Religion and Politics

Hello Fixed

I don’t believe that the prosperity of the nation is tied to the election of Trump. If anything it has survived Trump and his mercantilist approach to trade. Not only that but if anonymous is believed then again Trump is merely a figure hear that is tolerated and even resisted. And don’t get me wrong, I disagree with the efforts of those inside the WH to dull Trump’s Presidency because he represents the will of the People (even the will of those who did not vote to allow the vote of others to decide their future). The Nation learned from the mistakes of W. Bush and they were his mistakes and he was allowed to make such mistakes, to exercise the powers granted to the occupant of the President’s Office.

Again I much rather have more people feel angry and hurt to vote than apathetic about who wins or loses.

Hey Omar
The math is pretty simple, trump is the first us prez to tax corps overseas so much that they move their companies back to the US. Trumpy has already made us back close to a trillion in two years. Comes with record employment.

Funny is that he already said he was gonna do this literally 30 years ago when he said he might have to run to eventually save the country which he did. Logic is really elementary. But ok it is still pretty deep. Capitalism is more logical than fair.

Trump is like Napoleon no less, saved US last minute like Nap saved France. Like Nap the international elites hate him and will make sure there is gonna be war and mass death. It’s coming, I can see because eve though trump saved the children of ME from Isis and the US from bankruptcy and thousands of more sweet things he did and zero wrongs, the good people of the world still curse him. The good people deserve to see what they are really doing. A lot of people will go insane in guilt and shame when they see what the fought against and for. It will be pretty spectacular.

If a country exports a greater value than it imports, it has a trade surplus or positive balance, and conversely, if a country imports a greater value than it exports, it has a trade deficit or negative balance

So by your own definition of slavery, eating and sleeping are not slavery since in those activities there is no “theft of productivity for one’s own gain”.

Why don’t you just admit it and jump out of the hole that you dug for yourself.

Then one could move on to discussing if employment is some sort of theft or if it is a trade of labor for compensation.

The math, I’m afraid, is not that simple.
Tariff do not save us money. The tariffs are passed on to the consumer. Your price will be increased, which is one of the reasons that he may have waited to after the tax cuts were passed to shit on the capitalist system. That system was the legacy of America’s domination in the world after WW2. It was our choice. We were not victims of it, we were the beneficiaries of it.
Perhaps you believe that outsourcing is bad. However, in the case of the Boeing 787 development, it was a necessary condition, securing both the cash and the greatest possible number of customers at the price of having to develop China’s manufacturing. Instead of fighting a war which is more likely to spur the application of robotics and automation to ever greater areas of production (built in America…by Watson), the US should have instead continued to do like China and invest on it’s future, creating the infrastructure for electric vehicles for example, thus ensuring that we would lead the world in an emerging technology that could change everything. Instead we get into a trade war. You know how stupid it is to get into a trade war with the EU at the same time that you’re trying to win a trade war with Canada, Mexico, and China? Complaining about foreign manufacturer’s like BMW and Mercedes when in fact they have built fabrics here in the US, thus, like Airbus, could easily escape any effects of the war (as Airbus knows).

In the end, tariffs will increase what we pay. Perhaps they will eat the profits of certain companies, but in the case of Apple for example, the costs of the tariffs will remain less than the costs of shifting operations into the US where everything from rent to labor costs will be much more damaging to profits. This bullshit also flies in the face of our commitment to free markets and small government that stays out of the path of businesses. This is the nationalization of industries. This is fucking communism. We are on the path of guaranteeing the jobs of metal workers, coal miners, auto workers (and whomever else is deemed as essential to winning a toss-up state) for the sake of “national security”. Rather than letting the discomfort of losing one’s job spur change towards emerging industries (and the government should educate people displaced) we’ve prolonged the eventual death of coal and will encourage Detroit to produce another Aztek.

So Trump has taxed the cheap overseas labor to make it equivalent to the expensive american labor and this anti-efficiency is beneficial how? It’s across the board price increase to subsidize an inefficient workforce that the free market had determined was antiquated. Trump is meddling in the free market, and not only that, but in a nonsensical way by a sentimental and nostalgic effort to bring back the past.

Trump said in 2016 that the unemployment numbers were a lie and the real number was closer to 42%:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI2UztDjQhQ[/youtube]

Now suddenly those same numbers are believable simply because he’s in charge, but the participation rate is still at historic lows. The fact remains that the unemployment number doesn’t count folks who are unemployed for a certain length of time.

The civilian labor force is 161,776,000 and the population is 328,365,000 leaving 166,589,000 people not working. Subtract out students, seniors, disabled, housewives, etc and we’re still left with a sizable portion of the population who could be working.

Yes, tariffs are a tax on the poor and middle class to go along with the tax cuts for the rich. Also, let’s not forget that Trump scotus pick (Gorsuch) resulted in sales tax for online purchases, which is another tax on the poor. This is absolutely not sustainable. The only purpose of taxation is redistribution from the rich to the poor, but Trump has it backwards.

Well you can’t be slave to yourself, but you could look at it as being slave to the activity because the activity of eating and sleeping is stealing productivity from our goals. I typically only eat once a day for that very reason.

I’m not in a hole.

You cannot trade what you are not conscious of. Since you have no way of knowing what profit your labor is transferring to an employer, there is no way you could agree to it. And since employment is required to survive, the whole notion of “voluntary” is lost anyway.

Let us not forget this post: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=194156&start=25#p2708620

Or to use the technical
39:17
term economists like: he has to rip the
39:20
workers off, he has to steal from them
39:25
part of what their labor added.

That’s a bold, passionate, and emphatic statement from a professor of economics with an alma mater of Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. Surely he’s not confused.

An activity is stealing??

Sounds rather absurd.

You know how much your time is worth to you. You have a sense of “good trade” and “bad trade”.

This is an appeal to authority.

I could eat or I could talk to you, so if I eat, then it’s stealing time from you. Or we could say that if I talk to you, then it’s stealing time from eating.

But you don’t know how much you’re giving away in the trade. If people find out how much they are giving away, then they go on strike (I’ve had that happen to me when the guys figured out how much I was making in comparison). If they would strike if they found out how much they are giving away, then that means they would not agree to the terms if they knew what the terms are. They will agree to work for $10/hr if they don’t know how much money per hour the employer is making off of them, but if they find out the employer is making $100/hr and only paying them $10, they probably wouldn’t agree.

Yes I know, but it’s to counter your appeal to the ridiculous. If a pedigreed professor of economics can make a claim, then surely it’s not ridiculous.

You can say anything that you like. Doesn’t mean I or someone else thinks that it’s a reasonable thing to say.

What appeal to the ridiculous? I questioned whether employment is theft.

I didn’t know that it was all settled and carved in stone.

Hmm… let’s try this:

I don’t know how else to address that.

The implication that I’m in a hole says the idea must be ridiculous. You seem to act as if there is no merit whatsoever to the claim.

It is settled in academia as far as I can tell. I don’t see how Krugman and Stiglitz can be so revered if they preached bs. A round earth should be set in stone too, but people have their own opinions. The problem, though, with those going their own way regarding the economy is that they vote.

1+1=2 does not accurately represent your position.

Your hole is : Your insistence that eating and sleeping is slavery.

Keep digging.

Obviously one can say this, you just did. So let’s assume you are taking a stronger stand, but worded in a way that does not quite openly take that stand. You are saying that it is an accurate description of what is happening. You are using a word stealing, from the verb steal, and attributing it to an activity, rather than a person or what we think of as an agent. The agent, who makes the choice, is actually you, in this situation. No property was taken from you by an agent, someone unlawfully taking your property. So you are stretching the meaning, or, really using an active metaphor. It might be a useful metaphor, in some context. But in flat exchanges between people trying to understand a phenomenon, I don’t think it’s useful.

IOW it might be useful to highlight a feeling. It might feel like you are stealing time with someone because of your basic needs and your choice to satisfy them. Or it might feel like non-sentient abstracted processes are stealing from you.

Fine. Poetic use of language to get at ONE nuance of an experience. Or perhaps a few facets of an experience.

But as a general description it fails. It does not match my experience. It does not match my understanding of what happens when I MAKE A CHOICE. As I experience it. If you want to bring in determinism and view it in the 3rd person, it still does not fit, since it is still not stealing.

And in a deterministic universe there is only one outcome and you cannot say that the outcome which did not happen stole something, since that non-realized outcome did not and does not exist.

I don’t think it is useful or accurate to maintain these as good descriptions of these phenomena.

If you are playing devil’s advocate, rather than say, refusing to give up a position and being willing to argue whatever rather than admitting it was a dead end, OK that might be useful. A noble lie of some sort, but a temporary one.

Yes it does, but you refuse to see it. Your dogmatism is starting to become flattery since I must be correct in order to be eliciting this much bullheaded pushback. If I were incorrect, you would simply point out my error, “Here’s how you’re wrong ____________” but apparently you can’t and have resorted to clinging to dogma due to unpalatability of facts and your inability to draw a definitive line on a slippery slope of degrees of category.

I’m not insisting, but you push me into a corner by saying “Well if employment is slavery then what about eating a sleeping?” So from a certain point of view, you can be slave to an activity such as eating, sleeping, posting on ILP, but you cannot be a slave to yourself. That’s clearly stated, is non-contradictory, and I’m not in a hole in spite of you baiting me and wishing I were.

I enjoy watching you flop around.

You made up your own definition of slavery. It’s a silly definition. It means that everyone is a slave to literally everything. It means people are slaves to activities and inanimate objects. You’re a slave to oxygen molecules because you need to breathe in order to live. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera … It’s a bottomless pit of absurdity.

But go on, tell us more.

That’s actually really good commentary! Yeah I’m stretching. I’ve admitted that one cannot be slave to themselves, but have allowed for slavery of activity from a certain point of view. It’s not essential for my argument and is a diversion tactic employed by phyllo to get me to concede there is something to which I’m bound that also does not steal from me. If there is no agent, then it’s not an applicable analogy to challenge my wage-slavery assertion and the objection is moot.

But there is a sense in which there is an agent if that agent is the other in the self/other relationship wherein the other in this case would be the environment aspect of the universe that is not me. That agent is insisting that something be done immediately, but is counter to what I’d prefer to do with my time and is therefore stealing from me.

There is no deterministic universe in the sense you are using it. We are determined by randomness that is not predictable and not repeatable if the universe were rewound and started again.

It’s not a deadend because the core issue is whether employment is in the category of slavery notwithstanding degrees of suffering or anything else. I have 2 observations on my side: 1) employment is not voluntary. 2) profit is extracted and productivity is stolen. Unfortunately for everyone who’d prefer it to be otherwise, that is slavery. Being compelled to participate in activities where theft of productivity results is the very definition of slavery. Slavery is not ownership; it is not physically abusive, but it’s compulsion to participate in activities that results in theft.

Phyllo brought the point that he may want agree to that system, but I countered that it’s impossible to agree if you cannot be aware of the terms. Sure, if someone could layout plainly that I’d be making X and contributing Y to the company in profits, then I might be able to agree to the terms, but it’s essential in a slave system to keep such things quiet lest the slaves view it as unfair because Y far exceeds X as evidenced by the great division of wealth that exists.

Again, people are ok with that as long as it’s quiet. People are happy with the bone that is thrown to them, and so long as they can count on that bone, it doesn’t matter what the rich are eating. Well that’s stupid, imo. It’s giving something away for nothing in return. The slaves could argue that they’re getting reliability in return, but they’d get that just the same if they demanded more of their productivity as evidenced by 50 years of high taxation (redistribution) in the US. The system did not break down; contrarily, it’s the time Trump wants to take us back to because it was SO GREAT! But Trump is an idiot who can’t figure out that it was great because of the redistributive mechanisms that FDR instituted, so where Trump is taking us is pre-1930 and we already know how that ended.

The health of an economy is a function of the redistributive mechanisms because if the people do not have money, there is no economy.

No. You decide to eat or you eat and don’t go out with your friend. The going out with you friend never happened. That event cannot be stolen from you. It does not exist. What does not exist cannot be stolen. Further, if you, the organism, actually preferred to be with your friend, you would have done that. But you preferred to satisfy your hunger.

It doesn’t matter if we take in qm indeterminism or have a more newtonian pure determinism. There is no event where you went with your friend when you decided to eat. There was no stealing. What happened happened. What did not happen did not happen.

I think wage-slavery is a valid hyperbole. There was a time when one could head out to the frontier to some degree (and often steal, but that’s another story), but now, yes, we are compelled. But I need to see the phrase wage-slavery, rather than just slavery. And, in any, case, I responded to eating as slavery. However as far as wage slavery I think it is hyperbole. For some people the situation can be closer to slavery, though even there I would say it is closer to the horrors of sharecropper South, than slavery.

You don’t generally need slaves to think it is fair, you just need them to understand the power differential and consequences. You cannot force the person to live in a specific spot. You cannot separate them from their family members. They have recourse to take you to court for physical violence and other types of mistreatment. You can shift yourself between employers, though this is not fair or always easy. What you do in your own home is not restricted in the ways slaves were restricted.
You can play drums and learn to read.

Look, I hate the current capitalist system - and likely am more critical of it than Phyllo who went through the horrors of communism, which I am also not fond of - but just because X has a number of qualities that Y does it does not mean it is Y, at least not necessarily.

As polemic calling it wage- slavery, in many contexts, I like. But it’s not slavery, it is something that has some characteristics in common.

I’m with you generally on all this.

Opportunity cost represents the benefits an individual, investor or business misses out on when choosing one alternative over another. investopedia.com/terms/o/op … tycost.asp

What is stolen/lost is the opportunity to go out with a friend. Actually going out with the friend didn’t exist, but the opportunity did, and because the universe (agent) decided to impose its will in making me too sick to go out, the opportunity to have a good time with my friend was stolen.

Sure I concede that, but what I’m saying is that things are not destined to happen any certain way. Events are determined by randomness and not newtonian pure determinism.

You’re still associating slavery with suffering. A slave can be paid $1 million and still be a slave if they transferred, say, $10 million in productivity to their employer without agreeing to. Have you heard the saying that the loss of a jewel from the crown of a king is the same pain as the loss of a doll to a little girl? We may not have much sympathy for the slave who is only getting $1 million of his productivity, or a better example is a rich guy who had some art stolen from his house because he’s still rich, but it’s still a theft. The law regards it the same whether theft occurred from someone of abundance or the theft caused someone to starve. Stealing my only dollar is the same crime as stealing $1 million of my $100 million.

Fine, all that is true, but we’re back on the slippery slope looking for a place to draw a line differentiating one degree from another. The fact remains that I can only voluntarily work if I do not need to work, so even though I’m not forced to move or undergo beatings, I’m still forced to do something in order to go on living. So either I go make someone else rich, or I lay down and die.

Phyllo went through communism? I’d like to hear more about that.

In my view, there are two forms of government: consolidations of power and dispersals of power. I’d group communism with capitalism in the consolidation of power category because the inevitable result of a free (totally lawless or it wouldn’t be free) market is the eventual consolidation of power. So either the people make for themselves a government to prevent that or else someone will become the government and make slaves of the people.

[i]Franklin D. Roosevelt
131 - Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago
July 2, 1932

There are two ways of viewing the Government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776[/i] presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=75174

Well, common characteristics make for a category of things with common characteristics.

I’m happy about that :slight_smile: