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US Politics: Free Trade, Freer Trade, and Nuclear War


Fragile Bird

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1 hour ago, Squab said:

This is a perfect example of left wing authoritarianism:

Practically we need your money. Philosophically, we don't let individuals have rights.

Quite the contrary, the point is to provide individuals with a number of fundamental rights: the right to healthcare (which we are discussing), the right to education, the right to justice... etc.
In less developed societies, one could include the right to some basic housing, the right to food and water... etc.
This was once seen in the US as "freedom from want."

You are correct on some level that such a perspective on human societies denies one individual right: the right to be selfish.
But the way I see it, it's very simple. For individual humans living in a human societies, solidarity should be mandatory. All able-bodied adults should help provide for those who cannot: the children, the disabled, the elderly, the sick... etc.
It's interesting that you would describe this as "authoritarianism." I think it's just basic human decency.
In fact, given your misuse of the word "authoritarianism," I think I am allowed to say that a society in which anyone is allowed to let children go without education, the sick without treatment, or the disabled and elderly without pensions... Well I think I can say that this is a fascist society.

However, I also think libertarians should be free to "opt out" of society and build a cabin in the woods to live the dream. They'll come back as soon as they get the flu anyway... They'll come to see that the "state of nature" is actually not that comfortable to be in.

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1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Is it worth the effort of compiling a comprehensive response to someone who goes into all sorts of contortions to justify a position merely to maintain the pretense that their preferred winner was still the best outcome despite evidence mostly or entirely being to the contrary? Probably best to mostly ignore and limit responses to substantive points that have some basis in interpretation of reality.

I guess you're right.

But, as I said earlier, my real specialty is goofing around. Guess I just can't help myself.

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1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

Ya, take a look at my post if you haven't already. I could not believe the stuff I read on the internet about how much people pay in the US!

It's obscene. Luckily NY state has some good shit in place for diabetics in case the government explodes.

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1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

Right because the US economy won't grow . Nor will the rest of the world economy, to which China will export some of its national savings, and not only the US.

As I pointed out in one of my very first post in this topic, savings doesn't automatically become investment, because prices don't just automatically clear markets. And the first China shock was very large. Going forward it won't be as large. Sure in absolute terms it might be bigger. But the economies of the US and the world will be bigger too and will have an easier time adsorbing the savings China generates, assuming of course that it does in fact generate national savings to export. At some point, Chinese firms might realize they'd like to borrow on international capital markets and investors might realized they would like to hold financial assets from these firms. If that happens, the world might be exporting its savings to China.

They are also nice to have once you've built up your intensive capital industries and engineering know how and are ready to export their products and your firms would like to borrow on international capital markets and you'd like to keep your efficient firms and get rid of the not so efficient ones.

Let me see, here is a guy that went out and hired the whose who list of supply side clowns, like:

1. Dow 3600 man Kevin Hastett

2. That frickin idiot David Malpass

3. Larry Kudlow, who could fuck up a wetdream.

4. Steven Moore, the architech behind the Clownback Bust.

And then, Trump runs around, making very dumb statements about Dodd-Frank. And in case you didn’t notice, financial crises are very very costly to working class people. Many or most of these people will never recover financially.

Made some real idiotic comments about monetary policy, right in line with idiots like David Malpass.

And then he talked straight out of his ass about healthcare another issue important to many working class people.

And he wasn't a bad bet? Seriously?

It all makes sense once you understand what white economic anxiety is really about. Then Trump is clearly delivering for his voters.

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41 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Quite the contrary, the point is to provide individuals with a number of fundamental rights: the right to healthcare (which we are discussing), the right to education, the right to justice... etc.
In less developed societies, one could include the right to some basic housing, the right to food and water... etc.
This was once seen in the US as "freedom from want."

You are correct on some level that such a perspective on human societies denies one individual right: the right to be selfish.
But the way I see it, it's very simple. For individual humans living in a human societies, solidarity should be mandatory. All able-bodied adults should help provide for those who cannot: the children, the disabled, the elderly, the sick... etc.
It's interesting that you would describe this as "authoritarianism." I think it's just basic human decency.
In fact, given your misuse of the word "authoritarianism," I think I am allowed to say that a society in which anyone is allowed to let children go without education, the sick without treatment, or the disabled and elderly without pensions... Well I think I can say that this is a fascist society.

However, I also think libertarians should be free to "opt out" of society and build a cabin in the woods to live the dream. They'll come back as soon as they get the flu anyway... They'll come to see that the "state of nature" is actually not that comfortable to be in.

Squab is a well known troll, you're wasting your time.

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2 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

So in the meantime, why not double down on destroying the environment, redistributing wealth upwards to the people who need it least, stoke the flames of bigotry at every turn, poke North Korea with a sharp stick.  Put someone in the White House who constantly lies so much that it's now considered normal.  Are these all things that you consider inevitable regardless of what happened in 2016?

What's wrong with you? This is part of Trumps make America great strategy . :D:P

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2 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Ya, take a look at my post if you haven't already. I could not believe the stuff I read on the internet about how much people pay in the US!

Not sure about that; I'm a type 1 diabetic and I have a fairly standard employer-sponsored health insurance plan; I'd say it's definitely better than average, but comparable to plans offered by many other employers across most of the country. I pay $30 each for my monthly prescriptions of both my long-lasting and short-acting insulins, which contain 5 vials/cartridges of insulin. Under the ACA about a year and a half ago, I paid roughly the same. 

However, if you do not have health insurance coverage, boxes of Insulin can literally cost in excessive of $1,000 each. Which is absurd. The cost of the prescription hardware, such as glucosemeter test strips and syringes/needles, are also insane uncovered. They're like, hundreds of dollars at the least for a month's supply. 

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1 minute ago, IamMe90 said:

Not sure about that; I'm a type 1 diabetic and I have a fairly standard employer-sponsored health insurance plan; I'd say it's definitely better than average, but comparable to plans offered by many other employers across most of the country. I pay $30 each for my monthly prescriptions of both my long-lasting and short-acting insulins, which contain 5 vials/cartridges of insulin. Under the ACA about a year and a half ago, I paid roughly the same. 

However, if you do not have health insurance coverage, boxes of Insulin can literally cost in excessive of $1,000 each. Which is absurd. The cost of the prescription hardware, such as glucosemeter test strips and syringes/needles, are also insane uncovered. They're like, hundreds of dollars at the least for a month's supply. 

Yeah I think he meant how much people uninsured pay. And it's insane.

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10 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Do you know what I meant by the expression I wrote? I wasn't just writing gibberish for no reason. If China has higher consumption, it saves less, it exports less. And you can't get around that with whatever handwaving you were trying to do.
 

And yet, it seems China is trying to be a player in the international arena. That really doesn't jive with them having protectionist policies in the future, nor does rebalancing their economy to have more consumption and exporting less of their savings.

I don't disagree that the China trade had some negative effects. But, Trump hardly has any idea of the real mechanisms behind that. Nor does he have any idea how to fix them. His policies are horrible, make inequality worse, and don't take into account what will likely happened in the future. And of course on top of the horrible economic policy, you get all the white nationalist bullshit on top of that. And by the way, stirring that shit up, makes it harder to get better economic policy, besides being just ethically wrong, which by itself, is enough to not vote for his sorry ass.

Maybe you could get worse than Trump, but then you're really scrapping he bottom of the barrel.

By all means, keep rollin' the dice at the craps table. Anything could happen!  You might even get rich. But, I doubt it.

With a population of 1.8 billion.  How is that government going to pay for the healthcare for that many and given the demographic  consequences of their one child policy ( now discontinued ) , will there  be enough younger working people to support the  aging population ?  Im thinking  that in another 20 years or so, this going to become a serious problem for China .

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2 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Right because the US economy won't grow . Nor will the rest of the world economy, to which China will export some of its national savings, and not only the US.

The US will grow, but based on recent trends, it will not grow anywhere as quickly as China. Of course, it could be that Xi's attempts to consolidate power lead to a dictatorship and/or the whole thing falls apart (in which case this whole discussion will be quite amusing in retrospect), but it seems more likely that China will continue to outpace the US and the EU.

2 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Let me see, here is a guy that went out and hired the whose who list of supply side clowns, like:

1. Dow 3600 man Kevin Hastett

2. That frickin idiot David Malpass

3. Larry Kudlow, who could fuck up a wetdream.

4. Steven Moore, the architech behind the Clownback Bust.

And then, Trump runs around, making very dumb statements about Dodd-Frank. And in case you didn’t notice, financial crises are very very costly to working class people. Many or most of these people will never recover financially.

Made some real idiotic comments about monetary policy, right in line with idiots like David Malpass.

And then he talked straight out of his ass about healthcare another issue important to many working class people.

And he wasn't a bad bet? Seriously?

These horrify the political establishment, but most of them are pretty irrelevant to the vast majority of the population. Yes, he routinely says things which range from unconventional to nonsensical, but this has very little effect beyond diversion of media attention. And yes, he has appointed people to positions for which they are neither qualified nor suited... but only to positions which do not matter. For ones that do matter (e.g. the Supreme Court seat or the Chair of the Federal Reserve), his choices have been conventional, impeccably qualified and sometimes even bipartisan (Powell was appointed to the Board of Governors by Obama).

He makes a show of doing things and the media amplifies some of them for their own purposes, but he has not fundamentally changed the system either for the better or for the worse.

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1 hour ago, Altherion said:

The US will grow, but based on recent trends, it will not grow anywhere as quickly as China. Of course, it could be that Xi's attempts to consolidate power lead to a dictatorship and/or the whole thing falls apart (in which case this whole discussion will be quite amusing in retrospect), but it seems more likely that China will continue to outpace the US and the EU.

Actually, the OECD puts China's long term GDP growth at about the same pace as the United States and the world. Or perhaps more accurately it slowing down with more consumption growth. So yeah, I'm not buying this argument.

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

These horrify the political establishment, but most of them are pretty irrelevant to the vast majority of the population. Yes, he routinely says things which range from unconventional to nonsensical, but this has very little effect beyond diversion of media attention. And yes, he has appointed people to positions for which they are neither qualified nor suited... but only to positions which do not matter. For ones that do matter (e.g. the Supreme Court seat or the Chair of the Federal Reserve), his choices have been conventional, impeccably qualified and sometimes even bipartisan (Powell was appointed to the Board of Governors by Obama).

First it's hard to imagine why Trump would pick Powell over Janet Yellen who is more suited both by formal training and experience to lead the FED, than Powell is. It's true his pick could have been worse than Powell - thank god we didn't get that sorry ass clown Kevin Warsh appointed, who Trump was considering, and who is in contest with Larry Kudlow, apparently, about who can be wrong about the most. But, other than Powell, Trump has made some other questionable picks to the Fed, like Randal Quarles whose has said pretty shady stuff about Dodd Frank and Marvin Goodfriend who made some really bad calls about monetary policy during the GFC.

And I think your downplaying too much the effect of the clowns Trump got as advisors. At minimum it should have signaled to anyone paying attention, how things in the Trump administration was going to go down on the economic policy front. And then of course Trump is listening to these clowns.

And similarly you're downplaying too much Trumps many blindingly stupid comments over policy. This should have been another signal that his administration was going to be a complete cluster and for the most part follow the conventional Republican party line.

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2 hours ago, Squab said:

Just one cabin? Or does your authoritarianism allow them more than one? Could a group of people do it? Or a whole part of society? And does it have to be the woods or could it be a gulch?

I put the link in so you might understand what that word actually means.

Well you see I’m a libertarian. And most of the time I sit around giving friends and family real bad advice to take all their savings and invest into Bitcoin.

But just the other day, I was reading North & Weingast’s paper about the Glorious Revolution and found myself getting extremely pissed. Almost as pissed as the South losing the Civil War. I mean who were these noble losers who decided to the King, that he had to get their consent in order to tax? I mean it was the King of England’s property, so it was his rules. If the nobles didn’t like it, they should have moved.

And then I started to think about American Revolutionaries infringing on the rights of King George. And they violated his property rights, by insisting they have representation before being taxed. But it was King George’s property, so the American revolutionaries should have moved if they didn’t like it.

Seriously though, libertarianism, at least it’s extreme form, is one fuckin brain dead philosophy that is simply unworkable in any actual society. Now it’s fine to worry about government authoritarianism. But what most libertarians won’t acknowledge and completely miss is that private power can be oppressive. Particularly when private interest capture the government. Private power can oppressive through the channels of class, race, gender and so forth. And libertarians are simply blind to this reality, and hence is the reason why you had people like Barry Goldwater against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

I think freedom is generally good. But, I think freedom is generally good because it tends to raise the level of human welfare, and not because it is a good in and by itself, like some versions of libertarianism seems to think, particularly the brand of libertarianism that bases all rights on property rights which evidently can’t be interfered with, and which really ought to be called propertarianism, and leads to some ridiculous conclusions like being for absolute monarchy in England or whatever. Hence me often cracking jokes about the “libertarian overlords”.

And since, I tend to think of freedom as being good that enhances human welfare, and not a good in and by itself, it means at times I think impingements upon is justified. Sure, I’ll outlaw you from using your private property to discriminate against minorities, but that hardly means were going to descend into some kind of authoritarian hell.

And for all libertarians bleating about “freedom” it would seem many supported one Orange authoritarian clown. One might say, that libertarians are, for the most part, just full of shit. Sure every once in awhile, they may protest waterboarding or torture or something, but typically it is just a small whimper, compared to the loud scream they will make if some rich persons tax got raised.

And then you have the people that will run around with “Got Galt” shirts and will quote Mises and put on all types of libertarian airs. But really, their main beef is sharing the socialism with others, which they really just want to keep to themselves. These people are pretty much full of shit too. Think Tea Partiers.

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16 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Well you see I’m a libertarian. And most of the time I sit around giving friends and family real bad advice to take all their savings and invest into Bitcoin.

But just the other day, I was reading North & Weingast’s paper about the Glorious Revolution and found myself getting extremely pissed. Almost as pissed as the South losing the Civil War. I mean who were these noble losers who decided to the King, that he had to get their consent in order to tax? I mean it was the King of England’s property, so it was his rules. If the nobles didn’t like it, they should have moved.

And then I started to think about American Revolutionaries infringing on the rights of King George. And they violated his property rights, by insisting they have representation before being taxed. But it was King George’s property, so the American revolutionaries should have moved if they didn’t like it.

Seriously though, libertarianism, at least it’s extreme form, is one fuckin brain dead philosophy that is simply unworkable in any actual society. Now it’s fine to worry about government authoritarianism. But what most libertarians won’t acknowledge and completely miss is that private power can be oppressive. Particularly when private interest capture the government. Private power can oppressive through the channels of class, race, gender and so forth. And libertarians are simply blind to this reality, and hence is the reason why you had people like Barry Goldwater against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

I think freedom is generally good. But, I think freedom is generally good because it tends to raise the level of human welfare, and not because it is a good in and by itself, like some versions of libertarianism seems to think, particularly the brand of libertarianism that bases all rights on property rights which evidently can’t be interfered with, and which really ought to be called propertarianism, and leads to some ridiculous conclusions like being for absolute monarchy in England or whatever. Hence me often cracking jokes about the “libertarian overlords”.

And since, I tend to think of freedom as being good that enhances human welfare, and not a good in and by itself, it means at times I think impingements upon is justified. Sure, I’ll outlaw you from using your private property to discriminate against minorities, but that hardly means were going to descend into some kind of authoritarian hell.

And for all libertarians bleating about “freedom” it would seem many supported one Orange authoritarian clown. One might say, that libertarians are, for the most part, just full of shit. Sure every once in awhile, they may protest waterboarding or torture or something, but typically it is just a small whimper, compared to the loud scream they will make if some rich persons tax got raised.

And then you have the people that will run around with “Got Galt” shirts and will quote Mises and put on all types of libertarian airs. But really, their main beef is sharing the socialism with others, which they really just want to keep to themselves. These people are pretty much full of shit too. Think Tea Partiers.

I have very little doubt you give bad advice with your beautifully worded strawmen. Please let me have a go. 

Socialism is a great ideal, free money for everyone from the money trees and the world runs on unicorn farts. But really, socialists are full of shit. They just want control of someone else's money and when they take it they screw up whatever they said they wanted to do with it. Everyone gets demotivated and eventually starves like the Venezuelans. Or the North Koreans. Or the Cubans.

Great stuff if everyone wants to be equally hungry and poor. Except for whoever ended up in charge of the mess, usually the authoritarian who tried to implement "real socialism" this time round.

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2 hours ago, Squab said:

I have very little doubt you give bad advice with your beautifully worded strawmen. Please let me have a go. 

Socialism is a great ideal, free money for everyone from the money trees and the world runs on unicorn farts. But really, socialists are full of shit. They just want control of someone else's money and when they take it they screw up whatever they said they wanted to do with it. Everyone gets demotivated and eventually starves like the Venezuelans. Or the North Koreans. Or the Cubans.

Great stuff if everyone wants to be equally hungry and poor. Except for whoever ended up in charge of the mess, usually the authoritarian who tried to implement "real socialism" this time round.

Don't you think you should make a better argument against a system you deem unworkable?

All you've presented here is sound bytes. They just want other people's money. Everyone gets demotivated and "look at Venezuela". Everyone is equally hungry and poor. "It's not 'real socialism'". These are arguments you see on meme websites.

You should mention the political climate in which socialist-leaning governments have tried developing, and note the foreign policies their powerful neighbors have pursued in order to discourage this, by violence, regime change, or crippling sanctions if necessary. Using Venezuela and Cuba as examples is particularly hypocritical; I recommend you read "In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in the Reagan Years" by Thomas Carothers for more information on the subject.

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Revered as one of the chief gods of libertarianism I give you Ludwig Von Mises- https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mises

From the link- 

His brother Richard von MisesWikipedia's W.svg was a real scientist and doing actually philosophicallyimportant work in developing an early definition for randomness. Obviously, they didn't get along.
 
Mises' greatest work is generally considered (among his followers, at least) to be the gargantuan doorstopper called Human Action, which fully codifies the method of praxeology. Unfortunately for Mises, it was pseudoscientific upon arrival in 1949 and is even more pseudoscientific in light of current knowledge.
 
First, Mises completely rejects reality positivism and the scientific method in the social sciencesand humanities:
 
And it just goes on like this, completely exposing the thread thin, quackerry behind the Austrian School of Economics.
 
 
From here, Mises goes into how awesome completely laissez faire market policy is, gold buggery, and other typical Austrian hijinks. However, sane students of economics probably closed the book way back at the point when Mises declared his "theories" unfalsifiable.
 
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