The Super Rich Tax you to death

reply to post by OnceReturned


You mean like doctors in Cuba -- who are exported abroad in exchange for oil?

Yeah if I was a doctor I'd do it for the $$ -- nothing better than getting lucrative pharmaceutical perks like free vacations because you push their killer drugs....

Doctors are the third largest cause of death in the U.S. due to wrong prescriptions.

reply to post by drew hempel


But this is not answering any questions. You're just pointing out the way the world is and saying it sucks. A scientific approach to medicine has almost doubled the life expectancy in developed countries in just a couple hundred years. Versus tens of thousands of years before hand with no significant changes except for drops during plagues and natural disasters and climate change.

What would be your first order of business if you were in a position of great power? Build a spaceship and leave? It sounds like you disapprove of the major factors which virtually define the entire modern human endeavour. What sorts of things can you possibly do to make it all okay? Lobotomize people so they don't know it sucks? MK Ultra them into wanting and believing the same things as you do?

Ultimately it's people who are running the show. Any indictment of the system, while superficially sounding like an indictment of the leaders of that system, is ultimately an indictment of everyone involved. What's going on here is our doing and no one else's, and if it's not right it's because of something inside of us. No one has super powers which give them supernatural influence. Everyone is just a person and when all the people got together this is what they came up with: Society. Welcome, isn't it lovely? The whole thing is exactly the way we have set it up to be.

reply to post by OnceReturned


Puh-lease -- life expectancy is an average of rate of birth death and disease.

So let's say people live old but the population has high birth rate of death -- then that means the people die young?

No -- but that's how the statistics come out!!

Wow -- the U.S. is the only developed country without public health insurance and 90% of the health cost is on the LAST year of the patient....

So much for preventative health -- preventative is much most cost effective.

So sure people live longer in the U.S. but at what cost? We use the most energy in the world and we have military bases in hundreds of other countries -- we live longer because we kill the rest of the planet!

Simple as that - should we define success as the loss of others?

I think we're really just playing games right now. Everyone can interpret reality however they want. We all try very hard to come up with a pleasant, or at least tolerable, understanding of ourselves, the world, and our relationship to it. Our worldview. We each have one and they appear to be in total disagreement. No one even can be objectively right about ethical issues, which is all that any of this is. If I don't value human life or quality of life then no sentimental appeal will have any effect on me, and within my own system - which is the only thing I am bound by - I will not be wrong( but I do value human life and quality of life). If you don't like our societies system, that is just a stance towards it. It can't be right or wrong, you just don't like it. Anyone can adopt any stance or any worldview and they will interpret everything differently but correctly within their belief system. There is no objective list of priorities, you just have to pick them. You can pick their order in such a way that you can justify absolutely anything.

I'm not saying I don't feel for all the sh!ty situations that people are in. I just think suffering is unavoidable and I accept it, humans have never existed without it. My stance towards the system is one of guarded enthusiasm. I find this to be more agreeable than your position. Barring any radical insights or epiphanies, my worldview ought to remain relatively stable. I think that the pursuit of an agreeable worldview is almost at the top of the list of what humans try to do in their lives, and it may in fact be at the top. I am probably subconsciously deeply protective of my worldview, as you are yours, which is why we so consistantly fail to compel one another.

Anyway, its a stimulating game but I have to hit the hay. Thanks.

reply to post by OnceReturned


Imperialism is not an interpretation!!

video.google.com...#

Watch this on depleted uranium!

reply to post by drew hempel


Puh-lease. Propose a meaningful alternative! I'll read it in the morning. A plan of action, even if it starts with you being king of the world. How do you set it up to avoid the same sh!t that causes problems for us now???

You keep telling me why it's not right without telling me how it possibly could be. Rejection of civilization without a viable replacement is nothing but a loss. You have to have some alternative in mind in order to talk about how all of this is so bad. Something based in reality. Not just that we all work together and in 20 years we live in a global utopia. I mean, you get to make the laws and spend the money. What do you?

All of this is the best system that is availible until you propose a better alternative. Continuing to cite sh!tty aspects of the modern world does not make me think is any worse than I did five minutes ago. The concept of a bad civilization is only meaningful when we can at least conceptualize a better one that is populated by real humans. If there is no such way of doing business or it cannot work with realistic human beings it is no different than saying we would all be a lot better off in heaven.

Just a conceptual directon, guiding philosophy, first principals, priorities, anything, please! I want to hear what all of this is bad relative to.

reply to post by OnceReturned


Dude the truth is the solution -- simple and easy:

www.esoterictube.com...

reply to post by drew hempel


Any judgement of imperialism is an interpretation. Saying it is good or bad is an interpretation. Some people are cool with it and others aren't. Our worldview determines our stance towards any institution.

reply to post by OnceReturned


Genocide is not an interpretation!

books.google.com... k_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false


[edit on 15-3-2010 by drew hempel]

So, I've been thinking about this conversation for a few days now and this is what I came up with.

I've been trying to figure out why your objections don't really effect my beliefs about the system - which, by the way, I consider to be a rough approximation of free market capitalism. I'm a pretty nice guy, I would say nicer than most people. I care about other people, and it strikes me as odd that I am more or less unaffected by these terrible things that you are telling me about, which you attribute to our system. So, I had to think about why these human abuses are not working to talk me out of supporting our capitalism, and what are my beliefs about our system which cause me to continue to support it.

I realized a couple of things. Mainly, my support for our system comes from my belief in the validity of the underlying economic theory of a free market. This theory makes absolute sense to me, and I can imagine no system more rational than a free market. In a free market the market determines the monetary value of good and services based solely on supply and demand. In this way the goods and services which are most valuable to society are the ones which people will pay the most for. This provides the greatest financial motivation for people to provide the goods and services which are most desired by society. Also, people are payed baised exactly on how much society values the goods and services which they provide.

This way of valuing things makes seems right to me a in a deep way. If society isn't the entity which determines the value of good and services - and thereby determines the wages of those who provide goods and services - who else should? Certainly not an individual, or even a group of individuals. In any system other than a free market goods and services are valued arbitrarily. In a free market goods and services are valued exactly according to how valuable they actually are to society - as measured by how much people will pay for them.

This underlying theory of how the market should work seems right to me. At least, I am not aware of any superior way of doing things. The logic of free market economics is beyond reproach in my opinion. These beliefs about the underlying economic theory are the beliefs which are central to this part of my world view. This is why I am able to incorporate your criticisms about human suffering without changing my position substantially, even though in my life I do care about human suffering. I don't see any necessary connection between he abuses which you describe and the underlying economic theory. That is the crux of the issue for me.

I think that human rights violations will arise and have arisen under any concievable system. It doesn't seem like capitalism necessitates slavery. In fact, if we look at alternative systems of the past we find the same sort of abuses(or worse) under every system, ever. If we look at the united states, we don't have slavery within our borders. At least, it is illegal and is actively discouraged by law enforcement. The human rights effort is independant of the economic system. We don't have slavery but other countries do. We shouldn't change our way of doing things fundamentally in order to try to stop human rights violations in other countries, because it wouldn't actually work. I'm all for sanctions and what not in order to discourage human rights violations, but ultimately it is up to the governing body of a nation to implement and enforce ethical laws.


You talk about the child slaves making the chocolate. I think that what is to be expected under any system is that an importer of goods will buy the cheapest goods on the market. It's not up to that business person to decide how much the factory workers in other countries ought to make, or how many bathroom breaks they ought to get, or how safe the factories are. Maybe the chocolate case is a clear case of slavery, but ultimately we have to address less clear cases. Should the importer only buy from factories that pay their workers the same as American minimum wage? Or only from factories where the workers get a bathroom break every 2 hours? Or what? Where do we draw the line? And is it really the responsability of the importer of the goods to sort out all these issues? What if other importers don't hold their factories to the same standards, and important cheaper chocolate?

These ethical issues are not the sort of thing that economic systems are set up to sort out. I think there is a disconnect between the underlying economic system and the ethical policies governing the treatment of people. Capitalism doesn't inherently prevent ethical standards from being enforced. In a world with very minimum wages and excellent treatement of people - enforced by law - capitalism still makes the most sense of any system. I think that human rights violations exist, and that capitalism exists, but that blaming one on the other is fallacious.

I think that the validity of our economic system is independant of human rights violations around the world. I'm totally open to any argument proposing a direct connection between the two, but I am not sure a good case can be made for that connection. As I said I know that importers end up buying the cheapest goods, and often times the cheapest goods are made by treating workers badly, but as long as there is demand for a product it will be made cheaply, unless a nation gets a hold of itself and imposes reasonable human rights laws.

Will the argument be that human rights laws are in direct opposition to highest profit? And that is the connection? Well, my response is that the issue then comes down to something fundamental: How important is profit compared to unethical treatment of people? That's something that society has to decide. If the chocolate is sufficiently cheap, is it worth it to people that it came from child slaves? Certainly that would be a distasteful state of affairs, but as far as I can tell it is up to society to decide how important these issues are compared to one another. Who else has the right say how things ought to be? Free market capitalism is the manifestation of the will of society in the valuing of everything. Society's will trumps the will of anything else.

reply to post by OnceReturned


Right you believe in the myth of the free market. Don't worry you're not alone -- it's not some personal delusion you suffer from. Take comfort that you're kissing the backsides of TPTB -- the people riding the wave of globalcide -- here's some reading for you in case you want to learn why the free market is a joke.

books.google.com... t&resnum=11&ved=0CCcQ6AEwCg#v=onepage&q=&f=false

The Great Transformation by Karl Polyani is a classic.

www.hazelhenderson.com...

Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics by Hazel Henderson -- another classic.

Both of these details why the supply and demand model is a lie.

www.amazon.com...=ntt_at_ep_dpt_4

Anti-Samuelson by Marc Linder aka why the Supply and Demand Model is wrong -- not for moral reasons but for mathematical reasons.

www.amazon.com...

The Value of Nothing

Just to stay "current" -- this is an excellent brand new book on why the free market is a scam -- inherently!!

I realize though that reading books you disagree with is probably extremely painful -- for example when I read Thomas Sowell or Dixon Lee Ray or various other right-wing "libertarian" tracts --

So here's the Value of Nothing as a new video lecture -- 45 minutes of your time!

www.linktv.org...

But back to the books --

www.davidkorten.org...

books.google.com... lS-3BJJGVtgff8N36CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Herman Daly

Professor Robert Nadeau:

www.amazon.com...

I like how when the Economist reviewed Professor Nadeau's critique of economics the Economist did not even mention the term "quantum chaos" -- which is the main concept Nadeau relies on.

Well I guess there's a reason economics was called the "dismal science" -- what a joke!!

Now then this man is BANNED from Central America -- why?

ihscslnews.org...

The National Labor Committees highest profile campaign began when Charles Kernaghan testified before Congress that 13-year old girls in Honduras where being forced to work 13 hours shifts under armed guards for the meager pay of 31 cents an hour.

Yeah I got my University to join the Workers Rights Consortium -- so that there would be nonprofit independent monitoring of human rights abuses in the apparel industry....

And guess what? The Supreme Court has to decide if a University can boycott companies -- because it might be a violation of the Commerce Clause!!

www.youtube.com...

Mickey Mouse goes to Haiti - the expose on sweatshops in the Western hemisphere -- enjoy!

Guess it's time to read this research:

www.poclad.org...

www.veoh.com...

Well have fun with this new material -- I wrote a paper called the "Incorrect Supply and Demand Model" for my environmental economics calls at the UW-Madison -- and I've taken microeconomics, agricultural economics, and other economic courses.

So I'm well aware of the various arguments for or against the supply and demand free model --

For example -- consider this debate between Naomi Klein and Milton Friedman:

www.democracynow.org...

Talk about a "sacred cow" -- it's a cult!!

vimeo.com...

Or this great documentary:

video.google.com...#

The corporation. That reminds me of this book:

David T. Bazelon -- the Paper Economy:

www.amazon.com...

Oh yeah reading these books is a pain -- I realize -- here's another recent documentary on the China "Free market" with the West:

topdocumentaryfilms.com...

Santa's Workshop -- an excellent investigation.

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

Oh I forgot John Perkins' former professional "economic feasibility consultant" -- i.e. ECONOMIC HIT MAN for the empire:

www.linktv.org...

Nice documentary there (save you some neuron power instead of reading his books).

Along those lines of global economic pillage is Susan George's classic:

www.amazon.com...=ntt_at_ep_dpt_11

How the Other Half DIES.

And on why the Free Market is a joke in terms of world hunger:

books.google.com... S9TzLcKztgeL8oHwCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CCkQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=food%20first&f=false

www.share-international.org...

In an interview, Brewster Kneen, Canadian economist and author, calls market forces-driven agriculture a failed system and suggests a return to local farming

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

Let's not forget Professor Alfred Crosby's classic -- Ecological Imperialism:

www.amazon.com...

Or perhaps Pentagon Capitalism would be more to your liking?

www.amazon.com...

books.google.com... 0nOTQG-0EBLLoA&hl=en&ei=WkulS7b2KoS1tger6dWNCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CBUQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=&f=false

The manic logic of global capitalism -- William Greider.

Oh this one is excellent

www.amazon.com...=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0521846773&pf_rd_m=AT VPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0H9B591KTS2ZDRSKV6J6

Fiction, Famine and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland

Masterful job. 2003

Here's his summary of his book -- excellent research!!

www.mindfully.org...

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

Here's an underground classic -- learn what "grandma eyes" are in Taiwan:

www.amazon.com...=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269124421&sr=1-4

reply to post by drew hempel


I'm not worried that about supporting the free market at all, there's no need to comfort me by suggesting that I am one of a large group of fools and therefore safe in numbers.

I support the systm which allows me to live well, and which is the basis for the most successful economic enterprise in the history of man. I'm aware that there are anti-capitalism books. I watched "The Corporation" a day or two before you started this thread. The existance of anti-capitalist media does not prove that it is wrong, just like the existance of pro-Nazi media does not prove that the Nazi agenda is right. Even if that line of reasoning were correct, there exists a tremendous body of pro-capitalist, pro-free market work.

Reading books that argue against the position which I comfortably hold is not painful for me. Tell me the best one out of your list and I'll go buy it, I'm not interested in five thousand pages of liberals complaining about how poor people got the short end of the stick. You mentioned the Economist's review of one of those books, and how they left quantum chaos out of the free market conversation. Doesn't that make sense? Should we really have to appeal to quantum chaos in order to understand that the value of something ought to be what people will pay for it?

As always, I ask you, what do you propose as an alternative? That we let Michael Moore dictate the details of our economic policy? That we join the list of impotent or failed socialist states?

How can you completely ignore the successes of our system? The material quality of life in the United States, the power of our country to exert global influence, our GDP. What do you make of all this? Do you really look at socialist countries and think that they are the ones who have it figured out? Isn't it clear that those countries couldn't even exist without a congenial super-power also existing? Or do you support some system which hasn't been tried yet? What about the technological, artistic, and scholarly achievements that have been facilitated by our system? Do you know how many billions of dollars of foreign aid the US gives out every year? Aren't our successes as a nation indicative of doing something right?

Without pointing me towards a library, how do you - yourself - get around the fundamental logic of the free market? Supply and demand? These ideas are so simple and intuitively rational that I think they must be hard to argue with without invoking things like "quantum chaos." But I'm interested if you have anything.

Ever read any Ayn Rand? That's where I point you to find the ideas which I think are correct, as long as we're pointing one another towards books the other one probably won't read. As I said I'll check out whichever book you think best disputes the free market, and I'll watch the debate you linked.

OnceReturned summed up my thoughts on this 10 times better than I could have.

The only thing I can really add is how this subject gets EXTREMELY sensationalized every time it surfaces.

Yes, there are some of the MEGA wealthy that pay very little percentage wise. But even as 'the rich' is a small percentage out of our society, the group of these mega wealthy people is an even smaller percentage. Really, it's MINUSCULE in comparison to both the statistics of the general population and of the 'wealthy.'

MOST 'wealthy' people pay an extreme amount of taxes. Upwards of 60% when you count income tax, sales tax, property tax, etc.

The .00000000001% (exaggerating of course) of the MEGA wealthy population who get all the loopholes are unfairly lumped with those that pay out the behind in taxes. But it's made out to say that we need to raise taxes on the wealthy (ALL of them) when they already pay so much.

These people making $250,000-$1,000,000 a year are not the problem. They pay out the nose, believe me.

reply to post by OnceReturned


tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com...

What would Ayn Rand expect to happen? On the one hand we have the hot shot executives, on the other hand the schmucks who own stock in these banks. Would Ayn Rand expect that the executives would put aside their ambition, their lust for success, their greed, in order to benefit shareholders who are too dumb to even know what a credit default swap is? Not for a second; Ayn Rand would watch the Wall Street big boys run roughshod over their shareholders' interests and be applauding them every step of the way. That is how the game is played. If Greenspan didn't think the Wall Street crew would rip off their shareholders for every last penny, then he was not a worthy disciple of Ayn Rand.

Greenspan was a big Randian which reminds me of the great professor Ravi Batra:

www.ravibatra.com...

The Myth of Free Trade

www.amazon.com...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269124697&sr=1-1

www.amazon.com...

Greenspan's Fraud

Milton Friedman's LIES are taught as official economics -- that's what I had to learn in my high school economics class!

So this b.s. is the mainstream propaganda -- even national public radio won't point out the obvious about Cargill for example.

Vandana Shiva is a great choice:

Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply by Vandana Shiva


Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit by Vandana Shiva (Paperback - Feb. 2002)

antimiltonfriedman.blogspot.com...

Milton Friedman was not merely a hypocrite but a liar as well. He spent his twenty post-retirement years as resident ideologue at the corporate-funded Hoover Institution - a functionary for corporate capital and American imperialism. he provided the theoretical underpinnings for many of the policies put into practice by President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pinochet in the 1980s.

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Political Economy of Human Rights) (Hardcover)

That's an excellent Noam Chomsky book

www.amazon.com...

Guess you can just ignore it since he's an anarchist. haha.

How convenient -- here try this Chomsky book PUBLISHED BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS:

www.amazon.com...=sr_1_45?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269125212&sr=1-45

World Orders: Old and New

I quoted from that book when I was working on the sweatshop issue at the U of MN -- debating the whole Free Market brainwashed "leaders."