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Typical Pubbie posted:I've been invited to attend a presentation on experimental economics at my university. The people who invite me to these sort of things are college libertarians who want me to attend because they want a debate. Otherwise it's just a boring presentation by the head of the university's economics department. I'm usually happy to oblige arguing against things like Sweatshops Are Good and Minimum Wage: Maximum Rage, because you can pick their arguments apart with basic logic and research, but I don't know anything about experimental economics. Here's a video I found: So, Economics makes all sorts theoretical predictions about how people behave when solving particular problems, and those predictions are difficult to test in the real world because of all the confounding factors. Experimental economics is about creating lab experiments that duplicate those problems in a controlled environment (the lab) so as to (in theory) isolate how people actually act and use those results to evaluate the theory. It's a pretty cool discipline that is creating challenges to core assumptions central to economics, such as this paper. There are a bunch of really interesting results on the roles of fairness and reciprocity, bidding behavior in auctions, and other things. Google Scholar will do you right in finding many of them.
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Apr 9, 2013 18:48
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Gourd of Taste posted:Well no. I'm not saying they don't need it, I'm saying that it's something that has to be substantiated one way or the other. Sociological consensus seems to be that privacy (or intimacy, which I think of as an expression of privacy? but maybe that's not accurate?) is a basic human need, so I'd want to know more about the specific people that don't need that stuff! Is whether there are people who have no need for privacy whatsoever something we need to be concerned about, though? When people say "I've got nothing to hide so I don't care if the government monitors X" I doubt they have in mind for X to be "the interior of my home, with hidden cameras" or things of that sort.
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May 29, 2013 20:17
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Zeitgueist posted:The problem is this is used as an argument for everyone, instead of saying that giving up privacy should be voluntary. How would that work, though? The point of government intruding on privacy is not to spy on a bunch of people who volunteer to let the government watch them do innocuous things.
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May 29, 2013 20:55
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Zeitgueist posted:Exactly my point. I'm not following you. What I had in mind is that the people the government really wants to monitor (because they're doing things that are illegal, presumably) are not going to volunteer for monitoring. The people who would volunteer would by and large not be worth survailing.
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May 29, 2013 22:22
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shots shots shots posted:There are plenty of examples of countries with high minimum wages, and things tend to be more expensive in those countries, although it depends on the specific item. A good example of this is Australia. Also, the size of the wage increase matters. All of the minimum wage literature has studied responses to increases that are fairly small, in markets where the minimum wage wasn't an effective price floor. So depending on what you have in mind for a minimum wage increase or living wage, the research may not say anything much to support the idea that it won't affect anything. The charts you link to are junk (find actual econometric studies instead), as is the economic explanation given by the guy you're arguing with...basically you guys are just banging your political priors up against eachother.
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May 31, 2013 14:22
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2banks1swap.avi posted:So just how much higher are things in Australia priced compared to other nations of similar GDP per capita, then? It's complicated to make clean comparisons for obvious reasons, but $15 AUS has about the same purchasing power as $9 US.
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May 31, 2013 15:13
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KernelSlanders posted:That possibility seems counterintuitive. Am I missing something obvious here? Yes. That money isn't created, it's redistributed from other parts of the economy. So some people get higher wages but the companies that employ them have less to spend on investment, for hiring, to pay through to the owners, etc. It could happen the way you're describing but to get there you have to make assumptions about how the money gets spread around and what it would have been used for otherwise that at the very least are contestable.
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May 31, 2013 15:21
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Zeitgueist posted:Regardless, prices don't matter so much if there's a good safety net and livable wages. Prices don't matter so much if you make livable wages, but what constitutes livable wages depends on prices. How do we resolve this circular argument?
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May 31, 2013 17:35
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Zeitgueist posted:Tie wage minimums to price indexes and beef up our social safety nets and labor representation? What I meant is that statement made no sense, and begs the question we were discussing.
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May 31, 2013 17:48
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Quantum Mechanic posted: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. 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.
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Jun 2, 2013 15:17
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Install Gentoo posted:This is part of what I was trying to get across - if you're stuck at the actual base minimum in an Australian job it's unusual to say the least, and it also doesn't tend to be a status you'll retain for an extended time period. FWIW even without officially codified wage progressions, it works like this in the U.S. too.
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Jun 2, 2013 20:11
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Mans posted:If you don't understand that the massive amounts of capital that are acumulated by said private individuals and corporations cause massive and crushing poverty in the third world and destroy the social fabric of the first world then i don't know in which world you're living. People who haven't internalized leftist ideology tend to find that description unconvincing. What about the point that accumulated capital isn't sitting in a vault somewhere? That it mostly represents assets that contribute to the quality of life of ordinary people by, for example, producing things they want or need?
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Jun 4, 2013 20:30
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2banks1swap.avi posted:You did say that there's a coincidence of ultra-rich with a higher quality of life, but correlation is not causation, and industrialization preceded ultra-wealth. Those things he calls assets generally wouldn't exist had not some persons or people decided to take the risk and make the effort to build them up - People who later became wealthy (or more wealthy) because their projects were successful and enriching lives.
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Jun 5, 2013 14:30
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Zeitgueist posted:Tons of people take risks, and don't get wealthy. Tons of people get wealthy without risk. Tons of people get wealthy despite the failure of their projects(because they enrich themselves at the cost of the business. Tons of people get rich without enriching lives. That all sounds great except for being rhetorical bullshit that doesn't address the point. Even if some people get wealthy "without risk", whatever that means, business formation is risky and that risk has to be compensated or people won't ante up to do it. And I'm sorry, but for the most part workers do not take anything like those kinds of risks. Showing up to do a job for a wage is not taking a risk.
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Jun 5, 2013 17:47
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eSports Chaebol posted:It is still possible to reward entrepreneurial risk with a potential payoff that is greater than normal wages would be, but still less than all the money which is the current system. Saying entrepreneurs deserve more is fine argument to make, but it doesn't logically extend to saying they deserve everything. That's a fair point. In general they don't get everything now, though. For instance, look through the summaries of industry financials on Yahoo finance. Check out the average net profit margin, which roughly approximates the percentage of sales available to pay out to owners assuming none of it is reinvested. It varies by industry (wtf, television broadcasting) but generally it's not nearly as much as a share of sales as the company pays out in wages, for instance. Zeitgueist posted:People specifically are not allowed to keep or sell the products of their labor. If you create a product using facilities supplied by someone else, and materials supplied by someone else, and you're paid for the time spent doing your part of the production, in what way would it make sense that the end product is yours? Congradulations, you can tell a just-so story about hypothetical business owners who (because it's your hypothetical) totally don't care about risks or profits. If you can find real business owners who feel that way, that might actually be something worth talking about.
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Jun 5, 2013 20:37
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Zeitgueist posted:And if you pay me 10 bucks for a chair that you're going to sell for 100, you've paid me less than the value of my labor. If you can make chairs for yourself and sell them for 100 then the value of your labor is $100. If you need my tools, my supplies, my distribution channels, and wages out of my pocket to make chairs, your labor is not worth the final sale price of $100. Sorry, but LTV is ill conceived.
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Jun 5, 2013 20:43
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Zeitgueist posted:If your labor is not necessary, why are you getting paid to do it again? It's one component of the production and exchange of a good, for which you get compensated through wages. All the other components are necessary and valuable, including the owner's role of bringing everything together and supplying the capital. Zeitgueist posted:You're the one creating hypotheticals where everyone is a rational actor. I've given you examples where risk or profit is not a major concern, such as non-profits. Um.. Risk and profit (not called that, but work around a grant-seeking institution or one with an endowment and you'll find it's the same thing) are absolutely a concern for supposed non profits. Those things are relevant to keeping the lights on over the medium-long term, not just to paying out owners.
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Jun 5, 2013 20:55
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Aeolius posted:...Did you just dismiss Marxian economics because of an implication that it has nothing to say about capital? No... I'm saying that LTV, if it is valid, applies at the macro scale. It's the statement that looking at the economy as a whole, all value is created by labor because the capital inputs necessary for production can be decomposed into their labor inputs, therefore all value comes from labor. Not saying I agree with that, and without wanting to go down that road for the umpteenth time... One the scale of an individual company, LTV doesn't hold unless there are no capital inputs. There's no way to say the workers of company X are being exploited in a Marxian sense by company X because the capital inputs supplied by the owners are doing work, and when decomposed don't (unless the firm is 100% vertically integrated, I guess) include the labor of the workers of company X. ie: Did the woodworker making chairs in our example also make the lathe? Chop the wood? Brew the stain? If not, then he's not creating 100% of the value of the chair and it's impossible to say based on theory alone whether he's getting compensated more or less than the value he adds to the production. 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.
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Jun 6, 2013 14:44
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Zeitgueist posted:Tools are created by labor. Raw materials are refined through labor. All the tools in the world don't matter if the owner isn't a skilled carpenter. You need the labor to make something of value. Plenty of cooperatives work without an owner bringing things together...his position is superfluous at best, outside of a capitalist mindset, and easily replaced by giving a worker a managerial role. So, generally coops work like this - member 1, member 2...,member n all go into business and put up all the capital (or work, or whatever) necessary to get their thing going for whatever purpose. They share ownership and decision making in whatever way they agree to ahead of time. Workers who are hired on instead of buying in don't get in on the ownership structure. It's a special case of business ownership, not a replacement for business ownership. Zeitgueist posted:That's profit to the organization, not the owner....whom supposedly would not get into the business without the carrot of personal profit, given the risky nature of non profits. I couldn't speak to the motivations of every non-profit founder, but the ones I know do pretty well for themselves doing work it would be hard to get directly paid for, or have already made their money some other way. But even granting the point that sometimes the money is not the issue...so what? Are you trying to say most business would operate that way? That arguing that edge cases exist means something significant? edit: The distinction is nonsensical anyway. A non-profit that can't earn back its costs and some extra through grants, donations or whatever means is a nonviable entity. The owner has the same concerns whether the primary motivation is profit or not. wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Jun 6, 2013 |
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Jun 6, 2013 15:02
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:
Yeah, I misspoke a bit up above. I feel like it would be helpful to talk in terms of a formal specification. For instance: V = L + C That is, the value of a given commodity is equal to the component added by labor and the component added by capital. But capital doesn't add value because all the capital inputs are created by labor. That is to say, the value added by the capital is actually created by the labor that created the capital. So you can substitute some vaue of L for C and end up with the below: V = L1 + L2 Where L1 represents the value created by the workers creating the commodity and L2 represents the value created by the workers who created the capital inputs. If the item sells for 10% profit, how do you figure out from theory what share of that 10% represents value added by the workers who directly created the commodity and how much represents value added by the workers who created the capital inputs given that both groups add value? If you can't identify the share, how can you say that it's the L1 workers who are being underpaid for their contribution and not the L2 workers? edit: Should this maybe go back in the Marxism thread?
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Jun 6, 2013 15:51
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Of course LTV takes into account capital inputs. Let's say the value of a given product is C + L, capital input plus labour (the value added by labour, not just the value of the labour power aka the wage). Marxist 'exploitation' does not refer to the labourer not getting the entire, full value of the product (e.g. C + L = $100, the worker should receive $100 per product), but to the labourer not receiving the value added by their labour.
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Zeitgueist posted:Indeed, it's the people doing the work owning the business. Also sharing in the proceeds. I certainly don't have a problem with that, as long as those people are also fronting the capital. What I find problematic is the proposition that it's ok to let people take the risk and do the work to build a company up, then take it from them once it's established. Zeitgueist posted:You argued that businesses would not be started without the profit motive. Plenty of non-profits fail because they couldn't earn back their costs. Tons of restaurants fail because all but a few run at razor-thin margins. You made a broad statement and I'm simply pointing out that it was overly broad. Fair enough. People are not always rational, for sure. Sometimes they're rational (more or less) but happen to be wrong, too. I think business failures in general are more about that but I take your point.
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Jun 6, 2013 22:32
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Zeitgueist posted:The issue is that all the workers of the company took the risk and did the work, but not sharing in the proceeds. Nobody is saying that a 1 man company gets it taken from him and given to a different group of people. Workers that don't have capital invested in the company aren't taking the same risks as the owners. They may be risking their asses as hand feeders of genetically modified attack dogs or whatever, but for that they get paid wages and those wages constitute their share of the proceeds. It's the same problem if you're talking about a company of size 1, 10, or 10,000. It will still be a problem the day after the revolution, when the new worker-owners have to decide if they want new hires to dilute their ownership shares and find that arrangement doesn't seem as just as it did before they were in charge. It's the way worker-owned businesses and co-ops work today. Mans posted:Most of the times its banks that front up the capital so i guess in your world everything should be subservient to the interest of the banking sector because they are the ones who "front" capital. I'm sorry you live in a failing ex-colonial state that peaked over 200 years ago. =( Seriously, relocate to Brazil or something and get yourself paid.
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Jun 7, 2013 01:45
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poopinmymouth posted:Friend of mine is proposing that Roth IRAs could offset the negatives of the US moving toward such high amounts of contingent workers. I am not that familiar with Roth IRAs, and they seem immensely complex based on a rudimentary wikipedia search. A Roth IRA is basically a retirement account where you contribute after-tax money and choose how that money will be invested. When you retire and begin drawing on the account all the money you receive is tax free. There are a lot of details but that's the gist. There isn't really an argument for one over the other as they serve different purposes. Ideally you'd max out your Roth contributions throughout your career and enjoy a nice tax-free supplement to your state pension, Social Security, or other investment income when you retire. I don't know what your friend might be getting at. A Roth can help contingent workers in that it's not tied to their employer the way a 401k usually is, I guess? edit: Basically what Install Windows said.
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Feb 20, 2014 19:01
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falcon2424 posted:"Why weren't they doing it already?" That's not strictly true, though. A business might raise prices to protect its cash flow in response to a tax increase even if that decreases its total revenue. Which it might not, because if every business in a market faces a similar cost increase there's less to be gained by taking the hit in the margins to gain market share and so less likelyhood that you'll lose business to competition by passing the cost along. It could be that your customers don't have the money to buy what they were buying and/or won't stand for it, but maybe they do/will. It depends on your market.
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Apr 2, 2014 14:45
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falcon2424 posted:Can you walk me through this? I'm not sure I'm following. Are you sure you're looking at a tax on net-income rather than gross-receipts? In practice the revenue-maximizing pricing strategy for your company is contingent on your competitors' pricing and what the market is willing to pay. So depending on your particular market, it could be the case that you could all make more money if only everyone raised prices together. That's not going to be universally true but it will be often enough. Now, coordinating is hard both because it's illegal and because your competitors are greedy bastards who can't be trusted. But a tax increase provides the perfect circumstance by raising costs for everyone. A tax on net income is still a cost because of the way it impacts your cash flow. A business pays estimated taxes monthly or quarterly and sets a certain amount of cash aside for that purpose. When that estimated tax bill goes up the provision for taxes must also go up and the result is that less cash is available to pay for other things. So if taxes on your net revenue go up, the practical effect is that your monthly costs go up as well. Does that make sense?
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Apr 2, 2014 23:15
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:So I got myself into an argument after a high school acquaintance posted this lovely wank of an article using an example of a kid saying "my grandparents survived the holocaust, therefore white privilege is Not A Thing!". Well. You totally will find those people. They don't represent everyone, but they're out there, and this is how you'll probably come off if you pursue this argument over privilege on facebook. Your second point is literally "Yeah maybe YOUR family faced hardship but you can't generalize to all the other lucky people" and that's exactly expressing the view that white people come from an easy life extending down through the annals of history (except this dude's family). White privilege isn't about one person getting into Princeton and another not. It's about white people not having to deal with a whole lot of obstacles that, for instance, black people do and not recognizing that their reality is different. For example - getting treated differently by police. So in a sense the dude is missing the point. White privilege isn't a statement about whether he or his family faced hardship or whether white people in general face hardship. But almost everyone who has ever uttered the phrase "white privilege" in casual conversation or on the internet has also probably missed the point and is also likely a gigantic self-righteous douchebag. edit: To be clear - please don't be one of those people. =(
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May 3, 2014 15:57
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Triskelli posted:Was talking with a friend, had trouble jiving the idea of a free society and mandatory voting. Granted, I was taking the right tack of "what can be done to make it easier to vote" but he just kept countering with a hypothetical citizen that just didn't want to vote. How do you argue that without throwing the citizen in jail and forcing them to vote? Well...is that what you want to commit to when you say mandatory? If so, then own it and also recognize that it doesn't quite jive with the idea of a free society. It might still be worth it for <reasons> but reasonable people will disagree on that. Or you might moderate a little and focus on wanting to do everything possible to make it easier to vote and to encourage people to do that. In that case voting isn't quite mandatory, and that's ok, and the hypothetical citizen can do whatever.
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May 16, 2014 19:10
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VitalSigns posted:"You don't want to vote? No problem, that will be $50 please" Sort of a reverse poll tax. Only the rich deserve to choose whether they vote.
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May 16, 2014 19:33
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VitalSigns posted:The counter-argument is that mandatory voting makes it harder to put up institutional barriers to voting like closing polling places in poor neighborhoods, cancelling bus service, not giving employees time off, etc. The right likes to cast voting as a privilege so they can disenfranchise people and then blame it on them for "not trying hard enough" and not "making voting important enough". Or apathetic people show up and do whatever. Or people who don't want to vote fill out the "not voting because my grandmother died" card every election and nothing much changes except everyone's a little worse off because they have to fill out the cards. Or the institutional barriers go up anyway and poor people have to deal with it to whatever extent that's a thing that happens. Maybe we should make a mandatory voting thread.
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May 16, 2014 22:16
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Install Windows posted:In practice, exposing barriers in no way guarantees people will remove the barriers, often they willingly implement new ones. It's also the least efficient possible way to get to easier voting short of actively making voting harder. D&D: We must hurt the poor to make them realize how much republicans are hurting the poor. The beatings will continue until morale improves. The barriers are mostly legal. Voter ID laws are legal. Drawing ridiculous districts is legal. It's scummy but there's nothing someone's going to direct the bright cleansing light of scrutiny on or whatever. How many people don't vote because they want to but literally can't and how many don't vote because meh it's sort of inconvenient and it doesn't make much difference anyway? I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's mostly the latter. Sure, if you make voting mandatory you get more votes cast. That's pretty trivial. Are the voters engaged and making informed choices or apathetic and sort of doing whatever because they have to? Chile had mandatory voting, and we ditched it because many people didn't give a gently caress and it was a pain in the rear end for almost everyone.
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May 17, 2014 04:10
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Femur posted:Yeah, and you can do that, and noone would believe me if I whined because it seems impossible. Almost everyone can vote, though. Most people don't vote because it's sort of a PITA and/or they don't care that much.
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May 18, 2014 05:43
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MrOnBicycle posted:Maybe they shouldn't be debated? I might be wrong. I just think that surely you don't give something validity just because you debate something as long as you make it clear that it isn't a problem, and tell them why they are wrong to even think so. If you're one side of the debate of course you'd say there isn't a problem and of course you'd be telling the other side they're wrong to think so. Meanwhile it's being debated - you clearly take the other side seriously enough to try to refute them - so there must be something there worth considering. MrOnBicycle posted:In this case it's about political parties not debating the views and ideas of other parties, like the fascist and racist parties that exist have, because that will give those ideas validity. In this case it's a very dangerous strategy because while it's easy to convince yourself and politically like minded people that there's nothing valid about the positions of the other side, the truth is you're less reasonable than you think and their positions are more reasonable than the straw men you construct for your side to dismiss. Reasonable people who don't already agree with you will need to be convinced that you're right and if you're not making arguments you'll lose them to the side that is.
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May 27, 2014 20:21
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:I was wondering based on arguments I've had with high school classmates arguing that "oh, the UC system would work better if only it was ran like a business", what arguments and studies are out there that can help debunk the whole "if only X was run like a business, it'd be gangbusters!" canard. "The UC system would work better if only it was ran like a business" is too vague to debunk. Work better in what sense? What does it mean to be "run like a business"? You can't debunk what they're saying or even figure out if they're wrong until you nail down what you all are talking about. Edit: Re: The above post. Don't do this. Those are lovely arguments and if you go that way you guys might as well strip down and throw your feces at each other or debate the relevance of voodoo to the topic or whatever. Nail down specific propositions (ie: On-time graduation rates in the UC system would be higher if admissions officers were paid delayed compensation based on the % of candidates admitted who graduated in 4 years. IDK if this is true or even interesting but it's at least specific enough to talk around) and debate those on the merits. wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 14:29
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:Yeah, one of the guys I'm arguing with actually went to Haas in Cal and settled into a lucrative finance job in San Fran and he favors privatizing the University of California system. Like, what real changes would be entailed in each case and how would those changes achieve the results? For those statements to even be worth arguing with you need to get down to more concrete propositions. Or you could say something like "University of Phoenix is run like a business and their freshmen are the best amirite?  " then dodge the return poop.edit: It doesn't sound like the guys this dude is arguing with are saying the UC system should be privatized. wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 20:04
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Shibby0709 posted:Hey all, If you don't want to start an argument or you want to stay friends with this person you should probably drop it. Med school is pretty stressful (I imagine) and this sounds like harmless venting among peers that makes them feel like the poo poo they're going through is worth while. Whether it's objectively accurate or whether other professionals have it worse or whatever is really not the point. Also, any comment of the style "That thing you value and think you worked hard for? Let me tell you about how you didn't earn it" kind of makes you a dick and is not going to win you any points. Alternately, you could post something like "Maybe take up faith-based medicine. I hear doing that you only have to die on the cross once." and wait for the de-friend.
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Jul 9, 2014 14:37
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rscott posted:I got into an argument with a friend of mine who is pretty classically liberal and holy poo poo what is it with liberals who can't see a distinction between personal and private property? Like when you bring up that hey intergenerational concentration of capital leads to increasing inequality and kind of unbalances the whole system they act like you're trying to turn everyone into soulless automatons of the state because you can't leave everything you took from people to your kids. Then when I try to point out that like, owning things that make money is different from owning a house and stuff they just don't see a difference. What is a good line of debate to take to show how patently ridiculous this idea is? Should I go with trying to get them to show why they own anything? It's because to classical liberals this entire line of argument is dumb and you're missing the point. That wealth accumulates over time through savings and investment is trivially true and How Money Works. Owning things is pretty sweet. Being able to pass your things on to the next generation so they can own even more things is pretty sweet. Why are you complaining about the mechanism that can lift your family into prosperity? Also, ownership is not theft, commerce is not theft, jfc you are a crazy person. That's what your classically liberal friend is thinking while you're trying to have this conversation with him and the reason you're not getting anywhere. It's also what I'm thinking as I type this out. Absurd Alhazred posted:Try this angle: why should income from the cushy job of "born to wealth" or "holding financial instruments" be taxed any less than that of people who actually do real hard and/or creative work for their money? Consider this angle, which is what the friend probably hears: You work at something hard and/or creative all your life and manage to accumulate a nest egg. At the end of your life you'd like to pass the proceeds of your hard work on to your kids so they can have a better life than you did. According to rscott you shouldn't be able to because something something you STOLE your wealth something something intergenerational capital accumulation is BAD something something *stops listening and looks for a way out of this conversation*.
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Oct 21, 2014 14:11
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Not all of it. Just taxing some of it. It doesn't matter if you're given this by your dad, you didn't work for it, so if anything it should be taxed more. But why? The money has already been taxed. Probably several times. And one person's good fortune isn't screwing anyone else over. That's some crazy jealousy there. Absurd Alhazred posted:The taxes go to making sure people who did not have parents with those nest eggs don't get screwed over until the 4th generation. What? No they don't. They go into the general fund where they get spent on whatever. Absurd Alhazred posted:No need to talk about "STOLE" wealth or intergenerational capital accumulation if you think your audience will be bored. Repulsed, not bored. So much of taking rscott's side of this argument requires sharing assumptions about the way the world works that most people, especially successful people, don't share and find ridiculous or at least naive.
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Oct 21, 2014 16:42
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twodot posted:We tax every wealth gain (except for the exceptions), it is how we run our government. Inheritances are tax free up to 5 million or so, I haven't looked it up recently, which seems pretty reasonable to me, but that is primarily because I want people to be able to inherit real estate without being forced to sell it to pay taxes. Taxing wealth gains is a good idea, because people are typically by definition capable of paying them. Taxing windfalls more than ordinary wealth gains makes sense since people are even more capable of paying high taxes on windfalls. There's an argument that taxing windfalls is a good way to raise money because people are capable of paying, sure. In a strategic sense, if your objective is to raise some money, that's a good policy. But we're talking about (or so it seems to me from rscott's post) convincing someone who doesn't believe it's just to do that. Or maybe convincing them that they own what they own through THEFT and they ought to be ashamed or something. I'm not totally sure. The post had that vibe to it. "It works as a way to raise money" is true but not really useful in that context. rscott posted:maybe it is in fact you who are missing the point??? and is also a crazy person Nope, it's you. You are the crazy person. rscott posted:because again you're pretty much repeating the same poo poo (the start of this argument was some blog post on washingtonpost.com that was talking about how people who born to rich parents and drop out of high school have a better chance of remaining in the top income quintile than poor people who have graduated from college have to get into the top income quintile). Maybe that's a dumb measure of whether the American Dream is a thing or whether capitalism is defensible or whatever else. Is it reasonable to expect that many people would go from the bottom quintile to the top in a generation? Instead you'd probably expect movement up as a family accumulated capital - money, a culture valuing education, etc - so that successive generations achieve more than their parents. rscott posted:What then becomes the justification of perpetuating an economic system that leads to instability and inequality? The fact that you view capital accumulation and concentration (since they are inseparable) Why are capital accumulation and concentration inseparable? Is it impossible to start and grow a business and create new capital? Is it impossible to invest and take advantage of compound interest? As to the rest, capitalism has done more to better the lives of more people than any other system that has actually existed, dude. If it's not working fast enough for you or whatever IDK what to tell you except good luck with the revolution. Accretionist posted:Taking any side of any argument typically requires as much. And who cares what they think? Rich people often believe all kinds of goofy poo poo. It's not rich people, is the thing. It's most people. Rscott is the one that believes goofy poo poo.
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Oct 21, 2014 18:37
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I will admit I don't know as much as you do about say beating black women for sexual thrills, but I maintain I am better than you by far at economics. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 21, 2014 18:40
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To potentially cut down on dozens of pages of outraged leftist rage posting that misses the point: Estate taxes are fine as taxing anything else and NBD as long as it doesn't cause businesses to break up when they change hands or whatever. They're going to be evaded by virtually everyone rich enough to have an opinion on estate taxes but whatever, that's not really important here. The moral argument "You own what you own by ILLEGITIMATE MEANS and therefore we should TAX IT AWAY" that rscott was trying to convince his friend of failed to convince and he wanted to know why. The answer I'm offering to help explain that is "dude your fringe leftist rhetoric relies on an interpretation of how the world works that is at odds with reality and capital accumulation is pretty much our collective ticket out of poverty and not something to strangle, which is a thing most people understand." edit: To be (sort of) more constructive, rscott, to make any headway you are going to have to convince your friend of why his accumulation of capital is ill gotten and not say the result of his (or his family's) saving for the future or putting sweat into creating a productive business or anything like that. Most people don't see commerce as theft, or compound interest as theft, or having an investment portfolio as theft. When you quote mobility statistics they don't connect those trends to their behavior and your argument leaves them going "where are you going with this, crazy person?". wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Oct 21, 2014 |
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Oct 21, 2014 18:51
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