The truth about American welfare is that it is surprisingly untargeted. In contrast to Australian welfare, which actually does go to the poor, American welfare goes just anywhere. Being rich doesn't disqualify you from receiving welfare in the US.

Then you get the poor working stiffs who have bought the lie that you just need to pull yourself up with your own bootstraps, actively voting against their own best interests.

It's incredible.

I used to work for a contractor that used a life coach. At one point we got lunch together, and she was telling me all this libertarian 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps, personal responsibility political crap. She said that those who settled the Western States were the shining examples we should be trying to emulate." I've never suffered libertarians gladly, as those on this site can attest, so I asked her how a life coach fit into her rugged individualist pioneer spirit. She never hired me again. Oops. That's why I no longer talk politics with bosses or co-workers. >> ^ChaosEngine:

Mentally I equate the words "life coach" with "tarot card reader", "medium", "time share salesman", "politician" and various other useless parasitic forms of life.
TED is supposed to be about sharing grand ideas, not this self-help bullshit.
>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
Not the best TED.

*politics
*controversy

I think those of us that are disillusioned with the 1%'s economic narrative need to understand how the conservative people see the occupy movement.

These conservative people really do think that poor people are people who haven't worked hard enough, or haven't gone to college or haven't pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.

So we get conservatives that blame budget shortfalls on the 'extravagant' salaries of public school teachers.
We get conservatives who think that kids going into social work- should have $40,000 in student debt.
We get conservatives who believe that $7.25 an hour is just too much to pay for back-breaking work.

really, I can testify that liberals are guilty of group-think even more than conservatives are. so in the spirit of trying to absorb the tone of this conservative vomit...
*promote

He clearly misses the point.

It's not about suffering, it's not about riches. It's about the ever-widening inequality. Now *IF* everyone suffered equally, he might have a point; however, we know that this isn't true. But many of the one percent were born rich and they will die rich never having known suffering or how the less fortunate live.

The person who bootstraps themselves from rags to riches is the exception, not the rule in today's society; and even when that happens, no one lives in a vacuum. No one brings themselves to success all by themselves. Someone helped them, someone supported them. Government created the environment that allowed them to succeed.

>> ^criticalthud:

are there any statistics on being born into money vs. working your way rich?
I have the perception that most rich are born into money and the opportunities to make more.
and i have the suspicion that the republicans like Cain because they can run his campaign on the "he pulled himself up by his bootstraps" narrative. At once dismissing those who are destitute and simultaneously coloring the fact that most rich republicans are silver-spoon babies.


Three percent change from poor to rich.

are there any statistics on being born into money vs. working your way rich?

I have the perception that most rich are born into money and the opportunities to make more.

and i have the suspicion that the republicans like Cain because they can run his campaign on the "he pulled himself up by his bootstraps" narrative. At once dismissing those who are destitute and simultaneously coloring the fact that most rich republicans are silver-spoon babies.

I personally believe the only way to turn around this "new economy" is through innovation and entrepreneurship. Manufacturing is gone, we have to accept that. The service industry is hurting too, so we have to evolve.

As far as starting capital, I bootstrapped a business years ago with $2,000 and ramen noodles. It now employs 12 people. We pay better than market wages, provide excellent benefits, and generally treat each other like family. We found a niche and went for it.

Along my journey, I've met literally hundreds of young entrepreneurs that have similar success stories. It's not impossible, it just takes the willingness to work. You have to see problems as opportunities to make things better, and then take action. Sitting around talking about the problems doesn't do a whole lot of good. It's up to us to present solutions as well.

Just my $0.02.

Yeah that's all well and good but there's a problem. The old "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" adage is nothing more than a means of social control.

If I want a lot of stuff my life is meaningless? WELL THEN I better let the rich handle all that. They may have money, but are they happy? (+_+)

on top of all that is the time and effort spent trying to make sure you do everything correctly and just trying learn how to do it in the first place. my time costs $70/hr. i've probably spent $1000 worth of my time this week alone trying to learn how to be a good accountant and financial advisor.

now i'm going to start my own religion and make tax evasion one of its prime tenants. but, we will burn the works of ayn rand and forbid anyone from "pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps". we shall instead study the writings of vonnegut, devote ourselves to the history of radical anarchist movements of the 20th century, forbid sexual repression and of course, we will love our bodies and never think them sinful or imperfect. instead of taking the sacrament, we will rub each others backs and necks and shoulders and legs. the power of touch will be > than the power of prayer. and we will look at the teachings of new age healers with great skepticism, despite what we may or may not have in common with them. hallelujah. amen.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Yeah, I noticed that when I was self-employed (read that as being a freelancer), my taxes went way up. I now owe back taxes. It becomes difficult to remain solvent. It's like the high taxes are there to discourage people from competing with the larger companies, and I've almost caved multiple times and gone back to working for corporations. I shudder to think.

And then there's the problem of where your money is spent. It's not locally generally. A lot of it goes to wars and death. I'd much rather spend locally and help those I have a chance of encountering daily.

In reply to this comment by peggedbea:
being self-employed may or may not be turning me into a libertarian. i feel like i'd rather take 20% of my income and just hand it over directly to my elderly neighbors than send it to the pilfering sociopaths in washington. ... i'm currently researching the best ways to commit tax evasion.

>> ^blankfist:

Two comments in and you're back to your old games again. Where did I say "all" immigrants will be poor or "all" immigrants will refuse to pay taxes? Notice I mentioned US citizens as well. But you probably missed that while only listening to what you wanted to hear.

Seriously blankie, what's with the hostility? Forgive me for just this once talking like a normal person and saying "all" when I should've said "disproportionately."

I was mostly just asking about whether you thought immigrants were a special class of people with different demographics than the indigenous population, because I don't see the how you link immigration to the solvency of a social safety net unless you presuppose that immigrants are either going to be disproportionately poor, or disproportionately likely to commit some form of fraud (tax or entitlement).

>> ^blankfist:
It's not that "all" immigrants are poor, it's that if you were poor and you realized you could go somewhere and have access to things you'd not normally have access to, then what're the odds of you exploiting that?
It's a numbers game. The more you allow for exploits in a system, the more it'll be exploited. Etc. Same goes with citizenry and citizenry birth. But the real difference, I believe, is that if you are stable in your home country, you're probably less likely to migrate somewhere just for the entitlements. The opposite is probably more likely however if you're not stable. Is that not a reasonable assumption?


So here's the part where I walk on eggshells and gently point out that you do seem to be saying that immigrants will be disproportionately likely to be poor or commit fraud.

You're also tossing in that you think native born citizens will be that way too. If that's the case, then we're back to "so what does immigration have to do with anything?"


Let's say we turned America into a Finnish-style welfare state -- taxes are high, infrastructure is modern and in good repair, our public schools are the best in the world, our health care system is both cost effective and provides quality care, unemployment is low, our budget is in surplus, our unemployment benefits are generous (and have no time limit), and we have a growing private sector with a heavy technology focus.

If we then threw the gates wide open on immigration, I think you're right; most of the people coming here would be poorer than the average American, and at least in the short run, it'd be bad for the government's net fiscal situation -- more people on welfare, without a completely offsetting tax revenue increase.

But over the long run, I think the situation would reverse. The immigrants and their children would get a free, quality education. They'd get first class health care. They'd have access to public transportation, and a healthy jobs market. For the most part, they'd "exploit" the advantages offered to them to bootstrap themselves into a more productive, wealthier, tax-paying lifestyle. In the long run, the state's investments in the human capital of those immigrants would pay dividends that go beyond mere economic growth, it'd also diversify and enrich the culture of their nation, and bring new ideas and different ways of thinking into the shared project of their society.

Which is to say, I don't think immigration poses a fiscal problem for welfare states.

Bigotry on the other hand, that poses a problem for left-wing policies of all kinds. I don't really think that's a strike against the policies of the left though.

>> ^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.

Lazy, entitled, liberal kids no doubt. What they need to do is pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get a damn job and trust in the market. I'm tired of the hard earned four percent of income taxes I actually pay (after all my deductions and the bankruptcy of my Nevada paper corporation) going to literal "free lunches" at schools.

You know what we need to do to help these kids? Cut pay to social services workers.

Very rarely does someone fit squarely into an ism.

*Wanting corporations to pay taxes is not conservative. Not liking having to pay taxes is human. I'd feel much better about paying taxes if they weren't being dumped into corporate coffers through bailouts, subsidies and no-bid contracts.

*Social welfare is an attempt to limit the damage caused by our economic system. Our particularly ugly American version of capitalism (whose destruction cuts across all ideological lines) creates unemployment, low wages, inflation, and dramatic economic disparity. No amount of self determination and bootstrapping will end these systemic problems. You can argue the merits and effectiveness of individual social welfare programs, but at the end of the day, the problems they were created to remedy will still exist. If we restructured the system to be more beneficial to labor, there would less need for these kinds of band-aids.

*Small government and efficient government are two different things. "Small" is a purposely vague and arbitrary term. Powerful interests like "small" inefficient, ineffective governments, because they are easy to control. I'd like our government to be as big as it needs to be in order to be efficient. No bigger, no smaller.

*There are other lefties that support nuclear power.

*Everyone loves the constructive, creative side of the free market. It's the economic class war that results from unregulated markets that causes all the problems. In order for Trump to have his billions, other people are going to have to live in poverty to support his lifestyle. The free market is a system of winners and losers, opulence and suffering. You can't have one without the other.

*Optimism and pessimism are present on all sides of the spectrum. I am pessimistic about the times we live in, but optimistic about the future, because things have steadily become better for us since the dawn of humanity. As MLK said, "Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

*Conservatism doesn't have a lock on theism. Liberalism doesn't have a lock on atheism. While Protestants, Evangelists, Mormons and Muslims are usually socially conservative, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists and Unitarians are usually liberal. Conversely, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and the neo-conservative movement they inspired are atheist in nature (although their dogmatic, pie-in-the-sky economic views are a faith of sorts).

I haven't read anything on individualism being a root cause of poverty. I did a quick google search and found a couple things. One is the idea of "survival of the fittest", that those in poverty do it to themselves, and it's the individualist ideology that tells everyone "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and as a result those who cannot receive no help. Is that the complaint against individualism?

If so, I completely understand that a self-centric position on society would most likely create an environment where poverty could easily manifest and consume the less-to-do of society. I do think some will allow it to happen to them, while others will resist but their current station in life (specifically class) won't allow them to escape poverty. A couple bad financial decisions and the banks won't make it easier on you. The poor are usually in the financial position where they receive higher interest rates they cannot afford, while the well off with good credit receive lower intrest rates. It seems unfair.

I do believe charitable actions would be higher in an individualist society. We already live in a nanny state which is counter to the individualist society. Sure, the majority of spending tends to go to defense spending, but that doesn't mean we don't currently have excessive social programs already in place to catch the fringe of society. And still we have poverty. Lots of it.

What happened? The government has its hands deeply embedded in the private economy, and restrictions and regulations are steep for startup entrepreneurs, while the larger corporations enjoy crony-capitalism. Translation: regulations and restrictions create a tilted playing field where larger corporations can easily succeed with less competition, thus less jobs are created by budding entrepreneurs. So the number of workers goes up while the number of job creators goes down. Eventually we could all be working for the big corporations, and with less competition they could lessen benefits such as health or vacation pay, they could easily lower wages, and they could then extend the expected work week from 40 hours to something like 100 hours. If that sounds farfetched, I can tell you from first hand experience I've seen this exact thing happen to an industry I know very well. And when I say big corporations, I mean major parent companies that buy large businesses. For instance, let's take the advertising industry. One parent company could own almost all of the major companies in that industry, so if you complain about the 100 hour work week and loss of vacation benefits, your chances of receiving another job in that industry are cut to almost zero. I've seen it. And they do illegal shit like tell women not to get pregnant.

This kind of corporatist entitlement is bad. And we got here through regulations, through a regimented government nanny system that is counterintuitive to free markets. And this makes it very hard on people to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps", which is what all individualists claim to want of people around them. How can you pull yourself up when you're essentially a slave to corporations? I don't know. But it's not getting better. The nanny system, in my opinion, is making it worse. The more we ask for, the less we get. And I say this because I see a very real connection between system created to help us (welfare) and regulations that help big business. I see it as being connected. Poverty perpetuated by big business and bankers.

If we could peel back the regulations and restrictions on industry, we would see a growth of jobs. We'd see a decline in corporate dominance. Most restrictions or regulations are created to stifle competition, not help the consumer, mind you. From there, I'd like to think people would generally do better, have better lives, and contribute charitably to others. Poverty will never be stricken from the planet, but we certainly could do more to help those in our community. That's where it starts. And when people feel they pay into a nanny system, they feel less generous to help those in front of them. I know, I see it every damn day in LA.

Wasn't expecting that vagina monologue. You could probably cut out at least half of that and it would still be saying the same thing. I didn't think you would protest the fallacies so much. Hmmm.

How much do you know about the Renaissance? Preceding it in the Medieval times, monarchs had large royal treasuries, so they maintained the power and influence. If you were born into a lower class, then that's where you stayed. Then the merchant class arose, and they created competing currencies, a way to trade amongst themselves, a way to create wealth for themselves, and eventually they developed influence over the ruling class.

It was the traders vs. the nobility. A major power shift was transpiring as royal treasuries were no longer sustainable because they weren't producing 'new wealth', however 'new wealth' was being created by commerce among the commoners. Effectively, the common families pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and created a new class (the middle class). This threatened the monarchs, so they decided to lay claim to the wealth created by the merchant class, they forced them to use a centralized currency, and they created these charters where the merchant class were granted permission to do various jobs. Eventually the monarch took the power back and the people were offered a chance to create wealth in trade for a centralized currency.

This shows how the free market was working and working well. It also shows how government, or in this case the monarch, created a centralized currency (Keynesian anyone?), laid claim to the wealth created by the merchant class (income tax, property tax, etc), and ultimately forced people to acquire permission to work by forming corporate charters (corporation/government collusion).

Today, if you want to start a business, you must file with the government and get permission to do so. Sure you can file as DBA which is less expensive than becoming incorporated or filing an LLC, but it's still asking permission. And you must use the centralized currency of the Federal government to trade and pay debts. And the government is entitled to your wealth, through property tax, income tax, sales tax, etc. And it becomes too prohibitively expensive to keep a business afloat unless you're part of the elite rich nobility that can afford to keep their corporate charter. See any parallels?