OK, so screw the political summaries, what are you radical about?

Me:
taxation is thievery, there is no implicit social contract it is merely a thuggery-based protection racket.

The minimum wage is retarded. We'd fix the economy almost completely by installing a MAXIMUM wage of about $20/hour in today's market. But this would be only a partial step to the actual goal of having all work pay the same amount per hour.

Land is not a commodity. All land ownership should be public. If you grant that people have aright to exist, you must grant that they have a right to exist somewhere. Where? If land is owned then it is theoretically possible for it to be all owned and no longer available for the people to exist on.

The big firearms problem in America is that shooting, gun care, and responsibility should be taught from age four on in every classroom to every child. And there should be invasive homeschool outreach programs to make sure those kids don't get left behind.

How's that?

Environmentalism.

Human rights, equality, social engineering and the economy can all go fuck themselves. *nothing* matters as much as stopping the production of plutonium sludge, (50 million year threat) the waste of the top soil (50,000 year threat), the destruction of the ozone (permanent damage), or the loss of species diversity (~1 million year threat.)

Seriously. Will our ancestors give a flying fuck whether or not we shot each other? No. They will give a flying fuck about the fact that they can't farm, can't breathe, and die from cancer at age 20.

Anyone concerned with humanity, anyone who wants to claim moral high ground, anyone who considers themselves an altruist of any stripe, should take the environment as top concern and fuck all else.

yrs--
--Ben

I try to walk a pretty strict like about "no violation of consent = no harm = no fowl = no cause for intervention", but I'm not 100% perfect on that, and it's not actually a radcal statement anyway. Occaisionally I have anarchosomethingist fantasies; I sometimes even feel like dropping 1- or 2-state solutions in Israel/Palestine, and just jumping into the no-state solution, bu which I mean dissolution of nation-states, not nukes. (I don't stick with this analysis, and I'm also not up for discussing the issue, thanks. <g>)

These sympathies did come out a bit in my homebrew space-opera setting: I tried to avoid centralized governments out in space, instead having various selections of free states, syndicate-confederations, and so on. (I think I might ultimately deprecate those however, for the purposes of setting coherency. I'll save the anti-authoritarian wet dream for later.)

Christopher Weeks wrote: OK, so screw the political summaries, what are you radical about?


How's that?

Valamir wrote:

Christopher Weeks wrote: OK, so screw the political summaries, what are you radical about?


How's that?

Heh, yup. Pretty radical alright.

My only response is:

"Thank God there's not a snowballs chance in hell of any of this ever happening."

Actually, I'm a pretty firm believer in moderation. There are many ideas that may work. None that will work if taken to extremes.

So I guess my most extreme political view is that I'm extremely against extremes.


If pressed to come up with something, lets see.

I pretty much believe that speeding tickets are nothing but a form of revenue generation and do little to actually make driving safer. So I'd be in favor of cutting out the middle man and just issueing different classes of licenses.

If speeding means I'm going to have to pay a $200 ticket, then just let me pay the $200 up front, get a special license plate that says "this guy is allowed to drive 90mph on all major interstates" and skip the whole "license and registration please" step.

Benefits: you'd get ALOT more people paying the $200 voluntarily than the cops ever catch in a year. You can cut the number of troopers wasting tax payers money in speed traps and put them to work actually fighting crime, and it wouldn't take me 3 hours to drive to Chicago.

Hmmm...not quite up there with "maximum wage" but that's about as radical as I get.

I'm an anarchist. Read Emma Goldman. She'll tell you how I feel.

I personally would be content with a maximum wage as high as, say, twenty times the minimum wage, but that's a compromise. Ten times seems way more reasonable to me.

Locking up food - in granaries, in supermarkets - is evil. We should stop doing that.

Also we should celebrate every single kind of happy sex.

-Vincent

I think marriage, as a government institution, is wrong-headed in the extreme. Let anybody who wants one apply for a domestic partnership license, and leave marriage up to the cultural and religious institutions. It's a semantic argument, but an important one: all sorts of people have all sorts of relationships which means they rely on each other. I say, give them the ability to rely on each other legally.

As for single-vs-married taxes, I'd blow that out of the water.

---

Other radical views:
- Sales tax is the worst and most harmful tax we have in America, directly penalizing anyone who can't afford to not spend the majority of their income. (Person A, who makes $100K a year, spends 40% of their income on food, housing, and necessities. Let's say sales tax is 7% - they pay 2.8% of their income in necessary sales tax. Person B makes $30K a year and spends 80% of their income on necessities. They pay 5.6% of their income on necessary sales tax. This is retarded.
- Gas, on the other hand, should be taxed out the ass. Hugely, monstrously taxed. The money should go directly to paying for better public transportation.
- Clean water and universal healthcare are the right of all people in any nation that can afford to do so. I don't think they're natural rights, but I think they're extremely fundamental steps to the world progressing.

I'd abolish VAT (that's sales tax for you Americans), car tax, road tax and national insurance and bung it all on Income Tax.

Then I'd tax people an additional amount based on how far away from their place of work they live.

I'd tax the rich more than poor. I'd give huge tax breaks to families where someone stays home and raises their children until they reach school age.

I'd tax sales based on how far the item was made from where it was sold.

I'd tax food based on how bad for you it is.

Fuck the global economy; it only produces sweat shops, homogeny and a world of McDs anyway.

I'd remove thick children from school at twelve and send them into apprentiships.

I'd have academies for the really smart kids so they don't have to sit in class bored out of their brains while the Teacher explains how to some as absurdly simple as Algebra to the cretins all around them.

All public transport would be free at the point of use.

All new houses would have to have first class insulation and solar panels on the roof. Electronic appliances would be required to meet efficency targets.

Here is my (IMHO) moderate view that has somehow drifted to exremism in the last couple of centuries:

Citizens of a country get certain benefits from living there. In return they have certain responsibilities.

If our (US) government isn't *both* protecting the minority from the majority and protecting the majority from the minority, it isn't working the way it was designed to.

Get money the fuck out of politics. As long as the monied interests can buy representatvies, those representatives will only be representing the monied interests, not the other 99% of the country.

Abortion. I'm staunchly pro-choice.

Sex. If it's consensual, leave them the fuck alone.

In fact, that really describes my views on all government and life. Unless you're taking away from someone elses ability to chose how they want they're life to be, you should be able to do whatever the hell you want.

I think it's a shame that modern human beings seem incapable of striking a balance between balance and ecology. In the long run, I wonder if it really matters, though.

Apprenticeships, eh?

Gee.

That's a lot better than my idea of just sterilizing people I think shouldn't breed. (sarcasm monitor: OFF)

Hey, I considered putting the idea of parenting licenses in...

Radical? How radical?

I'm a pragmatic anarchist; I live with the system I've got but aspire for better. But if I have some notions for an ideal community, it would be these:

We can eliminate the effect of money on politics by eliminating elections. Let's just draw lots from the jury rolls to see who's on the county council every 4 years. Then the council draws lots for state reps, the state reps draw lots for Senate and Congress. Senate chooses one of their own to be President. Congress chooses VP.

Large scale corporate capitalism should be abolished. All businesses should be locally owned, preferably by the people who do the work. Large scale projects would be done by small companies working through co-ops. Market economy is fine, between individual humans. Market speculation is evil.

Communication and power networks should be owned by the citizens, just as the highways are.

Cease all weapons sales to foreign powers and international subsidies used to buy such weapons

Only non-profit co-ops should be allowed to provide health insurance.


That's it for now.

Just call me an anarcho-syndicalist.

Capitalism is entirely a process of theft and must be destroyed. It's also stupid, and will destroy our habitat if left to its own devices.

The nation-state is redundant and must be abolished; it's primary purpose is the maintenance of property rights for the benefit of the wealthy, and a standing armed force for use against the citizens.

The Western powers presently enjoying a temporary global hegemony must return what they have stolen from the third world, or die defending their ill-gotten gains.

I tend to favor the idea of a "free market," but I think making money of off another person's labor is obscene. I think people generally only really feel invested in something if they have a direct stake & say in it--so I believe workers should own the means of production. (I don't know how radical that is for a website which promotes the direct ownership & control of roleplaying games. Basically, I believe what the Forge promotes should be applied to all areas of production & commerce. No record company execs making money off of musicians. No book publishers making money off of writers. No art gallery owners making money off of visual artists. No movie studios making money off of filmmakers. No factory owners making money off of factory workers. No CEOs making money off of retail workers. And so on. But that's not really all that radical is it?)

Goody! Chance to post the stuff I typed up for the other politics thread!

Pro-Life. Your choice was having sex. It's about personal responsibility, and accepting the natural consequences of one's actions. Grow up. Allowances in cases of medical necessity.

Anti-gun. The fewer people with guns, the safer I feel.

Against the death penalty. Simply isn't our right, despite our desires for revenge. Death is not justice.

Against the current prison system, because it doesn't do enough to deter or (more importantly) reform criminals.

Anti-hunting. Yes, you heard me. If not, allow me to hunt my fellow men, or why not? Hence, pro-animal rights (and human rights).

Support Gay Marriage & Adoption. A dead man whose religion doesn't mean a thing to me should not be determining the legality of this to me...clear violation of seperation of church and state.

Support bigger government & more public oversight of government.

Less "privacy," more safety -- after all, if you don't have anything to hide, what are you worried about? BUT civil liberties are important and must be maintained. That is, more surveillance, but not more control. If it keeps some deadbeat schmuck from beating his kids, I'm all for it.

Taxes are the price you pay for being a part of society and recieving its benefits. You don't like it, go live in the woods by yourself and maintain your own roads, defend yourself, provide for yourself (electricity, food, medicine, education, rights).

Remove natural-born citizenship. Require everyone in a society to go through the same citizenship tests as immigrants.

Support increases in funding to Social Welfare programs. Hire the poor and lower class and people with children to work in it, not the unempathic assholes generally currently running such systems.

Provide everyone, everywhere, regardless of whether they are working or not, with the basics to survive. Wipe out poverty, for the most part. If you want more than the basics, work harder. It's a right that a government should provide those in its care. Period. Or the people shouldn't care about the government, its rules, regulations, or existence (and lo and behold, people in such situations don't).

Require a license for having children (like driving, or carrying a weapon...I mean, for the Gods' sakes, parenting is way more important than driving). I've seen way too many kids seriously and sometimes almost irreprably fucked up by irresponsible and reprehensible parents to believe any differently. Procreation is a privelige, not a right, because not everyone is responsible enough for the responsibility, and there's too much danger for innocent bystanders (or innocent byproducts, rather) without something in place.

Higher taxes for the more wealthy -- they have the most to give back. They don't want to be a part of our society, they can go live somewhere else.

Reverse spending on the Military and Public Education. I want to see $6.2 billion dollars spent per school for a fleet of schools, sometime.

Free and decent education, for everyone, everywhere.

Free and decent health care for everyone, no matter what. It's a right that a government should provide those in its care. Period.

No religion in government. None. Natch. Nada. Shoot anyone who says otherwise. (Well, maybe not shoot, but hey...)

Ban fundamentalist extremists for the good of society -- this includes groups like the KKK and any hate-group (anti-gay groups...goodbye! Yes, this means you wacko, right-wing Christian extremists hiding behind your supposed religious beliefs).

Severely curb corporate control and influence of the government.

I completely agree with Gareth about capitalism.

Legalize drug-use. Tax the shit out of it. People who do it in the privacy of their own homes, leave them alone. Impose strict fines and jail sentences for substance abuse which injures or has the potential to injure others. If not, ban alcohol and tobacco, too (I mean, really...what's the bloody difference?).

Increased spending on science & technology, including the space program.

As I said elsewhere, basically, I'm all for enlightened, empathic, communal governance -- requiring a choice to be governed and to be a part of a society, thus acceptance of its laws and regulations and behavior that supports the functioning of that society. This benefits self and the society that supports self and others which support society.

More simply, I believe a society (government) owes its people everything, and thus the people owe their society (government) everything.

greyorm wrote: Taxes are the price you pay for being a part of society and recieving its benefits. You don't like it, go live in the woods by yourself and maintain your own roads, defend yourself, provide for yourself (electricity, food, medicine, education, rights).

Some enlightening sources:

The Unconscious Civilization by John Ralston Saul

Any recorded lectures by Noam Chomsky are great ways to learn. His documentary "Manufacturing Consent" is a must.

The State by Harold Barclay (my Dad!) He also wrote: Culture and Anarchism and People without Government

Hey Raven.

How do you reconcile this:

Pro-Life. Your choice was having sex. It's about personal responsibility, and accepting the natural consequences of one's actions. Grow up. Allowances in cases of medical necessity.

Require a license for having children (like driving, or carrying a weapon...I mean, for the Gods' sakes, parenting is way more important than driving). I've seen way too many kids seriously and sometimes almost irreprably fucked up by irresponsible and reprehensible parents to believe any differently. Procreation is a privelige, not a right, because not everyone is responsible enough for the responsibility, and there's too much danger for innocent bystanders (or innocent byproducts, rather) without something in place.

Well, it seems like you have to consider that a crime, just like underage drinking or unlicensed driving, and have concomitant penalties, including requiring the parents to pass the licensing examinations before their child is returned to them, and possibly requiring them to monetarily support the child while it's outside their custody.

Good catch, Ralph.

I could go into a lot of details, but honestly, there aren't many easy answers to that question. Enforced birth control and mandatory sterilization come to mind as off-the-cuff possibilities, with the latter being way too invasive and permanent for me (given that people change, and mistakes can be made), and the former has its own problems.

So: pregnant without a license to parent? Child goes up for adoption at birth (or before, which is how it often occurs today with unwanted pregnancies). Given the number of families out there looking to adopt, that shouldn't pose much of a problem statistically (with parentless children). Way more than there are children available to adopt right now. And adoptive parents already have to be "licensed" under the current system.

Also, option to earn one's license while pregnant.

Of course, that doesn't do anything for the personal responsibility of the offending biological parent, so I agree with Shreyas' suggestion of fines being imposed, the parent being required to provide money for the child (even out of their custody), and/or jail time be served. Basically, treat them just like regular deadbeat parents.

Honestly, that isn't as clean as I'd like, either, but today's system is hardly better (and mostly worse).

(And Jen's giving me that "Get off the computer and help me clean up before company comes over" look right now, so I'll leave it at that).

Hmmm....

Prostitution, drugs and gambling should be legal. That would allow them to be government regulated and taxed to high hell.

Separation of church and state should be law. (Which is apparently a myth. There is a big difference between Freedom of Religion and Freedom from Religion).

I'd like to agree with Jack and Raven. You should have a license to breed.

Also, I'm pro-death penalty.

joshua neff wrote: I tend to favor the idea of a "free market," but I think making money of off another person's labor is obscene.

I discovered the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement after I'd already reproduced. Maybe my kids will be smarter than me.

If there's going to be a license to breed, the application should require you to demonstrate that your future child will be genetically predestined to usher humanity into a new era of living sustainably within our due habitat. Otherwise - denied.

Heh. I actually kind of mean that. It's not just the one-ups talking.

-Vincent

Christopher Weeks wrote:

joshua neff wrote: I tend to favor the idea of a "free market," but I think making money of off another person's labor is obscene.

Ummm....hunh? What do you mean? If you remove the right of people to enter work contracts in which an employer profits, how is that market free? Your whole post seemed like it ran counter to free market theory.

I know you didn't talk about legislating work for pay away, I was trying to extend the idea without putting words in your mouth. Sorry.

If Ron isn't paying the artists a cut of his income for every sale, isn't it the same thing as what you're claiming to be obscene?

Free market != labor profiteering, but it includes it. I think without such an institution, it would be hard to defend that the market were free.

Chris

Let me amend that: I believe in a mostly free market, not an entirely free market. At the local, small business level, I believe the market should be free. As in, imagine a farmer's market, in which all the farmers own their produce & sell it to consumers. No one controls the market--it's all based on free enterprise. But the farmers work the farm & sell what they grow.

Ron's making money off his books, not off the art that's included in it. The artists made money for producing the art. Where's the issue there?

I am a card-carrying supporter of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. I've wanted a vasectomy since I was 14, have tried to get one since I was 18, and finally got one when I was 21. I hear the age-based discrimination for infertility surgery is even worse for women, and that just sucks. Some people say "stop at two." I say "stop at zero."

Prostition, gambling, drugs, should all be legal and taxed. Huge fines for doing anything with them that'd hurt others (drug use with a child in the womb should be considered child abuse). Not a big fan of smoking, because it's the only way of "ingesting" a drug that can directly infect/affect others, and might consider illegalizing smoking-stuff as a method of ingesting product, at least in public places.

NO TAX BREAKS FOR HAVING A DEPENDENT. I've backed down from the stance I had when I was younger ("tax 'em more!") but I'm entirely and totally against people with dependents (usually children) getting more money for it. It's not healthy.

I'm a full supporter of the fairtax (www.fairtax.org), a system which removes the income tax in favor of a sales tax on new (not used) products, with a proposal to reduce/remove the "punishing the lower class" (basically, tax refunds equal to the COLA). The only place where I break with fairtax is the "more money for more people" philosophy. The tax break should be entirely based on the # of people working, not on the # of people being supported - again, this is the "no tax breaks for having a dependent" concept. Income tax is thuggery; sales tax is a choice, and this form of sales tax, where there's a rebate, is, well, fair.

I believe in school vouchers. I believe the concept should be extended to both social security and medicare - I should be allowed to take my social security money-voucher and move it to another reitrement account at any time, and medicare would work better if there were multiple places competing for your business.

In the United States, I am a supporter of States Rights.

I believe the House of Representatives should not conform to state lines. That's the job of the Senate. The House should be allowed to cross state lines if it would better represent the populace. Every state should have at least two Representatives within their borders.

I believe that presidents winning "the whole state" in the electoral college is unconstitutional. If 3 electors vote for candidate X, and 2 for candidate Y, candidate X shouldn't get all 5 votes. I also have a proposal for changing the presidential electoral process:

1. Each person in the populace has 3 votes for president, equating to their Representative vote, and the two Senate votes (just like electoral votes are now). They may place these votes where they like, giving one candidate 3 votes, one candidate 2 and another candidate 1, or splitting 1 vote apiece amongst 3 candidates. Two of these votes are "senatorial" and one is "representative."

2. All votes are combined to form the "Electoral vote" for each reason. The two senatorial electoral votes for each state are always given to the highest, and second-highest, winner of the senatorial votes cast by the populace. Each representative vote is resolved separately, and given to the winner. All electoral votes are equal for the next step, however.

3. The person with the most electoral votes becomes president. The person with the second most becomes vice president. All electoral votes are counted separately, not bunched up per state. With three votes per person, the fiasco of "oh my god, two people have exactly the same # of votes!" becomes much smaller. Still possible, just smaller.

joshua neff wrote: Let me amend that: I believe in a mostly free market, not an entirely free market. At the local, small business level, I believe the market should be free. As in, imagine a farmer's market, in which all the farmers own their produce & sell it to consumers. No one controls the market--it's all based on free enterprise. But the farmers work the farm & sell what they grow.

And why is it that bashing "capitalism" is so popular, without ever bringing up the huge benefit in terms of volume of available goods and cheapness of those that capitalism provides.

Hey Ralph, we might actually agree on capitalism. I totally agree with what Adam Smith said in The Wealth of Nations.

Adam Smith should be required reading in all high schools.

It was one of the few books I was assigned to read in college that a) I actually did, and b) I didn't promptly sell back for cash.

Its truly astonishing how visionary his words are when you consider they were written in 1776 at the height of Mercantilism.

Radical politics?

Hmm.

<Seth looks around>

Well, since it's a party and all....

I think that the Tories were right (although the English taxation was an abomination).

I think that the South was within its rights to secede (although the slavery was an abomination).

I think that the original Monroe Doctrine was the way to go.

I think that the medieval popes may have had a clue when it came to their understanding of the place of kings. (Okay, so that's a slight exaggeration.)

I think that the public school system is evil.

I think that the separation of church and state (as currently stated) is impossible.

I think that gun control violates the Second Amendment.

I think that most social workers and housing inspections violate the Fourth Amendment.

I believe that even the Constitution must be bound by the Bible.

I believe....that I will stop rambling now.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

Valamir wrote: Some family friends of ours are from Moscow, working as professors here in the states (for the last 10+ yrs). The first time the wife set foot in a Supermarket she broke down and cried. She had never seen so much food or other products available in one place for anyone to just walk in and buy without waiting.

I guess I haven't posted mine yet...

Ah Hell, it's already been said better than I can say it:

People who believe in a better way of life know that the way we live now is criminal. Denial of freedoms, death by starvation and exploitation, denigration of people's capabilities everywhere. If you see that these outcomes are socially produced, then you understand that every person who dies as a result was effectively murdered. Once you accept the possibility of attaining a humanist alternative, you have to be a terrible hypocrite, coward or cynic to live passively with the contrast between what is and what could be.

joshua neff wrote: Again, if RPGs can be creator-owned & -controlled, I don't see why other things can't be.

Before we all get hip-deep in an argument about the evils of capitalism, I should make it clear that this isn't something I feel extraordinarily strongly about. I'm not set on destroying the capitalist state & replacing it with a Worker's Paradise or anything like that.

However, I think it's sheer idiocy to pay someone $7.50 an hour, give them no say in how the workplace is run, & yet expect them to work as hard as they can & care that the company they work for succeeds. (For example, I work at Borders. I am, in fact, paid $7.50 an hour. We employees are regularly pushed to do our best, sell as much as we can, promote the store while at work. Why? We don't get anything out of it. If the store doesn't make enough money & closes--& there hasn't been a Borders yet that has closed because of bad sales, because the corporation has enough money to keep its stores open, despite not having enough money to pay its employees better than $7.50 an hour--I can just get a different low-paying retail job. What's my incentive to work hard? I get paid the same regardless. It's really in my best interest to slack as much as possible, since I get the $7.50 an hour whether I work hard or not.)

Because local economies do not have the capital to build $58 million processing plants that make goods cheap enough for the masses to buy.

They need that capital to come from somewhere outside of the community in order for it to get built.

For that you have to have some means of raising, collecting, and organizing that capital.

That takes either central control forcibly reallocating capital, or capitalists.

Capitalists are not evil. Capitalists are people who are willing to take risks that others won't.

Valamir wrote: Do you have any idea how expensive and hard to get goods are without capitalism?

Valamir wrote: No centralised economy has ever or could ever deliver the volume and pricing that capitalism can.

However, I think it's sheer idiocy to pay someone $7.50 an hour, give them no say in how the workplace is run, & yet expect them to work as hard as they can & care that the company they work for succeeds.

Valamir wrote: Because local economies do not have the capital to build $58 million processing plants that make goods cheap enough for the masses to buy.

They need that capital to come from somewhere outside of the community in order for it to get built.

For that you have to have some means of raising, collecting, and organizing that capital.

That takes either central control forcibly reallocating capital, or capitalists.

Capitalists are not evil. Capitalists are people who are willing to take risks that others won't.

Ralph, I trust that you know more about money and economy than I. So can you demonstrate this? Or even support it a little? How can we know that "no centralised economy...could ever...?"

At the same time, I might question the necessity and wisdom of $58 million processing plants, though. But again, that's not a "capitalism vs. centralized control" debate.

Capitalism enters into the picture in deciding WHAT the $58 million plant should produce. If enough people want jeans, the factory will make jeans.

Centralized Control means the factory might produce plaid corderoys or farm equipment...even if most people don't want plaid corderoys or farm equipment.

Ralph, thanks for the time you just gave us.

I have a few quibbles which may or may not be Big Things:

capitalism is nothing more than a system that takes capital and distributes it to where it is most efficiently put to use

In a Socialist system, the government simply takes the capital you have away from you and gives it to some one else

Simple. The businesses compete for the capital. The one that offers more profit to you is the one that you give your money to.

What this means is there is now more capital in the society at the end of this deal, then there is at the beginning. Society as a whole is wealthier. That's the efficiency of capitalism. By uplifting the total wealth available to a society, you uplift more members of that society

As soon as you put in limitations on the free flow of capital, you automatically by definition MUST wind up with a less efficient system.

Society is now automatically worse off. There is now less wealth in the system then there could have been because you (i.e. some government agency) interfered with where that money is going and routed it to a less efficient use.

Thing is, it doesn't work that way. YES in the short term you did just help out that 1 individual business and his family and employees more than if you'd let money flow freely. But that act, repeated often and consistantly over and over means that a generation down the road the standard of living for the average person is going to be lower than it could have been.

...this is where charitable giving and volunteer work have to pick up the slack...BUT, before you start to think "wouldn't it be nice if the government just took care of these things so that charity wouldn't be necessary" its important to not that when the government does that the overall level of prosperity for the whole society declines

No other system in history has been able to do a better job than this

I believe in taxing the bejeezus out of the rich. If you have an income of $500,000 a year, by any means at all, you should pony up 60% of it. Once that's set as a baseline, stagger it right the way down so that poor couples making minimum wage can have one spouse stay home with a kid if he or she wants to. Otherwise child care is a tax on the poor.

I believe in taxing any motor vehicle that is not used for proven and justified business use, scaled by cost and fuel-efficiency. If you can afford a $60,000 SUV, you can afford another $10,000 in taxes. If you buy a super-efficient car under $20,000, you should be able to ride home in style.

I believe that the separation of church and state, while a noble goal, is fundamentally impossible. I would like to enforce it, however, by making all political rhetoric about religion flatly illegal. No more "faith-based" bullshit. If you can't justify it without reference to the Bible, you shouldn't be able to legislate for it. Period.

I believe that Amnesty International should be backed by the world court with the power to levy major sanctions against criminal nations. For example, the three remaining countries that permit the application of the death penalty to children should be put under radical and even intolerable sanctions until they stop it. Incidentally, we're one of those three. And no, Iran isn't.

I believe that the death penalty is a disgusting holdover that has long since been abolished by right-thinking nations.

I believe that sexual contact of any kind between consenting adults of any number and sex is nobody's business but theirs. I will make some exceptions for doing it in public.

I believe, with Clinton Nixon, that the government has no business officiating at marriages, which are a fundamentally religious institution the way this culture thinks of them. Either (1) make marriage entirely a civil matter, in which case there is no justification for limitations of race, creed, color, or sex; or (2) make marriage officially a religious matter, as in fact it currently is, and have the state only issue civil unions -- equally not limited by race, creed, color, or sex. Every argument I have heard about why marriage should be heterosexual comes down to (a) because my religion says it's bad, or (b) because that's not how it's been used legally in the past. The former is unconstitutional; the latter is irrelevant.

I believe that it's about fucking time somebody actually decided to put 2 and 2 together and realize that education in this country sucks because the teachers are really badly paid and overworked, and thus there is no incentive for talented people to go into it. And don't tell me college profs don't spend a lot of time in the classroom, either, because they don't get paid to teach -- it's the ugly truth, folks -- and they generally work around 60 hours a week for under 50k. High school and elementary teachers are these days paid about equally, which is good, but have longer class hours and more students than they can possibly handle. Try this on for size: the average salary of a corporate receptionist after 5 years' experience is slightly higher than that of a high school teacher after equal experience. Fuck the rich and pay for schools. And if you don't like the schools, pay more for them, don't just weasel your kids out of them and blame the minorities you don't like.

I believe that affirmative action is a wonderful idea hamstrung by a total unwillingness, by everyone involved at every level, to follow through. If you admit an underqualified because underprivileged student, you must follow up and make up for lost time. If you don't, you just defer the problem.

I believe that education based on "self-esteem" is despicable unless you actually give the kids something to feel good about. I am tired of having to break students of the idea that their total ignorance is justified by their "personal style."

I believe that the press should stop claiming objectivity. It just allows the shitheads to claim to be objective and tell lies. Viz. Fox News.

I believe that the slander and libel laws should be loosened, so that we could prosecute Rush Limbaugh and the like for spreading poison.

I believe that politicians who lie about legislation or policy should be forced to pay for their crimes through public admission and large sums of money. So for example, Rumsfeld's public lies about how he never said that there was an imminent threat -- something he is on tape saying -- should cost him about $10,000 right now, cash on the barrelhead, and all the newspapers cover it publicly.

And that's just a start. As George Carlin said, "I don't have dislikes. I have psychotic fucking hatreds."

Christopher Weeks wrote:
In your meaning, I take efficiency to be the rate of production of new wealth as predicted by the individuals involved in the transaction. Is that fair?

Many socialists question the notion that said capital was actually "yours." That is, you generated capital through the use of public infrastructure, and as such the wealth that you generate is public wealth. So I think they'd describe it differently.

This is where efficiency is being guessed at. I assume that when you make the loan to the guy offering the higher return and he goes out of business, that's not an example of maximal efficiency, right? If there were some magical way of determining ahead of time what will succeed (I'm not suggesting such a thing exists without fail), then you could distribute the capital with maximum efficiency. Right?

That's bad logic. I'd buy the mean wealth per member of society has risen, but that doesn't say anything about the actual number of members affected. In a society of ten people, two businessmen and eight layabouts, if the two businessmen keep shifting capital to one another's innovative projects and the other eight simply languish, fewer people are helped than would have happened under a communitarian system. Right? Again, I'm not even stating that's a reasonable analogy to reality (at least not yet, I don't know if I'd take it that way eventually), just that that is how the logic can play out.

Except that "worse off" is wildly up for definition. Even if I grant that less wealth overall exists, I might think that having no people starving and thus violent, is actually more important to the "worse off" metric.

There are other problems with capitalism leading to "better off" that stem from short-sightedness. The upper management of companies seem to often be more concerned about short-term shareholder value gains than sustainable success. I think this clearly, at least sometimes, decreases the accumulation of overall wealth over time. Right?

I see the same logical fallacy. You are misrepresenting averages. Even if the total wealth divided by the population is lower, that does absolutely, positively NOT mean that "the standard of living for the average person is...lower."

Now wait a minute! If the capital is distributed to these less efficient causes by charitable donation, the overall level of prosperity doesn't decline, but when done by government it does? That can't be if the very reason for the decline in total wealth is the minimization of efficiency. It's the same!

Better at maximizing efficiency as we've defined it, right? The ancient Hopi seem to have run a thriving communal civilization, but of course their economic instruments and accomplishments were much less sophisticated. I think Cuba, with all of Castro's faults, is the shining star of modern communist success, but that might be because it's small. There is still a part elite that lives luxuriously on the backs of the rest of the populace, and that has to go, but lots of Cubans are pretty happy getting unlimited free education, whatever healthcare that their system can provide for free (with many, many doctors and very little material), and an obligation of only a few hours of work each week. How much better would they be doing if we hadn't been fucking them up the ass for forty years?

Christopher Weeks wrote: Ralph, thanks for the time you just gave us.

http://www.lp.org/

Based on a number of the posts on this thread I think some of you either are Lib or should be :) Take some time and read some articles explaining why the party policies are the way they are. You may learn some suprising things.

quozl wrote: Christopher, if you have more time and are interested in this sort of thing, read The Wealth of Nations if you haven't already. It... is very pro-capitalism and very anti-government control.

quozl wrote:

Christopher Weeks wrote: Ralph, thanks for the time you just gave us.

Christopher, if you have more time and are interested in this sort of thing, read The Wealth of Nations if you haven't already. It is an amazing book (which is still required reading in most every college economics program) that is very pro-capitalism and very anti-government control. While Adam Smith didn't know the complexities of the modern world, he sure knew his stuff 230 years ago.

BPetroff93 wrote: http://www.lp.org/

Based on a number of the posts on this thread I think some of you either are Lib or should be :) Take some time and read some articles explaining why the party policies are the way they are. You may learn some suprising things.

Not to shift the thread too much Ralph but what are you making that observation on?

Alan wrote: He was not in favor of laisez faire capitalism as a general solution to every economic problem.

THATs what Capitalism gives you people

That's the efficiency of capitalism. By uplifting the total wealth available to a society, you uplift more members of that society

YES in the short term you did just help out that 1 individual business and his family and employees more than if you'd let money flow freely. But that act, repeated often and consistantly over and over means that a generation down the road the standard of living for the average person is going to be lower than it could have been.

You are basically dooming all of society to a lower standard of living in order to selectively help certain individuals have a higher standard of living.

greyorm wrote: The current, modern "captialist system" has done precisely SQUAT for me and mine.

Okay Rev. here goes...

First off if "money talks" that is the opposite of class system because class becomes irrelavent. Second, I know a great many people who would disagree with the statement that hard work doesn't equal anything. I appreciate that you have had your experience, but I have had mine and they are equally valid.

What Ralph is talking about is actually not trickle down economics. Trickle down is raising the wealth of the already wealthy in the hopes that it will filter downwards. Ralph is talking about all members of society benefiting from higher levels of wealth, in other words the "goal" of capitalism.

Capitalism is only "about self interest" in the sense that it assumes that all rational human beings are going to act in their own self interest. This is not a statement about what we should do, but rather what we will do. This is exactly the same thing you are doing:

have very personal reasons for hating the system. The current, modern "captialist system" has done precisely SQUAT for me and mine, exactly as you point out, and it's only through social welfare programs (derived from enforced taxation, which is the opposite of capitalist philosophy of personal control of assets, as you mention) that I, and many others, are hanging on and surviving.

greyorm wrote:

That's the efficiency of capitalism. By uplifting the total wealth available to a society, you uplift more members of that society

Hey, look, trickle down economics.

As for Cuba, here are some random figures... make up your own mind.

(These are pulled from The CIA World Factbook. There are a bunch more figures, I just grabbed some interesting ones that are listed in percentages.)

USA:
Death Rate: 8.44 deaths/1,000 population (2003 est.)
Infant Mortality: 6.75 deaths/1,000 live births
Life Expectancy: 77.14 years
HIV Adult Prevalence: 0.6% (2001 est.)

GDP Growth Rate: 2.4% (2002 est.)
Inflation Rate: 1.6% (2002)
Industrial Production Growth Rate: -0.4% (2002 est.)

Cuba:
Death Rate: 7.38 deaths/1,000 population (2003 est.)
Infant Mortality: 7.15 deaths/1,000 live births
Life Expectancy: 76.8 years
HIV Adult Prevalence: less than 0.1% (2001 est.)

GDP Growth Rate: 1.1% (2002 est.)
Inflation Rate: 7.1% (2002 est.)
Industrial Production Growth Rate: 0.2% (2001 est.)

BPetroff93 wrote: First off if "money talks" that is the opposite of class system because class becomes irrelavent.

Second, I know a great many people who would disagree with the statement that hard work doesn't equal anything. I appreciate that you have had your experience, but I have had mine and they are equally valid.

Trickle down is raising the wealth of the already wealthy in the hopes that it will filter downwards. Ralph is talking about all members of society benefiting from higher levels of wealth.

On one hand you are saying self interest is bad, yet on the other you say that you don't like capitalism because it hasn't helped you

To say that capitalism would work in a perfect world is ridiculous because it has worked, in this world.

Communism has failed because it is a seriously flawed theory that is based on sentimentality and fear.

Yet that choice amounts to Forcing others to play by their rules.

Under a communist system your freedom to trade your skills, time or products has been taken away from you.

greyorm wrote: Besides, in order for society to function, everyone has to be forced to play by certain rules (no drinking and driving, no killing, no stealing, etc). That's what makes it a society, and not an anarchy.