Wait, so wanting to help other people makes me confused? Okay, now I'm confused....
You aren't helping anyone; you argue for a policy where other people pay for something you want to see happen.
Decades of history. Look at Japan. Look at California prior to the 1970s. And so on. And various studies back up that statement, too. Statistically, even small increases in college attendance result in large drops in crime rate
You're confusing correlation and causation. And even if there were causation, the fact that some forms of education cause something good to happen in some circumstances doesn't mean that any form of education is beneficial under any circumstances. Finally, "free college" doesn't help the poor or needy: they are already covered by scholarships; "free college" helps the well-off middle class avoid making a choice between a new car and a college education.
Okay, let me restate that by replacing the word "billionaire" with "wealthy person". It is inarguable that the wealthy are substantially more likely to lean to the right than the poor and middle class.
And so you're saying that some ill-defined group of "wealthy people leans right" and you just feel it in your bones that they don't volunteer, and your feelings prove conclusively that conservatives are no more charitable than progressives! Well, glad you cleared that up!
The way I see it, what matters is the result, not the approach.
The US already spends more per capita on healthcare, welfare, and other social issues than most other countries, yet we get no better, and often worse, results. So, obviously, the approach actually matters, and the approach of US progressives doesn't work.
Okay, here's a challenge for you. Be born in a country that has no roads, no sewers, no clean running water, and become a billionaire. Or heck, start out poor in this country and become one. In theory, it can happen, but it is statistically a fluke.
As a matter of fact, I was born in a country that was much poorer than the US to parents who came from dirt poor families. Both my parents and I worked throughout our lives, including while at university. We all picked fields of study based on future earnings rather than interests. Now you want to tax my income more, not to send to people who were as "unfortunate" as me, but to send it to pampered, privileged American middle class teenagers to study critical theory in college. I'm sorry if I don't buy into your politics. Disregarding the question of whether that's fair to me, it simply is not fair to those pampered, privileged American middle class teenagers whose lives you are messing up.
As far as robbing the poor of initiative goes, society has already done a pretty good job of that. When you have certain groups of people who feel that there are no options other than dealing drugs or committing other crimes,
Yes, generations of progressive policies are responsible for that: minimum wage, segregation, mandatory benefits, welfare traps, perverse incentives, financial regulations, housing codes, zoning laws, professional licensing, government education, etc. That crap is what is keeping the poor in (relative) poverty.
The problem is that like many conservatives, you're confusing the individual with the aggregate, arguing that by merely telling the poor that they should work harder, they'll magically be able to succeed,
Not at all. Classical liberals and conservatives simply believe that your wealth (beyond basic subsistence) should be based on how much you contribute to your fellow human beings. We have a very democratic and objective way for measuring those contributions: money in a free market. You give a dollar to someone else if they contribute a dollar worth of value to your life. And we don't mind that free markets and money result in unequal outcomes because we aren't materialistic and we don't measure people by their wealth.
They pay negligible income tax, and even if they lost 99% of their money to the government, they'd still be wealthy [so they really don't care about the consequences of their policies at all and just pick whatever position gets them invited to the most fun charity fund raisers.]
Wanting free education isn't naked self-interest. Only about ten or fifteen percent of Americans have student loan debt. The left is about 50%. So at least 35% of Americans support making public education cheap or free even though they won't benefit from it directly. Why?
Many of them are parents who don't want to pay for their kids. And, of course, some people are just confused, like you are.
Because they realize that having a well-educated public means less crime and more economic output. It's self interest, but only in a very broad sense of the word.
And your evidence that making college free leads to a "well-educated public means less crime and more economic output" is where exactly?
Society only benefits from sending kids to college if the cost of college is small compared to the increased future earnings; when that is the case, student loans are the right mechanism to finance a college education. When that is not the case, "free" college education is harmful both to the kids and to society.
Folks on the right believe in actual charity
Let me know when I can watch hundreds of rich billionaires volunteering at a homeless shelter. I'm not saying that no rich people ever do those things,
Ah, the knee-jerk response that "billionaire = conservative". Of course, that's nonsense; if anything, billionaires tilt slightly left. They pay negligible income tax, and even if they lost 99% of their money to the government, they'd still be wealthy.
Even if it were true, billionaires are such a small fraction of the population that what they do and believe is not representative of any movement. I don't believe that even when it comes to corrupt jerks like Steyer, Bloomberg, Oprah, and Soros.
All snark aside, if you look at charitable giving, the left and right are approximately equal, believe it or not, though they do approach it in very different ways.
Nope, sorry, I don't believe it. I only know of one significant study that makes that claim (Margolis), and it is wrong (in fact, I'd call it dishonest).
In any case, it's also irrelevant. Charity necessarily involves a personal element that you yourself just admitted the left is denying that element. So, whatever the left is doing, it's not charity.
that the left believes that those to whom much is given, much is expected from
Yes, and that's what makes the left so utterly evil, namely the view that when people are successful, it is because stuff was "given" to them.
And the worst part of that is not the fact that you end up taking away money that people have saved and worked very hard for, or that you're hurting the economy and progress, the worst part of it is that you destroy the lives of the "poorest and most valuable" and rob them of initiative by telling them that whether they succeed or fail is out of their control.
Other states can afford to have lower taxes in part because they get a lot more gas tax money
That reasoning, again, is utterly disconnected from reality; you're confabulating. Try putting some numbers on the fairy tale (I just did), and you'll see how bizarre your beliefs actually are.
Another reason is that a lot of California's gas tax money goes to support California's mass transit systemâ"something that rural states don't have any need for,
I.e. dysfunctional government.
Finally, California's roads are worse than other places in part because of Prop 13 causing people to be unable to easily sell their homes and move closer to their jobs when they change jobs.
I.e. dysfunctional government.
BTW, those are the exact same maps from the exact same sources that I was referring to, so any differences here are purely a matter of word choice.
I didn't refer to the pages for "word choice", just for data. I think and analyze for myself.
Actually, it mostly is out of altruism. Folks on the left tend to be pretty serious about that whole "love your neighbor, clothe the poor, and feed the hungry" thing.
What folks on the left are voting for is "someone else/the rich/the privileged should pay for/do something causes I care about". That isn't "loving thy neighbor" or "clothing the poor", it is self-righteous, lazy, destructive social signaling. And often, it amounts to nothing more than naked self-interest, like students wanting free education and forgiveness of their student loans.
Folks on the right should really try it sometime.
Folks on the right believe in actual charity, which means (1) making personal sacrifices and donations, (2) personal interaction and volunteering, and (3) not parading around charity for social signaling or ulterior motives.
You should try actual charity some time, instead of posturing and social signaling.
There are limits to how high taxes can go. Every dollar that Californians pay to the federal government that doesn't come back to the state translates to a dollar that California couldn't collect in higher taxes and use within the state. So no, it isn't "transparently false". In fact, it is self-evident.
Given that California's taxes are already among the highest in the nation, that argument is absurd. Other states manage to have better roads, better education, better government services with a fraction of the tax revenue and spending (per capita) of California.
Citation needed. The numbers don't lie. California is a net provider, rural states are net takers.
Numbers don't lie, but people lie with numbers and with terminology. "Federal spending" could be university campuses and corporate subsidies, or they could be nuclear waste dumps, border protection, and socially harmful spending. Federal spending could be political and corporate cronyism, or it could be a measly return on government-mandated programs like social security. In fact, the very term "net takers" is wrong, because it implies that rural states want the crap that the federal government pushes on them, when in reality, they largely vote for smaller government and less federal spending. Finally, if you actually look at the maps, you'll see that the coastal/rural divide just doesn't hold anyway; federal spending vs taxes is, literally, all over the map.
Yes, you can argue that it is worth spending money on those rural areas because they grow our food, but the fact still remains that if those rural states were in better shape financially, California would directly benefit.
Californians are welcome to vote for smaller government, smaller federal taxes, and less federal spending any time. Unfortunately, they always seem to vote for growing the federal government. You can be certain that that isn't out of altruism, it is because they (unlike you) understand that California is much more dependent on the federal government.
If you are an engineer who isn't incompetent, and you want to maximize your income, you basically have to work here. 80-90% of the engineers I knew back at FSU are here for that reason regardless of their political ideology.
As I was saying: California works great for a small elite of highly paid people in a narrow range of occupations. But California fails its masses, and it fails on the very dimensions that progressives claim to be good at: economic equality, tolerance, education, etc.
Why would the tax rate negate the 12% output advantage.
I didn't say that. Rather, I was referring to the fact that spending creates lots of economic activity, just not anything useful.
You seem to be mixing GDP per-capita and median household income or per-capita household income. California's median income is 3rd and 30% above the national average.
No, I'm not "mixing" anything. I'm explaining that people who say "California government is working well, just look at the per-capita GDP" are full of it.
California is afflicted by the same malaise as Europe (although it's not as bad in California yet as in Europe).
Frost != snow and ice storms. Spend a winter in any midwestern city where they use salt on the roads. Seriously, it will suck, but it will break you of whining about California roads.
So what you're saying is that California is basically a microcosm of the country as a whole. The wealth in America is very unequally distributed, with a minority living in wealthy coastal enclaves while much of the rest of the country is in urban slums and rural poverty.
Well, yes, in a sense that is right. But what's more interesting is the fact that California as a state performs worse than most of the rest of the country, and that is because it is the most progressive state.
What you should be comparing, then, is California's per-capita GDP to that of the entire country. It's about 12% higher than the country as a whole,
I didn't inject GDP in this, I was simply responding to someone else's simplistic analysis. But at 12% higher per capita GDP is actually underperforming given its taxes, cost structure, and resources.
If California weren't helping to support all the red states with their larger rural populations, its per-capita GDP would be even better compared with the country as a whole (and its roads would be in better shape, too).
Sorry, I have looked at those analyses and they don't work out. The idea that California finances the rural populations of other states is a myth.
Your roads argument is transparently false: roads are paid out of state and local taxes, and those are not traded off against federal taxes; in fact, California has some of the highest taxes on the state and local level.
But on the whole, the government at the state level is run better than the government at the federal level (which isn't saying much, but still...).
Well, you are welcome to believe that. I consider California's government to be an utter disaster, and like many other people, I can't wait to leave.
As of 2015 (according to wikipedia) California is ranked 10th per capita (not counting DC).
Which illustrates another problem: California's economy is volatile. The point is: California is far from the top.
Other than New York, all of the states with higher numbers either are "petro-states" with low populations (Alaska, Dakota, etc) or quasi-city states (Massachusetts, etc).
Ah, so now you want to get into detailed analyses. Well, given the high cost of living in California, a lot of California's GDP isn't real output, it's just churning. That is, California's massive regulations and taxes may increase the GSP on paper, but they simply aren't productive. And wealth in California very unequally distributed, with a minority living in wealthy coastal enclaves while much of the rest of the state is urban slums and rural poverty.
In any case, you are entitled to your own opinions. If you come from Europe, India, or Mexico, I'm sure it's dazzling. And if you're a Prius-driving Facebook engineer with a $2M home in Mountain View, I'm sure it's just fine for you too. But if you think that "look people, if you tax like California you can be like California" is persuasive to people in the rest of the country, you're a fool.
Compared to states with frost, our roads are like _glass_
Well, hate to break your wealthy, privileged, coastal bubble: California has plenty of frost, and those roads are in even worse condition than the roads in the warmer parts of California.
Somehow, I think you actually want things like a sewage system, a justice system, a police force, roads, an education system. Perhaps you'd prefer to have ones that worked, too.
I would. Sadly, California's education system ranks near the bottom, and arguably so do its justice system, police force, and roads. Other states do better with lower taxes.
Why do people hate taxes so much? The results do have considerable value - have you been to, say, Papua New Guinea?
Well, I have lived in several countries and US states with substantially lower tax rates than California and substantially better infrastructure.
I don't mind taxes per se, I mind the kind of stupid, dysfunctional, racist, corrupt, crony-capitalist system that operates in California.
California's GDP kinda disproves your entire premise.
California ranks 17th in the US in terms of per capita GDP. Given its favorable location and history, that's a piss poor performance. It's actually below average for states in the West.
Conservatives like to think that "big government" (like the kind that paves roads, funds schools, funds fire depts.) are bad
I'd love to see MI put up proposed rules for lead in water and NC put up proposed rules for discriminating against LBGTQ..
The bill doesn't affect gays or lesbians at all. Lumping together gays, lesbians, and transgender people just because our identities have "something to do with sex" is a sign of ignorance and stupidity.
This is how a well run democratic republic is supposed to operate.
California's infrastructure is falling apart, California's public finances are a train wreck, it is one of the worst state in terms of income inequality, has some of the highest poverty rates and per-capita welfare spending, its schools are near the bottom, and citizens are fleeing the state, while a small number of wealthy people live in enclaves and run the place. That's how banana republics and leftist shitholes operate.
Right, just like Hollywood closed and now all movies are made in Vancouver.
Actually, movies and TV series are increasingly being made outside California. Canada is popular, so are Europe and the American South. And the reason is almost entirely the cost and hassles of working in California.
I don't know progressives that are actually in favor of illegal immigration. Do not confuse this with how people want illegal immigrants treated. Typically but not universally, progressives are for larger scale legal immigration and admission of refugees, and would rather give illegal immigrants a way to become legal than crack down on individual illegal immigrants.
So you are saying that you, and progressives in general, are "not in favor of illegal immigration", and on the other hand they "want to give illegal immigrants a way to become legal". Sounds to me that my "telepathy helmet" is working just fine. Your discomfort comes from the fact that this is not a logically consistent position. And even if you think it is, we tried this 30 years ago and it didn't work. In fact, it is a slap in the face for legal immigrants like myself.
I describe myself as a liberal, progressive, or leftist as shorthand.
Well, and indeed you hold mainstream "liberal, progressive, and leftist" political positions. And like most of that leftist mainstream, you hold to a set of logically inconsistent rationalizations, mostly carefully crafted propaganda for the economically and historically illiterate.
The actual logical edifice that ties together American leftist ideology is much simpler: it's whatever gets Democrats elected. They just miscalculated for the last few years, because they didn't manage to pull the wool over the eyes of American workers and legal immigrants this time: more and more of those voters are figuring out that admitting large numbers of refugees and legalizing illegals by the millions is not in their interest.
Okay, name a political philosophy you like.
I'm a classical liberal and an advocate of free markets, as represented by Bastiat, von Mises, Hayek, Sowell, Jefferson, and Adam Smith.
Should I feel free to ascribe every facet of that philosophy to you, or would you insist on being able to make up your own mind without carefully checking into what people in your political movement have said?
I have carefully checked into what these people have said. I may disagree on some details with them, but overall, they represent my views on government, morality, and economics.
I could name problems coming from ANY corner of such. Sure, if voters, law-makers etc. behave in an "ideal" way problems may be averted
The nice thing about classical liberalism (libertarianism) as a principle is that when voters, politicians, soccer moms, whoever behaves in a non-ideal way, they themselves are forced to bear the consequences. Furthermore while classical liberalism can't be realized perfectly (no political ideology can be), if you use it as your guiding political principle and ask "how can we increase personal responsiblity and how can we decrease the power of the state", you move away from totalitarianism and towards a free, open, and just society.
The "base rate fallacy" is, essentially, disregarding the prior probabilities of things. I can establish that illegal discrimination is at least plausible, so it's not like it has a vanishingly small prior. The rest of my reasoning is essentially Bayes' Law.
HIV infection also doesn't have a "vanishingly small prior", yet the base rate fallacy still applies.
Again, you completely fail at reading my mind.
The problem is that your mind contains a number of conflicting and inconsistent ideas, so when people point them out to you you say "well, I'm certainly not thinking that". Well, "that" is what your other views imply.
Ideally, people would get hired, promoted, etc. on the basis of what they can do for the company, not any irrelevant or proxy factors.
You have no idea what is "relevant" to running any particular business, and neither do you or the government. If I want to work surrounded by gay white males, that should be my business, not yours.
If an employer doesn't hire a guy because he's black, or gay, or was considered female at birth, they're treating that guy as an interchangeable part of a group the employer doesn't like.
Well, and I'm saying that a private employer should have the right to take that view of their employees, even if it is a demeaning and irrational view, just like you have the right to view employees as a whole that way, even though it is demeaning and irrational.
If we see that one group is hired disproportionately to the percentage of qualified applicants, or that the only people promoted are of one group, that's strong evidence that management is judging people on the groups they belong to (typically involuntarily) rather than as individuals.
So what? Maybe that works for the company, maybe it doesn't. It's the company and the investors who need to live with the consequences. So far, you still haven't given any compelling justification for government to intervene. I mean, what's next? Are you going to hold cities responsible for having interracial marriages at the predicted rates for race-blind marriages?
But when Apple says that it's done, choosing to move whatever technology you provide in house, the results can be really painful.... It's the second chipmaker in recent months who believes Apple isn't playing fair
Between Apple and these billion dollar companies Apple's business has created, my only reaction to this is... why is the taxpayer wasting money and resources on resolving these lawsuits? They should work out their differences in private mediation.
they're not left wing Anyway if you want to know more on the difference see here [justicedemocrats.com].
Well, they adopt third position economics. That makes them proto-fascist. So, you're correct, the Democratic party, Bernie Sanders, and the Justice Democrats are actually right wing.
At the end of the day everything you wrote is something you're telling yourself to feel better about cutting your taxes while abandoning the poor.
It's jerks like you that condemn people to perpetual poverty by being tools for politicians who view welfare dependence and poverty as convenient vote getters.
Right-wingers are just as likely to screw up the system as lefties, if not more so.
Hence my point: Giving power to corporations is exactly what you are proposing, whether it is a progressive regulatory state, a right wing directed economy, or a left wing nationalized economy. That is, there is little practical difference between socialists, fascists, progressives, or theocrats. That's why the right place to be on the Nolan Chart is the top corner.
Your source is a right-leaning publication. Sorry, but I'll take them with large grain of salt.
That is not an argument, that is sticking your fingers in your ears and making funny noises. The way to learn about something is to look at opposing viewpoints and poke holes in them, not to reject them because you don't like the source.
In this case, there are large numbers of other sources. More importantly, the economic conclusions agree with what I saw on the ground: Americans vastly overestimate the wealth, social safety net, or quality of life of the average European.
Slashdot Mirror
Propaganda and indoctrination indeed work! Teach those kids to grow up to be little socialists and fascists!
A ham sandwich is a "serious alternative to Windows", for some values of "serious". It depends on your application and needs.
You aren't helping anyone; you argue for a policy where other people pay for something you want to see happen.
You're confusing correlation and causation. And even if there were causation, the fact that some forms of education cause something good to happen in some circumstances doesn't mean that any form of education is beneficial under any circumstances. Finally, "free college" doesn't help the poor or needy: they are already covered by scholarships; "free college" helps the well-off middle class avoid making a choice between a new car and a college education.
And so you're saying that some ill-defined group of "wealthy people leans right" and you just feel it in your bones that they don't volunteer, and your feelings prove conclusively that conservatives are no more charitable than progressives! Well, glad you cleared that up!
The US already spends more per capita on healthcare, welfare, and other social issues than most other countries, yet we get no better, and often worse, results. So, obviously, the approach actually matters, and the approach of US progressives doesn't work.
As a matter of fact, I was born in a country that was much poorer than the US to parents who came from dirt poor families. Both my parents and I worked throughout our lives, including while at university. We all picked fields of study based on future earnings rather than interests. Now you want to tax my income more, not to send to people who were as "unfortunate" as me, but to send it to pampered, privileged American middle class teenagers to study critical theory in college. I'm sorry if I don't buy into your politics. Disregarding the question of whether that's fair to me, it simply is not fair to those pampered, privileged American middle class teenagers whose lives you are messing up.
Yes, generations of progressive policies are responsible for that: minimum wage, segregation, mandatory benefits, welfare traps, perverse incentives, financial regulations, housing codes, zoning laws, professional licensing, government education, etc. That crap is what is keeping the poor in (relative) poverty.
Not at all. Classical liberals and conservatives simply believe that your wealth (beyond basic subsistence) should be based on how much you contribute to your fellow human beings. We have a very democratic and objective way for measuring those contributions: money in a free market. You give a dollar to someone else if they contribute a dollar worth of value to your life. And we don't mind that free markets and money result in unequal outcomes because we aren't materialistic and we don't measure people by their wealth.
They pay negligible income tax, and even if they lost 99% of their money to the government, they'd still be wealthy [so they really don't care about the consequences of their policies at all and just pick whatever position gets them invited to the most fun charity fund raisers.]
Many of them are parents who don't want to pay for their kids. And, of course, some people are just confused, like you are.
And your evidence that making college free leads to a "well-educated public means less crime and more economic output" is where exactly?
Society only benefits from sending kids to college if the cost of college is small compared to the increased future earnings; when that is the case, student loans are the right mechanism to finance a college education. When that is not the case, "free" college education is harmful both to the kids and to society.
Ah, the knee-jerk response that "billionaire = conservative". Of course, that's nonsense; if anything, billionaires tilt slightly left. They pay negligible income tax, and even if they lost 99% of their money to the government, they'd still be wealthy.
Even if it were true, billionaires are such a small fraction of the population that what they do and believe is not representative of any movement. I don't believe that even when it comes to corrupt jerks like Steyer, Bloomberg, Oprah, and Soros.
Nope, sorry, I don't believe it. I only know of one significant study that makes that claim (Margolis), and it is wrong (in fact, I'd call it dishonest).
In any case, it's also irrelevant. Charity necessarily involves a personal element that you yourself just admitted the left is denying that element. So, whatever the left is doing, it's not charity.
Yes, and that's what makes the left so utterly evil, namely the view that when people are successful, it is because stuff was "given" to them.
And the worst part of that is not the fact that you end up taking away money that people have saved and worked very hard for, or that you're hurting the economy and progress, the worst part of it is that you destroy the lives of the "poorest and most valuable" and rob them of initiative by telling them that whether they succeed or fail is out of their control.
That reasoning, again, is utterly disconnected from reality; you're confabulating. Try putting some numbers on the fairy tale (I just did), and you'll see how bizarre your beliefs actually are.
I.e. dysfunctional government.
I.e. dysfunctional government.
I didn't refer to the pages for "word choice", just for data. I think and analyze for myself.
What folks on the left are voting for is "someone else/the rich/the privileged should pay for/do something causes I care about". That isn't "loving thy neighbor" or "clothing the poor", it is self-righteous, lazy, destructive social signaling. And often, it amounts to nothing more than naked self-interest, like students wanting free education and forgiveness of their student loans.
Folks on the right believe in actual charity, which means (1) making personal sacrifices and donations, (2) personal interaction and volunteering, and (3) not parading around charity for social signaling or ulterior motives.
You should try actual charity some time, instead of posturing and social signaling.
Given that California's taxes are already among the highest in the nation, that argument is absurd. Other states manage to have better roads, better education, better government services with a fraction of the tax revenue and spending (per capita) of California.
Numbers don't lie, but people lie with numbers and with terminology. "Federal spending" could be university campuses and corporate subsidies, or they could be nuclear waste dumps, border protection, and socially harmful spending. Federal spending could be political and corporate cronyism, or it could be a measly return on government-mandated programs like social security. In fact, the very term "net takers" is wrong, because it implies that rural states want the crap that the federal government pushes on them, when in reality, they largely vote for smaller government and less federal spending. Finally, if you actually look at the maps, you'll see that the coastal/rural divide just doesn't hold anyway; federal spending vs taxes is, literally, all over the map.
Californians are welcome to vote for smaller government, smaller federal taxes, and less federal spending any time. Unfortunately, they always seem to vote for growing the federal government. You can be certain that that isn't out of altruism, it is because they (unlike you) understand that California is much more dependent on the federal government.
As I was saying: California works great for a small elite of highly paid people in a narrow range of occupations. But California fails its masses, and it fails on the very dimensions that progressives claim to be good at: economic equality, tolerance, education, etc.
I didn't say that. Rather, I was referring to the fact that spending creates lots of economic activity, just not anything useful.
No, I'm not "mixing" anything. I'm explaining that people who say "California government is working well, just look at the per-capita GDP" are full of it.
California is afflicted by the same malaise as Europe (although it's not as bad in California yet as in Europe).
Geez, how ignorant can you be? https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
Well, yes, in a sense that is right. But what's more interesting is the fact that California as a state performs worse than most of the rest of the country, and that is because it is the most progressive state.
I didn't inject GDP in this, I was simply responding to someone else's simplistic analysis. But at 12% higher per capita GDP is actually underperforming given its taxes, cost structure, and resources.
Sorry, I have looked at those analyses and they don't work out. The idea that California finances the rural populations of other states is a myth.
Your roads argument is transparently false: roads are paid out of state and local taxes, and those are not traded off against federal taxes; in fact, California has some of the highest taxes on the state and local level.
Well, you are welcome to believe that. I consider California's government to be an utter disaster, and like many other people, I can't wait to leave.
Which illustrates another problem: California's economy is volatile. The point is: California is far from the top.
Ah, so now you want to get into detailed analyses. Well, given the high cost of living in California, a lot of California's GDP isn't real output, it's just churning. That is, California's massive regulations and taxes may increase the GSP on paper, but they simply aren't productive. And wealth in California very unequally distributed, with a minority living in wealthy coastal enclaves while much of the rest of the state is urban slums and rural poverty.
In any case, you are entitled to your own opinions. If you come from Europe, India, or Mexico, I'm sure it's dazzling. And if you're a Prius-driving Facebook engineer with a $2M home in Mountain View, I'm sure it's just fine for you too. But if you think that "look people, if you tax like California you can be like California" is persuasive to people in the rest of the country, you're a fool.
Yes. It sucks.
Well, hate to break your wealthy, privileged, coastal bubble: California has plenty of frost, and those roads are in even worse condition than the roads in the warmer parts of California.
I would. Sadly, California's education system ranks near the bottom, and arguably so do its justice system, police force, and roads. Other states do better with lower taxes.
Well, I have lived in several countries and US states with substantially lower tax rates than California and substantially better infrastructure.
I don't mind taxes per se, I mind the kind of stupid, dysfunctional, racist, corrupt, crony-capitalist system that operates in California.
Well, California's school system is worse.
California ranks 17th in the US in terms of per capita GDP. Given its favorable location and history, that's a piss poor performance. It's actually below average for states in the West.
Conservatives like roads; too bad that California's are so shitty. Conservatives also like schools and fire departments, but are not so fond of firemen that make nearly half a million dollars a year.
The bill doesn't affect gays or lesbians at all. Lumping together gays, lesbians, and transgender people just because our identities have "something to do with sex" is a sign of ignorance and stupidity.
California's infrastructure is falling apart, California's public finances are a train wreck, it is one of the worst state in terms of income inequality, has some of the highest poverty rates and per-capita welfare spending, its schools are near the bottom, and citizens are fleeing the state, while a small number of wealthy people live in enclaves and run the place. That's how banana republics and leftist shitholes operate.
Actually, movies and TV series are increasingly being made outside California. Canada is popular, so are Europe and the American South. And the reason is almost entirely the cost and hassles of working in California.
So you are saying that you, and progressives in general, are "not in favor of illegal immigration", and on the other hand they "want to give illegal immigrants a way to become legal". Sounds to me that my "telepathy helmet" is working just fine. Your discomfort comes from the fact that this is not a logically consistent position. And even if you think it is, we tried this 30 years ago and it didn't work. In fact, it is a slap in the face for legal immigrants like myself.
Well, and indeed you hold mainstream "liberal, progressive, and leftist" political positions. And like most of that leftist mainstream, you hold to a set of logically inconsistent rationalizations, mostly carefully crafted propaganda for the economically and historically illiterate.
The actual logical edifice that ties together American leftist ideology is much simpler: it's whatever gets Democrats elected. They just miscalculated for the last few years, because they didn't manage to pull the wool over the eyes of American workers and legal immigrants this time: more and more of those voters are figuring out that admitting large numbers of refugees and legalizing illegals by the millions is not in their interest.
I'm a classical liberal and an advocate of free markets, as represented by Bastiat, von Mises, Hayek, Sowell, Jefferson, and Adam Smith.
I have carefully checked into what these people have said. I may disagree on some details with them, but overall, they represent my views on government, morality, and economics.
Now your turn.
The nice thing about classical liberalism (libertarianism) as a principle is that when voters, politicians, soccer moms, whoever behaves in a non-ideal way, they themselves are forced to bear the consequences. Furthermore while classical liberalism can't be realized perfectly (no political ideology can be), if you use it as your guiding political principle and ask "how can we increase personal responsiblity and how can we decrease the power of the state", you move away from totalitarianism and towards a free, open, and just society.
HIV infection also doesn't have a "vanishingly small prior", yet the base rate fallacy still applies.
The problem is that your mind contains a number of conflicting and inconsistent ideas, so when people point them out to you you say "well, I'm certainly not thinking that". Well, "that" is what your other views imply.
You have no idea what is "relevant" to running any particular business, and neither do you or the government. If I want to work surrounded by gay white males, that should be my business, not yours.
Well, and I'm saying that a private employer should have the right to take that view of their employees, even if it is a demeaning and irrational view, just like you have the right to view employees as a whole that way, even though it is demeaning and irrational.
So what? Maybe that works for the company, maybe it doesn't. It's the company and the investors who need to live with the consequences. So far, you still haven't given any compelling justification for government to intervene. I mean, what's next? Are you going to hold cities responsible for having interracial marriages at the predicted rates for race-blind marriages?
Between Apple and these billion dollar companies Apple's business has created, my only reaction to this is... why is the taxpayer wasting money and resources on resolving these lawsuits? They should work out their differences in private mediation.
Well, they adopt third position economics. That makes them proto-fascist. So, you're correct, the Democratic party, Bernie Sanders, and the Justice Democrats are actually right wing.
It's jerks like you that condemn people to perpetual poverty by being tools for politicians who view welfare dependence and poverty as convenient vote getters.
Hence my point: Giving power to corporations is exactly what you are proposing, whether it is a progressive regulatory state, a right wing directed economy, or a left wing nationalized economy. That is, there is little practical difference between socialists, fascists, progressives, or theocrats. That's why the right place to be on the Nolan Chart is the top corner.
That is not an argument, that is sticking your fingers in your ears and making funny noises. The way to learn about something is to look at opposing viewpoints and poke holes in them, not to reject them because you don't like the source.
In this case, there are large numbers of other sources. More importantly, the economic conclusions agree with what I saw on the ground: Americans vastly overestimate the wealth, social safety net, or quality of life of the average European.