rican mistake of confusing Socialism with Communism. The Socialists threw o ut the proto-Communist in 1870, correctly - and remarkably accurately - pro phesying that the "leading role of the party" would lead to a worse dictato rship than any around in 1870.
etting grain out of farmers and distributing it to the cities than any cent rally planned economy can manage. There are aspects of life where the untra mmelled free market doesn't work as well - remember Enron?
But at what cost is this socialism you favor and how does it get paid back? I was looking at some figures for the national debt of various countries a nd it looks dismal. The debt for the US for example is 52K per capita while the UK is about three times that at 160K. China is fairly low at 2K. It bo thers me a little bit that I owe my country 52K, but I don't worry about it much since I know somebody else will pay it for me. So, I guess I'm a soci alist.
merican mistake of confusing Socialism with Communism. The Socialists threw out the proto-Communist in 1870, correctly - and remarkably accurately - p rophesying that the "leading role of the party" would lead to a worse dicta torship than any around in 1870.
getting grain out of farmers and distributing it to the cities than any ce ntrally planned economy can manage. There are aspects of life where the unt rammelled free market doesn't work as well - remember Enron?
k?
It's a more expensive system than minimalist capitalism, but it pays for it self by supporting a more productive work-force. Germany and Scandinavia ar en't economic basket cases - Germany is out-exporting everybody except Chin a which has something like fifteen times the population.
and it looks dismal. The debt for the US for example is 52K per capita whil e the UK is about three times that at 160K. China is fairly low at 2K. It b others me a little bit that I owe my country 52K, but I don't worry about i t much since I know somebody else will pay it for me. So, I guess I'm a soc ialist.
Probably not. Socialists have a better understanding of what national debt represents.
That debt is balanced by national assets, which are harder to quantify - no body is going to buy up a road network and ship it someplace else, but its hard to imagine an advanced industrial country which hasn't invested heavil y in roads, sewers, schools and universities and the like.
Why don't you pay some attention on stuff that likely to present a problem?
Heartening to see that you're at last accepting that all the critics you mention are actually different people rather than just one person using multiple sock puppets to argue against you. It can be looked on as the first step on the long path to recovery for you. I wish you luck in your journey.
"Critics" rather over-dignifies their role - and yours. I see them more as deranged obsessives, venting their delusions in public. More obsessive bore s than gibbering idiots, but definitely on that continuum
ng
You've got that the wrong way around. AlwaysWrong is a collective label for several anonymous nitwits. In applying it to different people I'm not sugg esting that they are multiple sock puppets of the same person, but rather v arious representative examples of the same kind of mental defect, who happe n to exhibit much the same kind of stereotyped behaviour. The group does in clude several people who post under different aliases, which change from ti me to time, none of whom deserve the attention required to keep their ident ities distinct.
I'm sure your experience would be instructive, if it were relevant.
AlwaysWrong is a name given to a poster who posts under a variety of pseudo nyms. Paul Burridge isn't the poster who usually attracted the label, but h e fits the type.
I see it as similar to "right-wing nitwit", which is a term of abuse that f its several of our more ideologically blinkered regulars.
Paul Burridge claims to have been posting since 1993, but he obviously hasn 't been posting over the same pseudonym for all that time. Fred Bloggs is w orth keeping track of through his various pseudonyms, but none of the other s has earned anything like that much respect.
You mean the "type" who can do basic arithmetic, can do simple sums and who knows that you can't rack up a huge national debt and print money indefinitely without the whole thing collapsing in the worst possible way at some point? If so, I plead guilty.
Slowman is lying. "AlwaysWrong" was a name given to an *individual* (by John Larkin) because he is/was, well, always wrong. I'd been calling him DimBulb for some time, for the same reason (though one of his strange assertions was that a 100W heater heats a closed room faster than a 100W light bulb - hence DimBulb). Because he used a different nym each week (usually quite like yours, actually), he is/was also called Nymbecile. Slowman is trying to cover his tracks. Again.
Bill, even you should agree that if someone takes a dollar from you for a purpose and spends *even one cent* otherwise, that's fraud. We're talking about Warren justifying taking a dollar based on the
3% we spend on roads (and transportation).
If you misunderstood that, consider the matter corrected.
Isn't it tedious always being wrong?
Education and police are local expenses. Not federal.
To the extent Fauxchahontasp /wants/ to make them federal, it's to concentrate power, not improve services.
Defense is an enumerated power, one everyone's agreed to. IOW, explicitly agreed to; legitimate.
But yes, like all things concentrated in the federal government it becomes politicized, inefficient, and corrupt in execution if not in outright immorality.
Since you're (rightly) complaining about it for defense, why do you then turn and want the same lot in charge of EVERYTHING? So they can turn it all political, inefficient, and divert the monies to their supporters? That's madness, or worse.
Are you in any position to know? I mean, factless, without any information, study or understanding; without inquiry, or curiosity; wrong on the facts you do cite, and relying on myth and fairy-tales, how could you?
Most of these exchanges comprise people trying to convince you the moon's not made of cheese, thus proving to you they're working for Big Oil.
I'm surprised anybody could mistake one for the other. Their styles, vocabulary, sophistication, interests, prose, etc.--completely distinct to anyone with a soul.
(E.g., Cursitor hasn't even mentioned AW's favorite subject, toilets.)
t his preconceptions persuade him to say some remarkably silly things.
husiastic about big government and concentrated power than I am, but he is in favour of the government collecting enough in taxes to do a decent job o f feeding the poor, looking after their health care, and making sure that t heir kids get educated.
central control of the economy.
It's obviously centralized control of the economy--that's an objective fact.
e work force.
We already do that, have, forever. That's not the same as trying to rectify inequality with redistribution. The latter doesn't work, doesn't fix why poor people are poor.
Instead we've created powerful financial incentives that encourage the behaviors that make people poor, and a government-poverty complex that thrives on servicing it.
em out, but even right wing nitwits like James Arthur have no objection whe n the same mechanism is applied to financing and running national defense f orces, police forces and road makers and road menders.
No, now they're using it for "law enforcement," and for political advantage.
tution
The old system guaranteed almost anyone could start something and prosper; the new anarchy only admits cronies.
That (thanks Obama!) causes inequality, rather than cures it.
eech. The others were education, defense and the police force.
Which leaves the principle untouched.
That's a claim, not a logical consequence - and a demented libertarian clai m at that.
a form of corporate welfare.
It looks - from a logical point of view - just like welfare. Pay now, don't get any immediate benefit, but see the benefits down the road. The fact th at even a right-wing nitwit can see the benefits doesn't give it a privileg ed status in logic.
In the Dutch Republic, the various provinces ran their own defense forces. They weren't any less corrupt than the UK's national army of the period - t hough it did help if you could keep the Stadtholder's cronies out of the a dministration( the House of Orange - effectively the monarch to whom the Du tch republic tried to deny monarchical power with limited success)
Because defense is a lot worse in the USA than in most countries. Who do yo u think that the famous pork-barrels were being bought from? The founding t ax evaders - who adjusted the 1787 constitution to make sure that they were going to keep on making loads of money out of supplying the US army - are still with you.
Other countries do a better job of keeping their defense spending under con trol. Not wonderful, but good enough.
The madness is in your sentimental attachment to the 1787 constitution. It was never very good, if better than what came before it, but it's MS/DOS to Germany's Linux.
Easily. I have the advantage of not wearing your ideological blinkers, whic h make the perfection of the 1787 Constitution a not-to-be-thought-about gi ven.
Unblinkered, you don't have to put too many facts together to get the big p icture. I'm curious enough to have read what Chomsky has to say on the subj ect, and acute enough to know that he's the last of the anarcho-syndicalist s and as blinkered in his way as you are in yours.
I'm sure that it looks that way to you. Your own particular moon (the 1787 US constitution) *is* made of green cheese (which has now gotten exceedingl y ripe), and your opinions are convenient to Big Oil and the rest of the fo ssil-carbon extraction industry. Sadly, I've not been taken in by the propa ganda that has suckered you.
krw is being boringly literal - again - and asserting that anybody who doesn't share the smallest detail of his very limited world view is a liar.
krw would be an archetypical right-wing nitwit is he wasn't so stupid that even the other right-wing nitwits have noticed.
DimBulb (not a name he ever posted under) was the archetypical AlwaysWrong, but the trouble with giving allegorical type-names to people is that other people come along who fit the type well enough to deserve the label.
merican mistake of confusing Socialism with Communism. The Socialists threw out the proto-Communist in 1870, correctly - and remarkably accurately - p rophesying that the "leading role of the party" would lead to a worse dicta torship than any around in 1870.
getting grain out of farmers and distributing it to the cities than any ce ntrally planned economy can manage. There are aspects of life where the unt rammelled free market doesn't work as well - remember Enron?
k? I was looking at some figures for the national debt of various countries and it looks dismal. The debt for the US for example is 52K per capita whi le the UK is about three times that at 160K. China is fairly low at 2K. It bothers me a little bit that I owe my country 52K, but I don't worry about it much since I know somebody else will pay it for me. So, I guess I'm a so cialist.
It's a lot worse than that.
If we guess the typical American's promised, say, $1,200 a month in Social Security from 65 to 79, that's $202k apiece, or 300e6 x $1,200 * 12 = $60T, current dollars.
Throw $100k apiece in Medicare, and we're up to $300k apiece, or $90T, on top of the national debt ($17T).
THAT is the amount we'd have to have, today, in cash, to pay for all these promises.
We don't have it, so we have to finance it.
Now, throw that load on those few paying net federal taxes-- quickly, while they're still job-locked!--spread the financing over their useful plantation life (it's for the common good), and, um, it's impossible. (I get ~$682k in taxes per taxpayer, if overhead and waste are zero, and half are net taxpayers.)
That's just Medicare and Social Security, without defense, roads, feducation[sic],...
So what the heck--throw in Obamacare and a free car.
You don't have it - today - because of the GFC brought on by the bankers th at you think can do no wrong. You don't believe in Keynesian economics eith er, so you treat the pump-priming deficit-funded stimulus required to rescu e your economy from your bankers mistakes as a permanent Democratic extrava gance. Great rhetoric. Lousy logic.
In other words you'd like to post as "James Arthur"? He doesn't understand or believe in Keynesian economics either, and has yet to demonstrate an appreciation of the fact that Keynesian deficit-funded pump-priming stimulus stops as soon as the economy is running close to capacity.
The Great Depression wiped out 25% of the US economy - factories closed, businesses bankrupted - which created a lot more of a problem than the current level of national debt does. Since the US dollar deflated by about 30% in the process, the then US national debt was - in real terms
- a lot bigger after the Depression, which is an equally undesirable outcome, and you were paying it from a smaller economy.
See if you can study up enough to do slightly more complicated arithmetic.
Not being AlwaysWrong - as a person - doesn't stop Paul Burridge from earni ng a right to the label by being reliably out of touch with reality. You pe rsistently post as "James Arthur" so regular readers of this group know tha t you are equally far out of touch with reality without anybody having to l abel you as such.
BBC documentary on TV tonight states China is in fact - and contrary to popular belief - deeply in the doo-doo and at huge risk of defaulting on its massive debt. Perhaps you can view it on iplayer. It's called 'This World - How China Fooled the World' - pretty scary! #bbcthisworld
I'm actually quite sympathetic to Keynesian economics and it's unfortunate that Keynes has become something of a hate figure among many people and blamed for all sorts of ills not least of which the huge levels of national debt of many leading countries. But whereas Keynes' approach had promise, it was totally crippled in practice by arithmetically inept lefties like yourself who believe money grows on a magic tree and if you run out you just print more. Or issue more bonds; don't worry if you can't balance the budget at the end of a cycle; just bung the deficit on the national debt. Now we're finally starting to see where that approach eventually leads to.
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