Ralnia wrote:Pumping oil into the ground? Haven't heard that one...
My social studies teacher (moderate) told me.
Actually, I've heard of that. It's supposedly cheaper and safer than storing reserves in tanks.
they are hardly a step to an authoritarian police state.
They're a step toward it. There's still along way to go, but they're taking us in that direction.
As phong said, the US swings back and forth between authoritarian and relaxed states. Bad as PATRIOT is, that hug-cuddly liberal Woodrow Wilson signed laws that made it a Federal crime to criticize the government during WWII.
So, everyone now has to rent a car to go anywhere?
No, see "mass transit", "bikes", and "feet". Those would take care of most trips.
I'm getting tired of repeating myself, so maybe a picture will help.
That's the city of Philadelphia and its inner ring of suburbs. The only densely built up urban areas are the city of Philadelphia itself (it's built densely like an eastern city, not spread out like LA or Phoenix), and the smaller cities of Chester and Camden. Everything else is suburbs of varying density. I'd tell you where the clusters of industry and residences are, but that would be pointless--industry is scattered in small islands of industrial parks, and most people live in subdivisions built over farmland and scattered all over the map. The usual model is that houses or factories and warehouses are within around cul de sacs with one or two connections onto an arterial road (the major ones are the ones drawn on the map--the intricate web of minor arteries are invisible at this resolution). There are, within the area depicted on this map, about two million people. Explain to me, WITHOUT repeating your "feet, bikes, and transit" tautology, how to economically get those people to their jobs, schools, supermarkets, and what-have-you, without cars. Then tell me how you're going to do that for every other major metropolitan city in the country (I'm being generous here, by the way--I could extend the region to include the exurbs out in Bucks, Delaware, and Chester counties, or the Trenton and Wilmington regions, all of which are part of the Delaware Valley and linked to Philadelphia.)
First you start out with an abolition of patents and copyrights. Then just go with an abolishion of copyrights. And now you say that people have the right to be paid for inventions, just not to hoard them.
I never started out with "an abolition of patents and copyrights", I started at "abolishion of copyrights" (look back in the thread). I was mistaken in the definition of patent, so I thought that that meant "people have the right to be paid for inventions, just not to hoard them." So I've gone back 1/2 a step, not 2.
So why, exactly, if you put the time, money, and effort into inventing something, which when you factor in things like market research, safety testing, liability research, etc. can take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, do you not get the exclusive right to decide who uses that product, and the right to charge whatever you like for its use? And without this right, who do you think is going to spend the time and money to do this? Oh, you might get your Edison wannabees tinkering in their garages, but you think anyone's going to spend millions of dollars (if it's even there to invest) if there's no way to recoup their investment? You're steadily retreating from Communism, and that's nice, but you're still not understanding the importance of the profit motive in driving the advance of society.
Tell me, what are you going to do? Force people to give up their OWN intellectual property to the government and pay them a government-set price?
Two cases.
1. They don't want to be a writer. Under communism, they can do something that they do want to do instead.
2. They do want to be a writer. In this case, they get income from the government for being a writer, and they're writing because they like it, not to get rich.
Case number three, the one which blows your tidy little theory apart because unlike your examples, it actually applies to the real world: People spend months or years writing a novel or screenplay or composing an album, see it become popular, get paid a fraction of what it's worth and see any asshat steal his ideas and get paid the same price for them by the government, give the hell up, and don't write for publication anymore. They push brooms for a living and maybe jot down stories in their free time or put on shows for their friends in thier garage. Trust me, I know writers, both journalists and novelists, and they all say the same thing: once you get over the thrill of seeing your work in print, you want your damn money.
That is the single worst part of a communist government, the ease of the government to get too much power over the people.
I agree.
And in all these kilobytes of pinko argle-bargle, you've yet to explain how to prevent that. Concession accepted, Mr. Libertarian sir.
It is just so much simpler to use a flat rate tax rate
True. The f(price) idea was just something I tyhought of then, back to my original idea. However, I have alread conceder to a flat sales tax, as long as income level remained similar.
So we agree on something, albeit for different reasons.
<snip stuff on space that Phong is handling quite well on his own>
the people Communists kill die for nothing
Just curious, what did the Native Americans that Andrew Jackson (the inventor of germ warfare) killed die for?
Alexander the Great catapulted plague victims over city walls, so Andrew Jackson hardly invented germ warfare. Second, they died for the same thing Gallic Celts, Hittites, Ostrogoths, Nubians, the Indus Valley dwellers, Australian aborigines, the pre-Colombian Mesoamerican civilizations subdued by the Maya and the Aztecs, and countless hundreds of other vanished tribes and civilizations died for: the expansion of a larger, more technically advanced civilization. Is it good that a lot of innocent people died? No. Were abuses committed by the advancing civilization which were barbaric and unnecessary in advancing the goal of spreading across the continent? Yes. Would I trade modern North American civlization--the U.S. and Canada--for what they replaced? No, and neither would you.
Oh, and as for your admission that the people who died in the name of Communism died for nothing? Concession accepted.
And speaking of pollution, the lead from all the bullets you'd have to use to put down that armed rebellion I mentioned is poisonous
You could just phase the cars out - start by killing the subsidies for driving. This itself would make driving less attractive, but wouldn't stop it. Then, set a fairly high (hybrid-level) fuel efficiency standard for new cars. The people would still have their old cars, so they wouldn't be very unhappy. After a while, put an excise tax on gas, and raise itslowly until a generation of people grows up knowing that mass transit is much cheaper. Then the cars that did exist could rust away in the junkyards.
Try not to backpedal straight into an oncoming bus (an efficient component of a functional mass transit system). Now we're going to "gradually phase out" cars. So much for "see feet, bikes, and transit", huh? By the way, my map is still up there. Explain how you're going to build and pay for a transit system that can serve the suburbs, and then justify banning private ownership of automobiles instead of relying on new technology to reduce pollution and, if you insist on reducing car use, intelligent urban planning that makes walking and transit cost effective.
you've stripped away my ability to charge what I want
See above.
I did see above. I refuted above. You're repeating your "you still get paid" tautology. Tell me, if the government pays you, can they quarter soldiers in your house without your permission?
However, the reason you used to claim the Bush administration is not legitimate could be applied to every single American adminstration since John Adams (since Washington ran unopposed both times)
Only those that would have lost under Condorcet.
I like how you snip the second half of my points to make it look like you've totally addressed what I had to say. I told you to produce the political theory that justifies stripping legitimacy from a presidential adminstration over mathematical quirks in the voting method. Dodge the question again, and I'll assume you've conceeded that point as well.
as well as a paper which laid out in detail the No-Show Paradox problem within Condorcet
I'd like to see that paper, since I thought Condorcet is relatively free from no-show.
A strong No-Show paradox...
the right to charge what I (or my publisher, in my case) please for permission to use that work
See above.
Seen, refuted. And stop taking my responses so out of context even I have to go back and re-read what I wrote to figure out what the hell you're talking about. You're not just snipping for space, you're snipping relevant material.
And most people who own cars drive everywhere BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO
Most people who own cars use them mostly for their commutes. This is exactly the kind of thing that mass transit is perfect for.
IF industrial, commerical, and residential areas are clustered together in some sort of order, which they're not in most metro areas, which is the core of your problem. You're mostly right about the commutes--many city dwellers don't own cars, and lifelong city dwellers may not even have liscenses. Unfortuately, you can't eliminate the commutes and you can't economically substitute transit without 1) spending more than you are maintaining a road network, and 2) sapping productive time sticking people on buses and trains that have to travel between widely dispersed clusters of industry and residences. For Chrissakes, it takes longer for me to get to school on the train than it does by car, and the train has an arrow-straight run between here and there and stops in the middle of campus, while when I drive I go at least a mile out of my way to the east over a network of hilly, twisting backroads to avoid the stoplights on Montgomery Avenue.
Got any studies on how much it would cost to build and maintain a public transportation system so comprehensive that there would be no place anywhere in, say, the Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-D.C. megalopolis outside of walking distance of a public transit stop?
Jeez, every post of mine on transportation so far just points out anothert one of "feet", "bikes", "flexcars", and "mass transit". In this case, replace "walking distance" with "biking distance" (put bike racks at transit stops), and it's not unreasonable.
BZZZZZZT! WRONG! They have to be within walking distance because even if they bike to one station, they have to WALK to their final destination when they get off at the other station. I've worked in industrial parks where it's impossible to comfortably walk from one warehouse to the next, so you'd need multiple bus or transit stops within one complex. I hope you can fit that many zeroes on a check.
you'll need tens of thousands of them to service the outer suburbs
In this case, see "mass transit".
I mean the exurbs where even by your standards settlement is so dispersed mass transit would be totally impractical.
people show up at their jobs drunk
Then they don't get paid. Since pay isn't automatic, they still have greed as an incentive, also.
No, they don't. They have bare survival. That was their incentive in Communist Russia, too, and in Russia, people knew to read the date stamp on products to make sure it wasn't made on Monday or Friday, because those were the days where everyone was drunk. I love how you think you've outsmarted millions of people with years of experience avoiding work in a system that REWARDS work, and think you can stick them in a system where there's little to no incentive for doing more than the barest minimum necessary to keep food on the table and still have a productive economy. I'd challenge you to prove this, but what would be the point? You know and I know that you can't and I know I've got a mountain of real-world evidence backing up my position to bury any half-assed theory you manage to scrounge up between now and when you post your reply.
(the rest of that post)
Ok, ok, very limited capitalism (especially on business). It's not too much different than limited communism, but it counters most of your post.
No it most certainly does NOT counter most of my post. Believe it or not, but changing the fucking NAME of your theory doesn't change it's fucking content, its predictions, or the fact that it's Goddamn wrong. Concession accepted on every point you thought you'd handwave away with one sentence, especially since you immediately followed it up with an admission that you're not really changing any of your views anyway.
[qupte]
Under Marx, I lose my house, my retirement fund, and my Playstation. Under you, I get to keep the Playstation.
Funny.[/quote]
And true, which you didn't bother to refute. For those of you readers who don't know the original context of that comment, I was refuting his claim that he could mandate income equality without outlawing private property ownership and private investment. Concession accepted, Mr. Limited Communist.
Income equality implies banning income from investment
Or just increasing the capital gains tax. It wouldn't be complete equality, but I didn't say I wanted that.
Making your position so ambiguous you can't get pinned down and hammered does not constitute winning the argument. Do you want income equality or not? If you want equality, complete or otherwise, you can forget investment, because investment wealth is impossible for the government to control without setting a tax rate so high nobody will invest anyway. If you want just wealth redistribution on even the Western European model, you've just admitted Communism doesn't work because wealth redistribution implies somebody is generating wealth.
I don't think it's been sent to the judicial commttee yet.
Good.
I can't confirm that, mind you. I don't feel like trawling through the Congressional Record to find out for sure. I'm not turning up any new news about it, at any rate.
You've taken away businesses' ability to pay what they want to their employees
No, just limited it - I didn't say I wanted complete income inequality, so businesses would still have a fair amount of control.
What the hell is "limited" income equality? Either businesses have the ability to pay the fair market salary to high-value employees or they don't. If they do, you're a capitalist, and concession accepted that communism doesn't work. If they don't, you're back in Leonid Brezhnev land, and concession accepted that communism doesn't work. Even in limited capitalist countries with extremely high tax rates like Sweden prior to 1991 (and I'm being VERY generous with the definition of capitalism here), there's no cap on income.
You can't achieve income equality without making it illegal for employers to raise wages to attract more qualified workers in tight labor markets
But you can have near-equality.
Here on Earth, it doesn't matter how often you repeat something; it won't make it true. You can't have "near equality" and still pay the fair market value for a person's services because the spectrum of value for all the skills required in a modern economy is so broad as to make that impossible. Either you're going to grossly overpay your janitors or grossly underpay your nuclear engineers (or if you fuck it up badly enough, do both at the same time). Doing either takes away all incetive to work any harder than the barest minimum needed to keep food on the table, because you can get paid nearly the same to push a broom as you do for anything dangerous, challenging, or responsible. It doesn't matter if you cap people's income with mandatory salary caps or huge taxes, the effect is the same. The Soviets tried to counteract this problem by rewarding their most important workers with access to better goods and services, but if you advocate that solution, you've just conceded that your system doesn't work.
and/or setting up a progressive tax rate so steep it's effectively impossible to make more than X dollars
But you can have near-equality.
Yammer, yammer, yak and blather--Ralina repeated himself again and thought that refuted my argument. Oh, and you failed to address the individual example I gave you regarding my father working in refineries. I'll take it that for all your pie-in-the-sky theories, you can't solve a relatively simple practical problem. Concession accepted.
Proof of impending Soviet-level individual poverty in the developed world?
Probably not that bad, but read Fast Food Nation.
So the free market produces a better life for people than communism. Concession accepted. As for Fast-Food Nation, if I recall correctly, the academic reviews were not kind to it. I could be wrong on that, though.
You've wavered between abolition of business and strict regulation of business
Now more towards the latter.
Proof you haven't yet constructed a wall of ignorance; bully for you. Unfortunately, you still support policies which are communist in effect if not in name.
paying everyone equally no matter what work they do.
No, no pay for no real work, and some variation for quality of work.
Which is qualitatively the same, as evidenced by your own statements in this post and elsewhere.
ceases to be a matter of "it's a woman's body"
If it's still in them, I'll let them debate it.
What part of "brain waves identical to those of an adult in an REM state" is difficult for you to understand? It's conscious, it's alive, it's human. Whether or not it's attached to someone else is irrevelant, or should conjoined twins have the right to attempt to murder each other?
<snip A-bomb stuff addressed by Nathan