Understanding Rush Limbaugh

Back on the main theme, the idea that politicians should be mandated to equalize human conditions for some top down fairness is pure Communism. So Mr R as well as Pedro I Rengel sound like Communists to me.

America isn’t about fairness or equality. There are a lot of countries where everyone has the same level of wealth and gets by just fine. There is nothing wrong with that. But it ain’t American and never will be.

And really the only ones who are really to blame for that whole crisis are the “regular folks” who simply didn’t pay their mortgages.
That’s what caused the whole collapse. People “buying” houses and living in them without paying.

You can’t blame that on the salespeople.
It’s just horrendously stupid to think you can buy a house without paying for it.
These are the dumbasses that lost their homes but also caused the entire economy to collapse.

Call me a communist again, I’ll call you a civilized retinue.

Otherwise yes, that is correct. Very good assessment.

The issue is not how you make capitalism morally correct. The question is how do you make it work.

Ask poor people who live to see 75 if it is morally correct, and then go fuck yourself.

Turns out, it’s greed for wealth and beautiful things and greatness that produces better living conditions for the prole, not bleeding hearts. G’figure.

Way #1 to make it work: make prevent communist regimes from asserting control over the world. Everything else is secondary. I count nazis and fascists as communists. For for them, 'tis all about the commune. Not the individuzzle. The fhurer and the whatever it was they used to call mussolini and Franco where godheads that allowed for the commune. You know, in that sense the communists are still better then them. They aren’t THAT weak.

The individual, bitch. The individual needs leveraged debt.

2008 crash was a result of regulations that forced banks to loan money to subprime borrowers and then those borrower taking more money than they could afford to pay back and spending it on mcmansions.

Likely true!

Rush flunked out of school before deciding to proselytize how much smarter he is than academia and capitalize on the ignorance of layfolks, who’re prone to mistaking cockiness for intelligence, by peddling short-sighted ideas, based mainly on hate, that seem sensible only on the surface, the depth of which is about all either he or his audience is equipped to explore.

A DittoHead is a special variety of idiot: the arrogant who congratulate themselves for abilities they don’t have and summarily demonize intelligentsia for lacking a “common sense” that is only common to uneducated people.

Hannity was a dropout too, which qualifies him as genius by conservative reckoning, oops but then Liberty University gave him a handout: an honorary degree. But conservatives still regard him as smart, so how can this paradox exist? Well, Liberty University teaches the earth is 6000 years old, so I can only surmise if one is educated in bullshit, it doesn’t count against their common sense… even if it was a handout they didn’t earn.

Now this guy is REALLY stupid:

[i]Paul Krugman

Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Columnist for The New York Times

Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography.

Previously a professor of economics at MIT, and later at Princeton University.

Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics.

Author or editor of 27 books, including scholarly works, textbooks, and books for a more general audience.

Published over 200 scholarly articles in professional journals and edited volumes.

Alma mater

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Yale University[/i]

Yup, that’s how you identify dummies. The smart people dropout and hop on the radio to pound their chest for avoiding stupid things like nobel prizes and degrees that sap everyone’s common sense.

Corruption existed everywhere. They packaged all those bad loans in CDOs and peddled them to wall street which ended up in the hands of sovereign wealth funds, pensions, etc, but the ratings agencies were in competition to get the ratings business so they rated them AAA for fear of losing the contract. Everyone looked the other way so long as everyone was making money.

And you coulda sold a house to a dead guy back then… maybe even a dog. There was no income-check, no out-of-pocket expense, nothing.

I can’t think of any link in the chain where shenanigans didn’t happen. There really is nowhere to place the blame except the unregulated, freemarket general mindset: the idea that the market can regulate itself without a governor; it infected every participant.

Barbarian, I’m not a communist. But the government is currently in a position such that their actions to some extent determine the distribution of wealth. It’s the rules that are in place that have created the billionaire class and that have made it increasingly difficult for average people to retire at a reasonable age and to get basic healthcare. So I understand what you’re saying that it’s not the role of government to distribute wealth, but if you agree with that then it has to work both ways. Creating a regulatory environment that facilitates a massive consolidation of it is in fact a redistribution. And it’s one that doesn’t serve the majority…which is what they’re supposed to do. I get it that we can’t find a cure for cancer unless someone has enough money in a big pile someplace to stop what they’re doing and get a job like that done…but that’s not the only instance, nor is it the most common type of thing that happens with large consolidations of wealth.

What happened to the idea that a person ought be able to work an honest job and make an honest living? Why is it that we start from the premise that since a guy has a billion dollars that he must have earned it, and that it’s his and that to take some of it would be immoral? How did he earn it? What were the circumstances that allowed him to amass that fortune?

I’m asking. I don’t think all cases are the same. I don’t think that every rich person is evil. But there is such a thing as more money than you can ever spend. There is such a thing as working an entire life and never escaping poverty. What do you say to the person who works full time for 40 years and ends up with nothing to show for it and who eventually dies from a stroke while bagging groceries in a walmart at 68 years old because he has to in order to keep his electricity on?

It’s that whole mentality of getting rich quick. The idiot homebuyers thought they’d borrow 300k while making 50k, then sell the house for 700k and retire at 45. The banks just wanted the mortgages because at the end of the day they can garnish the social security of the homeless who they foreclosed on. The traders wanted the CDOs because they put big numbers on the books, risk be damned, and everyone just thought that the government wouldn’t let a mass exodus of homebuyers flooding the homeless shelters happen.

Serendipper you make a valid point. I’m about to be 40, and have been all over and seen and done all kinds of shit and there’s still a certain class of people who would narrow me down to the simple fact that I went to college when it comes time to decide how they’re going to judge my intelligence. In many cases, the dumber the person is…the more likely they are to resent the educated and rationalize how college is stupid.

Rengel please don’t call me that. I’m sorry I called you a Communist.
I think Capitalism works because rather than a model of proper behavior, it is a psychological license to exist. It only works when it is allowed to be that.

Mr R, I agree government regulation is to blame.

It’s an insult to the principle of trade to call these people home buyers.
Whoever “bought” a home without paying for it should be thankful there are homeless shelters. These don’t exist in the Congo.

I was enjoying Homer and appreciating Xenophon at university until I made a thesis on Minoan Crete wherein based on a study of murals of Knossos I suggested it may have been a matriarchal society and thereby evoked the wrath and contempt of my professor who set out to get me removed. I beat him to it and got a specialized job based on some technical skills I had acquired as a kid. Thanks to that I didn’t get in student debt.

Well I didn’t want to say “homeowner”.

I’m beginning to define conservatism as the proposition that smart people are stupid and stupid people are smart. They will value your intelligence until you disagree with them, then you’ll lack “common sense”. As best I can tell, “book smarts” primarily causes a loss of “common sense” and I’ll concede there may be some truth in that correlation, but what truth resides is only applicable to a single person. But what is it that the vast majority of smart people can’t see? And why is it only uneducated people can see it? Instead of humbly admitting that NOT studying economics didn’t make them experts and that there may be something they haven’t considered, they doubledown with “liberal agenda, indoctrination, brainwashing, omg protect the ego!”

Common sense is what’s readily apparent and obvious to even the dumbest person, and what’s most obvious is that the earth is flat because: look around, don’t it look flat? It’s common sense! Stupid science disagrees. It’s the government’s fault!

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

It’s common sense that we could just keep going faster and faster right? It’s common sense! But stupid Einstein says no.

Common sense is essentially a superficial overview of a situation with no depth of exploration.

Like the gold standard seems sensible until I ask what happens when the population expands and people get richer, where will all the new gold come from? “Oh yeah I didn’t think of that.” Some cocky-sounding guy on youtube said money needed to be backed by something and it seemed sensible until we actually think beyond the slogan.

Or “the min wage will drive up prices.” How? Prices are already as high as companies can push them. Are we to think walmart is being charitable by offering lower prices than it could get away with? Hell no! They’re charging the max they can without losing business and revenue and profit. 21 times over 80 years the min wage has been raised and it’s always “the sky is falling” with those people. The reason prices go up is: people have more money! They buy more stuff and increase demand, which increases prices that people gleefully pay. In my min wage study, states with higher min wages had 10% higher gas prices (on ave), but 30% higher median incomes (on ave). Who wouldn’t take a 10% hike for 30% more pay?

It’s dumb idea after dumb idea and it’s stemming from the fact that they haven’t thought it out and are too proud to admit they don’t know something. And there’s the terror that someone somewhere might get something for nothing.

Most people that read Latin and Greek that I know are conservatives.
“Book smarts” is a toddler term. Which books? Rubbish on “Social Sciences”? Dan Brown?

These posts are getting really long and wordy, I can’t promise I read all of them.

But here, some points:

Distribution of wealth. That’s a dandy. That will be Obama’s claim to fame, making that up or bringing it to the fore. Distribution of wealth.

Because, as we all know, wealth is a river that flows and then evil capitalists divert it to their own ranches or whatever. It comes from God in a determined quantity and precedes human activity.

“2008 crash was a result of regulations that forced banks to loan money to subprime borrowers and then those borrower taking more money than they could afford to pay back and spending it on mcmansions.”

A lot of people don’t know this. But it’s true. Fanny May and Freddy Mac is a GOVERNMENT(ok, -ish, governmentish) institution. They were covered by the government to take inmense risks while packaging this risk as not risk at all and had the kind of capital at their disposition that buys and sells regions of the planet. Why? Believe it or not, the original rationale had to do with keeping house prices affordable for the hard working man who evil capitalists just want to roll over and mistreat.

So often, this is the logic of the left:

I feel bad about this thing, make a regulation that fixes it. (doesn’t understand at all the dynamics of the thing causing the bother)

regulation is put in place

The regulation, because it was put in place with no actual understanding of the situation, both doesn’t fix supposed problem and creates a bunch more.

Leftists: there is a problem here. Since no regulation exists to fix that problem, it is evidently a problem of not having regulation.

regulation regulating the previous regulation is put in place

Right wingers: it was your fault to begin with! You had th-

Leftists: EVOOOOOOOOOLL!

Right Wingers: but-

Leftists: RACIST EVOOOOOOLLLLL!

Right Wingers: you-

Leftists: Ok, on to the next subject.

they move on to the next subject

The only people shrewd enough, intelligent and determined and hard boned enough, to actually pose economics as a problem of regulation and actually understand the dynamics of the thing they are regulating, is the Chinese communist party.

I know, in their hearts, that’s what a lot of the more educated, more intelligent, shrewder Western left would like. Thanfully, they don’t have the heritage of a 100 years of starvation and insanity that the communists in China have, so they aren’t hard boned enough to get it done.

In my experience, there are two and only two kinds of leftists.

  1. People that have feelings and haven’t looked into the claims made by left or right. It is forgivable to believe the claims of the left before looking into them, to believe the stance of the left corresponds with the real world before checking, as the real world precedes thought and there is no reason thought should a priori correspond with how things actually are. I used to be this kind until, no thanks to your fancy Universities, I started looking into the claims one by one. Guess what there was a totally unexpected and unfailing 100% rate of?

  2. Actual communists. These are hardcore people that I respect and admire, and are my enemies. Very few of those actually around (enough to make ass puppets of the first kind).

Oh yeah? Most people who can’t read at all are conservatives.

Nice try. Physics, math, literature, medicine, programming… you name it. Anything that requires intelligence.

If you ever return from your safe space shielding you from realizing that you’re allying yourself with the dummies, you can peruse the 27 points correlating cognitive deficiency with conservatism viewtopic.php?f=3&t=194612