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Economic Liberalism Discussion

Your a misanthrope, what do you care about the global poor?

Pick a fucking side!

When have I ever praised death squads!

Go back to ChapoTrapHouse or LSC!

I was talking less about you so much the Neoliberals who act as though the rest of the world should be grateful for the meager scraps that the hyperrich toss from their table.
 
Stripping them of their wealth and taking away their martini lunches through punitive taxation, as well as Iceland style capital controls.
So, go with Huey Long's planned 'share our wealth' program where income is capped at 2 million, inheritance was capped at 5 million, and the government took anything over said cap and taxed anything below said cap as well?
 
Crystal ball show me economic liberalism
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The first spreadsheet program. Visicalc. The developer couldn't even patent it because there wasn't a category for that, so he stayed poor.

The telephone invented 5 years before Bell did, by Antonio Meucci, a stage technician by trade.

The man who invented vulcanized rubber spent time in debtors prison, slept in abandoned factories, and squatted in friends' sheds because he was so poor.

And there's always Tesla.
 
The first spreadsheet program. Visicalc. The developer couldn't even patent it because there wasn't a category for that, so he stayed poor.

The telephone invented 5 years before Bell did, by Antonio Meucci, a stage technician by trade.

The man who invented vulcanized rubber spent time in debtors prison, slept in abandoned factories, and squatted in friends' sheds because he was so poor.

And there's always Tesla.
The correct answer is actually "literally everything"
 
The first spreadsheet program. Visicalc. The developer couldn't even patent it because there wasn't a category for that, so he stayed poor.

The telephone invented 5 years before Bell did, by Antonio Meucci, a stage technician by trade.

The man who invented vulcanized rubber spent time in debtors prison, slept in abandoned factories, and squatted in friends' sheds because he was so poor.

And there's always Tesla.
To explain why I Liked this, it's because I find it really important to have a known line between the modern "social democracy" style capitalism found in Europe and the Gilded Age Economic Anarchism. There's really not a better way of describing it, and it captures the essence of the situation in question quite well: It happens from wildly insufficient regulatory controls allowing for ludicrously abusive monopolistic practices. Tomas Edison is a perfect example: He invented far less than he gets credit for, and many of the things genuinely invented with his involvement were his involvement rather than him being a sole innovator. Instead, he was an early version of a modern video game executive, only even worse because he took personal credit for innovation from employees. Hiring on numerous creative minds, pressing them to innovate under horrible working hours, using the threat of the overpopulated labor market for the field to toss them out at the slightest opportunity... Then giving them nothing but a wage. No royalties for their creations. No credit for what they enabled for society.

The line between liberalism and anarchism is actually a pretty common one. The extremes of political liberalism are generally regarded as dysfunctionally direct democracies, such as the current US's system, yet the basic ideals easy lead into anarchism. The reason for this is that liberalism is generally regarded as an inherently moderate position, not to "either" impractical extreme. People like Rodyle latch onto the abberation of the Neoliberals, and the anarcho-capitalists with good PR, but the general population of liberals is still freedom-promoting limited-yet-present government types. The social liberals, for example, want a mixed Socialist/Capitalist economy where the government has a far greater hand than most current ones, but stops much short of a command economy by having the government's involvement being built around necessities and preventing extreme inequality including in wealth.

The correct answer is actually "literally everything"
...depends on how you define "invention by labor". Some of the more famous things require really broad definitions of "labor" due to sheer abruptness and accidental creation, such as a few early artificial sweeteners. One of the boundaries is the line between invention and discovery, the difference between penicillin and morphine, while the other is how abrupt a breakthrough can be before you stop calling it working to invent and instead just inventing without really laboring to do so, as is the case with the off-the-wall "it just works" stuff you occasionally run into while looking at weird inventions.
 
Increased push for free movement between Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand
Armed with official support from the federal Conservatives in Canada and the promise of a Brexit deal next year, advocates of an agreement calling for freer trade, movement, and greater co-operation between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom are ramping up their efforts.

Although the idea has been floating around for several years, organizers of the non-profit organization CANZUK International say their proposal is well on its way to becoming a reality thanks to greater support from politicians and the public in each of the four countries and the U.K.'s impending divorce from the European Union, which will allow it to negotiate new arrangements with other countries.

James Skinner, the founder and chief executive of CANZUK International, said they have already started increasing their activities in preparation for these events.
With Brexit going on, support for Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand on considering the creation of an agreement for freer trade, movement, and increasing cooperation between the four nations might be growing. The movement supporting this is called CANZUK International.

Both nations are English-speaking, culturally similar, and a part of the Commonwealth. It's not surprising that a considerable number of folks would consider something like this.

Here is a link to their website.

Interestingly, they did a piece on the possibility of letting the United States of America join. It makes sense because the nation is also predominantly an English-speaking country with a similar culture. However, the huge population gap between the USA and the current potential members of CANZUK is the most notable problem. Also, most of the older generations of America may not be willing to join such an agreement. Would not surprise me that the American youth would be open for it.
 
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Not going to happen. The current liberal order is breaking apart at the seams and we are seeing a retreat of America from the world accelerate from the Obama years.

If anything this is how the congress of Vienna broke apart due to the rise of Germany, it's just past the point of no return. And no, magical Millennials will not change things around, especially if you tell them how the hyperrich use neoliberalism to gorge themselves on the world's wealth and leave scraps for everyone else.
 
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I think you need to give us the location. Because if that's Europe or a metropolis like San Francisco, housing prices have been kept somewhat artificially high with zoning restrictions and labyrinthian construction codes that go wildly beyond what's actually useful for the public good. Huge chunk of the reason businesses are leaving California is that it can take several extra years to build infrastructure thanks to utterly insane bureaucratic requirements.

The US in general has inflated housing costs from a nasty real estate market standard, caused by our urbanization patters being driven by rapidly escalating transportation abilities. Rather than have reasonable apartments, the urban sprawl demands extremes in conditions... And there's no restriction on rent costs, so you get insanity like that because there's nothing stopping it beyond the ability to pay among the public. College tuition has exploded for much the same reason, because student loans nearly guarantee they get the tuition fee, no matter how high it is.

As damn-near always, the problem is more that the problems just aren't cared about than something actually unsolvable and inherent to being Capitalist. It'd actually be remarkably trivial to remove that sort of nonsense by just capping off rents to a fraction of the cost to make what's rented. Damn near every major problem with capitalism comes down to price-gouging, because there's many things people can't really live without, and will thus pay absurd sums for. Some of these things can be nationalized in the sales to consumers fairly safely, like utilities and medicine, others have been shown to routinely get fucked when moralizing bureaucrats get involved, like a lot of raw resource extraction.

But don't you understand? The Numbers say that this is a good thing and that we are living in the best times ever! Why do you hate the global poor Rodyle?
As for this, have you bothered checking the portion of income used on necessities? Increased need for dense urbanization in cities developed as sprawl and eternal penny-pinching have caused some aspects of quality of life to decline, but when it comes to stuff outside needs, it's utterly exploded upwards. We have privately owned space programs at this point, the only genuine complaints to be had come entirely down to "but the rich are obscenely above us!" or the aforementioned penny-pinching making quality go down.

Regarding the former, it's an inevitability of having any sort of hierarchy where wealth can concentrate at the top. The question to ask isn't how big the gap between top and bottom is, it's how things are towards the bottom and how much damage the top is actually able to do. And that continues to prove to decline, in the few ways it does decline, due to immense scaling difficulties with high-standard lifestyle needs and cutting costs, rather than the ability to do so declining. Everyone against Capitalism banks on somehow keeping the ability to do so intact after completely overhauling the economy and being able to somehow act on that ability under fundamentally different resource distribution methods without breaking anything out of incompetence or ignorance.

Overall, it's an issue of Capitalism having some perverse incentives in its current dominant form. These can mostly be solved with proven-to-work regulations. The alternatives fail because of much more fundamental problems in having incentives at all. Sure, you count sustain the world's current living standards on the work of 5% of the population, but how do you get that 5% working and how do you make sure they're doing the right jobs? It also generates a remarkably stagnant system because temporary interests are extremely hard to fulfill and there's entirely separate problems involved in incentivizing progress.

A big thing to realize about why the penny-pinching is so dominant is that the highly-developed contries consume obscene amounts of resources. You'd need another five Earths to give the whole world American living standards, just for the food. Capitalism handles this trivially, dealing with resource bottlenecks by turning to alternatives and making solutions and just upping the costs until sustainable consumption and expense rates are reached. Any sort of planned economy seeking to give the highest standard of living to everyone inherently can't, because the only solutions are either forcing innovations to solve the issue or reduce the standard of living, defeating some point of the system either way.
 

I know that he's banned and that he can't respond, but it think it's worth pointing out that socialists are a against measures that would lead to more housing being built because it would mean that developers would make money and because gentrification or because they think only expensive housing would be built.
 
I know that he's banned and that he can't respond, but it think it's worth pointing out that socialists are a against measures that would lead to more housing being built because it would mean that developers would make money and because gentrification or because they think only expensive housing would be built.
They tend to be right about that unless there's a previous government regulation requiring otherwise. (The second one, I mean)
 
They tend to be right about that unless there's a previous government regulation requiring otherwise. (The second one, I mean)
Developers build expensive housing if they aren't allowed to build anything else, say if zoning laws only allow for single family homes. If you have zoning laws that call for high density housing and make development easy you get market rate housing
 
Doesn't Houston, Texas have very few housing regulations and is one of the more affordable major cities in America?
Yes. It's also incredibly sparse so it's not the best solution. Ideally you'd have much denser cities
 
Living in cramped silos is not exactly best for people and is incredibly soul crushing.
Well, the alternative is massive government spending on decent public transit to allow further outward growth combined with price controls to make non-mass residency affordable in an age where an increasing percentage of the population are temps and contractors who can be fired at will and without reason and don't expect to hold any one job longer than a year.
 
Living in cramped silos is not exactly best for people and is incredibly soul crushing.
Yes clearly living in a city like Paris would suck. I mean you could ask our resident duck about that
 
Living in cramped silos is not exactly best for people and is incredibly soul crushing.
The key is, of course, a middle ground. For example, the house I live in could easily work perfectly fine without its second story, we flat-out don't use the dining room table outside holiday meals. We use it as a shelf, and half the room is dedicated to barely-used entertainment remnants (no, seriously, the entire wall to the left of me at the moment is nothing but comics and boxes). The only time this house has ever had any sort of space constraints is when there were eleven people living in here. And even then, the basement was well over half unused, the space constrains were from trying to cram all the beds needed into just the top floor, of which the only intended room lacking a closet is the one I sleep in today (the house at some point had roof space turned into another room). Which, itself, is over halfway totally unused, with the dresser and shelves not actually being in use because I only sleep in my room.

My family could easily have lived with a quarter the available space when we all lived here, and now it's just me and my dad (my parents waited for me, the youngest of the three kids, to turn 18 before divorcing to avoid the paperwork snarl). We factually had half the building unused with twice as many people in here. This isn't a huge house, though a third of the total floor space comes from a hollow foundation basement. The fact of the matter is that virtically-built housing can work very well, the problem is that the economy pushes for the unworkable extremes because of perverse incentives from regulations and total lack of price regulation on this particular necessity (always price regulate necessities, they can be gouged to utterly insane degrees thanks to the extensive suffering in their absence). Food at least gets subsidies to stabilize prices by paying farmers to not grow crops.

This isn't packed like sardines with 11 people, either. I'm talking "literally have just one floor and we'd still be able to fit everything we use" kind of excess space. Oh, the property as a whole has lawn with about half the ground area of the house, alongside a proper driveway and garage. The place is way bigger than needed for even a seven-person family (especially if the kids have bunk beds, like we briefly did due to the middle child being moderately murderous before being sent to a mental institution. He got better, but not before leaving knife marks in the solid wood sliding door that divides the living room and foyer. Which means there's a wall over twice as thick as it needs to be to accommodate a moving solid-wood wall). My grandma's house is even more egregious, being built into the side of a hill (you can literally walk out of the basement) and having a lawn about five or six times larger than the house itself.
 
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