The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

I am not favoring unlimited market protection, in most cases I'd like to see less of that. However you still seem to be very optimistic about stuff, much more than I.

So if your livelihood was to produce milk for generations and now you quit as a middle aged man who has no real knowledge of other kinds of work, how does that person become richer? So you sell your land and then you're jobless and all you can do is hope somebody will pay your a few $ so you get something to eat. You make it sound like individuals do not exist and everybody can switch jobs at will without issue. That's not the case.

Also if a nation doesn't produce vital good X at all for a longer time than that means it will reduce the know-how in that nation to produce good X and the more time passes, the harder it becomes to build up an industry for X again. If X happens to be a rather basic and vital produce, say milk, I sort of understand that nations want to have their own steady production of it. Independence has a value after all.

A single "miracle", under rather special circumstances. Single examples don't really prove much by themselves. The fact that economic issues under a free market has given rise to government welfare on multiple occasions alone weights heavier as an argument against the idea that an unregulated free market makes everyone richer. Somebody did end up poor to give a reason for those "we want welfare"-problems after all.

Another things LastWeekTonight got me wondering about yesterday: What is your stance on schools?
I've tried to come up with a concept in which a theoretical "free market over everything"-state could get schools to work as a privatized industry, but there simply is no profit in providing schools unless you want to accept that some people can't go to school at all because they can't pay for it. Also schools that may go bankrupt randomly and leave confused students behind that lose a year of education or two because of it sound like a bad idea.

i'd already posted it in Youtube thread :https://forums.uberent.com/threads/youtube.70391/page-6#post-1134658


but hell if everyone's going to watch it might as well have the embed here :


this does indeed deserve to be debated in this thread.

why would i even need a knife if not for the kitchen or carving (wth do i want a pipebomb for ? cleaning the toilet?) it's not like i live in a jungle needing to cut bushes or wood to get through with a machete or something

also why should i trust You, some random guy with a knive then ? especialy with a gun?
and i'm not belittleling you but critisizing you because you are likely indeed less trained in firearmuse and situational awarness then a proffesional

do you or your father work in a policedepartment or a securityagency?
my father was in the military for a short while but that's it ... so yea he may have some knowledge on weaponuse but he hasn't trained using them since he left .. so how reliable exactly is such a person for an extreme case? .. not all that much i'm afraid ..

also what's that bs of me saying the goverment being better then you?
simpliest rights of freedoms? ... gunrights that are highly abuseable by people are simple to you?
if you are unhappy with your goverment then maybe convince the people to vote for the politians of your trust or go and organize demonstrations ... it's always easy to do nothing but just complain ...

luckily i don't have to deal with the bs you guys have to and frankly i wouldn't want to life in the states ..

I don't mean to specifically talk about issues with how the US use private organizations paid by tax money to setup schools, I wonder more what elodea thinks about schools in a free market. While I don't like the idea of private streets I can at least somehow imagine how that might work. But schools?

Note: LunarHalcyon, of course, is my group.

"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." ~ Mark Twain


Sometimes, there are more than 2 kinds of people...

yes. it makes no sense whatsoever for schools. so many things do not reasonably apply to schools as they would for businesses. these cases of schools closing in the middle of the year and students being "out of school" (this is such a crazy concept to me!!!) because a school went out of business (without the quote marks there. it's very literal) is completely insane. whoever thought that was a good idea or even acceptable?

education is NOT a business!

it is THE N°1 pillar of a country.

while we can't correlate much in terms of generalized statistics there is a clear a direct correlation with education level of a country and it's GDP.

that's an interesting quote because it applies legitimately nowhere.

the guy's trying to appeal to the humanity in people then goes and fucks it up by asking something anti human by nature and a thing that the owners of the glass are least of all willing to do.

You have to think people were insanely dumb to hope they'd fall for that.

(and they are and do otherwise noone would quote it)

If education is so important, and teachers are so valuable, why is it that the governments of most countries pay them absolute rubbish compared to their private sector counterparts?

Because private schools tend to be funded by high payments of rich parents who want to see their kids, as stupid as they may be, succeed.

Yes many countries seem to not value teachers high enough. I am sure we can all agree that those countries make a mistake.

Nice, let me try quickly respond to the corporate welfare stuff, then we can talk about the interesting education stuff!

Fair enough, I definitely don't mean to say life is easy for anyone. Only that it shouldn't be forcibly made easier for someone at the expense of making life harder for others. Life is hard for everyone and every coin has two faces. If people want to help voluntarily like buying higher margin dairy products like cheese, then more power to them.

Likewise, i would caution us to jump to the conclusion that it is automatically a doomsday for him. Land can be used for lots of different things besides dairy farming. If i was him, i would look at spot and futures market prices for different types of farm goods, then do some maths to figure out what will net me the most profit for the least amount of risk. I would sell my cows and get a loan from the bank if necessary with my business plan.

If a farmer sells his stuff (accumulated labour), that means he discovers that transitioning to another farm good is less productive than what a third party could do with the land (he gets more money this way). Money is liquid and can be invested into other ventures. His biggest losses from selling actually come from government itself in the form of any capital gains/divestment taxes, as well as the income taxes expected to be levied on the operations of the buyer which are fed into the price of the sale. e.g. buyer only expects to make $1m instead of $1.3m a month because of taxes, therefore he is only willing to pay ~30% less for the land than otherwise.

Individual sovereignty is different from national sovereignty. Independence means the ability to choose whether or not to co-operate with others taking into account the risk of greater interdependance.

To clarify my terrible explanation in the previous post- I meant that things like time needed to re-establish industry and any other risk you can think of are already accounted for in prices when private business decisions are made. If I benefit more by selling today, taking into account the risk of missing out on prices going up in the future, then i'll sell. Or if i think it is likely prices will go back up, but that it will happen so far down the line that I make more money taking a short position today and paying start up costs again in the future, then i will do that. To that end, free markets are the best known vehicles for the accumulation and propagation of relevant information e.g. futures exchanges. Everything the government learns, the market already knows.

Fair enough, I should list a few more cases.

• Hongkong and China. The British brought rule of law, propery rights, and economic liberalisation to a barren rock. Now Hongkong has more skyscrapers than NYC and more GDP per capita than the USA and all of Europe with exception of Switzerland.
• East and West China. The east was opened to free trade in a few delimited sectors. In 30 years they've seen a recovery from mass starvation, backward infrastructure, and dirt poverty into a rising middle class concentrated around the east. You don't even have to take my word for it , look at what Communist China chooses to do.
• Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore is a tiny island with no resources, only british rule of law and property rights - yet have absolutely staggering gdp per cap. Malaysia is filled with corruption, bribery, institutional racial and religious discrimination, and blurry lines between private and public property (expropriation happens all the time). Malaysia by rights could otherwise have done exactly what Singapore did - they are in the same geographical location that serves as the main trade hub for the entire SEA area.
• Switzerland compared to its neighbours. Economically liberal, strong emphasis on private enterprise and property rights.
• Nordic countries pre/post economic deregulation in the 1990's. Stagnation and decline into economic prosperity
• Japanese industry post ww2 despite significant material shortages. They quickly became second largest economy by 1960's next to the US. They are still kind of a mixed economy though with a fair bit of intervention, which is where their economy has faltered since.
  
• South and North Korea
• Chile pre and post military junta from 1990's compared to the rest of latin america.
• USA/Canada vs Mexico

I would repost that graph of economic freedom mapped against GDP but it would probably be dismissed again as correlation. Yet I think if i showed a graph with CO2 levels and global temperatures the reaction by people would be very different.

Free markets don't create the need for welfare states. Again, the poor in developed countries are far better off than the poor in developing countries. Rather, welfare states arise from people using political power (force) to create and enforce them. It is easier to pass a majority vote with my mates against a rich guy than to work harder or smarter ourselves. Socialism is merely greed cloaked in fake moral virtue. I have nothing against objective self interest, only when violence is chosen as the means. If the golden standard is preventing situations where welfare is demanded, then utopia is either one in which everyone is equally dirt poor or one involving a military tyrant

So there are three parts to this. What is private education and how is it different from public, how do we get to a private system and what does it look like (is it pragmatic), and should it be subsidised through taxation.

Private vs Public
This is the structural question where we set our aims and ask which system best achieves those aims. Our aims are - better quality education tailored to each student, better productivity outcomes, and efficiency of resource allocation (affordability).

Therefore I am for anything that promotes choice and competition. Well run schools should be rewarded for their efforts and badly administered schools should not be rewarded. As opposed to places like the US where the worse a school performs the more money it receives, while the better it performs the more money is taken away from them. These are perverse incentives that do not further our aims.

Public vs private for me is not whether education will exist as much as it is about who should run and control the schools - government, or the customers? Parents(buyers) and teachers(sellers) care more about educating kids than bureaucracy and special interests. I would rather the money go primarily between parents and teachers instead of through a governmental 3rd party. Bad schools go bankrupt because no-one goes to them, bad teachers won't get a job, and frankly you will find me celebrating both those outcomes.

Now in the real world I have no doubt that you will find examples of private schools providing better as well as worse benchmarked outcomes, but that misses the entire point of the structural change. Private systems automatically push education into a market correction whereas government just tries to throw more money at the problem.

Pragmatically, education reform in australia specifically is not a point of high contention for me. It's only a miniscule 7% of the budget compared to welfare and social security at 35% which is more than twice the spending on our socialised medicine. It was also hard for me to reason into this position because my experience in Australia has been selectively with the top public schools in an education belt that is frequented by obsessed Asian parents. Even though public education is generally decent enough from my own limited experience, it doesn't mean it couldn't be better or cost less if you empowered the teachers on the ground who know best.

Viability
There's profit from providing schools because there's demand. If you had a kid, I'm sure you would want him/her to be educated at the best school possible. In Australia, asians have a long history of creating significant housing bubbles in specific catchment areas with reputable, high quality public schools because the school is then forced to enroll their kids. About 60% of us go to public schools. Some people even do K through 10 education in public schools, then switch to private for 11 and 12 for the two years which determine university entrance.

Public to private transition would initially be mostly a matter of private buyouts because the labour force already exists. Teachers become competitive owners and administrators of their own schools. That money can then be rebated to the taxpayer in some way (maybe as school vouchers see below) as you clear those liabilities off the books which helps fund the initial transition.

I would strongly challenge the confused student thing. As a kid I moved schools every few years and one time my school burnt down in a huge fire. None of this resulted in '1 or 2 years' of disorientation for myself or others, temporarily going to different places hired out by that burnt down school was actually pretty fun.

There's definitely a point where moving is too frequent though but I doubt schools will be going bankrupt so much as to be causing that, let alone bankrupting randomly. It's not in the interests of parents or teachers for a school to go bankrupt. As for randomness, only relatively bad schools go bankrupt by the free choices of customers. The parents themselves know beforehand because they are themselves choosing which schools will go bankrupt and which ones won't simply out of self interest for their kids.

Steve Jobs

Funding
Affordability is interesting as a matter of whether there is responsibility for society to subsidise. Kids are unique because they don't choose the circumstances of their birth and it isn't justifiable to throw them out into the free market the same way i would argue for anything else because they can't forge their own path. For those reasons, I would probably support pointing a gun at society to make sure they can get a k-12 education after which they are on their own. But only to a certain extent. I would structure any subsidisation program to still have some level of out of pocket that may be covered by voluntary philanthropy, scholarships and other such programs. Out of pocket is really important because people still need to bear some direct responsibility. After all, the parents had a voluntary choice to have kids in the first place and they should be discouraged from having 20 kids and putting them all through free education paid by tax payers.

Doing some napkin maths, we are currently spending about 11k per student a year through taxes in Australia. Current elite private schools charge an out of pocket anywhere from 2-35k per year on top of that. Undoubtedly a percentage of poor parents will not be able to afford k-12 education at market prices and that is where I can see an argument for a school voucher system. Note: we spend about $300 mil purely on governmental education overhead where could otherwise be going to these Let the parents choose where they spend the voucher instead of government controlling the purse strings totally separated from what customers are saying they want on the marketplace.

Hayek

I'm also of the opinion that voluntary subsidisation programs will pick up a fair bit of the slack. If i ran a private school, purely out of self interest one of the things on my mind would be establishing the perception of the school as being the 'bedrock of the community' in order to better secure enrollment. One of the things I would do in that regard would be to set up an 'underprivileged' program that heavily subsidises a reasonable amount of poor kids. This would also be an issue of risk management - I don't want the media demonising my school as being 'selective/elitist etc.' and only caring about money.

I was hoping the voucher system would be brought up, as that's exactly the sort of system I've been advocating for education in the UK for years.

I was lucky enough to attend a private school. My parents are not wealthy by any means, but I was granted a scholarship which meant the fees they paid were within their means. Essentially, they had the voucher system that Elodea described above.

Education is a tricky one from the libertarian mindset, because the people purchasing the service are not directly benefiting from it - they are buying on behalf of someone else. Or, to look at it another way, the person receiving the service is unable to pay for it, and so must repay it later on. Essentially, our contributions to the state education budget through tax is our way of paying for the education we received when we were younger - a bit like student loans.

There is no doubt in my mind that my educational background has led me to far greater success than I could ever have achieved at state school. Our local comprehensive is, frankly, a sh*thole. It is the only option available locally and every child from age 11 to 16 goes there unless their parents can afford an alternative. It's a pretty abysmal state of affairs and in my opinion is largely responsible for the steady decline of the town in which I live.

I want the opportunity that was given to me to be available to more children. I want parents to be empowered to choose a school for their child. I want a system that recognises that not all children are naturally academic, and that encourages them to make better use of the skills that they do have. If suddenly private school was a £1,000-a-year prospect rather than a £5,000-a-year prospect, suddenly a lot more parents would be empowered. They could afford that just by cancelling their satellite TV subscription. I could envisage several rival schools emerging in my area. Competition to drive standards up.

Tatsu is absolutely right. Education is fundamental to any civilised society, and the cornerstone for any developed country. It's so incredibly important - and that is why politicians should not be entrusted with it.

The idea to use tax money as a payment, but decoupling the schools from state control at the same time via vouchers is an interesting one. Sounds like a viable concept in theory. Has it been applied large scale anywhere? Scholarships sort of go into that direction, but only sort of.

That's actually not necessarily the right stance to have. Birthrates tend to go down in many rich countries and that's actually a problem. If your nation has a birth rate that is too low to sustain itself on the long run you might actually want to favor people who have 20 children and of course they should all be well educated.

In general I'd say a well educated young person is basically a resource for a nation and unless extreme over-saturation is reached it's generally rather good to have more of them. So no need to punish that "have 20 children and have them all educated for free by tax payer", as growing up well educated future workers is probably one of the most important things a nation can have.

why is informatics paid so freakin little when technically and intellectually it's one of the hardest job on the planet?

why do star Footballers earn nearly 400 000$ a week while surgeons who save lives make that max in a year?

why do politicians (I'm mostly speaking for france here but I dunno maybe this applies elsewhere) who pretend to be fighting for the needs of their lower class have a restaurant night (yes ONE meal) upwards of 13 595$ when these same lower class people couldn't even fathom how much money that represents and cloud eat for a month with that kind of money ?

ect...

I dunno. the world is just backwards like that.

Really, there is no way to justify a school system, that you didn't, as a collective, put your entire arse into. It causes so many problems, on a personal, social, economical, industrial, experimental, political, and cultural scale, to allow a population to receive an inferior education.

When all transactions are voluntary, people get paid exactly how much society values their goods and services.

Footballers get paid that much because a lot of people watch football. If you don't think they should be paid that much, then don't watch. Surgeons can't provide their services to millions of people at the same time. quality * quantity = value

Do not confuse politicians spending other people's money with market forces.

You not watching football, singular people not watching football, does not decrease the revenue of "football" as an entity by any measurable margin worth mentioning.

Why are we still on this free market rubbish? It's an inherently-flawed model used to justify the current status quo.

Football generates that much money because the business that runs it has its fingers in a number of other industries and has a well-funded ability to advertise that, thus drawing in more viewers. You are trying to reduce an established worldwide phenomenon that is powered by business, trade, merchandise, TV channel rights and actual whole segments of journalism and boiling it down to "they get paid that much because the free market values them at that much, ez". This is, as I mentioned before, a complete tautology that collapses in on itself under the most minor of observations.

Such as the fact that the Championship in the UK received pretty decent coverage - not quite as much as the Premiership - but close enough. But the wages between the two leagues? The bonuses per goal scored? They don't match up with how much each division is watched. A lot of top Premiership clubs sell merchandise abroad basely solely on the brand recognition of the team colours and / or player names. Manchester United is incredibly popular in Japan, if you want a use case.

Footballers do not get paid what they get paid because a lot of people watch football. The truth is a lot more complex, and at times a lot shadier, than that. Or have you gotten Sepp Blatter, former FIFA president, already?

*nvm, too much effort trying to convince someone that 1+1=2

That's such a cop-out, Gorbles. If it was so simple to dismiss an ideology with just a "minor observation", surely someone would have made one somewhere in the many pages of this thread that ended the discussion?

If you have an observation to make, please do make one.

Not that I promote this, but technically, considering no force on Earth is going to stop football as an overrated industry, you accomplish more market change by interrupting a football venue on an aggressive scale, sabotage their broadcast equipment, block their parking lot or infrastructure, their electricity or something, than you do not-participating in it. 90% of us in these forums don't participate in the industry, there is literally no greater magnitude of ignoring them, than we already are doing right now. Society on average is stupid and will continue to exaggerate football to the point where it's even toxic to colleges, who price gouge students to provide free ride scholarships, equipment, and merchandising, to college teams. We can boycott colleges too... if we want to flip burgers for the rest of our life while simultaneously ruining the country.

Can't we just accept that the masses can be a bit stupid in some areas, and that rich people will cater to stupid people if it means being even more rich? Which includes educational price gouging, pharmaceutical monopoly price gouging, and other forms of stupidity gouging? Seriously, capitalism unabridged, leads to epi-pen and hepatitis-medication gouging. You can say "if the product is too expensive then Reagenomics shows it'll sell less", but people DIE without it so the price doesn't matter, they literally got you bent over the countertop with your pants around your ankles on it, they cut the generic out of region and nothing else about production got more expensive so they just wanted 600% more money in pocket and a nice penthouse in Switzerland and that's pretty much that.

Capitalism should be allowed, but the government should definitely, to moderate as well as participate as a competitor themselves, participate in the process themselves. Instead of welfare or unemployment, the government can contract light duty work out and subsidize the company for the wage. Instead of letting a monopoly having exclusive control, enter the market with the monopoly and provide product/service at lowest possible price so the company can't gouge and has to offer it in at least a similar price.