Father-daughter talk.... the truth about liberalism

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I think you'd have to listen to Rush for a while to get an understanding that your listening to somebody who truly believes that if capitalism is given full faith and credit that, regardless of whether or not economic disparity still exists, the poor or have-nots will still be better off than the middle-class of a largely horizontally stretched or flattened society through government effort. I'm personally a very big fan of Dennis Prager, probably much more calm and methodical than Rush or much of anyone out there - he does come at it from a Jewish standpoint but he's also someone with a remarkable amount of good will invested and who can look himself in the mirror every day knowing that he's giving it the very best, that he's actually serving a d a heck of a roll model just on how he can present what a truly adult train of thought is, and at worst - if he's read the tea leaves all wrong he's at least made such an eloquent and heart-felt case of the wrong side that when people can actually tare down his observations and not just out of hubris, they may very well have a super-strain of future societal structuring ideas that actually might work far better than anything that's ever existed (and he himself might very well commend that).

I guess my point is - I don't care really what side your on so much as to say that you don't really want to look at republicans as decisively oppressive, evil, racist, sexist, calculating, money-grubbing people; to do so really is to draw a complete strawman, it falls pray to all the outsider's fallacies, and its ultimately its most destructive where at the very minimum there are a handful of pivotal ideas that they get right, maybe have a unique perspective on, that people who take such an emotional animocity to them would end up throwing everything out the window including what they do correctly, solely because they can't pick who they are or what they really wanted appart in a logical manner.

There's definitely a hierarchy to the United States.

International bankers
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Super rich
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Everyone else

It's sort of a double layered oligarchy. Definitely not a democracy though.

How can you say such a thing??? There is PUH-LEN-TY of disparity here in the US between the haves and the have nots! If you think that all people in the US have equal influence in terms of government and social policy, think again! Class DOES EXIST in the US no matter how much our society tries to pretend it doesnt. Money==Power in our society and dont even THINK of trying to tell me that money is evenly distrubted in the US!

Well, Haliphron, in terms of societies, the US is one of the least hierarchical societies that has ever existed, period. I mean, you can say that there are rich people, but the majority of people identify with one class: the middle class. Even though there are variations, it is difficult to say that the US is exactly as hierarchical as most people perceive a hierarchy.

In any case, I don't see Ancalagon's comment as *that* bad.

The simplest solution:

If a corporation dies, let it burn... don't try to prop it up (something both Bush and Obama are guilty of)... Sure, some employees may lose jobs, but it doesn't draw out the problem over a long period of time... It's akin to diving into a cold swimming pool vs. getting your feet wet first and slowly lowering yourself in...

Right now, bad management and risk-taking is rewarded, in that if a risk doesn't work, it's subsidized by taxpayer money. If the greedy corporate as*holes and their shareholders know that there is a real risk of losing money on bad ideas and bad management, they won't be so likely to run such a loose ship...

It's a shame, really, how corrupted the concept of the corporation has become. Corporations were originally designed to allow many people to invest in a company, and each person would only be liable to how far they were invested. Now, corporations have become the enemy of a free market, stomping on any possible competition wherever it rears its head (or just buying it out)... I would say that Corporatism is now a greater enemy to freedom than Communism ever was...

In an ideal world, I would take any corporation that controls more than 50% of any given market share for a product or service and break it up... right now, you need 99% to be a monopoly, but if you have more than half, that means you're larger than all your rivals put together (I'm looking at you, Microsoft and Walmart)... by keeping all corporations below that threshold, no one corporation can dominate, and actual competition can proceed, preventing the stifling of a free market that's going on now...

My perspective, after spending the first nineteen years of my life in one of the most conservative areas of the country:
Most of the conservatives I know are social conservatives- homophobes, single-issue anti-abortionists, racists, xenophobes, pro-torture, with no qualms about letting the government play Big Brother because as long as you "have nothing to hide," there's no reason why you should need civil liberties. In my entire life, I have yet to hear anyone put forward a cogent argument for any of the social conservative positions other than pro-life. The small-government economic conservatives are far rarer among the "common people," and those in the general public who do hold such views often have an absurdly distorted take on them.

The Republican Party as I knew it growing up, in a region that has been represented for years by John Boehner, is an abomination with no redeeming qualities. The Republican Party I know, the one of which virtually everyone in my hometown is a staunch supporter, is the Republican Party that tramples civil liberties, places illegal wiretaps, condones torture, drives the economy into the ground by allowing spending to far outpace revenue and then blames it on the Democrats, openly feels contempt for the plight of the poor, is fine with bombing the hell out of civilians as long as they have funny-sounding names, and alienates anyone who is attracted to the same sex or does not fall into the same fundamentalist born-again Christian sect as them. It is not the Republican party of fiscal sanity, of individual freedom, of the Second Amendment, of keeping the government out of our lives. They want the US government to say "to hell with the rest of the world" and nuke anyone who gets in our way. They don't care if spending is out of control as long as it's a Republican who's signing the spending bill. They want the government to force their own specific, narrow interpretation (or, more accurately, bastardization) of Christianity down everyone's throats. They would gladly go back to the old Mosaic law of stoning gays. They don't care if the government reads your mail and installs cameras in your home, and don't believe that any part of the Bill of Rights is significant enough to be worth defending. To them, civil liberties do nothing but protect criminals from justice. In short, they are monsters.

You can say this is just a strawman or a stereotype, but stereotypes come from somewhere. I grew up in this environment, I have seen it first-hand. My public school teachers have, on multiple occasions, argued frankly and openly in favor of torture and of unlimited government surveillance of everything. Whether you want to admit it or not, cretins like these are the base of the Republican Party.

There is corporate corruption and manipulation, but a monopoly is not inherently evil. Where monopolies are able to exist (without government help) they serve a market purpose. In software, there is a significant economy of scale that favors a market dominated by one corporation, and other factors such as compatibility issues also push the market towards one de facto standard. And monopolies can be leapfrogged, as Microsoft did to IBM.

First off, just as you have your life experience, I have mine. I spent all of my life to the present day living in a town of "rich conservatives"... the types of people that you would expect only to see on MTV teen dramas... There are two types of people that are predominant here... you have the extremely wealthy people that are also usually greedy (I'm about a 15 minute drive from the homes, err, mansions, of some professional football and baseball players, just to put this into perspective)... Basically, the types of people who get all the money (many times inherited, though not always the case), and lord it over everyone else just trying to get by... Then you have the people who inherit that money from their parents... and they're incredibly dumb, often only "expressing" the social political viewpoints that you mentioned in your post because that's what FOX news (which their greedy corporate parents have on) is expressing at the time, and they're just repeating it... Basically, I live in a town of Donald Trumps and Paris Hiltons... and it's not fun... That's why the concept of the corporation as I knew it growing up is inherently evil and fosters unbridled greed and a collective superiority complex...

As for your actual arguments, I disagree with some of your points there... Okay, economies of scale is prevalent in software production, I get that... but at the same time, dominating the market share means you don't have to worry about making a quality product compared to if you have competition... the main reason Windows has always had bug issues is because Microsoft still owns about 90% of the market share... you would definitely see Microsoft actually working to make a better product if Linux or Apple controlled more of the market for home computers... Without competition, there is no motivation, only stagnation...

Having a standard is one thing, but you don't need one singular company to enforce it... if anything, Microsoft has tried to deviate from known standards on several occasions to try and twist the standard into something that benefits them over others... There are groups like IEEE, ANSI, and W3C to design and disseminate the standards, without actually trying to sell anything based on those standards... that way there's no conflict of interest, especially in comparison to a theoretical monopoly inventing its own standards as a means to unfairly crush competition...

I won't argue the point about leapfrogging, but if there is such a disdain for Microsoft products, how come there is nothing that has leapfrogged Microsoft yet? Apple failed to do so... even with Microsoft's antitrust settlement still in effect, and Apple capitalizing on actually making a quality product, Apple still only controls 9% of the market share... Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see a market controlled by Apple either, but I want to see an equilibrium where healthy fair competition will spur on greater products, and, in the end, benefit the consumer...

Yeah, I know a handful of the "rich conservatives" too. Not quite to the same extent, though, from what you've said. The mentality I see in the wealthy disgusts me to no end, and I know that's what you're criticizing. But I just wanted to point out that even if the current structure of how we deal with corporations is wrong, the idea of one producer dominating a particular market is not, in and of itself, evil.

Software-speaking: I grew up in a Mac-only household, and today I predominantly run Linux. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy by any stretch of the imagination, but I have to acknowledge that there is a reason they got where they are today. People will use what everyone else uses because it makes compatibility easier, and Microsoft was able to jump in and corner the market early on. Apple has failed to gain significant traction because people don't want to pay the premiums- you can buy a rebranded Acer with the same specs as a MacBook Pro for under half the price. And while people may be annoyed with Vista temporarily, a lot of people do actually like it, and not a lot of people hate it enough to justify learning a new OS. Sadly, this does mean there is less incentive to keep innovating, but MS can't lag too far behind the ball. And Windows 7 is actually quite nice, from what I've seen, so they aren't turning out complete crap on a regular basis. Leapfrogging will happen when competitors offer something really useful, unique, and new, and make the cost of switching low enough to be worthwhile. The Linux world spends much of its time concocting elaborate knock-offs of Windows and Mac capabilities (google "Make Ubuntu look like Leopard" or "Make Ubuntu look like Vista" for examples). A better implementation of what already exists won't get anywhere, MS will get leapfrogged only if someone does things differently and the new way is obviously better.

A couple things. First off, while there are certainly disparities, there really isn't class, in the traditional sense. There is too much overlap between what you would traditionally refer to as class to make that distinction in this day and age.

Toad mentioned letting corporations fail. The problem is not propping up corporations, the problem is that there is a legal entity known as "The Corporation" in the first place. It should never have been allowed to happen.

But it is inherently corrupt.



There is no such thing as a monopoly without government assistance. In a truly free market, monopolies would not be possible.



Eh, I don't believe there is such a thing as "evil". Inherently corrupt, I would agree with that. The set-up actually requires the heads of a corporation to do everything they can to boost their bottom line. They don't have the right to a conscience.



Are not a monopoly.



Is not a monopoly.

This is true. Class barriers are too fuzzy to really be useful.


Not necessarily. The threat of competition can keep large monopolies honest unless they are able to impose significant barriers to entry.


Free markets can, under some circumstances, allow monopolies to develop. In industries that have very high initial investment rates, high fixed costs, little initial return on revenue, and very low variable or marginal costs (leading to extreme economies of scale, as in the case of software where marginal costs are essentially zero) a monopoly can develop and in many cases is actually in the market's best interests.


No, but they can help a monopoly to develop by giving a competitive edge to whatever company has the largest market share, by virtue of which it will then gain an even larger market share, giving it even more of a competitive advantage...


Not a perfect monopoly, but it currently controls 88% of the desktop computer market, and it probably holds an even greater market share in office suites (am I the only one who uses OpenOffice exclusively?) and even their grossly deficient web browser is able to dominate the Internet.

No, they just make large monopolies sink money into buying out the competition before the competition grows to large to handle. That's why Google bought out YouTube... the latter was threatening to crush Google Videos... now with YouTube in their arsenal, Google effectively controls the streaming video market... I'm willing to give Google some leeway, however, since they've proven that even without serious competition, they still tend to innovate rather than stagnate...

The same cannot be said for Microsoft. You were saying that windows 7 is supposedly very good? That's because Apple is still robbing Microsoft of market share... It's not serious competiton, but it's the first actual competiton that Microsoft has had since they crushed the earlier incarnation of Apple back in the 1990s... and if Apple didn't have their iPod (and now iPhone) sales to subsidize their PC division, they wouldn't even have the 9% of the market share they have now...

Just as in any other social Darwinist application, lack of competition breeds stagnation... there's no desire to innovate new technologies if there's nothing being developed superior to your own xtuff by a competitor...

But we aren't talking about disparity -- we're talking about hierarchy.

Hierarchies have clear, unambiguous levels to them. In midieval europe, it was King, nobles, knights/merchants/landowners, serfs. You took orders from those above you.

In many cases this is the right answer (although bankruptcy laws are there to help control the burning process). However, if you're talking about American car makers, they have lots of other companies in that industry that rely on them, and if you're talking about large banks, they are rather important to the economy as a whole.

There still needs to be accountability, and enormous corporations should not be allowed to think of the government as a giant free insurance corporation, but things are a little more complicated than that.

I hate that right-wing delusion that success is due to hard work. 99% of success is due to luck - ie who you know, where and to whom you are born and pure luck itself. Plenty of people work like dogs for next to nothing while others make a lot for sitting on their butt all day.
I'm about as far to the left as you can get on every single issue.

I honestly wonder if elitist conservatives truly believe that success is entirely, or even mostly due to hard work. Sounds to me like another myth that is meant to delude the masses into working their butts off while those on the top reap the fruits of their labor. Democracy seems to beget dishonesty; cos when people are free to choose you cant force them to act in your interests so you have to try and manipulate them to go along with you.