Andrew Breitbart Dies at 43

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I guess I'm not able to see the conservative/republican take on things as not also being ideologically driven. Creating public fear over rising government debt during the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression while at the same time campaigning on even larger tax cuts that will actually reduce tax revenue seems rather duplicitous to me. It would be one thing if they were merely focusing on cutting spending and reducing inefficiency. It doesn't seem like their priorities are straight unless you interpret what they're doing as an ideologically motivated "shock doctrine" or "starve the beast" policy.

I also think the left is actually more in tune with reality than any conservative is willing to give them credit for. It's not that "the rich" are all psychopaths, it's that some aspects of the economy really are a zero-sum game where one group can accumulate more at the expense of another in a systemic way. That it's really happening is independent from any moral angle you want to put on it.

Good answer and completely fair.

I don't really think anyone 100% knows what's going on, not even including the supposed players in Washington. I think starve the beast is a big part of it, that and anything they can do to motivate businesses to return and add fuel to the fire for the economy - mainly in the belief that if you can gin up the economy hit a certain golden ratio where you have maximum revenue due to maximum dollars to graze off of. Keynsians would say we're well below that ratio in taxation, a lot of fiscal conservatives would argue that even if we've dropped taxes ever since the 1950's pretty much one thing has changed - we weren't competing with the whole world for our own jobs in the same way that we are now. I think what's going to happen regardless of who gains power - whether its conservatives or liberals - we'll have to pull our belts in.

I used to not believe any of that, and I was mostly fed the idea that if I went to college, got a good degree, and had a good work ethic anything could happen. Found out quickly that in the professional world I can be fired by twits or people who just find me 'wierd' as I can anywhere else. To this day I have jobs that I can keep for six, seven years, whatever it is because I'm dealing with people who are real, level-headed, grounded, etc. and then if I have to start a new job I can find a bunch of twits who won't train, have very strange cooked up notions about what a person's supposed to think, how their supposed to walk, talk, look, etc. and - they don't always mean ill but - their ignorance can still choke a person out. Also I'd agree with you that - while I don't think economies are completely zero sum games I also realize that the job market requires skilled people, that skilled players make the best companies, and not everyone has that in them, and essentially we've forced companies and corporations to essentially be our system and carry everyone whether they can afford to or not.

It really seems close to a no-win in our generation, BUT I do see it this way: even most capitalists would tell you that they aren't in love with the system, its not about that, its a sense they have that its the second worst to anything else. We're in a spot right now also where technology is really on the move in ways that it never has been before. Today people are wrangling each other over whether there's enough food to go around, whether there's enough oil, what we'll do about climate change, what we'll do about the population peak around 2050; I really think we should be much more interested in science and technology than we should be having it out with each other over who has the least odious recipe for a crap sandwich.

Well, I think it's time for an experienced tax professional who votes after looking at history and the numbers instead of voting with his heart.

To begin with, realistically, capitalism and socialisim are the same in the sense that both are forms of economic feudalism. Where they differ is as follows:

(1) In capitalism, the enterprenuers become the rich kings and lords. In socialism, it's the public officials who become the rich kings and lords.

(2) In capitalisim, society is productive and improvements in the quality of life do come, but not all at once. Socialism is the opposite because there is no incentive to invent or create because any extra wealth one may receive from their extra effort gets shared by the rest.

(3) All of the worlds great socialist countries have one thing in common: They all have failed. Russia, all of the countries of the old Eastern Block, Britain, France, Italy, and let's not forget Greece. And oh yes, there's China. Now China is converting from socialism to fascisim, which is socialism with property ownership - which is still a form of economic feudilism. Ultimately, it too will fail.

Of course, let us not forget the Georgetown economics professor who was on the news last year for failing his whole class. He gave his students a choice: be graded by capitalism or socialism. The class chose socialism - which meant that the grades would be averaged together and everyone would get the same grade. The first exam resulted in every one getting a C. The second resulted in a D. The third resulted in an F. The students got upset and demanded to know why they were flunked. After a long discussion, it turned out that the "A" and "B" students quit studying for the exams. They were sick and tired of puting in the extra work to pull the weights of those who wouldn't work as hard. Thus the lesson: Socialism was designed by lazy people for lazy people. Society becomes stunted. But in capitalism, there is more hard work and risk taking because there is incentive to make a profit - and thus society advances.

Now, of course, there will be failures to communicate, because some people you just can't reach.

But I am going to be very entertained by watching the socialists use their nonsense to try to tear this up.

Longshanks

How dare you say that though!! That's taking right wing talking points in Rush Limbaugh MLA citation straight from email chains where the Marine who did 15,000 tours of Iraq makes the great socialist professor run out of the room crying by asking him why the rock in his hand hasn't evolved into an animal!

....sadly I think a lot of people find their adjustment with the world by running from reality and, those who can't bring themselves to do the same essentially have to pay their tab in addition to their own.

This is a great start - flaunting professional certifications that, in all likelihood, you'll give people no means to verify and which are, regardless, really are not that relevant to your argument.



Wait a minute, since you're talking about how you actually vote why the hell are you contrasting socialism and capitalism? Most parties (at least most parties that anyone ever votes for) in the US aren't socialist. Do you honestly sit down and think "I could voter for the Workers of the World Party or I could vote for one of the other parties" each election?



Strictly speaking, the central planners in the Soviet Union did use incentives and performance targets. While they were generally not as good as market-based incentives, they were effective enough to influence some factories to produce an enormous amount of industrial output, sufficient to have very negative environmental consequences (if you want, I can dig up a Microeconomics textbook that mentions environmental degradation via centrally decided performance targets as one of the failures of Centrally Planned economies).



That story, I'm pretty sure, is made up. But, regardless, depending on the mindset of the people in the class, they could realize that they'd all benefit from studying and thus gain more of an incentive to play their small part to make sure the GPA remains high - you know, like how athletic teams work (I'll admit there's some selection bias in that motivated people join teams, but I'd say there's a similar selection bias in economics students).



If I were a socialist (and most democratic socialists aren't advocates of Soviet-style central planning - they're either market socialists or advocates of decentralized participatory planning) I would find your arguments utterly unconvincing.

Change for the good of everyone within capitalist systems only work when the underclasses form unions, or progressive movements, and twist what they and their families need from their rich overlords. The funny thing is, organized labor and progressive movements are accused of being socialistic, and even communistic by the captains of industry and their conservative political allies. And by this, through non-stop propaganda, union busting, and use of false evidence (rigged tape used against ACORN), along with BS bumper sticker slogans screaming "class warfare," they are able to strangle progress through which capitalism can work for everyone.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

In a lot of ways I'm a flaming neolib, as are my parents - hence I'd have to say I see both sides and also have a foot on each side of the line. I'd agree with you that certain amounts of that are needed to set up checks and balances, its also walking a fine line when the unions themselves have no checks on them and you end up with something like, say, the unions devouring Detroit or the teacher's unions essentially making education a teachers first students second sort of thing in net effect. I live near Cleveland, OH and I've noticed Buffalo also has similar policy - very strong liberal policies dragging down labor markets (both by business-unfriendly policy and by incredible amounts of embezzlement; Cleveland Division of Water being quite the topic lately on the later) and even straddling huge bodies of freshwater they just can't bring much back. I'm all for unions as long as they have some real accountability for the going concern of the specific industries they represent; without that you get a greedy SOB or two at their helm and you end up with the same kind of avarice in their ranks that you might tout for CEO's and big capitalists and then they themselves become the problem rather than the bargainers.

Keep in mind we *rely* on employers at present to essentially keep people fed and sheltered via provision of wages - in a way the free market system is essentially the primary welfare system. Done right its a blessing and its flexible enough to endure all kinds of problems and bounce back because its liquid and it moves on its own to fill the needs and opportunities that are out there; there's no human or group of humans who could ever centrally plan as efficiently and we're still several decades from any possibility of using AI in such a way.

I think part of the problem is that people do not consider that you could have degrees of socialism and capitalism without one of them being overly dominant. In essence you use capitalism to check the problematic areas of socialism and socialism to check the problematic areas of capitalism.

I think almost anyone understands that (well, libertarians would disagree for their own reasons) but the arguments really are over what's the most optimal ratio. Clearly you need a safety net for the impovrished, also marhall's said it before and I agree that while the safety net is in place its best not to have such a hard line for the safety net that people just above the net are forced to fall in; hence it should be more of a gradient.

The hardest part of it all though is matching human desires with what's realistic or sustainable, and it seems like this is the biggest headache that many socialist countries get into and how their lifestyles end up centered on borrowing. Quite sadly we've taken major note that the US, supposedly having a stronger capitalism to socialism ratio, has also really gone off the rail almost to the same extent as they have. Clearly we've had *huge* flubs and a lot of them have come in the form of stimulus bills, government doing its usually awful job as venture capitalist, and we also have another problem that's quite sad - we can't even talk about the results of programs because, anywhere that race comes into play you end up with a third-rail topic where you don't dare to fix the problem but rather you just throw as much money as you can down the hole (like for instance inner-city schools; the parents aren't there for the kid, the other kids are essentially forced into something close to a study hall education, they'd be much, much, much better off if there were high quality subsidized boarding schools complete with dress code to get bright kids with potential out of that mess, not to mention charter schools for the parents who want to help their kids but, if you try saying that we have BIG race-mongers who'll come out on behalf of the teachers unions and demagogue such things to bits given the chance). We also have a social security system that's underfunded, solutions to fix that for at least another century are often floated and simultaneously shot down for whatever reason (they exist - why they don't go anywhere is beyond me), and then you have our military spending which - the combination of being the strongest free society and having naval control means we're in a position to help keep the world stable, its much better us at that helm than someone like China, but the challenge is figuring out how to subsidize it or even figuring out how to work something out where the countries who want us there essentially help us, at least partially, subsidize the costs.

I doubt there is similar selection bias between econ students and sports teams. Unless it's an upper level class, you have no idea of the skill set and interests of those in your class. Your classmates are just as likely to be dimwitted lazy freshman communications majors as anyone else. If you had a underachiever on a sports team, you can remove them from the team. You can't remove underperforming classmates. Therefore, some will have to work much harder than others are capable or willing to contribute if the overall team goal is to excel. Most people aren't that altrustic and are willing to go down in flames as long as the "teammates" weighting you down perish as well.

I think it would be much more likely in the Georgetown scenario, if they had any hope or possibility of doing so, is that the A students would simply drop out and try to reschedule the class in a few quarters; mainly that I used to be one and I know that the people who are going all out for their A's have a lot of self-worth wrapped up in them. I somehow doubt many of them were the ones opting for grading by socialism.

True, most "democratic socialists" are facists, which is socialism with property ownership.

Longshanks

The coroner, Michael Cormier, is now dead and is suspected to have been poisoned.

Possible arsenic poisoning probed in death of coroner's official

NOW A WITNESS TO BREITBART'S DEATH VANISHES

It's probably related to the birth certificate. Or Area 51.

Maybe, or maybe Breitbart was just a fat bastard.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer