American Politics in One Easy Lesson

[Wei Wu Wei]

Welcome to socialism 101.

Do these links disprove the data? Or....do they just try to stick a label on it so you dont have to think about it anymore?

Some of the most successful nations in the world, with the best education systems, the best quality of life, the highest happiness indexes, the largest percentage of people going to college, etc. have heavy socialist elements in them.

Is Democratic Socialism the answer? No probably not, but it's not whatever boogyman you believe it to be.

[Rockntractor]

Some of the most successful nations in the world, with the best education systems, the best quality of life, the highest happiness indexes, the largest percentage of people going to college, etc. have heavy socialist elements in them.

You mean like Greece now or maybe Italy? One by one it will happen to all of them.

[Janice]

Quotes in the article are from the GPO.

Notice their glowing report about obamas "The President's Plan for Economic Growth and Deficit Reduction."

[Wei Wu Wei]

You mean like Greece now or maybe Italy? One by one it will happen to all of them.

More like Germany, and the Scandinavian nations.

An afternoon reading about the economies and recent histories of these different nations will prove otherwise.

[Apache]

That's not what I said. Business always benefits the owner. What I'm saying is a business environment needs both owners and workers, and each of these groups have mutually opposed interests. If either side of this balance gets too much sway, the system tilts and begins to break. The system is never "in balance", but when it is close to it, owners and workers both benefit immensely (of course the owners always benefit more).

If you want the system to be sustainable, you need to try to keep these mutually opposed yet mutually dependent forces in balance. This is not a communist argument or even an anti-capitalist argument it's actually extremely pro-capitalist. This argument says we should try to keep the forces in balance so that our economic system can keep going. An anti-capitalist argument would be to scrap the entire system and create a new one. This is why an argument for "balance" is actually a conservative argument, because it tries to preserve the capitalist economic system.




Does this ranting make you feel better?

When you finish wailing on that strawman meet me back in reality for some grown-up talk. Putting your fingers in your ears and yelling "I can't hear you....stupid!" stops being impressive somewhere between the 5th and 6th grade. I'm totally willing to have a calm and cool discussion about this, and I do actually concede when other people make good points, but please don't act like a child.

I've heard you loud and clear. You are a communist. You have made it perfectly clear that you are happy to change the United States instead of moving to where your preferred system exists. The obstacle in the way of America's recovery is the goverment you want in place. The nanny-state, you can't live without us, government...


Get the fuck outta my way :wink:

[Rockntractor]

Get the fuck outta my way :wink:

[Apache]

DAYUM :eek:

Did I do that

[fettpett]

More like Germany, and the Scandinavian nations.

An afternoon reading about the economies and recent histories of these different nations will prove otherwise.

lets put this in an easy to understand way, the US has had a 3% GDP growth on average, EU Countries have been LUCKY to get 1.5-2%, they would love to have the growth the US has had. Our tax policies have been the prime reason, particularly since Reagan and Bush cut and simplified the tax code.

[MrsSmith]

More like Germany, and the Scandinavian nations.

An afternoon reading about the economies and recent histories of these different nations will prove otherwise.

Hey, WW, does Arroyo thank you kindly when you sail into threads and save his butt for him? He snarks and drowns until you barge in with your unsourced claims. Your essays and half-correct info are always irritating enough that everyone forgets that Arroyo still hasn't answered any questions, provided any facts, or done anything but look down his nose at everyone, just as though that were enough to prove his point. After all, peons shouldn't question their "betters," right?

[Odysseus]

I'm perfectly happy to debate the spending side of this argument. I am reasonable and see that cutting spending is half of this process. I think there should be a debate on what needs to be cut and how much, we should aim at lowering our expenditures overall, although this can be done through cutting in some areas and raising others.

However, there needs to be a reasonable concession that revenue is part of this too. The last decade has been a period of tax cut economics, to ignore the effects of this is to be deliberately obtuse. If you want a sustainable system you need to fund it through taxes, which after periods of large scale tax cutting may need to be raised. It's really not the end of the world to raise some taxes and make some spending cuts.

Raising other areas isn't realistic. We don't have the revenues. We don't even have the revenues to pay the interest on what we already owe. Spending more on anything that isn't absolutely critical, like preventing the next world war, is absurd.

I should've known it would be best to avoid analogies...

Especially when they backfire on you. Care to address the substance of the argument?

Because it is the workers who create it -

No, the workers create parts of the whole, for which they are compensated. The factory didn't spring into existence spontaneously, it was financed by investors. The workers didn't start working until it was already in place.

This is an issue of value and where it comes from. Let's take two items, a jacket and a bundle of blu-ray disks. Let's say they both have a pricetag of $60. Now clearly, in terms of use-values, these items are very different. If you are cold and you don't have a blu-ray player, then the jacket has greater use-value to you. If you live in South Texas and you get bored easily, then the blu-rays have more use-value to you. These items are qualitatively different in their use-values and cannot really be compared to one another on a consistent basis.

However, the fact that they both are worth $60 says something about them. It says there is something that is quantitatively equivalent between the two items. This equivalency is the equivalency of another form of value, exchange-value. This means that exchange value has nothing to do with their physical, qualitative use-values.

What this means, effectively, is that instead of giving someone $60, you could give them the jacket, which they exchange for the blu-ray disks, which they sell for $60. Each of these interactions are equal exchanges, because when you are trading the jacket or the disks as commodities, you are exchanging them for their exchange-values, not their use-values. It means that getting $60 worth of tradeable commodities is the same as getting $60, at the level of exchange value.

Some people might say a thing is worth only what someone will pay for it, as if value arises out of the exchange itself, but this isn't true , as can be seen in cases where it cost more to make a product that you get from selling it. If it takes $90 to produce a jacket that only sells for $60, this process doesn't work and no wealth is generated. There is actually a loss of wealth in this process. This is because a certain amount of wealth goes into the creation of the product, via the labor of the production process.

The economic illiteracy that you display is consistently astonishing. There are numerous cases in which people sell products at a loss, because there is no demand for them. The "exchange value" varies from transaction to transaction, because the value of a commodity differs between the producer and the consumer. If I produce a commodity and put it up for sale, I value the money that I will receive more than I do the commodity, while the purchaser values the commodity more than the money in his pocket. If we didn't have differing views of the value of the commodity, no sale would occur. The price isn't the value of the commodity, it's the mechanism by which the commodity is exchanged.

Suppose there is a city that desires 2 plants for trade which grow in equal volume. One of these plants grows plentifully just a mile away from town, while the other grows 40 miles away. If these plants were to be exchanged, the plant that grows further away would have a higher exchange value because it takes more labor and time to acquire it. More labor goes into the commodity, so it is worth more.

Again, illiteracy. If the the city is expanding its population, and the plant grows equally well in both places, real estate will be a premium closer to the town, while it is more cost effective to grow the plant further away and build housing in the closer area. This describes just two of the potential interests that may conflict in the use of the closest plot of land, but there will always be more, because different people have different interests, and the purpose of prices is to demonstrate the most efficient use of a commodity. Commodities, i.e., supplies, are limited, while demand is infinite. This is why prices fluctuate constantly, and any attempt to define them in terms of labor value is doomed from the start.

Of course it is far more complex than these simple examples, but this is a very basic skeletal picture of where value comes from. When the process gets larger, you get more and more interesting and complex examples that are grounded in this picture but require even greater analysis.

Profit comes from paying workers less than the exchange value of the commodity, meaning that profit and therefore wealth comes directly from workers.

No, profit comes from exchanging a commodity for more than it costs to make it, but the exchange value is meaningless, because there is no such thing. To go back to your analogy of DVDs and jackets, let's assume that the fixed cost of producing a jacket is the same as a case of DVDs, that is, $60. I have no interest in a case of the same DVD, therefore I might buy one for a few bucks, but I won't buy a dozen. OTOH, I might need a jacket. The DVD seller, seeing that he is going to take a loss, might cut his price to mitigate that loss, while the seller of the jacket might raise his price during a cold snap. In other words, the demand for the products determines the price, not some abstract value based on the amount of labor involved.

It is absolutely true that the owners play a very important role, and without the owners there are no workers (in this system), but without the workers, there can be no wealth generation.

And yet, Microsoft managed to generate quite a bit of wealth before it began hiring large numbers of workers. Go figure.

I'm going to guess you are going to try to point out some inane example to counter one sentence of this post while ignoring the vast majority of it so I'll give you the condensed version here: Owners owe a share of their wealth to their workers because it is the workers who produce the goods or services which generate profit during the process of exchange. No workers, no goods or service, no profit. Simple as that.

You guess as wrong as your analysis. Owners trade wages for labor, and laborers trade labor for wages. If a laborer doesn't value his wages more than his time, he doesn't sell his time. If an owner doesn't value the time more than the wages, he doesn't part with the wages. Simple as that.

Yes the Greeks the greeks the greeks the right-wings favorite country to look at.

And the left's least favorite. Wonder why that is...

How about we look at Germany, which has even more robust social programs, stronger labor laws, and the best economy in Europe?

Germany today is where Greece was two decades ago. It will fail the same way, it's just going to take longer. As Thatcher said, the problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of other people's money. Today, Greece is learning that. Tomorrow, Germany will.

A fair share would be one that is proportional (or greater) to what they make, as Adam Smith said.

Well, that settles that. When I fill out my tax forms, I'll simply tell the IRS that I owe a proportional or greater share of what I make than the next guy. That ought to satisfy them.

I want a number, Wei. I want to know what percentage of my income the government is entitled to. Not some abstract BS that makes you feel good, but an actual hard number, because every nickel that I make represents a piece of my life, a period of time that, once done, is gone forever. I get a fixed amount of money every month, and that represents the time that I spend at my job. How much of my time, how much of my life, is the government entitled to take from me, in the name of social justice or fairness or whatever you want to call it? Give me a number, or go away.