News Us politics - read first post before comment

[scout86]

What makes this exceptionally stupid, to me, is that a large majority of people in the country, including Republicans, is in favor of both the DACA program and the child healthcare program. Sounds like a clear majority in Congress are in favor of both too. Then, for crying out loud, vote on THOSE! Pass them and drive on. If Trump vetoes them, overturn the veto. It sounds like there are enough votes to do that too. Whoever thought of tangling all these issues up into one ridiculous ball ought to be taken out on the Capital lawn and held for a day or two in an old fashioned set of stocks. Maybe we can throw rotten vegetables at them.

The whole point of doing this is to try to force people to vote for something they don't like, in an attempt to save something they DO like. That's just plain not a good idea. Things should be able to stand or fall on their own merit and it should be clear who voted for what and why.

Last, but not least, (and this came up last time too), federal workers are being asked to work now and get paid later. But not Congress. Regular people working for the government might have a problem paying their bills and I doubt that the landlord will be happy about waiting for the rent. The first paychecks to stop should be Congress. Cancel their healthcare for the duration too, and any other perks that can be stopped.

 

[Anarchy]

Washington should be the last ones to get checks

adding anything to that statement would be adding redundancy. (Sorry @Rumors )

And, in my universe, you figure out what's essential first, then come up with a way to pay for it. Then, if you have money left, you figure out how you're going to use THAT. You don't say, "I think I'll only work part time this year." (Give a tax cut to the rich.) Then decide not to pay the light bill. These people, and the system, are nuts!

Just exactly who gets the money from these ($100k - $250k) tickets?????

The system really is perfectly rational, it's just that the key to understanding it is usually kept obscure.

By the people, for the people?

The word "the" implies a concrete universal whole. It isn't a universal whole and never has been

You just get told that to get you to go to bed along with it without putting up too many awkward objectons.

Rephrase it as

By (some of) the people, for themselves

and it becomes a lot more obvious.

The quip by John Maynard Keynes, the economist on the back of who's fallacies our central planners rob us, gives another illustration of the same rhetorical sleight of hand:

National debt doesn't matter, because we only owe it to ourselves

The sleight of hand / tongue, lies in the "we" and the "ourselves" being two different sets of individuals.

Every government is necessarily a class government. The very existence of a group in society that has the ability to legally take resources from another group immediately sets up two classes and conflict between the two.

The class conflict is between the net payers and the net recipients. One of the clearest analyses of this is by a former vice 'resident of the united state, John C Calhoun.

By definition the redistribution will flow from those who are less politically powerful and influential, to those who are more politically powerful and influential.

Don't forget a second think that any of us on this website are amongst the politically more influential. Some of us might get a few crumbs out of the loot to keep us quiet but even that is like someone breaking your legs, then giving you crutches and demanding your gratitude, because without them, you would not be able to walk.

Let's be clear, unless you are paying $ five figures for a ticket to the gala or high in the $five figures for an after dinner speech, you are not a member of either the actual or prospective benefiting class. You are therefore in the class of net contributors.

 

[Anarchy]

D'oh! Messed up the html. The quote didn't close

 

[Neverthesame]

@Anarchy Ha. My post was pure cynicism, don't worry I'm not that gullible. ;)

 

[Justmehere]

@Anarchy - fixed. Next time, please raise a help ticket. Thanks!

 

[scout86]

The class conflict is between the net payers and the net recipients.

I'm not sure that's exactly true, or, at least it's more complicated than that.

For example, we have poor people in this country who don't pay taxes and receive benefits from the government. We also have rich people in this country who pay little or no taxes and receive benefits from the government, Even though they probably don't think of their various subsidies as government benefits. If you were to figure "government benefits" as a percentage of income....... I don't know, I suspect there are people at the bottom end of the income ladder who receive a higher percentage of their income from the government than the non-tax-paying-billionaires. And, personally, I'm totally fine with paying taxes so poor kids can go to school and the disabled can have a place to live. I'm not quite so ok with paying taxes so Wells Fargo can rip off it's customers, do stupid things, and get bailed out by the government.

Personally, I don't see "The Government", per se, as being the problem here. The problem is we have political parties who've been bought out by what I tend to think of as "Wall Street". Which is an over simplification, I know. It's still a democracy and the voters, at least in theory, still have the possibility of taking back the government. It's just a hugely uphill fight and probably requires something like human beings being better than they actually are.

 

[Anarchy]

Hi Scout

I'm not sure that's exactly true, or, at least it's more complicated than that.

For example, we have poor people in this country who don't pay taxes and receive benefits from the government. We also have rich people in this country who pay little or no taxes and receive benefits from the government, Even though they probably don't think of their various subsidies as government benefits.

In detail, there are complications, which I sort of summed up in the last two paragraphs.

Don't forget a second think that any of us on this website are amongst the politically more influential. Some of us might get a few crumbs out of the loot to keep us quiet but even that is like someone breaking your legs, then giving you crutches and demanding your gratitude, because without them, you would not be able to walk.

Let's be clear, unless you are paying $ five figures for a ticket to the gala or high in the $five figures for an after dinner speech, you are not a member of either the actual or prospective benefiting class. You are therefore in the class of net contributors

I didn't intend to go into detailed analysis of all of the intricacies. John C Calhoun's class analysis provides a key to interpret the whole picture.

Actually teasing out all of the details is hugely interesting, but it takes a long time, probably several life times, and I think that we'd lose a good few people's attention along the way even if we just attempted a dozen posts on it.

Just to further address your point though, the exploiting class must always be smaller than the exploited class. First of all, there is "absolutely advantage", some people are absolutely better than most others at some things, for example, some people have an absolute natural advantage at playing professional football or basket ball, or appearing attractive to enough people to make a living as a professional model...

So, a few people have an absolute advantage at living parasitically, whether by being slick liars, or coercive tyrants.

And there's also the balance between parasite and host. If it reaches the point where parasites are consuming faster than hosts can produce, then there's a collapse.

Such collapses are actually fairly common if you know what to look for (ruined cities are a fairly good clue!). A fairly big and bloody collapse was the collapse of the absolutist bourbon regime and it's system of economic regulations and entrenched special privilege in the French Revolution.

There were also local collapses in Britain in the 1830s, as the system of poor relief had encouraged mendicancy to such an extent that parish economies collapsed under the weight of the "poor rates".

There are a bunch of recent examples, around the world, for example Argentina and Cuba both had middle classes and per capita GDPs equal to the united state of that time, in pre Peron and pre Castro days.
At independence, both Ghana and Nigeria had education levels, wealth distributions and incomes, better than South Korea had at those dates!

Those are local or single state examples of limited global significance

The real biggy that we have fairly good accounts of is the collapse of the warfare and welfare entitlement empire of the Romans, which in Europe, crashed the entire civilization. The material standards of living of 600 ce weren't achieved again until around the year 1800.

A local examples in the united state is the collapse of Detroit.
Other big cities in the middle of the united state, like Chicago, St Louis and Membabwe Memphis, look like they might not be far behind Detroit.

Check out the wealth distribution in the united state by county. The wealthiest area is a ring of counties around the DC beltway

Those counties aren't actually home to productive activities, making or growing things that people need or enjoy.

That's wealth that has been taken coercively from the people who make, grow, distribute or sell the things that people need or enjoy.

That concentration of wealth in a parasitic rather than the productive population, is not a good sign.

It's still a democracy and the voters, at least in theory, still have the possibility of taking back the government. It's just a hugely uphill fight

In a sense, every government / regime is a "popular" one. No regime can exist for long against the will of a majority of the population. Even a Saddam Hussein.

The consent doesn't need to be active, it can be passive resignation, assuming that the regime is a necessary evil or an inevitable law of nature, or fact of life.

The complete lie that likens the true inevitability of death with the imposition of taxes, is an example of the sort of abusive mind f*ck ideology that gets used.

Going back to Etienne de la Boetie in the 1550s, and David Hume in the 18th century, thinkers have marvelled at civic obedience.

How easy it appears to be for a small number of people to control and oppress a much larger number.

That control cannot be by force. The oppressors are necessarily a minority, they're not productive of anything useful to ordinary people, and are at a serious disadvantage numerically and in their ability to trade their products to get arms to fight with.

So how do they hold power?

The answer is ideology.

They convince the plebs that they are at best necessary, or at worst inevitable and inescapable.

( the idea of "ideology" being a false consciousness, serving the interests of the ruling class, is broadly correct when applied to the tax eating and tax paying class analysis of Calhoun, and of the mid 19th century French economists Charles Comte and Charles duNoyer. Marx got his version of that analysis in screwed up and mis understood form from Saint-Simone - who didn't read much, he just went to salons, and Marx screwed it up further himself)

This is achieved by enlisting intellectuals to create and spread the ideology, and to counter any challenges to it.
In return, intellectuals are cut in on some of the loot, and are allowed to claim some prestige.

For most of our history, intellectuals have usually been associated with the churches, hence the alliance between the throne and the altar.

The intellectuals taught that the king was:

A god (still taught about the Japanese emperor) or,

Descended from gods, or,

Appointed by, or had a warrant from a god, and ruled by divine right.

The last one is still implicit in present day democracy

It is assumed that a majority may do anything to a minority (so long as the ritual of due process is observed) because....

Because what?

Because of the unspoken assumption, still there, of divine right of majority.

Intellectuals are now found outside of the churches. Rulers are just as keen to have Intellectuals working for them. Hence the rulers get to write the checks to fund universities.

Cont:

 

[Anarchy]

The purpose of Intellectuals is occasionally made clear

Probably the best illustration that I know of was Gustav Schmoller, professor of economics at the university of Berlin at the beginning of the twentieth century who openly stated that the role of professors at that university was

"To form an intellectual bodyguard around the (Prussian royal) House of Hohenzollern"

The state usually tries to grab control of other essential parts of the economy
It monopolises the post office, so it can open and read your mail

Same for telecoms, and more recently it sells licences to participate in a cartel to screw over the customers (don't think that the regulator is there for consumers! It's there to maintain the cartel that screws consumers).

Transport, to control who goes where ("you have no rights when you travel " -TSA)

Police and military ( don't think that they're there to defend you - there's plenty of case law that finds that they're not).

Contact.

 

[Anarchy]

OK, but surely the state / government is necessary to regulate the economy and make it fair?

Here's where history outdoes even the wildest conspiracy theories

Gabriel Kolko, a historian, dug right into this in the 1960s. He's actually anti free market, which is sweet, because his historical work contradicts his personal prejudices.
(The Ref is: Kolko; triumph of the conservative state )

Everyone got the lamestream historiography, that an alliance of farmers and workers got government to rein in the monopolistic and exploitive excesses of the robber baron big capitalists at the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the twentieth ( the "progressive era").

That Upton Sinclair's "the jungle" exposed the oppression and in sanitary conditions of the Chicago meat packing plants and regulation and inspection were necessary to end those abuses...

Anyway, it appears that non of that actually stands up, and the true story is very close to the exact opposite!

First of all, there were very serious attempts at monopoly.

The first big corporations were the railroads. Forget ideas of these being creatures of a free market. Apart from the northern pacific (about the only one that didn't go bankrupt), the transcontinentals were subsidised to the hilt, with direct monetary subsidy per mile of track laid, land grants up to 15 miles either side of the track and closure of land outside the land grant to settlement for 100 miles either side!

Profit and defrauding of private investors was of course privatised

But the costs, even of murdering the populations who were already living along the line of the railroad and it's land grants were socialised.

The financiers of the railroads began trying to cartelise the smaller local railroads, and other industries. These all failed, because competition could not be stamped out.

Attempts were made to establish monopolies byou acquisition and merger in:

Agricultural equipment (McCormick International Harvester), Oil Refining (Rockerfeller Standard Oil) Steel Making (us Steel) Sugar Refining, starch making, leather tanning, biscuit making...

Absolutely all failed to achieve increased profits, even with an aggressionist tarrif to prevent customers from buying from overseas, as soon as a cartel or merger tried to cut production (the only way to raise price is to limit supply), new competitors popped up taking advantage of the high price and offering better deals.

The competition usually had more modern plant, and we're more entrepreneurial than the big bureaucratic attempts at monopoly.

The only way to try to get monopoly profits was by using government coercion, whether to directly close the competition down, or to impose disproportionate costs on them.

Regulation and inspection of meat packing was achieved within two to three months of the publication of "the jungle"
Bureaucracy doesn't move that fast!

The big meat packers had actually been lobbying for compulsory inspection since the end of the war to bring the south back within the tarrif.

Having a compliance department is proportionately less costly for a bigger plant than it is for a smaller one.

Similarly, some consumers might be happy to have meat slaughtered at the back of a mom and pop butchers, or milk ladeled out of a churn into a jug, rather than bottled in a big mechanised dairy.

It's little wonder that big meat plant and big dairy companies are often donors to medical and veterinary schools. The cry of "health hazard" isn't going to be unwelcome.


Kolko, and a bunch of other guys have explored the links between the big Yankee familes, their foundations and the administrations

The links are amazing and frightening, all the way from the assassination of McKinley onwards.

What initially appears socialistic, can be very croniest

Central planning scrutiny and control of the economy and production, can be very good for a very small and very wealthy group, if they control the central planners.

And that really does seem to have happened.

Even militant unions can be a treasured part of that, so long as you have the union leadership in your pocket.

How can unions raise wages?

Only by reducing the supply of workers.

In a free economy, unions only tend to take hold in small local niches, such as construction, anthracite coal mining, some of the localised high skill areas.

In less skilled or more mobile areas, they cannot compete with non union workers. And apart from sudden technological changes (eg the motorcar rendering the horse buggy industry obsolete), large scale unemployment on the free market isn't common and doesn't last long.

If wages are to be artificially raised across the whole economy, it means that those whose productivity is lower than the enforced minimum wage are forced to become permanently unemployed.

Welfare payments taken either by direct tax or the invisible tax of money printing, keeps thone unemployed from setting up Hoovervilles, and starting revolutions.

Again, the costs of higher wages are placed directly on the smaller less mechanised employers, onto the unemployed and onto the tax payers

The profits from reduced competition and artificial scarcity are privatised.

 

[scout86]

@Anarchy, you never cease to amaze me, and I mean that in a good way. The thing is, there's too much there for me to deal with in one big chunk. I ended up skimming what you wrote, rather than reading it, and there are so many things I could comment on,,I have no idea where to start.

A lot of what your said, I agree with.

What do you make of the fact that a number of the people we have in power here now seem to favor a country based on the ideas presented by Ayn Rand, in "Atlas Shrugged"? (Which, incidentally, is one of the rare books I couldn't make myself finish.)

 

[Anarchy]

We get the lies and distorted version of events in state sector education and 24/7 from mainstream broadcasting, sor unfortunately there are a lot of layers of lies to cut through to start to make any sense. And auto correct doesn't help!

It's worth re reading, when you get a moment.

Ive never tried reading Rand, I've read stuff by some of her earlier contemporaries. But find her later inner circle, the radians, like Nathaniel Blumenthal/Brandon, totally repellent, and the stink rubs off onto her .

Gerard Casey, when he was prof of philosophy at UCD, had a girl working through Rand's Philosophy. I think the poor girl had a breakdown and didn't finish.

Anyway, explaining that I don't know much about rand or atlas shrugged...

I think that the basic idea, that producers ( john galt in the story) will get sick of the harrassment and looting by the regime, and stop producing, and go off and enjoy life instead, is well supported by evidence and is basically true.

I don't know enough about either Rand's other story lines, or how that might translate into policies, to comment

What we have seen in the past with Reagan in the united state, and Thatcher in Britain, was lipservice to the flawed ideas of the Chicago school of economists (I call them the Chicago-cult), and even to Hayek.

But looking back, very little of it translated into policy.

What did happen was the state increased its size and it's percentage of looting from the economy, in both places, and some cronies got very rich, while a lot of people got badly hurt.

The dramatic and rapid cycling of boom bust in Britain in the 80s was due to thatchers regime inflating the money supply to pay for its policies and cronies. Then slamming the interest rate brakes on, as soon as consumer prices started to rise.

At the same time Thatcher was extolling the virtues of saving and investing.

That was a cynical ploy, if ordinary people had saved the money, they'd get to spend it after the prices had been bid up by her cronies spending the money first! The ordinary savers actually lost out.

I think on the basis of experience in the thatcher, Reagan bush and Blair years, that the policies will be very far from rand's book.

I do know that Rand had a very rose tinted view of Plutocrats, she extolled the virtues of the Rockerfellers and Morgans, claiming that they got there by hard work alone.

The history of their links behind the scenes to the regime, show something very different

 

[scout86]

that producers ( john galt in the story) will get sick of the harrassment and looting by the regime, and stop producing, and go off and enjoy life instead

I'm not sure I made it that far into the book! LOL I read the first part, and found it impossible to figure out who the "good guys" and "bad guys" were. Somewhere, I had heard that one of the characters was a Norwegian pirate. That idea appealed to me, so I decided to stick with it until he appeared and then decide if it was worth finishing the book. Aaaaannnnnnd after what seemed like forever, I skipped ahead, looking for him. He's there alright, but, by then things were totally not making sense and I decided to give it up. I do remember some reference to some sort of utopian valley where the "creators" decided to hide out.

There's a reason I could sort out "good guys & bad guys", I think. And that would be that she skipped over a lot of inconvenient things that happen in the real world. Like all those industrialists are quite willing to exploit their workers, unless the workers have some way of leveling the playing field. And the group that she lumped together into "takers" isn't so neat and tidy in real life. Paul Ryan is really sold on the book. He's gone on at great length about it in the past. I haven't seen any references to it lately, but the ideas show up in thoughts like "healthcare isn't a right". I can imagine that he sincerely believes what he says he believes. Which makes me wish he'd go spend sometime out in the real world, so he can come to understand how it all breaks down. There's a big chunk of the Republican Party that seems to be using that book as inspiration, and I think they're manipulating a lot of people to get the votes to get their way. A lot of the people they're manipulating are the same ones who'll lose out in the end. And, maybe, the fact that they're falling for it DOES go back to our educational system. (I say that, even though I'm totally in favor of public education. I just have a radically different idea of what it should look like.)