More blame the victim mentality from the master of the craft.
"Your Honor, if it please the court, the supposed victim known as "the people" was not only dressed in a "screw me over" outfit, they practically BEGGED the accused Fat Cat to give it to them good and hard. The people let themselves be screwed over because they must have WANTED it like that! My client, Mr. Fat Cat, was only giving the people the proper screwing they so obviously desired. Did 'the people' struggle? Did they resist? Not that I noticed! Obviously, the real criminal here is not Mr. Fat Cat, but... THE GOVERNMENT! I suggest we give it the death penalty."
No, they are not in government. What a waste of their time that would be. They HIRE people to do that menial shit for them. If the power of the people is not in government, that is the people's fault. We can get it back. Government works when we take the time to make it work for us, and it is a tool of oppression only when we let our guard down.
Yeah... are you 'special?' Do you suffer from dyslexia or some other reading disability? I only ask because I did not say that government is either totally good or totally bad, in fact, I said just the opposite. "The government does tons of terrible shit... This is not one of those things" implies the government is both good and bad. Hope that helped clear things up for you.
Yes, the FCC is sending out routers to ten thousand random people because the FCC wants to spy on, uh, ten thousand random people. The government is out to gitcha! RUN! Fucking moron. The government does tons of terrible shit, like giving all the wealth generated by the middle class to about 400 well connected guys, but guess what? This is not one of those terrible things. When you act like a paranoid schizophrenic, and tell everyone the government is ALWAYS out to screw EVERYONE over, ALL THE TIME, you are doing the work those 400 well connected guys want you to do. They want everyone to mistrust the one thing, the only thing that can possibly stop them: the power of people working together, i.e. government. So thanks for that. You do know that even if you were to fellate them 24/7 for the next fifty years, they won't let you into their little club, right?
Modern capitalism has nothing to do with investing in a company. How many investments go into IPOs or stock splits, and how many are simply betting on a company by paying someone else for existing stock? If you aren't buying it from the company, you aren't investing in the company per se, the investment already went to the company, you are not giving the company the money, you are giving it to someone else.
If anyone is making more than around 6% on their investments, society isn't doing well. Adam Smith wrote about this in Wealth of Nations when he said that the interests of the worker and the land owner coincide with society in general, but the interests of the stock owner are directly contrary to that of society. When society as a whole is doing well, and everyone who wants to be is gainfully employed, businesses must pay their workers more to attract and keep them, meaning, there is less money for dividends, and there is less incentive to buy stocks over other forms of investment. It is only when many people in society are desperate and poor that the stockholder makes out like a literal bandit, as the poor and desperate demand less of the pie, meaning more pie for the stockholder. And obviously, if society is doing poorly, the value of land and the income from rent tend to go down, so the land owner has society's best interest at heart. As does the worker. But the stock holder wants society to fail so that he may become rich.
Do you not see that as a problem with capitalism? There is a reason that throughout most of their history, most major world religions have considered usury (predatory lending) a sin. Yet capitalism is based on usury. When capitalists use their leverage to keep more of the pie, they amass more political power as well. They can use this increased power to enact policies that favor capitalists over land owners and workers. This positive feedback loop of money->power->money means that a very small group of people end up controlling most of the assets of a country. This is not, as Adam Smith commented, the way to increase the wealth of your nation. It is the way to increase the wealth of a very small group of sociopathic individuals.
Capitalism ultimately leads to a two class society, with very little mobility between the classes, as the capitalists give all the really lucrative opportunities to their friends and relatives. It also leads to wars of conquest, and to empire building, as the ultra wealthy attempt to use their nations power to accumulate more assets and control outside of the nation they dominate. So, far from being better than the predominant historical method, capitalism, unchecked by society in general, leads to exactly the same outcome. As evidence, I present the world as it exists today.
Having worked at an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) company, I can tell you that many of them are scams designed to head off worker unionization drives, while allowing little to no control of the means of production by the workers, through different classes of stocks with different voting rights. This was a Reprographics firm in San Francisco that employed a lot of Philipino workers, and basically the ESOP amounted to a retirement account that would tank if the company did. It really depends on how the charter and bylaws are set up. Having helped start a programming cooperative myself, I've looked into it. Cooperatives (in California at least) are simply types of non profit, "mutual benefit" corporations. Another structure that we looked into was the LLC, which is in a lot of ways more flexible and better for smaller businesses, but we ended up going with the co-op structure simply for the name and connections to other cooperatives. At the time, LLCs were a new thing, and a lot of people didn't really associate them with employee controlled cooperative businesses.
You can set up cooperatives in unfair ways as well, they are just non-profit corporations, so again, its all about how you set up the charter and bylaws. I believe in one person, one vote, not one vote per share. Fundamentally, I see society as a system of voluntary cooperation, and while some disparity in wealth and ownership is good, too much is very, very bad. Income disparity shouldn't be more than about 100 to 1. Wealth disparity can be a little higher, because some people choose to save and invest their income while others spend it, and those who behave responsibly with their money should be rewarded over those who don't.
It's all about balance, the middle path between extremes. "The string that is too tight snaps, and that which is too loose slips the fret."
Whoah. You know how silly it sounds to say that half of Americans own the means of production? Do you really not know how little the bottom 90% has invested in stock? Not much. That includes ALL investments, including 401Ks. You are absolutely, 100% wrong on this. The average American is a serf. If he wants to eat and have a roof over his head, he will do what the ultra rich.001 percent tell him.
I've posted it before. http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph Please, read this carefully. If you do not have figures that refute what is claimed in the report, please do not dispute those claims, as your arguments, without evidence, will fall on deaf ears. You need to understand, the American dream is dead. It was stolen by Wall Street. We CAN get it back, we CAN have an ownership society.
I don't want to do away with ownership. I don't want to do away with the free market. I'm a socialist, not a communist. I would like to see more democratic control over the means of production, in the form of workers' and buyer's cooperatives, not government run factories. Governments can run natural monopolies, not well perhaps, but better than private owners can. As for non-monopolies, I must accept the evidence I have seen. I wish human nature were different, but when factories in in the former USSR were privatized, they performed better. The monopolies that were privatized did worse.
But first, we need to deal with the small but powerful band of thieves and brigands who have stolen our American dream. As long as the top 10% own two thirds of ALL wealth, the middle class will stagnate as they have for the last thirty years.o
Yeah, as such things exist in the real world. My theory is, the owning class fights so hard against communism because it negates ownership. In order to resist this onslaught, communist regimes turn to hard liners. Hard liners destroy any chance of control by the proletariat. You saw it in the Russian revolution, with the workers' Soviets maintaining real direct democracy for several years during the civil war. Basically, you get a revolution that overthrows property, you always have an immediate, brutal, and internationally supported counter revolution which, win or lose, turns the revolution paranoid and vicious. Armed revolution is too polarizing, it rarely creates a society better than the one it replaces.
oWlPoRk or whatever the poster's name is, is a known troll, continually posting inflammatory shit, and I have no respect for them. You, on the other hand, are kind of a dick, but not so much that I will automatically insult you any time you post.
My argument is so simple, even oWlPoRk should be able to understand it.
First, calling something by a certain name does not make it that thing. Is it a "No True Scotsman" fallacy to say that the DPRK is not really a Republic, or a Democracy, despite it's name?
Second, even if the DPRK really is a democratic republic, you can not tar and feather all democracies and republics by the actions of that one example. Look at socialist Europe, perhaps that is a better model of what socialism can be than China.
My guess? They don't. People get cut off sometimes. They do not remember the thousands of times they weren't cut off while saying "protest" but the one time it does happen sticks out. They tell a friend, who starts watching for it as well. It doesn't happen, but the friend is cut off while saying "democracy." Or, well, actually, they continued talking for several minutes after that, but when they did get cut off, of course it was because they said "democracy." And that's how myths are born.
You know how that guy Kim Jong-il runs a place called "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea?" I've heard he's a pretty bad dude, killin' and oppressin' all over the place. That just goes to show how terrible all Republics are, right?
Now off you go to herp a derp, little guy, and let the big folks talk politics. Maybe some day when you're older and less prone to tantrums, you can talk with the rest of us.
We will forever be indebted to Shatner for raising the theatrical craft known as "chewing the scenery" to new heights. To celebrate, we should all eat ham tonight.
I like the Socratic form of irony, which may be familiar to many Internet trolls: feigning ignorance to provoke an opponent. I also like the Blackadder definition: "It's like goldy or bronzy, only with iron."
What?!? Please learn your history, or at least read the links provided. The White Citizens Councils oppression was completely parallel to any local government oppression. And it was the Federal Government that stepped in and stopped the oppression with.... wait for it.... regulations. The rest of your post is just nonsense, I can't even make heads or tails of it. You don't know what you are trying to say, and neither does anyone else. HOW did economics go a long way to eliminating segregation, where is your proof of that outrageous claim? What exactly did Wilson do?
I have provided evidence of what the White Citizens Councils did, and you provide no evidence to refute it, you simply, without any evidence whatsoever, deny it. You are not a rational person.
Shorter version: getting rid of governments and regulations will let the owning class, who own ninety percent of the world's resources, dominate us economically in the same way the White Citizens Councils used economic pressure to dominate or destroy any black people who tried to get ahead in the world. Do you understand? People can use money to dominate and destroy others, and doing so is profitable, if we let them do it. Absent government regulations, the ultra rich owning class WILL use their money against us all in the same way the White Citizens Council used their money against blacks.
If you think this outcome is unlikely, please explain why one wealthier group successfully used their money to destroy a less wealthy group, but that won't happen to all of us if we get rid of the government regulations preventing it.
We don't need to change human nature, because human nature isn't what you seem to think it is. The kind of selfish, hierarchical patterns you seem to believe is human nature is just one part of human nature, there is another part that can come to the forefront given the right circumstances.
It's funny because the people you mention as supporting regulations also support other progressive causes. They do not act against the working class, and they do not act in the interests of the ruling class. I'm seeing a pattern, even among the wealthy, some people want to control and dominate others, and some people don't. FAR more rich people, such as the Koch brothers, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck, support deregulation.
Are you ultra-wealthy? No? Thought not. So a group or institution that has control over the ultra wealthy will not necessarily have control over you. Using control to prevent others from dominating the less powerful is not the same thing as using control to force the more powerful to dominate the less powerful. In fact, they are opposites.
Knowing the ultra rich will ATTEMPT to dominate and control any institution or group they feel has power over them means they will attempt to dominate and control all of society. Media can say bad things about them, they will dominate the media. People can buy from others, they will attempt to drive all competition out of business. Schools and universities may develop disruptive technologies that remove their power, they will attempt to destroy such research. Individuals can voice their discontent with the ultra-rich, they will attempt to silence them. People will try to get fair value for the work they perform for the owning class, the owning class will destroy their lives in order to make them so desperate, they will do what they are told.
Your plan of deregulation would let the sociopaths utterly dominate and control society. Your plan would lead to you becoming a serf to the owning class. Your plan has been tried before, and the results were abysmal and damaging to society during the gilded age. The owning class already have all the power. They already own 90% of everything. If we do away with government regulations, there is nothing stopping the owning class from using their wealth to destroy society and create a large pool of very desperate workers who will be willing to do anything for some scraps of food. That is their plan. They do not just want to be rich. They want everyone else to be poor and miserable, so they are easy to control and dominate, and our democratic institutions are the only thing standing between the owning class and eternal world domination.
I don't want to be a serf or a slave, but that is what will happen if we get rid of regulations. If you think getting rid of regulations will do the opposite, please explain how, given that the owning class owns ninety percent of the resources and you seem completely unwilling to redistribute that wealth. You want to give the keys to the hen house to the foxes, and then shoot the farmer and his dogs. That will not go well for the hens. And you are a hen, you are not a fox, so don't think you'll come out on top in that scenario.
I just don't see the evidence, and based on history, I simply do not buy your theory, but thanks for the debate. Broadcast TV will be around at least as long as broadcast radio. Get back to me when that goes away, and then I might be willing to debate you on the death of TV. Until then, I will sit here quietly thinking you are a fool.
We need to change the way we regulate businesses, perhaps implementing subsidies to help them navigate the regulation process on a level playing field. There is no reason that proper regulations can't be set and enforced without favoring the rich. We have regulations against murder, murder can be profitable, and yet somehow we haven't had murderers capture most, if any, police forces.
Even without regulations at all, the playing field is automatically tilted towards the rich. This is a bad thing. Money can capture more than just regulations, look up "deep capture." Without regulations, money will dominate all areas of society and we will have two classes, the ultra rich, and the serfs. The ultra rich are the primary drivers behind deregulation: if regulation is such a boon to the rich, why are they all against it?
The ultra rich will attempt to dominate and control any institution or group that they feel has any power over them. Without government to stop them, they will succeed. Based on my debates with you in the past, I can only conclude this is the outcome you desire. To me, it seems you worship power and hierarchy, and given the opportunity you would do just as the ultra rich do now. You don't want them stopped because you want to be them.
Do you often fantasize about extreme environmentalists? Could you share more of what happens in those fantasies? I mean, get to the good stuff, this part's boring.
Good Lord. This looks like a total scam. This is all funded by a known patent troll. It appears to be some sort of viral marketing campaign to drum up customers, i.e. moronic investors willing to part with huge sums of money they will never see again. And now we're all part of it, they'll point at Slashdot and say, "Look! Nerds are talking about it. Smart people. See them talking about it? Now give me some money." I feel dirty now.
And, I mean I'm sorry, but did you even look at those graphs? You can move around the bottom ninety percent all you want, it doesn't even matter. You are a peon if you aren't in the top one percent. And there is no way short of a miracle you or I are getting into the club that owns ninety percent of the wealth in this country. We're all fighting over table scraps.
Slashdot Mirror
More blame the victim mentality from the master of the craft.
"Your Honor, if it please the court, the supposed victim known as "the people" was not only dressed in a "screw me over" outfit, they practically BEGGED the accused Fat Cat to give it to them good and hard. The people let themselves be screwed over because they must have WANTED it like that! My client, Mr. Fat Cat, was only giving the people the proper screwing they so obviously desired. Did 'the people' struggle? Did they resist? Not that I noticed! Obviously, the real criminal here is not Mr. Fat Cat, but... THE GOVERNMENT! I suggest we give it the death penalty."
No, they are not in government. What a waste of their time that would be. They HIRE people to do that menial shit for them. If the power of the people is not in government, that is the people's fault. We can get it back. Government works when we take the time to make it work for us, and it is a tool of oppression only when we let our guard down.
Yeah... are you 'special?' Do you suffer from dyslexia or some other reading disability? I only ask because I did not say that government is either totally good or totally bad, in fact, I said just the opposite. "The government does tons of terrible shit... This is not one of those things" implies the government is both good and bad. Hope that helped clear things up for you.
Yes, the FCC is sending out routers to ten thousand random people because the FCC wants to spy on, uh, ten thousand random people. The government is out to gitcha! RUN! Fucking moron. The government does tons of terrible shit, like giving all the wealth generated by the middle class to about 400 well connected guys, but guess what? This is not one of those terrible things. When you act like a paranoid schizophrenic, and tell everyone the government is ALWAYS out to screw EVERYONE over, ALL THE TIME, you are doing the work those 400 well connected guys want you to do. They want everyone to mistrust the one thing, the only thing that can possibly stop them: the power of people working together, i.e. government. So thanks for that. You do know that even if you were to fellate them 24/7 for the next fifty years, they won't let you into their little club, right?
Modern capitalism has nothing to do with investing in a company. How many investments go into IPOs or stock splits, and how many are simply betting on a company by paying someone else for existing stock? If you aren't buying it from the company, you aren't investing in the company per se, the investment already went to the company, you are not giving the company the money, you are giving it to someone else.
If anyone is making more than around 6% on their investments, society isn't doing well. Adam Smith wrote about this in Wealth of Nations when he said that the interests of the worker and the land owner coincide with society in general, but the interests of the stock owner are directly contrary to that of society. When society as a whole is doing well, and everyone who wants to be is gainfully employed, businesses must pay their workers more to attract and keep them, meaning, there is less money for dividends, and there is less incentive to buy stocks over other forms of investment. It is only when many people in society are desperate and poor that the stockholder makes out like a literal bandit, as the poor and desperate demand less of the pie, meaning more pie for the stockholder. And obviously, if society is doing poorly, the value of land and the income from rent tend to go down, so the land owner has society's best interest at heart. As does the worker. But the stock holder wants society to fail so that he may become rich.
Do you not see that as a problem with capitalism? There is a reason that throughout most of their history, most major world religions have considered usury (predatory lending) a sin. Yet capitalism is based on usury. When capitalists use their leverage to keep more of the pie, they amass more political power as well. They can use this increased power to enact policies that favor capitalists over land owners and workers. This positive feedback loop of money->power->money means that a very small group of people end up controlling most of the assets of a country. This is not, as Adam Smith commented, the way to increase the wealth of your nation. It is the way to increase the wealth of a very small group of sociopathic individuals.
Capitalism ultimately leads to a two class society, with very little mobility between the classes, as the capitalists give all the really lucrative opportunities to their friends and relatives. It also leads to wars of conquest, and to empire building, as the ultra wealthy attempt to use their nations power to accumulate more assets and control outside of the nation they dominate. So, far from being better than the predominant historical method, capitalism, unchecked by society in general, leads to exactly the same outcome. As evidence, I present the world as it exists today.
Having worked at an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) company, I can tell you that many of them are scams designed to head off worker unionization drives, while allowing little to no control of the means of production by the workers, through different classes of stocks with different voting rights. This was a Reprographics firm in San Francisco that employed a lot of Philipino workers, and basically the ESOP amounted to a retirement account that would tank if the company did. It really depends on how the charter and bylaws are set up. Having helped start a programming cooperative myself, I've looked into it. Cooperatives (in California at least) are simply types of non profit, "mutual benefit" corporations. Another structure that we looked into was the LLC, which is in a lot of ways more flexible and better for smaller businesses, but we ended up going with the co-op structure simply for the name and connections to other cooperatives. At the time, LLCs were a new thing, and a lot of people didn't really associate them with employee controlled cooperative businesses.
You can set up cooperatives in unfair ways as well, they are just non-profit corporations, so again, its all about how you set up the charter and bylaws. I believe in one person, one vote, not one vote per share. Fundamentally, I see society as a system of voluntary cooperation, and while some disparity in wealth and ownership is good, too much is very, very bad. Income disparity shouldn't be more than about 100 to 1. Wealth disparity can be a little higher, because some people choose to save and invest their income while others spend it, and those who behave responsibly with their money should be rewarded over those who don't.
It's all about balance, the middle path between extremes. "The string that is too tight snaps, and that which is too loose slips the fret."
You sound just like my fave web comic, Dinosaur Comics. Sexy times!
Whoah. You know how silly it sounds to say that half of Americans own the means of production? Do you really not know how little the bottom 90% has invested in stock? Not much. That includes ALL investments, including 401Ks. You are absolutely, 100% wrong on this. The average American is a serf. If he wants to eat and have a roof over his head, he will do what the ultra rich .001 percent tell him.
I've posted it before. http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph
Please, read this carefully. If you do not have figures that refute what is claimed in the report, please do not dispute those claims, as your arguments, without evidence, will fall on deaf ears. You need to understand, the American dream is dead. It was stolen by Wall Street. We CAN get it back, we CAN have an ownership society.
I don't want to do away with ownership. I don't want to do away with the free market. I'm a socialist, not a communist. I would like to see more democratic control over the means of production, in the form of workers' and buyer's cooperatives, not government run factories. Governments can run natural monopolies, not well perhaps, but better than private owners can. As for non-monopolies, I must accept the evidence I have seen. I wish human nature were different, but when factories in in the former USSR were privatized, they performed better. The monopolies that were privatized did worse.
But first, we need to deal with the small but powerful band of thieves and brigands who have stolen our American dream. As long as the top 10% own two thirds of ALL wealth, the middle class will stagnate as they have for the last thirty years.o
Yeah, as such things exist in the real world. My theory is, the owning class fights so hard against communism because it negates ownership. In order to resist this onslaught, communist regimes turn to hard liners. Hard liners destroy any chance of control by the proletariat. You saw it in the Russian revolution, with the workers' Soviets maintaining real direct democracy for several years during the civil war. Basically, you get a revolution that overthrows property, you always have an immediate, brutal, and internationally supported counter revolution which, win or lose, turns the revolution paranoid and vicious. Armed revolution is too polarizing, it rarely creates a society better than the one it replaces.
oWlPoRk or whatever the poster's name is, is a known troll, continually posting inflammatory shit, and I have no respect for them. You, on the other hand, are kind of a dick, but not so much that I will automatically insult you any time you post.
My argument is so simple, even oWlPoRk should be able to understand it.
First, calling something by a certain name does not make it that thing. Is it a "No True Scotsman" fallacy to say that the DPRK is not really a Republic, or a Democracy, despite it's name?
Second, even if the DPRK really is a democratic republic, you can not tar and feather all democracies and republics by the actions of that one example. Look at socialist Europe, perhaps that is a better model of what socialism can be than China.
My guess? They don't. People get cut off sometimes. They do not remember the thousands of times they weren't cut off while saying "protest" but the one time it does happen sticks out. They tell a friend, who starts watching for it as well. It doesn't happen, but the friend is cut off while saying "democracy." Or, well, actually, they continued talking for several minutes after that, but when they did get cut off, of course it was because they said "democracy." And that's how myths are born.
You know how that guy Kim Jong-il runs a place called "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea?" I've heard he's a pretty bad dude, killin' and oppressin' all over the place. That just goes to show how terrible all Republics are, right?
Now off you go to herp a derp, little guy, and let the big folks talk politics. Maybe some day when you're older and less prone to tantrums, you can talk with the rest of us.
We will forever be indebted to Shatner for raising the theatrical craft known as "chewing the scenery" to new heights. To celebrate, we should all eat ham tonight.
In China, they speak Pig Mongolian, not Pig Latin.
I like the Socratic form of irony, which may be familiar to many Internet trolls: feigning ignorance to provoke an opponent. I also like the Blackadder definition: "It's like goldy or bronzy, only with iron."
Please make more sense. The same what?
What?!? Please learn your history, or at least read the links provided. The White Citizens Councils oppression was completely parallel to any local government oppression. And it was the Federal Government that stepped in and stopped the oppression with.... wait for it.... regulations. The rest of your post is just nonsense, I can't even make heads or tails of it. You don't know what you are trying to say, and neither does anyone else. HOW did economics go a long way to eliminating segregation, where is your proof of that outrageous claim? What exactly did Wilson do?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson#Civil_Rights
I have provided evidence of what the White Citizens Councils did, and you provide no evidence to refute it, you simply, without any evidence whatsoever, deny it. You are not a rational person.
Shorter version: getting rid of governments and regulations will let the owning class, who own ninety percent of the world's resources, dominate us economically in the same way the White Citizens Councils used economic pressure to dominate or destroy any black people who tried to get ahead in the world. Do you understand? People can use money to dominate and destroy others, and doing so is profitable, if we let them do it. Absent government regulations, the ultra rich owning class WILL use their money against us all in the same way the White Citizens Council used their money against blacks.
If you think this outcome is unlikely, please explain why one wealthier group successfully used their money to destroy a less wealthy group, but that won't happen to all of us if we get rid of the government regulations preventing it.
We don't need to change human nature, because human nature isn't what you seem to think it is. The kind of selfish, hierarchical patterns you seem to believe is human nature is just one part of human nature, there is another part that can come to the forefront given the right circumstances.
It's funny because the people you mention as supporting regulations also support other progressive causes. They do not act against the working class, and they do not act in the interests of the ruling class. I'm seeing a pattern, even among the wealthy, some people want to control and dominate others, and some people don't. FAR more rich people, such as the Koch brothers, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck, support deregulation.
Are you ultra-wealthy? No? Thought not. So a group or institution that has control over the ultra wealthy will not necessarily have control over you. Using control to prevent others from dominating the less powerful is not the same thing as using control to force the more powerful to dominate the less powerful. In fact, they are opposites.
Knowing the ultra rich will ATTEMPT to dominate and control any institution or group they feel has power over them means they will attempt to dominate and control all of society. Media can say bad things about them, they will dominate the media. People can buy from others, they will attempt to drive all competition out of business. Schools and universities may develop disruptive technologies that remove their power, they will attempt to destroy such research. Individuals can voice their discontent with the ultra-rich, they will attempt to silence them. People will try to get fair value for the work they perform for the owning class, the owning class will destroy their lives in order to make them so desperate, they will do what they are told.
Your plan of deregulation would let the sociopaths utterly dominate and control society. Your plan would lead to you becoming a serf to the owning class. Your plan has been tried before, and the results were abysmal and damaging to society during the gilded age. The owning class already have all the power. They already own 90% of everything. If we do away with government regulations, there is nothing stopping the owning class from using their wealth to destroy society and create a large pool of very desperate workers who will be willing to do anything for some scraps of food. That is their plan. They do not just want to be rich. They want everyone else to be poor and miserable, so they are easy to control and dominate, and our democratic institutions are the only thing standing between the owning class and eternal world domination.
I don't want to be a serf or a slave, but that is what will happen if we get rid of regulations. If you think getting rid of regulations will do the opposite, please explain how, given that the owning class owns ninety percent of the resources and you seem completely unwilling to redistribute that wealth. You want to give the keys to the hen house to the foxes, and then shoot the farmer and his dogs. That will not go well for the hens. And you are a hen, you are not a fox, so don't think you'll come out on top in that scenario.
You are confused about what I am saying, but I just don't have the patience or the interest in setting you straight. Have a nice day.
I just don't see the evidence, and based on history, I simply do not buy your theory, but thanks for the debate. Broadcast TV will be around at least as long as broadcast radio. Get back to me when that goes away, and then I might be willing to debate you on the death of TV. Until then, I will sit here quietly thinking you are a fool.
We need to change the way we regulate businesses, perhaps implementing subsidies to help them navigate the regulation process on a level playing field. There is no reason that proper regulations can't be set and enforced without favoring the rich. We have regulations against murder, murder can be profitable, and yet somehow we haven't had murderers capture most, if any, police forces.
Even without regulations at all, the playing field is automatically tilted towards the rich. This is a bad thing. Money can capture more than just regulations, look up "deep capture." Without regulations, money will dominate all areas of society and we will have two classes, the ultra rich, and the serfs. The ultra rich are the primary drivers behind deregulation: if regulation is such a boon to the rich, why are they all against it?
The ultra rich will attempt to dominate and control any institution or group that they feel has any power over them. Without government to stop them, they will succeed. Based on my debates with you in the past, I can only conclude this is the outcome you desire. To me, it seems you worship power and hierarchy, and given the opportunity you would do just as the ultra rich do now. You don't want them stopped because you want to be them.
Do you often fantasize about extreme environmentalists? Could you share more of what happens in those fantasies? I mean, get to the good stuff, this part's boring.
Good Lord. This looks like a total scam. This is all funded by a known patent troll. It appears to be some sort of viral marketing campaign to drum up customers, i.e. moronic investors willing to part with huge sums of money they will never see again. And now we're all part of it, they'll point at Slashdot and say, "Look! Nerds are talking about it. Smart people. See them talking about it? Now give me some money." I feel dirty now.
I will counter you citations with these:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html
http://www.economist.com/node/15908469?story_id=15908469
Sorry, there is no social mobility in America anymore.
And, I mean I'm sorry, but did you even look at those graphs? You can move around the bottom ninety percent all you want, it doesn't even matter. You are a peon if you aren't in the top one percent. And there is no way short of a miracle you or I are getting into the club that owns ninety percent of the wealth in this country. We're all fighting over table scraps.