I'm glad we have comissar Stip to tell us what is ok to be wasteful and inefficient.

okay real quick cuz (by our standards, anyway) I need to head to bed



No. These are subtle distinctions that I suspect you are missing given how broad the brush strokes are that you use to make sense of the relationship between individuals, government, and economic relationships. I really don't see what the problem is with this stuff.




No. I do think that small groups of experts are capable of managing resources. That's what happens within large private organizations after all. What do you think happens when Wal-Mart makes decisions, or Exxon, or Monsanto, etc. What I am saying is that small groups of people do do these things all the time. If you get good managers you'll have decent results. If you get bad managers you'll have terrible results. I do think it is usually (I'm sure I can find exceptions I wouldn't mind) potentially dangerous for any one group to have total control over any particular resource or facet of the economy. But that's not the case with any of the above mentioned examples.



I'm not prepared to call Amtrack or the Post Office disasters. I'm especially not ready to call them disasters in all caps.


All cost benefit analysis is subjective insofar as the categories and standards that you use to measure are (usually) not objectively right or wrong. Yours are no more or less valid than mine, or vice versa. If society, acting through its institutions, decides that the most important standard we want to use to assess whether or not the post office is worth it is its profitability than it's in trouble. If we decide that other standards matter then that's fine to. We use politics to decide what standards to use. That's one of the things at stake in this election, which is unusually ideological.

A running theme throughout all our arguments seems to be this inability of you to accept that your standards are far from universal standards, and that it is possible for people to intelligently and morally deviate from them.




Well I think the profitable parts of the postal service and Amtrack could easily be duplicated. But what if a rail line connecting parts of rural NJ to NYC cannot sustain the volume to be run profitably, but that line is still necessary for the people who live there to be hooked into the city. Public enterprises can decide that those benefits make it worth running at a loss. a private enterprise presumably would not. Why should it? It exists to make money for its shareholders, rather than serve the needs of a larger set of stakeholders. It does so by providing something the public may need, but it provides it only insofar as it is profitable for it to do so, not because the public needs it.



Sure. Markets make those decisions too, based on who has more money than others. There's no way to get around that. There are some things where I think the market will do a better job aggregating and responding to what people want/need. There are other times I think public organizations will do that better. I know you keep wanting me to say it is always one thing or the other but it isn't. The world is a messy place. If your theory makes it simple there is probably a problem with the theory.



Again LW, I think you're arguing with the demons in your head, rather than me. I never said that externalites justify everything, nor did I say that you can ignore questions of economics and profitabiltiy in everything (or even anything). I just argued that these (profitability) are not the only standards we use to decide whether or not something is worth it, and sometimes they are not the primary standard.


? Can you make this concrete?


You mean how is the post office not an example of fascism. I think the fact that you would even formulate this question makes it impossible for me to answer.


well I'm not sure I said this, but again I'm also sure what the difference between situating these small groups of men in a government office building or in a corporate office building is nearly as prominent as you make it out to be--especially once we're dealing with businesses of a certain size and scale.. Well, one difference is that the political process gives citizens a degree of potential accountability that the market can't supply (and then there are other types of accountability markets can supply--which is why it is good to have both).


_-----------------------------------------

Well for starters I recognize/believe, to a far (nearing infinite, it sometimes seems) greater degree than you do, that wealth is socially created (although individual effort and initiative play a huge role in this) and that the context that makes the generation of wealth possible has a legitimate right to place limits on the individuals ability to appropriate it for themselves


I agree, but probably because I think the balance is already far too skewed in your direction.


yeah, in a world where the rich (the oligarchic rich, especially) control far higher (basically obscene) shares of income and wealth than they have in generations I have a hard time taking this very seriously. If you listen carefully you can hear the world's smallest and most expensive violin playing for them.




well for starters I think there is a connection between these two things. Each helps beget the other. But it forces a level of social responsibility onto capital that it won't take on itself. Capital probably does want to leave the nation if it can be more profitable elsewhere. And that may be good for the people who control that capital. But you know who it is terrible for? The nation.



Again, you need to read what I actually said--not look for certain trigger words so you can start railing about what you want to rail about. My point (and McP's) was that educational success depends on the environment students grow up in as much as the schooling itself. Do parents have time to help their kids? is there stable employment in those communities? Are sufficient food resources made available for food, physical and mental health. Education of young people is happening pretty much 24 hours a day. Schools can only do so much in the time they have these kids, and we are often asking schools to make up for a lackluster environment for educating people the 16 hours kids aren't in school. Doing that is very very expensive, and probably not nearly as effective as actually fixing the source of the problems that interfere with learning outside the classroom. If education really matters to you than you need to fix that. And it's going to be expensive.


It's not that people are targeting weak Americans. I don't think pirates bore any resentment to the people they robbed either. What you want is as much of other people's money as you can possibly grab for yourself. And in the process of getting as much as you can for yourself what you're doing to the people you're taking it from often tends to drop out. Marx argued (largely correct, I think on this point) that in the process capitalism ends up eating itself by destroying the ability of consumers to purchase the products they make by not providing workers with enough money to purchase the things capitalism produces. The short sighted desire for maximizing profits now ends up destroying the soil you need to make profits later. So you look for new markets to repeat the process but eventually you run out of space. I don't think Marx was wrong in his critique. I think he was early.



When you point out all the tax increases paul ryan supported to pay for all the spending he endorsed under president bush I'll take him seriously.

well, probably not. But I'll take him marginally more seriously on this stuff.



well I can't speak for Krugman, but elsewhere (not in what you've quoted here but he's written a little more than the 100 words you've quoted above) he has argued that we do need to pay down deficits, and that they can't go on forever, but that the time to do so is not when growth is slow and needs all the help it can get. He's also argued that where debt comes from and where the money goes matters to.

I am happy to admit that certainly what he emphasizes will be influenced by his political leanings, but a shift of focus is not a contradiction.

omg what has this thread turned into

what you have is citizen stip, who has a particular set of values, and citizen littlewing, who has a different set of values, and a political system that tries, as best as it currently can, to listen to citizen stip, and citizen littlewing (but not citizen human bass because he lives south of texas and is therefore suspect) and other citizens and then writes policy based on a balance of the aggregate preferences of those measured against restraints imposed by laws and rights.

But that's fascism for you.






Look, it kind of makes sense that people like Von Mises and Hayek would see fascism and communsim everywhere. They grew up in a world when things like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union A: Existed, B: Had real power for a while, and C: used that power in incredibly destructive ways. That paralyzing fear of those countries had a deep influence on the way that they look at the world. I understand why a woman who was a victim of spousal abuse would be resentful towards marriage. But you're several generations removed. Sharing those fears in a world that has passed them by is just kinda silly, like seeing an old woman in an old country village somewhere who still wards herself against the evil eye.

There are serious conversations to be had about the proper balance between individual and collective rights and the proper way to distribute political and economic power in a society. And they should be had by serious people.



when you are ready to be a serious person we can have that serious conversation. In the meantime I'm sure you can find people to party with on your Von Mises board, where every year is 1934!

Your subtle distinctions, to me anyway, are nothing more than empty excuses for justifying anything and everything the government does under different pretext without examining the external factors that lead them into being. Another string of quotes.













I'm sorry, but these quotes are just a collective jumbled mess. You don't trust the people to run the programs they want, but place credence in their needs? How is this not tyranny of the majority!? You claim the people need to have unprofitable rail lines, but then you claim that we need to get the pulse from citizen stip, citizen littlewing and determine aggregate preferences. Well when the fuck was the last time we determined the aggregate preference of that rural rail line running from rural New Jersey into the city? And why should one person's particular set of values be imposed upon the others!? Particularly if mutually exclusiv alternatives exist. How does a political system, especially OUR political system listen to its citizens? It's impossible. When you have a system of government where 550ish individuals can sign a 787 billion dollar stimulus plan across 320,000,000 people, you don't have a system that's listening to its people. This government does everything it can to NOT listen to its people simply by the way it functions. It functions on a basis of creating as many rent seekers and free riders as possible. You do this so as to maintain the status quo and drown out what people really want. By passing that 787 billion dollar stimulus plan (the creation of need) you make people like Paul Ryan throw their principles out, and his constituents principles out, and he goes to capital hill begging for money as best he can on behalf of his constituents. Our congressmen and women are nothing but paupers on our behalf, begging for the money they aggrandize themselves by law. People get elected for bringing home the pork projects. You can circumvent the pulse of the people by simply attaching riders. You perpetuate bureaucracies. You set up bureaucracies. And you perpetuate losers. All while making the populace as dependent as possible. And to make things worse, you just jiggle the handle a little bit to justify it, without looking at the bigger picture.

I mean, I don't understand how you can examine ethanol and not support it. It's just people valuing profits different than you. It's more intelligent managers than you. You're just a plebe who doesn't know what he needs. It's what the people of the midwest want, and they value their subsidies just like that rural person in New Jersey values their rail line into the big city. And just like old people in the country value their postal service. In all three cases we don't know what the popular support REALLY is. In all three cases they exist for the sake of the bureaucracy and paying of constituents. You take away competition. You socialize risk, and privatize gain.

Then GM. With GM you state you don't support because there's other economic actors that can fulfill that demand. You don't want capital to leave the country because its bad for the nation. Well why can't people simply say they don't want GM to go away because it's bad for the nation? You're just all over the place with this stuff.

And then you're failing to take into account points I brought up earlier. By taxing the people, by running these institutions, you create need for them. By artificially propping up these institutions as they are all economic losers, you inhibit people from competing and bearing out the true costs of those services! You don't even WANT to consider mutually exclusive alternatives. In the case of the Post Office, AMTRAK, medicare, Social Security, you are completely resigned to maintaining the status quo simply because it exists, and WITHOUT getting a pulse what the nation really feels. These institutions, these government structures, they exist and rest upon assymetric information and they prey on peoples emotions by creating the need in the first place. Again, if the government started cultivating corn, and I stood against it, I'd want people to die. But would it really be so bad if that unprofitable rail line went away? Would it really be that bad if the assets of the Post Office and AMTRAK were auctioned off and allowed to operate in the private sphere?

Let me ask you a question - would you compete against the government? Would you? Tell me why ANYONE would try to enter markets and compete against the likes of the Postal Service, AMTRAK, General Motors, Medicare, or Social Security? First you have the government taxing your opportunity to gain customers, it's squeezing your customers of discretionary income. Then beyond that, the government can do WHATEVER IT WANTS to keep its institution competing against you, particularly when you consider these institutions are dominated by civil workers unions. It taxes your customers to perpetuate its existence and shield its inherent inn inefficiencies! Rendering the market analyst, who can place value and profit however he wants, a moot point. Government can regulate you out of existence, tax you out of existence, subsidize its entity ad-infinitum. The very existence of the government institution is a barrier to entry against all mutually exclusive alternatives. It's an entity that you cannot FAIRLY compete against. This stifles economic development, and may actually make things WORSE OFF for the people you purport to support by stifling creative destruction. It's like the union standing in the way of the automated machine to preserve the union workers job at the customers expense. The worst thing Ford could have ever done is not take bailout money. It's competing against something it can't fairly compete against.

Long story short - I don't think there is a shred of linearity to anything you say. It's all just mush. A mish-mash of rhetoric that sounds pretty, but is borne of little critical thought, or dynamic thought, or out of the box thinking.



But WHY shouldn't it be profitable!? If you can point to all these things you don't like about our governments infrastructure, then how can you honestly support any of the rest of it? The people who are perpetuating the things you don't like are using the same justifications as you to continue programs like Ethanol and the auto bailout.



Actually, no. In all reality I take into account, far better than you, that other people have different priorities in life. It's the fundamental reason why I seek to decentralize this bloated government apparatus that has turned us into a nation of rent seekers and free riders. That way you can live a way of life that aligns with your morals, and I live a way of life that aligns with my morals. I mean, you're acquiescing what you believe to a majority of the populace that you readily admit is ignorant! It's just insane. You poo-poo'd this idea of mine. We all gotta be the same - its for the good of the nation, except Amish people.



If you got rid of the Post Office then a private player would move in to meet that demand. The demand is tangible - it's real. And there will be a natural price for it. You perpetuate an entity that operates in a radically inefficient way, but that has infinite resources to paper over its economic failures. But if you got rid of it, things would naturally adjust to meet their demand. Perhaps those who live in areas where it's not profitable will pay increased costs, but demand an increase in their wages to account for it. Or maybe in the absence of the monopoly, someone like me would hire cheaper letter carriers. Or maybe someone would come with a means of delivering mail in a radically different way that we can't even forsee.

This one reason why I think progressives are so hell-bent on using government as a means of imposing systems upon the nation and ignoring economics. They don't want to compete. They don't even WANT the alternatives to exist. It's always puzzling to me why progressives are so quick to point the flaws of the free market: "insurance companies shouldn't be for profit" "products would be cheaper if we didn't pay executives so much" "college education is too expensive". Okay, so why not start non profit insurance companies? Why not start businesses that don't pay executives a whole lot of money? Why not start your own college that doesn't cost so much? Why try and force us all into medicare for everyone? And float maximum and minimum wages? Why have forced redistribution? Why call for universal education? Why not compete and show us how it's done?

Progressives have ideas that are so good they need to be imposed on everyone.



I guess you can arrive here if you just wanna look at the post office and ignore: General Motors, the bank bailouts, mortgage bailouts, ethanol subsidies, farm subsidies, national flood insurance, FEMA, the TSA, drones all over the place, video cameras all over the place, AMTRAK, medicare, medicaid, EBT, SNAP, Social Security. I can go on for ever. It's the national general welfare.



Still, I gotta love the ethos: We can't trust man to make his own decisions, so we need a small group of men managing the decisions of everyone! Surely this can't go wrong...


Well, you did. Let me help you out.





I've never seen such rampant disregard for the idea of free transactions and value in my life. Certain social and economic relationships have real value. The engagement of free transactions is what value is predicated on. And to ignore this is to end up as Greece and Spain. Collections of European nations that ignored the precepts of value in economic terms, bestowed "profitability" in things by ignoring economics, and placing an artificial value upon their contributions to society by artificially devaluing the labor of others by expropriating wealth. Just a preposterous system.



What's that about arguing with the demons in my head? Good Lord. You don't examine why people become rich. You discard the rationality behind value. You ignore free transactions. And you ignore the individual inputs that result in individual outputs. This is a strawman.



Aside from completely ignoring my question COMPLETELY about that demon in your head that we just want to exploit people...

Given the idea that I want as much of other people's money as I can possibly grab for myself, why the hell would I want everyone to be POOR! Why would anybody rich want everyone else to be poor if they wish to obtain wealth!? My life would be FAR better off if America was a bunch high skilled, highly educated people than if I was in Zimbabwe. Your empty strawman is about as empty as it gets Stip. You, the academic, is creating a strawman without any scope as to how the private sector actually works. My company gets richer when society gets richer. My wages get bigger when everyone else becomes richer. And this is the ultimate flaw of Marx's empty philosophy. It presumes that there is some structured race to the bottom - where none exists. Capitalism has made the world ENORMOUSLY richer by every meaningful measure that you can define. It's not eating itself, and if it is, it doesn't have to be that way. What is this problem with you wrapping your head around the idea that if you want that wealth that you have to return more of an investment than the next guy. If America was a nation of problem solvers, instead of a nation of rent seekers and free riders, we'd all be a lot richer.

God forbid you look at our current corporatist structure, the ethanol subsidies, AMTRAK, and the Post Office, and realize that this is nothing more than a means of people using the force of law to grab as much of other people's money as possible, prohibit entry into the market place, eliminate competition, and aggrandize wealth. The only threat? Potential elections. And all you gotta do to keep YOUR access to the kitty is give as many people as possible a taste and attachment to the kitty as well.



We're not talking about that. We're talking about how when government signs a spending bill into law that every representative should have equal access to that spending bill.



Interesting isn't it? Paul Krugman has a change in focus, Paul Ryan is a contradiction that you can't take seriously...

Your subtle distinctions, to me anyway, are nothing more than empty excuses for justifying anything and everything the government does under different pretext without examining the external factors that lead them into being. Another string of quotes.













I'm sorry, but these quotes are just a collective jumbled mess. You don't trust the people to run the programs they want, but place credence in their needs? How is this not tyranny of the majority!? You claim the people need to have unprofitable rail lines, but then you claim that we need to get the pulse from citizen stip, citizen littlewing and determine aggregate preferences. Well when the fuck was the last time we determined the aggregate preference of that rural rail line running from rural New Jersey into the city? And why should one person's particular set of values be imposed upon the others!? Particularly if mutually exclusiv alternatives exist. How does a political system, especially OUR political system listen to its citizens? It's impossible. When you have a system of government where 550ish individuals can sign a 787 billion dollar stimulus plan across 320,000,000 people, you don't have a system that's listening to its people. This government does everything it can to NOT listen to its people simply by the way it functions. It functions on a basis of creating as many rent seekers and free riders as possible. You do this so as to maintain the status quo and drown out what people really want. By passing that 787 billion dollar stimulus plan (the creation of need) you make people like Paul Ryan throw their principles out, and his constituents principles out, and he goes to capital hill begging for money as best he can on behalf of his constituents. Our congressmen and women are nothing but paupers on our behalf, begging for the money they aggrandize themselves by law. People get elected for bringing home the pork projects. You can circumvent the pulse of the people by simply attaching riders. You perpetuate bureaucracies. You set up bureaucracies. And you perpetuate losers. All while making the populace as dependent as possible. And to make things worse, you just jiggle the handle a little bit to justify it, without looking at the bigger picture.

I mean, I don't understand how you can examine ethanol and not support it. It's just people valuing profits different than you. It's more intelligent managers than you. You're just a plebe who doesn't know what he needs. It's what the people of the midwest want, and they value their subsidies just like that rural person in New Jersey values their rail line into the big city. And just like old people in the country value their postal service. In all three cases we don't know what the popular support REALLY is. In all three cases they exist for the sake of the bureaucracy and paying of constituents. You take away competition. You socialize risk, and privatize gain.

Then GM. With GM you state you don't support because there's other economic actors that can fulfill that demand. You don't want capital to leave the country because its bad for the nation. Well why can't people simply say they don't want GM to go away because it's bad for the nation? You're just all over the place with this stuff.

And then you're failing to take into account points I brought up earlier. By taxing the people, by running these institutions, you create need for them. By artificially propping up these institutions as they are all economic losers, you inhibit people from competing and bearing out the true costs of those services! You don't even WANT to consider mutually exclusive alternatives. In the case of the Post Office, AMTRAK, medicare, Social Security, you are completely resigned to maintaining the status quo simply because it exists, and WITHOUT getting a pulse what the nation really feels. These institutions, these government structures, they exist and rest upon assymetric information and they prey on peoples emotions by creating the need in the first place. Again, if the government started cultivating corn, and I stood against it, I'd want people to die. But would it really be so bad if that unprofitable rail line went away? Would it really be that bad if the assets of the Post Office and AMTRAK were auctioned off and allowed to operate in the private sphere?

Let me ask you a question - would you compete against the government? Would you? Tell me why ANYONE would try to enter markets and compete against the likes of the Postal Service, AMTRAK, General Motors, Medicare, or Social Security? First you have the government taxing your opportunity to gain customers, it's squeezing your customers of discretionary income. Then beyond that, the government can do WHATEVER IT WANTS to keep its institution competing against you, particularly when you consider these institutions are dominated by civil workers unions. It taxes your customers to perpetuate its existence and shield its inherent inn inefficiencies! Rendering the market analyst, who can place value and profit however he wants, a moot point. Government can regulate you out of existence, tax you out of existence, subsidize its entity ad-infinitum. The very existence of the government institution is a barrier to entry against all mutually exclusive alternatives. It's an entity that you cannot FAIRLY compete against. This stifles economic development, and may actually make things WORSE OFF for the people you purport to support by stifling creative destruction. It's like the union standing in the way of the automated machine to preserve the union workers job at the customers expense. The worst thing Ford could have ever done is not take bailout money. It's competing against something it can't fairly compete against.

Long story short - I don't think there is a shred of linearity to anything you say. It's all just mush. A mish-mash of rhetoric that sounds pretty, but is borne of little critical thought, or dynamic thought, or out of the box thinking.



But WHY shouldn't it be profitable!? If you can point to all these things you don't like about our governments infrastructure, then how can you honestly support any of the rest of it? The people who are perpetuating the things you don't like are using the same justifications as you to continue programs like Ethanol and the auto bailout.



Actually, no. In all reality I take into account, far better than you, that other people have different priorities in life. It's the fundamental reason why I seek to decentralize this bloated government apparatus that has turned us into a nation of rent seekers and free riders. That way you can live a way of life that aligns with your morals, and I live a way of life that aligns with my morals. I mean, you're acquiescing what you believe to a majority of the populace that you readily admit is ignorant! It's just insane. You poo-poo'd this idea of mine. We all gotta be the same - its for the good of the nation, except Amish people.



If you got rid of the Post Office then a private player would move in to meet that demand. The demand is tangible - it's real. And there will be a natural price for it. You perpetuate an entity that operates in a radically inefficient way, but that has infinite resources to paper over its economic failures. But if you got rid of it, things would naturally adjust to meet their demand. Perhaps those who live in areas where it's not profitable will pay increased costs, but demand an increase in their wages to account for it. Or maybe in the absence of the monopoly, someone like me would hire cheaper letter carriers. Or maybe someone would come with a means of delivering mail in a radically different way that we can't even forsee.

This one reason why I think progressives are so hell-bent on using government as a means of imposing systems upon the nation and ignoring economics. They don't want to compete. They don't even WANT the alternatives to exist. It's always puzzling to me why progressives are so quick to point the flaws of the free market: "insurance companies shouldn't be for profit" "products would be cheaper if we didn't pay executives so much" "college education is too expensive". Okay, so why not start non profit insurance companies? Why not start businesses that don't pay executives a whole lot of money? Why not start your own college that doesn't cost so much? Why try and force us all into medicare for everyone? And float maximum and minimum wages? Why have forced redistribution? Why call for universal education? Why not compete and show us how it's done?

Progressives have ideas that are so good they need to be imposed on everyone.



I guess you can arrive here if you just wanna look at the post office and ignore: General Motors, the bank bailouts, mortgage bailouts, ethanol subsidies, farm subsidies, national flood insurance, FEMA, the TSA, drones all over the place, video cameras all over the place, AMTRAK, medicare, medicaid, EBT, SNAP, Social Security. I can go on for ever. It's the national general welfare.



Still, I gotta love the ethos: We can't trust man to make his own decisions, so we need a small group of men managing the decisions of everyone! Surely this can't go wrong...


Well, you did. Let me help you out.





I've never seen such rampant disregard for the idea of free transactions and value in my life. Certain social and economic relationships have real value. The engagement of free transactions is what value is predicated on. And to ignore this is to end up as Greece and Spain. Collections of European nations that ignored the precepts of value in economic terms, bestowed "profitability" in things by ignoring economics, and placing an artificial value upon their contributions to society by artificially devaluing the labor of others by expropriating wealth. Just a preposterous system.



What's that about arguing with the demons in my head? Good Lord. You don't examine why people become rich. You discard the rationality behind value. You ignore free transactions. And you ignore the individual inputs that result in individual outputs. This is a strawman.



Aside from completely ignoring my question COMPLETELY about that demon in your head that we just want to exploit people...

Given the idea that I want as much of other people's money as I can possibly grab for myself, why the hell would I want everyone to be POOR! Why would anybody rich want everyone else to be poor if they wish to obtain wealth!? My life would be FAR better off if America was a bunch high skilled, highly educated people than if I was in Zimbabwe. Your empty strawman is about as empty as it gets Stip. You, the academic, is creating a strawman without any scope as to how the private sector actually works. My company gets richer when society gets richer. My wages get bigger when everyone else becomes richer. And this is the ultimate flaw of Marx's empty philosophy. It presumes that there is some structured race to the bottom - where none exists. Capitalism has made the world ENORMOUSLY richer by every meaningful measure that you can define. It's not eating itself, and if it is, it doesn't have to be that way. What is this problem with you wrapping your head around the idea that if you want that wealth that you have to return more of an investment than the next guy. If America was a nation of problem solvers, instead of a nation of rent seekers and free riders, we'd all be a lot richer.

God forbid you look at our current corporatist structure, the ethanol subsidies, AMTRAK, and the Post Office, and realize that this is nothing more than a means of people using the force of law to grab as much of other people's money as possible, prohibit entry into the market place, eliminate competition, and aggrandize wealth. The only threat? Potential elections. And all you gotta do to keep YOUR access to the kitty is give as many people as possible a taste and attachment to the kitty as well.



We're not talking about that. We're talking about how when government signs a spending bill into law that every representative should have equal access to that spending bill.



Interesting isn't it? Paul Krugman has a change in focus, Paul Ryan is a contradiction that you can't take seriously...

Real quick, cuz I'm off to bed.



I think large groups of people can set priorities. I don't think they can manage. I think that about any organization, public or private. I believe, for instance, that Congress should give the bureacracy mandates and then their primary function should be oversight. In what publicly traded company do stock holders manage day to do operations?



you equate tyranny of the majority with majority rule. If you think democracy is tyranny of the majority, which you seem to, then it is. But you've also made your definition so expansive as to be largely useless.


Our elected officials decide whether or not to fund Amtrack.


We're back to this again? Such is the cost of people living in groups together. What is important is that reasonable protections are built in to stop democracy from becoming tyranny of the majority. You would draw that line (I think) at an absurd place, in part because you seem to elevate property rights above most other rights and social considerations to an unworkable degree. That the interdependent nature of our world is morally offensive to you doesn't change the fact that this interdependence still exists.


Not directly no. But those 535 people were all elected, and had to answer to voters. Many were punished (I've said this in other threads, or probably this one, that I think the actual practice of our system is deeply flawed. But I still think even our deeply flawed system is vastly preferable to what you defend, and I think our time is better spent improving the practice of that system.



Again with Paul Ryan. If he had also opposed the exact same type of 'reckless' spending under President Bush I would feel bad for him.



I think this is a bit melodramatic but like I said above, I am perfectly happy to agree that there are all sorts of problems with our appropriations process and all the rest. Government is messy and imperfect, especially in a country this large.


What you just described explains why ethanol subsidies exist despite my personal opposition. Unlike you, I am not assuming that my personal preferences or values represent some platonic form of righteousness and justice, and that therefore anything that deviates from it is illegitimate. Like I keep saying, because myself and the people from the Midwest will differ on whether or not these things are necessary we have processes to figure out where money goes. And that process has flaws, and responds to imbalances of power and influence. As do markets. As does EVERYTHING.







That is always a potential problem with subsidized industries for sure. Fast Food is a better example. But as we've both agreed, when something isn't profitable the private sector probably won't engage in it. However, there are things that a society needs that aren't profitable that will likely be neglected by the private sector. That's one thing public industries/programs/organizations are supposed to address. Again I would just go ahead and throw the military into any conversation where you're including amtrack and the post office.


I do? And you base that on what, exactly? Keep in mind that unlike you, I have consistently defended democratic principles in our arguments--that MY preference for Social Security (which I support, but not simply because it is the status quo--I feel little attachment to something just because it happens to exist) does not therefore take on some kind of privileged meta status in the grand scheme of the world because I happen to enjoy it. If the country got rid of SS tomorrow because that's what people wanted I would bemoan that decision, challenge it, argue against it, work to change it, and all the rest. But I would not challenge the legitimacy of the fact that something changed.


that would be fine if there were strong assurances that the unprofitable but necessary/important services were maintained. But I doubt we'd get that. I also think, with certain critical types of infrastructure, that there are advantages to the public owning them, even at a loss, to ensure that they are available at all times, cannot be easily exploited by private ownership, etc.



I guess we would have to ask that question of the private health insurance industry, toyota, ford, volkswagon, honda, hyndai, Fed Ex, UPS, and every hedge fund manager who invests people's retirement savings.



Well I suppose that's possible. It's either that your own mind is so heavily boxed in as to make 'outside the box' thinking an impossibility. Honestly, there's nothing I'm saying here that is particularly radical or unusual.



Profitability is nice. It's something to strive for. Wasting money is stupid. Profitability is not always the end of the conversation. And yes, they'll use the same justification in terms of whether or not the government has the RIGHT to subsidize ethanol. And they do have the right. I think it is bad policy based on a concrete evaluation of what ethanol does, the costs, etc. But my objection is with the details, not the principles.



That's your theory, is it? That's your big insight into how progressives think. Everything I've typed during the course of our discussions and that is your take away?

--umm, these things happen.


As do you. We're both arguing in favor of a different philosophy that we want to see imposed on everyone. Yours has a more superficial 'I'm letting everyone do what they want' quality to it. it's superficial because it places each individual in a free standing vacuum that does not exist. Because we all do touch each other your individual choice has a public consequence. Economics is largely an other regarding, rather than self-regarding sphere of action.



The national general welfare is not the same thing as fascism. Actually none of these things are, even if others (like the increased size of our survelliance state) point to an alarming and threatening trend. Also, you are attributing to me (and to progressives, I guess) programs and policies that they almost universally hate. LWing hating something does not mean that a progressive therefore loves it.


That thing you just quoted does not mean what you're attributing to me above.


that's possible, but I suspect it is because you haven't looked that hard. I'm not even a socialist.


I agree. My point is not about how we assign value. it is about who gets to appropriate the profits/value generated by those transactions, and by how much.



No, this is once again you arguing with the demons in your head. My statement was that given the fact that the wealthy now control a larger percentage of the world's wealth than they have in 80 years the environment they labor under can't be THAT hostile to them. they've somehow managed to be quite successful despite your protestations to the contrary. I'm not sure what anything you were talking about above has to do with that statement. Those were just the things you want to be yelling at me about.


Did I ignore a question in this exchange? if so I apologize. What was it?


you wouldn't. You're just being short sighted and failing to recognize the long term consequences of your extraction.


absolutely. Yet what Warren Buffet seems to grasp, that you don't, is that maintaining a nation of highly skilled and educated people costs money and resources, much of which will have to come from people who are wealthy since that's where the resources ended up. But you've dedicated an awful lot of words here and elsewhere explaining precisely why the process of ensuring a high skilled, educated, and productive people is illegitimate. You don't want it if we need to use your money to help pay for it.


Wow. Empty gets pretty empty. That's really bad.


you come back to this epithet quite a bit. There are two possibilities here.

One--I am just an idiot, who despite studying this stuff for a living (I am an academic) somehow manages to miss all these very simple truths

or

Two--these truths may not be as simple as you think.



Capitalism has done a lot of good, and even marx (and I am not a marxist, btw, although I do think he's largely correct about this) argues that capitalism is a necessary step in human economic development. Capitalism solves the problem of scarcity. It creates enough of the 'stuff' the world needs to take care of everyone's needs. Where capitalism ultimately will end up failing (and this process takes time) is as a system of distribution. In the absence of regulation to constrain it (my view), or inevitably (marx's), capitalism begins to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands. If you believe, as I do, that the biggest economic problem facing us today is inequality, you start taking Marx's argument seriously.


It's a distribution problem. If I solve a problem but someone else is able to lay claim to the fruits of my labor, or if they are able to control access to the resources I need to solve that problem, there are limits to what my ingenuity can do for me. America today is still a fantastically wealthy country, but that wealth is distributed in a fashion that is increasingly both inequitable and damaging. that's why our recovery is so aenimc (one reason, anyway)


That's a fair critique. I've told you that before.





Yes, but these are spending bills he voted for. I agree that a member of Congress should take stimulus money for their district even if they voted against it. They are doing their voters a disservice if they do. My problem is with the fact that he had previously voted for these spending bills, etc. under republican administrations.

That to me speaks of a more nakedly partisan hypocrisy than Paul Krugman saying that deficits are a problem (certainly how much of a problem is influenced by partisan considerations) but not as big a problem as a stalling recovery. There is an entirely consistent logic there--a hierarchy of threat and harm.


you're gonna buy my book when it comes out, right LW?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-0 ... nanke.html


Welp.

Stip, I'm on the road and just don't have the mental fortitude to properly tackle your discourse. Maybe this weekend.

stip is relentless

Responding to your posts takes me at least 30 minutes so I understand. No rush. As the semester starts to play out I'll have less and less time for this.

I had an awesome response going - and then my Blackberry died in O'Hare...

Oh, by the way. Can we get some kind of government mandate to force O'hare to install some fucking electrical outlets? Welcome to the 21st century O'Hare.

the money set aside for O'Hare was transferred to the Rahm Emanuel tie budget

I don't see the point of more bond-buying by the Fed.

Now, with the ECB it makes more sense, if the goal is to keep peripheral country interest rates down to keep interest rates from further destroying budgets and economies.

Most definitely a shovel ready project.

If it's possible to transcribe that data to musical tones, do you suppose that it would sound sort of like a Thom Yorke composition?

let the light pour in, indeed.