California on the Brink

[xoxoxoBruce]

SURPLUS.

[spudcon]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

SURPLUS.

Surplus what?

[xoxoxoBruce]

The surplus Bush took office with.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

What surplus? Responsible people never found any. Irresponsible ones did claim one existed. Or that one would emerge any year now. To the rest of us, it looked like smoke and mirror tricks.

I have never heard of a balanced Federal budget since 1969. Yeah, I'm that old.

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

You have an astonishing degree of faith in extremes of big government. Time and experience will completely cure this. The world does not work like that. See "people ruin everything" as more than something on a T-shirt but a basis for an active working principle of what nations and politics can do, and what they simply can't.

Why then do you have so much faith in corporations? Don't people run those as well? And we see where it's gotten us when we allow them to just do whatever they want. I would put faith in the government over unregulated business any day.

Economically quite ignorant. Inequalities in distribution of income are simply the natural outcome of human nature and fortune. "Equality Of Result" is less Socialism's Utopian goal than it is the reason Socialism fails and will always fail. Socialism is a faithless and impoverished bitch, and only the slow of mind ever put their faith in her.

I don't. Guess I'm just not slow enough between the ears.

When you discover that a "balanced, fair, sustainable future for ALL" is not only readily, but actually most, possible under capitalism, not under the bureaucratic approach socialism must take (Was there ever a Socialist economy that was "sustainable"? They have fallen, been abandoned, and so forth.), then you are inoculated against one of the great Lies of the Left. Until that happy day, your thinking is so unrealistic and anti-wealth as to verge on pathological. See, the Lie of the Left contends that wealth is zero-sum -- it is not, not on a planetary scale at any rate -- and that success must equal cheating, which is simply boneheaded. There is nothing in Capitalism that requires cheating anybody. You're clearly unaware that you can practice capitalism according to scrupulous ethics and do damned well in the process. Put that to the test if you think I'm talking through my hat, I dare you!

Since my thinking diverges so far from yours, it sounds like my thinking is both more adult and saner, doesn't it?

Since when did I ever say everyone should earn the same amount? Of course there will always be inequalities in wealth distribution, the problem I have is the SIZE of the inequality. It never ceases to amaze me how people can argue against a fair and living wage for the masses of people, while at the same time arguing why it is fair for top executives to earn obscene amounts of money, many of which really don't deserve it.

While we're on this subject, you really should check out Bill Moyers most recent episode on PBS. He interviews an insider from the health insurance industry. Honestly, if you are pissed off after watching that, something is seriously wrong with you.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Inherited a recession in 2000, not so? Recovered from same.

Inherited a recession in 1982 also. Recovered, and engendered a prolonged boom.

Republicans both times, btw, not that I think party has much to do with it. Maintaining an environment where profitability is both easy enough and reliably expected is the secret. No, I don't think you can honestly plead either poverty or even straitened circumstances attributable to anything but decisions you made. Not then, at any rate.

Now the story may turn out differently. What Obama's ideas will give us is an inflation cycle like the 1970s, which some few writing on this board are too young to remember, and apparently not sufficiently educated to know. Otherwise, you would have zero enthusiasm for the Democrats' inventing a couple trillions out of, well, nothing really.

Those recessions were quite different from what Obama inherited. We were on the verge of a complete and total collapse of the financial system. We were on the verge of another Great Depression. And we do not yet know what effect the stimulus and other actions Obama has taken will have. It is too soon to tell.

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

What surplus? Responsible people never found any. Irresponsible ones did claim one existed. Or that one would emerge any year now. To the rest of us, it looked like smoke and mirror tricks.

I have never heard of a balanced Federal budget since 1969. Yeah, I'm that old.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by sugarpop

Why then do you have so much faith in corporations? Don't people run those as well? And we see where it's gotten us when we allow them to just do whatever they want. I would put faith in the government over unregulated business any day.

Why? Two things in particular give me my faith in business: experience with the government and experience of socialism. I've seen what socialism does to peoples, in Europe and to a small extent, in Africa. Give me capitalism any time; at least most of the people behave like adults. And of course there's all the news all the time about the failings of this or that socialistic nanny-government program here at home.

Your assumption that business must do evil just from being business is not borne out in my experience, and it is also an indication that you have no business experience whatsoever. I've a larger body of data to work with than you do.

I am pleased you're finding your way to an agreement that "people ruin everything" indeed. Though I don't think you quite grasp everything I'm saying there yet. Good job so far, though. Chew on it some more and see what juice trickles.

I'm not particularly after unregulated business, but it is very easy to so overregulate business as to make it uncompetitive, and at that juncture business shrivels -- and then you have North Korean standards of living. Unless you can repair the damage wrought by too much administrative overhead, which is what overregulation is. The more thoroughly you avoid overregulation, the lower the cost of doing business and thereby generating real wealth, and all the more of it as well.

The government is and always shall be part of the administrative overhead, and its function in the economy is emphatically not to provide either goods or services, but to provide sufficient stability for goods and services to be provided by those making it their business to do so. If you want to call that a service, that's fair enough. Government functions are there to handle tasks a society deems needful, but which no one has ever found a way to be profitable doing. Largely, these functions have a coercive element somewhere in them, and at bottom, that's never a moneymaker -- and morally, it should not be, to avoid setting society's enforcers and guardians at the throats of the economic producers. That's the fundamental moral rationale for taxation, and has been since at least the Bronze Age. In prehistory, it's likely, but unproven. It's hard to reconstruct a tax structure if nobody invented writing to keep track.

But government lacks, because of taxation, the bottom-line mechanism of profit for keeping score on how well it uses its revenue in performing its tasks. If a business does this badly, it goes bankrupt and fails. Governments simply charge more and continue -- without permitting the option of not paying the increased charges. Governments fail by being overthrown, not by going out of business. Survivors of the resulting transition period get the chance to reset -- but the cost is often very great, in lost economic activity and/or destruction both material and human.

Here's my simile: the economy is like the body of an eland or a bighorn sheep, while the government is like their horns: the horns are useful in defense and even propagation of the organism, but they levy a cost upon the organism to create them. Nonetheless, the organism lives better for having grown the horns.

Since when did I ever say everyone should earn the same amount?

You believe this implicitly, if not quite completely. If you did not, your posts would sound more like mine. A person's philosophy, her idea of "the way things ought to be" causes certain ideas to be expressed and held, and others to be rejected. It is clear from your posts and your arguments what ideas and ideals you hold to, just as it is clear from mine what ideas and ideals I hold to. As you noted earlier and elsewhere, there's a pretty wide difference.

Of course there will always be inequalities in wealth distribution, the problem I have is the SIZE of the inequality.

Good God. Why? Should the peaks of talent and luck and pluck not be rewarded fully? Should not the nadirs of these also receive their merited recompenses? This "leveller" attitude is Socialism's least fair idea, and it's a real stinker through pretending to be its most fair. "Equality of Result" whether you do well or ill is unnatural -- and it cannot help but forbid doing well.

That is not merely bad; it is profoundly insane. Only the mad forbid doing well. (There are people here who insist I'm nuts.)

It never ceases to amaze me how people can argue against a fair and living wage for the masses of people, while at the same time arguing why it is fair for top executives to earn obscene amounts of money, many of which really don't deserve it.

Try being an executive with the luck and the smarts to steer a moneymaking endeavor on a path that actually makes money, generates wealth. It's also called "being the boss." (You don't seem to be thinking of yourself in that way. But to understand this it is important that you do.) Being rich frankly isn't disgusting, nor is being rewarded as your due: this is what bonuses are truly for -- if you make greater profits for your company, you take home a personal share of this increase. This is the most direct and powerful indication that you are personally doing something right. Bonus checks of six or seven figures are merely a sign that this is happening on a large scale -- and often with a correspondingly large risk. Get it wrong and one way or another, you're out of work. High risk, high reward; nothing unfair or obscene in that, is there? The people who can actually do this sort of thing successfully are notably thin on the ground, but may be grown and developed in their fields. The people who want it done reliably -- well, guess what kind of demand there is for this sort of thing. There's a lot of perfectly good coal around, but how about those diamonds?

To claim that somebody doesn't want a "fair and living wage" for anyone is the language of class-war and resentment, and I am suspicious of it. It is mainly employed by capital-S Socialists and others who are failures at capitalism and business, resent being failures, and are sure that if only the world's rules could be changed, they'd come out on top where they believe they deserve to be. So they wank around with rule-sets that fly in the face of true human nature, like communism, fascism, and socialism, singly and in combination. Somehow, these sickly people -- you can see their sick souls peering out of their eyes sometimes -- figure that the world will get all better if they repeat the actions of the revolutionary soviets and the aggrandized State of the fascists.

The twentieth century proved these bozos are all wet. Proved it, and paid for it, in blood as well as money. Blood spilled -- hundreds of millions of lives gone, snuffed -- and money, well, burnt.

The young people should take the lesson from this history. Don't allow large government. Don't fund it, don't give it a base in law or custom.

While we're on this subject, you really should check out Bill Moyers most recent episode on PBS.

Ah yes, PBS. An entity that does not turn a profit and is subsidized by tax dollars, including the tax-dollar mechanism of tax-deductible donation. Its economic situation colors more than its production values; it colors its worldview also. Economics has a force to it like gravity. Practically nothing escapes it in the end.

It's government-operated TV. There is a certain stultification of the entire product because of this, a savor that is very distinctive when you compare it to television companies that aren't a government enterprise. Government-controlled communications and media have a distinctive officially-vetted style to them, and it's something that makes you wonder just what you'd be reading if it weren't officially passed as acceptable. Compare also the average BBC program to the average American one -- not the peak achievements of either, but the run-of-the-mill. You find yourself with an impression of ploddingness from the Beeb. Official officiousness is a living death for entertainment. Remember network Standards and Practices on our side of the pond? That PC-think absolutely ruined Saturday morning and children's drama until the Standards and Practices jobs were eliminated.

He interviews an insider from the health insurance industry. Honestly, if you are [sic] pissed off after watching that, something is seriously wrong with you.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html

Full disclosure: my health benefits are Federal, which leaves me beyond the reach of the industry, so I am a bit remote from the worst such things could do to affect me. But that doesn't mean I am wholly off the grid or own my own island.

[Shawnee123]

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

-e. e. cummings

[sugarpop]

UG, please stop thinking you know what is in my mind. You don't. You have NO CLUE what I am about, and that last post of yours proves it.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

My dear girl, I read your posts. What is in your posts is in your mind; what you write is my clue, and the evidence under consideration. Have you never noticed you never prove nor even try and show that what is in your mind is any different from what is in your posts? No. Never. Not once.

You are as much what you write as I am what I write, Sugarpop.

So kindly give it a rest; you are unpersuasive. And you have no cogent counterargument; I refuse to make you the issue.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

You're thinking, I suppose, "I don't have any class hatreds. I'm not conscious of any annoyance except at this UG guy. What is this peckerhead on about?"

Well, I know the language and the philosophy of class resentment. You have been so immersed in a class-resentment philosophical milieu during your short life that you think believing it's wrong to be too wealthy is right and normal.

It's not.

It is a tactic of the socialists, the fascists, and all the other leftists of every single available description to foster resentment of those more successful than their constituents.

And like most things Left, it is also Crap. It fueled the Russian Revolution, and made Mao Tse Tung feel needed -- and inspired the Great Leap Forward (made a lot of forward progress into graves, what with malnutrition, starvation, and a general Communist Chinese war on science) and the Cultural Revolution (which may constitute evidence that Chairman Mao had gone insane, and which lost a generation of economic and intellectual development for China) which had the Beijing government assigning people to careers as cooks, for Pete's sake. Grandiose micromanagement, and everybody gets an equal share of the misery.

In imitation of the Communists, the Fascists busily nationalized industries and ran command economies -- which really aren't economies at all. They are instead a symptom of economic illiteracy. A growing economy didn't happen, to speak of, in Spain until Franco was replaced -- and starting from a low, longtime-fascist baseline meant Spain was cheap for years after. The followers of Marx essentially seemed to pretend markets didn't exist, and the followers of National rather than International Socialism didn't quite think of going quite that far. The fascists didn't think an awful lot. The Communists tried to utilize the best brains, but they somehow never managed to pick the best ideas.

You write the words you do because you have certain values. They inform the thoughts you think, and hence the words you post. You could hardly post otherwise -- not and actually carry it off. I write the words I do because I have better values yet, and thus from time to time have better thoughts. So it's hardly difficult, nor at all illegitimate, to grasp yours.

If the best you can say is, "That is not what I mean," then how about trying to write what you do mean? Or ought you to reconsider in depth just what it is you're going to mean from now on?