Oh shit, I've dug myself into a deep hole on this thread. Just to let you know, Athlone, I've still got some other threads on my "to post" list with you.
Quote: (08-09-2011 05:45 PM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:
Quote: (08-09-2011 03:58 PM)Samseau Wrote:
The state is as ignorant as you are when it comes to spending money efficiently.
I would contend that the state is in a better position to judge what is better for the nation's financial future as a whole than ordinary citizens are, given the amount of information available to them.
You're confusing the sum with the parts. The state might be better to decide for the
nation, but not for each
citizen. And I would always give priority to citizens over the state, because the nation should exist for the citizen and not vice-versa. This isn't Sparta.
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The only thing that could prevent that is corruption, which is the main source of state mismanagement(pork-barrel spending, rampant deregulation, faulty contracts, etc).
Corruption is a fact of human nature. The founding fathers created the USA to be a government that is limited in nature in order to limit the amount of harm a corrupt politician could do. They saw the government as being more capable of doing harm than good.
One of the world's greatest books is entirely on the subject of creating citizens who would be entirely devoted to the state, and it concludes in the final chapters that such a state is impossible.
The fact that corruption can never be removed from governance is enough to kill the idea of socialism. But there are still other significant problems.
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If money is spent wisely by the state, it's effects are multiplied and the citizens prosper greatly.
If the money is wasted, the negative effects are multiplied.
Which means that if we concentrate on mitigating corruption (the principal source of waste), we have a system closer to the ideal. Correct?
Instead of trying to create a free-for-all and minimize the state, why not attempt to make the state better? You admit here that this would create prosperity.
I admit it is impossible for two reasons:
1. Corruption is impossible to remove. Someday my blog will explain this in greater detail as I will cover the subjects within The Republic.
2. The state, even without corruption, would still be prone to error. A large organization can be completely wrong while one man can be completely right. When the state errs, as it must due to human ignorance, there will be far more suffering than need be.
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Compare that to a capitalist economy, where individual citizens are in control of their money. Citizen A wastes his cash, no one else is hurt. Citizen B profits greatly, and at least a few others will also share in his success.
Or Citizen B gets together with citizens C and D and hoards most of the wealth, leaving nothing for citizens E through Z. He lives in a capitalist society with little regulation, so there is not much preventing him from doing this by any means necessary, and nobody else is able to accumulate enough wealth or power to stop him.
A capitalist system still has laws. No one can do whatever he wants. On the contrary, in socialist systems politics pick winners and losers all the time, and then there is really nothing anyone can do about it.
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Trickle down economics have not proven to work for anyone but a few at the top, as the current state of the US shows. These people, like most, are self-interested. When you make them richer, they enrich themselves first and foremost. They have no reason to care about anyone else.
This is a gross over generalization. Some rich men care about others, some do not. It depends on their upbringing.
Also, trickle down economics is just an empty buzz word. Make concrete criticisms not empty buzz-word attacks.
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I do not understand why people would expect the outcome to be any different in a capitalist system, whereby the inherent goal is to encourage self-advancement and capitalization. They have very little incentive to really spread the wealth to others and promote general social welfare, but all of the incentive to exploit others (ex. financial deregulation, sub-prime loans) and get richer.
This criticism can be applied to any political-economic system. This is a criticism of human nature.
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And, historically, state-manipulated countries always manage to fuck it up. It's so easy to make one little mistake, and bam! the economy explodes 2008 style. Wiemar Germany, USSR, Chile 1970, China 1958, (there are hundreds of other examples).
There are hundreds of examples of the free market causing the same kind of implosion, not the least of which is our own 2008 crisis.
The 2008 crisis was entirely manufactured by the Federal Government promising to backstop all home loans made by banks, which started with the creation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in the 1970's. Because the system was socialist, the banks did not fear any loans backfiring on them as they knew if the home owners were to default the government would foot the bill, and not the banks. Because the system was socialist, the losses were applied collectively and we printed trillions to pay off the bad loans.
The 2008 crisis is a textbook example of unintended consequences from politicians using socialist principles in a good-willed manner. (The road to hell is paved with good intentions.) Otherwise known as, human error.
I challenge you to find any kind of economic disaster close to the ones produced by socialist systems. (I'm NOT saying that the USA is socialist, but that the 2008 was operating under socialist rules.)
You can check out the mass-starvation disasters in Soviet Russia or in the PRC.
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Issue #2: The main reason why Nordic countries like Sweeden prosper as socialist countries is because they do not have to pay for a military.
This is just not true. In terms of per-capita military expenditures, Nordic nations rank quite highly. Norway is seventh in the world, Denmark is 15th, and Sweden is 18th. They all spend more per-capita than China and Russia, and plenty of other "socialist" countries top the list (France and England in the top 10).
These states are paying for militaries, and they are paying quite dearly.
The highest ranked one, Norway, only pays half of what the average US citizen pays. And given that Norway's population is under 5 million, which is less than 2% of America's population, it isn't hard to see why they need to pay so much per citizen just to keep pace with America.
But I admit it was wrong for me to say they pay "no military", when I really just meant they were free-riding off American largess. Without America, these places would have been invaded by the USSR over 50 years ago.
I suppose without America today, they would do fine for at least a few more decades but I hope no serious terrorist threats were to arise against them.
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Right now America is going bankrupt because they are trying to do both a military and welfare state.
The size of the welfare state in the US is not at all comparable to that of the USSR or to those in Western Europe.
Hmm... straight from the liberal paradise of
Columbia,
"Myth: The United States has an unusually small welfare state.
Fact: Welfare state programs are quite large in the United States—transferring close to one third of the country’s income from one to another part of the population. When measuring the size and impact of a welfare state, it is critical to not limit the analysis to traditional notions of welfare like cash assistance but to include a broader set of social welfare transfers such as education, employer-provided benefits, and all in-kind benefits. "
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Issue #3: Socialist economies turn women into horrible creatures. Roosh's experience in Denmark is also common to most countries with a welfare state.
I don't buy it. Denmark is not the only socialist state in the world. Its perceived lack of attractive women in the eyes of one PUA cannot be used as an indictment upon an entire system of governance.
Welfare states become
substitute husbands for women. Both Roissy and many MRA writers have remarked on this.
Side note for
Roosh:
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I don't remember ever saying socialism causes problems in women. I focus on feminism, which happens to be strong in America, Britain, and Scandinavian countries.
Have you ever seen a third-world country with feminism? I think a welfare state is a necessary condition for feminism.
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Issue #4: Capitalist economies are defined by low taxation and few regulations. No country in the world meets this criteria. America has one of the highest tax rates in the world.
Not in the developed world.
Measuring taxes as a percent of GDP is
meaningless. In absolute terms, America is #1. Could it be that if our tax rates were raised excessively on corporations they would suddenly start to have their margins squeezed enough so that they cannot generate such large returns?
Moreover raising taxes on corporations just means they will raise prices on their goods.
The corporation is a red-herring; the real problem is that small businesses are taxed and regulated into oblivion, so there is no competition for corporations. If the USA were to become more capitalist, corporations would own less of the wealth.
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Hong Kong is an example of a capitalist city, however, and it is one of the most powerful cities on the planet.
Hong Kong is part of a communist country.
Hong Kong, after America (America was very capitalist until the turn of the 20th century, and has since grown into something else), is the most successful capitalist experiment in history. It was just a small fishing village on the coast of China, occupied by the British, that, absent of major taxes or regulations,
grew into a major metropolis.
It's sovereignty has since been taken over by China, but the Chinese give Hong Kong a
great deal of autonomy, which persists to this day.
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Finally, a factual aside: America has not been less regulated since the 1970's, it has gotten 2x as bad. Ask any small business owner who's been around more than twenty years and you'll probably learn how bad our government has become.
Factual? This is entirely untrue. Their is far less in the way of financial regulation today than there was in the 1970's, and taxes are far lower as well.
Our government has less control now than it has at almost any other time in the last 100 years due to aggressive deregulation. There is no debating this.
haha... too bad people
in the industry have plenty to disagree with you on that.
To quote from the above link, "I can't think of any other industry with more regulation than the financial one."
I have to agree with Schiff, have you ever opened an account on e-trade or scottrade? The list of rules regarding day-trading, margin holds, puts/calls etc. is
fucking mind-boggling.
And, even without considering the financial industry, there are literally thousands of other over-regulated industries in America. Covering them all is a waste of time, but one example is the car industry; ever notice that only car-dealerships are the ones who can buy cars wholesale at auctions?
They pay 50% of the price you do for the same car on a car lot. Yet the average man cannot go to these auctions because there are 100 regulations in place prohibiting him from accessing these cars.
My father has access to a car dealer's license, amazingly enough, but he's not a big car dealer owner so the state of New Hampshire has repeatedly tried to shut him down through threats and fines.
He has lost thousands this year paying off lawyers to defend himself the state, but hey, according to you,
we need more regulation! Yeah, that the ticket!