Sadly, the Republicans are right on the money for the most part. Just think about it for a sec: If it weren't for the war, where would the Democrats be? Would they have a hope in hell of winning the seats they did in '06? Would there even be a remote chance at a Democrat elected in '08. Iraq is the only leg they have to stand on. The leadership (and most of the voter base if Slashdot is any indication) believe that the Republican Party of 2007 is the same as the Republican Party of 1980. They have almost no idea about how badly they've been co-opted on the domestic front. The Republicans are talking things like corporate responsibility, education, the enviornment, and it'll only be a matter of time before they co-opt the Dems on health care too.
I'm of the completely opposite viewpoint here. You have a right to your own life, but that right is not a blank check to force others to provide for your survival. The abstraction we refer to as "health care" is simply goods and services like any other. They are not simply lying around waiting for the government to come up with an equitable distribution, but must be produced by capable individuals. To use government to force a company to provide a new drug at a discounted rate is a violation of rights. To use government to force a doctor to treat you at a fixed cost is a violation of rights. To use government to tax others to pay for the values needed for your own survival is a violation of rights. The government has been performing some version of these actions ever since Medicare was signed into law, and it has absolutely *wrecked* the health care market, driving costs higher and higher (I don't like to discuss the concrete when it comes to debates like these simply due to the fact that they've been twisted around so many times, but hell, when it comes to a non-contradictory universe, the moral is the practical). The only way socialized medicine could be implemented here is through oppressive taxation or rationing of care.
If it blows that much, quit. Go clean bedpans at a nursing home, or roof buildings, or even take some of that free money the govt throws around, take some college courses and learn how to do something that pays money. It's your life, man.
Well, if the unions were abolished (I'm not big on abolition, but IMO government ceasing to coerce employers to negotiate would be both moral and practical), the US automakers could compete in the small to midsize auto market, and wouldn't have to rely on truck and SUV sales to bring home the bacon (like they did for most of the '80s and '90s).
Labor unions only have power as long as the companies that sponsor them are willing to blank-out the law of supply and demand. I remember a piece by George Reisman about the auto industry back when Japan was seriously kicking the American companies' asses (Ok, still true), and it's not even that the pay was significantly lower (about 5 or 6 dollars different, IIRC, in an industry where 25-30 dollar wage rates aren't uncommon). In a union shop, employees don't compete with each other for a higher spot on the food chain, don't cross train (their job is their job, and they're not going to sweep floors or mount tires if their job goes a little slow that day), and any attempt to swap benefits plans for something more economical requires a union vote. The non-union Japanese shops were able to save considerable money both on benefits and man-hours.
California has passed laws greatly opening up the cable market (removing the requirement of negotiating and paying extortion money to each of the municipalities they serve (the REAL "infrastructure cost")), but they've only been on the books about a year at this point. Right now, I'd just say give it a little bit. As for satellite, I've got it at home, and it's generally about as nice as the cable out here in OK (my only point of contention for the longest time was the lack of local channels).
Ultimately, higher minimum wages (or "living wage" laws) are just going to jack prices up and force companies to cut work staff, so it's not like they'd do any fucking good anyways. Usually jobs like these get filled either by high school/community college kids looking for spending money, elderly collecting social security benefits, or people who have pretty much pissed away every other opportunity they had at doing what is basically sedentary work.
You make a really good point here. I'll just point out that working at Wal-Mart is also in that comfort zone where 'working' generally consists of standing around, operating a cash register, and moving around pallet jacks. I mean, I'm sure there's probably some disaffected underemployed would-be software designers in there somewhere (I'm taking this as an article of faith, I've never *met* any of these), but this isn't exactly high-demand labor. And it's not as if these people are unemployable anywhere else. The jobs they can get might not be as comfortable, or may not be within climate controlled environments, or they may have to load up all of their cheap shit and get on a Greyhound to another town, but there's opportunities out there for those willing to break out of their comfort zone and look for them.
True enough. Wal-Mart is a pretty safe target for those who would categorize its customer base as "white trash". Maybe that's why we don't see Target-bashing.
I've had a few friends do short stints at Wal-Mart after crashing and burning elsewhere, and I got to meet a few of their co-workers. The job really pays about as well as anything else they'd be competent and motivated enough to do. Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up.
I never said there was a right to cheap telephone service. The rights I was speaking of were liberty (not being able to open a private telco) and property (having one's income taken by force to pay for the government telco). Yeah, it was a monopoly before, but SBC didn't have to grant it their moral sanction by getting involved.
So, in other words, to continue to grow, it has to continue providing value to its customers, and to remain a monopoly, it has to *compete* with its potential competitors.
Read it a little more throughly. Standard Oil was a small-shit monopoly (pre-automotive, less than 1% of GDP and about 1/3 the size of the shoe industry at their largest) and were on the verge of getting competed out of the market by the time the breakup went to trial. Without government coercion, monopolies only survive when they provide a better deal than whatever else is out there, and those companies do not justify government theft of property for doing what would be perfectly legal for any other business.
SBC's ethical obligation to make money stops where the rights of others are involved. They accepted public money (i.e. money extorted from the South African people at the point of a gun) to build their telephone network, and had the government violate the rights of would-be competitors to enforce a coercive monopoly.
True enough. Any moral company would have taken one look at the situation, thanked the ANC for their time, and walked away. Telephones are a service, not a basic human right to be provided at the expense of others.
There are things a rational and free man, with his happiness as his standard of life, can find to be worth fighting and dying for. Like continuing to be a free man. As for family, I would fight to the death for any of my brood, simply because I could not imagine life without them. Having children, however, is an obligation that one takes upon oneself voluntarily.
While I despise all religion, I'd say that the previous points make what is probably the only difference between Christianity and Islam: the margin of error in interpretation.
Jesus Christ, if such a person ever existed, died a slave's disgraceful death and left behind no record of his own. Of the four accounts of his life generally accepted among religious types, only one *might* have been written by someone who knew him firsthand, with the other three copying biographic detail from an unknown source. The canon only entered into its final form three hundred years after his supposed death. A considerable number of movements cropped up largely deemed heretical to the trinitarian Roman Christianity that eventually became the dominant form. In all of this, it's next to impossible to tell what Christianity, as opposed to, say, Roman Catholicism or Methodism, demands of its followers.
Muhammad, on the other hand, died as the conqueror of the Arabian peninsula. The four orthodox Caliphs, all of whom knew him firsthand, had no problem in continuing the wars of conversion across the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, eventually making it into southern France a hundred years after Muhammad's death. That's quite some "internal struggle against evil" right there.
The problem with that is that the moderate religionists have already conceded the moral points of the fundies. Take the example of a Christmas Catholic. He has conceded that God exists, sent his son to Earth as a mortal man, and left behind a text as a guide to moral action on Earth. What point can he make against another believer who decides to take that text literally and give, say, homosexuals the prescribed treatment? That the book is wrong?
If Christianity and Judaism are fucked up, does that make it perfectly OK for Islam to be fucked up too? The only break Christianity gets, in my book, is that most places that practice it have been involved in an 800-year long struggle between it and the Aristotelian concept of objective reality.
Religion and statism (of which militaristic Rome and Japan were classic examples) are two sides of the same coin: the placing of an individual's values outside of the individual's own life and happiness. Religion is evil for the exact same reason that ideologies like communism and fascism are evil: they advocate the sacrifice of the individual for some higher purpose.
The culprit is not religion in and of itself, but the undertone that marks both religion and collectivism: the philosophy of altruism. By altruism, I do not mean simple generosity, but rather the belief that a man's standard of value should not be his own life and happiness, but rather his duty to others: God, the state, his brother-men. It is the ultimate dismissal of human life and values.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, the Republicans are right on the money for the most part. Just think about it for a sec: If it weren't for the war, where would the Democrats be? Would they have a hope in hell of winning the seats they did in '06? Would there even be a remote chance at a Democrat elected in '08. Iraq is the only leg they have to stand on. The leadership (and most of the voter base if Slashdot is any indication) believe that the Republican Party of 2007 is the same as the Republican Party of 1980. They have almost no idea about how badly they've been co-opted on the domestic front. The Republicans are talking things like corporate responsibility, education, the enviornment, and it'll only be a matter of time before they co-opt the Dems on health care too.
I had JRA when I was a kid too. I took some Advil and got over it. More importantly, your right to life is not a blank check upon my life.
Maybe that's why I've never heard of HEB up here in Oklahoma.
I'm of the completely opposite viewpoint here. You have a right to your own life, but that right is not a blank check to force others to provide for your survival. The abstraction we refer to as "health care" is simply goods and services like any other. They are not simply lying around waiting for the government to come up with an equitable distribution, but must be produced by capable individuals. To use government to force a company to provide a new drug at a discounted rate is a violation of rights. To use government to force a doctor to treat you at a fixed cost is a violation of rights. To use government to tax others to pay for the values needed for your own survival is a violation of rights. The government has been performing some version of these actions ever since Medicare was signed into law, and it has absolutely *wrecked* the health care market, driving costs higher and higher (I don't like to discuss the concrete when it comes to debates like these simply due to the fact that they've been twisted around so many times, but hell, when it comes to a non-contradictory universe, the moral is the practical). The only way socialized medicine could be implemented here is through oppressive taxation or rationing of care.
If it blows that much, quit. Go clean bedpans at a nursing home, or roof buildings, or even take some of that free money the govt throws around, take some college courses and learn how to do something that pays money. It's your life, man.
Well, if the unions were abolished (I'm not big on abolition, but IMO government ceasing to coerce employers to negotiate would be both moral and practical), the US automakers could compete in the small to midsize auto market, and wouldn't have to rely on truck and SUV sales to bring home the bacon (like they did for most of the '80s and '90s).
Labor unions only have power as long as the companies that sponsor them are willing to blank-out the law of supply and demand. I remember a piece by George Reisman about the auto industry back when Japan was seriously kicking the American companies' asses (Ok, still true), and it's not even that the pay was significantly lower (about 5 or 6 dollars different, IIRC, in an industry where 25-30 dollar wage rates aren't uncommon). In a union shop, employees don't compete with each other for a higher spot on the food chain, don't cross train (their job is their job, and they're not going to sweep floors or mount tires if their job goes a little slow that day), and any attempt to swap benefits plans for something more economical requires a union vote. The non-union Japanese shops were able to save considerable money both on benefits and man-hours.
California has passed laws greatly opening up the cable market (removing the requirement of negotiating and paying extortion money to each of the municipalities they serve (the REAL "infrastructure cost")), but they've only been on the books about a year at this point. Right now, I'd just say give it a little bit. As for satellite, I've got it at home, and it's generally about as nice as the cable out here in OK (my only point of contention for the longest time was the lack of local channels).
Ultimately, higher minimum wages (or "living wage" laws) are just going to jack prices up and force companies to cut work staff, so it's not like they'd do any fucking good anyways. Usually jobs like these get filled either by high school/community college kids looking for spending money, elderly collecting social security benefits, or people who have pretty much pissed away every other opportunity they had at doing what is basically sedentary work.
Damn straight. No one has a 'right' to earn more than the value they produce.
You make a really good point here. I'll just point out that working at Wal-Mart is also in that comfort zone where 'working' generally consists of standing around, operating a cash register, and moving around pallet jacks. I mean, I'm sure there's probably some disaffected underemployed would-be software designers in there somewhere (I'm taking this as an article of faith, I've never *met* any of these), but this isn't exactly high-demand labor. And it's not as if these people are unemployable anywhere else. The jobs they can get might not be as comfortable, or may not be within climate controlled environments, or they may have to load up all of their cheap shit and get on a Greyhound to another town, but there's opportunities out there for those willing to break out of their comfort zone and look for them.
True enough. Wal-Mart is a pretty safe target for those who would categorize its customer base as "white trash". Maybe that's why we don't see Target-bashing.
I've had a few friends do short stints at Wal-Mart after crashing and burning elsewhere, and I got to meet a few of their co-workers. The job really pays about as well as anything else they'd be competent and motivated enough to do. Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up.
Is that counting or not counting the other part of the price? You know, the one taken out of every paycheck you make?
I never said there was a right to cheap telephone service. The rights I was speaking of were liberty (not being able to open a private telco) and property (having one's income taken by force to pay for the government telco). Yeah, it was a monopoly before, but SBC didn't have to grant it their moral sanction by getting involved.
So, in other words, to continue to grow, it has to continue providing value to its customers, and to remain a monopoly, it has to *compete* with its potential competitors.
Read it a little more throughly. Standard Oil was a small-shit monopoly (pre-automotive, less than 1% of GDP and about 1/3 the size of the shoe industry at their largest) and were on the verge of getting competed out of the market by the time the breakup went to trial. Without government coercion, monopolies only survive when they provide a better deal than whatever else is out there, and those companies do not justify government theft of property for doing what would be perfectly legal for any other business.
SBC's ethical obligation to make money stops where the rights of others are involved. They accepted public money (i.e. money extorted from the South African people at the point of a gun) to build their telephone network, and had the government violate the rights of would-be competitors to enforce a coercive monopoly.
True enough. Any moral company would have taken one look at the situation, thanked the ANC for their time, and walked away. Telephones are a service, not a basic human right to be provided at the expense of others.
There are things a rational and free man, with his happiness as his standard of life, can find to be worth fighting and dying for. Like continuing to be a free man. As for family, I would fight to the death for any of my brood, simply because I could not imagine life without them. Having children, however, is an obligation that one takes upon oneself voluntarily.
While I despise all religion, I'd say that the previous points make what is probably the only difference between Christianity and Islam: the margin of error in interpretation.
Jesus Christ, if such a person ever existed, died a slave's disgraceful death and left behind no record of his own. Of the four accounts of his life generally accepted among religious types, only one *might* have been written by someone who knew him firsthand, with the other three copying biographic detail from an unknown source. The canon only entered into its final form three hundred years after his supposed death. A considerable number of movements cropped up largely deemed heretical to the trinitarian Roman Christianity that eventually became the dominant form. In all of this, it's next to impossible to tell what Christianity, as opposed to, say, Roman Catholicism or Methodism, demands of its followers.
Muhammad, on the other hand, died as the conqueror of the Arabian peninsula. The four orthodox Caliphs, all of whom knew him firsthand, had no problem in continuing the wars of conversion across the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, eventually making it into southern France a hundred years after Muhammad's death. That's quite some "internal struggle against evil" right there.
The problem with that is that the moderate religionists have already conceded the moral points of the fundies. Take the example of a Christmas Catholic. He has conceded that God exists, sent his son to Earth as a mortal man, and left behind a text as a guide to moral action on Earth. What point can he make against another believer who decides to take that text literally and give, say, homosexuals the prescribed treatment? That the book is wrong?
If Christianity and Judaism are fucked up, does that make it perfectly OK for Islam to be fucked up too? The only break Christianity gets, in my book, is that most places that practice it have been involved in an 800-year long struggle between it and the Aristotelian concept of objective reality.
Religion and statism (of which militaristic Rome and Japan were classic examples) are two sides of the same coin: the placing of an individual's values outside of the individual's own life and happiness. Religion is evil for the exact same reason that ideologies like communism and fascism are evil: they advocate the sacrifice of the individual for some higher purpose.
The culprit is not religion in and of itself, but the undertone that marks both religion and collectivism: the philosophy of altruism. By altruism, I do not mean simple generosity, but rather the belief that a man's standard of value should not be his own life and happiness, but rather his duty to others: God, the state, his brother-men. It is the ultimate dismissal of human life and values.