So if the richest people can only have 5 mansions instead of 6 after taxes, they'll turn to the black market? Puuuleeeese.
Greed and envy are really eating you up, aren't they? Anyway, how many "mansions" people have is irrelevant; investors want to maximize return on investment no matter what. Many forms of corruption are perfectly legal, like Wall St paying Hillary $250k/speech and getting favors in return.
Being a dictator/non-democracy is largely what allows them to heavily pollute, have slave-like working conditions, and export goods instead of having local consumption: work hard & dirty and get little in return.
Obviously. But the question is how democracies turn into dictatorship, and we can look to history for that, because it repeats itself again and again: politicians run on promises of reining in big, evil corporation, keeping the environment clean, breaking up monopolies, providing government funded healthcare/retirement/education, redistributing money more fairly, taxing unearned income highly, and using laws to keep prices low and salaries high. Those are the political programs socialists and fascists run on, again and again. And when they get into power, they don't deliver (because they can't), turn themselves into dictators, and wreck the economy.
If you give corporations enough power
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. You erroneously think of those as "giving power to the people", when in actual fact it amounts to nothing more than giving power to corrupt government officials and a few well-connected corporations. It is in a free market that corporations have the least amount of power.
I'm not looking at Europe in general. We should copy the most successful countries.
Even "the most successful countries" in Europe are doing worse than the best US states. Why should places like California and Mississippi copy also-rans like Norway or Germany if they could copy US states that are doing even better, like New Hampshire, Utah, and Maryland?
"These national-level comparisons take into account taxes, and include social benefits (e.g., "welfare" and state-subsidized health care) as income. Purchasing power is adjusted to take differences in the cost of living in different countries into account."
That's a lot of adjusting, leaving a lot of room for bias to creep in.
Indeed! Those adjustments give Europeans credit for shitty government services that are actually worth less than their nominal monetary value. So, there is bias in there, namely in favor of Europe. In reality, Europe is actually a lot worse than those numbers would let you believe. Take it from someone who lived in Europe and left.
Canada, Germany, Norway, etc. have higher tax rates for the wealthy and their MEDIAN incomes are about the same or higher than USA and WITH better social safety nets. We don't have to theorize, their middle is doing better.
Those claims are wrong. Germany and Norway have lower tax rates for the wealthy, median incomes are lower in most of Europe, and their social safety nets are no better than those in the US. Furthermore, their middle class is doing worse by many economic measures.
then CA should proceed with CALEXIT (or Pacifica).
California is has huge problems with welfare dependency, public debt, and bad schools, among others. I'm not sure why you bring it up. Most of America would probably not be sorry to see California go.
If you like big houses and big cars, you are right that it's easier to get those here. But there's more to life than that.
Good, so, we have dispensed now with the idea that the poor or the middle class in Europe are economically better off.
Now, which of these "there's more to life" issues do you think Europeans are doing better on?
but that's not the same as a comfortable living
Much of Europe has never had a comfortable life. People born before 1950 had to deal either with the Nazis or the aftermath of WWII and communism. Some of the better run countries (like Germany) have had a few decades in which life seemed safe and predictable, but they are facing a demographic cliff now. Average youth unemployment across the EU is 20%; it's 35% in Italy, 41% in Spain, and 45% in Greece. How "comfortable" do you think the life of unemployed youth in Europe actually is? And when you're older and lose your job in Europe, you're pretty much done for in many countries. The idea of a "comfortable life" in Europe is a fiction for most Europeans.
You mean bribing politicians to let fat cats get fatter? Yes, they do that. But you seem to be saying if they are taxed higher, they'll bribe more. I find that silly.
Well, in absolute terms, they bribe less because the economy tends to crater and there is less money to bribe with. In relative terms, however, if you take away the ability of people to make a decent return on legal investments, corruption and black market activities become the primary "investment" vehicles.
So we have to become a polluted 3rd-world sweat shop to compete with the 3rd world? Is that what you're saying?
The third world is primarily socialist countries and dictatorships (effectively, fascist countries). That's what you're advocating we should become, not me. Venezuela provided a good recent object lesson.
You've listed one information source you find dear, pray tell who other then Sowell you've listened to or read?
I read several books a week. And I have given you other books and authors to look at: von Mises, Hayek, Nozick, Friedman, Rothbard, Bastiat. I also experienced socialist and social welfare states first hand, and my parents (barely) lived through fascism.
As I was saying, I tried to keep it simple for you.
You think I'm someone who doesn't understand your methods.
Well, I certainly understand your methods because they are so typical: it's second-hand left-wing propaganda, full of name calling, goal post shifting, and simple falsehoods, a mix of modern progressive political messaging, Frankfurt school ideology, and echoes of Soviet/Russian disinformation. Of course, as is typical too, you don't even quite know what you're doing.
The competitive difference between a company that hires only white males as engineers and one that tries to hire the best engineers is mostly lost in the noise
It's not telepathy; you identified politically as a progressive in this very thread. Progressives support large scale illegal and legal immigration and admission of refugees. Why did you self-identify as a progressive in this thread if you don't actually support progressive immigration policies?
Okay, do I have to get serious about this? If an employer is illegally discriminating, there will be disparate results.
Yes, but there will be disparate results also if the employer is not illegally discriminating.
Therefore, the conditional probability of disparate results given illegal discrimination is higher than the conditional probability of disparate results given no illegal discrimination. That means it's evidence.
You need to look up the base rate fallacy.
Under pragmatic social views, allowing private discrimination leads to more problems overall than it solves
That's merely your belief, not a fact. In fact, I think that prohibiting private discrimination leads to far more problems overall than it solves.
The classic liberal case is that the business that discriminates on traits unrelated to the ability to do the job will be at a competitive disadvantage to one that doesn't, and that isn't enough of an effect to push any change..
Change for what? Why should companies have representative populations in the first place? There are millions of businesses in the US; none of them needs to have a representative pool of employees for everybody to do well. Indians might want to work with Indians, lesbians with lesbians, Mexicans with Mexicans, macho men with macho men; what harm does that do to anybody? They don't need to be at a "competitive disadvantage" based on their choices, it is fine for them to co-exist as they are.
And what is even more reprehensible about your view is that you basically think of employees as interchangeable cogs and deny that we have the capability of making our own choices.
As with most statistics, it really depends on how you slice it.
No, it doesn't.
So, it seems that America's poor are wealthier than middle-class Europeans, while at the same time America's middle-class is not as wealthy as Europe's middle-class.
Look, I didn't start misusing the term "wealth" for "income"; the American left did that. CNN itself keeps misusing the term, so it is deceptive and disingenuous to start using it for savings in that article. In the usual sense of the American left, namely that of "income", Americans are "wealthier" than Europeans.
Now, as for your "net worth" statistics, yes, the median net worth of Americans is lower than that of Europeans, but you don't quite seem to understand what that means. European median net worth is higher in large part because Europeans are older on average, which translates into a huge demographic problem for Europe. In addition, many Europeans feel they need to save more for retirement (because their retirement benefits are pretty stingy), and Europe discourages consumption and spending through taxes. Finally, Europeans also have more steady incomes throughout their lives, while Americans tend to make a lot of money in a few years at the peak of their careers (40% of Americans end up in the top 10% of income earners in their lifetime), a testament to a much more flexible labor market and much greater opportunities in the US.
The Australian example highlights some other differences: while Americans are required to waste their money on useless government pyramid schemes (Social Security, Medicare), Australians put 9% of their income into a mandatory retirement savings account. That sounds like a great idea, and it's something we should adopt. Replacing Social Security with such a program would immediately see US median net worth skyrocket. Conversely, if you count the value of US social security contributions alone as part of the net worth, US median net worth would likely be near the top.
It's almost as if anyone can find a data set that confirms their preferred outlook.
It's almost like you actually need to understand something about the data you're citing.
You are exaggerating the impact of higher taxes etc. If they are smaller investors, then their taxes are smaller anyhow, or at least should be.
You were talking about "fat cats", i.e., big investors. If those people don't constitute a big part of overall investments, then taxing them won't yield a lot of revenue, so you are just taxing them out of envy and spite, not to gain significant amounts of revenue.
And put it where?
There a plenty of other places rich people can put their money without paying taxes. Government corruption, for example, is an excellent investment.
overnment official jerks don't need to "cheat", they "poison babies" simply by not giving a fuck and by not being liable for the consequences of their actions.
Example? Two or three groups keeping an eye on something is usually better than one. Sure, sometimes inspectors are jerks, but that's true of any endeavor. The fact that humans are imperfect is not a reason to let corporations run willy nilly over the environment etc.
You're absolutely right that governmental agencies like the EPA are keeping an "extra eye" on environmental sins and are making very cautious decisions because US administrations don't want to get in trouble with environmentalists; the result is limited job growth, limited economic growth, and stagnation.
If you hand over more power to the government, like they used to behind the Iron Curtain, the motivation of government officials shifts from irrational caution to irrational attempts to meet economic output targets; that's why the environment behind the Iron Curtain was such a disaster.
Canada, Germany, Norway, etc. have higher tax rates for the wealthy
Top marginal income tax rates are about 53% in the US, significantly higher than both Germany and Norway. Worse yet, top marginal income tax rates in Europe start applying to people in the middle class, often barely above the median. Furthermore, comparisons to Canada and Norway, two resource-rich countries in favorable locations and with small populations, are invalid anyway; we couldn't run the US like Canada or Norway if we wanted to. The only really valid comparison of the US is to the EU as a whole, rather than cherry-picking the wealthiest European states. Otherwise, you ought to compare the US to at least the larger countries, like France and Germany.
and their MEDIAN incomes are about the same or higher than USA
The US has one of the highest amounts of per capita social spending in the world, higher than all of Europe and most of the Nordic countries. Even as percentage of GDP (an invalid comparison because it's absolute spending in $PPP that actually matters), US spending is very high. Countries like Germany have cut their social safety nets massively because they found that generous social safety nets result in people staying out of the workforce. And the services you get from the government in Europe are shitty: long wait times, limited choices, demeaning rules.
We don't have to theorize, their middle is doing better.
No, we don't need to theorize. Have you actually lived in Europe? And I don't mean as an American expat with full access to American opportunities whenever you want to? I have. The European middle class is highly taxed, has limited economic opportunities, and is less economically well off than the US middle class. Much of the European middle class lives below the US poverty line (that is, when you don't cherry-pick Norway and Luxembourg for your comparisons.) The situation in Europe is grim, both economically and politically. And if the US were really as repressive and miserly towards the working class and the middle class, it wouldn't be the migration destination of choice for so many people.
There is no point to growth if you're never going to consume; this is true for the overall economy just as much as it is for an individual. Finding the sweet spot where you have decent growth while enjoying a high quality of life is the tricky part.
Well, and under capitalism, everybody is free to choose their own sweet spot. What isn't fair is if you choose high consumption and go to school for years on end when you're young and then demand that others still subsidize a good retirement for you when you're old.
Thus, investment is not necessary for capitalism in general.
Are you kidding? The very name "capitalism" refers to the use of capital for investing.
Checks and balances and cross-agency audits. It ain't perfect, but often better than waiting until after the damage is done. There's less incentive for gov't officials to cheat because their paycheck varies less per success or failure of a company. It takes fairly blatant cheating to give them a strong incentive.
Government official jerks don't need to "cheat", they "poison babies" simply by not giving a fuck and by not being liable for the consequences of their actions.
Well, you can consider yourself a "computer scientist", I consider you a university dropout with no significant publications and have zero respect for your professional opinion based on your background (thanks for being so honest). As I was saying, we'll have to agree to disagree.
Spoken like a true "Libertarian" which I used to be, but outgrew.
I'm sure you superficially "believed in" libertarianism; many young people like the anarchy and rebelliousness of it. But based on what you have said, you didn't understand libertarianism any better than you understand progressivism or history. I'm sorry, but you simply need to read up a lot more on history and work on your arguments.
The gov't is kind of like an OS: it coordinates resources, enforces limits, and provides standards. I remember the early days of multi-processing PC's where applications could pretty much do what they want and bad apples ruined it for everybody. (Similar with browser pop-ups etc. these days.)... And in most economic models it [wealth] is a bounded resource: factories etc. have a maximum capacity.
Again, you're assuming that there is a fixed amount of resources around that need to be allocated nicely. Any economy like that is bound to fail because nobody has any incentive to make capital investments. We had that during the Dark Ages. Hence the name.
The only way to make progress is to grow the economy, and that happens only through capital investments. If you take away money from people who make capital investments to people who simply consume, as you do when you redistribute from rich to poor, you harm growth in two ways: first, you get less capital investment because of the money you took away, and second, the people you took it away from will not view capital investments as a worthwhile activity at all anymore.
Capitalists have shown many times they'll harm or poison babies for profit, and cannot be trusted in general to voluntarily not be jerks.
The world is indeed full of jerks, and capitalists have indeed occasionally "harmed or poisoned babies". They then get punished both by customers and by the courts. Generally speaking, capitalists don't gain anything in the long term by harming their customers, and there is little potential for corrupting government officials.
If you give the government more power to intervene in economic affairs, government positions become extremely powerful. What prevents those jerks that want to "poison babies" from simply becoming government officials? And how do you keep them in check once they are in government? Certainly not voters. Believe me (based on first-hand experience), if you think that the occasional capitalist "harming babies" is bad, it's nothing compared to the horrors that happen when you give government officials the ability to do that and get away with it.
I didn't specify a cause of wealth log-jamming at the top.
Well, you can't "specify a cause" when you start off with an incorrect understanding of the problem. For example, your statement implies that you view wealth as a bounded resource that "log jams" somewhere. Your statement is the rough equivalent "I didn't specify a cause of the earth being flat; physicists are still puzzling over the exact cause(s)".
Owners of the (foreign) factories and automation software and/or patents seem to get richer, while the rest stagnate.
So, government-mandated monopolies and barriers to entry (like copyrights, patents, regulations, etc.) created in response to big corporate lobbying make markets less efficient. How is that an indictment of free markets?
The solution to this is not to tax upper-middle-class professionals and redistribute their income to single mothers, the solution is to get rid of the government-mandated monopolies and barriers to entry.
Am I to understand that poverty is determined by how it is caused, and not the actual condition/outcome?
Well, that's the standard definition, and it's the definition that calls for increased redistribution are based on. And you are right that it differs from "actual conditions/outcome." But we pretty much have eliminated financial poverty in the US. The poor in America are wealthier than many middle-class families in Europe and most middle-class families across the globe. Yet we still have undesirable outcomes like childhood food insecurity. So, obviously, poverty in the financial sense isn't the cause of those outcomes in the US, and more redistribution isn't the answer.
I advocated which policies, now?
Well, we have been talking about redistribution, you reference US wealth and power, and you point to a site that advocates increased government spending to reduce childhood food insecurity. That implies things about your position, but you're welcome to clarify.
I consider someone who goes hungry to be impoverished, generally speaking.
Hunger is a subjective experience, not an objective measure of being economically unable to meet your nutritional requirements. You can spend all your money on expensive junk food, be obese, and still be hungry all the time. In fact, the poorest populations in the US also have by far the highest obesity rates.
In response to your assertion about "absolute" poverty (whatever that distinction is)
I suggest you look it up, it's an essential distinction.
You think poverty in Africa, for example, is not also caused by policies?
Absolutely! Policies like socialism and redistribution. Policies that destroy property rights and free markets.
Since about 1980, trickle-down has been failing more and more, in many countries. The "market" ain't working well for about 90%. GDP's grow, but most don't receive the benefits of that growth. Time for a Plan B.
You make it sound like the entire West switched to laissez-faire free market economics and massive cuts in welfare spending in 1980. In fact, the opposite is true. Oh, Reagan talked a lot about those things, but his policies were cosmetic. Social welfare spending on the poor has tripled since 1980 (in absolute dollars). Federal government spending along has gone from around $7000/capita in 1980 to about $12000/capita today (in 2014 dollars). The budgetary cost of federal regulations has gone from $18b in 1980 to $60b in 2017. Also, massive illegal immigration started in the mid-1970's, and illegal immigrants and their children have poverty rates of around 50-60%; that's a population of about 10 million illegals living in poverty, accounting for nearly a quarter of the 45 million people living in (relative) poverty in the US.
So, you correctly identify the time around 1980 as a good point for comparison. But far from a return to cut-throat laissez-faire capitalism, the period since 1980 has seen a massive expansion of government, welfare, and social spending in the US (and much of Europe), accompanied by a stagnation in wages and growth.
You're right: we need to stop going down that path and find a Plan B to what we are doing, namely cutting back government spending, government regulations, welfare programs, and illegal immigration, etc. to pre-1980 levels.
So it took you 20 years to write one Diploma thesis, it was "published" by the university, you didn't get a degree, and you believe that makes you a scientist. Well, we'll just have to disagree on that.
25 % of households with children living in large cities are food-insecure.
Oh, the kind of suffering kids are subjected to in inner cities is tragic and deeply offensive. But it is clearly not due to absolute poverty: the US government redistributes tens of thousands of dollars on each of those kids per year already, on education, nutritional assistance, welfare, and other expenses, so they are clearly not suffering from absolute poverty. What they are suffering from is misguided social policies, single motherhood, inefficient schools, a bad social environment, etc. Another way of seeing that the problem is policy, not absolute income, is to realize that much of the European middle class lives below the US poverty line. I myself grew up in a household that, by US standards, would probably be considered poor.
The question you should be asking is how you can sleep at night, since you seem to be advocating policies that will keep children living under these conditions for generations to come.
Slashdot Mirror
Greed and envy are really eating you up, aren't they? Anyway, how many "mansions" people have is irrelevant; investors want to maximize return on investment no matter what. Many forms of corruption are perfectly legal, like Wall St paying Hillary $250k/speech and getting favors in return.
Obviously. But the question is how democracies turn into dictatorship, and we can look to history for that, because it repeats itself again and again: politicians run on promises of reining in big, evil corporation, keeping the environment clean, breaking up monopolies, providing government funded healthcare/retirement/education, redistributing money more fairly, taxing unearned income highly, and using laws to keep prices low and salaries high. Those are the political programs socialists and fascists run on, again and again. And when they get into power, they don't deliver (because they can't), turn themselves into dictators, and wreck the economy.
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. You erroneously think of those as "giving power to the people", when in actual fact it amounts to nothing more than giving power to corrupt government officials and a few well-connected corporations. It is in a free market that corporations have the least amount of power.
Even "the most successful countries" in Europe are doing worse than the best US states. Why should places like California and Mississippi copy also-rans like Norway or Germany if they could copy US states that are doing even better, like New Hampshire, Utah, and Maryland?
Indeed! Those adjustments give Europeans credit for shitty government services that are actually worth less than their nominal monetary value. So, there is bias in there, namely in favor of Europe. In reality, Europe is actually a lot worse than those numbers would let you believe. Take it from someone who lived in Europe and left.
You made specific claims:
Those claims are wrong. Germany and Norway have lower tax rates for the wealthy, median incomes are lower in most of Europe, and their social safety nets are no better than those in the US. Furthermore, their middle class is doing worse by many economic measures.
Why is that? Because you are cherry-picking European states and comparing against the US as a whole. If Sweden and Germany became US states, they would be among the poorest. In fact, several large US states are doing better than all the OECD states, including Luxembourg and Norway.
California is has huge problems with welfare dependency, public debt, and bad schools, among others. I'm not sure why you bring it up. Most of America would probably not be sorry to see California go.
Good, so, we have dispensed now with the idea that the poor or the middle class in Europe are economically better off.
Now, which of these "there's more to life" issues do you think Europeans are doing better on?
Much of Europe has never had a comfortable life. People born before 1950 had to deal either with the Nazis or the aftermath of WWII and communism. Some of the better run countries (like Germany) have had a few decades in which life seemed safe and predictable, but they are facing a demographic cliff now. Average youth unemployment across the EU is 20%; it's 35% in Italy, 41% in Spain, and 45% in Greece. How "comfortable" do you think the life of unemployed youth in Europe actually is? And when you're older and lose your job in Europe, you're pretty much done for in many countries. The idea of a "comfortable life" in Europe is a fiction for most Europeans.
Well, in absolute terms, they bribe less because the economy tends to crater and there is less money to bribe with. In relative terms, however, if you take away the ability of people to make a decent return on legal investments, corruption and black market activities become the primary "investment" vehicles.
The third world is primarily socialist countries and dictatorships (effectively, fascist countries). That's what you're advocating we should become, not me. Venezuela provided a good recent object lesson.
I read several books a week. And I have given you other books and authors to look at: von Mises, Hayek, Nozick, Friedman, Rothbard, Bastiat. I also experienced socialist and social welfare states first hand, and my parents (barely) lived through fascism.
As I was saying, I tried to keep it simple for you.
Well, I certainly understand your methods because they are so typical: it's second-hand left-wing propaganda, full of name calling, goal post shifting, and simple falsehoods, a mix of modern progressive political messaging, Frankfurt school ideology, and echoes of Soviet/Russian disinformation. Of course, as is typical too, you don't even quite know what you're doing.
It's not telepathy; you identified politically as a progressive in this very thread. Progressives support large scale illegal and legal immigration and admission of refugees. Why did you self-identify as a progressive in this thread if you don't actually support progressive immigration policies?
Yes, but there will be disparate results also if the employer is not illegally discriminating.
You need to look up the base rate fallacy.
That's merely your belief, not a fact. In fact, I think that prohibiting private discrimination leads to far more problems overall than it solves.
Change for what? Why should companies have representative populations in the first place? There are millions of businesses in the US; none of them needs to have a representative pool of employees for everybody to do well. Indians might want to work with Indians, lesbians with lesbians, Mexicans with Mexicans, macho men with macho men; what harm does that do to anybody? They don't need to be at a "competitive disadvantage" based on their choices, it is fine for them to co-exist as they are.
And what is even more reprehensible about your view is that you basically think of employees as interchangeable cogs and deny that we have the capability of making our own choices.
No, it doesn't.
Look, I didn't start misusing the term "wealth" for "income"; the American left did that. CNN itself keeps misusing the term, so it is deceptive and disingenuous to start using it for savings in that article. In the usual sense of the American left, namely that of "income", Americans are "wealthier" than Europeans.
Now, as for your "net worth" statistics, yes, the median net worth of Americans is lower than that of Europeans, but you don't quite seem to understand what that means. European median net worth is higher in large part because Europeans are older on average, which translates into a huge demographic problem for Europe. In addition, many Europeans feel they need to save more for retirement (because their retirement benefits are pretty stingy), and Europe discourages consumption and spending through taxes. Finally, Europeans also have more steady incomes throughout their lives, while Americans tend to make a lot of money in a few years at the peak of their careers (40% of Americans end up in the top 10% of income earners in their lifetime), a testament to a much more flexible labor market and much greater opportunities in the US.
The Australian example highlights some other differences: while Americans are required to waste their money on useless government pyramid schemes (Social Security, Medicare), Australians put 9% of their income into a mandatory retirement savings account. That sounds like a great idea, and it's something we should adopt. Replacing Social Security with such a program would immediately see US median net worth skyrocket. Conversely, if you count the value of US social security contributions alone as part of the net worth, US median net worth would likely be near the top.
It's almost like you actually need to understand something about the data you're citing.
That's because you are a brainwashed leftist prick in a wealthy society who doesn't know any better.
You were talking about "fat cats", i.e., big investors. If those people don't constitute a big part of overall investments, then taxing them won't yield a lot of revenue, so you are just taxing them out of envy and spite, not to gain significant amounts of revenue.
There a plenty of other places rich people can put their money without paying taxes. Government corruption, for example, is an excellent investment.
You're absolutely right that governmental agencies like the EPA are keeping an "extra eye" on environmental sins and are making very cautious decisions because US administrations don't want to get in trouble with environmentalists; the result is limited job growth, limited economic growth, and stagnation.
If you hand over more power to the government, like they used to behind the Iron Curtain, the motivation of government officials shifts from irrational caution to irrational attempts to meet economic output targets; that's why the environment behind the Iron Curtain was such a disaster.
Top marginal income tax rates are about 53% in the US, significantly higher than both Germany and Norway. Worse yet, top marginal income tax rates in Europe start applying to people in the middle class, often barely above the median. Furthermore, comparisons to Canada and Norway, two resource-rich countries in favorable locations and with small populations, are invalid anyway; we couldn't run the US like Canada or Norway if we wanted to. The only really valid comparison of the US is to the EU as a whole, rather than cherry-picking the wealthiest European states. Otherwise, you ought to compare the US to at least the larger countries, like France and Germany.
Among industrialized Western nations, the US has some of the highest pre-tax MEDIAN incomes in the world. More importantly, the income tax burden on low and average income earners is substantially lower in the US than in Europe, and Europeans pay massive and regressive VAT taxes on top of that. German/Scandianvian style social welfare states are paid for by the middle class. (Note that the Tax Foundation actually understates US taxes.)
The US has one of the highest amounts of per capita social spending in the world, higher than all of Europe and most of the Nordic countries. Even as percentage of GDP (an invalid comparison because it's absolute spending in $PPP that actually matters), US spending is very high. Countries like Germany have cut their social safety nets massively because they found that generous social safety nets result in people staying out of the workforce. And the services you get from the government in Europe are shitty: long wait times, limited choices, demeaning rules.
No, we don't need to theorize. Have you actually lived in Europe? And I don't mean as an American expat with full access to American opportunities whenever you want to? I have. The European middle class is highly taxed, has limited economic opportunities, and is less economically well off than the US middle class. Much of the European middle class lives below the US poverty line (that is, when you don't cherry-pick Norway and Luxembourg for your comparisons.) The situation in Europe is grim, both economically and politically. And if the US were really as repressive and miserly towards the working class and the middle class, it wouldn't be the migration destination of choice for so many people.
Well, you brought up your supposed credentials as support for the idea that people should take you seriously.
Well, and under capitalism, everybody is free to choose their own sweet spot. What isn't fair is if you choose high consumption and go to school for years on end when you're young and then demand that others still subsidize a good retirement for you when you're old.
Investors aren't motivated by "inequality", they are motivated by returns. If we don't get 5-7% return on investment year over year, they pull out of the market. Furthermore, most of the stock market is held by small investors and institutional investors.
Are you kidding? The very name "capitalism" refers to the use of capital for investing.
Government official jerks don't need to "cheat", they "poison babies" simply by not giving a fuck and by not being liable for the consequences of their actions.
Well, you can consider yourself a "computer scientist", I consider you a university dropout with no significant publications and have zero respect for your professional opinion based on your background (thanks for being so honest). As I was saying, we'll have to agree to disagree.
I'm sure you superficially "believed in" libertarianism; many young people like the anarchy and rebelliousness of it. But based on what you have said, you didn't understand libertarianism any better than you understand progressivism or history. I'm sorry, but you simply need to read up a lot more on history and work on your arguments.
Again, you're assuming that there is a fixed amount of resources around that need to be allocated nicely. Any economy like that is bound to fail because nobody has any incentive to make capital investments. We had that during the Dark Ages. Hence the name.
The only way to make progress is to grow the economy, and that happens only through capital investments. If you take away money from people who make capital investments to people who simply consume, as you do when you redistribute from rich to poor, you harm growth in two ways: first, you get less capital investment because of the money you took away, and second, the people you took it away from will not view capital investments as a worthwhile activity at all anymore.
The world is indeed full of jerks, and capitalists have indeed occasionally "harmed or poisoned babies". They then get punished both by customers and by the courts. Generally speaking, capitalists don't gain anything in the long term by harming their customers, and there is little potential for corrupting government officials.
If you give the government more power to intervene in economic affairs, government positions become extremely powerful. What prevents those jerks that want to "poison babies" from simply becoming government officials? And how do you keep them in check once they are in government? Certainly not voters. Believe me (based on first-hand experience), if you think that the occasional capitalist "harming babies" is bad, it's nothing compared to the horrors that happen when you give government officials the ability to do that and get away with it.
Gosh, why don't you follow the links I provided?
Why don't you do a bit of research yourself.
Well, you can't "specify a cause" when you start off with an incorrect understanding of the problem. For example, your statement implies that you view wealth as a bounded resource that "log jams" somewhere. Your statement is the rough equivalent "I didn't specify a cause of the earth being flat; physicists are still puzzling over the exact cause(s)".
So, government-mandated monopolies and barriers to entry (like copyrights, patents, regulations, etc.) created in response to big corporate lobbying make markets less efficient. How is that an indictment of free markets?
The solution to this is not to tax upper-middle-class professionals and redistribute their income to single mothers, the solution is to get rid of the government-mandated monopolies and barriers to entry.
Well, that's the standard definition, and it's the definition that calls for increased redistribution are based on. And you are right that it differs from "actual conditions/outcome." But we pretty much have eliminated financial poverty in the US. The poor in America are wealthier than many middle-class families in Europe and most middle-class families across the globe. Yet we still have undesirable outcomes like childhood food insecurity. So, obviously, poverty in the financial sense isn't the cause of those outcomes in the US, and more redistribution isn't the answer.
Well, we have been talking about redistribution, you reference US wealth and power, and you point to a site that advocates increased government spending to reduce childhood food insecurity. That implies things about your position, but you're welcome to clarify.
Hunger is a subjective experience, not an objective measure of being economically unable to meet your nutritional requirements. You can spend all your money on expensive junk food, be obese, and still be hungry all the time. In fact, the poorest populations in the US also have by far the highest obesity rates.
I suggest you look it up, it's an essential distinction.
Absolutely! Policies like socialism and redistribution. Policies that destroy property rights and free markets.
That should be "in constant dollars." Haven't had my coffee yet.
You make it sound like the entire West switched to laissez-faire free market economics and massive cuts in welfare spending in 1980. In fact, the opposite is true. Oh, Reagan talked a lot about those things, but his policies were cosmetic. Social welfare spending on the poor has tripled since 1980 (in absolute dollars). Federal government spending along has gone from around $7000/capita in 1980 to about $12000/capita today (in 2014 dollars). The budgetary cost of federal regulations has gone from $18b in 1980 to $60b in 2017. Also, massive illegal immigration started in the mid-1970's, and illegal immigrants and their children have poverty rates of around 50-60%; that's a population of about 10 million illegals living in poverty, accounting for nearly a quarter of the 45 million people living in (relative) poverty in the US.
So, you correctly identify the time around 1980 as a good point for comparison. But far from a return to cut-throat laissez-faire capitalism, the period since 1980 has seen a massive expansion of government, welfare, and social spending in the US (and much of Europe), accompanied by a stagnation in wages and growth.
You're right: we need to stop going down that path and find a Plan B to what we are doing, namely cutting back government spending, government regulations, welfare programs, and illegal immigration, etc. to pre-1980 levels.
So it took you 20 years to write one Diploma thesis, it was "published" by the university, you didn't get a degree, and you believe that makes you a scientist. Well, we'll just have to disagree on that.
Yes, economic growth and free markets benefit the wealthy more than the poor. But both benefit. That's why being poor in the US is financially better than being middle class in much of Europe.
More redistribution does reduce income inequality, but the poor still end up worse off in the long run.
So, the question you need to ask is: do you want everybody to be better off, or are you willing to impoverish people for the sake of equality.
Oh, the kind of suffering kids are subjected to in inner cities is tragic and deeply offensive. But it is clearly not due to absolute poverty: the US government redistributes tens of thousands of dollars on each of those kids per year already, on education, nutritional assistance, welfare, and other expenses, so they are clearly not suffering from absolute poverty. What they are suffering from is misguided social policies, single motherhood, inefficient schools, a bad social environment, etc. Another way of seeing that the problem is policy, not absolute income, is to realize that much of the European middle class lives below the US poverty line. I myself grew up in a household that, by US standards, would probably be considered poor.
The question you should be asking is how you can sleep at night, since you seem to be advocating policies that will keep children living under these conditions for generations to come.