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ToughDiamond
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21 Jan 2022, 5:53 pm

Dox47 wrote:

Ayn Rand was rigid and dogmatic and wrote interminable wooden dialogue, but she wasn't wrong about everything, her insights about pathological altruism and how people often behave like crabs in a bucket dragging each other down were pretty spot on, her account of the fall of a company town due to adopting Marxist principles for the allotment of resources in Atlas Shrugged is particularly good.

I've heard tell that any attempt to go socialist within a larger capitalist system, or to compromise the transformation in any way, can't possibly work. It's a school of socialist thought called impossiblism.

Aspiegaming
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21 Jan 2022, 6:33 pm

Dox47 wrote:

Aspiegaming wrote:

Wild West Mentality in America. "Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." Ayn Rand BS.

More like "who's going to pay for that?", as the reality is you couldn't do everything just by taxing the wealthy, you'd need to significantly tax the middle class as well, and support for welfare programs of all kinds goes way down when you tell people they'll actually have to pay for them. Ayn Rand was rigid and dogmatic and wrote interminable wooden dialogue, but she wasn't wrong about everything, her insights about pathological altruism and how people often behave like crabs in a bucket dragging each other down were pretty spot on, her account of the fall of a company town due to adopting Marxist principles for the allotment of resources in Atlas Shrugged is particularly good.

Yes, but she also inspired people to refuse to help other people in need. Sure there may be a point in telling people to help themselves, but then a lot of people who refuse to take my hand and pull me up when I get knocked down act like a bunch of selfish snobs.

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Dox47
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21 Jan 2022, 9:18 pm

Aspiegaming wrote:

Have you actually read her work?

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ToughDiamond
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21 Jan 2022, 9:20 pm

Dox47 wrote:

I wonder if it couldn't be done without hurting the ones in the middle though. I found a few numbers about wealth ownership in the UK, and did a few sums:

According to UK government figures, in 2018 to 2020:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... omarch2020

"The wealthiest 10% of households held 43% of all the wealth in Great Britain in the latest period; in comparison the bottom 50% held only 9%."
So by subtraction, the middle 40% held 48%.

The median wealth of households is said to be £302,500 (see above link), and

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... holds/2020

"There were an estimated 27.8 million households in the UK in 2020"

Then the total wealth owned by households in the UK must be about 27.8 million x £302,500 - i.e. £8.4 trillion
So we've got
Top 10%:
2.78m households hold a total of £3.616trillion, £1.3m each
Middle 40%:
11.12m households hold a total of £4.036trillion, £363,000 each
Bottom 50%
13.9m households hold a total of £756.8billion, £54,450 each

Levelling that would give every household £302,500:
The top 10% would lose 76.7% each on average
The middle 40% would lose 16.7% each on average
The bottom 50% would gain 455.5% each on average

That's not a huge loss to the middle ones, and the formula could be tweaked so that those towards the top end of the middle sector paid a little more while the lower end paid nothing or gained a little. So according to that, there's no need to take from the middle people at all, there's enough concentrated into the hands of the ones above median wealth.

Dox47
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21 Jan 2022, 9:23 pm

↑
The devil is in the details, especially when the wealthy often don't make their money by drawing a salary, or have unrealized assets such as stock that they borrow against rather than sell and render the income taxable.

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Aspiegaming
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21 Jan 2022, 9:54 pm

Dox47 wrote:

Aspiegaming wrote:

Have you actually read her work?

I don't really care. If it means the rich are the saviors of humanity and Lord knows they aren't, run public institutions better and Lord knows they can't, and do the government's job better AND LORD KNOWS THEY CAN'T, I'd rather jump into an abyss.

Atlas Shrugged, BAH! Oh boo hoo, the rich are holding up the world and can't take it anymore! Boo hoo hoo! Atlas Goes Bowling is more like it.

And I've been drinking lately.

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If my darkness or eccentricness offends you, I don't really care.

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Last edited by Cornflake on 22 Jan 2022, 5:34 am, edited 1 time in total.: Drinking or not, a personal attack (removed) is not acceptable.

Descartes
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21 Jan 2022, 10:43 pm

The Republican Party has become a grave threat to democracy, human rights, the environment, and modern society in general and they either need serious reform or to go extinct. I won't hold my breath for either.

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RetroGamer87
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21 Jan 2022, 11:16 pm

We should bring back the death penalty. I'd rather have a speedy and painless execution than spend 20 years in prison and then be released as an old man who can't find employment. Long prison sentences are just a grift so prisons can make more money. How about the dock in the courtroom be fitted with some execution device so that the condemned can receive his sentence immediately. The judge should be the one to pull the lever because the judge can't stomach the idea of doing it with his own hand then he has no business telling someone else to do it.

Corporal punishment for lesser crimes. Not something that causes permanent injury. Better five minutes of pain than five years of your life wasted and then be unable to find housing or employment after. As a culture should not discriminate against excons. They have already had their punishment. I think the system is designed to punish them twice.

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RetroGamer87
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21 Jan 2022, 11:17 pm

Descartes wrote:

If they went extinct they would need to be replaced by another party. Having only one major party would also be a grave threat to democracy.

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RetroGamer87
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21 Jan 2022, 11:23 pm

Aspiegaming wrote:

thinkinginpictures wrote:

I don't understand why being in favor of basic housing, food and drinking water, as an UBI (Unconditional Basic Income) would ensure, is such a controversial idea.

Why can't we all agree that this is the most humane and most obvious solution to poverty in this world?

Wild West Mentality in America. "Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." Ayn Rand BS.

America's Calvinist roots?

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ToughDiamond
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21 Jan 2022, 11:24 pm

Dox47 wrote:

Well, the example is about wealth owned rather than salary - I know that the wealthy in the USA pay very little income tax because they have no income, on paper at least. Though I expect the wealthy would (and probably already do) perform similar tricks with their fixed wealth to avoid parting with that too. It was just a quick-and-dirty calculation to shed light on the question of whether the people in the middle would need to hand anything over in order to remove the rich-poor divide. Pure theory. It would need a political will of iron and some very smart thinking for lawmakers to actually do it. I can't see it happening without first establishing a command economy.

Descartes
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21 Jan 2022, 11:37 pm

RetroGamer87 wrote:

Descartes wrote:

If they went extinct they would need to be replaced by another party. Having only one major party would also be a grave threat to democracy.

Yes, no argument here. But we can't have a party that panders to the extremist factions of society.

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Dox47
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22 Jan 2022, 1:54 am

Descartes wrote:

Hah, that's about the least controversial opinion you could have around here, it's practically the board consensus.

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22 Jan 2022, 2:09 am

Dox47 wrote:

Descartes wrote:

Hah, that's about the least controversial opinion you could have around here, it's practically the board consensus.

Ha! That's actually my toned down opinion! :lol:

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Dox47
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22 Jan 2022, 3:31 am

Descartes wrote:

Ha! That's actually my toned down opinion! :lol:

I'm sure it is, just as I'm sure that's also very close to the conventional wisdom here. I'm not sure that we have a single openly Republican member here at the moment, not just some off-beat conservatives or libertarians, but an actual card carrying member of the party. Considering that the US is pretty evenly split between the parties, and in theory AS should not correlate with political opinion, that strikes me as odd.

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Dox47
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22 Jan 2022, 3:32 am

Descartes wrote:

But we can't have a party that panders to the extremist factions of society.

Sure we can, in fact we have two.

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