UtahBill

you don't watch the news?

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Education is expensive, ignorance is costly.

Each generation should have more opportunities than the last, but not at the expense of the next.

TurtleDude

Lets see-three Ivy league degrees, co-director of a couple companies, owner of a major farming operation, among other things.

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emdash

Sanka Coffie: I'm the driver.
Irv: You're not. You're the brakeman.
Sanka Coffie: You don't understand, I am Sanka Coffie, I am the best pushcart driver in all of Jamaica! I must drive! Do you dig where I'm coming from?
Irv: Yeah, I dig where you're coming from.
Sanka Coffie: Good.
Irv: Now dig where I'm coming from. I'm coming from two gold medals. I'm coming from nine world records in both the two- and four-man events. I'm coming from ten years of intense competition with the best athletes in the world.
Sanka Coffie: That's a hell of a place to be coming from!

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I know nothing

American

See this is when things get dangerous.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by liblady i like radical leftists. however, obama is governing pretty much from the center, with the exception of healthcare reform.

Keorythe

Lets let them buy 3 homes please.

Because that pays the salaries of:

Contractors
Building material suppliers
Illegal aliens...err I mean laborers
Tax collectors
and even building designers (for the ultra-exquisite artist' style home)

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UtahBill

and you find time to post here? I suppose we should be honored by your presence.....

__________________
Education is expensive, ignorance is costly.

Each generation should have more opportunities than the last, but not at the expense of the next.

TurtleDude

Just don't kiss the boots-I just had em polished.

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obvious Child

Actually both the CBO and the GAO have come to conclusions that significant parts of the deficits are due to tax cuts.

CBO Data Show Tax Cuts Have Played Much Larger Role Than Domestic Spending Increases In Fueling The Deficit, Rev. 1/31/05
Pensito Review GAO Wants Bush Administration to Wake Up to Economic Problems
New CBO Report Shows Dire Consequences of Bush Tax Cuts, AMT Patching - Budget Projections - Federal Budget & Tax - OMB Watch

And it makes sense too. Tax cuts reduce revenue from the base of what would have been collected. You won't find a single respectable economists who will say that tax cuts pay for themselves. And don't forget that under Bush the US is spending more then it has. The weekly borrowing amount is pretty staggering.

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TurtleDude

tax cuts do not have to be paid for -government spending does. The mentality that you have concerning this is why this country is in the mess it is.

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ashurbanipal

Turtledude,

I'm curious to know how you would respond to this line of argument:

It appears to me that the idea of people producing wealth on their own as a general rule is almost never true any longer. At one time, a person could take only a few possessions into the wilderness, and emerge with a significant amount of wealth in the form of goods (medicinal herbs, gold, food, animal pelts, or what-have-you). At this time in human history (I suppose it's really pre-history) we formed our concepts of ownership and property, which have changed very little since that time. There were two conditions that held during that time:

1) As compared to imaginable demand, an almost unlimited quantity and range of resources

2) Comparatively little ownership of land as compared to the land available.

Neither of those conditions hold any longer; it's easy to see why they had an effect on our concepts of ownership and therefore why those concepts have to be modified. The initial reason we had an economy of any sort was for the benefit and survival of all individuals who participate in the economy. At one time, since anyone could obtain wealth by working hard, it made sense to take an absolute view of the ownership of property. Someone who was lazy and sat around the hut all day didn't deserve to command the material power that those who worked could produce for themselves.

But we are no longer in that situation. It is no longer possible for anyone to go into the wilderness and obtain wealth unless they first own the land--and it requires wealth to buy land. We no longer have virtually unlimited resources in comparison to demand.

It's clear that an economy is not necessary to ensure property rights. In a situation where human beings were entirely on their own, not trading anything with anyone else, notions of ownership are still sensical. So, again, we have an economy to ensure the survivability and relative comfort of the participants in the economy. But we have to now recognize that no one acquires wealth entirely on their own. Any such endeavor depends on a complex network of relationships with others, and when those others do poorly, the acquisition of wealth is more difficult for more people.

Anyone with a reasonably good grasp of history should understand this. There are two times I can think of, off the top of my head, that genuinely unbridled market economics was tried, and it led to totalitarianism or near totalitarianism within just a few generations.

The first of these was the most instructive--the collapse of the Roman Empire led to almost pure market economics because the weak tribes and associations were killed off very quickly, leading to a vast patchwork across Europe of equally-matched clans that were forced to trade with each other. Weapons and warfare were crude enough to actually be rare in the period from about 600-850 A.D. There were raids and the occasional battle, but during this period such things were more rare than people probably realize. Market economics ruled--the balance of military power ensured that trades were seldom tainted with deception, but there were otherwise no regulations on who could trade what, for what price, or etc. Taxes were minimal if they existed at all.

During this period, we find the roots of feudalism develop as a result of the economic prosperity of a few families, while the vast majority of the population gradually sank into the worst possible poverty. The rich became the aristocracy, everyone else was a serf. It took the population crash caused by the morte bleu, along with the lessons learned by those serfs from generations of enslavement, to begin to turn things around.

It's pretty easy to understand how this happens. Wealth is a type of power, and its intelligent exercise leads to the acquisition of more wealth and power. In an environment where all the means of acquisition are owned by someone else, those who are comparatively less well off will continue on that trajectory, absent some chance happening. Adam Smith himself recognized this and wrote of it at some length in The Wealth of Nations.

Of course, anyone with a grasp of history can see that the opposite idea, that of complete egalitarianism in distribution of wealth, doesn't work either. The agency responsible for the distribution of wealth enriches itself at the expense of everyone else. What I am pointing out is that this is the case no matter which system is adopted.

So here's the point: the only viable economic system is one which balances the ideas of market economics and socialism. That system must balance who holds the power. This means that a redistribution of wealth is not automatically bad--it can only be so to someone who is holding on to an archaic and unexamined view of property and ownership. It can be bad if done incorrectly, but in itself is not necessarily bad. The rich did not get rich by themselves, and when the poor get too poor, that should be acknowledged and wealth redistributed accordingly, but within certain limits.