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I remember some time ago in D&D somebody posted a study or an article that went through how much of the economy is involved in protecting wealth from theft (whether it's direct loss-prevention or management) and it being something like a quarter of the economy. Does anyone remember that paper or happen to have it?
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Feb 21, 2013 14:53
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Waaaah the Christians are out to get me
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shots shots shots posted:Think about how many unbanked people we could help in this country too if we didn't require bank accounts to be tied to a verifiable ID. We should probably make sure all sorts of vital services are available to people without ID. Banking is not a fundamental right guaranteed by the US constitution, this isn't hard, son. I mean I'm okay with a bunch of things requiring ID if ID is funded by the state.
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Feb 25, 2013 11:14
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Stalins Moustache posted:"No depictions or rape, beastiality, necrophilia, pedophilia or other sick stuff" The key thing to remember with pornography is, assuming you're coming from a free speech perspective, is why the production of things like paedophilia porn is illegal. It's not just because "it's icky and we don't like it," it's that one must break the law in order to produce the footage. Same with bestiality - animals cannot legally consent. I think the legal rationale for necrophilia is desecration of a corpse, but I'm not too familiar with that. It's why there's such a legal shitstorm around "loli porn" - animated porn that clearly depicts children; strictly, it shouldn't be illegal, since it doesn't require any illegal activity to occur to actually produce. That hasn't stopped several governments prosecuting it like child porn, though. Ultimately, what is your goal with pornography laws? Is it to avoid an incentive to create undesirable material, or is it a method of social control? In terms of "other sick stuff" where is the line drawn? What separates out a really hard bondage video (which can get pretty nasty, albeit entirely consensual) from a rape scene? Like I said before, is the ban on things which simply LOOK LIKE the described situations, or does it actually have to be the act in question? On who should the responsibility of judgement fall in these cases? Pornography's such a varied thing that it's very difficult to make a set of rules for what is and isn't okay; it's hard enough to even define "what is pornography?" Ultimately you have to work out what your goal is, and work from there.
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Feb 28, 2013 14:16
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Install Gentoo posted:I know several people like that. Honestly I think they're really weird for it, but I doubt they're insincere about their beliefs. I also doubt they're the only people in the world who feel that way! Would you also say shelter isn't a fundamental human need because some people prefer to sleep under the stars, or that sex isn't a fundamental human need because asexual people exist? A few outliers don't invalidate his point in anything but the most semantic way.
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May 31, 2013 01:53
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Install Gentoo posted:It's worse if you don't get sick and better if you do. Hence it evens out to about the same - someone on minimum wage in Australia is also living well below the poverty line This is false. shrike82 posted:Australia's moving towards the US in terms of privatizing healthcare and pension funds (DB to DC) so I'm not sure pointing to them as a model will make much sense given that they toe the neoliberal line. Oh hey it's Shrike talking about things he doesn't know the first loving thing about, again. We are not privatising our government healthcare or pension services. What you are referring to is private health cover and compulsory superannuation. Private health cover has existed alongside Medicare since Fraser (some 3-4 years after it was introduced, and we've had compulsory superannuation as an addition to the aged pension since Keating. Our big issue in terms of liberalism is our state services like electricity and water being privatised, not our social security. There's also some systemic funding issues, mostly due to the fact that 12 years of loving Howard pissed away the 90s boom on tax cuts and our current government refuses to tax mining corporations. Also, people talking about the Australian minimum wage really need to leave the 15 dollar figure behind. It's the nominal federal minimum but nine times out of ten it's immaterial since the minimum wage for a given industry is set by the contract the union has negotiated with the employer and enforced by the government as an award wage.
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Jun 2, 2013 12:32
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wateroverfire posted:FWIW, if 9/10 is about right then if the president is able to get a $9.00 + inflation minimum wage law passed about the same percentage of working Americans will be making minimum wage as working Australians. I don't know if 9/10 is entirely correct but very few jobs in Australia besides maybe fast food service pay minimum wage. Even Class 1 retail "who may have limited experience, and work may be performed under close supervision using established practices, procedures and instructions." earn slightly over min wage, about 16 dollars an hour. Food and drink service actually earn more. Most awards also have clauses that state that pay must rise each year of experience.
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Jun 2, 2013 15:40
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Freudian posted:Wait, I'm not sure I understand. The logic behind giving companies tax breaks is that they'll just outsource or migrate to cheaper climates otherwise, yes? But mining operations can't outsource. The rocks don't move. You have to have operations in the country with the actual resources. So why give them tax breaks to persuade them to stay in Australia when they fundamentally cannot leave Australia? Because it's political suicide to try and tax the mining companies, because they along with our complicit media have run a very successful propaganda campaign presenting themselves as the lifeblood of the country and that if you tax them they won't be able to CREATE AUSTRALIAN JORBS. Most Australians are under the impression they account for some 30%+ of GDP and workforce when the reality is 10% GDP and a vanishingly small amount of the workforce.
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Jun 3, 2013 02:45
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shrike82 posted:And I've yet to see anyone mention the fact that Australian's lurching rightwards so we should expect to see the government strip the country of overly generous welfare and overly burdensome taxes over the next decade or so. Not as much as you'd think. Economically, our right-wing party is about on par with the US Democrats. The last time they tried to touch industrial relations law (i.e. collective bargaining and worker rights in general) they got thrown out on their arses so thoroughly the Prime Minister lost his seat for the first time in our history. A lot of the hay the Liberals make, politically, is in middle-class and corporate welfare as opposed to straight-up budget cuts and austerity, and this time around they haven't got any Commonwealth assets to sell off to maintain a budget surplus as they do it. Australians still know what side their bread is buttered on and the Liberals are trying really hard to pretend everyone will be better off under them. The unions are still powerful, as well. Added into that we're seeing a significant rise in independent MPs and the two most prominent minor parties, the Greens and Katter's Australia Party, both of which are economically left. The Right as America understands it is actually vanishingly small here.
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Jun 5, 2013 04:26
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A social democracy still relies on the mechanisms of capitalism to function. Land, factories and machines are still privately traded, stock in companies can still be owned privately, but legislation is used to account for the inherent instability of capitalism by redistributing money through taxation and welfare. The state sits parallel to the economic system to pull it back into line. Socialism is a different way of organising the economy overall, where workers are entitled to a share of the profits their company makes commensurate with some agreed-upon metric of wealth created, ideally equal to the amount of labour they have performed for the company. E: companies are, of course, not the only way of organising a theoretical socialist economy but they're a common one Picture it this way. Social democracy is where workers go to a privately-owned company and work for a wage, and the government takes some of the profits as taxation and doles it out as social spending. Socialism is where the workers own the company jointly and are paid a percentage of its profits, rather than a fixed wage. That's very simplistic but it's an illustration. The issue socialists tend to have with social democracies, besides the worrying tendency of social democrats to embrace fascism when presented with a choice between it and socialism, is that capitalism is inherently unstable by socialist thought, and so is any system built on it. The New Deal is used as an example of how hard-won concessions by the state to labour can be eroded by the constant application of a system of low-key propaganda and the gradual concentration in the hands of those with money. Quantum Mechanic fucked around with this message at 13:01 on Jun 6, 2013 |
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Jun 6, 2013 12:50
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Chantilly Say posted:What if the jointly-owned company performs poorly due to faults other than the worker's performance? You're right, nothing about socialism precludes a social safety net. The role of the state in a socialist society is debatable but most socialists are generally in favour of some sort of basic stipend. Chantilly Say posted:One problem with capitalism is that it's not actually very good at allocating resources 'fairly', and making wages a slice of the profits of a company doesn't seem to solve that problem. Now, any socialist or strong social-dem country would have social safety institutions that would alleviate some of the relation between a company's performance and worker compensation, but I don't really see how a jointly-owned company would be so incompatible with social democracy. It isn't, worker cooperatives can and do operate within capitalist economies. The idea of socialism is that that is not the exception, but the norm - factories, land and machines, and general funds for investment (the "means of production" and "capital") are owned and allocated publicly and workers are entitled to the full profits of their labour from using them.
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Jun 6, 2013 13:18
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wateroverfire posted:Even from a Marxian perspective it makes no sense to say he's entitled to 100% of the profits. They may not justly belong to the owner, but they can't be said to justly belong to him either. Yes? What's your point?
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Jun 6, 2013 14:58
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KernelSlanders posted:If the household created its own currency, say offering homebucks to the children in exchange for chores and letting them turn them back in for TV hours then the household would be in the same situation with homebucks as the US federal government is with dollars. The household's ability to spend in homebucks is limited only by the ability of the economy (its children) to produce real goods and services (do chores). This is a fantastic analogy and one I'm going to use later on.
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Jul 30, 2013 06:24
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Zuhzuhzombie!! posted:Help them figure out that "governance" will exist regardless of whether or not it's government as we know it or the stereotypical dystopian nightmare. Libertarians have a hard time grasping the concept that the destruction of public government doesn't leave some void that will not be filled. Most Libertarians will tell you "Oh I don't want NO government, I just want government to stick solely to guaranteeing contracts." At which point the question is do they believe that government should have a monopoly on force in order to do so, and if so (since that's the only possible way) what stops said minarchist government from falling prey to regulatory capture in the same way as a neoliberal government.
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Aug 6, 2013 23:55
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:They'll be contractually obligated not to Honestly not untrue. There's a lot of unrestrained constitution worship and the seeming belief that a constitution can form a set of instructions on how to run a state and not require any interpretation whatsoever.
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Aug 7, 2013 14:16
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Pierat posted:Here's the thing. Those effects can happen if the minimum wage is set too high. A business would close if the minimum wage sets the marginal cost of labor above the value of the marginal product of labor. But, there is a 'correct' minimum wage that doesn't create these effects. This is a fantastic post that explains the dynamics, benefits and downsides of the minimum wage beautifully. I personally like the Australian system where the minimum wage is bargained separately for each industry by their representative union. All the benefits of the minimum wage without the distortive effect of making it one-size-fits-all. Quantum Mechanic fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Aug 25, 2013 |
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Aug 25, 2013 23:00
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Does someone have the nice effort post writeup on why the government budget cannot be compared to a household budget? I should really save these things. There are three major reasons why the government budget can't be compared to a household budget - a) governments can print their own money, b) governments can borrow money for absurdly low interest rates and c) government spending is effectively a closed system. a) is fairly straightforward. In the case of the US, its debts are issued in US dollars. Since it controls the supply of US dollars, it by definition cannot go bankrupt assuming regular function of Congress. Obviously it can if Congress resoundingly poops itself like it is currently, but that's a separate issue. There is no structural means by which the US can go bankrupt. The US also controls its revenues. Households, on the other hand, cannot print their own money and have very limited means of deciding to bring more money in. b) is a little more abstract. Bond rates on US debt fluctuate, but recently have been hovering around 2.5%. That means when the US borrows money, it pays 2.5% interest. There is nearly nothing, aside from tax cuts on the very rich and changes in corporate tax rates, that does not generate a greater economic return than 2.5%. The US could practically use money borrowed at 2.5% to pay people to dig holes and fill them up and still come out ahead. Obviously it's far better if it's used on substantial investment like infrastructure, or jobseeker benefits that get people back into paid work faster, but nearly anything short of burning it for warmth will have better returns than 2.5%. Imagine if your household had a managed fund with 5% returns, and a credit card with a 2.5% rate and million-dollar limit. You'd be absolutely mad not to max out the card and stick it in the fund, because even after paying the interest on the card you're STILL making 25 grand a year for absolutely nothing. Obviously that's very simplistic and there are certainly things the government can do that either don't generate returns or ruin their ability to borrow at such low rates, but that's the broad sketch explanation. There's also a limitation to this paradigm (it assumes infinite growth from finite resources) but that's not the problem conservatives have with it. c) is sort of related to b. When governments spend money, it doesn't "disappear." It isn't "wasted." Every single dollar the government spends domestically stays within the system and is spent. When the government, for example, buys muffins from a local bakery for its meetings, that money stays within the local area. The bakery owners spend it on, say, gas money. The guy running the gas station spends it on a new TV from a local outlet. The lady who owns the department store spends it on her membership to the local country club, and so on until it rises back up and is taxed again by the government. When a household spends money, it leaves the household system entirely and goes off to somewhere else. The money is "gone."
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Oct 3, 2013 02:51
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Strudel Man posted:On what basis are you asserting this? Keep in mind that 'returns' in this sense refer not to the effect on national GDP, but the effect on tax revenues. I am extremely dubious that "nearly anything" the government spends money on will see a net benefit of 2.5% by this estimation, or indeed break even. Assuming you're analysing this from a neoliberal perspective, GDP is what matters. The tax revenues don't matter ultimately, because the higher the GDP, the more money there is available to borrow and hence the lower their rates. The government's purpose isn't to make money, from this perspective. Again, this isn't inherently my perspective (I think governments should exercise considerably more public ownership than they do and that their purpose is to guarantee prosperity, not necessarily GDP) but it's the accepted paradigm.
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Oct 3, 2013 04:52
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 14:50 |
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Pierat posted:Oh, and a really big part of our high healthcare costs is that Americans have bad health. lovely diets and unhealthy lifestyles and poverty and all that. It's a more uphill battle for ues than other developed countries. Naive comparisons to other countries with single payer aren't going to prove any points because there's a big omitted variable bias. Australians are tremendously fat and unhealthy, consume massive amounts of fatty fast food, soft drinks and alcohol, smoke like chimneys and, for a not inconsiderable period had an obesity rate HIGHER than the United States. Diabetes, heart disease and other obesity-linked diseases are rampant. Do not try and pretend healthcare in the US costs more because you're unhealthy, because somehow Australian UHC manages to be half the price while taking care of a population making an excellent effort at killing themselves through fat and booze.
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Oct 12, 2013 14:00
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