Actually, in a lot of facets aside from entertainment, that's exactly how it works. If I go to a restaurant and my meal or service was subpar, I can complain about it and get a refund. If my new car falls apart, there are lemon laws that protect me. If I purchase just about any normal item that breaks and/or doesn't perform the function that it was specifically designed to. I can return it for money or a new one. Why is it that entertainment is somehow above this?
First, the RIAA and MPAA aren't selling "entertainment" - they're selling licenses to view and listen to their work. Unless you're saying CDs and DVDs won't play for you unless you've pirated them first, the comparisons you're making with other products don't make any sense. The products are meeting expectations, you're just expecting the wrong thing.
And the claims that it works that way for other products are dubious. When I go out to eat, I don't get to skip out on the bill based on how delicious I thought the food was.
Also, "normal" items are typically paid for before you use them. If I go buy a toaster, for example, I pay for it before I get to take it home. If it's broken or doesn't meet my expectations then I return it and get back the money I already paid.
And record profits are bad when they're unreasonably high... Noone should make millions from doing a small amount of work, payment should be proportional to the level of effort required to do the work and should cease when someone stops working. In most other industries this is already the case.
Who are you to say what other people should be allowed to do?
Unfortunately in real life that's not how it works. If you want to try something before you buy it then there are plenty of legal ways to do it. You can go listen to it in the store, download the sample tracks off Amazon, borrow it from a friend, listen to it on the radio, or a million other legal ways.
I know it sucks that you don't get to just go around doing whatever you want, but that's how society works. If you don't like the law then work to get it changed or move somewhere else. In the meantime, you have to abide by the law just like everyone else. Should I be allowed to go around committing identity theft just because I think the laws against it are stupid?
Of course, the other reason that the monk analogy does not fit that seems to be oft overlooked is that the monks did not make record profits as printing became increasingly common.
Oh no! Not "record profits"! People in the music and movie industries are supposed to work for warm fuzzy feelings like everybody else, right?
A) Downloading music and movies and games for free actually makes people more likely to buy them, not less - my movie collection was tiny back when I just had to watch whatever was on TV or the cinema. A couple of months ago I had to buy a new set of shelves to keep my new DVDs on.
Maybe that's how it works for you, but I don't know anybody who "pirates" stuff and then also buys it. I'm pretty sure that's mostly a myth made up on Slashdot to justify being cheap.
B) Probably most importantly in this argument my money is now freed up to spend on other stuff, and no, by that I do not mean pizza. I mean that since I can download a discography of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers for free while I actually only own four or five albums of theirs that the $50 or so (?) I just saved can be spent going to see / buy albums from less well known bands that need the money to pay rent and bills, rather than buy another Bugatti Veyron so when their friends come round they can race.
The part of that which makes sense contradicts what you just said in the last paragraph. If you buy more movies and music now that you pirate them, all other things being equal, you should have less money to spend on other stuff...
The goal should be to make things better. Swapping out Bush's poor choice of appointees for equally poor choices doesn't really get us any where.
At some point Obama and his supporters will have to stop using Bush to justify their own poor decisions. Yes, Bush made horrible decisions. Yes, Bush was an idiot. Yes, Bush was a bad president. That's why everybody hated him and why so many people were excited about Obama changing things - it was implied that he meant change for the better. So it's a bit disappointing to see Obama make poor choices and then have those choices justified with "But look what Bush did," or "It's okay because we're no worse off than with Bush." Pointing out that somebody else did something stupid doesn't make their own choices any less stupid.
Unfortunately, for most, the only way to get a fair price is to talk your congressman into price controls; ISPs are often monopolies in the area in which they serve.
It's not your congressman, but your city council who you should talk to. They're the ones who give out the local monopoly in the first place.
eFile is free, but you can't do it on the IRS's website. It redirects you to some spam filled third party sites where it's sometimes hard to figure out what's part of the regular tax form filling process and what's an advertisement or for pay service. There's really no reason for it not to be right on the IRS website.
If you're reading the EULA, seeing that google may filter pages you view, and then using Chrome anyway then that means you're consenting. Or you're just incredibly fucking dumb.
If you don't like it, use something else. There's not exactly a shortage of web browsers...
...drug testing all unemployment/foodstamp recipients sounded equally foolish to me
That actually sounds like a good idea IMO. I'm completely against foodstamps and unemployment, but if we're going to give tax money to bums, I'd like to at least know they actually need it for reason other than they've spent all their other money getting wasted.
The primary goal of voting is to make your opinion known to the people representing you. The candidate that happens to win is almost irrelevant.
When everybody votes for the candidate they most agree with, it gives a better picture of what the people actually want.
For example, if I vote Republican solely because I agree with their economic policies, the fact that I completely disagree with them on social issues is completely lost - as far as the politicians can tell, I completely agree with the Republicans on everything.
On the other hand, if I vote for a party that agrees with the Republicans on economic issues, but holds a different stance on social issues, it sends the message that I only partially agree with the Republicans. Even if they win, they know that at least some people disagree with them on that.
As it stands now, politicians see that 50% of the population completely agrees with them, while 49% of the population completely disagrees with them. There's very little data for them to actually make decisions with.
Very true. This is also important for the instructors (at least in CS) - how can you mark programming assignments if the environments used for development are that diverse.
I don't think that's a real problem. The scope of most CS projects is so limited that the environment shouldn't matter. When I was in school we never knew what platform our projects would be graded on, and it was never a problem.
Worst case scenario, have the students SSH into a specific machine and write their assignments there.
Okay, so you believe supply and demand is the sole determining factor.
I didn't say it was the sole determining factor. I'm just saying it's not entirely the fault of government and big business.
Then please explain the "war on drugs", the bailouts, the DMCA, and the PATRIOT act. It clearly isn't the people that decide.
No, it IS the people who decide. The majority of people voted for, and continue to vote for politicians who support those things. Politicians and big businesses are whores. They support whatever keeps them in power and keeps their wallet full, and you can't do either of those things without the support of the voters and the consumers - a.k.a. "the people".
That's not typically how imporovements in technology work, though. The jobs don't go away or become fully automatic, they just become less labor intensive.
Take ditch digging, for example. 200 years ago digging a 100 meter long ditch, a meter deep could probably take a few dozen men with shovels a few days. Now, one guy with an excavator can dig the same ditch in a day or two all by himself.
There will always be a need for humans to decide what gets done. Technology helps with actually doing it.
Yeah, it's definitely the government and big business. It couldn't possibly be hundreds of millions of Americans spending hundreds of billions of dollars, demanding cheap products made in China.
As fun as it's been watching you squirm, back track, subject change, name call, and generally wallow in ignorance, I'm finally bored of you. You've dragged things so far off topic I just don't even care any more.
So does this mean you can't tell me the section of the Wolff, Zacharias, and Masterson paper that says they're comparing the "richest" and "poorest" in each category?
At the very least you could you give a link to the Robert Folsom paper you mentioned. I still haven't found it, and I'd kinda like to read it.
Or would you rather just nag me about mis-placed hyphens?
Sorry, answer my questions from my previous post and I'll respond to yours. Until then, we're not getting anywhere.
What is this? The third time in a row you've changed the subject? All of your questions were about things I didn't say, based on assumptions that aren't true, or were supposedly rhetorical ad-hominem attacks like "Are you an idiot?" My original response was more of a response than most of them deserved and answered or refuted most of what you said, except for the blatant ad-hominems, which I'll continue to ignore. If you want any more of an answer you'll just have to read my original response again and hope it makes more sense to you the second time around.
I take it you did not have to learn the rhetorical method at the school that so miseducated you?
Out of curiosity, which school is it that advocates the ad-hominem approach you're so fond of?
Sigh, are you still on that? Wealth disparity and income disparity are both increasing according to every study. Can you find any reputable study that says otherwise? I mean, this trend has been going on for decades. How can you claim to have any education in economics and not know this?
I don't even have to come up with a response if you're just going to change the subject. Guess you'll just have to make another not so subtle implication that I'm a "nutjob".
Are you really that big of an idiot? Seriously? They say it is decreasing for some subgroups, then go on to show that it is increasing overall for the population.
If the fact that they made up a measurement with their name in it, and STILL couldn't provide conclusive evidence supporting their agenda doesn't clue you in that you're wrong, I don't think there's any convincing you.
Sigh. Wealth disparity is the difference between the richest and the poorest. They're breaking it down into the difference between the richest and poorest in certain segments of the population, such as just women or just hispanics.
Which part of the paper are you talking about specifically? I saw a lot of talk about medians, averages, and means, but didn't see anything about the "richest", "poorest", "wealthiest", "top x%", "bottom x%" or anything like that.
What are the wealthy doing to deserve being born with more money? This isn't even so much about what the poor deserve. It's about making the economic playing field even enough so that our economy does not collapse when too large a portion is born with nothing and has to go into debt immediately just to have a chance at advancement or to live a normal life.
If it's about levelling the playing field, why are you so concerned about making the rich poorwe by taking their money and having them pay for everything? Why not focus on bringing the poor up to the level of the rich? Overall, I'd say rich people generally seem happier than the poor, so I don't see why the goal should be making everybody unhappy.
Is it your reading comprehension or your ability to reason that is so broken? Paying someone with tax dollars taken more from the wealthy then than the poor for a service they provide to both rich and poor, however, does fit the definition of wealth disparity. Think of it this way. Five guys go in on a pizza. The guy with the best paying job pays the most and the unemployed guy doesn't pay at all. Everyone eats the pizza. That's wealth redistribution.
Your example is irrelevant. The guy with the best paying job wasn't forced against his will to pay the most, he volunteered. There's nothing stopping the "rich" from volunteering to pay for social services for poor people right now. Your example doesn't really backup your argument that the "rich" should be forced to buy stuff for the "poor".
How about this: Five guys go in on a pizza. The guy with the highest paying job isn't hungry, so he doesn't pay anything and doesn't eat any pizza. The unemployed guy is starving, chips in the most money, and eats the most pizza. Everyone pays their fair share and eats as much pizza as they want.
That is what is proposed. That's what socialism is, provided it is paid for with progressive taxation, like we have now. The problems being, we currently don't have enough socialism or progressive enough taxes for the playing field to be level and the economy to be stable, as we've been reducing the level of progressiveness of taxes for several decades now and it has imbalanced the system.
LOL! By that logic poor people already get free social service, they just have to pay for it themselves. Protip: if something is being "paid for" then it's not being provided "for free".
Okay, you actually want names of economists: Edward N. Wolff, Ajit Zacharias, and Thomas Masterson a the Levy institute just published a paper showing the Gini was up to 6.2 as of 2004 (a drastic increase). Robert Folsom, just published an article on it the other day. Peter Wallison is a vert well known economist and he's been writing articles and giving interviews about this for a decade. Did you want more names?
First, I didn't say whether I thought income disparity was increasing or decreasing - I simply questioned whether you could name an economist who said it was increasing and that it increasing would be a problem.
That said, I thought your list was kinda funny. Peter Wallison takes the stance completely opposite of you on regulation. In fact, so opposite that he helped Ronald Reagan develop proposals to deregulate financial markets. If he's correct about income disparity, are you sure he's not correct on deregulation? And if he's incorrect on deregulation, how can he be trusted about income disparity?
As for Edward N. Wolff, Ajit Zacharias, and Thomas Masterson of the Levy Institute of Bard College... If you had even bothered to read the introduction of their paper (assuming you meant this one), you'd notice that they actually disagree with you. From their introduction:
Economic disparities among population subgroups in the United States have, in some cases, undergone profound transformations over the last half century; in other cases, disparities persist. Official poverty rates among the elderly, for example, are now in line with overall poverty rates; in the past, the elderly were much more prone to poverty. Meanwhile, disparities between racial sub-groups persist in spite of some improvement.
Apparently that wasn't what they wanted to see, so they made up their own measurement, the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-being, or LIMEW for short. Not surprisingly, when the economics department of the second most liberal college in America makes up a unit for measuring income disparity, the measurement shows more income disparity than the traditional measurements. Just one catch - even their new measurement says the situation is improving overall. From their conclusion:
The LIMEW provides a different picture of disparities among population subgroups. According to the LIMEW, racial disparities decreased from 1959 to 1989, but then increased to 2000, while both EI and MI show a narrowing of disparities over the period. (All three indices show almost no change between 2000 and 2004.)
But it's almost irrelevant anyway, because the paper isn't measuring disparity between "rich" and "poor", but based on race, age, sex, marital status, education and some other factors along those lines.
I couldn't find the Folsom article you mentioned, but given his other work I'm a little skeptical that he's the economic authority you're making him out to be.
Ahh, but we're providing for the national defense by redistributing wealth.
That doesn't even make sense. Paying somebody for a service they provide doesn't fite the traditional definition of "redistributing wealth."
Umm, who says we should hand cash to the poor? That's not socialism. Socialism is taxing the people to provide services and industries by the government, instead of by the private sector. Redistribution of wealth comes in when we tax the wealthy at higher rates than the poor in order to pay for shared services. That is to say, when we
Economically speaking, capitalism is private ownership and control of markets and industries. Socialism, is collection of monies and resources collectively and government control of markets and industries. Collecting more in taxes and spending it on more social programs (school funding for our socialized school system, police for our socialized law enforcement, and to pay for socialized healthcare) is increased socialism. Further, more progressive taxes that take larger shares from the rich and redistribute them via government spending on such programs is increased socialism. The more progressive taxes are and the more are collected and redistributed, the more socialist our economy. The less collected and the less progressive the taxes, the less socialized our economy. We've been moving to less progressive taxes which is less money redistributed from the rich to the poor which is less socialist and more capitalist.
LOL! You're really confused. Socialist countries have higher taxes because they need to pay for the services they provide. But having high taxes doesn't make a country socialist in and of itself. The reverse is also true. Having low taxes doesn't make a country capitalist - it could just be an efficient socialist government (yeah right!).
On a side note, it's interesting that you automatically assume having lower taxes means the government is providing less service. It didn't even occur to you they might be providing the same level of service more efficiently. It's like even people who advocate bigger government subconciously aknowledge the government is inefficient.
Umm, okay. That's what happens when you only get your news from Fox and associates. Sorry, but pretty much every economist recognizes wealth disparity is increasing and the gini coefficient is increasing.
You could have just said, "No, I can't name one." But, you're right, I do watch Fox news. And I watch to CNN and MSNBC, too. And quite a bit of CSPAN. And I watch Futurama on Comedy Central, and a lot of Food Network. But I don't see what my TV watching habits have to do with naming economists who agree with you. It's almost like you changed the subject...
Sure it is. Taxing the people and establishing a navy instead of letting those who can afford it provide for their own defense with private militaries, for example
No paying a Navy is providing national defense, which most people would concede is very much different than taking money from some people and giving it directly to other people for no reason at all. Providing defense is in the constitution. Redistribution of wealth isn't.
If that's not good enough for you, let me put it another way. At the very least, the Navy is providing a service, namely defending the country. What service do you think poor people are providing that they deserve to get paid tax money for doing it?
Bullshit. Statistically speaking, most rich people start rich. You haven't ever even opened an economics textbook, have you?
I minored in economics. That doesn't make me an "expert" by any means, but it's enough to know you're full of shit. Considering the rest of what you wrote is basically bullshit, name calling, and avoiding my questions, I think I'm just going to stop feeding the trolls.
We collect a smaller percentage of the income of the wealthiest people in comparison to the poorest. That's a decrease in socialism and an increase in capitalism. That's been the trend for a decade.
That's a change in tax policy, not a change in economic system. Get a clue.
That just made the problem worse and delayed the crash, it didn't cause the problem. The wealthy are getting wealthier and the poor are getting poorer as a trend. Do you expect that to be sustainable and stable? Economists sure don't.
I don't even think you can name a real economist who thinks that's happening, much less one who thinks it's happening and thinks it's a problem.
A democracy's job is to do the will of the people, so yeah it sort of is the government's job.
The government's job to do the will of the people within the limited range of powers granted to it in the Constitution. Taking from the rich and giving to the poor isn't one of those powers. The government doesn't just get free reign to do what ever it wants. It has to play by the rules.
Want to come over and play a game of monopoly with me? I'll start with a $5K and you can borrow limited money from me at 15%, when I feel like it. You can then take responsibility for how well you do.
Nice straw man. Back in real life, most "rich" people start off "poor", which according to you isn't even possible. Real life directly contradicts your claims - I'll leave it to you to figure out what that means.
Slashdot Mirror
First, the RIAA and MPAA aren't selling "entertainment" - they're selling licenses to view and listen to their work. Unless you're saying CDs and DVDs won't play for you unless you've pirated them first, the comparisons you're making with other products don't make any sense. The products are meeting expectations, you're just expecting the wrong thing.
And the claims that it works that way for other products are dubious. When I go out to eat, I don't get to skip out on the bill based on how delicious I thought the food was.
Also, "normal" items are typically paid for before you use them. If I go buy a toaster, for example, I pay for it before I get to take it home. If it's broken or doesn't meet my expectations then I return it and get back the money I already paid.
Who are you to say what other people should be allowed to do?
Unfortunately in real life that's not how it works. If you want to try something before you buy it then there are plenty of legal ways to do it. You can go listen to it in the store, download the sample tracks off Amazon, borrow it from a friend, listen to it on the radio, or a million other legal ways.
I know it sucks that you don't get to just go around doing whatever you want, but that's how society works. If you don't like the law then work to get it changed or move somewhere else. In the meantime, you have to abide by the law just like everyone else. Should I be allowed to go around committing identity theft just because I think the laws against it are stupid?
Oh no! Not "record profits"! People in the music and movie industries are supposed to work for warm fuzzy feelings like everybody else, right?
Maybe that's how it works for you, but I don't know anybody who "pirates" stuff and then also buys it. I'm pretty sure that's mostly a myth made up on Slashdot to justify being cheap.
The part of that which makes sense contradicts what you just said in the last paragraph. If you buy more movies and music now that you pirate them, all other things being equal, you should have less money to spend on other stuff...
The goal should be to make things better. Swapping out Bush's poor choice of appointees for equally poor choices doesn't really get us any where.
At some point Obama and his supporters will have to stop using Bush to justify their own poor decisions. Yes, Bush made horrible decisions. Yes, Bush was an idiot. Yes, Bush was a bad president. That's why everybody hated him and why so many people were excited about Obama changing things - it was implied that he meant change for the better. So it's a bit disappointing to see Obama make poor choices and then have those choices justified with "But look what Bush did," or "It's okay because we're no worse off than with Bush." Pointing out that somebody else did something stupid doesn't make their own choices any less stupid.
It's not your congressman, but your city council who you should talk to. They're the ones who give out the local monopoly in the first place.
Where? I've been filling my taxes online for a few years now and I've always been sent to a third party site.
eFile is free, but you can't do it on the IRS's website. It redirects you to some spam filled third party sites where it's sometimes hard to figure out what's part of the regular tax form filling process and what's an advertisement or for pay service. There's really no reason for it not to be right on the IRS website.
If you're reading the EULA, seeing that google may filter pages you view, and then using Chrome anyway then that means you're consenting. Or you're just incredibly fucking dumb.
If you don't like it, use something else. There's not exactly a shortage of web browsers...
That actually sounds like a good idea IMO. I'm completely against foodstamps and unemployment, but if we're going to give tax money to bums, I'd like to at least know they actually need it for reason other than they've spent all their other money getting wasted.
The primary goal of voting is to make your opinion known to the people representing you. The candidate that happens to win is almost irrelevant.
When everybody votes for the candidate they most agree with, it gives a better picture of what the people actually want.
For example, if I vote Republican solely because I agree with their economic policies, the fact that I completely disagree with them on social issues is completely lost - as far as the politicians can tell, I completely agree with the Republicans on everything.
On the other hand, if I vote for a party that agrees with the Republicans on economic issues, but holds a different stance on social issues, it sends the message that I only partially agree with the Republicans. Even if they win, they know that at least some people disagree with them on that.
As it stands now, politicians see that 50% of the population completely agrees with them, while 49% of the population completely disagrees with them. There's very little data for them to actually make decisions with.
Oh wow! I didn't know about the "Create Search" menu option - I had always been adding them manually. Thanks.
They found other ways to get paid.
I don't think that's a real problem. The scope of most CS projects is so limited that the environment shouldn't matter. When I was in school we never knew what platform our projects would be graded on, and it was never a problem.
Worst case scenario, have the students SSH into a specific machine and write their assignments there.
I didn't say it was the sole determining factor. I'm just saying it's not entirely the fault of government and big business.
No, it IS the people who decide. The majority of people voted for, and continue to vote for politicians who support those things. Politicians and big businesses are whores. They support whatever keeps them in power and keeps their wallet full, and you can't do either of those things without the support of the voters and the consumers - a.k.a. "the people".
That's not typically how imporovements in technology work, though. The jobs don't go away or become fully automatic, they just become less labor intensive.
Take ditch digging, for example. 200 years ago digging a 100 meter long ditch, a meter deep could probably take a few dozen men with shovels a few days. Now, one guy with an excavator can dig the same ditch in a day or two all by himself.
There will always be a need for humans to decide what gets done. Technology helps with actually doing it.
Yeah, it's definitely the government and big business. It couldn't possibly be hundreds of millions of Americans spending hundreds of billions of dollars, demanding cheap products made in China.
As fun as it's been watching you squirm, back track, subject change, name call, and generally wallow in ignorance, I'm finally bored of you. You've dragged things so far off topic I just don't even care any more.
Either that, or I just got trolled...
What's stopping you?
So does this mean you can't tell me the section of the Wolff, Zacharias, and Masterson paper that says they're comparing the "richest" and "poorest" in each category?
At the very least you could you give a link to the Robert Folsom paper you mentioned. I still haven't found it, and I'd kinda like to read it.
Or would you rather just nag me about mis-placed hyphens?
What is this? The third time in a row you've changed the subject? All of your questions were about things I didn't say, based on assumptions that aren't true, or were supposedly rhetorical ad-hominem attacks like "Are you an idiot?" My original response was more of a response than most of them deserved and answered or refuted most of what you said, except for the blatant ad-hominems, which I'll continue to ignore. If you want any more of an answer you'll just have to read my original response again and hope it makes more sense to you the second time around.
Out of curiosity, which school is it that advocates the ad-hominem approach you're so fond of?
I don't even have to come up with a response if you're just going to change the subject. Guess you'll just have to make another not so subtle implication that I'm a "nutjob".
If the fact that they made up a measurement with their name in it, and STILL couldn't provide conclusive evidence supporting their agenda doesn't clue you in that you're wrong, I don't think there's any convincing you.
Which part of the paper are you talking about specifically? I saw a lot of talk about medians, averages, and means, but didn't see anything about the "richest", "poorest", "wealthiest", "top x%", "bottom x%" or anything like that.
If it's about levelling the playing field, why are you so concerned about making the rich poorwe by taking their money and having them pay for everything? Why not focus on bringing the poor up to the level of the rich? Overall, I'd say rich people generally seem happier than the poor, so I don't see why the goal should be making everybody unhappy.
Your example is irrelevant. The guy with the best paying job wasn't forced against his will to pay the most, he volunteered. There's nothing stopping the "rich" from volunteering to pay for social services for poor people right now. Your example doesn't really backup your argument that the "rich" should be forced to buy stuff for the "poor".
How about this: Five guys go in on a pizza. The guy with the highest paying job isn't hungry, so he doesn't pay anything and doesn't eat any pizza. The unemployed guy is starving, chips in the most money, and eats the most pizza. Everyone pays their fair share and eats as much pizza as they want.
LOL! By that logic poor people already get free social service, they just have to pay for it themselves. Protip: if something is being "paid for" then it's not being provided "for free".
First, I didn't say whether I thought income disparity was increasing or decreasing - I simply questioned whether you could name an economist who said it was increasing and that it increasing would be a problem.
That said, I thought your list was kinda funny. Peter Wallison takes the stance completely opposite of you on regulation. In fact, so opposite that he helped Ronald Reagan develop proposals to deregulate financial markets. If he's correct about income disparity, are you sure he's not correct on deregulation? And if he's incorrect on deregulation, how can he be trusted about income disparity?
As for Edward N. Wolff, Ajit Zacharias, and Thomas Masterson of the Levy Institute of Bard College... If you had even bothered to read the introduction of their paper (assuming you meant this one), you'd notice that they actually disagree with you. From their introduction:
Apparently that wasn't what they wanted to see, so they made up their own measurement, the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-being, or LIMEW for short. Not surprisingly, when the economics department of the second most liberal college in America makes up a unit for measuring income disparity, the measurement shows more income disparity than the traditional measurements. Just one catch - even their new measurement says the situation is improving overall. From their conclusion:
But it's almost irrelevant anyway, because the paper isn't measuring disparity between "rich" and "poor", but based on race, age, sex, marital status, education and some other factors along those lines.
I couldn't find the Folsom article you mentioned, but given his other work I'm a little skeptical that he's the economic authority you're making him out to be.
That doesn't even make sense. Paying somebody for a service they provide doesn't fite the traditional definition of "redistributing wealth."
LOL! You're really confused. Socialist countries have higher taxes because they need to pay for the services they provide. But having high taxes doesn't make a country socialist in and of itself. The reverse is also true. Having low taxes doesn't make a country capitalist - it could just be an efficient socialist government (yeah right!).
On a side note, it's interesting that you automatically assume having lower taxes means the government is providing less service. It didn't even occur to you they might be providing the same level of service more efficiently. It's like even people who advocate bigger government subconciously aknowledge the government is inefficient.
You could have just said, "No, I can't name one." But, you're right, I do watch Fox news. And I watch to CNN and MSNBC, too. And quite a bit of CSPAN. And I watch Futurama on Comedy Central, and a lot of Food Network. But I don't see what my TV watching habits have to do with naming economists who agree with you. It's almost like you changed the subject...
No paying a Navy is providing national defense, which most people would concede is very much different than taking money from some people and giving it directly to other people for no reason at all. Providing defense is in the constitution. Redistribution of wealth isn't.
If that's not good enough for you, let me put it another way. At the very least, the Navy is providing a service, namely defending the country. What service do you think poor people are providing that they deserve to get paid tax money for doing it?
I minored in economics. That doesn't make me an "expert" by any means, but it's enough to know you're full of shit. Considering the rest of what you wrote is basically bullshit, name calling, and avoiding my questions, I think I'm just going to stop feeding the trolls.
That's a change in tax policy, not a change in economic system. Get a clue.
I don't even think you can name a real economist who thinks that's happening, much less one who thinks it's happening and thinks it's a problem.
The government's job to do the will of the people within the limited range of powers granted to it in the Constitution. Taking from the rich and giving to the poor isn't one of those powers. The government doesn't just get free reign to do what ever it wants. It has to play by the rules.
Nice straw man. Back in real life, most "rich" people start off "poor", which according to you isn't even possible. Real life directly contradicts your claims - I'll leave it to you to figure out what that means.