The Incompatibility of Obamanomics and Human Happiness, Christmas Edition
How odd it is, then, that they should also be the folks who harbor an unshakeable belief that the universe is a stingy, scarcity-driven machine whose iron law is that if A does well, B must do poorly. I cannot improve upon Mr. O’Rourke’s summary of this Weltanschauung:
There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney‘s argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we’ve got—with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners.
In this zero-sum universe there is only so much happiness. The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin.
There is only so much money. The people who have money are hogging it. The way for the rest of us to get money is to turn the hogs into bacon.
Mr. President, your entire campaign platform was redistribution. Take from the rich and give to the . . . Well, actually, you didn’t mention the poor. What you talked and talked about was the middle class, something most well-off Americans consider themselves to be members of. So your plan is to take from the more rich and the more or less rich and give to the less rich, more or less. It is as if Robin Hood stole treasure from the Sheriff of Nottingham and bestowed it on the Deputy Sheriff.
This view of the world has many unpleasant policy corollaries. It redefines a certain species of stinginess as the higher generosity and it fans the flames of resentment and envy at the expense of ambition and hard work. And it has this effect not just domestically, but also internationally. And it is in terms of international politics, in terms, that is, of America’s place on the world stage, that Mr. O’Rouke’s argument really gets traction. The question is, he says to the president,
“whether you want to convince the international community that zero-sum is the American premise and redistribution is the logical conclusion.”
I would argue that the world doesn’t need more encouragement to think in zero-sum terms or act in redistributive ways.
Western Europe has done such a good job redistributing its assets that the European Union now has a Spanish economy, a Swedish foreign policy, an Italian army, and Irish gigolos.
Redistributionist political ideologies, in decline since the fall of the Soviet bloc, are on the rise again. Will you help the neo-Marxists of Latin America redistribute stupidity to their continent?
Et very much cetera.
The fundamental mistake that Leftists make concerns the bounty of the world. It is much, much greater, potentially, than they admit. Conservatives (I do not mean Republicans) tend to be cautious spenders not because they believe the zero-sum scenario, but because of just the opposite. They know that growth is the ticket to sustainable largess and that overspending hampers growth. It is sometimes said that Leftists are people who believe in a perpetual Santa Claus domiciled in Washington, D.C., not the North Pole. In fact, as Mr. O’Rourke suggests, conservatives have a much warmer appreciation for Santa Claus. It’s just that they know he is an avid capitalist. It is Leftists like President Obama who are telling the world “to go sit on the Grinch’s lap instead of Santa’s.”
It’s sour, crabbed, Scrooge-like advice. Don’t take it.
Oh come on.
Leftists don’t believe for a second that life is a zero sum game. It’s simply part of the con. That’s what they want YOU to believe, because that is how they gin up envy and control the people by directing their anger at the other guy instead of themselves. The Mullah’s are the masters at it, but it’s the key strategy of all leftists.
One would have to be a blooming, galactic idiot to think life is a zero sum game after the last 200 to 500 years of human history. Maybe their gutter-snipe lap-dog slobberingly-stupid followers believe it, but the Alinsky-ites aren’t even close to being that dumb. (I’m excluding Nancy Pelosi, of course)
In my experience, Leftists really do believe in zero sum economics.
They believe that there exists a fixed sum of wealth produced by a nation- and if some people have more than others, they are either:
1) Greedy capitalist thieves who took it from others.
2) Cool people like movie stars who deserve it.
In the name of “balance” POTUS and his populist comrades are seizing control of the culture and telling the Constitution to go to hell. I wrote about the lingo of the “moderate men” and their odd ideas of “balance” here: http://clarespark.com/2010/11/06/moderate-men-falling-down/.
Clare, most people with a grasp of history and imbued with rational thought processes, intuit that the radical left is alienated from the “common man”. To wit, they can extrapolate that feigned caring is little more than a sop for controlling their lives.
Now most rational adults aim to lead independent, interesting and fulfilling lives, sans parental control. So who in their right (no pun intended) mind wants to reach age of maturity, only to have a nanny leadership ordering them to do this and that? Exactly.
However, leftist power brokers realize that TOTAL control (as they inch incrementally forward) is their only option, therefore, going for broke is a necessary tool – the ends justifying the means.
Therefore, when citizens realize that their leaders are behaving in a cognitive dissonance fashion, they should also understand that none of their actions are happenstance. Not at all.
In any case, Conservatives would do well to march forward, but not in the way in which the Obama regime (and surrogates) expects them to – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/11/12/obamas-forward-march-to-tyranny-when-is-enough-really-enough-before-freedomliberty-is-no-longer-an-option/….instead, learning from their tactics and paying them FORWARD!
The leftist elite thinks of themselves as the only righteous moral agents, and they think of the rest of us as an unthinking herd of animals to be manipulated.
I’ve said this before but it bears repeating until it sinks in: The economy is not a pie. The economy is an ecology. The more economic activity there is, the more room–niches, opportunities, choices–there will be for economic activity. Activity begets activity as life begets life. Money has no meaning except as a tradable form of human energy–and, in the case of interest payments, of human energy captured as patience. Just as sunlight drives the rain forest by nurturing its green plants, the driving force of an economy is that same human energy: our desire to make things, create meaning, invent and innovate, and develop new systems of thought and production. We are restless beings whose nature is to struggle in dissatisfaction. Human desire is the greatest positive-reinforcement cycle that evolution has yet developed. It works in every case–until someone steps in with a proposed short cut and the intention of refining human nature.
It’s a jungle out there!
(Indeed, predators, pests, and parasites abound. Locusts, wolves, sharks, vermin- and sheep!)
The the idea space — where nearly all of those niches abide (great post you did has made, btw) — it is moral discipline, self-displine which is the only safety against degeneration.
Releasing a toxin into the economic ecosystem has sadly predictable results.
Very well said TT. Using ecology as a metaphor for the economy is not only instructive, it is logically powerful. Keynesians that know more about economics beyond sound bites will not accept this metaphor, however, because it makes most of their economic assumptions void.
Whenever I talk to liberals I am struck by their level of concern about how much other people make and what they have. (A topic I think about almost never) They seem to care much more about how much rich people make than how little poor people make. To the point that they seem perfectly willing to harm the poor if it will also harm the rich.
The envy and jealously is quite a turn-off. It’s a sin expressly prohibited by the Tenth Commandment. Its a cancer that tears at the fabric of communities. It is just ugly.
In the immortal words of my father, “Some folks are just bad people.”
Funny you should mention that.
I think it was Ludwig von Mises who described leftist ideology as “The cosmic aggrandizement of petty resentments.”
I’ve yet to find a better description.
I’ve always been fond of the organized mobilization of envy.
“The envy and jealously is quite a turn-off. It’s a sin expressly prohibited by the Tenth Commandment. Its a cancer that tears at the fabric of communities. It is just ugly.”
Indeed it is.
The relevant text, for those who perhaps have never read the bible: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that [is] thy neighbour’s.”
But, @ Old Soldier – it’s human. We need to find someway to cut that off. “You deserve everything – late/modern childraising meme – is NOT the answer.
@ Anon. That would be nice, if true.
But both sides are on your ” Nobody should have all of this! We gotta get this guy and take it away from him!”
Vote out the incumbents. Either side. Put in new blood. Otherwise we get the same-old same-old.
But you and they…get out the vote for “OUR” side. Even if they aren’t.
Good luck. And happy ‘New’ Year.
Sorry Kathy, I don’t buy the argument. When was the last time you heard a Republican, no less a conservative, advance class warfare rhetoric (AKA covetousness)? While I willingly accept that many GOP members of Congress are much too weak in advancing the principles of free enterprise, I don’t recall hearing any of them talk about redistribution. The only exception to this rule being the now thoroughly discredited and shamed turncoat former governor of Florida, Charlie Crist (I loathe even the process of writing this man’s name…).
Thomas T. Thomas
Very well said.
This article seems to bootstrap PJ O’Rourke’s comments to Obamanomics (Bushonomics + extra steroids). This site is melting down! Ha. Tell me, is the Rush Limbaugh daily Angry Mosque Sermon ginning up all this class war and crank economics?
People talk about zero-sum games as if the alternative were always positive sum games, but I’m very much afraid that Republican politics is landing us in a negative-sum game. Look at the world from the point of view of a very wealthy person bent on becoming even wealthier. If you have faith in the growth potential of the economy, you may be satisfied with your current share of the wealth since it will increase in absolute value if the whole economy gets bigger. If you don’t believe in future growth, however, the only way to continue to increase your wealth is to get a larger share of the pie through lower tax rates on high brackets, paying lower wages, and moving your capital to countries where it pays a higher return. And it may make sense to do all these things even if they result in a decline in the aggregate wealth of the nation. Why would you care about that after all? What are you, a socialist? Anyhow, after a certain level of wealth, the psychological rewards of wealth don’t come from consumption—you can only live so well, after all—but from a sense of superiority to the others. Impoverishing your fellow man therefore has a positive value since it makes you relatively wealthier even if it doesn’t make you absolutely wealthier. Of course some of our plutocrats—Gates, Soros, Bloomberg, Buffett—have motives that go beyond the brutish desire for more and more wealth and power; but we seem to be afflicted with a plague of lumpen-billionaires these days, human refuse like Donald Trump, Adelson, and the Koch brothers. For the likes of them, greed and superstition mark the borders of human aspiration; and if economic life is going to be a giant game of musical chairs, all they care about is landing their butts in the last chair.
How does a person respond to such stupidity? What a brain dead string of comments. You really can’t stand that some one might have 1 dollar more than you. Just because some one made a dollar, does not mean that there is now 1 dollar less for you to make. Get a life, you’re a brain dead leftist!
Funny, I never evinced the slightest envy of the rich in what I wrote—I’m not poor myself and there aren’t any expensive toys that I’m hankering for. Of course the notion that everybody who disagrees with the hard-right party line is consumed by envy is pretty much the only thing you’ve got in your collective head so you have to trot the idea out at every opportunity. Meanwhile, as somebody who has patrolled these threads for the last month, I can report that there is a huge amount of envy on the right. You guys manage to envy poor people because you imagine they are living high on government money. You manage to envy school teachers because you think they’ve got it easy. You envy well educated people because they don’t have your self-esteem issues–presumably that’s why you get so furiously angry when you think you’re being looked down on by people on the left or even in the center. If you thought better of yourselves, after all, why would you give a damn what other people think of you?
Not that an actual thought matters in these parts, but my whole point was that there is no guarantee that enriching the already rich is a case of a positive sum game. Indeed, the evidence is that it is not the case under current conditions and the wealthy are acting as if they knew it were not the case. Their political efforts focus on getting a bigger and bigger cut, not on promoting real investment or dealing with the current lack of effective demand. Under different circumstances, the accumulation of wealth by individuals and families has served a wider purpose but that was when the rich invested the money in new plant, personnel, and research instead of making largely financial plays or exporting capital abroad. Under current conditions, and this was my argument, we’re in a negative sum game. It’s not just that a dollar somebody else gets isn’t a dollar I get, but that draining wealth into a tiny number of pockets is actually decreasing the total number of dollars. Now one can certainly dispute my claim, though the enormous increase in inequality bears witness that something like it is taking place. Simply reverting to the old crap about envy doesn’t cut it, though, since it’s irrelevant to what I’m saying.
When you say you are “patrolling this thread,” what precisely do you mean?
Do you mean you come here with the intent to troll and disrupt the conversation?
You think I’m trolling; I think I’m slumming.
Seriously: I started visiting this site because I wanted to talk with people who disagreed with me. Most websites, left, right, or center, are mutual admiration societies where people endlessly validate their ideas without serious challenge. What’s the point of that? The bad news is that it is very hard to have a reasonable conversation with unreasonable people, and nothing I’ve seen here has altered my original impression that the modern hard right is a pathological movement. You remind me of the student revolutionaries I encountered in the 60s who denounced everybody as fascists. Here, everybody is a Marxist, or rather simultaneously a Marxist, Communist, Islamicist, Socialist, lesbo, Nazi, and fascist. Ideological fervor destroys the basis of communication as words lose their meaning and become mere brickbats to be hurled at real and imagined enemies. You are so extreme, so relentlessly doctrinaire, that it would be comical if you would-be Bolsheviks didn’t have actual influence in the real world.
I can’t believe you were foolish enough to post that.
Soros, Buffet? Selfless billionaires? You wrote that, of course, only because they give their millions to left wing causes. In reality, Soros is a currency manipulator and Buffet is an inside trader who has back taxes that would curl your hair. You just bought the b.s. the left just wants you to believe.
Watching lefties post here is lovely. They believe exactly what they are told.
What’s with the hatred of Soros? Obviously, very few people in these parts have ever read his writings since he gets accused of being a Marxist or socialist when he’s actually a follower of Karl Popper. A great deal of the money he has spent on political causes went to promoting democracy—Popper’s “Open Society”—in the newly freed countries of the East block. Soros is an example of a kind of person almost unknown in the U.S., the businessman as intellectual. In Central Europe there is a tradition of such men. Some of our tycoons are thoughtful, but they typically don’t have much background in philosophy or political philosophy.
I expect that the real reason Soros attracts such unreasoning hatred is that he is a Jewish financier. You portray Soros as Jew Suss. Officially, the American right has forsworn anti-semitism in favor of unconditional support for Israel, but old ideological reflexes die hard.
By the way, I wasn’t suggesting that billionaires like Soros are selfless saints or that I agree with them in every respect. I wrote that the have “have motives that go beyond the brutish desire for more and more wealth and power,” and that’s what I meant.
Jim Harrison, please review comment 4, Old Soldier, thank you.
Old Soldier merely repeats the party line for the zillionth time. You guys are like geezers with emphysema who have to live their lives hooked up to a respirator, except in your case the gas you need to breath is 100% pure cliche, not oxygen. Envy is irrelevant.
My complaint against the increasing inequality of American society is more Madisonian than Marxist. The founding fathers knew that extreme concentration of wealth was fatal to any republican form of government—they had read their Aristotle on that point. Teddy Roosevelt, who was wealthy himself, of course, cited the political consequences of inequality in supporting the graduated income tax—revenue wasn’t the main point of the tax. (Note that T.R.’s outlook was far more liberal than Obama’s who was very careful to promote the recent minor change in tax rates as a revenue measure.)
I sometimes wonder if right wingers understand the scale of the problem. Jeff Winter’s book Oligarchy takes a crack at quantifying things. He claims—and the numbers look reasonable to me—that even the famous plutocrats of ancient Rome were not so wealthy proportionally as our billionaires are now. Meanwhile, the Gini coefficients tell a similar story: we’re in banana republic territory now even as many of the former banana republics are moving in the opposite direction.
The Koch Brothers are “human refuse”? On what do you base this judgment — what personal knowledge, what facts, what accounts? “Human refuse”? How many people do they employ and insure, what goods and services do they create, what charities do they support? Do you know? Do you know how many medical care facilities they’ve opened and fund in third-world countries, how many opera houses and museums they subsidize and in some cases have entirely renovated? But they’re “human refuse”? Why? Because their political preferences don’t align with yours, or with another subset of billionaires? And this doesn’t make them simply people you disagree with, but “human refuse”?
“Republican Politics” are not running the country. Mitt Romney was not elected president. Republicans did not gain control of the Senate.
Trump. Surely doing business with him is a zero sum game. He and the Koch brothers are the worst side of capitalism. Very much a winner takes all mentality proven by word in Trumps case and deed with the latter. Soros a good bloke? Hmmm, must be two of them then. Living here in Japan I like their method of a more co-operative form of business, a little fat left on the bone so to speak rather than the burn ‘em out American mentality. Capitalism is good, but the market as god has limits and dehumanizes and perverts people as much as communism. This either/or thinking style is so base. Sometimes business is beneficial in equality and sometimes it returns little more than sparse subsistence to workers. This zero sum gag is a common theme of Rourke, I imagine he butters up and amuses his business mates with it and it allows him to keep getting invited to those swanky dinners despite always getting too pissed and making an ass of himself.
The class of rich you talk about exist, but they are not the ones you list. The real evil rich are called crony capitalists, and use gov connections as a profit center, for subsidies, special exemptions, and regulaions to cripple smaller compeditors. And Obama loves and supports the crony capitalists, with the biggest example being his bailouts and his subsidies to green fatcats.
The real devide is between those who want special favors from gov, and those that just want to be left alone, to make money by hard work and innovation in a free economy, be they rich or poor. The dems all represent the former, some corrupt repubs do as well, but most still beleive in free enterprise, as does the Tea Party and Libertarians.
As such, I dont see any of the “evil” rich you describe, like Koch, Adelson, or even Trump, clamboring for gov bailouts and subsidies, while many of those you list as the good guys are the very ones clamboring for the bigger gov that facilitates crony capitalism, corruption, and degrades real innovation and prosperity.
Jim Harrison. Comrade, Leftism is about control of everything.
Why you give away knowledge to the piigs. You teach them what we must not allow, that ONLy effete elites refer to said ‘Koch brothers’. You reveal secret knowings. Like only Gay media knows of Tea-bagging; let secret out do not; let them wallow in their freedom , rule of law. Ewe must protect the secrets of Koch and tea bag silliness; They must not know the true meaning of the other secret/sacred words like fairness, organic, fair trade, dignity, human rights.
Leftism/Socialism is ultimately totalitarian. Period. Leftism is about control of everything.
It’s always amusing the reverence the left has for places like Stalin’s USSR or North Korea. These are “fair” systems where everybody has the same amount, which is generally nothing or close to it. (But somehow the Party elites always seem to have a lot of everything, obviously the caring totalitarian state’s version of one-percenters except nobody craps in the streets there to protest it.) Even the wealthy, such as Oliver Stone and Sean Penn, wax lyrical about these repressive hellholes but somehow never seem to manage to just pick up and move to one of them.
The leftists have stuff but HATE it that some people have MORE stuff; they would rather live in a world where nobody has anything.
“The leftists have stuff but HATE it that some people have MORE stuff; they would rather live in a world where nobody has anything.”
Well beginning in 2000 and finishing in 2008 those two draft-dodgers who sent their fellow Americans off to two pointless wars wars costing your economy terabucks have succeeded in doing just that. The great irony is that having inherited an economy which is nearly bankrupt you then blame the incoming President for not fixing things in four years.
Hint: stop getting into wars in other parts of the world where you have no business being. Let those in the Middle East sort their own problems out. Oil supply is not a valid reason for sending your fellow countrymen and women off to die and be maimed.
We have to have an honest conversation about salaries of public employees in this country. I don’t care how much a person is paid in a private company. But I do care how much a school superintendent is paid in my school district because it is my money! A US congressman’s salary is $175 000 plus all imaginable benefits. City majors in this country are millionaires. An so on, and so on!….
Assuming the existence of a fertile milk cow and a bull, the right says, “Let us breed these two so that we can have more cows tomorrow, some of which we will butcher and consume, while still enjoying milk and cheese today.” The left says,”In fairness, we must take these cows from the farmer, and butcher both the cow and the bull now, and hand out hamburger to everyone, today.” In short, the right sees the opportunity for prosperity spread out over time, through proper husbandry. The left sees only limited goods that can be spread out now!
In our industrial society, the same story plays out repeatedly. Someone invents, say, the automobile. At first, only the rich can afford the automobile. But, over time, the production of the automobile becomes easier and cheaper. The price of the automobile drops. It becomes a mass item.
Take electronics. In the late 1970s, my brother and sister-in-law gave my father a calculator which was the size of a brick. But, this calculator was spectacular. It had several memory registers. You could do some modestly complex calculations using +,-,*,/,=, and square root. This calculator cost $300 then (which would be about $1,200 now). My father was overjoyed with this extravagant gift. It was clearly an expensive gift, and just perfect for my father and his accountant-like mind. Today, you are likely to get the same calculator, the size of a credit card, as an annual calendar gift from your insurance agent, or perhaps as a MacDonald’s happy meal trinket. Along the same lines, several years ago computer memory was incredibly expensive. Today, you can but huge capacity flashdrives at every convenience store check-out.
Those on the right are like mature adults who see prosperity over the long haul. Those on the left are like three-year-olds throwing a tantrum at the grocery check-out lane when told by a responsible parent, “No. You may not have a chocolate bar.”
Aesop told us about the ant and the grasshopper many centuries ago. Obama wants us to enjoy the life of the grasshopper today. The lure of NOW, without plans for tomorrow. Conservatives are like the ants, diligently preparing for tomorrow with its joys, as well as the inevitable winters to come.
I’ve always loved Aesop’s fable about the ants and the grasshoppers. Sadly he stopped short of its conclusion.
Had he continued, the story would have proceeded with the grasshoppers inventing fanciful stories about how ants had food because they had stolen it from the grasshoppers, or that the ants had actively prevented the grasshoppers from collecting food in the first place. The grasshoppers would accuse the ants of bigotry and oppression, of refusing to share with the grasshoppers because they had green exoskeletons. Some among the ants would take up the cause of the grasshoppers and attempt to force other ants to give up their grain, but never be willing to give up any of their own grain.
Eventually grain so carefully collected and stored by the ants would be raided by the grasshoppers in the name of “fairness.” Some of the grain would be eaten by the grasshoppers, but much of it would be left to rot on the ground, squandered and ruined, of no use to anyone.
The following summer, the ants who were able to would move to a place where there were no grasshoppers. Those who remained would collect less grain, knowing it would be stolen from them, and hide away as much of the grain they did collect as possible to protect it from the grasshoppers. Come winter, the grasshoppers would wail about how the ants were being selfish by leaving, and by not working hard to collect grain.
Eventually either the ants would succeed in protecting their grain from the grasshoppers, who would either starve to death or learn how to behave like ants. Or the grasshoppers would succeed in overwhelming the ants, after which all would starve.
“Conservatives are creators. Liberals are destroyers.”
-David Horowitz
There’s a fable that I think is even more on point. See the old fable about the avaricious man and the envious man.http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/54.html
I read your link. The part about the envious man was right on target, but the part on the avaricious man was not. A truly avaricious man would not care that much that his neighbor got rich as well, as long as he did. The avaricious man in the link turned out to be both avaricious and envious.
A better anology is the traders dilemma game (sometines also called the prisonersw dilemma), with these rules:
1. If both pick trade, each gets one coin.
2. If one picks trade, while the other picks looting, the looter gets 2, while the trader loses 1.
3. If both select looting, both lose 1.
The optimum strategy is for both to always pick trade, giving the best total return for all. Picking looting can work better short term, until the other player catches on and also selects looting, then both lose.
Altruists would always pick trade, this works as long as they always ancounter other altruists or traders, but they become helpless sheep if faced with too many looters.
Smart traders follow a winning strategy called tit for tat, they pick trade, until they get looted, and then they loot the looter as well until the looter finally relents to trade and they get their own back, then they trade again. It works just as well as altruism against another smart trader or an altruist, both gain. As long as the looter eventually relents, gives back their loot, and goes back to steady trading, this works as well, but not quite as well as nobody trying to loot. Permanent looters may get short term gains from the traders, until the smart ones catch on and retailiate against the looter, then they lose.
This system thus works to encourage honest trading, benefiting all and discourage looting. Traders gain, Looters eventualy get found out and punished. This encourages most to become permanent traders. It is called free enterprise.
But this system breaks down if a majority passes gov backed looting, since the traders can no longer retaliate against the looters to get their own back. Eventually the traders get tired of being looted, and you no longer have traders left, and only have looters, at which point even the traders and altruists become looters, and everybody loses. That is where the dem party is taking us today.
In other words, the Left are Ebeneezer Scrooges.
Precisely, PacRim Jim. It’s leftists who fret most about curbing “the surplus population”. Leftists answer to poverty is “let ‘em go on welfare”. In Scrooge’s day that was the prisons and workhouses. Like Scrooge, Leftists scoff at private charity at Christmastime – or any other time. Leftists fit the Scrooge profile tighter than Roseanne Barr in Spandex.
Except for one thing. Scrooge was jealous of his own money, he didn’t twist himself with envy of other people with money. So leftists are worse than Scrooge ever was.
Thanks from an old grammarian, Micha, for getting and using the difference between envy and jealousy – and in a single sentence, yet!
When the Pubs go into a nice house, they say, Wouldn’t it be great if everyone could have a house like this? How could we grow the economy to make that happen?
When the Leftys go into a nice house, they say, Nobody should have all of this! We gotta get this guy and take it away from him!
Yes! That´s so true! Lefties are after your doublewide. In some weird parallel Fox universe maybe. Get out and meet someone who isn´t you. You´ll feel better.
Hello Pot, this is kettle…
Epic.Fail.Troll.
Isn’t brutus Latin for stupid?
The problem is U.S. Government has been cutting sectors that create wealth for a Nation; Mining, manufacturing and Agriculture, and increasing sectors that merely service wealth; Banking, health, insurance, etc.
Until People wake up and support Wealth creation sectors, we will continue down this self destructive path. We have been closing down Economy since early 70′s, when Nixon instituted the Petro-Dollar System and following administrations followed up with NAFTA which cut knees out from Manufacturing, and then eviscerated Mining industry with regulations that forced companies to foreign lands.
Its not brain surgery; support Mining, Agriculture and Manufacturing. Each job in these industries creates a Dozen or more downstream that pay living wages.
Retake control of U.S. Dollar before it completely collapses, we are on the precipice of a currency meltdown, we know it, other nations know it and have abandoned U.S. Dollar to settle transactions. We are just too lazy to strengthen it with hard assets and enforce fiscal discipline.
Either we fix our economy, or it will get fixed for us.
There’s one exception to the left’s belief in the zero-sum: the government is a positive-sum game to them, particularly when it comes to R&D. All gain comes from US government R&D (other governments, not so much). So speaketh the left.
The zero sum game is power. If you have power then I don’t have enough, I want yours.
Obviously if you give your power to the left you lose.
As the lesbian said: that’s not funny.
The bedrock of modern liberalism is abortion: the definitive existential zero-sum ‘game.’ My life or yours must be ruined; I choose yours. Small wonder liberalism’s worldview is dour.
Sung to the tune of the BEER BARREL POLKA:
Bring out the rich folks/We’ll tax them to death in the square/If they own a nice house/Or just run a grocery store/That one wears glasses/Let’s take all his money right now
Sung to the Chorus of OVER THERE:
Over there/Over there/In two chairs/In two chairs/Over there/Sits Barack Obama/And Josef Stalin/Drinking beer they’ll never pay for Over There
Sung to the tune of AULD LANG SYNE:
Should Old Age Pensions pile up/Fear not, the bill’s not yours/Your great-grandchildren not yet born/Will live to pay it off.
Happy New Year to everyone except Jim Harrison, who doesn’t deserve one.
I hesitated to comment on this thread because people who believe Barack Obama is a Marxist are beyond the reach of reason(I know!I used to be one), but I think it’s interesting that an article denouncing “Leftists”– a political category so broad and vague as to be meaningless– as “dour people with no laughter in their hearts” should be followed by a comment thread characterized by almost unremitting bile and fatuous overgeneralization. I was directed here by the blog of the New Criterion, a magazine whose level of intelligence I respect even if I don’t agree with it (an alien concept to most of the posters on this blog)
so it was shocking to discover the low intellectual level of this discussion.
When one commenter had the gaul to write a prefectly calm and reasonable post that didn’t happen to agree with the party line, the only response he received was personal insults and displays of petty malice. This post stands out though. Several lines of lame satire followed by a juvenile insult. “Happy New year to everyone except Jim Harrison, who doesn’t deserve one.” Seriously? How old are you? You might as well say “Nanny-nanny-boo-boo.” If this what it means to “have laughter in your heart” I’ll take a pass.
Excuse me. That would be “gall,” not “gaul.
I hesitated to comment on this thread because people who believe Barack Obama is a Marxist are beyond the reach of reason(I know!I used to be one), but I think it’s interesting that an article denouncing “Leftists”– a political category so broad and vague as to be meaningless– as “dour people with no laughter in their hearts” should be followed by a comment thread characterized by almost unremitting bile and fatuous overgeneralization. I was directed here by the blog of the New Criterion, a magazine whose level of intelligence I respect even if I don’t agree with it (an alien concept to most of the posters on this blog)
so it was shocking to discover the low intellectual level of this discussion.
When one commenter had the gall to write a prefectly calm and reasonable post that didn’t happen to agree with the party line, the only response he received was personal insults and displays of petty malice. This post stands out though. Several lines of lame satire followed by a juvenile insult. “Happy New year to everyone except Jim Harrison, who doesn’t deserve one.” Seriously? How old are you? You might as well say “Nanny-nanny-boo-boo.” If this what it means to “have laughter in your heart” I’ll take a pass.
… and keep him and his Superior Mind far a away from any position where he can affect the lives of anyone besides himself.
For surely, he will, in his Infinite Wisdom, bring nought but death and destruction to those lives.
Obama lied, and he stole the election, he instigated the Benghazi mess from the very beginning and now acts like he is innocent.
America is history, I don’t care
let the minorities and the liberals take over
This is true, but it doesn’t go far enough. The Leftist mindset is one that outsources the responsibility for individual happiness. The Leftist does not regard himself as self-responsible; his happiness is implicitly at the mercy of others’ attitudes, decisions, and actions. That attitude is generalized over all of Mankind when the Leftist addresses politics.
Karl Marx himself stands at the source. Marx defined freedom as an absence of tension, conflict, and unfulfilled desire. But those things are inherent in human existence; the sort of imperturbable contentment and perfect harmony Marx equates to freedom is unachievable by humans under the veil of Time. Which, of course, is why the “new socialist man” is inherently required by every Marxian scheme.
I once heard Leftism characterized as “the politicization of envy.” No summation could be pithier or more accurate. It stands as a reminder to us why envy is listed among the Seven Capital Sins.
“I once heard Leftism characterized as “the politicization of envy.” No summation could be pithier or more accurate. It stands as a reminder to us why envy is listed among the Seven Capital Sins.”
Don’t believe everything you hear Francis. My nett worth in Australian Dollars is about $1.2 million. My only problem is with my ambition to die broke can I spend it all without being frivolous? I don’t envy anyone. As a socialist I have no objection to people being rich. The reason for my leftist views is when I see people who for one reason or other through no fault of their own have an incapacity to rise above their station in life.
I do not accept that they are all capable of rising above the circumstances in which they find themselves. Regrettably the conservative right adhere to a sort of social Darwinism by which the fittest will succeed and the rest, well we are all created equal so it’s their own fault if they don’t succeed.
What I am against is the American myth that each and every one of us can rise above the inequality in society and become anything we want. This just isn’t true. Therefore we have an obligation to assist those who need assistance. Conservatives from what I have observed have an almost sociopathic lack of empathy for those less fortunate. I feel that altruism is the finest of human qualities. That is why the left exists, to combat the excesses of unfettered capitalism. That is why I am a socialist.
Tony N, it’s very big of you to care so for your fellow man, but my question to those who propose socialism is why pick such a cumbersome vehicle as bureacratic government to sustain those less able?
Surely, as one who has garnered a $1.2 mm (A) fortune, you recognize that market based responses to difficult questions (and what more difficult question extant than first world indigency?)are the most efficient, and of longest term value to society? What better way to more quickly hypothesize, test, guide and resolve problems than by the myriad decision taking process of a market driven solution. Of course, such processes also take effort, and far more than that of the internal checkoff labelled “I gave at the (tax) office.”
So perhaps your moral standing is not on such firm ground, here Tony? For given your convictions, one would think a person with the leisure of a $1.2 mm (A) fortune standing behind him would be hard on the trail of effecting these solutions in a more proven and efficient manner that would withstand the test of time and the market place, rather than fobbing it off on yet another bloated, wasteful and ultimately uncaring bureaucracy….
______
There’s nothing to be said about 2012 except:
Newtown.
…because it’s the inherent conclusion of leftist policies? What’s your point if otherwise?
Roger, let’s look outside your borders. I am 67 and live in Perth, Western Australia. I have been retired since last January which meant a drop in income from about $60K (which my no means makes me highly paid)to about $16K. Because I am well below the income threshold I also get a part-pension of about $9K a total annual income of about $25K p.a. This means I am also entitled to a Pensioner Concession Card. The benefits? My medication under our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme have dropped from about $30/prescription to about $5. My doctor bulk bills me for all my consultations because I have a PCC, that is to say the Federal government picks up the tab, it costs me nothing.
I have Private Health cover. I have have contributed this for most of my life and will maintain it as I am at an age when I would be most likely to need it. My last stay in the CCU in a private hospital cost $21K just for the bed for 5 days, not including cardiologist and other costs.I paid nothing. If I did not have private cover (which by the way is tax deductible) I am covered by the public health system which is funded by a Medicare levy which is paid by all wage and salary earners. The is no such thing as NO medical cover in Australia.
My PCC entitles me to reductions on electricity, gas, water and council rates, vehicle registration. I am also entitled to two free rail trips each year to anywhere in this large state of ours. I am entitled to free urban transport between the hours of 9:00am and 3:30pm.
We have universal superannuation in Australia. After living off mine as my primary source of income and withdrawing $25K fer personal use after 12 months I have $3K more than I did this time last year. My house which I paid $12K for in 1969 I could now sell for $850K. It is not counted as an asset for the purposes of assessing eligibility for government entitlements.
As a former union delegate and now member of the Australian Labor Party we have won for our fellow Australians:- Four week’s annual leave, 15 days cumulative sick leave (which may be taken as carer’s leave if a family member is ill and you are the primary care giver), 13 weeks long service leave every seven years and a 17.5% loading on top of you normal wage when you go on leave. Overtime is worked at time-and-a-half weekdays, same for the first three hours on Saturday and then double time for the rest, double time all day on Sunday and double-time-and-a-half on public holidays.
We are a country of only 22 million, yet we can provide all these things to our citizens. We do not achieve this by making the rich poor. By your definition we are current governed federally by a what you would consider a socialist party. I have no problem with that I am a member of the state body of that party. We got through the GFC relatively unscathed do to our resource rich state of WA. In fact many Americans are coming to work here as they can earn $250K+p.a. in our mineral and energy sectors.
So you see Roger if good men and women stand up and fight for their fair share of that pizza we can all be winners. Fight being the operative word as some want more than their share of our natural riches.
With all due respect Tony, you completely miss the point. Your union negotiations are single data points in the micro economy. The point Roger makes is regarding the Left’s penchant for static economic analysis in the aggregate. You essentially are comparing apples with oranges.
Poppakap, with all due respect, I feel that you misunderstand the extent of union coverage in Australia. 58% of all Australians work under union agreements of one sort or another. 43% are covered by enterprise bargaining agreements, 15% are covered by awards. The remainder are covered by contracts, 92% of which are unregistered. Each state has a peak body with which the unions are affiliated. These state bodies are in turn affiliates of the national body. The national body in turn is a member of the International Labour Organisation based in Geneva. So from the workplace all the way up to the ILO unions have an involvement. Sometimes our unions act independently at other times collectively depending on the situation. In 2007 we were successful in ousting not only a federal government but causing the Prime Minister to lose his seat as a result of that government introducing draconian anti-union legislation. So you see when necessary we can muster the entire union movement across Australia to act as a single body.
All levels within the union movement have delegates to the next tier up. As well the union movement has a large representation on the state and federal bodies of The Australian Labor Party. In respect of static economic analysis in the aggregate (whatever that is supposed to mean), it was was a Labor, i.e. leftist government which introduced labour market and economic reforms which were responsible for us now entering our 21st consecutive year of economic growth. We barely noticed the GFC. There are young people now entering our workforce and universities who have never experienced a recession.
So you see Poppakap all labour market, economics and social reforms have occurred under the stewardship of successive Labor governments. The problem with the US is that you do not have left wing parties of any significance. Both your parties are right of centre and beholden to Wall St and large corporations. President Obama is hamstrung by big money which prevents him introducing social, economic and workplace relations reforms which your country sorely needs and which my country already has. I consider myself a socialist, a word which has no great impact in this country. However in your country this word somehow morphs into something else making me a Marxist-Leninist ideologue. Nothing can be further from the truth. The word liberal – very loaded. The Liberal Party in Australia are the same as the British Conservative Party and your Republicans. They are right wing and sometimes they stray to far to the right.
You are correct in one thing, comparing the US with Australia is apples and oranges. Have a look at countries outside your own and you will realise that the US is the very antithesis of a worker’s paradise.
This was of course addressed higher up the thread (regarding planning for future vs. taking NOW), but Tony lives (today) in a time where the Australian demographic continue to cover his current overhead (Australia is also a natural resource rich country with a relatively homogenous population, but let’s leave that aside). Tony lives within a shrinking envelope, however.
Socialist (and socialist-leaning) countries, however, tend to run into demographic problems relatively quickly, thanks to the relative expense of raising children in a limited income environment. Too also, the increasing nannyism of the State tends to result in a more child-like (if not childish) population, which will result in a further disincentive to take on the “burdens” of parenthood. Ironically, the most necessary resource to a welfare state — future taxpayers — is the most quickly consumed by it’s own self-defeating policies.
But cheer up, Tony! Perhaps Oz’s strong natural resource portfolio will benefit you in the end, and your country’s demographic problems will be saved by by a just-in-time Chinese invasion.
(That is if China’s demography doesn’t doom it before then!)
___________