$168 Per Day

[Symmetry]

Problem is that governments are the least efficient method of doing things, other than becoming larger. You get twice as much bang for your buck by just leaving it on the road than you do for any government redistribution.

Yes, but if no one is doing anything about the problem, an inefficient solution is better than no solution. That is the main problem with the consistently anti-government responses. Sure, it's fine to champion "efficient" methods of problem solving, but that's only relevant if you're actually out there pushing for those things to happen in the private sector. None of these people do.

I do, but I guess that's beside the point.

Ok, well then I applaud your efforts, but there's a disturbing conflict among many small government advocates. I understand why one might rail against constant big government expansion, but if we all agree on what the goals are, then it's better to have a solution than not have one. For example, let's say we can all agree that poverty is a bad thing. If we think that we have some obligation to stop bad things from happening (and I think that we do), then we are all obligated to pitch in, to the extent that we can. If private charity could get the job done, and prevent it from recurring, then I would be for that solution (but it would require a nationwide effort). But of course, doing so requires a significant time investment by those involved, because you have to set up an entire infrastructure for monitoring conditions to ensure that poverty is not still happening. We already have an entity that does this monitoring -- the government -- and it's no surprise that there's only a limited amount of resources in the private sector for doing this, because private sector work in this area can only run on donations since there is not a whole of money to be made in ending poverty (actually, this is not so true if a legitimate loan system is established, and this can be seen in the microloan systems used in developing nations). But there's not enough private donations to end poverty. So if you are a small-government conservative, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place; you can either admit that poverty is bad but recognize that nothing is going to change it because people don't donate enough, or you can advocate the one reasonable solution we have (let the government infrastructure that already exists, help solve this problem), at the expense of threatening a government expansion that you do not want. I sympathize with the position that such people are in, as I am not really someone that has a stance on how much influence the government should have. I am a consequentialist and I think that it is more important to actually solve the problem, rather than not solve the problem and have a more ideal (limited) system of government. The best society is one where bad things do not happen, and we are foolish to avoid using any tools we can to stop bad things from happening.

I should point out again that this conclusion rests on the assumption that we have a moral obligation to prevent things like poverty. If you agree with that, then you should be willing to contribute what you can to solve such problems, but if you don't, then obviously you might feel something akin to being stolen from if you are taxed to solve this problem. But I think that anyone who doesn't think poverty is bad enough to compel action would be a rather unpleasant sort of person.

Agreed, but there is a well-established way of avoiding that moral obligation for people who really don't want to deal with the problem of poverty. Make poverty itself a moral crime. Call the poor feckless, lazy, ignorant and inherently criminal. It's one of those pervasive 19th century ideas that equates poverty with mental illness and criminality.

It's an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard.

[thegreekdog]

You attack anything specific about what I say and I will destroy your arguments with the wrath of an angry god and make you appear to be a drooling retard barely capable of clickety-clicking your keyboard into sentences that have structural form.

I don't care about your class warfare rhetoric. All you are doing is attempting to throw down one set of elites and replace them with another set of elites. And you don't even identify the right problem. The CEO pay is but a consequence of the debt based currency.

""If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered".- Jefferson

Considering what you are railing against, you might want to reread that Jefferson quote a few more times until it finally sinks in.

You're like a doctor giving the flu patient a tissue instead of fighting the very virus that is causing the sickness.

These analogies are old, son.
Jefferson is the most two-faced president we had until the mid 1800s.
Philosophically, he was also wrong quite a bit of the time. In fact, so far, that quotation has been wrong. Let that sink in. But! If I were you, I'd let the wisdom of John Adams sink in a little bit deeper than Jefferson's. If Jefferson had his way, America would have been a French puppet State. True Fact. I'd be stupid to listen to just Jefferson on any subject.

Ok, let's look at it from this perspective:
Do you personally buy any products/services from corporate owned companies? Isn't it really consumer buying habits then that are to blame? If nobody bought products/services from corporate owned enterprises there would be no big fat CEO's grubbing all the profits. The low prices gained by the corporate structure are what's attractive to people but then they don't like the consequences of their support. Why is it so easily forgotten that the two things are connected?

Or I could take a knife and go kill the sons-of-bitches like Mary Harris Jones said?! Just because it's an option doesn't make it a good one.
There's no question of who to support anymore. People who make $19K a year don't have any options for where to shop. And in my community, we have Wal*mart, JCP, Walgrens, CVS, F&F, Shop*Ko, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Cub Foods, Sullivan's Grocery, and Menard's. That's it for 45 miles. All big-chain stores. Our beloved Kmart will be closed by January.

The low prices argument is bullshit. Just because a company has low prices does not mean they get low prices by ripping off their employees and giving the money to the CEO. Like Hostess did. The two things were 'not connected' until recently. That's what's so easily forgotten. Union power peaked in 1970, and this out-of-control CEO pay sh*t didn't start until around '78. And that's not a coincidence. The system didn't work like this until now, and these assholes don't have to continue making more money than God for our country to function. They don't earn this, the workers are the ones who create the wealth.

Example:

this is how it should work.

James Sinegal recent campaign donations (he's given $108,000 of soft money and $162,900 of contributions, mostly to Democrats):

August 16, 2012 - $100,000 to Priorities USA Action PAC (PAC for Obama)
December 31, 2010 - $2,400 to Maria Cantwell (Democrat)
October 26, 2011 - $2,400 t Maria Cantwell (Democrat)

[thegreekdog]

Agreed, but there is a well-established way of avoiding that moral obligation for people who really don't want to deal with the problem of poverty. Make poverty itself a moral crime. Call the poor feckless, lazy, ignorant and inherently criminal. It's one of those pervasive 19th century ideas that equates poverty with mental illness and criminality.

It's an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard.

The 20th and 21st century view is that the government can take care of those people, which is also an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard or actually solve the inherent problems.

Does your public school suck? Let's just throw another $2 million at it like we did every year for the past 30 years.
Out of work? Let's just keep you on unemployment for a year or more.
Underemployed? Let's just make sure you get enough food stamps and welfare checks to keep you there.

[PLAYER57832]

Agreed, but there is a well-established way of avoiding that moral obligation for people who really don't want to deal with the problem of poverty. Make poverty itself a moral crime. Call the poor feckless, lazy, ignorant and inherently criminal. It's one of those pervasive 19th century ideas that equates poverty with mental illness and criminality.

It's an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard.

The 20th and 21st century view is that the government can take care of those people, which is also an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard or actually solve the inherent problems.

Does your public school suck? Let's just throw another $2 million at it like we did every year for the past 30 years.
Out of work? Let's just keep you on unemployment for a year or more.
Underemployed? Let's just make sure you get enough food stamps and welfare checks to keep you there.

I see, becuase its now the government's job to create jobs, not just to provide a safety net.

What ever happened to your lauded free market that was to solve everything completely on its own.

[Funkyterrance]

Ok, let's look at it from this perspective:
Do you personally buy any products/services from corporate owned companies? Isn't it really consumer buying habits then that are to blame? If nobody bought products/services from corporate owned enterprises there would be no big fat CEO's grubbing all the profits. The low prices gained by the corporate structure are what's attractive to people but then they don't like the consequences of their support. Why is it so easily forgotten that the two things are connected?

Or I could take a knife and go kill the sons-of-bitches like Mary Harris Jones said?! Just because it's an option doesn't make it a good one.
There's no question of who to support anymore. People who make $19K a year don't have any options for where to shop. And in my community, we have Wal*mart, JCP, Walgrens, CVS, F&F, Shop*Ko, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Cub Foods, Sullivan's Grocery, and Menard's. That's it for 45 miles. All big-chain stores. Our beloved Kmart will be closed by January.

The low prices argument is bullshit. Just because a company has low prices does not mean they get low prices by ripping off their employees and giving the money to the CEO. Like Hostess did. The two things were 'not connected' until recently. That's what's so easily forgotten. Union power peaked in 1970, and this out-of-control CEO pay sh*t didn't start until around '78. And that's not a coincidence. The system didn't work like this until now, and these assholes don't have to continue making more money than God for our country to function. They don't earn this, the workers are the ones who create the wealth.

I'm not disagreeing that the workers create the wealth, that's pretty obvious.
So let's take your example of your options within 50 miles: Do you happen to know which of these corporate owned chains are better to their employees? Does this affect where you shop or do you generally go where it's most convenient at the time/slightly cheaper? Everyone has options in an open market, it's just "too hard" to make an effort one way or another. So you save $5 choosing one place over another, even on a $20k salary this doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
My point is that we Americans are very good at pointing out what's wrong but terrible at adjusting our habits in an effort to make things better. Armchair politicians can spout all they want but until they actually reflect their beliefs in their own consumer choices they can keep it to themselves as far as I am concerned.

[Symmetry]

Agreed, but there is a well-established way of avoiding that moral obligation for people who really don't want to deal with the problem of poverty. Make poverty itself a moral crime. Call the poor feckless, lazy, ignorant and inherently criminal. It's one of those pervasive 19th century ideas that equates poverty with mental illness and criminality.

It's an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard.

The 20th and 21st century view is that the government can take care of those people, which is also an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard or actually solve the inherent problems.

Does your public school suck? Let's just throw another $2 million at it like we did every year for the past 30 years.
Out of work? Let's just keep you on unemployment for a year or more.
Underemployed? Let's just make sure you get enough food stamps and welfare checks to keep you there.

Ah, all those magic jobs out there in a recession. What a shame that people are just too lazy to work. I'm totally with you on this. The Great Depression too. Just a load of bums who didn't want to get a job. Dust bowl? Try paying your water bills.

[thegreekdog]

Agreed, but there is a well-established way of avoiding that moral obligation for people who really don't want to deal with the problem of poverty. Make poverty itself a moral crime. Call the poor feckless, lazy, ignorant and inherently criminal. It's one of those pervasive 19th century ideas that equates poverty with mental illness and criminality.

It's an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard.

The 20th and 21st century view is that the government can take care of those people, which is also an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard or actually solve the inherent problems.

Does your public school suck? Let's just throw another $2 million at it like we did every year for the past 30 years.
Out of work? Let's just keep you on unemployment for a year or more.
Underemployed? Let's just make sure you get enough food stamps and welfare checks to keep you there.

I see, becuase its now the government's job to create jobs, not just to provide a safety net.

What ever happened to your lauded free market that was to solve everything completely on its own.

What? No seriously, what are you saying?

The government's job is not to create jobs. The government can provide a safety net. But there is providing a safety net, and then there's what the government does now, which is perpetuate the state that people find themselves in. It seems clear, at least to me, if we just take public schools, as an example. Public schools in the United States get more money per student, by far, than any other public school system in the world, yet we have very poor schools for the most part. I certainly don't have a solution to that problem, but I do know that the solution should not be making the per student amount higher when throwing more money at the problem has not worked the 2,000 other times we've done it. But I don't see anyone proposing anything other than throwing more money at the problem. Why?

I'm also not a 100% free market person, as you well know. What I am in favor of is limiting the government's control over things, especially when the things it does are abject failures in nearly every way.

[thegreekdog]

Agreed, but there is a well-established way of avoiding that moral obligation for people who really don't want to deal with the problem of poverty. Make poverty itself a moral crime. Call the poor feckless, lazy, ignorant and inherently criminal. It's one of those pervasive 19th century ideas that equates poverty with mental illness and criminality.

It's an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard.

The 20th and 21st century view is that the government can take care of those people, which is also an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard or actually solve the inherent problems.

Does your public school suck? Let's just throw another $2 million at it like we did every year for the past 30 years.
Out of work? Let's just keep you on unemployment for a year or more.
Underemployed? Let's just make sure you get enough food stamps and welfare checks to keep you there.

Ah, all those magic jobs out there in a recession. What a shame that people are just too lazy to work. I'm totally with you on this. The Great Depression too. Just a load of bums who didn't want to get a job. Dust bowl? Try paying your water bills.

Woah there killer. Jumping the gun aren't we?

I guess my question to you would be this:

(1) How much more money, incrementally, has been spent on public education from 1960 to 2012? How much have the US public schools improved?

(2) How much money is spent on unemployment benefits? How many people have gotten jobs at the end or towards the end of their unemployment run?

(3) How much money is spent on welfare? How many people who have been on welfare have been able to get themselves out of welfare?

And throw in this one as well - What leads you to believe that the people who write and administer these laws are interested in anything other than their own self-preservation, power, and wealth? And who do you think ensure that those people will continue to enjoy power and wealth?

[Lootifer]

The 20th and 21st century view is that the government can take care of those people, which is also an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard or actually solve the inherent problems.

Does your public school suck? Let's just throw another $2 million at it like we did every year for the past 30 years.
Out of work? Let's just keep you on unemployment for a year or more.
Underemployed? Let's just make sure you get enough food stamps and welfare checks to keep you there.

We can land on the moon, we can pull a device from our pocket and communicate with anyone else in the world through any medium we like, we can buy a car that can accelerate faster than gravity, we can rent an apartment that is over half a kilometre off the ground.

Yet we cant set up a simple and efficient public framework in which to fund improvements to our schooling?

...

.....

.......

Oh thats right we can, in fact theres lots of them all accross the political spectrum, we are just, collectively, too belligerant as a species to ever possibly agree on one.

[Symmetry]

Agreed, but there is a well-established way of avoiding that moral obligation for people who really don't want to deal with the problem of poverty. Make poverty itself a moral crime. Call the poor feckless, lazy, ignorant and inherently criminal. It's one of those pervasive 19th century ideas that equates poverty with mental illness and criminality.

It's an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard.

The 20th and 21st century view is that the government can take care of those people, which is also an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard or actually solve the inherent problems.

Does your public school suck? Let's just throw another $2 million at it like we did every year for the past 30 years.
Out of work? Let's just keep you on unemployment for a year or more.
Underemployed? Let's just make sure you get enough food stamps and welfare checks to keep you there.

Ah, all those magic jobs out there in a recession. What a shame that people are just too lazy to work. I'm totally with you on this. The Great Depression too. Just a load of bums who didn't want to get a job. Dust bowl? Try paying your water bills.

Woah there killer. Jumping the gun aren't we?

I guess my question to you would be this:

(1) How much more money, incrementally, has been spent on public education from 1960 to 2012? How much have the US public schools improved?

(2) How much money is spent on unemployment benefits? How many people have gotten jobs at the end or towards the end of their unemployment run?

(3) How much money is spent on welfare? How many people who have been on welfare have been able to get themselves out of welfare?

And throw in this one as well - What leads you to believe that the people who write and administer these laws are interested in anything other than their own self-preservation, power, and wealth? And who do you think ensure that those people will continue to enjoy power and wealth?

These are questions that you find much more interesting than me, but I'd be happy to look at your findings and discuss them. Sadly, I'm not going to be doing the legwork for your own vague points. If you have some answers, I'll discuss them with you, but a Lionz style list of vague leading questions is just tiresome. Especially when they're immediately followed by another vague list.

[thegreekdog]

The 20th and 21st century view is that the government can take care of those people, which is also an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard or actually solve the inherent problems.

Does your public school suck? Let's just throw another $2 million at it like we did every year for the past 30 years.
Out of work? Let's just keep you on unemployment for a year or more.
Underemployed? Let's just make sure you get enough food stamps and welfare checks to keep you there.

We can land on the moon, we can pull a device from our pocket and communicate with anyone else in the world through any medium we like, we can buy a car that can accelerate faster than gravity, we can rent an apartment that is over half a kilometre off the ground.

Yet we cant set up a simple and efficient public framework in which to fund improvements to our schooling?

...

.....

.......

Oh thats right we can, in fact theres lots of them all accross the political spectrum, we are just, collectively, too belligerant as a species to ever possibly agree on one.

I'm not really talking about funding public schooling. I'm suggesting that there are reasons other than money why public schools are failing and yet the only solution we are provided and pushed towards is increasing the funding. Mostly because, in my jaded view, the people that receive that funding are the ones that are pushing for it.

[thegreekdog]

Agreed, but there is a well-established way of avoiding that moral obligation for people who really don't want to deal with the problem of poverty. Make poverty itself a moral crime. Call the poor feckless, lazy, ignorant and inherently criminal. It's one of those pervasive 19th century ideas that equates poverty with mental illness and criminality.

It's an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard.

The 20th and 21st century view is that the government can take care of those people, which is also an easy get-out for people who don't want to think too hard or actually solve the inherent problems.

Does your public school suck? Let's just throw another $2 million at it like we did every year for the past 30 years.
Out of work? Let's just keep you on unemployment for a year or more.
Underemployed? Let's just make sure you get enough food stamps and welfare checks to keep you there.

Ah, all those magic jobs out there in a recession. What a shame that people are just too lazy to work. I'm totally with you on this. The Great Depression too. Just a load of bums who didn't want to get a job. Dust bowl? Try paying your water bills.

Woah there killer. Jumping the gun aren't we?

I guess my question to you would be this:

(1) How much more money, incrementally, has been spent on public education from 1960 to 2012? How much have the US public schools improved?

(2) How much money is spent on unemployment benefits? How many people have gotten jobs at the end or towards the end of their unemployment run?

(3) How much money is spent on welfare? How many people who have been on welfare have been able to get themselves out of welfare?

And throw in this one as well - What leads you to believe that the people who write and administer these laws are interested in anything other than their own self-preservation, power, and wealth? And who do you think ensure that those people will continue to enjoy power and wealth?

These are questions that you find much more interesting than me, but I'd be happy to look at your findings and discuss them. Sadly, I'm not going to be doing the legwork for your own vague points. If you have some answers, I'll discuss them with you, but a Lionz style list of vague leading questions is just tiresome. Especially when they're immediately followed by another vague list.

Oh yeah, I forgot. You're doing this thing where you post an ad hominem rant and then bob and weave.

[Lootifer]

(1) How much more money, incrementally, has been spent on public education from 1960 to 2012? How much have the US public schools improved?

I take your rhetorical and come back with:
a) How much more time did children spend with at least one parent in the 1960's compared to 2012? how has this affected in-class behaviour?
b) How much has the nutritional value of our diets decreased from 1960's compared to 2012? how has this affected in-class behaviour?
c) How much more outdoor exercise did children in the 1960's do compared to 2012? how has this affected in-class behaviour?
d) How much have cultural behaviour standards decreased from 1960 to 2012 due to the impact of pop culture? how has this affected in-class behaviour?
e-h) All the "this country has gone to the dogs" rhetoric that conservatives blame for todays sorry state (e.g. elimination of corpereal punishment, decrease of religion etc). how has these changes affected in-class behaviour?
i) How has the location of supportive extended family changed since 1960? (i.e. are we more dispersed geographically now?) how has this affected behaviour?

Should I go on? I reckon I still have a few more in me.

[Lootifer]

I'm not really talking about funding public schooling. I'm suggesting that there are reasons other than money why public schools are failing and yet the only solution we are provided and pushed towards is increasing the funding. Mostly because, in my jaded view, the people that receive that funding are the ones that are pushing for it.

I'd completely agree with that, though I usually do

(in fact its pretty much the same point as I was making with my rhetorical question post lol)

[AndyDufresne]

And now, for something almost entirely different, but still on topic, from Futurama:




--Andy