Teabaggers are Destroying My Home State

[Crazed Rabbit]

All I hear is defeatist whining. Grow up and be a man.

EDIT: If in doubt, that comment was meant to be more light-hearted than it may sound....

I'll just be sure to remember it the next time anyone complains about Union being hard to form because of those big bad corporations.

CR

[HoreTore]

I'll just be sure to remember it the next time anyone complains about Union being hard to form because of those big bad corporations.

CR

Never in my life have I complained about that. Workers rights are a struggle, there is no reason why anyone would want to give them, that's why people demand them.

If you convince enough people that your demand is just, you will succeed. If you can't convince enough people to succeed, your demand isn't just.

[Beskar]

You know who else who hates Unions?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Here is Crazed Rabbit's Economic Bible.

[Centurion1]

Never in my life have I complained about that. Workers rights are a struggle, there is no reason why anyone would want to give them, that's why people demand them.

If you convince enough people that your demand is just, you will succeed. If you can't convince enough people to succeed, your demand isn't just.

just let me add that to my little red book of bull.

[jabarto]

Regressing, huh? Is this another one of your claims that is based on a few anecdotes and no data?

I told you twice over that the cost of living in America has been steadily increasing for decades while wages remain the same or even lower.

[Centurion1]

I told you twice over that the cost of living in America has been steadily increasing for decades while wages remain the same or even lower.

wrong they increase at disproportionate rates, yes. but wages have gone up with the cost of living your employer HAS to give you a cost of living adjustment.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

wrong they increase at disproportionate rates, yes. but wages have gone up with the cost of living your employer HAS to give you a cost of living adjustment.

Actually, the only employers REQUIRED to provide cost of living adjustments are those that are bound to do so by law (federal government jobs) or by contract (some union contracts include such a provision). You are correct that most employers make such increases anyway, else they risk losing their employees (and usually their best ones) to other employers who will provide such increases. Any compulsion is de facto, not de jure.

[Beskar]

Actually, the only employers REQUIRED to provide cost of living adjustments are those that are bound to do so by law (federal government jobs) or by contract (some union contracts include such a provision). You are correct that most employers make such increases anyway, else they risk losing their employees (and usually their best ones) to other employers who will provide such increases. Any compulsion is de facto, not de jure.

Experience over-here shows the opposite. Those at the bottom don't get such an increase unless the minimum wage is increased, generally this is sort of done in-line with inflation in the UK at least. Outside of this and public sector or contracts done due to Unions, it never happens.

Also, in America, with your service culture, minimum wage is around the $2.13 mark, so they do not even see the benefits of the federal $7.50 rate.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Experience over-here shows the opposite. Those at the bottom don't get such an increase unless the minimum wage is increased, generally this is sort of done in-line with inflation in the UK at least. Outside of this and public sector or contracts done due to Unions, it never happens.

Also, in America, with your service culture, minimum wage is around the $2.13 mark, so they do not even see the benefits of the federal $7.50 rate.

Um, no it isn't. The only people who get paid less are those who get a lot of tips, ie waitresses. And even then the base wage is much higher than $2.13.

Oh, look , I found your Little Red Economic Book:

I told you twice over that the cost of living in America has been steadily increasing for decades while wages remain the same or even lower.

Wages have been increasing. Color me completely unconvinced.

CR

[Beskar]

Um, no it isn't. The only people who get paid less are those who get a lot of tips, ie waitresses. And even then the base wage is much higher than $2.13.

Do you tip the employees at Mc Donalds for your burger?

Oh, look , I found your Little Red Economic Book:

You are right, I do share a lot of beliefs with Orwell. As Wikipedia mentions -

His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense, revolutionary opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism.

I would say I am aware of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and have ideas rooted in democracy and socialism. Thank you for realising that. <3

Unfortunately, the example you quote is not an economic theory, but a political statement.

[HoreTore]

It's always so cute when right-wingers think that Orwell attacked socialism.

He attacked Stalin, because in his mind he had turned CAPITALIST, which is the worst thing in Orwell's book(that's everyone looks the same in the final scene of Animal Farm).

[Beskar]

It's always so cute when right-wingers think that Orwell attacked socialism.

He attacked Stalin, because in his mind he had turned CAPITALIST, which is the worst thing in Orwell's book(that's everyone looks the same in the final scene of Animal Farm).

It is amusing because Orwell is attacking the right-wing. He is attacking authoritarianism in its aspects. He sees the Animal Farm (USSR) getting corrupted by Napoleon (Stalin) from its original loafty inspirational goals. He was attacking what the USSR became, not what it was in the beginning. Unfortunately, Stalin had too many fingers in too many pies, and people were more worried about other people, that Stalin was simply overlooked.

[HoreTore]

It is amusing because Orwell is attacking the right-wing. He is attacking authoritarianism in its aspects. He sees the Animal Farm (USSR) getting corrupted by Napoleon (Stalin) from its original loafty inspirational goals. He was attacking what the USSR became, not what it was in the beginning. Unfortunately, Stalin had too many fingers in too many pies, and people were more worried about other people, that Stalin was simply overlooked.

Well at least CR has removed that qoute from his siggy where Orwells calls for an armed socialist revolution....

[Ironside]

Wages have been increasing. Color me completely unconvinced.

CR

Inflation adjusted? The 2009 data should be quite interesting and we're talking on 30 year scale here.
Now I can agree that the cost of living haven't probably increased more, inflation adjusted.

[Centurion1]

Do you tip the employees at Mc Donalds for your burger?

No but they make minmum wage. definetly not 2.13 lol.

[Beskar]

Want weird statistics?

1 in 8 people in America suffer from Hunger.

6 in 10 suffer from overweight/obesity.

lol.

[TinCow]

1 in 8 people in America suffer from Hunger.

That's not quite correct. That includes people whose income is low enough that they risk hunger if the income flow is disrupted, but they're not actually experiencing a shortage of food. They're essentially people who are at risk of going hungry in the future. The number of people who actively do not get enough food to eat is much lower. This report says that 3.7 percent of the population fell into that category in 2005.

[Husar]

Well, considering the USA are a first world country I'd expect that to be 0%, 3.7% is definitely way too much IMO.
I don't know what the numbers are here in europe but if they're above 0%, that's just as bad.

[Aemilius Paulus]

I do not get it. How do the libertarians propose handling economics with no central authority? I thought the Panic of the 1907 was the final lesson needed, after which the people and the gov't finally grew wiser, and created the Fed. What will happen without it? And even before the Fed, the government still had quite a few options to tinker with the economy. What will happen when this is gone? Everyone knows about the vicious circular nature of recessions. With no outside money, the effects will be catastrophic, leading to prolonged busts where a slight downturn would have sufficed.



And in general, with the power void left following the dramatic shrinking of the government duties, is it not reasonable to point out that there is no such thing as a prolonged power vacuum, and that the sole solution would be for the corporations to fill that in, as it is in so many places in the world? If there is one thing certain, it is that power will always be in someone's hands, and that it will be in the hands of very few. Libertarianism does not lead to a free paradise, but rather the institution of some other oppressive force. Since I cannot find more positive oppression in this world than the oppression of the US gov't, I would rather have the status quo.

Just to spite the libertarians, I would love to see some advanced country go along with this. The only problem is, it would likely be US, and I would never wish such harm to this great nation. But purely as a Russian, I would rejoice. How can you expect US to stay a global superpower with a libertarian government? Such a demanding position requires a strong government. A government ready to not only defend itself, but intervene, and to actively participate in various interventions on a daily basis. With a libertarian government, China and Russia shall inherit the world. And maybe the EU playing a secondary role, but I can imagine China and Russia easily playing off the nations of EU one against the other. As usual, the euro-skeptics will help out. Many thanks to EMFM and Furnuculus

Libertarianism is a very fashionable idea today in the US. It reminds me so much of communism in theearly 1900s - 10s, 20s, and to a lesser degree, in the 30s. Except that far left movements were actively persecuted in most nations. Still, a great deal of intellectuals supported it. Many people liked it too, although USSR was already running an experiment of it starting with the 20s, so the sentiments were a bit sobered by the negative stories leaking out of the secretive USSR. In the late 1800s, the far left ideologies were still fresh, though, and no one has tried them yet, and so the socialist agenda was widespread, even if it so often collided with various governments, persecuted through the urgings of either the European monarchs, not comfortable with the revolutionary rhetoric, and the big business, for very obvious reasons.

However, today there are no political restrictions in US. But there is that history of libertarian tendencies, as we can observe in Jefferson's writings, for instance (thank God in the end it ended up in favour of the more prudent and realistic Hamilton, Adams, and Madison). Today, libertarianism has the advantages communism did not enjoy. So it spreads and spreads. It advocates a different, yet similar utopia. It promises solutions which are overtly simplistic - and we know better than to trust that sort of argumentation, right? All this theory needs is the implementation of it to show everyone what it truly leads to.


Just the notion that any sort of extreme can prove to be the most optimal solution strikes me as pure ideological madness. Since when have such extremes, extremes which will affect every aspect of gv't, since when have such extremes proven to be successful? Answers do not lie on the extremes. Nothing is so simple. Why can a libertarian not see how similar a communist society as prescribed by Marx is not all that much different from libertarianism in its practical results? But whatever, this is still debatable. The larger question is the one I have already put forward - how can this extreme lead to any good? It goes beyond all common sense and history. For hundreds of years we see national governments go far into left and right, and we always see the shift to the centre, eventually, or else the nation stagnates or some other misfortune occurs.

Germany went from the ultra-liberal Weimar Republic (both in the social and economic sense - classical economic liberalism, that is). Then it went to Hitler's ultra-right government. France went from rather far-right of DeGaulle and into the rather far-left of Mitterand. But both came back to the relative centre. A libertarian nation will soon turn from one extreme into the opposite extreme, after overwhelming discontent drives the state to turn to an extreme of command economy - as the historical rule states. In the end though, the nation will set itself back on the same, moderate course which it followed before the libertarian revolution. I do not see any other way.

[TinCow]

Well, considering the USA are a first world country I'd expect that to be 0%, 3.7% is definitely way too much IMO.
I don't know what the numbers are here in europe but if they're above 0%, that's just as bad.

I would expect that the numbers would be similar in most developed nations. Hunger is directly linked to poverty rates, and no developed nation has successfully reduced poverty to an acceptable level.

[edit]I've been looking for statistics, but it seems the UN, WHO, etc. do not even bother gathering hunger data for developed nations. The stats for the US come from national estimates. I'm guessing European stats would have to come from similar sources. Google isn't producing much when I look for individual EU nation stats.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Do you tip the employees at Mc Donalds for your burger?

They get paid minimum wage at least. Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

Well at least CR has removed that qoute from his siggy where Orwells calls for an armed socialist revolution....

I had no such sig. I once had this quote:

"That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."

Which most of you socialists seem to vehemently disagree with.

I would say I am aware of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and have ideas rooted in democracy and socialism. Thank you for realising that. <3

Unfortunately, the example you quote is not an economic theory, but a political statement.

So you're saying I have similar views to Gene Roddenberry? Or are you just incapable of actual debate such that you bring up star trek nerd stuff?

I do not get it. How do the libertarians propose handling economics with no central authority? I thought the Panic of the 1907 was the final lesson needed, after which the people and the gov't finally grew wiser, and created the Fed. What will happen without it? And even before the Fed, the government still had quite a few options to tinker with the economy. What will happen when this is gone? Everyone knows about the vicious circular nature of recessions. With no outside money, the effects will be catastrophic, leading to prolonged busts where a slight downturn would have sufficed.

The Panic of 1907 was contained, and the damage quite limited, because of the actions of owners of large banks. Those heads of corporations got together without the government and prevented a large collapse of banks.

At the beginning of the great recession, the recently created Fed didn't do anything. For whatever reason (and there are several possible) it allowed banks to collapse where, if the Fed didn't exist, private banks might have stepped in as they did in 1907 and limited the damage.

Also, AP; I don't believe libertarianism has anything like the popularity of communism back in the early 1900s. It certainly isn't 'spreading and spreading'. Nor does Libertarianism require changing human nature.

CR

[Aemilius Paulus]

The Panic of 1907 was contained, and the damage quite limited, because of the actions of owners of large banks. Those heads of corporations got together without the government and prevented a large collapse of banks.

Ha! You swallowed the bait. Surely you do not think out of all the recessions, some even depressions, I chose that one on random, do you? But that is precisely why the Fed was created - the people and the gov't were very alarmed to see a single man, J.P. Morgan bail out all of US. The previous recessions did not have that, because there was no such one powerful individual. After Morgan's death, there was no such individual again, save for John D. Rockefeller - and he did not lived until the late 30s. The point is, the bailout only comes with such powerful individuals, and if there is such a powerful individual, then he has no business being so powerful. A fabulously wealthy business magnate is not at all accountable with how he uses the money. As long as he does not fund genocide, he will pretty much remain OK, even in terms of his PR.

And hell, IBM sure got away with literally making the Holocaust possible, and they were not even German-based. On the contrary, they were a US company, and they retained their usual relationship with their business branch in Germany. They knew what they did, and they did not do a thing to pull out, even though they could have - at the very least, they could have broken their relations with the German branch. Instead, they kept working along. The worst part, of course, is that they totally got away with it. No, I am not at all anti-corporatist. But I am anti-libertarian, which will set loose the corporations. No, I am just a centrist.

At the beginning of the great recession, the recently created Fed didn't do anything. For whatever reason (and there are several possible) it allowed banks to collapse where, if the Fed didn't exist, private banks might have stepped in as they did in 1907 and limited the damage.

Muahahahaha!!!11 Not only you swallowed my first bait, but you also fell into a nearby trap. The very reason why nothing was done before and in the beginning of the Great Depression as that because Hoover was what you call a libertarian. He kept insisting the businesses should go their way and that the gov't should not interfere. Yeah, lot of good that led to...



Anyhow, I gotta run, sorry for not elaborating more.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Ha! You swallowed the bait. Surely you do not think out of all the recessions, some even depressions, I chose that one on random, do you? But that is precisely why the Fed was created - the people and the gov't were very alarmed to see a single man, J.P. Morgan bail out all of US. The previous recessions did not have that, because there was no such one powerful individual. After Morgan's death, there was no such individual again, save for John D. Rockefeller - and he did not lived until the late 30s. The point is, the bailout only comes with such powerful individuals, and if there is such a powerful individual, then he has no business being so powerful. A fabulously wealthy business magnate is not at all accountable with how he uses the money. As long as he does not fund genocide, he will pretty much remain OK, even in terms of his PR.

Some pointers; you're wrong about the Fed. While created in response to various panics including the 1907 one, it was a response to the dangers of such a panic, not the thought that one individual had the power to bail out the US. Secondly, Morgan didn't 'bail out' anyone by himself. His bank and other large banks worked to shore up the reserves of sound banks in order to stop the panic.

The bailout didn't come from powerful individuals but powerful banks. Your sentence about people having no business being so powerful is nonsensical. The end, regarding genocide, veers off into the rather completely irrelevant.

Muahahahaha!!!11 Not only you swallowed my first bait, but you also fell into a nearby trap. The very reason why nothing was done before and in the beginning of the Great Depression as that because Hoover was what you call a libertarian. He kept insisting the businesses should go their way and that the gov't should not interfere. Yeah, lot of good that led to...

You shouldn't try to set a trap when the other guy has written college papers about the topic

Some information on how and why the Fed failed;

Friedman and Schwartz argued that all this was due to the Fed’s failure to carry out its assigned role as the lender of last resort. Rather than providing liquidity through loans, the Fed just watched as banks dropped like flies, seemingly oblivious to the effect this would have on the money supply. The Fed could have offset the decrease created by bank failures by engaging in bond purchases, but it did not. As Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in Free to Choose:

The [Federal Reserve] System could have provided a far better solution by engaging in large-scale open market purchases of government bonds. That would have provided banks with additional cash to meet the demands of their depositors. That would have ended—or at least sharply reduced—the stream of bank failures and have prevented the public’s attempted conversion of deposits into currency from reducing the quantity of money. Unfortunately, the Fed’s actions were hesitant and small. In the main, it stood idly by and let the crisis take its course—a pattern of behavior that was to be repeated again and again during the next two years.

According to Friedman and Schwartz, this was a complete abdication of the Fed’s core responsibilities—responsibilities it had taken away from the commercial bank clearinghouses that had acted to mitigate panics before 1914—and was the primary cause of the Great Depression.

The obvious question is: Why didn’t the Fed act? We don’t know for sure, but Friedman and Schwartz proposed several possible explanations: 1) the Fed officials did not fully understand the disastrous consequences of letting so many banks go under. Friedman and Schwartz wrote that Fed officials may have “tended to regard bank failures as regrettable consequences of bank management or bad banking practices, or as inevitable reactions to prior speculative excesses, or as a consequence but hardly a cause of the financial and economic collapse in process”; 2) Fed officials may have been acting out of their own self-interest since many of them were affiliated with large Northeastern banks. Bank failures, at least in the early stages, “were concentrated among smaller banks and since the most influential figures in the system were big-city bankers who deplored the existence of smaller banks, their disappearance may have been viewed with complacency”; 3) The inactivity may have been caused by political infighting between the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., and regional Fed banks, in particular the New York district bank, which was the most important part of the system at that time. But we may never know the real reason.

As the current head of the Fed said:

As everyone here knows, in their Monetary History Friedman and Schwartz made the case that the economic collapse of 1929-33 was the product of the nation's monetary mechanism gone wrong. Contradicting the received wisdom at the time that they wrote, which held that money was a passive player in the events of the 1930s, Friedman and Schwartz argued that "the contraction is in fact a tragic testimonial to the importance of monetary forces [p. 300; all page references refer to Friedman and Schwartz, 1963]."
...
It was in large part to improve the management of banking panics that the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. However, as Friedman and Schwartz discuss in some detail, in the early 1930s the Federal Reserve did not serve that function. The problem within the Fed was largely doctrinal: Fed officials appeared to subscribe to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's infamous 'liquidationist' thesis, that weeding out "weak" banks was a harsh but necessary prerequisite to the recovery of the banking system. Moreover, most of the failing banks were small banks (as opposed to what we would now call money-center banks) and not members of the Federal Reserve System. Thus the Fed saw no particular need to try to stem the panics. At the same time, the large banks--which would have intervened before the founding of the Fed--felt that protecting their smaller brethren was no longer their responsibility. Indeed, since the large banks felt confident that the Fed would protect them if necessary, the weeding out of small competitors was a positive good, from their point of view.

In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn. Bank failures and depositor withdrawals greatly reduced the quantity of bank deposits, consequently reducing the money supply. The result, they argued, was greater deflation and output decline than would have otherwise occurred.
...
Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.

So we see it was not Hoover, it was not some executive libertarian principles, but rather the failure of the central bank by itself. Indeed, the existence of the central bank may have contributed to the magnitude of the crash.

Furthermore, the decidedly non-libertarian policies of FDR (high taxes, price fixing, encouraging business and then worker cartels, etc.) also prolonged the depression.

You've been hoisted by your own petard.



CR

P.S. - in some ways a libertarian is anti-large corporations because they oppose rent-seeking by such large companies with lots of lobbyists, and they oppose burdensome regulations that small businesses don't have the lawyers to deal with.

[HoreTore]

I had no such sig. I once had this quote:


Which most of you socialists seem to vehemently disagree with.

That's a call for an armed revolution, my friend.

But I'm no revolutionary socialist like you are, CR, so I see no need to kill and oppress the bourgouise class if they don't agree with the working class. I believe in dialouge and reforms instead of revolutions, as they tend to end up all Stalinist....

But hey, we agree in principle, Comrade!!

[Centurion1]

That's a call for an armed revolution, my friend.

But I'm no revolutionary socialist like you are, CR, so I see no need to kill and oppress the bourgouise class if they don't agree with the working class. I believe in dialouge and reforms instead of revolutions, as they tend to end up all Stalinist....

But hey, we agree in principle, Comrade!!

no its not

[Crazed Rabbit]

That's a call for an armed revolution, my friend.

But I'm no revolutionary socialist like you are, CR, so I see no need to kill and oppress the bourgouise class if they don't agree with the working class. I believe in dialouge and reforms instead of revolutions, as they tend to end up all Stalinist....

But hey, we agree in principle, Comrade!!

Saying a symbol of democracy must be kept is a call for armed revolution?
Right........

CR

[Beskar]

They get paid minimum wage at least. Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

I was told they get paid service minimum. Blame the Americans that told me, if that is not the case. One of them worked in Pizza Hut at the time as well.

So you're saying I have similar views to Gene Roddenberry? Or are you just incapable of actual debate such that you bring up star trek nerd stuff?

I was talking about Ferengi economic theory, which Gene Roddenberry did devise as a representation based on your type of Free-market ecominics. While the Federation is a Socialist/Communist styled economy and everything is paradise. Also, there are many other concepts of dystopian future based on your ideas, such as in Robocop. Also books such as Jennifer Government.

[Crazed Rabbit]

I was talking about Ferengi economic theory, which Gene Roddenberry did devise as a representation based on your type of Free-market ecominics. While the Federation is a Socialist/Communist styled economy and everything is paradise. Also, there are many other concepts of dystopian future based on your ideas, such as in Robocop. Also books such as Jennifer Government.

You have no idea what sort of government I think is best, do you?

CR

[Beskar]

You have no idea what sort of government I htink is best, do you?

CR

No government. Just like the Ferengi, or an extremely limited one like in the book, Jennifer Government.

[HoreTore]

no its not

Thank you, that added something to the discussion.

Saying a symbol of democracy must be kept is a call for armed revolution?
Right........

CR

Just what do you believe a revolutionary socialist like Orwell would want that rifle used for?

Orwell wanted an armed workers class to prevent it from being abused by the other classes, by using the threath of an armed revolution.