Would be an interesting experiment. I need motivation right now to get off my lower-middle-class ass lol

It would be good for me. And a lot of others would get to experience something different, too, having a bit more.

this is incredible

Not sure about your claim, but the book itself looks like Steven Pinker "capitalism solved poverty" hogwash: https://soundcloud.com/citationsneed...imism-industry



The Al Jazeera interview portion of this starting at 3:51 is outstanding; dude is doing what Meet the Press used to pretend to do.

"Free market" is myth/magic and is predicated on the obviously incorrect and immoral premise of private property.

Not sure why you want to cut old people's benefits as part of this?

In general though you're way further left than a United States "moderate" unless you're hiding your true views (which it seems like you are).

In other news nobody sane cares what the far left thinks either. I'm moderate in the sense that I try my very best to make my perception of reality as close as humanly possible to actual reality. I don't waste a whole lot of time worrying about the way things should be. I figure out how they actually are and go from there.

Capitalism has two major problems today: unpaid negative externalities, and anti competitive behavior by large firms. Those and a general desire to not pay taxes by baby boomers cover most of our economic problems around inequality, environmental degradation, etc. Blaming capitalism for these two solvable problems (a serious revenue neutral carbon tax + real anti trust action and IP reform) and saying that they are inherent to the system is super silly.

In other news full socialism/communism is exactly as bad as the right wingers make it out to be. Seriously it's been tried to a greater degree than supply side economics and it's just as intellectually bankrupt in the sense that you can't be deader than dead. I had to add that last part because full bore communism has been tried to a greater degree than supply side economics, and has led to significantly worse results.

I consider the whole government control vs individual control argument to be settled. The right answer is that government should handle what government is good at and private enterprise should handle the rest. Again: courts, police (the degree appropriate to keep violence to a minimum and property rights protected... I'm not in favor of suppressing minorities lol), fire/disaster response, infrastructure, healthcare, defense, regulations designed to prevent any given private enterprise from growing too large or pushing its costs onto the public, and a minimal not quite subsistence level of welfare for those at the very bottom of the social order... Mostly to stop them from becoming so desperate that they do something dumb and we have to spend taxpayer dollars on locking them up.

That's pretty close to what the right answer looks like. It's not full capitalism, and it's not full socialism. It takes the best aspects of both and melds them together into something that actually works in the real world.

There are a lot of details left to argue about inside those categories. We could argue about how to dispense welfare payments and whether they should be means tested. Personally I favor a flat universal basic income to every adult citizen, which reduces the amount of envy right wing politicians can weaponize and greatly reduces the cost of administration.

Oh and basic scientific research. The government has a very different revenue structure than other entities because of its ability to tax production. It's very hard to monetize doing research that doesn't have a product in mind as a private individual... but the government does it automatically through tax collection. This is a similar rationale to why infrastructure is better handled by the government.

Oh well that's a relief, because the world's foremost philosophers, economists, scientists, and politicians are still vigorously debating this. They will sure be glad to know BoredSocial has figured everything out already.

Wait until OP finds out Sheldon Adelson is the reason we don't have online poker in the US. Boy is he gonna feel silly!

But Mason Mallmuth told me Obama was the one who created UIGEA, and Dean Heller did everything in his power to try to stop him.

Go from there to where given you don't spend time worrying about how things should be?

https://twitter.com/leyawn/status/87...603245057?s=09

fwiw, BoredSocial, if you're actually concerned with the two problems you listed and want them fixed, that puts you pretty far to the left of basically everyone in congress.

You are correct in recognizing that the left has come to represent conservatism, and the mainstream right - liberalism.

The reason why it isn’t hypocritical to do something parasitic like poker for personal gain and believing that regulating it might be a good thing is because most people aren’t so massively ******ed as to conflate self interest with desirable policy.

WarHammer40k vs not being a Catholic fascist

Yeah they totally aren't. That hasn't been true in a good long while. The people still debating it are losers who refuse to update their views to global experience. These ideas aren't theory anymore... we have tested them extensively in the real world. I'm simply relaying the results.

Awww end of history neoliberalism. We can't do pure capitalism, we can't do pure communism. The government should just stick to what it's good at; taxation, providing basic services and minimal welfare services, and let the private sector do everything else. There's no other possibility.

I want to see the happiest world possible for the median human today and in the future. I definitely don't think that we have a right to screw things up severely for future generations so that we can have nicer stuff for a decade or three longer. I'm extremely flexible about how we get there.

Asking animals (even if they are smarter than the typical animal) to voluntarily reduce consumption hasn't worked yet since life popped up on our planet... So that means science. I'm very pro science lol.

This isn't even an argument dude. It's just really weak sauce snark that isn't even technically right. Eventually great questions get answered. We used to think the universe revolved around the earth. We've pretty much tried most of the variations of government vs private control... and the results are that both have their place in well run societies. The fact that this is controversial just shows how behind current economics and political science the vast majority of people are.

But beyond that I am so ****ing bored of talking about how much control the government should have when we well into the optimization phase of exploring the right answer to the question. We can talk about it wrt to very specific situations... but the broad strokes are already painted. Sorry.

I could not care less. Really. Almost everyone in Congress is a paid mouthpiece for some special interest or other. If it isn't the 'conservatives' (who have no respect at all for norms that have held the country together for a couple of hundred years) shilling for big carbon it's liberals shilling for whatever special interest paid for their buyin. As I look around an awful lot of 'liberals' sure took a lot of money from big finance, big healthcare, and teachers unions... all of whom are exactly as evil as the special interests the right shills for.

Good god do I hate the political system the Baby Boomers built.

Piketty made a pretty compelling argument that the US is on entirely the wrong path for long term growth and stability, but keeping thinking those questions are settled.

Edit - also the Baby Boomers didn't build this political system. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, et al did and what you are seeing today is *PRECISELY* how it's supposed to work.

Aren't you a little behind the times? The push in economics right now is the move away from theoretical models and into empirical research, exactly because the supposed right answers don't actually work when looking at the real world, even though theoretically they should.

The endpoints are a bit mangled as well. Singapore is often held up as some capitalist example but owns all the housing. Norway is more socialist than Venezuela, yet has growth rates right up there with the US.

I don't think the private vs public answer is as solved as one would like, and of course how a country should be organized is always under contestation.

Okay but not screwing things up for future generations is a consideration of how things should be so you are concerned with such things despite your protestations.

We haven't faced such an existential crisis since life popped up on the planet and extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary solutions. If science can't give us what we want we have to be pro science if the scientists are telling us we need to reduce consumption.

Most of us are too smart to play poker anymore.

You should know that saying that Norway is more socialist than Venezuela out loud kind of kills any credibility you might have. It's just such a stupid thing to say that it kind of hurts my brain honestly.

Do you know why we're moving away from theoretical models? Because we have the data to go get actual answers instead of engaging in the furious government vs freedom intellectual masturbation that passes for mainstream political thought.

We're not going to get what we need to get out of this jam through reduced consumption. I'm for gradually phasing in a 100+ dollar per ton carbon tax... but that's mostly to force the supply chains to squeeze out the easy changes already. I have zero expectation that the average person will stop consuming exactly as much meat as they can afford or driving an SUV if oil is cheap. I'm also in favor of distributing that carbon tax revenue to everyone on a per capita basis weekly. I'd redirect exactly zero of it. If you want to subsidize green energy, and we should, do it through the normal appropriations process.

EDIT: This isn't super clear but I stand behind it. The cliffs is that you can get people to substitute one product of similar quality for another if pricing changes... but good luck getting them to reduce total consumption without major political consequences that will result in very bad things.

Also holy **** lol at calling my version of government services 'basic' lol. I'm basically advocating for the government to run 30-35% of total GDP... at least. Do you have any idea how much defense + healthcare + infrastructure + education + science is? It's absolutely massive.

Yeah sorry I don't think the government should fix the price of almost anything that they aren't actually fully providing and thus rationing.