>> ^Ryjkyj:

NO, seriously. Why is no one on the show refuting this statement? Is there something I don't know? Is this the latest bullshit that we're telling ourselves?


My understanding of the situation is if you take TARP, by itself, not the multi-trillion gift from the FED, and don't account for inflation, then the US government has more cash now than they put in.

It all depends what you mean when you say "the bailout".

We all paid in inflation for the the FED giving money out of thin air before TARP was even proposed, but nobody is even pretending to claim that we go that back, they are just pretending it did not happen.

At the end of the day TARP is a problem because it privileged banks over citizens, not because it cost tax dollars.

Congress could have simply handed $0.25T to Fannie and Freddy instead and told them to buy up all "toxic mortgages" at market rate, and then renegotiated them to keep people in their homes. We could have tippled our money, and gotten the poison off the bank balance sheets, stabilizing the banks, and benefiting the citizenry of the country.

The problem with that plan is that the big fish in the market profit from constructed scarcity, so any scarcity reducing plan like that goes right out the window.

>> ^jerryku:

dgandhi, but how much of those "gifts" of the government, created in the past, were already paid for entirely by past generations of Americans?


Not gifts, common property, and it's not like this ever stops consider this MOST of technological advancement is produced, not but private industry, but as a direct result of government money spent on research.

>> ^jerryku:

Is DARPA's creation of the Internet still on some kind of 50 year monthly payment setup? I don't think so. Perhaps the government needs money to upkeep the Internet.


It did not start, and did not end with TCP/IP. Don't be obtuse, the needs of the US federal government account for the vast majority of bleeding edge technology. The technology, that nobody else can afford to buy, and which, once developed, eventually works its way into consumer tech.

>> ^jerryku:
The things we enjoy using in this world are produced by the billions of people who inhabit it. Should everyone be taxing everyone? No, we buy their things and that's that.


Taxing is what we do when it's scale inefficient to charge. You charge for your services I charge for mine. I don't charge, and am not charged for, the tax supported infrastructure I use. You, I and our clients/employers are taxed for these things.

>> ^Mikus_Aurelius:

Try going up to someone who actually does math for a living and suggesting that "you can't do math with infinite (sets of) numbers". There is a well established, consistent, and applicable theory for dealing with infinite sums. It's called a limit. We've only been using them for 400 years.
Demarcations between the abstract and concrete are useless. Every mathematical theory is abstract. Numbers don't exist, but they can be applied in millions of useful ways. So can infinite sums.


The physical universe has a range from planck to ~ 15B lightyears, or < 100 orders of magnitude. Once you get bellow 10^-100 you are just blowing smoke, we treat limits as equivalences, and within the context of our strictly bounded universe, they might as well be, but there is no reason in a non-bounded universe that they must, or would be, we simply have no way to check.

While math is useful it is not TRUE, and it is not only one set of rules, but many within different domains. When we need to set new rules to model something new, we do, to treat any of these conventions as necessarily or real, is to ignore the basic ad-hoc nature of the tool.

Now I realized that you all had this conversation before I got here, but I would like to answer this question:
>> ^blankfist:

Without spouting some tenuous social contract talking point, is there some reason why government should own the product of our labor?

You stole it. That's all I need. What you have in your hand is not the result of your labor only, but disproportionately a result of the all of the infrastructure of government which allows you to do what you do efficiently.

We have decided, through our government, to socialize those things which we have found to be inefficient to keep in private hands. Every road is not a toll road, the police do not protect people on a fee-per-call basis, the military does not protect our borders selectively, we all benefit, and we all pay when we make money, because, in reality, those who make the most take the most from the commons.

I'm a computer geek. Everything I work with on a daily basis is dependent on technology created with money from the DOE or DARPA, they don't charge me for this common technology, but it makes my field possible, and it makes what we do orders of magnitude more powerful and profitable.

Don't think your exempt, every business that you depend on, every service and product that you buy is cheaper and more plentiful because of our socialized roads, legal systems, DARPA funded tracking technology etc. etc. etc.

The fact that you WANT not to be the recipient of this socialized charity does not make it so, you have taken something that you did not earn. Don't whine when we expect you to give it back.

>> ^blankfist:

I just think all this chest thumping to raise taxes is silly when it's being spent for shit most of you hate. Anyone? Anyone?


Some of it is, lots of it is not, at the moment nobody in a position to act on the issue seems at all interested in pushing hard to remove the bad programs, only the good. I'll not champion the destruction of good programs in the name of some arbitrary context free judgement that taxes are bad.

@therealblankman
@budzos

How in the hell did you manage to make me think that Santorum is more a class act than either of you two?

Nice job aiming way below the bar.

>> ^marbles:
I am wrong to "assume" that the only person that has a right to what I produce is myself?


Conservation of M/E means that you can't create, only rearrange. So to even begin to asses such a position it is necessary to clarify what forces are morally relevant, and how much change is "production"? And then, of course, to explain why we should assume that some forces (only human, I'm guessing) moving things makes them "property", when nothing about the physical world implies any such relationship exists at all.

If you can pull matter out of the aether, you might be able to fashion some sort of internally consistent ideology around that, but since you can't, your just banging your head against physics demanding that it is so.

Saying that we accept an absurdity as a social convention is simple enough, but to demand, despite all evidence, that it is true is unbelievable foolishness.

>> ^MarineGunrock:

Good luck finding half-jacketed 7.62 x39 rounds.


http://www.sportsmansguide.com/net/cb/golden-bear-762x39-125-grain-sp-ammo-20-rds.aspx?a=472398

They are required for legal hunting in many states, but nobody attacking an armored car is going to go out of their way to find less effective ammo. The fact that they don't actually say what they are firing, makes me suspicious.

What do you want to bet they used lead rounds instead of mil surp FMJ?

Game theory is just sociopathy codified. It takes extremely constructed conditions, like game shows and corporate governance, to actually make it not plainly stupid.

It shows how contrived this is that this game matrix is easily exploited.

One player can say that they are voting steal, and that they will split the winnings, so the the other player better pick share if they want anything.

Their only decision becomes weather they want to screw their opponent more than they trust them.

>> ^P1ggy:

Now they are in $20,000 of debt trying to sell melting ice cream online. Well, I guess the transferred the problem.


If you check out the website you will see that they are selling non-perishables from the store as art in plastic display boxes, at prices that are absurd for the non-artsy components.

This appears to have been spearheaded by the one-red-paperclip guy, and a few other hipster artists using very much the same notoriety = value trick that got him a house.

The video is clearly a significant part of their PR scheme to make back the money. I would be interested to see their accounting at the end of this little adventure.

>> ^Superman:

I meant to do that!

>> ^marbles:

Social contract theories have no relevance to the philosophy of liberty. As I pointed out from the beginning, your references have no context. Liberty exists outside of any relationship to an external authority.

This is your premise, it is also your conclusion. You have failed to demonstrate it at all. You have not made an argument. You have simply made a flurry of self contradicting statements, and insisted that they are true, and that any counter argument is false by definition. Do you really expect anybody to take you seriously?

>> ^marbles:

I guess you’re right. Marxism is actually based on a small group’s right to the individual. Not even Marx was naïve enough to believe that a utopian classless society was achievable, let alone sustainable.


Marx advocated only the abolition of capital, not of workers rights to what they produce, he believed that capitalism had already destroyed that right:

>> ^Karl_Marx:

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing
the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a
man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork
of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the
property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of
property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to
abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent
already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.


>> ^marbles:

the creation of value; the producing of articles having exchange value.
So where does production come from again?



To restate: where does the producing of articles having exchange value. come from

Lets see, how many ways can I interpret this?

1) Where do produced items come from : They are made of other things + energy, conservation of M/E
2) Where does the idea of production come from : The social contract of market societies
3) Where does the exchange value of objects come from : Somewhat arbitrary cultural valuation
4) ??? : what you secretly mean probably goes here, how about cluing us in?

>> ^marbles:

I did just clearly demonstrate it.

Where?

>> ^marbles:

Care to prove it false?

State your case and I'll give it a whirl.

>> ^marbles:
Sorry but self-ownership is a hyphenated word not found in the dictionary. The implications in of itself are clearly not literal: My self owns myself? So why exactly are you trying to make a literal argument?

Because the logical consistency of your ideology depends on the ability to bootstrap a property system with the ownership (as in what they word usually means) of self. Dispensing with that when it gets inconvenient makes the whole thing fall apart.

Without actual self ownership, you have no logically necessary ownership claim to the value produced by self, and so you can not build you system on property only. You must start adding more first principles in order to get there. If libertarians have been purposely obfuscating their ideology as you claim, then they have been hiding the weakness in their argument, and making a false case.

I take most libertarians at there word that they actually meant what they said. Your position now significantly diverges from that put forth in the video, and requires you to make a different argument to bootstrap your personal libertarian-derived view.

What new first principle are you introducing to bootstrap ownership from only figurative ownership of self?

>> ^marbles:

I’m sorry, was I supposed to give a damn about your hypothetical social contract?

You used its existence as an argument. You want to back peddle and say you didn't mean it? Then do so.

>> ^marbles:

I didn’t use your property arrangement for anything; I rejected your claims outright.

And then, as an example, argued that I was wrong because what I suggested would not work in my property arrangement, read the transcript.

>> ^marbles:

And yet you recognized property for Nomadic humans. Wonder what all those hunter-gatherers were doing? So does physical life also need a social contract to exist?

possession ≠ fee-simple

Possession is fact, who has current physical control of a thing is not an issue for philosophy, but only of physicality. If I hold a pen in my hand I possess it, irrespective of any ownership claims on the pen. To take the pen from me without my consent requires the initiation of actual physical force against me, based on the physics.

If you own the pen, I don't have to interact with you in any way to use it, or take it home with me. There is no way to know if you own the pen, or if anybody does.

There is no demonstrable physical consequence of fee-simple property, possession, on the other hand in a matter of facts. My acceptance of both the fact and historical relevance of possession, does not get you within miles of fee-simple.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

However, any place I've ever seen that implements AA does so via quotas. Quotas should be illegal under the aforementioned EO laws. If I'm the most qualified person, I should get the job. If I'm denied the job because I'm a white male and the company has a quota to meet, then that was not an equal opportunity, it was discrimination.


I think this is a boogieman. White people use "quotas" to explain to other white people why they can't just give them a job for being white. I would be interested in some actual evidence that quotas have been used to refuse to hire a clearly more competent candidate more often then racism does so.

If your organization of more than a few dozen people does not look demographically a while lot like your local general population, then your hiring practices are almost certainly racist, even if nobody is making them that way intentionally. Quotas only factor into hiring when your hiring process has already failed to be color-blind, If your organization has been racist, and now they have to play catch up by reversing the bias, that seems fair enough to me.

I'm not a proponent of quotas, but my issue with quotas is that they don't generally address issues of class, having all the black folks moving boxes, and all the white folks sitting in cubicles, does very little to address the disproportionate race/class correlation.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

This is my biggest problem with AA... it ultimately does nothing to solve the problems it's supposed to address. @Morganth alluded to it in his post. Rather than handicapping white people, we should be addressing the problems that lead to race inequality. AA is like breaking the legs of Olympic athletes so the folks in the Paralympics can keep up.

Except, that's not what it does. AA does not stop the best and the brightest, it simply corrects for preexisting bias that effects the criteria on which the decision is made. What you are describing looks a lot more like unchecked white privilege than it does AA as it exists in the real world.

Allowing people to pursue a career at what they are good at does address the problem. The problem is both material, in the sense of disproportional class disadvantage, as well as societal, in the form of the assumption that "those people aren't good at X". AA lets people work themselves out of poverty, and creates social role models of skilled and successful non-white/male people.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

It runs a few levels deep, too. Putting less qualified people in jobs means the jobs will be done to a lower standard. That ultimately hurts our general standard of living as well as our ability to compete globally.

AA does the exact opposite of this. Consider what unchecked privileged looks like in comparison to meritocracy. The clearest example is blind auditions. Non-blinded auditions disproportional favor men, who everyone "knew" were more likely to be better qualified. Once you remove the knowledge of the sex of the player, the assessment of merit massively changes.

You can't blind college admissions, for example, because they are based on a life history in a classist and racist society. Collage is probably the simplest, though not the best, place to make this adjustment, but making it is better than not.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

If you were diagnosed with a particularly dangerous form of cancer tomorrow, would you seek out the best specialist you could find or would you seek out the best minority specialist you could find?


When white men get positions, this is in no small measure a result of there white/maleness. Knowing this, given the choice of two equally regarded doctors, I would choose the one whose regard is based on their merit, not on their privileged race/sex.