Lift, just when I think I have you figured out, you suprise. Take this thread, “Population Explosiona and How to Fix IT.” I was certain your response would be something like, “Populations don’t explode. That’s collectivist thinking. Only individuals explode. And when they do, it’s a messy business.”
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I’ve told him a dozen times. He regularly displays a forehead scrunching flavor of raving goofiness, but then there’s that occasional smattering of clear thinking profundity which leaves one puzzling over how the twain manage to coexist in the same scrambled mind.
@ pwrlifter198:
I still think Bugs Bunny is the most interesting on TV.
Lift, just when I think I have you figured out, you suprise. Take this thread, “Population Explosion and How to Fix It.” I was certain your response would be something like, “Populations don’t explode. That’s collectivist thinking. Only individuals explode. And when they do, it’s a messy business.”
[/quote]
Yes, but I have learned to fight my battles where the use of language can be employed more precisely.
I still believe the overpopulation argument is a red herring.
7.5 billion people would probably never have come into existence on this planet without the technology to support their basic needs. Hunting and gathering would have become an all out bloody mess with so many people fighting over resources. Fortunately, man in his most rational genius was able to crawl out of the muck, cooperate with his neighbor whom he still does not wholeheartedly trust, and build civilization to what we see today – even with all of its faults.
DD why do you think I am assigning evil to efficiency and innovation? I agree with all you are saying, but in a consumer based economy, merchants and manufacturers have to create needs, then fill them. My post was simply arguing that as technology increases efficiency, fewer worker bees are needed and there is a market incentive to reduce the number of people competing for jobs. You actually make this point for me in the Soviet example.
Also, the Soviets shot themselves in the proverbial foot by over investing in a military industrial complex with no market outlet. There are only so many state actors to sell weapons to AND you don’t want to sell the good stuff to a potential rival that may use it against you.
Everyone here is painting me as the enemy of the free market. I am not that guy. All I am saying, sixty plus years after John Forbes Nash said it, is that markets need referees or they become a zero sum game. The alternative is not free markets, but market anarchy in which every gain is accomplished by some individual’s or entity’s loss.
There is also the heretofore unanswered question of what you do with the losers in the market. Some people, just like in athletics, will not be able to compete as enterprises become more complex. The same people in your example who would have been able to push a plow, may not be able to learn the required skills to build, operate, or maintain computers. If Social Darwinism is your answer, then fine, we must agree to disagree.
Leaving those unable to compete out in the cold is unwise unless you also plan to deprive them of suffrage. I cannot offer an end all solution as to what to do with them, I merely suggest that the current system is the natural outgrowth of that dilemma.
As to going back to custom made cars, aren’t there markets appearing for just that sort of thing? Think Jesse James and Orange County Chopper. We don’t see the Swiss grapling for market share on the cheapest time piece available; they make a great watch and preserve their reputation. Rather than see Americans competing with Chinese and Filipino workers for providing the cheapest labor pool, I would rather see American workers producing superior products that the global market clamors for.
Cheaper goods is not necessarily the end goal. I don’t always buy the cheapest squat suit, in fact I rarely do. I also do not hunt for the highest price tag. In the age of IT, I look for the product with the best consumer feedback.
[quote]John S. wrote:
Dustin wrote:
John S. wrote:
Dustin wrote:
John S. wrote:
The liberals Utopian dream?
Nah, a statist’s utopian dream.
Not sure how you got statist out of that, Perhaps we should have a look at the liberals dream leader.
“Liberals” want to murder millions of people? How the heck is a murderous dictator their leader? Some of you need to quit listening to the Glenn Becks and Michael Savages of the world. They don’t know what they are talking about.
And what makes an individual a liberal?
It’s amusing to see people throw that term at others in an attempt to describe them without even knowing what it means.
A liberal is someone who thinks taking from others is ok, see tax the rich to pay for health care. They have this desire to put everyone into classes as sort of a collectives attitude. As history has shown this attitude sets up guys like Mao, also see Hitler and Stalin.
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I don’t dispute this, at least with the modern notion of what a liberal is, but “conservatives” have been taking part in wealth redistribution for some time now as well. So to say it’s just those “darn liberals” messing up everything is categorically false.
And conservatives (Republicans) are sitting right next to them in the loony-bin.
The system is FUBAR and it is due to idiots on both sides of aisle.
[quote]pwrlifter198 wrote:
Everyone here is painting me as the enemy of the free market. I am not that guy. All I am saying, sixty plus years after John Forbes Nash said it, is that markets need referees or they become a zero sum game. [/quote]
What does game theory and economics have in common?
John Nash was a good mathematician but a horrible economist.
John Nash missed missed the fact that all markets have referees: they are called consumers.
[quote]pwrlifter198 wrote:
Cheaper goods is not necessarily the end goal. I don’t always buy the cheapest squat suit, in fact I rarely do. I also do not hunt for the highest price tag. In the age of IT, I look for the product with the best consumer feedback.[/quote]
This just shoes how woefully ignorant you are.
You would most definitely buy the cheapest squat suit when comparing the exact same product.
Goods of differing quality are not the same good. In fact it is impossible for goods of the exact same type and brand to be of the same quality because they are different goods individually. It is possible that these two goods will have two different prices. All goods are valued individually.
You are right in one respect: the goal is not cheap prices; that is just a consequence of what happens when goods become more abundant. This is a good thing for consumers.
The question I must ask: would you be opposed to cheaper squat suits if it did not mean the quality was compromised?
[quote]pwrlifter198 wrote:
DD why do you think I am assigning evil to efficiency and innovation?
[/quote]
You were arguing that technology destroys jobs. It absolutely does not. But in addition to not destroying jobs, it raises the standard of living.
I didnâ??t bring up the soviets. But as you point out, the bureaucracy did a worse job than the free market. And no bureaucracy has ever done anything to suggest it can do better than it.
See, to me that sounds like government spending and intervension. The bottom line here would be which system is the most productive and that is shown time and time again to be the free market. The government, by definition, is a zero sum game.
First of all, the losers do whatever they want. That’s what makes it a free market. But essentially, if there was a winner, there should be employment opportunity available. You forget that there is a whole engineering field devoted to creating positions where unskilled labor can accomplish skilled tasks. See the assembly line.
Here you are confusing a business with an individual. A non-competitive business is left out in the cold in a free market. Individuals do not have to stay with that business. Are you suggesting we artificially prop up non-competitive business? Less productivity, worse product, backwards technological process, lower standard of living. Essentially, doing this is wealth destruction. It is worse than a zero some game.
Which further disproves your theory of technology destroying jobs.
And government intervention never leads to a more competitive American product.
[quote]
Cheaper goods is not necessarily the end goal. I don’t always buy the cheapest squat suit, in fact I rarely do. I also do not hunt for the highest price tag. In the age of IT, I look for the product with the best consumer feedback.[/quote]
All of these things you speak of are free market forces. Driven by technological innovation.
Government intervention forces decision making away from these logical factors. I think that you should have to buy from that expensive company with an inferior product because they use â??greenâ?? light bulbs. I think we should structure taxes in a way that the other guys are more expensive. That is bureaucracy vs. free market.
I agree that technology raises the standard of living for the consumer, but it also makes some jobs unnecessary. The rest of your statement is that technology creates jobs EVENTUALLY. Unfortunately for the worker that loses his/her job to a robotic arm or outsourcing can take little consulation in the hope of an eventual job, especially if get rid of public assistance programs like unemployment insurance, housing assistance, or publicly funded vocational education programs.
The assembly line allows few workers to accomplish what many would have been required to do previously. Understand, I am not assigning morality here, and I don’t propose stifling technology in order to create work. That would make us uncompetitive. The point I was making above, is that there is a role for government to play in assisting displaced workers or those who for reasons beyond their control cannot work, i.e. physical or mental disability (a point I might add that has yet to be addressed by any poster here). If your response is leave this to charitable organizations like churches and community based services, then I say fine, but failing this governments cannot allow large sections of their populations to starve to death in the street. There are real, measurable social consequences to this level of inaction which has also, in your words, been proven time and time again.
Also, you must think that I agree with every hairbrained idea that has come out of the beltway. There are thousands of “light bulb” examples to which the market response creates exactly the opposite of the intended outcome. Of course government intervention should be painstakingly rare, and I do not propose that it currently is. This is no different from saying that I want refs of any sport to stay of the way until needed.
This thread began with the idea that the way to curb unwanted pregnancies and slow upward population trends was to eliminate public assistance that rewards such behavior. My original post was that doing so would create as many problems as it would solve as the programs were born because of an existing crisis and were not the cause of it. The OP drew a causal connection between high unwanted pregnancies and government subsistance programs. I stand by my original post. Infants born to teenage moms are still infants and there’s not a man or woman posting here worth their salt who would propose letting said infants starve to death in order to curb bad behavior. If I am wrong, then I not only don’t care much about your opinion, but I don’t care to know you.
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I agree that technology raises the standard of living for the consumer, but it also makes some jobs unnecessary. The rest of your statement is that technology creates jobs EVENTUALLY. Unfortunately for the worker that loses his/her job to a robotic arm or outsourcing can take little consulation in the hope of an eventual job, especially if get rid of public assistance programs like unemployment insurance, housing assistance, or publicly funded vocational education programs.
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But now there is an assembly line of workers that build robotic arms. Mechanics that maintain it. and the gijit is now affordable to the masses.
As an engineer that has spent considerable time designing products for manufacture in an assembly line, I can tell you don’t know know about assembly lines. The line I designed for was comprised of almost completely uneducated, unskilled labor, that wouldn’t have jobs otherwise. And thanks to technology were able to produce a better product for consumers. Go deal with take times and stations then tell me otherwise.
you are logically inconsistent from “displaced workers or those who for reasons beyond their control cannot work” to “large sections of their populations”. If large sections of the population cannot work, everyone is screwed. The government destroys, not creates wealth, in every action.
when and where?
Bureaucrats have never managed this. Do you believe they ever can?
I think you are putting words in people’s mouths. Maybe people on wealfare who have children should have all their wealfare go to state care of the child.
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
pwrlifter198 wrote:
Cheaper goods is not necessarily the end goal. I don’t always buy the cheapest squat suit, in fact I rarely do. I also do not hunt for the highest price tag. In the age of IT, I look for the product with the best consumer feedback.
This just shoes how woefully ignorant you are.
You would most definitely buy the cheapest squat suit when comparing the exact same product.
Goods of differing quality are not the same good. In fact it is impossible for goods of the exact same type and brand to be of the same quality because they are different goods individually. It is possible that these two goods will have two different prices. All goods are valued individually.
You are right in one respect: the goal is not cheap prices; that is just a consequence of what happens when goods become more abundant. This is a good thing for consumers.
The question I must ask: would you be opposed to cheaper squat suits if it did not mean the quality was compromised?[/quote]
Of course not unless I found out that the reason company B was able make my suit for less money was because they forced children at gunpoint to sew my suit with their tiny little hands. Then my choice would be driven by moral considerations. To this you say, see the free-market worked, you made a choice, and to that I would agree. Sometimes, however, that information is not readily available to consumers or the morality is not as cut and dry. Instead of tiny little fingers making my suit, my suit is made by clearing huge segments of rainforest in Brazil. I don’t care about rainforest or biodiversity, but my grandkids might. Brazil can’t stand to lose the jobs so its government does nothing. The country I live in, the US, decides to put tarrifs on my suit in an attempt to discourage the rainforest clearing, because the government of the US is led by a bunch of liberal commies who hate free-markets. Of course, in fairness to your arguments I have to admit that Brazil just finds another buyer for its now cheaper products because US demand has gone down. Teems of Brazillian workers are now out of jobs and terrorists set up camp to start recruiting the disenfranchised. There are frequently no good solutions, but markets like natural selection don’t always advantage the consumer, or species. They are, as you point out, natural phenomenon with no moral compass and no vision for the longterm.
As to what does game theory and economics have in common, you’d have to ask Oskar Morgenstern, co-author of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Although I am sure you are much smarter than he or his co-arthur mathematician John von Neumann, he would be in a better position to answer your question than I am.
DD wrote: you are logically inconsistent from “displaced workers or those who for reasons beyond their control cannot work” to “large sections of their populations”. If large sections of the population cannot work, everyone is screwed. The government destroys, not creates wealth, in every action.
Now we are arguing semantics. What qualifies as “large sections” is subjective. Is 3 million out of 300 million a big number? Of course not all 3 million homeless in our country are there for reasons beyond their control, so what’s a good number? If someone gets their arms and legs blown off in combat, an industrial accident, or just has the poor misfortune of being born that way, what should we as a society do? Do we rely on private donations to do the job? Huge segments of the needs are meet that way, so if only 300,000 fall through the cracks, is that acceptable? All I have tried to flesh out in this volume of text, is what is your theshold for government intervention? Are you an anarchist who believes that governments should not exist. If so, great. That means I will never have to worry about you getting elected and actually imposing any of your ideas on anyone else.
[quote]pwrlifter198 wrote:
DD wrote: you are logically inconsistent from “displaced workers or those who for reasons beyond their control cannot work” to “large sections of their populations”. If large sections of the population cannot work, everyone is screwed. The government destroys, not creates wealth, in every action.
Now we are arguing semantics. What qualifies as “large sections” is subjective. Is 3 million out of 300 million a big number? Of course not all 3 million homeless in our country are there for reasons beyond their control, so what’s a good number? If someone gets their arms and legs blown off in combat, an industrial accident, or just has the poor misfortune of being born that way, what should we as a society do? Do we rely on private donations to do the job? Huge segments of the needs are meet that way, so if only 300,000 fall through the cracks, is that acceptable? All I have tried to flesh out in this volume of text, is what is your theshold for government intervention? Are you an anarchist who believes that governments should not exist. If so, great. That means I will never have to worry about you getting elected and actually imposing any of your ideas on anyone else.[/quote]
I personally believe that there are very few that fall into this category. and to know what or if deserving people would fall through the cracks, you’d have to allow that help before government intervention. The problem of course being that homeless and poor get to vote regardless of work ethic and politicians,have only an incentive to play to voters, not reason or rightness.
And who says there couldn’t be an anarchist political group?
The problem of course being that homeless and poor get to vote regardless of work ethic and politicians,have only an incentive to play to voters, not reason or rightness.
My post above:
Leaving those unable to compete out in the cold is unwise unless you also plan to deprive them of suffrage.
[quote]pwrlifter198 wrote:
The problem of course being that homeless and poor get to vote regardless of work ethic and politicians,have only an incentive to play to voters, not reason or rightness.
My post above:
Leaving those unable to compete out in the cold is unwise unless you also plan to deprive them of suffrage.[/quote]
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
DD wrote: to know what or if deserving people would fall through the cracks, you’d have to allow that help before government intervention.
Rest assured, government intervention is slow. The average wait on SS disability determination is over 600 days. Church groups and community based programs have in most cases already been called on and utilized. Add to that fact that SS turns down about 40 percent of applicants even after the wait and a hearing.
There is still the issue of children born to conventional families with congenital defects. Insurance companies won’t cover these kids even with waivers of the pre-existing conditions and the medical costs will eat the average middle class family alive. Small business owners employing the families of such parents can find themselves priced right out of the market. This is one reason 80 percent of couples who give birth to an autistic child for example end up divorcing. The stress is too much.
[quote]pwrlifter198 wrote:
And who says there couldn’t be an anarchist political group?
That would be like having “bald” as a hair color.[/quote]
Anarchists exercise their politics without the use of coercion.
It is a fundamental mistake to assume that because we do not believe in the possibility of functioning government we do not have “policies” that we adhere to. It is just that we are not so presumptuous to think we know what’s best for you that we would use government to force our beliefs on you.
To the extent that there are anarchists there are anarchist groups and they even attend meetings with each other just like republicans and democrats. It is a bigger mistake to assume we don’t have anything to talk about. We just assume not talk about how to take over government but rather peaceably end it.
[quote]pwrlifter198 wrote:
There are frequently no good solutions, but markets like natural selection don’t always advantage the consumer, or species. They are, as you point out, natural phenomenon with no moral compass and no vision for the longterm.[/quote]
The market is a process made up of the infinite combinations of wishes and desires of individuals. As soon as the consumer quits benfiting from a particular market it will disappear. Think of the horse drawn carriage market: it is all but gone – left to a few Romatics who like to tour Manhattan. And no the market is incapable of longterm planning, however, human beings can.
Game theory only holds up if there can be a winner and loser – hence it is a game. Economics does not deal with games in the strict sense of the term. By definition all economic transactions result in each party giving up something he values less for something he values more. Where is the loser?
Maybe with respect to entrepreneurship game theory holds up but then we must turn away from strict economic inquiry and turn instead to the role of management and speculation.