No have the what, yes?
Presidential predictions for 2024?
- Thread starter Seattle
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When the banks got their welfare, erm, I mean "bailouts", did people whose homes were foreclosed upon get their homes back too?
Is there an average wealthy person? They got that way by various methods, many of them unsavoury. They did not get that way by working two part-time jobs and supporting a disabled parent. Nobody pulled themselves up by their bootstraps from slum to billionnaire, except though very unsavoury methods.
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
It wasn't their homes. They didn't pay for them. The better loans were absorbed by other banks and the ones in default were absorbed by the government. Eventually they got their money back (real estate prices went up).
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
That's not true. Of course, no one got that way by working two part-time jobs. Most people who started a business didn't become a billionaire. A few did. What were the unsavory methods used by Mark Cuban, or that were used to start Costco? Or how about Michael Jordan or Lebron James?
No bootstraps there. Born with talent, got some lucky breaks, took advantage of the insane sprotatainment business and then advertised stuff. AFAIK, neither produced anything.
Bought and sold things other people did and made - garbage bags, media, sport teams - produced nothing.
Costco buys and sells stuff other people made; produces nothing. (Most people with just their bootstraps can't raise 2.5M to start their little business.)
And they're very small potatoes compared to the Waltons.
Your point?
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Seattle
Valued Senior Member
My point? Your point is what I'm wondering about? You don't seem to be dealing in reality. No one produces some good or product by themselves that is worth a billion dollars but that's hardly a valid point.
You seem to agree that it's OK to be worth several million dollars, right? I'm not even clear if you agree with that. How is someone worth several million dollars? They don't produce by themselves some good worth a million dollars.
If you are OK with the ways that people end up being worth millions of dollars, that's the same way that people are worth billions of dollars.
Obvious, with you and parmalee, I'm dealing with the irrational but I play the hand I'm dealt.
Why not. If they make sacrifices in other areas to be able to afford those trips, why should they not be allowed to?
Would you stop everyone on welfare from getting iPhones, for example, when cheaper options are available - assuming one even deems a mobile phone a necessity? What about subscriptions to streaming services when free services are available? Should they all line up at food-banks or soup kitchens? Only use charity-shops for clothes?
Society usually sets welfare levels such that a person should be able to survive and do so with dignity. How they then use that welfare, whether they buy the cheapest-brand food, or live in the least-expensive locations, so as to then afford small "luxuries" like a trip abroad, that's up to them.
It is also up to society to determine the eligibility for welfare, and whether it is means-tested or not so as to help the most unfortunate even more.
In your examples, the wealthy men produced nothing at all - contrary to your previous claim: .
Many great fortunes are derived from trade in goods made by other people - indeed, sometimes the other people themselves are the trade goods - or the selling of non material items (entertainment, computer programs, a platform for strangers to malign one another...) or the manipulation of largely imaginary money. Many great fortunes are derived from preying on the insecurity and vanity of gullible people (fashion, cosmetics, firearms) or on their psychological weakness (religion and other opiates). In none of those situations is value being created or preserved; in all cases, people trade their productive time and effort for the proffered luxuries.
The very concept of stock going up is entirely unproductive: it's simply trade in expectations of gain for no work.
Where did you get that idea? I never once agreed that any sentient entity should be valued in dollars. Of course it's never OK for any one person to take a disproportionate share of their community's assets, or to have disproportionate control of their community's governance.
That's what zealots say when the tenets of their faith are questioned.
I've never really understood objections to welfare--or if a person does "approve", there has to be a very clear reason why someone is on welfare. And there usually is a reason. In some rare instances, it may simply be that the person is lazy--so what? (It's virtually impossible in the US for a person who is just lazy to exist on welfare.). Some people are lazy, and some people, I figure, are congenitally lazy--they truly cannot help it. I don't have a problem with that--it's certainly better than being a congenital exploiter and abuser, like, say, Jeff Bezos. Still, in most instances there are reasons other than laziness. It could be crippling anxiety, for instance, and it only appears to the untrained eye as laziness.
What do you mean "(your) money"? You are not being deprived of anything, and if you think that you are, just create more from your infinite capital. It's not a zero-sum game, remember?
The main reason being that if you're born in the wrong neighbourhood, to the wrong parents, the whole great big deck of cards is stacked against you from that moment on. Badly organized societies allow a very large portion of their citizens to fall into the have-not, will-never-have category. Welfare is a poor wet sop to stave off revolution by the disenfranchised - and that's given grudgingly ("If I give you even a tiny bit of my money without you doing something of greater value for me, you'll be in my debt and I get to decide how you should spend my money."
There are obviously better ways to deal with our castoff fellow humans than throwing them a crust and making them sit in the corner where we can make sure they don't enjoy it.
But [nod to thread topic] I don't think a Harris administration will bring that about. I doubt they would even contemplate overhauling social assistance programs or instituting *gasp, choke, splutter* a basic guaranteed income.
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It's a (post-) Christian thing. Same logic as the Inquisition. It's also something we've helped bequeath unto the world, maybe even part of our Anglo-American heritage; these days, it's the American Way.
Remember, Reaganistas lived under a delusion in which harm is their sacred duty and it hurts them more than it hurts the people they harm. The Boomer economic theory has busted, their geopolitics failed, and their hatred really is hatred, no matter what they call it: The only thing left is their tendency toward exclusion↗; the only solution to a problem requires figuring out who is ineligible for the solution. (Remember the 2011 Republican primary? "Let them die," is as clear a summary of the Boomer-Reaganista ethic as American conservatives will offer.)
It is an empowerment psychology: They are unjustly deprived if they are not allowed to harm others.
†
Some weeks ago, someone made a point along the way, and it wasn't actually a big thing, more of a thing that makes you go hmm. But considering the actual demographics, Boomers are a unique generation. They were the biggest generation when they occurred, and because of how the world and subsequent generations have gone, remain extraordinarily influential. In a way, the point is that they are somehow accustomed to the economy and society revolving around them. Of course, there are questions of what that means and how far anyone is willing to push the point, because it is easy to go too far, but there is in the cultural result a solipsism that goes well beyond a tacitry about "my way or the highway"; it's ingrained in praxis, implicitly and inherently present and affecting. In the moment, what occurs to me is all the people around them, and how it continues to shape experiences and discussions of everybody else's lives. It's part of what's wrong with GenX, for instance, and affects subsequent generations in historically unprecedented ways, to the point that Zoomers just think of it as the noise and blur of what goes on in the world. We're thirteen years since "let them die", and that part of the discussion has only gone downhiill.
Speaking of weird, it occurred to me that we have a generational spectrum; either Biden is the last Boomer president, or Trump will be. GenX is sending a prosecutor with an attitude, and a dad joke. And then there's Vance, whose Millenniality is an iconically terrible introduction to the Big Show.
Which, of course, they can blame on a Boomer.
Anyway, yeah, that underlying solipsism of such fantastic dystopian ambition is a hell of a legacy.
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
I would tend to agree that it's not important to have excessive rules for how you can use the money. I would be more restrictive as to who would qualify. For the smaller group that did quality, I would probably be a little more generous than is presently the case. Where food stamps are concerned, I think the current rules are about right.
Of course, each "society" can do what they want to do. I don't think your viewpoint or mine is the only valid viewpoint.
I'm concerned with incentives, motivation, what society can afford and the side-effects of any policy.
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Seattle
Valued Senior Member
You must be pushing 50. When is it your generations turn to take any responsibility or blame for anything? Will that generation just be a "victim" until the grave?
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
I don't think you understand what "produce" means. Substitution "to cause a result".
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
It's not a zero-sum game. That doesn't mean that it creates itself.
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
Steinbeck, in the "Sea of Cortez", made a similar point, which in theory is logical. He said that if it is the case that there aren't enough jobs for everyone in a society, if there are only jobs for 96%, then why "punish" the 4% for being lazy or whatever since it doesn't matter, if there aren't enough jobs for everyone that doesn't matter.
He said, would you rather have the most productive people employed or the least productive?
It's a simple scenario of course but there is some logic to it. It's a little too simple but that's for another day...
To address your point, I would say to do as they do in physics, start with the most simple scenario just to make it easier to visualize the problem.
You imply that many people can and should be on welfare if that's what they chose. If you were dropped in the middle of the woods (no society) you would have to "work" to survive. There would be no society to pay you to do nothing.
Let's make it a little more realistic. You are part of a large family or very small group. Everyone spends all of their time just trying to survive whether it's planting crops, cooking, making clothing, looking after children, etc.
If you are "lazy" or anxious or are injured and not able to walk, they aren't likely to let you just be a freeloader on their labor. If you are mentally ill or seriously enfirm, yes, they will take care of you.
Modern society isn't really any different. People need to be productive in one way or another if the rest of society is going to send their "money" to you.
There is no free money tree. There is no particular societal need (unless they so choose) to support someone that could support themselves but just doesn't want to.
Most people don't really want to go to work every day. If you mess with the incentives and reduce motivation, you don't have a very vibrant economy. There is less "excess" capacity to support the needy and certainly not enough to support the merely lazy.
Ultimately it's just a race to the bottom. Why wait until we hit the bottom, as is the case, for example, in Venezuela?
I see. Fart in a crowded room. Incite a riot. Nuke Nagasaki...
Commercial production used to mean manufacture something tangible, not launder drug money through international banks. But, whatever, just so you get a result.
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
I'll bet you are the life of the party...
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