> Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better
Let me translate
“you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.”
I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research why it was created - not just wikipedia, get some books published between the 20 to 60s. When was public education first introduced at scale? When was eugenics promoted in the United States?
The 1910s - 1920s was the beginning of the major authoritarian and progressive movements in the United States. Read about the history of Woodrow Wilson.
At the end of the day, the United States during the 20s was losing its independence already. It was openly talked about on higher-class circles.
In that context all these predictions are really aspirations.
That said, I think the United States is still one of the most free and diverse countries on the planet. Has its issues and can 100% improve. But the same people and families who are part of the WEF are the same families / people in the 1910s - 1920s promoting the same general ideas.
It’s probably a waste of time to argue this, but the arguments for central banking were the same as the arguments put forth by Alexander Hamilton. More stability, greater resilience, etc.
The arguments against it were vague references to tyranny, orchestrated by people whose wealth is generated from resource extraction and inherited wealth.
Inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer into the upper class without most people realizing it. Wealth, be it institutions or individuals, will always push for central banking as it entrenches their power.
“Inflationary monetary policy” is wealth transfer to the government (which they're then supposed to spend on common infrastructure, and other collaborative projects that everybody agrees on but nobody wants to shell out for unless everyone else is too). If the government is supporting the upper class and leaving everyone else to rot, no monetary policy will fix the issue.
I think this is supposed to be true, but nowadays when the wealthy mostly hold assets that have real value, like real estate and equities, as opposed to USD in a bank account, I'm not sure how well it works.
Sadly, my internet degree in armchair economics doesn't give me the ability to come up with a functioning tax system (however much I think I can beat the status quo) so I have no further pearls of wisdom.
Is this really the case? Inflation favors debtors over creditors, the upper class tends to be the latter not the former. While it is the case that the value of savings goes down, the lower class are much less likely to save.
Nobody owes more money than the rich. This is true of countries as well.
“Wealth” as most people think of it comes from power over money more than from the absolute value of net worth.
I had a lot of credit card debt in University. I was the richest person my friends knew. That money gave me access to people and opportunities I would not have had otherwise. Today, I owe a million dollars ( mostly mortgage ) but am considered quite well off I think. Don’t get me wrong, I am far from wealthy but I am probably the “richest” person in my family.
In University I used to joke that if you gave $50,000 to a penniless man with nothing, he would have $50,000 ( be doing pretty well ) whereas if you gave it to me I would be broke and it would not change my life at all. Today, I guess it would be several hundred thousand instead but otherwise still totally true.
If your average Latin American country was able to borrow as much per person as the US owes, they could build roads and factories and hospitals and universities and chip foundries and be instantly wealthy. The only problem is who is going to lend it to them?
I think you're mistaking wealth with purchase of luxury goods. If someone has no money, and borrows to buy a fancy set of clothes they might be perceived as wealthy by onlookers but they still have no money. Worse, even, as the interest on that loan will make them even poorer to the point of having a negative net worth. If you owe more than you own, you are not wealthy as you have negative net worth. Inflation someone in your situation precisely because they aren't actually wealthy: they owe more than they own.
This is exactly my point: someone who borrowed money for, say, university or to buy a house or a car is helped by inflation. By comparison wealthier people who are more likely to have bought those assets outright, are not. And the wealthiest people who are - directly or indirectly - the ones lending out money to other people see their wealth transferred to the first group.
Some debtors and people who own hard assets benefit from inflation.
People with more ephemeral assets and in service business are harmed by inflation. The service sectors in particular are full of low quality, debt-laden companies who can’t withstand interest driven financial stress.
It's not the case, but people keep wringing their hands about how inflation robs the poor of the ~$500 they have in their savings accounts, while ignoring how much it helps the middle-class mortgage owner who is in fixed-rate debt for a million dollars.
They get away with it because they don't make the distinction between price inflation and asset inflation. The cost of bread doubling is a huge problem for the poor, but means little to everyone else. The cost of assets doubling doesn't matter to the poor, because they have never, and will never save enough money to buy assets. The cost of assets doubling matters greatly against a yuppie who is trying to buy a home. The cost of assets doubling matters greatly in favor of someone who bought a home last week.
Inflation sucks for you if you earn minimum wage, because half the country thinks that raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation means will bring about the apocalypse. Inflation doesn't matter much to you if you're in a high-demand industry, with wages rising to match it. Inflation sucks for you if you're not working, but doesn't matter to you if you are, and there's a labour shortage, which increases your wage bargaining power.
If inflation robs the poor person of the $500 and helps the middle class person with a mortgage.... all other things being equal, we transferred wealth from the poor person to the middle class person. yay, with me so far?
By the same account, if the middle class person is helped a little bit by inflation, (but also has some cash) the rich person who is leveraged many times over into 10 properties, and has most of their wealth in equities (which themselves are leveraged because of corporate debt) is going to be even better off after the increase in money supply.
Their share of the pie grew and the middle class persons maybe grew, but not relative to the rich person. Therefore, that is wealth transfer.
The majority of US equities is held by the upper class and corporate debt dwarfs consumer debt (including mortgages).
But you're missing the bigger picture: the rich who issues mortgages (or more likely, has stake in a real estate company) is having their wealth transferred to the lender. Most wealthy people loan more than they owe. If you owe more than to loan out then by definitely you're not wealthy, your net worth is negative. Similarly, a poor person who owes $20,000 on an auto loan, whose car is now worth $25,000 just saw a significant gain.
Inflation helps people who owe more than they lend out (most poor and middle class people). People who lend out more than they owe, directly or indirectly through stake in companies that do lending, are the ones experiencing less profit because of inflation.
You're right that the banking system is a little more complicated than I made it out to be, but let's ignore that for now. You agree that the majority of the fortune 50 is holds more debt than credit, right?
We don't have to speculate about how much debt rich people have, you can look at what % of equities is owned by the upper class and you can go compare consumer debt to corporate debt.
Now as to the banking system, there's a little bit of a feedback loop here because they're really the ones creating money, so no they're not really a net creditor either. I owe my bank 700k on my house, but that's new money being created in some respects.
> You agree that the majority of the fortune 50 is holds more debt than credit, right?
No. Not at all. Apple, #3 on the list for example, has hundreds of billions its loaning out because it has nothing better to do with its excess cash [1]. Almost every company on that list has positive total equity, some on them on the orders of hundreds of billions of dollars.
> We don't have to speculate about how much debt rich people have, you can look at what % of equities is owned by the upper class and you can go compare consumer debt to corporate debt.
I'm really baffled at what you mean by this? Yes, the rich own most equity. But how do you interpret this has having more debt? Equity isn't debt, it's ownership in a company.
> Now as to the banking system, there's a little bit of a feedback loop here because they're really the ones creating money, so no they're not really a net creditor either. I owe my bank 700k on my house, but that's new money being created in some respects.
Sort of? Banks don't get to regulate currency supply, the Fed does. It's true that banks leverage more than they have in their reserve, but that doesn't necessarily increase the money supply.
And my point is if you owe 700k on your house and inflation doubles (all prices go up 2x, but so do all wages) then this is very good for you. You effectively got a house for half the price. If you are a multi-millionaire real estate mogul who's writing mortage loans, then this not good for you. That money invested in the home loan isn't even going to keep up with inflation.
Thanks for the detailed reply, we're really getting into the meat of it here in this debate.
"has hundreds of billions its loaning out because it has nothing better to do with its excess cash "
That's not really being a creditor if you're investing in something that doesn't cap the upside. Likely apple's fund is investing into companies that will benefit from inflation, and if in my contrived example the money supply doubles their valuation in said company doubles.
It's really fixed rate loans that are 'creditors', not investment firms. Some googling tells me they also have ~230 billion in outstanding debt. So I think it's safe to say in this example they're a net debtor.
>But how do you interpret this has having more debt?
By proxy through being invested in corporations that themselves take out debt to invest in money making ventures.
>Sort of? Banks don't get to regulate currency supply, the Fed does.
Banks ARE the Fed! The local federal reserve banks aren't themselves buying assets its nationally chartered banks that are required to be part of the fed that are participating in this dance.
>If you are a multi-millionaire real estate mogul who's writing mortgage loans, then this not good for you.
Most multi-millionaire real estate moguls who are writing mortgage loans know this, which is why they sell them to the federal government or other government institutions.
> If inflation robs the poor person of the $500 and helps the middle class person with a mortgage.... all other things being equal, we transferred wealth from the poor person to the middle class person. yay, with me so far?
No, I'm not with you, because it's not the poor person who is fronting a million bucks in cash that the middle class person borrows, in order to buy the house.
For the obvious reason that he doesn't have a million dollars to lend out.
FYI, corporate debt is ~60% of household debt in the United States. (~10T vs 15T). Corporate cash balances are ~4T, and household cash balances are ~5T. [1] Net corporate debt is ~6T, and net household debt is ~10T.
You look at these numbers, and you tell me - who benefits more from having debt inflated away?
Your contrived example very conveniently excludes what inflation buys (Infrastructure, public spending)[1], and also who pays for the majority of it (The lender - who happens to be neither of the two people in your example.)
So yes, if we have an incorrect contrived example that doesn't even attempt to serve as a proxy the ground facts, and we ignore half the consequences of it, yes, of course, we can draw whatever conclusion you want.
Still not with you.
[1] Yes, obviously, its possible for a government to spend that money on stupid shit. It's a good incentive to elect ones that spend it on useful things.
>our contrived example very conveniently excludes what inflation buys
Yes I did this on purpose because you seemed to misunderstand some very basics of economics. That poor folks holding cash has wealth indirectly transferred to debtors who are leveraged into assets is not a controversial economic theory. It's fucking basic math.
So once the contrived example made sense to you your first response is to move the goalpost completely and talk about something unrelated?
We're not talking about the necessities of monetary policy we're talking about the effects, please focus on the relevant parts of a debate instead of jumping around to avoid conceding a (very basic) issue.
As an aside, you picked infrastructure as your main deflection point? Do you have any idea what % of US revenue is spent on infrastructure compared to everything else?
You also seem to misunderstand per capita vs. aggregate. Do you think if poor people have as much money in aggregate as one rich person that means they're rich? In the same way, comparing all outstanding consumer debt (of which the vast majority of mortgages) is not helping your argument, you'll have to show me a breakdown that shows on average a poor person is more often a net debtor.
You also need to distinguish debt into assets vs. depreciating assets. Using leverage on stock is not the same as buying nikes with a high interest credit card.
You're still missing the part where its not poor folks who hold cash. The bottom quartile owns next to zero cash. All that an average person in that position owns is the clothes on their back, their personal effects, and maybe a shitty beater car.
The rest of your argument unravels, because you've based it on this fundamentally flawed assumption.
You seem to be all over the place, I picked $500 cash because YOU used that as an example. Do you remember? Scroll up a bit.
>The rest of your argument unravels, because you've based it on this fundamentally flawed assumption.
No, it's not flawed, it's not my argument, it's logic and economic theory that anyone without some weird learning disability can follow.
If there are two groups of people and you give them both newly created money, but one group more money, the group that got less is worse off. Just because number go up doesn't mean they're better off.
All things are not equal. I know someone who was the CEO of a small hospital network.
When he retired, his compensation was greater than the sum of salary for the entire company. The company paid for his Tesla lease, but orderlies making $12/hr had a uniform deposit deducted from their first few checks.
Something like 70% of the population has no savings of any kind.
You know that the arguments about poor grandma with $500 life savings are bullshit, because everyone making them would happily let grandma die for a buck.
The only reason resource extraction types care about inflation is that most use debt to avoid taxation, and increase interest rates hurt their return on assets. Because the perversion of the US Senate has happened, we care more about corn companies, oil drillers, etc than anyone else.
That's not really correct. What's correct through is that the bottom 80% don't receive enough interest to break even on interest expenses. I.e. they pay more interest than they receive back. This is the primary driver of inequality.
And this is true for everything. For housing, for stocks, for lent out money.
Deflation and inflation are bad because they make people speculate on the currency in either way. Inflation discourages paying off debt. Deflation encourages hoarding. Both of them are harmful because they create a self reinforcing feedback loop.
A negative interest rate forces money to circulate and it encourages you to pay off debts. Thereby it eliminates both inflation and deflation.
I'd imagine that wealthy individuals are highly leveraged. In other words, rather than selling assets to buy things they take loans against those assets to buy things. This (1) prevents ever having to pay tax (2) gives them benefits from inflation and (3) gives them benefits from low interest rates as their assets appreciate faster than their interest rate consumes money
Most sources I read indicate the opposite: poor and middle class people are much less likely to be debtors rather than creditors. They're more likely to have an auto loan rather than own a car outright. Likewise, they're more likely to have a mortgage on their home rather than own it. The wealthy, by comparison, are more likely to invest their money, issuing loans to other people.
> inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer to the upper class without people realizing it.
Going to need some evidence to back up that statement.
Without centralized banking you essentially have no set policy one way other the other. I can understand why one would take issue with the current governance structure, but I don’t agree that letting money randomly fluctuate with no mechanisms for intervention to be a good thing.
In a nutshell if I have enough assets that generate lets say for example 6% return and can borrow cheaply like at 1% then I can't lose. Money makes money unlike the poor who borrow at 19%. Inflation benefits the wealthy because their assets go up in value and then that "perceived wealth" gives them access to more cheap money as collateral.
The absolute end to that line of reasoning is that there shouldn’t be any state at all.
Why does the state need to “keep the peace”? It does so through a monopoly on force. Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit?
The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making, ie the rule of law, consent of the governed. I realize I am in the minority in modern day America though.
No, the absolute end is that the state should enforce negative rights, not positive ones. Liberty is the freedom from interference by or obligation to other people.
> Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit?
They can, so long as they do peacefully. What the state provides is simply due process for the resolution of disputes, and the expectation that this process will be used instead of violence.
> The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making
This is democracy, which is somewhat tangential here. You can have a decidedly un-free democracy or (more hypothetically) a very free dictatorship.
“It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.” - Ronald Reagan
A free dictatorship would be one where the dictator's powers are very limited, but he is not democratically elected.
> liberty as non domination, one isn’t subject to the arbitrary will of another.
Yes exactly. I just see things like "interfering in private negotiations/transactions between free, equal people" as fundamentally authoritarian/dominating.
If interference with private transactions is fundamentally authoritarian, I still don’t understand how you see any sort of state as compatible with liberty.
Yes yes, “keeping the peace” but how is such an authority deemed to be legitimate? Who gets to define due process? How are they funded if not by taxation?
At the end of the day I don’t understand how you aren’t just an anarchist.
The state is compatible with liberty in so far as it acts to secure the liberty of its citizens. Again, liberty here meaning, basically, freedom from violence by other people. A state which acts to protect its citizens liberty is legitimate (in my view) regardless of how its members come to authority. Democracy (in one form or another) seems to be the least-worst option for administering this state (defining the process, etc.), but to me, is it not the source of its legitimacy.
You just said that interference with private transactions was by definition a violation of liberty, so any outside action of the state would be at best a violation of liberty to secure liberty, somehow. Which, is somewhat nonsensical. There is no well defined liberty math.
If that is your reasoning then consider barter vs money exchange.
With money one party has to borrow it first and pay interest. With barter nobody is paying interest. The money lender is clearly abusing his "authority" over money by excluding it from the economy. He uses that power to charge interest and thereby render economic activity that can only cover its own costs unprofitable.
Here is an example. I sell you an apple for $1 and you sell me a banana for $1. We are both better off because I like bananas you like apples. However, if I had to borrow the money first from a bank with interest, then the trade would not be profitable. This is the real source of unemployment. Artificial minimum profitability.
Well, none of this has anything to do with liberty until some force is used. What happens if you just fail to pay the money lender? If he can imprison or enslave you then you're absolutely right. If all he can do is spread the word that you're not likely to repay your loans then it's not a matter of liberty.
Money is just cut paper, a convenient medium of exchange. If you have bad credit, your liberty is not in danger. The only thing in jeopardy is the willingness of others to cooperate/transact with you. Since they don't owe you anything to begin with, the point is moot.
That reductionist approach to liberty is a mirage for teenage boys and hermits. If I can do whatever I want, you can’t.
The United States would have been pushed into a deep depression, but for JP Morgan’s vacation plans being a little different. Early 20th century America was not a radical place, the fact that the Federal Reserve was created underlies how fubar the system was.
By what metric? For who? Surely it was good for some and bad for others, much like any other place. How comfortable people are and how happy they are are fundamentally unrelated to how free they are.
> how fubar the system was
All we basically disagree about is how the general welfare clause is to be interpreted. It had a narrow interpretation for most of US history, and then a broad one starting in 1936 with United States v. Butler. The US was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, given that so many people immigrated there. I don't see why a continued narrow interpretation would be catastrophic.
"How comfortable people are and how happy they are are fundamentally unrelated to how free they are."
That would be false.
"The US was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, given that so many people immigrated there."
That would be false, too, unless you were very wealthy. Just because it was better than, say, starving in Ireland does not mean it was "good". Source: My father's father was a sharecropper.
I do not know any single word or short phrase that describes "the freedom [you are] referring to", since as far as I can tell, the concept you use is known only among certain libertarians where it is called "freedom". Perhaps it would be "the absence of a hypothetical[0] threat of legally sanctioned violence from 'the government' in response to actions outside of a certain limited range". (Personally, if we're discussing the threat of violence, I am much more concerned by non-legally sanctioned violence from 'the government'[1][2], where by "much more" I mean "not very much at all" since violence and the threat thereof is actually fairly low on the useful methods of coercion scale.
Now, if you are interested, my personal definition of "freedom" is along the lines of (OED, 1978 ed., "Freedom (4)") "the state of being allowed to act without hindrance or restraint" with the additional proviso of something like "...not infringing excessively on the freedom of others..." and made all lovely and transitively closed by the Kantian version of the golden rule.
[0] Before you get all wrapped up around "hypothetical", consider: let's say your state health officials declare a mask mandate and you, like all rational people, do not wish to obey; you go into a convenient Half-Price Books mask-free. Many freedom-loving libertarians seem to believe that the next event would be a member of the 101st Airborne popping out of a convenient closet with an M1A1 Abrams under each arm and reduce you to a fine mist for your temerity. What would much more likely happen would be a store employee or manager asking you to leave. Unfortunately, that presents a problem for our libertarian friend---at that point, you are technically trespassing and even the fiercest libertarian would say the use of force against you is legitimate, no?
[1] What is the dividing line between 'the government' and any other human institution, and why do you regard it as more dangerously coercive than, say, your family?
[2] Y'all do realize Rand Paul doesn't want people who vote Democratic to have their votes counted? The methods for that are technically legal, I suppose, but it's not really very far from "round'em up and shoot'em" (which would be illegal) in the grand spectrum of historical human behavior.
I'd take my definition from The Declaration of the Rights of Man[1]:
> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.
> you go into a convenient Half-Price Books mask-free
The problem with this scenario isn't the liberty of the patron, but the liberty of the proprietor. Mask mandates have been varyingly enforced, but generally the government will issue extremely stiff fines or force closure of noncomplying businesses. I'm of the opinion that, like my house, under what conditions I choose to admit people to my business is none of anyone else's concern. I support the right to discriminate against masked and unmasked, shirted and shirtless, tall or short, and any other arbitrary criteria that the proprietor solely chooses.
> What is the dividing line between 'the government' and any other human institution
The government is the sole authority which is able to legitimately use force against you. They also govern public spaces, where you have a right to be, and reach into private interactions. If your family tells you that you have to wear a mask to see them, you can tell them to go to hell and face no consequences. If they beat you up or take your property, you have recourse: you can call the police or take them to court. None of this is true if the action (deemed "legitimate") is taken by the government. They can kidnap you, confine you against your will, and seize your property, and you have no higher power to hear your case.
> but it's not really very far from "round'em up and shoot'em"
I hope you're not comparing election fraud with mass murder. I would implore you to watch some videos of actual mass murders and see if you change your mind. Even a beheading video would do it I imagine.
That's one definition of liberty, but not the only one. I'd propose the alternative: Liberty is the freedom to take actions in society as it exists. Therefore a society that had greater prosperity has greater Liberty.
You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not?
Keeping the peace means enforcing nonviolent interaction and providing due process for conflict resolution. Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power. They are different words for a reason. You can be very poor and very free, or very comfortably enslaved. Liberty is fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you.
Your definition of liberty here is getting really tangled.
If liberty is “fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you” then how is having a set monetary policy incompatible with liberty as long as it comes from a “legitimate” source of power?
Because compliance with that monetary policy is enforced with.. force? You must pay taxes in USD, and if you don't you go to jail. The government also conveniently controls the USD supply, which allows the to debase it as they see fit, forcing you to obtain a set amount of USD per year to pay taxes. If the government accepted tax revenue in gold or bitcoin or anything else they don't totally control, you'd be absolutely right.
But we all agree that the government is legitimate, and so it's use of force is legitimate. Additionally, if the government forced you to pay it $1000 a year, even if you could deposit that in gold, you would still be forced to pay. The currency seems irrelevant.
It seems like what your saying is you believe taxation is legitimate, but requiring taxes to be pain in USD is illegitimate. Which, like, is just your opinion man (and makes the whole argument circular) I don't see any generic argument that makes taxation compatible with your definition of liberty but taxation in USD incompatible". I don't see really any generic definition of liberty that would distinguish between those two actions.
I'm rate limited, but to your example below of a currency no one could obtain, the government could equivalently apply a greater than 100% wealth tax. Or the government could define all speech as force or any number of other things. A capricious government can do bad things yes, but requiring taxes to be paid in a particular currency doesn't give them any more powerful ways to be capricious.
The currency seems irrelevant, but it's not. Imagine my government in Tyrannia only accepted taxes in a currency which was impossible to obtain except by stealing it (also illegal). The government would then hold every citizen in a catch-22, allowing it to arbitrarily decide whom to imprison for not paying taxes and who to imprison for stealing the currency required to pay them.
It is though, since they can debase that self same currency as they see fit. This fundamentally changes the playing field when negotiating your taxes with the government. The only reason USD has any value at all is because it's what everyone has to pay taxes to the US government in, and what US bonds are paid in.
What you’re saying is essentially “imagine a government with the power to create laws that allow arbitrary imprisonment with no recourse, that would be tyrannical”, which, yes, but that only has to do with the currency because that’s what you chose for your example.
Said government could pass a law stating that all citizens must be in two places at once, and achieve the same effect.
As mentioned in a previous comment, I'm saying "Imagine a government without broad power over general welfare". This was the US government until 1936 with United States v. Butler. I don't think it would be a catastrophe to reverse this decision again. It seems that in spite of best efforts, the US has failed to preserve the very meaning of liberty, as it was initially envisioned, from total deterioration even in its very definition.
The material distinction when the United States was founded wasn’t whether the state in general had broad power over the general welfare, but whether the federal government would. State government did have such power.
Any centralized authority with a monopoly on force is going to have to levy taxes. Otherwise you’d end up with people just refusing to pay because they didn’t get the judgements they desire.
If there is a state _at all_ there is force involved. I don’t really understand what you believe is possible here. What you’re discussing is tantamount to assuming that American traditions of due process just exist in a state of nature when they absolutely do not.
I believe it's possible to have a state whose powers and authority are fundamentally limited. I also believe that was the original intention of US. I agree taxes must be levied. I just disagree it's legitimate to levy them for most of what they are spent on today.
If I ask myself "what should the state be allowed to do?", it's basically answered by "what would I be comfortable holding a gun to someone's head for?". To take a popular example: If it's wrong to hold a gun to a doctor's head in order to force them to treat a patient (which I think it is), and it's wrong to hold a gun to a bystander's head to force them to pay the doctor, then it's wrong to fund healthcare with taxation.
Stealing from your primary food supply isn’t really what I had in mind when I was referring to petty theft. If anything I meant stealing a small amount from a significant excess.
> I'd have no problem holding a gun to someone's head in order to extract what compensation is due to me under a lawful agreement.
So if a doctor enters into a contractual agreement with the state to provide healthcare, then it’s ok?
Contracts should have monetary penalties only - you can't sign yourself into slavery. If the doctor breaches a contract, and the contract has provisions for what he will pay in breach, then he must pay it or have it seized (with force). We've long banned debtors prisons for good reason. There's no holding a gun to anyone's head required unless they try to stop you from seizing property to which you have a lawful claim.
So as long as I write the laws and excite the laws I can do whatever I want. Taxation is lawful because the government duly passes laws asserting such claims. Taxation therefore cannot be theft.
Unless there is some definition of “lawful” that exists outside of writing and enforcing the laws. Which begs the question according to who? In this instance that someone seems to be you.
Taxation isn't theft, it's robbery, since it involves the threat of force. The only remaining question is "What services is it ethical to rob people in order to fund?". My answer is "Not nearly as many as most people today suppose".
Anything that we enact into law is "lawful", it's circular reasoning. It doesn't say anything about the ethics of the situation. If 80% of people agree democratically to murder the other 20%, it will be lawful, but does it suddenly become ethical? And if they change the word so that it's "lawful execution" does that make it OK?
In the same vein, I'm using the common definition of "robbery" without any legitimizing window dressing. I'm asking "under what circumstances is it ethical to rob people?" and "under what circumstances is it ethical to enslave them?"
Surely some exist. For instance, being drafted to fight a war and being enslaved are basically equivalent in terms of lived experience. We've decided that yes, in order to defend society against existential threats it's ethical to enslave people. I don't disagree, and would like to point out adherence to the maxim of violating liberty only in direct defense of liberty.
But this does frame the draft to fight WWII and the Vietnam War differently. It's much harder to make the case that North Vietnam was an existential threat to US liberty, so drafting/enslaving people to fight there seems much less ethical.
Following this line of reasoning, the question is "Is it ethical to rob people to pay doctors?". And since lacking a doctor doesn't deprive anyone of liberty, the answer must be "No".
You'll note that all of this can basically be derived from the following (from the Declaration of the Rights of Man)
> 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights...
> 4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights...
By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to prevent people from using force in disallowed ways, right?
> Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power.
I didn't say they were synonyms. I said prosperity was a prerequisite to liberty[1]. A poor person isn't free to inhabit a house, and if they try to do so the state will use force to prevent or remove them.
[1]: actually I said all else equal, more prosperity means more liberty. To use your example (which I don't really buy, a rich slave is sort of not a thing), a "rich" slave is able to purchase better food for themselves than a poor slave whereas a poor slave would need to resort to theft, and risk force as a consequence.
> A homeless person can be more free than a person confined in a mansion, can they not?
Sure. But a rich homeless person is no longer homeless, and a poor person confined in their home is less free than a rich person confined on their home. You haven't addressed my point.
> Yes, since using force to compel action is basically the definition of slavery and decidedly un-free.
Right, so when I said
> You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not
I was correct. The government decides which things are good or not (using force in disallowed ways) and prevents those. Generally governments high in libetry also do things like punish fraud, because fraud is bad and misleading people and stealing their money...reduces liberty? Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty, and should the government even do it?
> a poor person confined in their home is less free than a rich person confined on their home
I disagree. The rich person may be more comfortable, but they are no more free. Confinement is confinement.
> Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty
Fraud is related to securing of property rights, which are a part of liberty. How free are you if people can remove the food from your pantry? Fraud as a criminal offense has been derived from "theft by false pretense". But I'm pretty sure we'd be fine if we decriminalized it and relegated it to a tort.
> I disagree. The rich person may be more comfortable, but they are no more free. Confinement is confinement.
Is level of confinement the only thing that defines slavery?
Assume the rich person and the poor person want the same thing. The rich person can acquire it. The poor person cannot (or can only do so by risking force in response).
All else equal, the rich person can do strictly more things. How are they equally free? The definition of freedom is usually something along the lines of "the ability to do things". The rich person can do more things, they're freer.
The term for what I'm describing is sometimes "freedom from want" and is a commonly considered to be a freedom/right when discussing freedoms if you look beyond liberalism as it was in 19th century. The idea being that while liberalism does a decent job of ensuring that the government doesn't oppress you, it does nothing to ensure that other people don't oppress you. Granting some standard of living to everyone ensures that you can't be taken advantage of because you have no better option, no one can treat you worse than the living standard the government provides.
> The idea being that while liberalism does a decent job of ensuring that the government doesn't oppress you, it does nothing to ensure that other people don't oppress you.
The government does this by... oppressing you, by limiting your choices and your freedom. Nature itself is oppressive. We are all born naked and hungry and at the mercy of others. This does not constitute oppression by other people, and no amount of governance can change this. All government can do is provide due process to resolve the inevitable conflicts. What is should not do it paternalistically dictate how people should interact peacefully.
It very much does if it involves limiting what terms employers and employees can agree to. And it certainly requires oppression if you're going to seize and redistribute wealth to finance the required bureaucracy.
> It very much does if it involves limiting what terms employers and employees can agree to
You don't really need to do this if you provide a strong welfare state. Provide government healthcare and benefits to all citizens equivalent to say $10 an hour, and you don't need to limit how employers and employees interact. They have the freedom to quit.
> And it certainly requires oppression
So we come back to the beginning: all taxation is oppression?
Keep in mind that my scheme actually probably involves less government force than yours. People will be less violent, requiring less respondent force, if given a minimum standard of living. So do you want the government to use more force? Or is "oppression" the issue, I can't keep up.
> You don't really need to do this if you provide a strong welfare state
Why is providing a welfare state a prerequisite here? From where do you derive the need to protect people from the total consequences of their failure or misfortune by forcing the collective to bear the burden?
> all taxation is oppression?
Of course it is - it's robbery. Just like the draft is slavery. The important question is "What circumstances make it ethical to rob/enslave people?". They do exist, but they are quite limited.
> do you want the government to use more force
It's not about degrees of force, it's about what situations force is applied to. The only acceptable application of force (read violation of liberty) is to defend liberty itself from imminent danger. Applying any degree of force to compel cooperation is indistinguishable from that degree of slavery. What's the problem with strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual interaction between people?
> From where do you derive the need to protect people from the total consequences of their failure or misfortune by forcing the collective to bear the burden?
I'll answer this with a question: you said elsewhere that its unethical to compel doctors to treat a patient. Let's assume that's the case. What happens when you are robbed by someone, shot, and your wallet is stolen, you even pass out from the shock and blood loss.
A bystander calls an ambulance. Then what? The ambulance service, the hospital (and the doctor) have no idea if you can pay for their services. Let's assume you can, you have fantastic insurance. What is the right way to resolve this situation? It seems to me your answer is that the hospital should have every right to refuse to serve people without identification (and in fact this is probably in the hospitals best interest, from a pure ROI perspective).
So do we throw our hands in the air and let some people who, by any account, don't deserve to die (they're insured, if their wallet wasn't stolen, there'd be no issue at all!) through no fault of their own, or do we protect people from the total consequence of their misfortune by providing some kind of guardrail?
A more general answer is that people, in aggregate, don't like the instability that comes from a lack of welfare state. If you provide absolutely no welfare state, and I lose my job and can't find a new one, it is very likely that the best thing for me to do is to steal from someone. And people generally speaking dislike that because unlike robbery from the government, which involves paperwork and court rooms, that kind of robbery really actually involves guns. And people seem to find suits and paperwork to be less force than guns.
So you pick your poison: a democratically controlled nonviolent robbery that you can influence and plan for, or a stochastic violent robbery that you can't control at all. Personally, I find paperwork to be less violent than a gun, but you have weird ideas about what constitutes violence, so I'm curious what you'll say.
> What's the problem with strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual interaction between people?
It doesn't exist. Is coercion voluntary? If it's violent to threaten someone's life by holding a gun to their head, why isn't it violent to withholding food they need to live (or the money they need to buy the food they need to live, or the healthcare they need to live, or the money they need for that healthcare)?
> What happens when you are robbed by someone, shot, and your wallet is stolen, you even pass out from the shock and blood loss.
You are at this point reliant on the charity (read: voluntary) of others. Even if you were identified and your insurance accepted, the paramedics or doctors can just refuse to do their jobs, for whatever reason, and face only professional consequences. You are in no way guaranteed to be treated.
Also, the insured could demand coverage for this case from their providers, with liability to their estate if they are not treated. This would force insurers to negotiate with hospitals to treat these patients rather than incur the liability.
> don't deserve to die
What do you mean "don't deserve?". If you're laying shot in the street, then clearly you're going to die soon without lots of outside intervention. This is your lot. Insurance isn't there to provide a guarantee of some outcome, it's there to reimburse as best it can after the fact.
> don't like the instability that comes from a lack of welfare state
Doing what "people like" isn't the same as being ethical.
> the best thing for me to do is to steal from someone
That depends on the risk/reward balance between stealing and figuring out how to be productive. If the punishment for robbery is severe, then chances are you'll figure out how to be useful to someone before resorting to it.
> Is coercion voluntary
Yes? If your grandmother offers you a cup of tea, insists, and will be offended if you don't take it, does that make it involuntary? She's clearly coercing you.
> why isn't it violent to withholding food they need to live
Everyone needs inputs to live, and everyone is born without the means to provide them for themselves. Therefore everyone must, at some point, enter into a negotiation with those who possess what they need. Absent any law and order, these negotiations often turn violent. All we've any right to do is make some rules around the negotiations, not prescribe universal cooperation.
> This would force insurers to negotiate with hospitals to treat these patients rather than incur the liability.
The ROI here functionally never makes sense for the insurer to do this, unless clients are paying enough to offset the cost of paying all unidentified people.
> You are in no way guaranteed to be treated.
Are you saying that this is the case today, or that this is how it would be. Because I agree with you. Despite laws that require doctors to treat you that exist today (to prevent this exact scenario), no one ever holds a gun to anyone's head. There's no need for violence. Professional (and in general civil) consequences are enough to enforce this.
> She's clearly coercing you.
Coercion requires force or threat. From me shooting you is the same as the harm from me starving you, so the threat is the same. A grandmother being upset isn't a threat, and certainly not the same level of threat, not is it force. So perhaps let's ask a different question: is choice freely given when your life is threatened?
> Doing what "people like" isn't the same as being ethical.
Utilitarians would disagree with you.
The root problem with how you approach the world is that you see any government force as worse than all force by everyone else. Like given how your approach contacts, if I coerced you to sign yourself into slavery, that's acceptable, since it meets your definition of "strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual".
If you believe government is the worse bad and nothing else can be as bad, sure that's a viewpoint. But it fails when you have other powerful organizations that hold the same power over an individual as a government does.
Imagine for a moment another extreme example where the government has a total use of force monopoly, and I have a monopoly on the water supply. You say that is unethical for the government to act against me, and also unethical for individuals to act against me, no matter what. This is true even if I use that Monopoly to enslave people or commit genocide, because I'm doing it without violence, only coercion. If that's your ethics, something's broken.
And pragmatically it's also stupid: people will lose faith in a government that fails to protect them. So a government that fails to protect its citizenship effectively will quickly cease to exist (the people with guns will desert to protect their families and tada: a new government). So once you accept that democracy is ethically good (and really even if you don't), the ethics are irrelevant. Governments must keep people happy or they will quickly cease to exist. And I subscribe to the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does. Governments try to make their citizens happy. If they don't, they'll be replaced by one which does, because that's what the people want. Your job is then to convince me, and everyone else's that sacrificing my safety is worth a government that is in your view more ethical.
My evidence is arithmetic? Someone who is leveraged with debt into assets now owns a larger piece of the pie (which we can loosely define as wealth) than they did before if the money supply increases compared to people who aren't levered into assets or just hold cash.
That depends heavily on the rollover period of said debt, along with other factors with how the debt is structured (eg variable interest rates).
Broad swaths of the middle class commonly fit within this framework as well, they leverage debt to buy houses.
The poor tend not to have mounds of cash sitting around, so the effects of inflation are only negative if there are not concurrent wage increases.
Pre central banking and stable (low) inflationary regimes, wealth has always been heavily concentrated in the upper class in the western world. The only real exception was the post war booms, which was during a time of heavy global monetary regulation.
Inflation is super complicated because it depends on what types of assets are held by whom and how susceptible those assets are to inflation. For example, high rates of inflation during/after WWII were a large contributing factor in a net reduction in wealth inequality, because much of the wealthy was heavily invested in fixed-return war bonds. Much of the rentier economy of the 19th century elite depended on predictably low (almost nonexistant) inflation in order to sustain their fortunes. Theoretically, the financial assets of today's wealthy should be somewhat less vulnerable to inflation (real returns over the last ~80 years seem to be lower during periods of high inflation but it's also sometimes hard to untangle inflation from the overall state of the economy). Ultimately, inflation is a pretty crude instrument in terms of who it affects; I think it's hard to make sweeping statements about who it's "good" for that hold up well over time.
That’s why the regulatory environment of the 20th century is important… Monetary policy that includes full employment provides benefits to the broader population.
“Hard money”, gold, Bitcoin, land, etc focused policy only benefits the return on assets for the people with those assets.
You mean interest is a wealth transfer into the upper class. The more you have, the more you get. Inflation increases interest rates which makes it even worse because it not only attacks incomes but also existing savings.
> Inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer into the upper class
No, it is a means of wealth transfer to the government without raising taxes. Where does the trillions in deficit spending come from? Inflation!
The politicians, of course, know this. But they keep up the misdirection by blaming it on greedy capitalists and/or unions.
The notion that it is for monetary stability is also propaganda. Milton Friedman in "Monetary History" showed that instability increased after the creation of the Fed.
>No, it is a means of wealth transfer to the government without raising taxes. Where does the trillions in deficit spending come from? Inflation!
Saving creates a hole in the economy, the trillions of deficit spending are a very stupid way of filling that hole. It works better than doing nothing which is why we do it.
>The notion that it is for monetary stability is also propaganda. Milton Friedman in "Monetary History" showed that instability increased after the creation of the Fed.
Uh, that is a property of capitalism. It's great at first when debts are low then it gets worse and worse.
Central banks and their role in tyranny is hardly “vague”.
They can siphon off the wealth of an entire nation by printing money. It’s an irresistible temptation that I don’t trust any man to resist long term. That kind of power shouldn’t be in the hands of any one person or organization.
>They can siphon off the wealth of an entire nation by printing money.
There are a countless other ways a country can do this and most of those are more targeted. The tax code is the most obvious example. Inflation is a flat tax of a few percentage points. If the goal is to wield power, it is much more important to control the tax code and move the income tax from 0% (generally true before the 16th Amendment in 1913) to 91% (1954-1963) or from 91% back down to 37% (the current rate). Blaming central banking as the primary cause for these issues just doesn't make sense to me.
I'm not sure the distinction you are making here. A flat tax is called that because it is flat in percentage not in nominal value. Yes, debtors will benefit more than creditors, but that doesn't mean it isn't a flat tax. Also it doesn't just impact cash which should be obvious from the last sentence. If inflation decreases the real amount owed by debtors, it also decreases the real amount that is owed to creditors, and therefore decreases the value of their investments.
> If inflation decreases the real amount owed by debtors, it also decreases the real amount that is owed to creditors, and therefore decreases the value of their investments.
I'm sure that's upsetting for wealthy people with investments
For the mom working 3 jobs at Macdonalds, as long as Macdonalds continues to pay an inflation linked salary, her debts being whittled away, that's great news.
Now if Macdonalds can cut salaries relative to inflation, that's a whole other problem.
I think you are projecting a moral or political argument into my comments. That wasn't my intention. My point is that there are more powerful levers in the government than the inflation rate.
Sure, having your debt reduced by 6% or whatever is good, but the government could also easily forgive all federally owned college debt and 100% reduction is certainly better than 6%. Increasing the minimum wage is another example. That would more directly benefit that mom with 3 jobs more than inflation.
Whatever your political goals are, there is likely a much more powerful tool to accomplish them than nudging the inflation rate up or down a few percentage points.
>It's a negative tax on debt, which poor people tend to hold. It doesn't apply to assets.
Thank you!! This is the first time I've heard someone acknowledge this since the "inflation crisis" started. Inflation is good for student debt holders.
Could be, but it makes a lot of assumptions and is loose with terminology. Monetary inflation does not equal price or wage inflation necessarily. We are definitely seeing price inflation which no longer seems to be transitory. There does seem to be wage inflation, but that is not guaranteed. So while if wage inflation keeps up for those holding debt, then yes. I wonder though if those in the position of student debt have the least leverage to take advantage of the wage inflation.
The other thing is that costs go up. The impact of this is much greater if you are poor which could also affect your ability to actually pay the loans. One has to eat after all.
So imho, it's a lot more complicated for an individual. Sure for a corporation that borrows tens of millions for a new capital expenditure it makes debt cheaper. But that may or may not translate to someone that is poor and paying off debt.
Their student debt might go down but so does their chance of ever owning a home.
They hoodwinked an entire generation of children into going six-figures in debt, made the high school diploma worthless etc.
Before:
-HS degree
-no debt
-immediately start a factory job that makes enough for an average home, 2 cars, and a spouse that doesn’t work
Now:
-4 year degree, delaying income in prime years
-graduate with a small house-worth of debt, with no house
-your new job’s earnings in real terms is barely enough to rent
-your spouse has to work too
-have to make one car work
The American people have been robbed of their prosperity and sold a bucket of lies.
"The Federal Reserve is private" is a meme at this point that is largely divorced from our usual meaning of public/private. Calling the Federal Reserve Board "private citizens" is like calling the Supreme Court Justices "private citizens". They are both officials appointed by the president, who must be confirmed by the Senate, and who collect a public salary. Any profits from the Federal Reserve go right back into the US Treasury. What more do we need to consider this part of the government?
While all supreme court justices are appointed, from my understanding only the chairman is appointed correct? Everyone that works for the fed is not necessarily appointed?
Maybe we say it is private but the government serves as the board :)
Seeing the tension over the years the Chairman, the President, and Congress implies to me that the government does not have absolute authority over the Fed.
All the board members are appointed. From their website:[1]
>The Board of Governors--located in Washington, D.C.--is the governing body of the Federal Reserve System. It is run by seven members, or "governors," who are nominated by the President of the United States and confirmed in their positions by the U.S. Senate.
Not everyone who works for the Fed is appointed, but that is also true of the Supreme Court, Congress, the FBI, or any other part of the government. The leaders are political appointees and they oversee a bureaucratic system that includes many workers who are ostensibly apolitical.
>Seeing the tension over the years the Chairman, the President, and Congress implies to me that the government does not have absolute authority over the Fed.
Once again, just like the Supreme court. Both of these entities are designed to be more independent of the day-to-day political squabbles of the president and Congress.
Financial elite finances all candidates, some of them win, the winners appoint the financial elite to be board members of the organization that is capable of printing money and giving bailouts/buying poisoned assets from said financial institutions. The money is not made from FED profits, the money is made by the financial institutions owned by the board members. What's so hard to understand about that? It's clearly a scam.
It does not only happen at the central-banking level, but it's another tool used by them.
Let me give you a similar example, not directly involving central banking, from my country. Paulo Guedes is the founder of BTG Pactual bank. He goes on and funds the candidate Jair Bolsonaro for presidency. Once elected, Bolsonaro appoints Guedes to Ministry of Economy. His monetary policies decisions makes the USD/BRL go from R$3.71 to R$5.70. November/2021 comes by and pandora papers are released. We find out the dude has almost 10 million USD stashed in offshore tax-heavens. His decisions made his personal fortune grow by 14 million BRL(equivalent to 956 years of minimum wage).
This does not involve central banking directly but the idea is the same: put the financial elite in positions that allow them to make large scale decisions to grow their personal fortunes while affecting the lives of all others. It's a scam.
>Financial elite finances all candidates, some of them win
Your entire point rests on this premise and once we accept this premise we acknowledge the entire government is already compromised. Once that happens why does the central bank matter when everything that follows could be accomplished some other way through that already compromised government? That is my fundamental point. It isn't that the central banks don't have power. It is that a central bank's power pails in comparison to the overall government. Therefore conspiracies theories about taking over the government to gain control of the central bank don't make much sense.
>Your entire point rests on this premise and once we accept this premise we acknowledge the entire government is already compromised.
I agree.
>Once that happens why does the central bank matter
I guess it matters because public awareness is necessary for us not to allow history to repeat itself. As Ford once said: "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
>I guess it matters because public awareness is necessary for us not to allow history to repeat itself.
But it is a symptom rather than a cause of the corruption. The energy spent on raising public awareness about this would likely be better served drawing attention to what we both seem to think is the underlying problem, the outsized influence that the wealthy have on the government.
No the wealthy love this because their debt becomes cheaper to service while their assets skyrockets. Inflation primarily hurts the non-asset owning poor.
The interest rates are high enough and the debt terms are short enough that they get screwed hard by relative buying power loss long before any of that matters.
Having your car loan evaporate over three years doesn't mean crap if you can't afford to make the payment after one.
I recommend reading on history of the bank of the United States. The FED was the 2nd iteration.
Also, Hamilton (who wanted a monarchy) had a lot of very authoritarian ideas and his ideas (and him generally) we’re not well liked by people supporting democracy or the formation of the republic.
It is impossible to consider that the whole of society has been created and planned in advance. To think that the upper classes manage everyone (they always did), that the schooling system produces people that are incapable of seeing the outside the box (and yet believe that they are free, nay - they 'know' it), that finance is the main weapon in the wealth extraction, that it is planned for us to move to technocracy (with a bio-medical-wallet-etc-id, tracked everywhere in spy-cities, not allowed to even leave your 110sqft micro-flat unless the computer says so), that all the disasters we face have resulted in incremental steps towards this aim (911, covid). Its a lot to consider!
That we have been harnessed and put to work creating someone else's heaven on earth (and hardcore slavery for the rest) is a bitter pill to swallow. And the techies here have recently been the greatest driver of this change. Their livelihoods do depend on it.
Anyway, good on you, for bringing some of these issues up.
Yes because it implies there is a conspiracy requiring God-like abilities to plan the long term outcomes of a multitude of decisions and actions many of which have conflicting goals.
What is more probable, that the current situation just emerged organically or that some elite group has conspired and executed flawlessly to make the world just like it is ?
There are subcontractors who work for my CM in China and I doubt they are paid much. It wasn't my plan to create wage-slaves and if I paid my CM more they would just likely pocket the difference. I'll admit I contribute to to problems you describe but that's very different than having intent and control.
Do you think that those individuals that own corporations, would be interested to gain greater control and wealth? Wouldn't it be good to transform society in a way that is most beneficial to them? Do you think that those individuals would be pretty ruthless in their execution of their plans? And that they would also try to be secretive? Of course.
Do you think that politicians can be encouraged to vote one way or another? Those on the blue team and on the reds? Given lots of money, lobbyists, etc? Or threats? I think it would be naive to think that they do not.
And if you control governmental policy, what would you work on? Education - to train obedient workers? Finance? The legal system? All of those.
Would you create or buy the media companies to ensure that your message is always provided, and that any negative exposure is squashed? Or get people talking about all the wrong things? Yes again.
Would you seek to increase dependence on government or increase people's self-reliance? Increase dependence on government, of course! What is the direction of travel do you think?
Would you even create a ready way to smear those who do raise the reality of the situation. A handy handle that allows you to dismiss those who are sharing information that you don't like. This too has been done - and the handle is 'conspiracy theorist'. This smear allows you to ignore whatever evidence might be being presented, and allow you to carry on with your day - no further investigation required!
My view is that if you have a good handle on human nature, specific goals and lots of wealth, it is actually not that hard to create the fish bowl. You will have created a class (the majority) of people who are too invested (financially, emotionally, spiritually) in the unnatural system you have provided. They will go to the schools you created, learn the values you want, just like their parents.
If you control the terrain, and provide the method that people use to "verify" information for themselves (and the method is accept the evidence free claims given, maybe occasionally double check something on Wikipedia) you can really go very far! No one checks anything - we are so invested in this we have to trust that "they've got this".
The truth is that "they" look at you and I as cattle. And they are just executing their best herd-management procedures. And - I think - they have been running things like this for a long time.
"Do you think that those individuals that own corporations, would be interested..."
I can't even get my business partner to agree with me on mundane things let alone a grand plan to shape the world regardless of wealth.
Your argument hinges on this hypothetical "you" and that is like identifying the handful of termites that coordinated the building of the colony's mound.
Besides does this mindset serve you in any way ? Even if you are right, keep in mind there is a third role: sideliner. Many financially independent people are neither cattle or rancher.
"I can't even get my business partner to agree with me on mundane things let alone a grand plan to shape the world regardless of wealth."
You don't have enough money.
"Your argument hinges on this hypothetical "you""
It does. So, do you think that politicians, businessmen - the really successful ones, are there on merit? That these are the best of us? Or the worst? Do they even have a morality?
"Besides does this mindset serve you in any way ?"
Fair question.
It doesn't serve me when it comes to finding motivation to earn more money, get my children into better schools, having a fantastic holiday, a holiday home, etc.
If you are prepared to consider that there is more to life than contorting yourself that enable you to make more money though, perhaps. I seek to uncover as much truth as I can in my way. I think my search does serve me in my attempt to live a meaningful life. Regardless of what others may say is a meaningful life.
One way to consider it, is that when we die we judge ourselves. We might ask, did we do what should have, did we do it right, did we even try? Why wait to do the things you think/know are right?
>Yes because it implies there is a conspiracy requiring God-like abilities to plan the long term outcomes of a multitude of decisions and actions many of which have conflicting goals.
Are you sure? You don't need a conspiracy theory. All you need is compound interest. Just think about it. An asset produces returns above what you spend on consumption. I.e. you are a net winner of the financial system. But milk, eggs, cars, houses have to be built by someone and you can clearly see poor people at the construction site of your house. You don't see rich millionaires build your house.
Meanwhile most people are paying into this system and they are net losers.
Not that I disagree with the underlying ideas, but I'd argue we're not slaves. I'll concede that in practice we can definitely be thought something more akin to peasants, but what we live in today is not slavery.
Now, is being a peasant, with all the concomitant limitations on one's livelihood any better than being a slave to the mental health of the bright and ambitious? Perhaps not, but it would be significantly more deleterious to their physical health.
I also understand that reasonable people can debate whether physical or mental health is more important.
If I am forced to give any percentage of my income to a government I do not want, I think that is slavery. You wouldn't think it ok if an individual forced you, or the mafia. The government is just big mafia.
But that is not really the nub of it.
Slavery is really a mental state - having been through the system we have been propagandised that the government is a good thing, it's the right way to manage ourselves - anything else is very bad. This is the creation of the slave mentality, putting the policeman inside your head, so that you feel highly uncomfortable just considering non-standard ideas - they are thoughtcrime.
Thoughtcrime egs: that news is just another show, a serious type of advert. That pharmaceutical companies will run world wide campaigns, seconding governments, drafting laws, to poison millions - this will fill up their pipeline with sickness for the coming decades.
If I am forced to give any percentage of my income to a government I do not want, I think that is slavery
This is a good example of what I'm talking about.
Maybe you think of it as slavery, but in reality, it's the very definition of peasantry.
Slavery is you get no money. And by the way, if you disagree with it, the power holder beats the tar out of you. Or maybe s/he just kills you and gets another slave. Whatever's most convenient at the time/place.
Other than money, there are also a host of other differences between how we live and slavery. Including the fact that slaves don't choose their masters. There is no right to leave. Less than expected productivity results in severe beatings. And on and on and on.
Again, peasantry is its own special form of perdition. No need to exaggerate to get that point across. I was only saying that it's clearly not slavery.
There will always be someone more powerful than you. I prefer that I can elect the leaders of the most powerful group. This is why anarchy doesn't make any sense: The government is simply the most powerful violent group. As long as violence exists, any anarchic arrangement is inherently unstable.
"The government is simply the most powerful violent group."
100% right. But let's not lie to ourselves that this is also morally right.
You may kid yourself that you are freely doing something meaningful when you vote to be governed by someone else, but the reality is that is based in fear (of others or the government).
You don't in fact need governance when you meet family members for social occasions. This natural behaviour can scale up.
But no, I don't think we are heading towards freedom. I think government is too powerful. Government would create the anarchic situations to allow for the strong paternal government response. In fact, this is how it has so much power now! It creates the objects of fear, and proposes a responses that just happen to require more from its citizens. More money, more control, etc. Its a one-way street.
Unfortunately, you cannot comply your way out of tyranny - so we are heading towards greater slavery and greater governmental control. This is because people are unable to take responsibility for their decisions - they don't even know what right and wrong are ffs. (Do not do unto others..)
> If I am forced to give any percentage of my income to a government I do not want, I think that is slavery. You wouldn't think it ok if an individual forced you, or the mafia. The government is just big mafia.
The government uses your money to build infrastructure that makes the land the rich own more valuable. The government itself is also a victim.
> I also understand that reasonable people can debate whether physical or mental health is more important.
I'm actually unsure what this means. I take it to imnply that physical health is more important, but I'm not convinced of that. Physical health impacts the individual and loved ones (via emotional labor and support). Mental health impacts the community (mass shootings); it's hard to predict the outcome of poor mental health per individual but it's clear on the whole that it's often the community that pays for it.
Yes. Those that have the power to trick others into giving them even more power have little restraining them from doing so.
It's also complicated by the fact that those who push against it haven't exactly made a name for themselves as reasonable people (at least the most vocal ones haven't) leading to derision of "freedumbs" and so forth.
I mourn the dearth of different perspectives and not assuming everyone is on a "side".
'power to trick' - that hit the nail on the head! The oligarchs, higher level bureaucrats, politicians, extreme wealthy etc. that is the superpower, at their core, they are magicians but not in a good, fun way, more like con-man who have mastered the power to _trick_ and deceive. I came to the conclusion sometime ago, that all these people of power and position are really just charlatans, albeit extremely good ones, they are nothing to aspire to and respect, they are no better then a grifter using 'slight of hand' and deception to remove as much wealth and power from others to themselves and when all else fails, they will resort to force/war if need be. In a nutshell, nothing but liars, cheats, cowards and dishonorable megalomaniacs that put on a (good) show for us peasants to better rob us blind.
I mean, "liberty" is exactly allowing people to convince each other to exchange things. Some people might get the short end, but does that mean it's not free exchange? Or does that mean liberty itself is not an aim worth pursuing?
In my personal opinion it is worth it to have liberty, even if so many people are fine with giving it up to others at the drop of a hat. It's too important not to have. I just wish individual independence wasn't so derided these days.
"The laws of Tombstone at the time required visitors, upon entering town to disarm, either at a hotel or a lawman's office. (Residents of many famed cattle towns, such as Dodge City, Abilene, and Deadwood, had similar restrictions.)"
"Dodge City, Kansas, formed a municipal government in 1878. According to Stephen Aron, a professor of history at UCLA, the first law passed was one prohibiting the carry of guns in town, likely by civic leaders and influential merchants who wanted people to move there, invest their time and resources, and bring their families."
IANAL, but I think there was no interpretation until the Supreme Court made that ruling. The Second Amendment was in a quantum state before that, both an individual right and not. When it becomes necessary to clarify something, then SCOTUS collapses the wave function in that particular area of law.
John Paul Stevens was a lawyer and a judge on the Supreme Court. He disagrees and includes actual court decisions and opinions.
>the Miller Court unanimously concluded that the Second Amendment did not apply to the possession of a firearm that did not have “some relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” And in 1980, in a footnote to an opinion upholding a conviction for receipt of a firearm, the Court effectively affirmed Miller, writing: “[T]he Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have ‘some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.’
SCOTUS didn’t begin to apply the bill of rights to anyone besides the federal government until Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad v. City of Chicago in 1897. The entire notion of individual rights (in the modern sense) guaranteed by the constitution was in its nascency in 1878.
"In reality, the district court judge was in favor of the gun control law and ruled the law unconstitutional because he knew that Miller, who was a known bank robber and had just testified against the rest of his gang in court, would have to go into hiding as soon as he was released. He knew that Miller would not pay a lawyer to argue the case at the Supreme Court and would simply disappear. Therefore, the government's appeal to the Supreme Court would surely be a victory because Miller and his attorney would not even be present at the argument....Miller was found shot to death in April, before the decision had been rendered."
Yeah, sometimes legal strategies are odd. I guess the point is that 2A was always about militias; essentially everything up until Thomas' concurrence in Printz considered 2A in the context of militia readiness, and the draft of 2A was even more explicitly about militias. It's sort of unassailable, but obviously not actually unassailable, because now we have Heller.
Myself, I think 2A is just an anachronism. Militias as they were at the founding don't exist anymore. Almost no one in modern US society meets military readiness standards. Armed forces use bonkers weapons of war the founders could never have imagined. Even individual person-on-the-street weapons are pretty boggling by 18th century standards. And this is just considering firearms, expanding "arms" to whatever the US military considers to be a weapon (software/hardware exploits, biological weapons, chemical weapons).
Further, I think "2A as a check on government" is meritless because Congress regulates militias, and the Constitution (Article I, §8) reads: "The Congress shall have power to... provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions." Allowing governments to suppress insurrections is the opposite of allowing checks on government.
I'm not like, super into gun control--I think the US is too big for a one-size-fits-all policy and I think a lot of implementations just land men of color in prison w/ felonies. But none of the pro-gun 2A interpretations make sense to me, and from where I sit the debate is more a reflection of Congress' ongoing slide into irrelevance and sclerosis as other less encumbered institutions in the US do the actual legislating.
You make several good points, but this whole "what can civilians with pew-pew weapons do against a modern army?" argument has been put to bed in actual combat now. See Vietnam and Afghanistan for humbling examples. Not to say it wouldn't be bloody, but victory is not assured by the technologically superior force, apparently.
Oh, definitely. But like, those weren't thriving countries at the time right. In any hypothetical US revolt, things go south very fast. Schools are closed, roads are closed, hospitals are commandeered, power stations are commandeered. Core internet infrastructure is shut down. We're talking about 1st to 3rd world country in under 2 years.
So to me, that kind of means the terrorists win. China/Russia would like nothing more than for that to happen--it would be a self-inflicted wound of insane magnitude, with global consequences. I don't know that any political issue is so bad that it's worth solving at that cost. Maybe climate change, but the groups of people who are heavily armed and the groups of people who care about climate change are mostly separate.
So I still think 2A is an anachronism. I'm not sure even TJ would agree that refreshing the tree of liberty at the cost of the west makes any sense at all. The world has just become unrecognizable in the last 250 years.
> the United States is still one of the most free ... countries on the planet.
By what metric? More importantly by what magnitude?
Would "in the top 20" count? Axross 200 world countries maybe, but to patriotic Americans who speak about freedom abstractly, knowing that they are 16th in democracy [0], 44th in press freedom [1], and 20th in economic freedom [2], probably wouldn't cut it as "one of the top".
Those rankings are very biased. The press one used to penalize countries at one point for not having journalist unions (don't know if they still do).
As an example, the US press was allowed to publish on the Snowden leaks but in the UK policemen forced The Guardian to smash their hard drives. UK is 11 places above the US: https://rsf.org/en/ranking/2021
The freedom ones often pick and choose freedoms. For example: none include self defense possession, but do include same sex marriage (something that was invented two decades ago).
I assure you, same sex marriage wasn't invented two decades ago. [0]
What was invented two decades ago is treating gay people with enough humanity to begin to CONSIDER giving them the same universal freedoms as straight people get.
So yeah, at this point, in 2022, same-sex marriage is an objective basic freedom. I am not interested in any religion-based counterarguments. Anyone's freedom to hold religious beliefs cannot impune on OTHER people's freedom, regardless of what religious people will claim.
Self-defense posession is a subjective one, I agree. I personally think it's an archaic freedom desire [1] (Honestly, to me comparable "I want the freedom to be able to beat my slave"). But I understand the alternative arguments. This one happens to be something on which the US is a massive outlier from the rest of the "developed" world.
The main point, though, is I don't think people on HackerNews seeking "freedom" are talking about freedom to own guns. I might be wrong.
Is there another way to index multiple countries and measure against each other?
Sounds like you might disagree with the freedoms they chose rather than the process of defining and measuring "freedom." That may be an expression of your own bias.
You are looking at this all wrong. If you want maximum freedom you need to go to a place like rural Somalia. As long as you have the most guns nobody will tell you how to live your life. Want to rape children all day long? Nobody is going to stop you. Want to kill your neighbors and steal their stuff? Total freedom. No nanny state government is going to try to take your money to build roads or remove the dead bodies.
Anyone who has "the most guns" will have "maximum freedom" anywhere. Somalia, USA, England, anywhere. The difference is it's easier to be the person with the most guns in Somalia than in US. However we are talking about freedom of ordinary citizens, not about being the most powerful individual in your country.
Those rankings have absolutely 0 values. We are currently under our 2nd curfew in less than a year, I can't go outside after 10pm under the threat of a 2000$ fine (which the police is very heavily enforcing) and yet we are way up there in the list you linked. Complete joke
Well, when we're in the middle of a Global Pandemic, with the 5th-highest death toll in human history [0], a couple things have to change temporarily, don't you think?
Also, this is a Quebec-only curfew. Take it up with your provincial government. If separated as a country, perhaps Quebec wouldn't make the list. Quebec has plenty of other counter-freedom policies including your government-endorsed islamophobia.
You are contradicting yourself. It's a global pandemic yet only quebec is going for these absolutely ridiculous measures. Hence why it's ludicrous for canada to be higher than the US. And it's been 2 years, it's not exactly temporary, especially since there's literally no scientific backing for a curfew in a pandemic and our government is not even pretending that there is any. At a certain point the "it's a global pandemic" excuse just does not work and you get well into the threshold of a non free society and I think we are well past that in quebec.
Also, quebec is still part of canada. So again, your point is just strange. You are just deflecting very weakly what I said.
Every province can take invidiual actions for their citizens that the federal government disagrees with. Quebec can do more than the rest.
That's not an argument for restrictive Canadian freedom, that's an argument for INCREASED freedom in Canada for individual provinces (especially Quebec)
"You don't like it -> move" is an argument that doesn't work very well across international borders, but ABSOLUTELY works within a country. If you find Quebec to repressive, move to a different province.
Agreed, and as a Muslim it's for more than one reason as you pointed out earlier. I'm actively looking into moving, probably across the southern border though. But still, I think it's very reasonable to expect the experiences of the second biggest province in a country to be reflected in international rankings.
In canada currently. 6th month of curfews this year... but at least this time it's until 10 pm and not 8pm like the first curfew. So I guess that's something lol
Depends on your definition of freedom, certainly. If your primary definition is "the range of behaviors for which the government will not prosecute you", it's probably the highest one not currently involved in a civil war.
I shared 3 definitions of freedom. You're welcome to yours.
But that sounds like optimizing a society for reckless individual expressionism that the government looks the other way on, vs ensuring that every human being in society has their basic needs met despite their race, gender, gender expression, socioeconomic class, diablement, or mental health.
Is it freedom if you can shoot guns at a barrel in your back yard without getting prosecuted, but can also be legally fired from your job and not have a house rented to you, solely for being trans?
The last man on earth is also the most free man in history. Freedom is not an absolute good nor is it defined as "that which produces the best outcome". The entire purpose of government is deciding which limits on freedom are reasonable to adopt.
I don't think the US is free at all, and would be interested in seeing facts that back it up. I see a country run like a corporation, where media, tech and science are carrying out very specific instructions from their handful of billionaire owners to steer the ship where they want it to go.
You can think what you want in the US but you cannot express it publicly if you have a significant following. You will get blocked, censored, ridiculed etc.
Maybe you mean something else with freedom? Freedom to carry out work and get payed for it? Sure.
I couldn't disagree more. Today's American society has way more liberty than it did in 1912. Blacks, women, Native Americans, LBGTQ+, other minorities: all live better today than whatever period you want to choose. Native American children were forced from their homes into institutionalize schools. In NYC tenements the police conducted midnight raids to force people to be vaccinated for smallpox (a worthy end but a terrible means). Women didn't have the right to vote. As others mentioned, Jim Crow ruled the South. There really is no comparison.
Many non renewable resources are past peak production, and declining fast. Austerity will be next. But it will be disguised as saving the environment. So that not only do you do not blame your politicians for being poorer. You will be blamed for over consuming and destroying the environment.
Energy crisis, like running out of heating gas is already hitting Europe. And shortages of fertilizer will be here this spring. China and Russia are not exporting. US doesn't make enough. Farmers will be planting without it. Expect higher food prices and possibly food shortages.
Things are running short in the supply chain, from chips to little bits and pieces. When things break, they will break fast. Make a plan B people. The wave is coming.
this is horribly misguided to say "disguised as saving the environment" .. it is conflating real environmental crisis with political posturing.. It is intellectually lazy to blur two big topics like this..
It's not just intellectually lazy, it's deadly. The last thing we need is to conflate politics with a catastrophe that will wipe out our lifestyle, a significant proportion of species, and potentially our civilization.
This reads more like am emotional outburst from somone with a belief system than an actual opinion. It's hard to argue against belief systems. And it will probably be taken by you in entirely the wrong way. It would be like trying to convincing a hasidic jew the messiah isn't coming. Kind of rude to even try.
I'm not conflating anything that hasn't been done. Political posturing around saving thr environment is exactly how politician convinced a vast section of the professional class that solar is a solution to our energy needs. Despite it being much less reliable, producing minuscule amounts of energy in large parts of the country and requiring a much more complicated supply chain. Even solar's claimed environmental benefits are vastly over stated.
For poorer people, stuck in older homes with baseboard heaters. The rising price of electricity meant they couldn't heat their home as much. So they're already suffering. While also being told by politicians its better for the environment this way.
A better, vastly more reliable, and powerful alternative of building new nuclear plants lost out due to political posturing around the environment. My province of Ontario, killed two nuclear projects, and our electrical prices nearly doubled. The professional class deference to "feel good" saving the environment experts they see on TV is a bummer to see. But they will not be isolated from these feel good, but poor decisions into the future. So I don't need to convince anyone. The bill will come due.
There are trouble brewing in EU over energy and food prices, but at the same time there are mitigating factors. The cut that middle men get for food has risen sharply the last few decades, especially for the kind of food that risen most in price. The more the customer pays in stores, the more incentive there is from the producers to cut the middle men. As an example, around 1/3 of the price for raw beef goes to the producer where I live, which is a result of low competition among the middle men, strict regulation, and a lack of innovation in the direct-to-customer space.
Energy prices was at a historical low just last year. This year the price has doubled compared to last year, but compared to 10 years ago its the same. People need to have a plan B, through hopefully it will involve investments to use modern standards and energy efficient heating.
Central Banking has been one of the most powerful and liberating achievements of civilization.
And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life.
And what 'freedoms' have you lost?
Well, there's more taxation.
And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you.
And you have to prove drugs work before selling them.
You have to pay workers a minimum wage, and make sure they don't die on the job.
What other 'freedoms' were are you keen to regain?
Can you explain why the freedoms you mention are the result primarily of central banking and not social and technological change?
The key freedom lost via central banking (at least irresponsible central banking) is the freedom of those in the future to do anything other than meet debt obligations.
Debt and credit is obviously necessary, and making money easily accessible and keeping markets liquid is a good thing, but if debt obligations grow too large, people increasingly forfeit their future productivity and the future of their children’s productivity to paying interest.
No one can enjoy increased freedoms if they are spending all their time paying off individual and collective interest.
I’m confused. If you mean public debt, doesn’t central banking free the public from meeting debt obligations when those obligations are denominated in the national currency?
Countries can and do issue public debt in other currencies. If we all used gold or bitcoin, there’s no reason to think public debt would be lower. But the obligation to pay it back would, in a sense, be harder to dodge.
There is a constraint the prevents (some) countries from more frequent debasement: if you debase your currency, then lenders will increasingly require that future debt be issued in an external currency. And even if you find lenders, the purchasing power provided in the debased currency remains constrained by external trade in non-debased currencies.
The primary purposes of central banking are to privatize seigniorage[1] revenue and increase bankers' ability to control politicians. The former is achieved through the Primary Dealer system and the latter should be self-explanatory. Needless to say, since most spending is electronic transactions, the seigniorage revenue is very nearly the entire face value of the created instrument.
It's a blatantly undemocratic power grab, effectively allowing a consortium of private banks to limit Congress's power of the purse. Or at least that was the theory. As we're seeing now, that one putative upside is nonexistent and the Fed is happy to cooperate with Treasury to spend trillions a year. The rentier class appears to be consoling itself with massive asset inflation, while still banking the seigniorage.
The United States could just as easily once again fund all of its spending by creating new U.S. Notes[2] (perhaps without the public debt clause) and then control inflation by extinguishing those liabilities through taxation.
It seems like you're defining "central banking" in relation to the independence (or maybe ownership of) the central bank. That doesn't seem correct to me.
China has a central bank, but it's fully publicly owned and is not politically independent of the CCP. The ECB, in comparison, is owned by the central banks of constituent banks. And on the other extreme, the Swiss National Bank is publicly traded and a minority of its shares are privately held (i.e., not by governments). (Perhaps related or perhaps not, the Swiss Franc also has historically had very high trust and very low inflation.)
My point is, there are multiple flavors of "central bank" ownership and independence; it seems odd to argue that the primary purpose of central banking is to allow private bankers to violate political oversight when, in some cases, the bank is fully public and not politically independent. Conversely, some examples of significantly more private central banks than the Fed seem to show a history of good management in the public interest.
Would you also consider triple bypass surgery done on morbidly obese patient as irresponsible? It enables bad behavior and arguably the patient may be better off dead than living in a life of pain, but it's undeniable that emergency heart surgery is a good thing.
Current situation looks for me more like a surgeon doing this triple bypass, and also keep selling junk food and cigarettes to this patient on another shift.
The problem, the reason why we don't have a free market economy, is that the saver gets to decide how much debt there is.
The saver gets to decide whether to lend out his money, to spend it or to simply keep it forever. The money is no longer circulating within the economy, which means someone, usually the government, is forced to borrow the money back into the economy at an interest rate that is simply not sustainable.
They have also enabled commercial banks loaning other people money irresponsibly and getting obscenous bailouts when the loan takers default because "the banks are too big to fail".
What a great world to live in.
It would be nice if the cost of rungs in the social later (housing, education, etc) wasn't so high that only certain kinds of people could achieve them.
Many of the "your not allowed to do that"s of the past are still in place for entire neighborhoods, only the words changed.
In 1922 only 5% of people went to University - now 50% go on to post secondary which is largely due to cost and opportunity.
Only about 50% finished HS - now it's 95%.
Doctors were not very affordable by anyone - now it's >90%.
Most people didn't have running water and electricity yet now it's almost 100%.
The only thing that's not as nice as 'real estate' - housing was cheap, but the houses were crap, and often you were isolated.
If you want to go out of major US urban area, and build a small home to 1925 standards, then it's affordable.
But if you are young, then I am actually sympathetic to you: education and housing costs are 'worse' now than in then 1990's. Those are the two things I will say Gen Z 'has it hard' with. That, and having to grow up where everyone has social media, which is not a social benefit, it's dystopian if you ask me.
All of those facts are meaningless without context.
Higher education is far more necessary for even a middle class existence than it was in 1922, and the middle class is getting less and less affordable. One of my grandfathers worked a family farm. My dad was able to grind his way out of the lower classes by working at Friendly's and other odd jobs to pay for college (up to and including his PhD). My father in law's uncle was a high school dropout who started showing people around at the local hardware store and was such a good salesperson the owner hired him after a few weeks. None of those are possible for most Americans these days (good luck pulling the leave-it-to-beaver "prove my value to the local store owner" at Home Depot or Walmart).
US citizens are now regularly advised to take Uber to the hospital if they can survive the trip, as it avoids the cost of an ambulance, which is often over a thousand dollars in a country where most can't afford a $500 emergency. I'm not sure how that qualifies as "affordable", and certainly not affordable to 90%+. Granted this is primarily an American issue.
More important to me than the quality of the house is the quality of the school district that it's in (see previous remarks about the modern necessity of education). I can fix/improve a house, I can't fix/improve schooling short of private school, which would probably be more expensive than fixing a house over the long term. Good look finding an affordable house in a good school district near any major metropolitan area with jobs.
A 1922s “middle class” experience is affordable for a most Americans today. As in shelter with heat, phone service, and electric lights but no appliances, no car, minimal access to effective healthcare etc.
Upward mobility is still available and just as rare. The health, intelligence, and drive that allowed someone in 1922 to better themselves are the same things that still allow someone to better themselves in 2022. It’s not easy, but it was never easy. Just look at how many people in 1922 where held back by the color of their skin.
As to getting a job at Walmart, have you ever actually applied? Their standards are incredibly lax.
So? A middle class experience from 1622 is also affordable for most Americans today, and now we don't have to worry about raids from the natives! Clearly we have no right to complain /s
I'm not arguing things are equivalent to 1922 on an absolute scale, but on a relative scale they're closer than they were in the recent past. The prosperity of the previous century has shifted the goal posts for what defines upper, middle and lower class. But after a long period of shifting the goal posts in a positive direction, we've had three or four decades of things shifting in the opposite direction, and that trend appears to be accelerating for the moment.
As for upward mobility, that largely only exists for people with college degrees these days. And even then only a few select degrees are really worth anything. And college costs are insanely inflated compared to where they were in 1980, let alone 1922. Is it possible to better oneself in 2022? Sure, but I'd argue there were much more opportunities for middle class people just 40 years ago. A Unionized coal miner with experience could make an upper middle class salary without the burden of higher education that costs as much as a house. Ditto for many factory jobs.
A job at Walmart making minimum wage that hasn't been adjusted for inflation for decades does not have anything resembling the same purchasing power as a minimum wage job 60 years ago. Walmart jobs are notorious for requiring food stamps despite working full time hours.
A higher percentage of Americans are going to collage in 2020. They are also graduating with more debt, so is it more or less affordable? That’s a more complex question than it might appear as students are in many cases choosing a very expensive education when more economical options are available.
It’s similar to how new cars in 2020 are both substantially more expensive on average but also of vastly higher quality. In both cases the cheapest options represent a tiny slice of the overall market suggesting cost is generally less an imposition by outside forces than a choice.
Ex: Great Bastion Collage in state tuition is under 11k not per semester but to get a 4 year degree. Out of state is twice that, but you probably have some equivalent in your state. They even have minimum additional requirements for students without a high school diploma or GED to get a collage degree.
I'm explicitly not replying to the meat of your comment, because I don't feel like I have anything to add to the productive discussion in this thread - which, by the way, I'm really enjoying reading :)
That said, this stood out to me:
> A job at Walmart making minimum wage [...]
According to Glassdoor[1], a retail cashier at Walmart with no experience earns an average of $22,049 / year. Assuming 50 weeks @ 40 hours per week, that's $11.05 / hour.
That does not include cash bonuses or profit sharing, which Glassdoor says adds another ~$1k.
Indeed.com[2] shows the average wage for a Walmart cashier is $10.56 - so we're at least in the right ballpark above.
My own experience at Walmart was unloading trucks from 4pm-1am the summer after I graduated high school (2002). I made $7.25 / hour then, when the minimum wage was $5.15.
Trying to build a life on that kind of money isn't easy, and I'm not trying to say that it is; I do want to point out that even Walmart doesn't pay minimum wage as a rule.
That's not to say there aren't other "tricks" that employers use, like limiting hours to prevent employees from qualifying from full-time benefits and such. There are.
The minimum wage in 1982 was $3.25. Today it's $7.25. The purchasing power of the minimum wage has certainly decreased, but I strongly suspect that many more businesses paid minimum wage in 1982 than 2022.
McDonald's in my town of <15k people pays $13/hr with no experience, with a $500 signing bonus and a guaranteed $1/hr raise at six and twelve months. The largest manufacturing employer here produce stamped sheet metal parts, and they have a large sign and banners lining the road claiming $18/hr, a $1,500 signing bonus, and fully paid family benefits. My California-based "healthtech" company employer doesn't even have health insurance as good as theirs.
USA is pretty dystopian. I'm an immigrant from the EU, and like most of us here I work in tech where the wages and benefits are very good (wages quite a bit better than even the richer EU countries and benefits on par I would say). But for the lower middle class and below it absolutely sucks in the US compared to most other countries with similar levels of development...
All of these improvements, numerically speaking, and yet my wife regularly has classes of 40 where none of the students have parents that went to college, a quarter of them need glasses that they can't afford, and an eighth is homeless.
The size of the group that benefits from modernization is indeed growing, as your numbers point out, but if you're not in that group you're just as stuck as you've ever been.
I would argue, as many would, that a high-school graduate now is much worse off now than a high-school dropout a century ago. Jobs are much more specialized, you can't rely on working on "the family farm", and the prestige of a high-school diploma has tanked to "You don't have this, what's wrong with you??"
> And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you.
Never thought about this before: Suppose I’m Black, respond to a Craigslist ad for a $10k car for sale by owner, and am refused for my skin color. What law do I or the state prosecute the seller under?
Most of the anti-discrimination laws I know of apply to companies, usually companies with more than N employees.
> The term "employer" means a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more employees [...]
I suppose the root of my question is this: Where is the law stating that an individual cannot act with prejudice against another individual, outside of an employment context? I've always assumed such a law exists, but never asked exactly where it is.
I'd be keen to be able to employ people without the government intervening in negotiations (minimum wage, various employment laws, etc.). I don't think the government has any place deciding what I can and can't offer. I also would like to be able to use my own judgement when hiring people, without having to worry about proving (the negative) that I'm not being discriminatory.
Workers have always had the freedom to strike. And employers should have the freedom to terminate striking employees. I don't see the need for regulation here. The "freedom" to attend college has created a mountain of student debt and an overeducated workforce. I fail to see the benefit.
All in all, directly, I'd like to live in a society where people are entitled to only what they can negotiate for, not more. And one that does not strive to protect people from the consequences of their own misfortune or inadequacy.
Interesting to see how sacrificing some freedoms to give more freedom to others in the short term, eventually enhances your same former freedoms in the medium or long term.
There is absolutely nothing liberating about central banking. It is a monopoly on money creation, and that monopoly is enforced through an apparatus of violence (police, courts and prisons, used to compel compliance).
It leads to a small elite being in control of trillions of dollars in national capital allocations every year, with virtually no democratic oversight.
It leads to financial institutions capturing 42% of corporate profits since 1973, with all of the growth in wealth inequality that goes along with that.
It leads to gigantic corporate welfare programs, like the government mortgage guarantee program, where financial institutions buy $1.5 trillion worth of government guaranteed mortgage backed securities - where profits are 100% privatized, and risk is 100% socialized - every year.
>>And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer,
You always had that freedom. Now you have the power to get the state to force the employer to keep you employed, and not replace you, while you strike.
This power has given public sector unions total control over public finances.
For example, New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:
In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year.
California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers. That is where all the social welfare spending is going.
>>Well, there's more taxation.
Yes, the state now forces you, under pain of imprisonment, to work 40% of the year to pay a bloated bureaucracy.
>>And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you.
And every one has to suffer higher costs, and less advancement, as a specialized caste of anti-discrimination lawyers extract billions of dollars per year from corporations for their failure to comply with impossible-to-comply-with anti-discrimination laws [1] while forcing the private sector to 1. spend billions more in "anti-racism" training, that includes lessons on the supposed omnipresence of "white privilege" [2] and 2. institute affirmative action programs, that waste resources and lead to less competent work forces, respectively.
>>And you have to prove drugs work before selling them.
Yes, you need the approval of a centralized regulatory gatekeeper, which is often incompetent, and prevents people from accessing life-saving medical products/services in a timely manner [3][4] or denies people access to a vaccine due to a risk from side effects that is orders of magnitude lower than the risk the vaccine mitigates. [5]
>>women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job,
Women had jobs back then. The jobs available to women have improved due to the cultural impact of much higher per capita productivity, which makes people far more independent and assertive.
>>you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life.
That is entirely due to higher per capita productivity, which enables more people to be supported through their post-secondary schooling years.
The massive per capita productivity growth seen since 1922 could soon be a thing of the past in the advanced economies, as the growing repressiveness of the state has steadily reduced per capita GDP growth rates over the last several decades, and this trend sees no signs of abatement or reversal.
Has Central Banking been liberating or do we only perceive it as such because it has historically aligned with American business and political interests? Would a small South American country being forced to sell it's natural resources or lose it's borrowing power agree? Would Middle Eastern countries that tried to form the petro dollar and were met with endless wars agree?
Any attempt to depict the US as a free country prior to 1920 is a nonstarter. There was slavery, Jim Crow, and women could not vote. Seriously, give me a break.
We also had one of the strongest eugenics movements in the world, under the same progressive flag as women's suffrage. It took the horrors of WWII to snap us out of it.
And it set us back because we overcorrected. The biggest evil of historical eugenics was the non-consensual application, not the idea that we should improve the gene pool.
This thread is an interesting summary of possible "eugenics" type applications and if those surveyed consider them moral today:
The Catholic Church still opposes all of those except for offering network support and feeding single mothers (in which cases it recommends generosity). I don't think that's an overcorrection; I think it's the result of thinking very hard about human dignity over many generations.
You can't completely discount the past because it doesn't meet a modern standard. It's certain that something many are doing today will be considered abhorrent in one hundred years. So are we all today too evil to bother with? Are you no worse than a murderer because you live in our flawed times? I doubt it. There were people and institutions before 1920 that were terrible and some that should be celebrated.
It was a free country, for a subset of the population. I would suggest that the idea of liberty, the definition, was as worthy then as it is now. I would also completely agree with the expansion of the people who are entitled to it.
my ancestors had property rights and university education for women, always anti-slavery.. please do not lump me into your vague assertion
edit- the USA was divided strongly between states, which had constitutions of their own. There was a very bright line between the Massachusetts colonies and the Virginia colonies, and then others.. Property rights and real education for women were a large topic! slavery was hated for good reasons .. the social contract that "my particular ancestors" created, specifically are what the PP were dismissing.. its inaccurate to dismiss that
This comment adds nothing to the discussion, and hackernews isn't the place for comments such as these. If you disagree with the ideas, elaborate and disect those you take issue with. Additionally, please keep the tone civil, disagreeing and adding nothing more that saying "hah" is not really the maturity level expected in debates on HN.
Which part is wrong? Some parts are obviously correct.
The US is definitely one of the most diverse large countries. India is probably more diverse along language lines. China is definitely not along any dimension. Even the EU states (that depend on US for defense and use oil to power their economies) are less diverse.
I agree with much of this as I think some of this has contributed to people's economic agency. But I think we should analyze the impact of these and not just chalk them up as actual improvements in people's liberty.
For example does enabling a person's ability to vote actually increase one's liberty in a corrupt/narrow system.
You see, "private property" was a step up from Feudalism. It allows you to own things. For example, the Web disrupted AOL, MSN, Compuserve, cable channels, radio stations, journalism, etc. But then, people started to just make their own "private" sites bigger. "I built it -- I own it!" OK, so Mark Z owns facebook, Jeff Bezos owns Amazon, and so forth. Our public discussions take place on "privately owned" platforms (really, owned by Wall Street bigwigs, but even they can't vote Mark Z out, they try and fail every year).
So basically the current system has led to a bunch of surveillance capitalism. That iPhone and Kindle can yank the apps and books you "own" out from under you. That Alexa and Siri listens to whatever you say all the time. That car you "own" will also soon have a bunch of software downloaded to make sure you are limited in what you can do -- which is probably the scariest thing because some sleeper attack can make all cars suddenly crash into gas stations at once.
In short ... your ideas of "private ownership" work on a small level but then you get these large corporations that continue "owning" things, and not giving them to you (infrastructure, backend software, AI data sets, you name it -- even "intellectual property" of patents and copyrights).
This IS a feature of capitalism, that we might want to rein in. Perhaps there should be a principle that courts would enforce private property less and less when it came to scale. So on a small scale (enforce my right to chattel property, my first 3 houses etc.) it's fine. But just what does it mean that I "own" 999 houses, and see no lessening of my ability to evict people ACTUALLY living in the house as squatters, just because I contracted with a bank and some "People with Guns" to enforce some "deed of ownership"? The land used to belong to some natives hundreds of years ago, or some other group that the current group just "took" from them. What moral system are you going to appeal to, that would allow unlimited private property ownership? Even John Locke's "homsteading" concept had a "proviso" saying that you should only own that which you can reasonably use. Even Adam Smith writing about the "invisible hand" was actually writing about how the Rich are led by an invisible hand to distribute goods equally (in his time) because they can only eat so much.
We see this pathology in online systems as well. Just like Bitcoin and Ethereum allow sending unlimited amounts of money in a fixed time for a fixed fee, this necessarily causes a bottleneck somewhere (proof of work miner, for instance, or everyone storing everything, leading to "flash loans" and other crap on the "world computer"). Actually, they charge the maximum fee for every transaction (even sending 5 cents) because the entire network secures everything. It's built for really huge transfers.
It can be summarized like this: "Centralization is bad, and happens through enforcement of some rules. The resources to enforce rules should therefore not be deployed for unlimited value of ownership by accounts, they shouldn't even be centralized (e.g. proof of work mining elects one "consensus leader", or Facebook has a huge centralized server farm) to the point that you get these pathologies: the elites at the top are out of touch with the people who are ACTUALLY using the products / services. Same with politics / states / etc. Keep it decentralized whenever you can.
> You see, "private property" was a step up from Feudalism.
Private property absolutely existed under fuedalism as well, albeit in a more limited form for most people. Serfs generally worked land privately owned by - or granted by the crown to - private individuals. Minor nobles had property rights equal to and exceeding those of private landowners today.
Property other than real estate was privately owned by serfs. This included all of their possession and in many cases and countries, their homes. They were usually nominnaly free to move elsewhere, though in practice this rarely happened for cultural and practical reasons.
> So basically the current system has led to a bunch of surveillance capitalism.
I agree completely with this, except for the "capitalism" part. Our current system has arisen in an increasingly regulatory environment, and most of the issues with it are directly attributable to that.
> In short ... your ideas of "private ownership" work on a small level but then you get these large corporations that continue "owning" things [...]
Ah, this strikes me as important. The concept of the corporation - or more specifically, limited liability - is 100% a product of our governmental system. One place where I break from the mainstream in a big way is that I believe that those responsible for a company should be responsible personally for damages caused by that company. How that breaks down between employees, managers, officers, and shareholders is left as an exercise for the reader but suffice it to say that when Exxon covers the Gulf of Mexico with crude oil I believe the damage caused by that should be remedied by everyone involved, including those who allegedly own a share of ownership in the company.
> even "intellectual property" of patents and copyrights
My position here is very adequately described by "Against Intellectual Property", by Stephan Kinsella
> But just what does it mean that I "own" 999 houses, and see no lessening of my ability to evict people ACTUALLY living in the house as squatters, just because I contracted with a bank and some "People with Guns" to enforce some "deed of ownership"?
It means that if people don't agree with your practices as a landlord, they shouldn't rent from you. If it's that egregious, homeowners should decide not to sell to you or to demand a higher price.
If people don't want to rent from you, you will have to lower your prices to maintain occupancy. If people don't want to sell to you, you'll have to increase your offers to continue to grow. Both of those things decrease profitability. When they intersect, then you'll have to start selling those houses to recoup your investment.
> Even John Locke [...]
> Even Adam Smith [...]
John Locke and Adam Smith are surely foundational, but they are hardly representative of our modern concept of "Capitalism".
For that matter, Thomas Paine is usually thought of as one of America's Founders; he'd likely be considered a Communist today based on the ideas he wrote about.
> It can be summarized like this: "Centralization is bad, and happens through enforcement of some rules. The resources to enforce rules should therefore not be deployed for unlimited value of ownership by accounts, they shouldn't even be centralized (e.g. proof of work mining elects one "consensus leader", or Facebook has a huge centralized server farm) to the point that you get these pathologies: the elites at the top are out of touch with the people who are ACTUALLY using the products / services. Same with politics / states / etc. Keep it decentralized whenever you can.
This statement is really interesting to me. I'm an Anarcho-Capitalist. Obviously, based on your post here, you and I have very different ideas of what an optimal socioeconomic system would look like.
... yet I completely agree with the statements "Centralization is bad" and "Keep it decentralized". I would go so far as to say that while our policy ideas aren't compatible, our worldviews are. We could likely work together to build something that worked well and that we both hated in equal measure. :)
Yep. I am friends with many anarcho capitalists. I would say I’m a left-libertarian. We have a lot in common!
The way I arrive at it is like this:
1) Property requires “men with guns” to enforce. How do we as a society determine property on a larger scale than personal property? However we do it seems to centralize control in the hands of a few, to exclude others from using a resource.
2) People form organizations, and those organizations make rules (of which property laws represent just one aspect). Organizations can be small (neighborhoods, small forums like this) or large (cities, states, federations, Big Tech)
3) Governments are just the people in charge of running the organizations. Every organization is run by some rules. The question is what system leads to the best results. I don’t criticize “THE government”. I criticize large organizations like states, corporations etc.
4) Taxes are just the analogue of rent. Private landlords can force you to pay rent or get out. If the scale is larger, a city makes you pay tax. The city is the landlord. Consider that Disneyworld is owned by a corporation, while Boca Raton used to be privately owned but then sold to the residents.
5) What would you arrive at if you applied the same critiques of intellectual property — owning ideas, songs etc. — to owning water, air, and so forth … and then down the line — owning huge forests or fields. What does “ownership” of such huge things really benefit people? When the eviction moratorium expires, from a consequentialist point of view is a nation with many nearly-homeless people going to be richer?
On my side, I would really love to hear how you work out this “exercise for the reader”you mentioned — it seems way above my pay grade hehe
Let me translate
“you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.”
I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research why it was created - not just wikipedia, get some books published between the 20 to 60s. When was public education first introduced at scale? When was eugenics promoted in the United States?
The 1910s - 1920s was the beginning of the major authoritarian and progressive movements in the United States. Read about the history of Woodrow Wilson.
At the end of the day, the United States during the 20s was losing its independence already. It was openly talked about on higher-class circles.
In that context all these predictions are really aspirations.
That said, I think the United States is still one of the most free and diverse countries on the planet. Has its issues and can 100% improve. But the same people and families who are part of the WEF are the same families / people in the 1910s - 1920s promoting the same general ideas.