Cops busting under age drinkers on facebook
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Mintmaster
Veteran
Ugh, more ignorant presumption.
You don't hire policemen or firemen to handle average load. You hire them to handle peak load. You have to have a certain number of policemen in each area ready for action, because they can't respond to an emergency 20 miles away with any immediacy. Moreover, there are certain situations that need many cops responding quickly which we don't want to ignore, like major robberies, riots/mobs, long blackouts affecting traffic, large fires, natural disasters, etc. All these things happen rarely but need prompt action from an immediately available and sizeable workforce.
No matter how many policemen, firemen, or medical personnel you hire, there will always be some events that require more manpower than is available. The question is how often you want that happening.
That's entirely dependent on wether you consider current gov't a mafia of course, which I don't.
And MY point is without the system we have now we'd fail even more.
Or how would you propose to keep the general populace safe from thugs, armed gangs, robbers, crazed arsonists, rapists, pleasure killers and all the rest of the scum of humanity at bay without police and prisons?
I can tell you, without doubt, that without any form of gov't, your freedom would absolutely be impacted negatively unless your ideal life is to live in a compound in Montana with a stockade around it, surrounded by a moat, armed to the teeth and backed by a mountain of canned goods and other supplies.
Hell, without a gov't, what would you use for legal tender in transactions? Certainly not dollar bills that's for fuckin' sure, they'd be counterfeited out the wazoo, and no other country on earth would touch it with a 1000 yard pole. You can instantly forget any form of high technology in your super free gov't-free America, because nobody would sell any to you when you don't have any money that has any kind of legitimacy behind it...
That image does sweet fanny adams to show how taxation correlates to freedom. You do have tax on one axis, but freedom is not the label on the other...
Lol, wut? You make no sense here.
Surely you're not saying all teachers (I assume you mean public school teachers) become figurehead puppets of the government just because their salaries are financed by tax money? That's a completely bizarre (and flat out wrong) supposition.
If 50+ of the world is malnourished, there's a systematic flaw somewhere. And a big part of it lies with our western capitalist system with the IMF, western countries subsidizing their agricultural products and dumping surplus on the world markets and thus squeezing out 3rd world farmers etc.
Yes I know, but what I was referring to is that up until say, the 90s, China apparantly had a pretty decent system for public schooling, pensions for retired people etc. Now that is mostly gone from what I understand and if you can't afford it, you can't have it...
No, taxation is lawful. Theft is unlawful appropriation of property.
I would need a source to confirm that.
Before the welfare state, I'd say most people were too poor to contribute to any form of charity. Or at least that's the way it was where I live, my country was QUITE poor up until the end of WWII, and things started to change for real only as late as the early 50s.
Some sure are, just like any other person might be. Fortunately in the democratic industrialized world, when they become too corrupt they're forced to resign, as is the case with that guy in the US whatsisname who hid his bribe money in his freezer... As a bonus, he's also getting prosecuted from what I read.
So you're saying by tossing out government, you'll also toss out all the corrupt people? Not so! THEY would still be there, and they'd still seek to get into a position of power. Difference is, there'd be no stopping them with no government acting as a deterrence against illegal activities.
Also, few from all politicians are corrupt of course.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
The problem is that when the load is average or small, the lesser crimes get more and more attention, essentially making them worse than what they are, and at some point things can go too far. The police should serve and protect not haunt you, because of something miniscule offense.
Mintmaster
Veteran
Those graphs are full of crap.
First of all, government spending is always higher to stimulate growth. Therefore your first graph proves nothing, because the spending is a reaction to the upcoming economic market. It's like showing how sick we become in the next few days as a function of immune response, and deducting that we should be suppressing our immune response to be healthier. Even ignoring that, weaker economies (due to demographics, geography, resources, language, history/culture, and many other factors) need more spending per capita to maintain the same floor in quality of life. The title of that graph is a bullshit conclusion from an uncontrolled 'experiment'.
More importantly, market conditions are very different now. The US has near zero interest, the lowest tax burden in the developed world, and a population desperate for work (hence willing to work for cheap). Why isn't the free market creating work? The reality is that for years our productivity has been increasing and the only reason that there wasn't a collapse in demand is that as a whole we've been duped into the consumer culture of buying shit we don't need, especially the middle and upper classes. That culture has now been shattered.
As for Ireland: "In terms of GDP per capita, Ireland is ranked as one of the wealtiest countries in the OECD and the EU-27 at 5th in the OECD-28 rankings as of 2008[3]. In terms of GNP per capita, a better measure of national income, Ireland ranks below the OECD average, despite significant growth in recent years, at 10th in the OECD-28 rankings. GDP (national output) is significantly greater than GNP (national income) due to the repatriation of profits and royalty payments by multinational firms based in Ireland." There are so many differences between Ireland and Belgium in all the factors mentioned above that the comparison is laughable.
Is that pure fabrication? Who thinks federal spending is 75% of GDP? Who thinks debt servicing is 40% of GDP and over half of federal spending?
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Blazkowicz
Legend
what is that growth for anyway?
so we can have better cell phones and crappier food while the rich are partying.
fuck that.
so we can have better cell phones and crappier food while the rich are partying.
fuck that.
Mintmaster
Veteran
What a fucking joke. How about weighing that curve fit by size of economy instead of making Luxembourg's $40B GDP worth as much as UK's $2200B? Or looking at all the half-million population counties in the bigger countries and putting them all on the graph?
Luxembourg and Ireland are piss-ant countries with huge dependency per capita on business from other countries. Ireland is in a shithole right now because of it. I could easily draw tiny boundaries within the UK or Denmark that enclose areas with a higher GDP per capita or GDP growth than Luxembourg and have the same population. Portugal has much lower GDP per capita than all the other countries, so it has much more room for growth. Spain has fucking 19% unemployment, and you're using it as a shining example for low taxation and low gov't spending?
Result: Taxation has very little effect on growth.
Mintmaster
Veteran
And that's the problem of the asshats who vote for and make draconian legislation, not the cops.
Mintmaster
Veteran
I don't really care what the rich do. They only earn huge salaries because owners/shareholders can't afford to make a mistake in hiring at that level so they give a few percent of revenue to those at the top of the ladder to keep them there. Lower down, they can afford to accidentally hire a fuckup and then fire him in search of the optimal workforce.
What I do have a problem with is them not being taxed like they should. Does anyone really think that someone earning $1M+/yr is going to give up their job if they pay 50% of that in tax off the top? Or that there aren't a hundred other people who would gladly take their place? Why should they be granted immunity from the nature of the free market? If they don't like it, move somewhere else. Oh, whoops, your business will die if it moves out of the US.
Tax their ass, and when I get there tax mine, too. This deficit is ridiculous. If you want to keep more of millions that you earn through the society around you, convince the people who outnumber you 1000:1 that the services they get are excessive and should be cut. Start with the military, please.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
50% is too much. In general I don't like progressive taxing, but understand that there has to be some amount of it, but 50% is too much for the highest class, no matter how you get your income.
That is an issue with law makers not law enforcement. They are tasked with upholding the laws that the general populace enacts through their elected representatives.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
Well I'm under the impression that the law enforcement can decide their priorities atleast somewhat. I'm not blaming the officer on the streets, but having e.g. the police have a quota on how many traffic tickets they must produce in a certain time frame is wrong, it only makes them work in a place they know will produce tickets whether that spot is dangerous or not, and that sort of thing does happen. I don't think such orders come from law makers.
I agree to this one. It's not unlike complaints about politics by people who don't bother to involve themselves in society in any way whatsover, other than protest-voting for the nearest criminal.
Mintmaster
Veteran
Human nature is what makes foreigners' lives worth less than ours. It's what makes use percieve risks as bigger than they are. It gives us that "us vs. them" mentality. It makes us want to blame certain things for our problems after seeing a few anectdotes.
Without government, someone else would be leading people into conflict. At least with the government there is some semblence of equality via democracy. Free markets make the rich control everything, rather than just attempt to by trying to influence others.
What's wrong with the war on poverty? Over half of the people today were employed and proven productive very recently, but now have no opportunity to work. It's a bulletproof refute to people like you who think that the unemployed are lazy and that the free market can provide work and a fair wage to anyone who wants it.
Yeah, but it's just a bunch of platitudes. There's a complete lack of marginal analysis. Purely free markets will result in even worse livestock analogies. Less productive animals will be discarded. There will be no regulation on animal treatment.
Propaganda is VERY different from indoctrination via public education. Overall, the younger population did NOT want to go to war. They do NOT see muslims as dirt. Those that do are most likely heavily influenced by their parents, not their teachers.
That's why free market schooling is very dangerous. You get areas that pass their warmongering traditions to all kids through deception rather than nationally regulated education that encourages the pursuit of truth. You get groups like the KKK creating their own school. The religious content in today's catholic schools is nothing compared to what we'd see with free market schooling. There wouldn't be a debate about creationism being taught in conservative areas, but rather an outright omission of evolution.
We are in a new age of globalism, multiculturalism, and free information flow. You can't use examples from the 60's or 70's today. There's a huge divide between the unconditional patriotism of the older generation and the younger generation that has low cost access to information.
How about you address the real point I made about feedback rather than focus on that side note? Taxation is very different from theft because it's controlled and predictable redistribution democratically deemed fair, whereas theft is chaotic, inefficient, and violent.
If you think a free market battle between theft and private policing is equivalent to or better than rules of taxation, you're an idiot.
I never said capitalism does. I believe pure capitalism with a minimum wage does, and only after productivity reaches a certain point. If you don't believe in minimum wage either, then you believe in slowing societal progression because that will impede automation and lower the standard of living for the poor.
I believe in social capitalism: provide a base standard of living for the poor/retired (through welfare/SS), provide services that are more efficiently/practically organized as a non-profit system at a national or state level (e.g. health care, education, defense, justice, emergency services), and let the free market take care of the rest. We're pretty much there today, but just need to make it sustainable with appropriate taxation.
That's what initiated it, and I agree with Shiff. But the conditions I mentioned before - near zero interest rate not helping to reduce 10% unemployment - have never been seen before, and they indicate that a recovery is going to be limited and very slow.
The cost of basic living (look at how little of our GDP goes to agriculture and housing, and the latter is mostly land value nowadays) has never been this low during other economic shocks, and entry level luxuries are also really cheap now. The consumer mentality that artificially kept employment decent in the last decade has been shattered and I see no reason for it to return.
It's an inevitability for productivity increase to lead to unemployment (or, in the case of no minimum wage, lower wages for the lowest bracket). The cheaper that goods and services get (esp. entertainment), the less you're willing to pay for something else that will compete for your dollars and employ the unemployed.
In terms of cost of production for any good/service (normalized to inflation, of course), there's never been a better time in history to start a business, but there's no demand for more goods and thus no reduction in unemployment. All we have is substitution, with some business growing and others shrinking. Why do you think China exports goods to us? Because their own population has so little need for their productive capacity that the cheap prices we pay is all they can get for it.
Stop living in the past and quoting people who lived in vastly different times than us. They could not foresee the situation we're in, where nobody can think of anything for the unemployed to do that could be sold at a price that pays a fair wage. Life for the poor is immeasurably better now than back then, and it's because of taxation.That last paragraph makes me very sad, do you know what freedom is?
I don't want your selfish version of freedom where unemployment necessitates that a certain percentage of people live a crap life, regardless of their productive ability.
Not that I would be opposed to apply them more often, but those alternatives have some serious holes in them. Additionally, dispute resolution only applies to contract law, what about criminal law?
The Luddites had plenty of other work opportunities, but at some point robots will become able to replace most unskilled workers, and do the same work for less than what it costs to feed the workers. What will happen to someone who neither has significant property nor the ability to sell his own work competitively?
Capitalism is not the cause of mass unemployment, but it doesn't solve the problem either.
Only in the same way you could say private property leads to serious societal issues. The material world is limited, and there is little still up for grabs. There will be societal issues any way you slice it. Some people don't believe in original appropriation as the basis of unlimited property rights.
Mintmaster
Veteran
I just threw out a number, but I don't see why. The salaries are often 100x bigger than that of his workers, and probably 10x bigger than people who have the ability to do what he does even better than him but never got the opportunity. What's a factor of 0.5x?
Quota's suck, but that's not the police. Its traffic wardens. It's a tough position from the POV of the city because they could employ someone and he could just say that there aren't many violators so few or no tickets to write. How do you make sure that he's doing his job?
You can't give him commission or make agents compete for bonuses because that causes even more outrage. You can't use statistics because that's really the same thing as quotas.
I hope you learned something. There's lots of data cherry picking and short-sighted, incomplete analysis by people with your view of taxation and 'freedom'.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.” — Benjamin Franklin
I think that quote still holds some merit though. I think in many countries for example in Finland it's too easy to just let go and stop working and sometimes even if you could get some work it's not worth it, because the salary is not much better than what you get from the government + you get to keep your 8 hours. I know some people over 30 yeard old, who have never worked in their lives or at maximum for a very short time. They are definitely not rolling in money, but imo they have got things a bit too easy.
A big goverment safety net will attract certain people to stop working start drinking etc. I think that majority of the people who receive money from the government should do something for that money, if only to stay in touch with the working lifestyle.
I don't know if I agree with all your words, but you put them together pretty well. Nice reading.
Mintmaster
Veteran
I'm not arguing for a bigger safety net. I'm saying that it should not be removed or drastically reduced for the purposes of reducing (or even preserving) today's taxation levels. In fact, I wouldn't really mind a slightly smaller safety net, esp. in the US if such an action can divert funding to give health coverage to lower income earners that don't qualify for medicare.
Thanks! Always good to know that when I put effort into a thread that it doesn't fall on deaf ears.
EDIT: Regarding Benjamin Franklin, remember the situation I brought up earlier:
This is something he didn't envision because automation to this degree was unfathomable at that time. We are not at that point yet, obviously, but one good example is that the US is an overweight nation where its food provided by under 2% of the workforce and under 1% of GDP. Even in 1900 it was 41%, so perceptions in the 1700's were very different.
You can train the unemployed as well as you want in an attempt to lead them out of poverty, but there's nothing for them to do that people will pay for. One can break away from the cycle I illustrated above by having the poor go neo-Amish, shunning cheap goods and inefficiently producing it themselves for the sake of employment and self-sufficiency, making the efficient producers lose business, but that's a step backwards in society and it will fall apart anyway as soon as people realize it's stupid to buy from the expensive local production. This is similar to the way some people want to stop imports from China for the purpose of job creation. Why? They really want to kill 5 Chinese jobs (and severly hurt their families) to create one for an American (who was doing okay on UI) that produces products at twice the cost? Let's improve our standard of living while helping China develop at the same time.
Personally, I would rather see the gov't pay lower benefits but create some part-time work (could be almost anything) for them to get additional wages. If the free market won't create jobs, lets have people vote on something for them to do. Infrastructure construction, telephone support, hospital volunteering, simple home care, etc. Unfortunately, this is analogous to "tax and spend", so it's a big no-no.
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