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@zedvictor4
Inherent selfishness or looking after number one has to be our primary goal.
No, it does not.
1. What is the alternative to an ordered society?
Chaos, obviously, a vacuum which is soon filled with a new power structure.
2. Doesn't natural hierarchy dictate social structure?.... Those at the top and the hoi polloi.
Yes, and in a healthy hierarchy those at the top have a duty to care for the well being of those at the bottom. In a rotten one, the ones at the top are obsessed with hedonism and power, and are more interested in supplying the lower classes with distraction than with looking out for their genuine well being.
3. Aren't duty and responsibility down to the individual?..... Perhaps more relative to conditioning than to inherency.
No, they're enforced by social structure. Unless someone is a castaway, a hermit, or condemned to solitary confinement, there is no such thing as an 'individual' human. And in the cases where there is such a thing, it usually engenders a psychotic break.
4. Doesn't hedonism take it's chance at any level?
Man has a fallen nature, yes. Which is why he needs social structures which encourage him to combat that nature instead of embracing it. You could see Machiavelli's 'Discourses on Livy' as a work that addresses this problem by examining how political structures encourage or discourage the rot brought on by corrupt human nature.
5. Therefore we end up in a situation. But is that down to misfortune or down to us?
Both. You can't extricate man from his environment. He both shapes and is shaped by it.
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@zedvictor4
In a perfect society, wage would be irrelevant and living would be the priority.
Yes, capitalism is inherently oppressive.
But society always has been imperfect and as I stated before,
Yes, obviously.
survival of the fittest and inherent selfishness is still what underpins social structure.
No, it is not. If it were, human society never would have formed. Humans compete on a collective level. When humans stop cooperating for the common good of their larger group and begin to squabble for individual gain, they gradually consume the benefits that have accrued through years of dutiful sacrifice until their society crumbles and is out-competed by a stronger, more cohesive one. This is why hedonism is always prevalent in crumbling empires.
Natural hierarchy is the reality and true socialism is the pipe dream and money is the Golden Calf.
I agree that hierarchy is natural but hierarchy implies duty and responsibility. When those are abandoned by the people at the top, the ruling class becomes corrupt and decadent, the masses become similarly corrupt, and the social order breaks down. Money is not the only Golden Calf. Hedonism is one. Distraction. Pride. Look at the people who run our society. Are they not rotten with every vice imaginable to man? Has that not trickled down to the hoi polloi?
To have is to be indifferent and to have not, is tough luck.I'm alright Jack, keep your hands of my stash.
The unfortunate situation that we find ourselves in.
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@Christen
You can't promote "a living wage" because living wages vary from family to family. My living wage could be 10 dollars an hour and that could be all I need to get by, while a neighbor on the other hand may need more money since you might have to take care of kids or whatever.
A living wage is enough money to raise large family. I'm not concerned with bachelors or spinsters, who should be concerned with using their income to either support their community or have a family anyway. A living wage for them opens up the possibility of the latter, and gives them more resources for the former. If they want to dedicate their lives to God, then money isn't an issue.
What's consumer debt? Are you talking about student loan college debt?
No, credit card/payday loan debt. Student loan debt is an even more pernicious problem, because they changed the rules to make it impossible to discharge that debt in bankruptcy. Mortgages are also a problem because of the perverse incentive structures that they create,
What is a debt jubilee? Is that cancelling debt?
Yes.
The reason automation is displacing so many jobs in the first place is because of minimum wage increases, forcing businesses to fire employee that they can no longer afford to keep paying, and then replace them with those robots.
No, it isn't. Literal slavery didn't stop the automation wave of the industrial revolution. It's Schumpeter's Gale, creative destruction, a destabilizing force which is an integral part of the capitalist system.
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@billbatard
Laws are just paper. When you look at successful revolutions, like the French one or the Bolshevik ones, or the Confederacy, these all involved the military itself fragmenting and fighting amongst itself. Assuming that the US would be bringing its whole military might to bear against rowdy civilians is dumb. Also, there is a difference between a regional secession, like American Civil War, and a popular uprising fueled by military deserters, which is what toppled the Bourbons and the Romanovs. Once the existing power structure in France crumbled Napoleon turned the Royalists' own guns against them, firing grapeshot into the crowd and decimating any attempt to undermine the new Republic.
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@zedvictor4
But history was and things are now just about the same as before but in a slightly different format.
Nobody even moderately well versed in history would claim this. During the Middle Ages, in both Europe and the Islamic Caliphates, usury was outlawed. Under feudalism, people could not be evicted from their land, because land wasn't a commodity. The world 'capitalism' wasn't used until the 1600s, because the situation which it described (the access to the means of production being restricted to a small cadre of people) was a completely novel development. A world that runs on credit, with extremely mobile capital and labor and the commodification of human labor and land, would be completely alien to someone living in the medieval era, just as their world is very difficult for us to imagine.
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@HistoryBuff
But Trump is absolutely guilty of the same things. He brought his children with him on state trips, and they got business contracts shortly after the trip. That is exactly what trump accuses Biden of, but he did the same thing with Ivanka. The difference being that Ivanka is actually using a semi-official position to profit herself. At least hunter wasn't a government official trying to cash in.If you want to go after all corruption, i am absolutely on board with that. But if you aren't willing to include Trump in that, then it isn't corruption you want to go after. You are just looking for an excuse to target your enemies, just like trump was.
If Congress were willing to impeach Trump under the Emoluments Clause for things like his involvement with the Saudis, they would have much better luck. But they won't, for the same reason the Nancy Pelosi wouldn't impeach Bush for war crimes: because they're almost all guilty of the same thing.
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It's lovely that you're enough of an idealist to think that a notoriously corrupt government investigating its own corruption and finding nothing is result that ought to be taken at face value.Of course they are. And in fact they have already investigated and determined there was no crime committed by the Bidens.
Also correct. And if trump had asked them to investigate there would be no problem. Trump has the authority to ask law enforcement to investigate. He does not have the power to pressure a foreign government to investigate his rivals. The moment he did that, he committed a crime.Again, if this were what happened we wouldn't be having this conversation. Asking the ukranians to co-operate with an investigation by the FBI would have been fine. But Trump never asked the FBI to investigate. There is nothing to suggest that he was ever going to ask the FBI to investigate. There was no investigation for Ukraine to co-operate with. He just wanted to send Giuliani on a fishing expedition. So when trump asked them to dig up dirt on Biden, it was a crime.
So you think that Trump can delegate his authority to enforce the laws to his cabinet, but cannot use said power himself? Under whose authority did he delegate it, then? Either he is vested with the power and can use it, or he isn't vested with it and is incapable of delegating it to law enforcement.
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@zedvictor4
Public ownership at the moment doesn't mean public ownership, it means ownership by whoever controls the levers of power, which means the same cadre of wealthy people who have been molding policy to their benefit for decades. Saying redistribution is just the same thing but in a slightly different format is meaningless, you could say that about many things. A dead body is the same thing as a human but in a slightly different format. Redistribution and decommodification changes the structure of government and society to make it difficult for things to revert. Land was commodified in Protestant England after the commons were seized by the government and redistributed to loyal lords, and then the peasants were evicted from their land en masse (this was also part of the process of proletarianization). The goal is to get back to the prior point, where evictions and land confiscations were impossible because power structures existed which opposed those things. In medieval Europe, this force consisted of the nobles and the Church who supported them as a foil to the power of the monarchy. Those powers were destroyed by the reformation in England and Germany, by the Revolution in France, and were undermined by things like the Tavora Affair in Portugal. As things stand now, land will continue to be pulled into fewer and fewer hands, as will all capital, because there are no power structures powerful enough to oppose it. You have to build those power structures from the ground up. In many second and third world countries evictions of this sort, drive by rapacious global capitalism, are still ongoing.
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@Greyparrot
Redistribution and decommodification.
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@Alec
I think that the number #1 priority of any society is the promotion of a living wage. If it doesn't accomplish that, it is a complete failure. Part of the problem with our society is that we've come up with 'safety valves' which prevent people from protesting to the degree which they ought to be, the main ones being consumer debt and a safety net. Dismantling the safety net can't really be humanely done at this point, but consumer debt could definitely be tackled, with debt jubilees both providing relief and discouraging banks from overlending. While we can quibble about the means, in the end what is required is twofold: a redistribution of wealth, and structural changes to make it more difficult for wealth to accumulate into limited hands in the future (plus the will to sustain such a political fight). Minimum wage laws are a bandaid, especially in the face of automation displacing more jobs in the future.
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@HistoryBuff
No, only law enforcement agencies and congress are allowed to investigate corruption. Why is it unclear to you? Groups that have legal authority to do a thing, are in charge of that thing. Presidents are not allowed to pressure people to investigate their political opponents.
The government of Ukraine is also capable of internally investigating corruption, which is what Trump asked them to do. The law enforcement agencies are also part of the executive branch, they work for the President, who is the Head of State and delegates powers to them through his Cabinet. This should have been covered in Civics 101, maybe this history buff skipped it.
If trump wanted to act legally, he would have had the justice department investigate. He is in charge of them. he could easily have done that. He didn't. He chose to pressure a foreign leader into doing his dirty work, which is a crime. He has released a memo confirming he committed that crime.
When the crime takes place in a foreign country, it's typical to cooperate with foreign law enforcement. Do you think that the president is capable of dispatching the FBI to Kiev and just starting an investigation there with no help from their government? It's almost like he should get their Prime Minister to agree to cooperate in a joint investigation first... oh wait.
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@thett3
I think that the idea isn't that 'white people' are oppressing black people, as that black people are oppressed in unique ways by economic and cultural structures (those structures also oppress whites, and are enveloping more and more white communities each day). We like to pretend that people are both blank states and perfectly will-driven, but that isn't the case. Humans are social creatures, and we are often defined more by our upbringing, our communities, and our interaction with one another within a larger framework that incorporates land and history than we are by some sort of iron-willed free spirit.
One of the biggest things is land. The top 100 land owners in the US own more land than all black people combined; the ownership levels are abysmal. To have a healthy human community, you absolutely need access to land, a tie to the land, and a tie to your own past on that land. Folkways of this sort evolve overtime whenever a human society settles down somewhere, and aren't easily uprooted. Those folkways moderate antisocial behavior, they pass down specialized survival techniques for that specific environment, and they make the population resilient to outside forces that don't have their best interests in mind. In the US, black people largely migrated up north to be exploited in factories, a flux of labor population that closely mirrored other historical urbanizations, like that which took place in England during the 'industrial revolution'. The major difference was that these cities were already packed with people, and those people were organizing and demanding better labor conditions. The wealthy people in cities certainly had their interests served by the upheaval, as it created a fragmentary, internally hostile working class that could be more easily exploited. As someone who grew up in a northern city, I can tell you that the ethnic tensions created by this are powerful, and that animosity is still passed down to his day. This creates a hardened lack of political resolve to do anything that benefits black communities among white and other ethnic working class minorities.
So where does this history leave black people? They left the land in the South, which they often didn't own, but which they did have cultural ties to, to come to cities where they were ostracized from many of their social peers, met with resentment, and alienated from the culture. An ersatz sense of defensive racial community materialized, but it often wasn't any replacement for what they had: the traditions and rules of social engagement which preserved order and imposed duties on people, enabling collective action. When those things did begin to arise again, they were often violently suppressed or surreptitiously undermined by US government intelligence. What arose was something that goes beyond IQ or anything else mentioned here: a population which has had much of its essential human collective organization beaten out of it. A diaspora that was never allowed to settle in, or put down roots. Antisocial (from a national perspective) behavior in a group like that is going to skyrocket, and they will come up with rules that protect the ingroup fanatically (rules against snitching being the main one). If you want an analogue from Europe, look at the Romani and their conception of 'gadjo': when it comes to cultural norms, the outsider is outlaw.
So where does this history leave black people? They left the land in the South, which they often didn't own, but which they did have cultural ties to, to come to cities where they were ostracized from many of their social peers, met with resentment, and alienated from the culture. An ersatz sense of defensive racial community materialized, but it often wasn't any replacement for what they had: the traditions and rules of social engagement which preserved order and imposed duties on people, enabling collective action. When those things did begin to arise again, they were often violently suppressed or surreptitiously undermined by US government intelligence. What arose was something that goes beyond IQ or anything else mentioned here: a population which has had much of its essential human collective organization beaten out of it. A diaspora that was never allowed to settle in, or put down roots. Antisocial (from a national perspective) behavior in a group like that is going to skyrocket, and they will come up with rules that protect the ingroup fanatically (rules against snitching being the main one). If you want an analogue from Europe, look at the Romani and their conception of 'gadjo': when it comes to cultural norms, the outsider is outlaw.
Of course the popular ideology today, fed to both white and black people by the media and education system, is that white people created this system and benefited from it. This is a farce funded, cheered on, and perpetuated by the people who actually benefited: the rich elite. And it's a simple sleight of hand that they use: when black people are discriminated against in favor of white people, the white person does better and the black person does worse. Relative to one another, this is true. But the real question is: does the white person fare better than he would if he were facing down the rich person on this own, negotiating his own pay, without coming into conflict with the black person at all? No, he does not. The ethnic conflict serves as a smokescreen to both continuously beat wages down, and to dismantle any power structure which can resist consumerism and the cultural horror that accompanies it. Ethnic conflict is a tool of consumerist capitalism, and it uses any social structure it can get its hands on to push atomizing social dysfunction on all populations. In the end, regardless of IQ or anything else, what the richest people in our society want is a population enslaved by their most base personal desires, with no loyalty to a higher ideal, to a human community, or any thing else that might lead them to pick up pitchforks, head to the Hamptons, and solve 90% of our problems.
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@thett3
Nah bro, the dream team is gonna be split up here. Peasants absolutely did sell their labor, they were typically required to either pay up a certain percentage of their crops to the lord or to work a day a week in the lords fields. I don't see a meaningful difference between that and being paid for your labor with cash. Cash was simply hard to come by back then.Outside of a Jeffersonian nation of self sufficient farmers and self employed small businessmen there's always going to be a reliance on those with economic power to make a living. It's just the way it is and always has been. Like you said, laboring is just a part of being human and I don't see what is so inherently bad about trading that labor for cash, or what the alternative is supposed to be.
I think that it's bad history to see the Middle Ages as economically contiguous with the present age, as usury was banned for much of them and the means of production were structured entirely differently. You just assert that there's no difference between land rent and a wage; I think that's a bit crazy. They couldn't be farther apart: in the case of a land wage, you have control over the material means by which you produce that rent, which also provides you with your own basic needs: food, shelter, water. In the case of a wage, you explicitly do not have any of those things, it is your labor itself which you sell, NOT the product of your labor, which does not belong to you. The gravity of this distinction is literally the basis of several centuries worth of brutal conflict and bloodshed. Power should not be economic, it should be political. That's the central perversion of capitalism: control by a class with no martial skin in the game, and no real productive capacity; it is at its root exploitative.
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@Greyparrot
Labor does not create value. Consumers create value.
So consumers gathering in a barren field and thinking together 'I am thirsty' will create bottles of wine? What value is created by their longing in the empty field? Please; that is a patently absurd statement.
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@Snoopy
UBI would be a lot more acceptable if it didn't discourage charity within the community. If under a certain threshold of income, people could opt out and get full tax refunds for their charity, what have you, this would make a lot more sense to a lot more people.I think that this is entirely wrongheaded; how do you figure that it discourages charity? I would certainly give more if I had more to give. To my church, and to the poor in general.Maybe you are right. I'll cover one point for now. I'm not too proud to accept help for my own sake and others, but I am sure not interested in other people's earnings, not that way. I find the prospect of it disgusting, would rather go hungry. I don't think that's all that uncommon right now. On this one, its the mentality that strikes me most, that we have to come to feel entitled as a people, to other people's earnings. There's nothing charitable about that, and our children may be surrounded by people satisfied that someone committing evil according to our wants is considered as "charity" enough. Now that I think about it, I wonder if it coincides with our defeat as a society. Maybe we're giving up on justice, and the bastards just wrote a check. How do you justify this?
I think that you've adopted a set of conceptions about how labor, value, and production work that have made you easy to exploit. Capitalism, as a system, accumulates money in the hands of usurers, while, economically, value is created by laborers and prices are set by the market. This is all explored in Adam Smith, and the economic history of Florence is a great example of how this confiscatory process plays out. How is it just for the surplus value created by labor to accumulate disproportionately in the hands of people who had nothing to do with that labor? I find that very difficult to justify, and I find the idea that trying to get a bigger share is unjust to be heinous. Because it assumes that an economic and political system founded on usury is just, when I hold that it is the opposite. The Marxists were wrong about a lot of things, but their criticisms of capitalism, which raped and pillaged the cultural and material treasures of Europe, and later the world, were often spot on. It is an evil system because it pretends at amorality, enables dispossession, and then pretends that dispossession is some unavoidable, natural consequence. It isn't, because economics isn't a naturalistic science, it's a moral one because it concerns man's interaction with the material world. We get to decide what that interaction looks like because economics are inextricably tied to politics.
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@Greyparrot
This is where you are completely wrong. Without labor, there is no value. Labor creates value, and the market sets a price. If no one is working in the vineyard, a bunch of gold or fiat money sitting in the vault will not create wine. This is a basic fact of economics understood since Aristotle: money is sterile. Labor doesn't need to be sold to have value; it is only within a system like capitalism that labor is exploited to create value for usurers in a legally justified theft of surplus value. It's really telling that your analogy of choice is a racetrack: an economic endeavour which creates nothing but indebtedness, olfactory money, and moral collapse. What a poignant portrayal of capitalist systems ;)I look at the economy like like bookies at a racetrack. Rich people line up to deal with the bookies and racers, who get a guaranteed risk-free cut from every bet placed and every race raced. Some of the rich people lose money and some gain money. The bookies and the racers get the same amount no matter what the rich people win or lose.One day the bookies and the racers say they want more than their guaranteed cut, and they are going to take it from the rich people who won at the racetrack. The rich people say the risk isn't worth the reward, so they stop going to the racetrack. The bookies and the racers now have no job. The bookies and the racers also refuse to risk their own money the same way the rich people did at the racetrack. The bookies and the racers are now generationally poor with a racetrack of plenty of labor, but nobody to sell it to.
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@Greyparrot
I mean it's the rich people that create jobs, not the middle class. So if you have to bribe the middle class with a taxcut to get them to look the other way while you purchase jobs with tax cuts for the rich, then it's totally justified.There is no free anything. Consequences exist. If you want to tax the rich at confiscatory rates, it is going to cost the country jobs. The tradeoff is you can have a big bloated government running everything and be unemployed...or you can have the opposite.
Not true at all. We have a largest consumer market in the world by a mile. If people want to sell stuff here, then they have to essentially do whatever we want. We simply let them get away with this because our politicians and policymakers are loyal to multinational corporations and don't represent the will of the people. No sane company is going to cut themselves out of a 13 trillion dollar consumer market in order to save money on taxes.
The idea that rich people 'create jobs' is also, imo, dumb. 'Jobs' are created when someone is willing to labor to create something of value through the application of skills; someone else owning the means of production is acting as a parasitic gatekeeper between labor and production, not the wellspring of production. Even if you're talking about innovation, that creates wealth, not jobs. In fact, it destroys jobs as efficiency increases. It's fine, of course, to increase efficiency, but it's not in the interest of the working class to bend over and take whatever the rich choose to give them. It's in their interests to organize and take either political or violent action to secure a share of the proceeds of more efficient production.
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@Snoopy
UBI would be a lot more acceptable if it didn't discourage charity within the community. If under a certain threshold of income, people could opt out and get full tax refunds for their charity, what have you, this would make a lot more sense to a lot more people.
I think that this is entirely wrongheaded; how do you figure that it discourages charity? I would certainly give more if I had more to give. To my church, and to the poor in general.
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@TheRealNihilist
I do agree; I don't think that the government is good at solving people's problems. It's good at handing them a big pile of money though, and letting them work on their own problems.Would you also agree that people with debt are just a tad better off not enough to get them out of debt? The government can solve people's problems if they are good at it. A government is not bad with money by definition it is because of bad policies. If they implement a policy like public healthcare they are pretty much cutting time out of people's lives to go through insurance, paying for healthcare directly by telling them to pay in taxes. They already pay taxes so they would only need to pay more or what Yang proposes to make healthcare happen.
A government is bad with money by definition, because there is no real controlling factor aside from elections, which are easily manipulatable. I don't support single payer because I think that the government will be more efficient, I support it because private insurance companies are evil, vampiric middlemen who contribute absolute zero positive things to health care while obscuring pricing signals and hiding the true costs of our ridiculous healthcare system, then slurping a huge cut for themselves off the top of the whole mess. They deserve to die, and while I would prefer to see their executives executed by firing squad I will settle for seeing their companies dismantled.
If it tended to you would be able to produce an example of it happening. One not existing indicates that it tends not to.I'll drop the inflation and bad choices because I don't have evidence for that but with the Alaskan UBI trial they found this "They found that full-time employment did not change at all, and the share of Alaskans who worked part-time jobs increased by 17%."
... that actually proves my point. People, I imagine retired people and mothers, got part time jobs because the 1k a year put them in a more comfortable position. But then again I'd have to see more statistics as there are a lot of confounding variables. But once again; a huge number of people dropping out of employment wouldn't be a good thing. That's not what UBI is meant to do; it's meant to supplement a full time or part time wage. As automation-driven unemployment increases, the UBI could be raised.
Alaska's UBI is much smaller than what Yang is proposing. UBI isn't supposed to free you from labor, it's supposed to increase your negotiating power as a laborer.I don't think that is the case by both cases of UBI in Finland and Alaska.
Why don't you think that?
Yeah, but the end goal is that they become more wealthy while still receiving 1,000 in UBI.So basically UBI is going to give people money but not make them wealthy?
Yeah, it's up to them to make themselves wealthy. This just gives everyone a leg up.
it's supposed to revitalize local economiesEvidence?
It's basic economics. Consumer economies drive economic growth, and handing people money creates a consumer economy.
help to fight systemic povertyWhy not improve the system instead of giving people money? I would also like evidence for this as well.
...once again, this is just basic logic. Poverty is defined as a lack of wealth. Giving people money by definition fights poverty. This is an improvement of the system. There are claims that you don't ask for 'evidence' for because they are self-evident.
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You're thinking of this within a capitalist paradigm, which isn't the only paradigm available. It's the one that we are currently living under.That is the paradigm the United States is living on so it is fair to have that approach. Your rebuttal is not a rebuttal because UBI will be placed if occurs in a capitalist paradigm. If there was another system that you think would be taking place during UBI do tell because I think the United States will remain in a capitalist paradigm.
I don't. Capitalism is based on a proletariat class which needs to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in return for a wage. As automation increases efficiency, what you are going to end up with is a large working class which wants to labor but which cannot (if we don't intervene). The American economist Henry George covered this extensively in his book 'Poverty and Progress'.
Then they work to earn more. But the 1k baseline gives them the freedom to pursue other work that they may find more fulfilling, or to work more limited hours. And since Yang supports Medicare for all, it removes our idiotic pairing of employment with healthcare. If they cannot work at all, then other welfare programs exist that will give them more. But the number of people who will be on those is vanishingly small.Where is the evidence from Alaska or Finland to even suggest people take up jobs that they want to do? The burden is on you to provide something that states that and from what I have read about Alaska it mentions they kept their current jobs not used their added freedom to commit to new ones. Yes public healthcare is good.
I already said, Alaska gives people roughly 1k A YEAR. That's not enough to supplement part time work, but it does help people pay down debts and invest a bit in the local economy. So I wouldn't expect that effect to show up.
So change their circumstances with $1,000 a month to them and everyone in their family and community.1k is not going to reduce wage stagnation since everyone is going to get the 1k if they are not on better welfare programs.
It's not supposed to; wages are going to become increasingly obsolete.
It is not going to improve schools.
Yes it will, since student success has more to do with parental involvement than with school funding. Taking people out of a scarcity mindset allows them to focus on small but important things like their child's school performance.
It is not going better the justice which unfairly sentences minority groups.
Obviously not, that's a different program which requires different policies.
It is only going to give them 1k more and even that is not that good because from what I read about Alaska that added freedom meant nothing to their jobs since they carried on working the same jobs that they did already.
That's because Alaska didn't give them 1k a month. 1k a month is enough to hold you over working a job with pay that isn't quite as great. 1k a year is not. And I don't get this bizarre fascination that you have with people quitting their jobs as a sign of success. Maybe people kept their jobs because they liked them? I wouldn't quit my job if I got $1,000 a month. I doubt my father or brother would either. But there is a small minority of people who want to quit but are afraid to. UBI would help them, which would put more pressure on businesses to treat their workers better as a result.
Maybe because the place that they were working at offered them company sponsored healthcare and to risk that for several families would be detrimental. Yang has said he is for public healthcare so that can offer freedom. I would like to bring in Finland because that I think has public healthcare and from this links said that added freedom of UBI did not make the unemployed find jobs."Did it help unemployed people in Finland find jobs, as the centre-right Finnish government had hoped? No, not really."Guess we need to wait a little longer for more in-depth look at what occurred with this statement "Mr Simanainen says that while some individuals found work, they were no more likely to do so than a control group of people who weren't given the money. They are still trying to work out exactly why this is, for the final report that will be published in 2020."
Of course, how do they define 'jobs'? The entire point of UBI is that it frees people to pursue unorthodox ways to make money, like artisan work or part-time work. Yangs UBI also includes a huge boost to trade schools as well, which would help to increase the number of self-employed people doing difficult to automate work. Your standards for success also seem rather bizarre. You complain about the Alaskan trial not leading to people leaving their jobs, and then complain about the Finnish one not leading to people working more. Which is your standard for a successful UBI program? Because both are exactly what I would expect: increased happiness, reduced anxiety and stress, a bit more part time work, but no huge change in standard, old-fashioned employment.
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...but they can keep the welfare programs if they want them, and the UBI is there as an option if they, for example, get a second job and get cut off from welfare as a result.What is the aim of UBI? I am getting an idea from what you said earlier but I want to make sure I am understanding your point correctly.
To help people rise out of poverty and to create consumer markets in impoverished areas. To increase negotiating power of both individuals and unions. The aims are manifold.
What UBI does, is it comes in and makes up the difference when welfare gets cut so it always equals $1,000 no matter what.This is on the assumption that Republicans won't cut costs for UBI right? They are cutting social security and their voters don't care so what is stopping someone like Trump to cut UBI a social security if I am not mistaken?
This argument can be used against literally any social program.
I live in a pretty working poor area, a lot of people do second jobs for under the table cash so that they can keep their welfare benefits and make more money; if they had to declare that money the government would decrease their benefits. UBI says 'oh, the government cut your SNAP and TANF benefits to $400? here's $600 to make up for what they cut'. If someone uses more than $1,000 a month UBI doesn't effect them directly at all.You do know this is an anecdote right? I want to remind you above of my question. What is stopping people in the future to cut UBI like they do to other social securities?
Yeah it's an anecdote. An anecdote is a good argument against an inaccurate absolute statement.
A lot of people who I personally know qualify for programs like SNAP and TANF don't take it and survive paycheck to paycheck because they think that it's immoral to take it.Do you have evidence for this because this is an anecdote as well? I can say I live in the richest area in the country and I would say why are people so poor can't they simply ask their parents to pay for anything? You wouldn't agree with it but there are teenagers or adults like this so either I choose to accept your anecdote or the rich adult or teenager. I rather not accept either and see the evidence.
All evidence which is not sensory is ultimately based on anecdotes. The problem with individual anecdotes is that they are limited in scope. They're not good for proving trends, but they are good for disproving inaccurate statements with a counter example. If someone says 'there are no northern lights', saying 'I've been to Alaska and I saw the northern lights' is a good counter argument.
My point is that the ADMINISTRATIVE costs of SS alone far, far outweigh the cost of giving billionaires 1,000 a month.Has this been shown in Alaska, Finland or some other UBI trial?
What on earth do you mean? We KNOW how much it costs to administer SS now. We also know how many billionaires there are in the US. If we multiply that number by 12,000, we know how much the UBI will cost and we can compare that number to the administration figure.
It's not a welfare program, and it's not supposed to keep up with the cost of living. It's supposed to subsidize reduced work hours and pump money into main-street economies.The problem here is that everyone who is eligible will get the money so the poor would still be poor and the middle class would still be the middle class. Now they have 1k more just like people who are much better off as well. Doesn't help actual problems like wage stagnation or healthcare so I don't see how UBI is more important than unions and public healthcare. Do you concede unions and public healthcare are more important that UBI?
Some unions enthusiastically endorse UBI because it increases their negotiating power. Think about a strike. If people have UBI, they can strike and then survive short term on the UBI. Without it, it is much harder to strike. I think that getting rid of private health insurance companies is really important, but they're two completely different problems.
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@Snoopy
How does a fiat UBI remain stable over time? I mean, if the dollar isn't tied to something of considerable value, eventually the effect of stimulus will wear off and the UBI amount will turn out to be worth less, right?
No. But the amount will need to modified from time to time.
I'm also concerned about the potential for quasi-populist kickbacks, and there are other potential problems to be addressed as well, such as a government that exclusively controls critical means of production, presenting a liability in which the people lack the productive capacity to take a hit (from the government) and negotiate if necessary.
Wasn't a problem in Ancient Rome. In fact, historically the Roman grain dole was so popular that politicians were terrified of touching it. It was considered political suicide. This is because behind all the niceties politics is always about force and the threat of force, and people will react violently if they are pushed too far from the standard of living which they have come to see as 'decent'. I imagine that a lot of people would use the $1,000 to buy guns, I know that I would buy a few.
Another potential issue to be addressed, that the governing agents have an option to simply open the floodgates just enough to keep the masses at an "acceptable" standard of living. I don't necessarily think we need to let the risks keep us from considering the implementation in a positive light either, but I think it should be considered whether the implementation burdens a liability onto future generations in a centralized application.
I think that the alternatives are astronomically worse. We're definitely an empire in decline, nothing is going to change that. I would rather it be a stable decline than an unstable one.
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@Greyparrot
You give them both $1,000 and see what they do with it.How do you differentiate between the systematically oppressed poor person and the gifted person choosing to be lazy to game the welfare system?
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@TheRealNihilist
You seem liberal to me, so I don't know why you seem to believe that most people on welfare are 'welfare queens'.That could be implied by what I said but I don't take the position. I think people on welfare depend on it and UBI will not help them get out of welfare because I think most people require more than 1k every month I think to ditch welfare programs and enter the job market.
...but they can keep the welfare programs if they want them, and the UBI is there as an option if they, for example, get a second job and get cut off from welfare as a result.
Most of them are working poor trying to make ends meet, and if they make more money and the government cuts their benefits due to means testing then UBI becomes the better option.So you the government is going to force UBI whether or not it is beneficial? What if like I said before the individual or family take more than 1k from welfare programs will that be cut as well?
NO. The government ALREADY DOES THIS. A person on welfare who for example makes more money gets their welfare cut ALREADY. That's what 'means tested' means. What UBI does, is it comes in and makes up the difference when welfare gets cut so it always equals $1,000 no matter what. I live in a pretty working poor area, a lot of people do second jobs for under the table cash so that they can keep their welfare benefits and make more money; if they had to declare that money the government would decrease their benefits. UBI says 'oh, the government cut your SNAP and TANF benefits to $400? here's $600 to make up for what they cut'. If someone uses more than $1,000 a month UBI doesn't effect them directly at all.
Also, UBI is no-strings-attached money. It's not SNAP, which people often are ashamed to use. There's no government oversee checking in on how you're spending the money. It gives you freedomShame can come after being able to survive and I doubt it would take people out of welfare programs.
I know for a fact it does. A lot of people who I personally know qualify for programs like SNAP and TANF don't take it and survive paycheck to paycheck because they think that it's immoral to take it.
Social security costs alone are like 2 billion a year I think, and the country has less than a thousand billionaires,so giving them all 1,000 bucks brings the cost to 12 million a year.I don't think you can support that claim but I am open to seeing the evidence of prior social security compared to current social security when using UBI.
That's not even my point. My point is that the ADMINISTRATIVE costs of SS alone far, far outweigh the cost of giving billionaires 1,000 a month.
Here is a study:It states this "When you are living in the United States, you will likely want to budget approximately $1000 – $1500 per month for housing and utilities." That is only for housing and utilities so other necessary payment like food or water would add to that total. Meaning if UBI is considered a welfare program it won't be enough by itself to keep up with the cost of living in the United States.
It's not a welfare program, and it's not supposed to keep up with the cost of living. It's supposed to subsidize reduced work hours and pump money into main-street economies.
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@TheRealNihilist
Nope, because people aren't impoverished intrisically, they are impoverished due to injustices within our economic system.False. Children who are born into poverty will be poor. Might not be forever but the time they are born for sure. I don't see how you got to that conclusion.
You're thinking of this within a capitalist paradigm, which isn't the only paradigm available. It's the one that we are currently living under.
it's always 1,000. Your assistance doesn't decrease as you climb out of poverty.Okay but what if people need more than 1k?
Then they work to earn more. But the 1k baseline gives them the freedom to pursue other work that they may find more fulfilling, or to work more limited hours. And since Yang supports Medicare for all, it removes our idiotic pairing of employment with healthcare. If they cannot work at all, then other welfare programs exist that will give them more. But the number of people who will be on those is vanishingly small.
Poor people aren't inherently irrational with moneyThat is not my claim. My claim is that poor people tend to make bad choices due to the circumstance they are in.
So change their circumstances with $1,000 a month to them and everyone in their family and community.
scarcity has been shown to lower a persons IQ by a standard deviation, and UBI helps to eliminate the scarcity mindset. I think you might have picked up some rather unfair views of poor people from Republican propaganda.Giving someone 1k doesn't solve their problems but it can help. Do you agree?
I do agree; I don't think that the government is good at solving people's problems. It's good at handing them a big pile of money though, and letting them work on their own problems.
Also, look at Alaska. UBI hasn't lead to either inflation or bad choices;I said tend not will.
If it tended to you would be able to produce an example of it happening. One not existing indicates that it tends not to.
people use the money to pay down bills or generally augment a responsible life.If the bills are manageable or they are rational people then it can work but it does not solve their problems which is why in Alaska they are still working their jobs not deciding to do something else with their life because the UBI does not cover them to do something more important. This is based on people not liking their job and I think that assumption is fair.
Alaska's UBI is much smaller than what Yang is proposing. UBI isn't supposed to free you from labor, it's supposed to increase your negotiating power as a laborer.
The reason that UBI doesn't lead to price inflation is because while it gives consumers more money, it also revitalizes local economies to create more competition. There was no measurable inflation in the Finland trial.Do you have evidence for Alaska? I would rather stick to one instead of another UBI trial in Finland.
I mean, I'm the one saying that there was no evidence of inflation. You're the one claiming that inflation would happen. The burden of proof is on you; find a study on the inflationary effects of a real world UBI program. There's no need to stick to one either, especially when we have so few examples to work with.
I don't see poor people doing that, because everyone wants a better life and more money.This interview would help understand my concern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50z8H2RYe7s Starts at 5:11. Do tell me what you think of it. Basically people who get 300 already will only get 700 more from UBI.
Yeah, but the end goal is that they become more wealthy while still receiving 1,000 in UBI. If their means tested amount is decreasing it's because they're making more money, which is good. It's not meant to help people who are permanently disabled (a very small number); it's supposed to revitalize local economies, help to fight systemic poverty, and to spread capital out of elite coastal enclaves.
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@TheRealNihilist
So basically you admit it doesn't help the poor or people with existing welfare programs that equal to higher than 1k so taking UBI is giving the person less money since those welfare programs will be removed when taking UBI?
Nope, because people aren't impoverished intrisically, they are impoverished due to injustices within our economic system.
they can transition to UBI and have an incentive to rise all the way to the middle class.Can you explain this more?
Yes. With means tested welfare, your welfare fades out. So it keeps people at a bare level of sustenance, and it's really hard for them to rise out of that because the 'boost' that the government gives them diminishes as they climb out. It's like if you have someone in a pit, and they increase in weight the close they get to the rim of the pit whenever they try to climb out. With UBI, it's always 1,000. Your assistance doesn't decrease as you climb out of poverty.
I don't see how that can be true. In order for this to occur that person must be rational with the money he has so that will remove most of the people who need the money because I think it is fair for me to say poor people tend to make more irrational choices because of the circumstance there is. There is also another problem. Why wouldn't businesses simply increase prices in order to get money from the UBI?
Poor people aren't inherently irrational with money; scarcity has been shown to lower a persons IQ by a standard deviation, and UBI helps to eliminate the scarcity mindset. I think you might have picked up some rather unfair views of poor people from Republican propaganda. Also, look at Alaska. UBI hasn't lead to either inflation or bad choices; people use the money to pay down bills or generally augment a responsible life. Similar things happened in the Finnish UBI trial. The reason that UBI doesn't lead to price inflation is because while it gives consumers more money, it also revitalizes local economies to create more competition. There was no measurable inflation in the Finland trial.
Do you mean his Yang's VAT proposal on I think European goods or something intrinsic to UBI?
It's a VAT on domestic automated industry, not on European goods. You may be thinking of the fact that Europe, along with every other civilized country in the world, already has a VAT because VATs are incredibly difficult to dodge.
What do you mean by means testing?
Means testing, in the context of social net policy, means that the government monitors the person given the money and changes the money given or gives specific rules for its use. It's expensive, intrusive, and I would argue demeaning.
If I am reading this correctly and what Yang proposes people who have existing welfare that is more than 1k would not be making a good decision to remove their existing welfare to get less money. This would mean if people know they are receiving less money they will simply maintain the upkeep cost for carrying on their existing welfare programs so even if there was a benefit to upkeep that would be reduced due to how much worse UBI is compared to programs that give more than 1k combined or by itself to an individual or family.
I don't see poor people doing that, because everyone wants a better life and more money. You seem liberal to me, so I don't know why you seem to believe that most people on welfare are 'welfare queens'. That just isn't the case. Most of them are working poor trying to make ends meet, and if they make more money and the government cuts their benefits due to means testing then UBI becomes the better option. Also, UBI is no-strings-attached money. It's not SNAP, which people often are ashamed to use. There's no government oversee checking in on how you're spending the money. It gives you freedom.
What do you mean by "And that number is way more than 1k for the 1%."?
All the bureaucrats and infrastructure that goes into means testing costs more than throwing some spare change at billionaires. Social security costs alone are like 2 billion a year I think, and the country has less than a thousand billionaires,so giving them all 1,000 bucks brings the cost to 12 million a year.
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@TheRealNihilist
UBI is not that good. It is not going to help the people who need it because they would have to drop existing welfare programmes to get UBI
This misunderstands the whole point of UBI. It will help those people in two ways: if they do start making more money and pull themselves out of poverty, they can start taking UBI, as it's not means tested and it also has little administrative overhead and is a no-strings-attached cash infusion. This means that instead of getting kneecapped as their income rises, they can transition to UBI and have an incentive to rise all the way to the middle class. The main way, however, is that it will tie consumer economies to people instead of money. Right now economic growth occurs in areas where people with money live because there is a big consumer economy, and economically depressed areas like the ghetto and small rural towns spiral further into poverty as their most skilled people leave for more affluent areas. These people can't get loans because they have no capital, and they can't leave because they have no capital and property values where they live are in the shitter. With UBI, a consumer market is immediately created in all of those places to the tune of $1,000 a person, which stimulates small businesses and local artisans and makes it easier for people to pull themselves out of poverty and find meaningful work. It spreads the wealth out of the suburbs, super-affluent coastal cities, and gentrified hipster dens.
People like Jeff Bezos are getting a free 1k. That 1k could have gone to a person who needs it more.
Ask yourself this: Republicans, who want to privatize social security, often try to get rich people to be exempted from receiving Social Security. Democrats vote to stop that from happening. Why is that? It's because, even though rich people receive SS, SS is still a net transfer away from the rich towards to more poor. But as long as everyone receives it, it remains popular and is politically difficult to attack. By making it a naked wealth transfer from the rich to the poor, you instantly make it more politically attackable. You aren't really giving Jeff Bezos $1,000 dollars a month, because the VAT that will fund UBI is going to hit him like a truck, to the tune of billions of dollars. But if UBI is universal, even the upper middle class will defend it, because they will be receiving it. If it isn't, then the rich and middle classes will oppose and undermine it. Also, means testing causes huge bureaucratic bloat. The upkeep cost of that bloat is also money that could be going to people who need it. And that number is way more than 1k for the 1%.
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@spacetime
You're not wrong, but what you're advocating is a fundamental restructuring of the way our society is organized -- it's never gonna happen unless some sort of large-scale catastrophe burns the current structure to the ground. I guess I just prefer to think within the bounds of the current structure.
Talk to anyone living one hundred years ago about the 'current structure' and they would call you insane. There's no such thing as a persistent structure, it's always changing. I just want it to change for the better. That doesn't require a disaster, it can happen incrementally as well.
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@TheRealNihilist
So a right-wing populist? Trump is not one by the way.
I'm YangGang. I'm an economic populist and a social traditionalist, but right now I think that it's more important to tackle the economic side, because capitalism destroys traditional economies via Schumpeter's gale. If the Dems nominate an economic populist I'll vote for them, if they don't I'll vote Trump.
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@TheRealNihilist
Then where are you? Centre right or far right?
I may want to send the world back to the Middle Ages, but I'm no racist. The things that Crowder used to say about people of color in his older, deleted videos chill me to the core. And we all know what sort of atrocities Candace Owens can inspire, and how much she admires genocidal maniacs like Hitler. And Shapiro wrote this genocidal screed: https://www.creators.com/read/ben-shapiro/06/07/the-radical-evil-of-the-palestinian-arab-population. I just want to hang bankers and go back to the Latin Mass =(
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@disgusted
Lol nice prison colony buddy. America isn't any better; France may be dead but America was stillborn.
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@thett3
I’m gonna respectfully disagree here. I was just reading in Peasants into Frenchmen about how once mechanized agriculture arrived, the harvest festivals immediately disappeared because the holiday became divorced from the work whose end they used to be celebrating. That’s not to say that modern capitalistic office work or driving a truck are these wonderful things, but people absolutely need to feel like they are contributing to the continuation of their existence...if every day is a holiday, no day is
It's not labor that I'm against or see as unnecessary, it's employment. The state of selling one's labor for a wage. Typically peasants didn't do that; they worked to pay rents and were able to keep a portion of their harvests directly. Laboring is part of being human, and I don't think that most people would stop if the condition of employment ended. Rather, I see the institution of employment as a restriction on human labor because it depends on the exclusive control of the means of production to propagate the power of the ruling class. I think that if we don't start looking at alternative models, we're going to slide into a horrifying, senseless techno-dystopia.
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I'm far right, and Steven Crowder, Candace Owens, and Ben Shapiro radicalized me. These hateful extremists are far too violent and malicious even for me; I disavow them all.
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@spacetime
Potential counterpoint: the psychological benefits of employment go well beyond "fulfillment" -- it's more about (1) providing a sense of routine & structure in people's day-to-day lives, and (2) forcing people to get out of their houses and interact with the outside world.
I don't think it actually provides either of those benefits. People leave their houses on their days off; they don't need work to do so. And most jobs provide no sense of routine or structure; they mostly provide stress and degradation, because under a capitalist system working a job means having your well-being subordinated to the caprices of another person, a person who was likely subjected to selective pressures which favor sociopathy. I think that if you scratch the surface you'll find that both of them are bullshit; I mean who honestly thinks that people need work to socialize when most holidays have, historically and presently, been reserved for socializing? If anything, work breeds insularity because it expends a person's social energies on absolutely toxic human contact.
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@spacetime
Ancient Rome actually had a grain dole to help deal with an oversupply of labor due to slavery and it kept them functional for centuries; it's a tried and true method. I don't think that full employment is attainable or even desirable; you were right when you said that it was largely drilled into us through conditioning. There's nothing fulfilling about working and not owning the product of your labor because a vanishingly small caste of plutocrats control the means of production. What people need to do is develop a parallel economy to the automated one making more expensive goods by hand; automation actually removes the problem that technology and economies of scales present because if you have a system like UBI then the revenue generated by the automated economy is poured into the craft economy. You can have the best of both worlds.Yeah, it's basically impossible to predict how such a drastic lifestyle change would play out on a societal level. That's why it's much safer to stick with what we know and pursue a full employment economy (to the extent that doing so is possible).
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@thett3
Stopping technological advancement is a good way to get curbed stomped in a few decades by countries that don’t. There is no easy solution
This is why we need to send the entire world back to the stone age. My Bond villain org has a few openings, come interview at our volcano base.
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@spacetime
If the goal is a full employment economy, then heavily regulating technological advancement is an absolute necessity. If it turns out we were wrong and there actually are more jobs getting created than automated, then we can always loosen up the regulations in the future.And I still am sympathetic to the idea of striving for a full employment economy. It would be the most socially constructive and fiscally responsible system of income distribution. I just don't know how realistically attainable it is.
Why don't we just set a bunch of nukes off in the upper atmosphere?
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Everyone say 'thank you Saudi Arabia!' So glad we put them in power; there may be violent terror movements destroying timeless cultural heritage and butchering religious minorities around the globe, but at least Israel is a bit more cozy!
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@Greyparrot
Doesn't matter. Earth will end in 12 years.
God I hope so.
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@Snoopy
Krugman is an insufferable grifter; that's why he thrives as both an economist and a journalist.Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as an Op-Ed columnist. He is distinguished professor in the Graduate Center Economics Ph.D. program and distinguished scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center at the City University of New York. In addition, he is professor emeritus of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School
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@spacetime
Do you believe that nude wrestling should be included in the curriculum?
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@TheRealNihilist
I don't think I need to tell you but I will tell you anyway. I disagree with your position. Is there anything more you would like to add?
What are you implying? Are you one of those people who think that Israel gunning down the lifeboats of the USS Liberty or selling American military technologies makes them a less than stellar ally? Or do you for some reason think that Crowder is an astroturfed shill for a deeply entrenched American oligarchy? Do you have a problem with Prager U, that bastion of fearless American conservatives, fiercely defending our great traditions of predatory usury and low corporate tax rates? If so, you can just get out! America, love her or leave her baby! Thanks to Prager U and Mr. Crowder, I can sleep soundly knowing that our child drag queen strippers will be paying the lowest personal income tax rate in recorded history. BOMB IRAN BOMB IRAN BOMB IRAN BOMB IRAN
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I'm a latino campus conservative, and I watch CRTV boldly. <3 Israel <3
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@Greyparrot
What is truly sad is how there is no French culture. No Culture that you can identify as being exclusively French anymore. Multiculturalism has infested France to such a degree that it's now a conglomeration of warring tribes and city-districts.Macron admitted the reality in this sad farewell to France and what it means to call yourself "French."“There is no such thing as French culture. There is culture in France, and it is diverse. It is not French culture.”—Emmanuel Macron
This began with the French Revolution and its immediate antecedents. When a country surrenders its soul to pursue material wealth and martial power, it enslaves itself to usurers and sets in motion a creeping corruption. In time, all of that country's immaterial treasures are corroded by this poison, and the material things which sprang from those intangible structures that we call 'culture' also crumble. Even the people themselves decay, both morally and as a physical population. Multiculturalism isn't the cause of this problem; when a tree dies, other things make use of its husk. And France died long ago. So did England and Germany, and much of the West is rushing to join them.
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They always have, it's just become more intense. Look at the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It's their business model: you aren't they're customer. You're their product. Their customers are their advertisers, so they will always serve corporate interests above the interests of the people, and corporate interests have also bought and paid for our government,
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@DebateArt.com
I know how to fix the former and not so sure how to fix the latter.
In a bit of poetic justice, we just have to start a spambot campaign.
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The most disgusting part is that he was clearly willing to send two innocent guys to jail over this. He was eager to testify when the cops told them that they had two men in custody, and backed out when he realized that it was the Nigerian brothers whom they had arrested.
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@Vader
I like that
Together we will heal the Great Schism and then expel the retards from DART.
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I humbly accept the extended offer of head modship. I promise to ban anyone whom I dislike, capriciously remove votes, and enforce rigid catholic morals on all posters.
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