a free market in real life translates to "give as many expensive tests as we can get away with"
healthcare isn't a MARKETPLACE. it is not driven by best price, because the buyer has no control to seek the cheapest service. no knowledge of medicine.....
face reality: there are some issues in life, where, believe it or fucking not, market forces do not help, and make things worse
I don't get it -- you just said yourself that the healthcare market is not a free market, yet you blame capitalism for its failure? How the hell do you justify that?
no time when he is having a heart attack to shop around
Emergency care is a very _very_ small subset of total healthcare costs. (in the single percent range). So this whole line of dialogue is, and has always been, a straw man. In reality, people typically have plenty of time to "shop around" -- what they don't have is the opportunity to do so, namely because the "government/insurance company/doctor" love triangle explicitly defies reason by judging costs by arbitrary negotiation rather than actual reality. The concept of "negotiated rates" is assinine in the first place. When I buy a product on Amazon, I don't have to haggle for "the best price", yet in certain market segments (such as auto sales or health insurance), suddenly we're in a bartering market. Things should cost what they cost, to _everyone_.
300BN fighter jet programs are $1000/citizen, and considering our absurd power, are much more worth PRIORITIES in what may be a 'issue' of waste.
Where do you get your numbers?
I tried to find any jet program that came near that number in annual cost and could not.
The Raptor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor) is about 62 billion TOTAL cost.
The F35 (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-30/lockheed-f-35-fighter-estimate-increased-9-in-a-year-u-s-says.html) is 1.51 trillion over _55_ years (~27 billion a year). I believe that's $86 per citizen, which is a far cry from the $1000 you're claiming.
With 'public' I meant a government working for its citizens.. at least, in a country where government functions, has also the interest of the public in mind and gets evaluated by its citizens, for example through a system of elections
Ah, so in fiction then? That's like saying corporations would be fantastic if they put the interest of the consumer first. But then that wouldn't be reality, eh?
Except your invisible hand is just moving the deck chairs. The cheap shale gas isn't going to last very long (yes, natural gas is 'better' for the environment than oil or coal) and just encourages more growth which is the underlying cause of the problem.
Capitalism is a fine method for optimizing short term issues, long term not so much. Anything to do with external costs or problems, not so much.
Except that reality proves you wrong. Natural gas will last longer than you give it credit for, and capitalism is already making solar more and more cost feasible every day. It will surpass fossil fuels within a decade, by natural market forces. Hawaii is already there (solar being cheaper than fossil fuels). Not saying capitalism is perfect, but the free market is doing a FAR better job "fixing" this problem than government tinkering is.
Prime Directive... LOCAL...LOCAL...LOCAL. Your operative or key word is impact. You want to insure that as much as your dollar achieves its intended objective and that you have the ability to (if you choose) to verify the impact. Avoid a national or international blunderbuss -- such an approach scatters your money, creates too much dilution and generally includes excessive overhead.
I question the equivalence here. "Big green"? Big oil made 137 billion dollars in profits in 2011 and owns more politicians than you can shake a stick at. How many billions of dollars does "big green" make in a year and how many senators do they control?
I would say that 211 billion vs 375 billion is in the same ballpark from an industry size standpoint. We're not talking "david and goliath" anymore. 211 billion is plenty of clout to throw around, especially when your market is growing when your competitor is shrinking, when your product is becoming cheaper when your competitor's product is becoming more expensive. Within a decade, "Big Green" will be the next "Big Oil". And they'll still be sitting on their mountain of tax subsidies and breaks too, same as oil is from many decades ago.
The change in the carbon 12/carbon 13 ratio in the atmosphere is a direct fingerprint of human derived CO2 from burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are depleted in C13 because the plants that they came from preferred the lighter C12 isotope. The increase in the C12/C13 ratio is direct evidence that the source is fossil fuels.
This sparked my interest, as it is the first time I've ever heard anyone on either side of the argument mention the carbon 12/carbon 13 ratio (which, in and of itself, is pretty shocking considering how often GW debates go down on Slashdot). Doing my natural due diligence to research the ratio, there's surprisingly little dialogue of it out there in the Googlesphere either. I did, however, find one blog that brings up a few counterpoints: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/the-trouble-with-c12-c13-ratios/
In particular, one that has me boggled is: how do climate scientists account for the Great Depression anomaly? (the fact the manmade CO2 emissions dropped by some 30% for 4 years, yet there was no matching ripple in the C12-C13 ratio trend or the CO2 trending)? Quoted below:
"I should acknowledge one imprecision in my description of Dr. Martin Hertzbergâ(TM)s graph in my first columnâ"âthe smoothly rising curve of CO2ââ"which prompted several intemperate responses, charging that I couldnâ(TM)t possibly expect CO2 or carbon levels to drop just because of a one-third cut in manmade CO2. Indeed, I should have written, âoeOne could not even see a 1 part per million bump in the smoothly rising curve.â Even though such transitory influences as day and night or seasonal variations in photosynthesis cause clearly visible swings in the curve, the 30 percent drop between 1929 and 1932 caused not a ripple: empirical scientific evidence that the human contribution is in fact less than a fart in a hurricane, as Dr. Hertzberg says. "
Everytime I see this brought up anywhere on the internet, it gets glossed over -- there's no counter argument. Could someone address this discrepancy?
Any correspondence, of anyone, can be quoted out of context. Targeting researchers working on climate change, demanding that they give you an easy source of mud for you to dig through, hoping you can score points in the press and with your political friends?
Yet this is the norm across the board in seemingly all other venues.
In the political realm, you have actors like Anonymous making public all the personal correspondence of a bunch of public servants -- and people here praise them for it.
In the private realm. businesses are regularly raided for emails suspecting "foul play" (see Solyndra). Most of the time, nothing truly egregious is fond, but there's plenty of "sketchy" dirt there to sink them.
It doesn't make sense if you're going to claim one of them is okay because "we're flushing out the hidden corruption!" whereas the other is just dirt-digging to make someone look bad. They both have the same intent with only your personal beliefs painting them one way or the other.
How is that proof? For one, it says nothing of her supreme court voting record. For two, it says nothing of "touchy" cases which aren't clear cut. By using her full voting record, they're just proving that the majority of the times, court cases are simple and obvious "open and shut" situations where everyone is on the same page.
I can make a good argument that any Democrat will nominate better justices than any Republican.
Recent ground breaking supreme court decisions would disagree with you. Chief Justice Roberts, appointed by Bush, certainly didn't walk the party line with respect to the healthcare individual mandate. Show me a case of a liberal judge making a similar "cross-party-line" decision on a major piece of legislation.
Whoosh.
I was making exactly that point. People who announce they're libertarians and then go to pains to explain that libertarianism isn't about getting rid of all laws, oh no, it's just the bad ones, are really not adding anything to the discussion or the politics or to understanding.
No, in fact the exact opposite is true. People who react to libertarians by assuming they want to get rid of all laws are adding nothing to the discussion or to understanding. It's exactly as ignorant as thinking anyone who wants social programs is a communist who wants to destroy the free market. You sir/maam were the one making the baseless comment, not I.
What are libertarians genuinely bringing to the table here?
ALOT of the same stuff as the conservative. A libertarian is frequently little more than a conservative that is more focused on (or more serious about) small government and state's rights than on religion and abortion. Or say someone who is a bit more intense in their views (so the conservative says "don't raise taxes, and reduce spending somewhat" where the libertarian says "cut taxes considerably AND cut spending considerably". Libertarians are not anarchists -- their views are analogous to the conservative you quoted. However, they're state focused over federal. And they typically MEAN it when they say "small government", where the conservative typically means "unless it's something I want, like defense spending"
I'd like to do away with the laws I disagree with, while keeping the ones do I agree with. Yay libertarianism!
That's the definition of all political belief systems. Unless you're an anarchist. Every single ideology has an agenda that they want to pass while shutting down another agenda. Why do you see this as unusual with respect to Libertarianism?
There wasn't even a discussion of maybe giving them 99 cents on the dollar.
And yet you'll vote again for one of our two corporatist parties, yes? I'm still pissed Obama didn't do a damn thing to demand accountability from failing banks. CEOs walked away with worthless assets with gigantic golden parachutes and taxpayers ate the bill. Fuck that. I'm voting third party.
We use oil for power because it's orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to produce at the scales we need. We'll move on to something else, but that something else won't be nearly as desirable.
Cheaper, not better. Synthetic oils are better in almost every way. They're simply not used because they're expensive.
Sure, if you completely ignore the practical problems with paving half the country with solar panels.
The only childish nonsense here is your insistence that because we have cheap power today we will be able to have cheap power indefinitely into the future. That's just not realistic.
Except that is reality. Hawaii is already at solar grid parity. And most of the US is projected to hit solar grid parity in 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#Grid_parity). And your "panels covering half the country" claims are way off the mark. Try one desert: http://voices.yahoo.com/mojave-desert-southwest-could-supply-solar-power-5802962.html
In 2010, 70.5% of petroleum consumption in the U.S. was for transportation. And we're already in the process of converting to electric or natural gas transportation. Even assuming we make _no_ tech advances in the near future, I'm unconcerned. Natural price forcing will convert the car fleet away from oil (already happening in buses and other public infrastructure). We can supplement with Synthetics. Absolute _worst_ case, people relocate nearer to where they work (or telecommute) and/or we eliminate the concept of the "suburb" and then transportation requirements get reduced significantly. This is far from a catastrophic problem.
When that paving truck comes down your street, or a hospital is built, or a government meat inspector is hired, or a hurricane tracking center is built, you're trying to tell us that taxes are just a pure negative drag on the economy?
None of that stuff costs money! (at least not any "real" amount of money worth bickering over -- it would be like complaining NASA is spending too much with their piddly 18 billion dollar budget). We complain about things we rightfully should be complaining about, because they cost a trillion dollars a year and are projected to go much much higher.
You have created this hopelessly oversimplified economic view, which is why I call Libertarian economics a sort of religious faith (my reference to the Temple of the Unseen Hand Of The Unregulated Free Market).
And yours is apparently equally simplistic, as you appear to believe social programs will magically balance out on the budget sheet and that none of us have any cause for concern (after all, unfortunate things happen to unfortunate people).
It sounds lovely that you could achieve some sort of equilibrium simply by relying on free market competition, but reality is significantly messier, and castrating the government's, and really, society's ability to moderate market behaviors.
And it sounds equally lovely to provide free everything to everyone, healthcare/jobs/boats/mansions/bliss on tap, when in reality, those things cost money. LOTS of money. And that spending should be carefully monitored and stringently scrutinized.
And how exactly do you propose to create this rising tide? By cutting taxes to the wealthy
Nope, by cutting taxes to everyone. Or at least not raising them. A small "economic booster" in the form of shovel ready jobs ain't that bad an idea either, but our politicians are too stupid to do that.
And how exactly do you propose to create this rising tide? By cutting taxes to the wealthy, and somehow, out of a sense of honor and obligation, they will gladly replace the lost government funds that go into education, work programs, etc.?
lol, you should check again to see how much government fundage goes into "education, work programs, etc" -- hell, you could probably fund those programs off the _rounding errors_ of any of the big spenders.
? And how would this help anyone on welfare when the causes of a recession are external such as, I dunno, the meltdown of a major currency over which the United States has absolutely no control whatsoever?
I'm assuming this is a hypothetical? As I'm not aware of any recession (certainly not recently) that started with a foreign currency meltdown.
You don't have a model. You have an ideological religion
You only think this because you like to think we're Somalian anarchists.
Governments since Rome, and probably long before, figured out that if you don't keep the masses fed, at the very least you create massive social, and ultimately political instability. Hence the "bread" in "bread and circuses"
It's funny you mention that, because "bread and circuses" was the beginning of the end for Rome, a last-ditch effort to divert the attention of the public away from real problems the government had no intent on addressing. Personally, I'd rather fix the problems instead of placating the populace until we collapse.
Back in the real world, real people, often through no fault of their own, face crises of an existential nature; whether it is health woes, long-term unemployment or underemployment, natural and man-made disasters.
And back in the real world, there's also corruption, waste, inefficiency, people getting handouts who don't need them. What's your point? We want reform, not elimination.
I'm curious as to how you, as a Libertarian, can justify the Sherman Act at all. After all, isn't the Unseen Hand Of the Unregulated Free Market (praised be its name from on high, copyrighted, trademarked and patented by The Tea Party Committee To Make Ron Paul God King) should make artificial and unwanted regulation of the market unnecessary, right?
I'm a libertarian as well, and the Sherman Act doesn't stand in opposition to our beliefs. Limited government, not anarchy. Hell, even Adam Smith (the father of capitalism) stated the danger of monopolies and collusion in "Wealth of Nations." Capitalism (and the free market) can only function properly in a competitive market. Monopolies and anti-competitive behavior are just as big an obstacle to competitive markets as is government regulation.
I am bugged by people who enrich themselves by gaming the system, often sabotaging the wealth-creating mechanisms of capitalism in the process. Especially when they turn around and use their ill-gotten gains to defend their "right" to game the system. (And dude, many of the arguments you and I have is motivated by the propaganda related to the arguments over those "rights".) Also bugged by rockstar executives who manage to pull down huge compensation packages all out of proportion to their contribution to company success â" in some cases when the company isn't even successful.
As am I bugged by that, and by the wealth imbalance as well. But it's simply not fair to demonize all business men, or all rich men, just because a few bad apples are in the bunch. I'd rather attack the problem rather than the symptom. And the problem isn't "having money", it's exploiting the system. We need to be surgical with this, not blunt with a tax hammer on everything above "income level X". Plug the holes, reform the tax code. Don't just redistribute the money through any means necessary.
And productive workers won't "follow the money" because, for starters, immigration is not as easy as just buying a plane ticket. It's an expensive and time-consuming process, and you may not even be eligible to begin with. But even if you are, why would you move to a country where your standard of living is several times lower?
That somewhat assumes equivalent "productive workers" couldn't be found in the foreign country. Because that money would be working for them at that point (meaning they would have the venture capital to spawn off new businesses and spool up productive workers, venture capital that we would be losing).
The problem here is not that the example was unrepresentative. The problem here is that the example was bogus. Somebody who accumulates a few million dollars in personal assets through their own work is certainly not in the top 1% of wealth. That would be somebody's whose disposable income amounts to that much in a week.
"The 99th to 99.5th percentiles largely include physicians, attorneys, upper middle management, and small business people who have done well."
"It is true that, using the Federal Reserve figures, almost half of the top 1% of wealth made less than $500,000 in income and 5 out 6 of the top 1% of wealth made less than $1,000,000 in income."
I feel like you're thinking of the top.1%. I believe that is the "do-nothing" wealth category you complain about.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get it -- you just said yourself that the healthcare market is not a free market, yet you blame capitalism for its failure? How the hell do you justify that?
Emergency care is a very _very_ small subset of total healthcare costs. (in the single percent range). So this whole line of dialogue is, and has always been, a straw man. In reality, people typically have plenty of time to "shop around" -- what they don't have is the opportunity to do so, namely because the "government/insurance company/doctor" love triangle explicitly defies reason by judging costs by arbitrary negotiation rather than actual reality. The concept of "negotiated rates" is assinine in the first place. When I buy a product on Amazon, I don't have to haggle for "the best price", yet in certain market segments (such as auto sales or health insurance), suddenly we're in a bartering market. Things should cost what they cost, to _everyone_.
Where do you get your numbers? I tried to find any jet program that came near that number in annual cost and could not.
The Raptor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor) is about 62 billion TOTAL cost. The F35 (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-30/lockheed-f-35-fighter-estimate-increased-9-in-a-year-u-s-says.html) is 1.51 trillion over _55_ years (~27 billion a year). I believe that's $86 per citizen, which is a far cry from the $1000 you're claiming.
Ah, so in fiction then? That's like saying corporations would be fantastic if they put the interest of the consumer first. But then that wouldn't be reality, eh?
Except that reality proves you wrong. Natural gas will last longer than you give it credit for, and capitalism is already making solar more and more cost feasible every day. It will surpass fossil fuels within a decade, by natural market forces. Hawaii is already there (solar being cheaper than fossil fuels). Not saying capitalism is perfect, but the free market is doing a FAR better job "fixing" this problem than government tinkering is.
Strangely applicable to government as well...
Are you serious? They make not be the same size now, but the writing is on the wall, and they're already a force to be reckoned with. Here's one link (211 billion in new investment in 2010): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global-RE-Investment-VC-Eng.png
Compare that to the drop in oil and gas investment in the same basic time period (down to 375 billion total): http://articles.marketwatch.com/2009-05-26/industries/30731975_1_iea-oil-and-gas-oil-sands
I would say that 211 billion vs 375 billion is in the same ballpark from an industry size standpoint. We're not talking "david and goliath" anymore. 211 billion is plenty of clout to throw around, especially when your market is growing when your competitor is shrinking, when your product is becoming cheaper when your competitor's product is becoming more expensive. Within a decade, "Big Green" will be the next "Big Oil". And they'll still be sitting on their mountain of tax subsidies and breaks too, same as oil is from many decades ago.
This sparked my interest, as it is the first time I've ever heard anyone on either side of the argument mention the carbon 12/carbon 13 ratio (which, in and of itself, is pretty shocking considering how often GW debates go down on Slashdot). Doing my natural due diligence to research the ratio, there's surprisingly little dialogue of it out there in the Googlesphere either. I did, however, find one blog that brings up a few counterpoints: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/the-trouble-with-c12-c13-ratios/
In particular, one that has me boggled is: how do climate scientists account for the Great Depression anomaly? (the fact the manmade CO2 emissions dropped by some 30% for 4 years, yet there was no matching ripple in the C12-C13 ratio trend or the CO2 trending)? Quoted below:
"I should acknowledge one imprecision in my description of Dr. Martin Hertzbergâ(TM)s graph in my first columnâ"âthe smoothly rising curve of CO2ââ"which prompted several intemperate responses, charging that I couldnâ(TM)t possibly expect CO2 or carbon levels to drop just because of a one-third cut in manmade CO2. Indeed, I should have written, âoeOne could not even see a 1 part per million bump in the smoothly rising curve.â Even though such transitory influences as day and night or seasonal variations in photosynthesis cause clearly visible swings in the curve, the 30 percent drop between 1929 and 1932 caused not a ripple: empirical scientific evidence that the human contribution is in fact less than a fart in a hurricane, as Dr. Hertzberg says. "
Everytime I see this brought up anywhere on the internet, it gets glossed over -- there's no counter argument. Could someone address this discrepancy?
Yet this is the norm across the board in seemingly all other venues.
In the political realm, you have actors like Anonymous making public all the personal correspondence of a bunch of public servants -- and people here praise them for it. In the private realm. businesses are regularly raided for emails suspecting "foul play" (see Solyndra). Most of the time, nothing truly egregious is fond, but there's plenty of "sketchy" dirt there to sink them.
It doesn't make sense if you're going to claim one of them is okay because "we're flushing out the hidden corruption!" whereas the other is just dirt-digging to make someone look bad. They both have the same intent with only your personal beliefs painting them one way or the other.
What made you think this was ever going to happen? He voted in favor of the Patriot Act before he even became president.
Well, when you spend 4 years blowing cash on stimuluses and tax cuts and bailouts, I guess that does sorta become true.
When there's a _major_ piece of legislation (like a landmark decision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landmark_court_decisions_in_the_United_States) on the docket, the spotlight is on you, and the President and your party are breathing down your neck to "fall in line" (like this: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/02/us-obama-healthcare-idUSBRE8310WP20120402), THAT's when she'll be tested. So far, she walks the party line on cases that matter.
Recent ground breaking supreme court decisions would disagree with you. Chief Justice Roberts, appointed by Bush, certainly didn't walk the party line with respect to the healthcare individual mandate. Show me a case of a liberal judge making a similar "cross-party-line" decision on a major piece of legislation.
No, in fact the exact opposite is true. People who react to libertarians by assuming they want to get rid of all laws are adding nothing to the discussion or to understanding. It's exactly as ignorant as thinking anyone who wants social programs is a communist who wants to destroy the free market. You sir/maam were the one making the baseless comment, not I.
ALOT of the same stuff as the conservative. A libertarian is frequently little more than a conservative that is more focused on (or more serious about) small government and state's rights than on religion and abortion. Or say someone who is a bit more intense in their views (so the conservative says "don't raise taxes, and reduce spending somewhat" where the libertarian says "cut taxes considerably AND cut spending considerably". Libertarians are not anarchists -- their views are analogous to the conservative you quoted. However, they're state focused over federal. And they typically MEAN it when they say "small government", where the conservative typically means "unless it's something I want, like defense spending"
I fail to see how a vote for one corporatist over another one is a "vote against".
That's the definition of all political belief systems. Unless you're an anarchist. Every single ideology has an agenda that they want to pass while shutting down another agenda. Why do you see this as unusual with respect to Libertarianism?
Fair enough, I made similar mistakes in a different thread with you.
And yet you'll vote again for one of our two corporatist parties, yes? I'm still pissed Obama didn't do a damn thing to demand accountability from failing banks. CEOs walked away with worthless assets with gigantic golden parachutes and taxpayers ate the bill. Fuck that. I'm voting third party.
Cheaper, not better. Synthetic oils are better in almost every way. They're simply not used because they're expensive.
Except that is reality. Hawaii is already at solar grid parity. And most of the US is projected to hit solar grid parity in 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#Grid_parity). And your "panels covering half the country" claims are way off the mark. Try one desert: http://voices.yahoo.com/mojave-desert-southwest-could-supply-solar-power-5802962.html
In 2010, 70.5% of petroleum consumption in the U.S. was for transportation. And we're already in the process of converting to electric or natural gas transportation. Even assuming we make _no_ tech advances in the near future, I'm unconcerned. Natural price forcing will convert the car fleet away from oil (already happening in buses and other public infrastructure). We can supplement with Synthetics. Absolute _worst_ case, people relocate nearer to where they work (or telecommute) and/or we eliminate the concept of the "suburb" and then transportation requirements get reduced significantly. This is far from a catastrophic problem.
Luckily, we licked that problem back in the 1940s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_oil
None of that stuff costs money! (at least not any "real" amount of money worth bickering over -- it would be like complaining NASA is spending too much with their piddly 18 billion dollar budget). We complain about things we rightfully should be complaining about, because they cost a trillion dollars a year and are projected to go much much higher.
And yours is apparently equally simplistic, as you appear to believe social programs will magically balance out on the budget sheet and that none of us have any cause for concern (after all, unfortunate things happen to unfortunate people).
And it sounds equally lovely to provide free everything to everyone, healthcare/jobs/boats/mansions/bliss on tap, when in reality, those things cost money. LOTS of money. And that spending should be carefully monitored and stringently scrutinized.
Nope, by cutting taxes to everyone. Or at least not raising them. A small "economic booster" in the form of shovel ready jobs ain't that bad an idea either, but our politicians are too stupid to do that.
lol, you should check again to see how much government fundage goes into "education, work programs, etc" -- hell, you could probably fund those programs off the _rounding errors_ of any of the big spenders.
I'm assuming this is a hypothetical? As I'm not aware of any recession (certainly not recently) that started with a foreign currency meltdown.
You only think this because you like to think we're Somalian anarchists.
It's funny you mention that, because "bread and circuses" was the beginning of the end for Rome, a last-ditch effort to divert the attention of the public away from real problems the government had no intent on addressing. Personally, I'd rather fix the problems instead of placating the populace until we collapse.
And back in the real world, there's also corruption, waste, inefficiency, people getting handouts who don't need them. What's your point? We want reform, not elimination.
I'm a libertarian as well, and the Sherman Act doesn't stand in opposition to our beliefs. Limited government, not anarchy. Hell, even Adam Smith (the father of capitalism) stated the danger of monopolies and collusion in "Wealth of Nations." Capitalism (and the free market) can only function properly in a competitive market. Monopolies and anti-competitive behavior are just as big an obstacle to competitive markets as is government regulation.
As am I bugged by that, and by the wealth imbalance as well. But it's simply not fair to demonize all business men, or all rich men, just because a few bad apples are in the bunch. I'd rather attack the problem rather than the symptom. And the problem isn't "having money", it's exploiting the system. We need to be surgical with this, not blunt with a tax hammer on everything above "income level X". Plug the holes, reform the tax code. Don't just redistribute the money through any means necessary.
That somewhat assumes equivalent "productive workers" couldn't be found in the foreign country. Because that money would be working for them at that point (meaning they would have the venture capital to spawn off new businesses and spool up productive workers, venture capital that we would be losing).
But that's simply not true. http://www.joshuakennon.com/how-much-money-does-it-take-to-be-in-the-top-1-of-wealth-and-net-worth-in-the-united-states/
"The 99th to 99.5th percentiles largely include physicians, attorneys, upper middle management, and small business people who have done well."
"It is true that, using the Federal Reserve figures, almost half of the top 1% of wealth made less than $500,000 in income and 5 out 6 of the top 1% of wealth made less than $1,000,000 in income."
I feel like you're thinking of the top .1%. I believe that is the "do-nothing" wealth category you complain about.