal abuse for a while.
As a foster parent, I am well and truly aware of the damage done to kids by parents with inadequate personal, social and parenting skills. Unlike you, though, I have no faith at all that anybody fucked up enough not to be motivated into getting their act together by watching their own kids suffer would be any better motivated by having their bennies cut off. I have met people who live this way, and if they can't steal peacefully from the state, they'll steal violently from their neighbours instead. From where I sit, "force them to better themselves" looks like a very forlorn hope.
Personally, I see very little upside to imposing sanctions on fucked-up people that will inevitably hurt those more socially responsible equally badly (worse, actually, because their resistance to getting by via thievery and violence is higher). These are the people I'm defending, not the sociopaths. I'm sorry to hear from you that arseholes outnumber good people where you live, but it's a matter of verifiable fact that this is not the case everywhere.
I don't believe that there is an economic solution to this problem, because at its root the problem is not economic but social, cultural and intergenerational. The belligerent lardarse defending his god-given right to drink beer and eat pizza and watch TV on the state's tab is a sideshow and a distraction. From a policy point of view, the most valuable questions you can ask about him are "what's his history?" and "what can we do to help children in his neighbourhood adopt less abhorrent values?"
I get hives from arguments about "big government". To my way of thinking, the aggregate amount of spending and/or regulation is almost completely irrelevant. What we actually need to be thinking about is the quality of regulation and the appropriateness and effectiveness of spending. Public policy is inherently complex, one-size-fits-all prescriptions very nearly always cause more problems than they solve, and no policy option ought to be ruled out simply because it involves regulating or taxing something. The fundamental question about any policy proposal is whether the upside is worth the downside. Every policy has both, and to pretend otherwise is unhelpful.
I don't think people who propose tearing systems down to the foundation are necessarily cold-hearted nor greedy, but they're generally young and don't have much idea how deep the foundations go, like almost every revolutionary in history. It's a method that generally causes massive suffering before society settles back into a pattern mostly resembling what existed before the revolution. What generally works better is pushing ideology aside, resisting simplistic category-based thinking (especially morally simplistic thinking), trying stuff out on small scales, and ramping up the successes. What do we want? Gradual change! When do we want it? In due course!
It would also be good if smart people spent more time discussing things reasonably amongst themselves than engaging in pissing contests.
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@flabdablet said:
@morbiuswilters said:
I need to apologize for losing my temper with you. I know you mean well and I really should not let myself get so angry.
Apology accepted, and it's refreshing to see nuance and reasoning replace bloviation and personal abuse for a while.
As a foster parent, I am well and truly aware of the damage done to kids by parents with inadequate personal, social and parenting skills. Unlike you, though, I have no faith at all that anybody fucked up enough not to be motivated into getting their act together by watching their own kids suffer would be any better motivated by having their bennies cut off. I have met people who live this way, and if they can't steal peacefully from the state, they'll steal violently from their neighbours instead. From where I sit, "force them to better themselves" looks like a very forlorn hope.
Personally, I see very little upside to imposing sanctions on fucked-up people that will inevitably hurt those more socially responsible equally badly (worse, actually, because their resistance to getting by via thievery and violence is higher). These are the people I'm defending, not the sociopaths. I'm sorry to hear from you that arseholes outnumber good people where you live, but it's a matter of verifiable fact that this is not the case everywhere.
I don't believe that there is an economic solution to this problem, because at its root the problem is not economic but social, cultural and intergenerational. The belligerent lardarse defending his god-given right to drink beer and eat pizza and watch TV on the state's tab is a sideshow and a distraction. From a policy point of view, the most valuable questions you can ask about him are "what's his history?" and "what can we do to help children in his neighbourhood adopt less abhorrent values?"
I get hives from arguments about "big government". To my way of thinking, the aggregate amount of spending and/or regulation is almost completely irrelevant. What we actually need to be thinking about is the quality of regulation and the appropriateness and effectiveness of spending. Public policy is inherently complex, one-size-fits-all prescriptions very nearly always cause more problems than they solve, and no policy option ought to be ruled out simply because it involves regulating or taxing something. The fundamental question about any policy proposal is whether the upside is worth the downside. Every policy has both, and to pretend otherwise is unhelpful.
I don't think people who propose tearing systems down to the foundation are necessarily cold-hearted nor greedy, but they're generally young and don't have much idea how deep the foundations go, like almost every revolutionary in history. It's a method that generally causes massive suffering before society settles back into a pattern mostly resembling what existed before the revolution. What generally works better is pushing ideology aside, resisting simplistic category-based thinking (especially morally simplistic thinking), trying stuff out on small scales, and ramping up the successes. What do we want? Gradual change! When do we want it? In due course!
It would also be good if smart people spent more time discussing things reasonably amongst themselves than engaging in pissing contests.
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@flabdablet said:
I don't know. The elephant would have been literally full of shit if this is a real photo. This looks like an indian elephant so that could explain the situation but still it's a lot of shit.
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@joe.edwards said:
What about things like baby formula and diapers? Or daycare so a single mother has some chance at actually earning an income.
How about: if you can't afford to have children, you shouldn't have children.
Why should the rest of society that can hold a job have to pay taxes to support someone who is selfish enough to think that the rest of society owes them the wherewithal to bring up a kid without them having to contribute financially towards it?
@joe.edwards said:I'm willing to believe there are welfare freeloaders, perhaps even many freeloaders...
Single mothers who expect society to pay taxes to support them in some fashion or another are freeloaders.
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@Snooder said:
The problem being that you can't really stop single mothers from existing. Shit will always happen. People will be dumb, condoms will break, boyfriends will fuckoff, husbands will die. Hence, the need for some sort of program to do as much as we can to alleviate the things that make being a single mother such a shitty prospect for the kids.
Confiscate the kids then, if they can't afford to look after them. While we're at it, stop all forms of IVF making fostering/adoption the only way* to acquire a kid if you're unable to produce one naturally.
Two birds with one stone.
- Or surrogacy, if you're rich enough - but if you're that rich, you're not part of the problem to begin with.
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@PJH said:
if you're that rich, you're not part of the problem to begin with
...because being rich automatically makes you an exemplary parent?
I don't think you've thought this through.
