The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

I just want to step in and say that both of you, Tatsu and Elodea, need to tone down the sarcasm about ten notches. I know it's frustrating when you are trying to explain something to someone and they don't appear to get it, but the tone that you're taking with one another is making this thread far too adversarial. Besides anything else, winding each other up makes the other less likely to accept anything you say because they're instantly put on the defensive.

I am enjoying reading the arguments back and forth, but please adopt a more civil tone.

Thank you

@elodea saw a documentary about Will Ruddick a guy that introduced complentary currency in some parts in Kenia.
I was wondering what you think about those.
Very interesting watch nonetheless (sorry about dutch subtitles) http://www.canvas.be/video/changemakers/najaar-2016/will-ruddick

Village Market Simulator v0.1 - Interest Bearing Debt and Inequality from the same guy

I'm with Hayek and the Austrian school when it comes to alternative currency markets where people are free to choose which currency they wish to hold and trade in. Centrally controlled and mandated currencies have been one of the biggest scourges on the free market. The purchasing power of your currency is eroded every day involuntarily by money printing and quantitative easing by third parties. Why are they allowed to counterfeit money but you are not? Current government debt is also secured on the earnings of the next unborn generation, which is entirely immoral.



That money is also handed first to banks who get to spend it before their inflationary effects hit the market. And this isn't a new phenomenon either where currencies are manipulated in ways to benefit more a select group of individuals. Even back in the day when they used hemp as a currency in the US, people were forced to burn their own livelihoods just in order to prop up hemp value for others. Another one is the great depression where the newly instituted federal reserve decided to artificially restrict the money supply, which triggered a cascade of events such as the break down of trade between gold standard nations of the time. These sorts of bad behaviour need to be able to be punishable within a free market the same way that happens within the cryptocurrency market with badly managed or set up alt coins.

Centrally controlled currency caused the fall of the roman empire. They were the first to discover the short term power of money printing and the denarius lost so much value with hyper inflation that the late Rome wouldn't even accept their own currency as payment of taxation as their mercenary armies clued up and would only accept gold as payment.

The euro is another big disaster example where you have one monetary policy and multiple fiscal policies. The end result being essentially a subsidised currency that benefits one group of nations at the expense of another group. It is immoral to tie up places like Greece merely on political reasons by denying them their own separate floating currency which would help them properly go through a market recovery. Greece needs a cheap currency in order to attract foreign investment and promote the growth of local industries exactly the same way that China and now India have been able to grow so much. As opposed to an artificially propped up expensive currency that encourages imports instead of local development and doesn't reflect the underlying market condition of the area.

The second point about income inequality is an important one. I don't see it as a problem (other than a political one) because inequality of outcome is only a relative measure of difference between individuals. It does not say anything itself about the wellbeing of the bottom 10 or 20 percent who are often better off than they were before. Free trade merely uncaps the potential of individuals to flourish to the best of their ability. If i hold all things constant and allow one person within a population to unleash his/her full productive potential, nothing has changed for the larger cohort yet there will be shown an increase in wealth inequality.

Socialists make the mistake of believing that wealth is a fixed sum pie, and that everyone is equally deserving or should be equal in outcome. They fail to recognise that wealth is the result of an accumulation of information and knowledge that is constantly growing. Or that people are different from each other with different gifts and talents either learnt or naturally born. They would cut a basketball players legs off to make the average man his equal in height. Not even the same individual is his own equal from day to day. Infact, one of the greatest factors that contribute to income differences is actually age and experience.

And that is the political risk. People are greedy and covetous, which is 'fine' up until they are allowed to enact their desires in forceful means via wealth redistribution policies. The crony capitalists pretend it's ok to bribe political power (the use of force) for their own benefit because they mistake the pursuit of self interest as having no boundary. While Socialists on the other hand pretend theft is ok because a majority voted to steal from a minority in a culture of despise for people who have worked hard and/or worked smart as targets of opportunity.

For example I don't see people like bill gates as having wronged me - rather he's improved my life and the lives of others so much. What is money really but a measure of the value provided by an individual to society. Fundamentally if i made an app and sold it for 1 million dollars, everyone else is better off by greater than 1 million dollars of value and I have 1 million notes of debt/favour that I can call on in the future. The focus is all too often mistakenly put on the visible money and not the harder to see provided value that the money actually represents within voluntary free markets.

watching you talk about socialists is like watching a slaver back in the sixteenth century explain what blacks have in their head.

to you socialists are some kind of murderous violent monster creature come straight out of a fairy tale book. not even a human.

you have not the slightest clue what a socialist is. and this is despite me defining it for you in the post above (which you've conveniently ignored) as per your bidding.

nothing in real life could confirm any of what you claim. you base your statements off of near black-and-white videos when you could have been basing them off of personal experience. how many years of your life have you spent somewhere other than home? experiencing other cultures? ways of life? eco-politics? for me that would be 7 years. for 14 countries.

I'm guessing you on the other hand have spent your entire life in Australia. perhaps even in the same town.

I think back to the time I was kicked out of the Vanguard for comparing something to cancer, because it was an "insensitive reference", and I just laugh. How slavers explained the non-sentient goings-ons in the minds of their black slaves. That's darker than I usually like my coffee.

Also, even back then, believe it or not, a lot of people knew just exactly how human those people were. Those that insisted that blacks acted human but were just mimicking like parrots, were extremely few, such as John Calhoun. There were even few that felt that way in the 1960, and few that feel that way today, but it was never remotely even 1 out of 3 people who ever thought that to be true. Especially if you count the blacks as people, which we do, because to do otherwise, would be evil.

And evil it is, it's so evil that now we portray that history as 90% of Americans owning 20 slaves each in 1820, when in reality it was... Well, in Alabama, out of 1.2 million free citizens, 0.03 million owned slaves, over half of those owning less than 5, and less than 300 total people owning hundreds. Those people basically still own slaves today as well, they're called minimum-wage workers in a price-gounged world, and they provide basically the monetary value that slaveowners would have provided to slaves, and just like in the 1820s, those slaves are both black and white.

Reality is less realistic than realism. Slavery is unacceptable, but America was always mostly slave-free. Slaves were just about as common back then, as 3d printers are at the time I type this message.

that's all good and jolly (not really though it's kinda awful statements) and but what about socialism being distorted into another dimension altogether?

my post above wasn't about slavery.

why is derailing my points so often a constant in the replies I get?

You do tend to use some pretty colourful and imaginative comparisons and metaphors, which I think may contribute to that effect.

lol calm down, there's no need for this bigotry against Australians. No-one ignored your post. I just didn't have the time at the moment to interpret what you were trying to say (no easy feat).

I didn't say socialists were parasitic blood demons, though judging them on their actions might indeed give rise to that interpretation. Well intentioned but deluded religious fanatics nonetheless, just like the woman who killed her own children so that they could go to heaven. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Anyway, let's get back to why I wanted you to clarify when you said i was misinformed about socialism because maybe I am. If we can get on common terms, only then can we have productive discussion. If anything, i want people to hear what socialism is from the horse itself - please don't just take my word for it.

Wittingly or not, in your first bullet point you describe socialism/communism as I have been referring to all along. The means of production is determined by governmental authority which uses coercion to enforce their plans as and when they conflict with the differing plans of individuals.

To be clear for other people who are reading, recognise that this is the first plank of communism where producing capital is owned by an 'annointed' body and their produce are distributed based on a central plan 'for the good of the proletariat' by said authority. At the core of socialism is the assumption that certain annointed authority figures know better than you what is in your own interest, how you should spend your money, what you should or shouldn't do with your life etc. This is the very antithesis of private ownership of life and property as per libertarian capitalism.

Again, I fail to see where i have been misinformed? This is the very definition of a mixed economy where one part is capitalism and another is communism. In the former, you choose who and for what you want to pay but not in the latter. One is voluntary, the other is involuntary. The democratic socialism you have laid out is exactly as i described where a majority vote can steal from a minority vote via taxation that funds specific government controlled industries.

This is theft disguised as compulsory purchase of government produced products and services. Socialists often like to trot out the meme of capitalistic robber barons while being naively unaware of the one they are propping up. There's a reason why the KGB referred to these people as "useful idiots" (their words not mine). What private business forces you to buy what they are selling? What private business randomly puts a car on your driveway without you ordering one and then forces you to pay for it?

Wow i'm on a home run or something, same as I've been saying all along. Socialism equates equality of opportunity with equality of outcome because it thinks wealth is a fixed sum pie. That is, if someone gains, someone must necessarily have lost by means of 'theft', giving rise to concepts such as social justice. If someone becomes rich, they think it must have been at the expense of someone else and so the hammer of violent correction via wealth redistribution is necessitated.

But this is of course very different from reality by simple everyday observation. If i grow an additional potato in my garden, who loses? Who have i stolen from? Capitalism recognises that wealth is not a fixed sum pie. If someone gains wealth without using coercion, then they have added to the pie of wealth without taking away from someone else.

Let's briefly see what the economic goal of communism looks like shall we?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

How strange, it appears socialism is the economic means by which to bring about communism. #LeninWasRight #Lenin2016

Need i really provide explanatory thoughts on this one? lol.

Your post was "about" slavery, it wasn't the main subject, but one merely needs to mention an incorrect perspective on a sensitive subject, to turn the reply into a correction on it. It's pretty extreme, to think that everyone in 1820s thought that about black people.

I'm all for competition. The problem is that you can't compete with government

1. Government can use force and coercion while private business cannot (and should not).
2. You cannot have competition when funding is guaranteed via taxation. Individuals cannot choose whether or not they want to pay taxes that fund government run institutions.

Competition hinges on voluntary transaction (choice). There often isn't choice when it comes to government institutions, and where there is it is often limited and restricted choice. I will be the first to admit however that if you can get a government owned business that satisfies the conditions of voluntary funding and purchase, then that is a good thing. For example services provided on a subscription type model where you can opt in or out, no taxfunded subsidies or advantages, and no legislative force used against competition.

As for idle hands work and job welfare programs. They are commendably well intentioned but again fall into the trap of trying to beat the market. No-one really knows whether society values jobs that are arbitrarily created or even that they are the best use of the time of applicants.

Just because a government says they'll hire anyone at $10 an hour to clean the streets doesn't mean taxpayers value that work at $10 an hour. One must recognise that the $10 per hour isn't being created out of thin air but is coming from taxpayers in the first place. If there was value in street cleaning the private individual (a road owner) would voluntarily pay for street cleaning services anyway and then pass that cost along to buyers who wish to use their road. In my head I keep going back to the pentagon buying thousand dollar hammers and other such ridiculous nonsense.

did i use the word "everyone"?

no i even specifically said "slavers" you're making up things I said now

WHAT bigotry against Australians?

seriously now is this all you have to resort to?

I said you may have never left your country which judging by your statements about women, the poor economy, politics and lack of contest to that statement is turning out to be true.

to entertain the negation of your accusation although by now you may take that as an indicator that I'm confessing to "anti-australianism" whatever that is : during my backpacking travels I came across Australians most. and noone who's traveled can or will say otherwise : Australians are by FAR the people in the world who travel abroad (and specifically backpack) the most with Germans coming in second.

does that make my statement even more crystal clear? that THIS :

comes across as a jab at a country's people to you is unbelievable. there's even the personal pronoun "you" in there.

I fact I straight up refuse to believe it.


whats makes a world of sense on the other hand is that having lost the energy to keep debating you don't care about the debate anymore you only care about defamation and a silly popularity contest which judging by @cwarner7264 's last post is apparently the best strategy in a debate on this forum.

seriously I'm sad that you guys feel weak like this and won't man up to the standarts of refine and sophisticated constructive debate that I've been trying to champion on this forum since the start.

sometimes I feel like I've done something good. like when I see MrTSBC is no longer "no" /"yes"-ing every single one of his post and instead provides thought-out argumentation over a small wall of text.

other times like these I'm frankly disgusted that I have to waste my energy fighting flat out-defamation its WRONG!

you're mocking the debate entirely. the definition I gave was specifically set up with intertwinements spefically to foil cherrypicking intentions and simultaneously explain this cherry picking behavior in people.

you cherrypicked your way straight out of learning anything from that defintion and re-establishing your own while making it seem like there was a semblance of a link between the two.

you want to see things the way you want to see them and there seemigly is no way of opening your eyes.

whew lad

I dunno, "private business cannot coerce or use force" is pretty blind. The same arguments apply to the government using it or not using it.

It's very simple to get away with for both parties: don't get caught. Either one gets caught, there's an equal chance of a shitstorm (see: Martin Shkreli and how that all went down).

..... no .....

You've misunderstood my words. I didn't say they cannot use force in that they are are unable to do so. Repeatedly throughout this thread I have stated that they should not coerce and that the role of government as a monopoly on force is limited only to the protection of property rights. The question I want people to ask themselves is this - what constitutes a justifiable and moral use of force? Is it ok to build a library at the point of a gun? What about a road? etc. etc.

Second, I've already addressed Martin Shkreli within this thread, how he was ratted out and punished by the free market, how government anti-trust was ineffective and nonexistent, and how regulators such as the FDA actually contributed to his confidence in thinking he could pull it off. You are free to read the actual facts here or do some of your own googling if you think i may have misconstrued things.

I think i broke tatsu again. Reboot tatsu.exe --safemode

Seriously though, there's not much more I want to say about what you're posting. Like Socrates said, when the debate is lost slander becomes the tool of the loser. I only hope people read your definition of socialism and decide for themselves.

just my current view on

socialism: lets enforce minimum wages


Free market/capitalism: i own a company and want to make profit so lets hire 1 dollar per hour people who need 10+ jobs to make a living

Socialism: I won't hire anyone cause I can't pay the social overhead of hiring. My business will be just me.
Free market: I want to make profit but if I pay 1$ my workers will leave to grow carrots on their own

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_55e9aa0de4b093be51bb378c

http://bridgemi.com/2015/12/when-low-wage-workers-problems-become-a-companys-problem/

Socialists who clamour for the use of governmental force to 'correct social injustices' often have very little understanding of business. Very much like armchair generals or backseat drivers who have all the incentive to propose the 'right' gameplan without any of the downside from being wrong. Violence is dumb, cheap, and lazy.

The point of a free market is that if people think they should be paid more, they are empowered to start a business and do exactly that, thus drawing away the human capital of their competitors.

History shows us again and again, particularly in the case of political unionisation that minimum wage law and other such price control derivatives act merely as transfers of wealth from one group of unemployed blue collars to another group of employed blue collars. Infact now a days with the advent of automation, you are actually transferring wealth from workers to those 'exploitative' capital owners as Human labour becomes uncompetitive with metal and plastic.

Next they'll be instituting worker quotas or government funded jobs programs to treat the symptoms of unemployment caused by minimum wage where it takes 20 people to install a door (1 doing the work and 19 having a paid break) etc. and other such nonsense to 'correct' their previous 'correction'. So the cycle of corrections upon corrections continues ad infinitum

It's amusing how short sighted socialist policy always ends up shooting itself in the foot. There are many ways to help these people and minimum wage is one of the most retarded, hostile, racist, and backwards ideas of them all.

If minimum wage was the key to prosperity and wellbeing, why not institute $1million minimum wage?