Jmurph wrote:

Ironically, if you think socialism is becoming a big problem, I think you can squarely blame the Republicans for not offering a real alternative and squandering the power they had. Instead of the smaller government they promised, they delivered the biggest spending government in history and a record debt. Fiscal conservatives were nowhere to be seen.

I agree that Republicans are far from blameless. As of right now, they aren't offering smaller government, free markets, or legitimate support for the concept of personal responsibility. What they're offering is a milder form of socialism than the democrats. I don't know if a good ass kicking in this election will get them back on the right track, but I think we're about to find out.

That said, the Republican's failures certainly don't justify Socialism; if anything, they help to demonstrate just how much of a problem it is.

Silkwizard is to Socialist Barrack Obama, as College Republicans are to Big Scary Black Face Carvers


(Protip: Neither exist)

SilkWizard wrote:

Let's say that I write one movie script this year and sell it for a million dollars. A million dollars??? Yes, because movies make millions upon millions of dollars around the world, because masses of individuals like you and me will go pay $9 to see them. If my script wasn't worth a million dollars, no one would pay me that much for it.

Okay. So now I have the best year in the history of writing, working my ass off and pounding out 10 scripts that I sell for a million a piece. Do I suddenly not deserve every single one of those dollars? What if I were making a billion per script? What if I were making only 100 dollars per script?

The amount is irrelevant. My work will be worth whatever people are willing to pay for it. Getting paid well for a valuable service doesn't make me a bad person, just as getting paid less doesn't make me a more virtuous person... and in neither situation is anyone else entitled to a share of that success.


Stupot wrote:
If they get taxed a little more heavily than people who are barely scraping by, so be it.

If I'm a multi-millionaire and someone breaks into my house and steals my TV, then yes, I can probably afford to buy a new one. But the fact that I can afford to buy a new one doesn't mean that anyone had the right to break in and take it from me.

I didn't say anyone has the right to break into your house and steal from you and no one in their right mind will. What I am saying, is that if I were you, and I wrote an amazing script, and I was paid a billion dollars for it, I would not feel as though I deserved to be paid a billion dollars for a script. I don't believe that the movie producers deserve to make billions of dollars off of your script either. I believe that there is still a large gap between the have and have-nots, the rich and the middle class. I believe that people in the lower middle class work just as hard, if not harder than most of the wealthiest people in America. However, it takes money to make money. I do not believe that a system of evenly distributed wealth (aka Communism) would either work or be a fair solution if it were to work.

You enjoy what your career is and you are getting paid to do it. As soon as you get paid for your first million dollar script and it turns out that you only get to keep $800,000, you will be just fine. But for those people who only make 24,000 a year so that CEOs of companies can sit back and do nothing and make millions, they can't afford to lose 20%.

I'm not saying I expect everyone in the world to follow my philosophy, because it's not one that looks out for 'number one'. But it's a system that helps out those who need it most while still supplying incentive for those driven to succeed and make plenty of money.

Keep Kant out of politics, he had a flawed view on morality anyways.

You used Deontology to back your beliefs up, I suggest you re-read what you typed out, that's actually Kant. He dismissed other moral theories in two ways:

1)The moral theory contradicts itself, and therefor cannot be used rationally(for example, suicide out of self-love).
2) One cannot rationally want a world where the moral theory is universal(for example, the man who sees others suffer, but does nothing).

Let me just point out a few flaws in that quote.

" Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. "

How does this apply to those who have money already? They pay for other people to do work and reap rewards without doing work. Having money to begin with does not constitute as work, and yet by simply having it, you can make more of it.

"-it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. "

This is also not always true. The best product does not win, unless you consider the best product to be the one that brings in the most money. It is often times easier to make money by producing cheap shoddy products and paying workers next to nothing than to pay a decent worker more money and have a more expensive product.

And no, I don't expect everybody to believe my philosophy. I understand those who believe whole-heartedly in the trickle-down effect, and that is fine with me. The economy isn't something that is easily explained or quantified. I cannot say for certain which methodology is truly better for the majority of Americans in the long run. Because of this, I can understand those who believe in the trickle-down effect. Just because I don't think that way doesn't mean that I want everyone to think my way. I do, however, want everybody to understand my viewpoint, just as I have attempted to understand yours.

This, is not attempting to understand it:
"Your argument is that "Well, he has more, so he can spare it!". You want the rich to give us their money at gunpoint, simply because they have plenty of it. You think that if somebody needs my money, they are entitled to it.
"

My argument is not that. My argument is that "He has more money than he truly deserves, and there are people who have less money than what they deserve." What's the best way to rectify the situation? It's not for everybody to have the same (i.e. Communism), because that is taking the problem and reversing it. It is simply to take some from the rich and give it those who make less. While it is not a perfect system, because some poor will get money they don't deserve, on the whole, it is much more balanced and fair. Surely you can at least attempt to understand what I have said. The fundamental difference between our philosophies isn't a sense of logic, it's a sense of 'deserve'. I do not believe that the vast majority of extremely wealthy people deserve to have as much money as they have. Do they deserve to be wealthy? Quite possibly. Is taxing them more than others making them not wealthy? No. Once again, I am not trying to convince you to believe what I am saying, but if you understand WHY I believe it, then we have a much better chance for some sort of compromise (which of course means nothing, as you and I aren't going to actually be making any policies, last I checked).

How much has the government contributed to you being able to sell your ten scripts for a million dollars each, Silk? How much does an action that benefits the common good benefit you, Silk?

What you describe as 'socialism' is the entire function of government - to take money from its citizens in the form of taxes and then return it via projects that benefit the common good, projects that could not have been completed except via a communal spending pool. Road networks do not get built unless governments build them. Poor people do not get an education unless the government provides an effective public school system. People aren't safe unless government hires police, firemen, and so on.

These are not things that people will do on their own - economies of scale prevent you being able to buy a metre of road outside your house. These are not the sort of things that corporations will do - they're focused on making profit, so any costs are going to get made external as much as possible - they'll all pass the buck. You absolutely need a government to set up these sorts of things, and we all benefit from substantially reduced crime rates, substantially improved general health rates (Epidemics are much scarier if half the country can't afford to go to a hospital - so they'll just infect other people), and a stronger economy (Yeah, I said it. More educated people, and more healthy people, means more skilled workers).

That's the pragmatic reason for governments to do governmental things. The market just isn't very good at supplying healthcare and education to the whole populace - it's just not worth it to try and sell schooling to poor people. Either that, or it's the cut-price budget schooling that's worse than anything public schooling can offer. And a public school system does not preclude a private school system from also existing - it doesn't even reduce the amount of profit it could make, because the people that go to public schools instead of private schools tend to be the people that couldn't afford private schooling anyway. The same argument applies to healthcare. These are absolutely not privileges - everybody has the right to a high-school education, and a shot at tertiary education. Everybody has the right to not be bankrupted if they get a digit chopped off.

As for moral justification - well, I'd start from the basis that everybody has the right to education and healthcare and go from there. Capitalist societies will always have unemployed people - it's just a property of the system that you're going to have 5% unemployment at minimum. Those 5% aren't unemployed because they 'deserve' it, mind, they're unemployed mostly because they got unlucky, because their parents were unemployed, because they only ever got a public school education and weren't quite good enough to get into university, because they got glandular fever in the last year of their schooling, because other people were just better - whatever the reason, it's not necessarily because they're freeloading. And that's irrelevant, anyway - because that 5% has a right to education and healthcare, and so do their children. And the only way they'll get it is if it's provided to them. And the only entity that will do that is the government, because there's no profit in providing a service to people that can't pay. Charity isn't sufficient - people just won't give enough money to charities for these sorts of things. There are substantial benefits to the common good - providing healthcare to this 5% of unemployed people means they don't act as a reservoir of disease, and providing education means their children have closer to the 'normal' chance of doing well. Plus, providing education means that they might be able to pull themselves out of poverty if they can get into a tertiary course - don't scoff at the possibility. I know a homeless guy who does mathematics at my university - he gets enough money to keep himself fed by playing xylophone for passers-by at night and getting some charity.

So somebody needs to be taxed for government to function - that's how it works, if you recall - take money from people, give it back in the form of projects that could not be completed by individuals. There are several things to consider here:
- There must be some threshold below which no tax is paid at all - set such that people will always be above the poverty line. People earning so little do not need the financial strain of the government taking some of their money.
- People with more money have greater opportunities to make even more money, and greater opportunity to hide that money from the tax system (Via, for example, the Caymans)
- The children of people with money have significantly greater opportunities than the children of people without money
- Large wealth inequalities are not good for social health - it goes along with higher crime rates and lower general health and education.
- People with money can afford to give more to the government.
- People with wealth likely owe a substantial amount of their success to the government

America really needs these sorts of systems. Without a decent healthcare system, more and more of your populace are going to going to become dependents due to lack of treatment or will be thrown into dire financial straits by the massively inflated cost of American healthcare - this is not good for your economy. Without a decent education system, only your rich will be able to afford a reasonable high-school education for their children, let alone tertiary qualifications - and you'll see less and less qualified people doing high-skilled jobs. Without a decent welfare system, when people do hit the bottom, their descendants stay there, because they never got decent education and were at a disadvantage from the beginning.

Some sort of HECS-like system is probably the biggest change your government needs to make, and then some form of universal healthcare. Otherwise, you just won't be competitive.

SilkWizard: Kudos to you for keeping the discussion going! It is often difficult to put one's beliefs out for examination out there as you are doing. While I may not agree with you on everything, I certainly respect you inviting civil discussion on these issues. You and Deadron have had some of the best political discussions I have seen anywhere both in tone and substance.