LawTalkers  

Go Back   LawTalkers

» Site Navigation
 > FAQ
» Online Users: 150
0 members and 150 guests
No Members online
Most users ever online was 4,499, 10-26-2015 at 07:55 AM.
View Single Post
Old 04-16-2018, 08:33 AM   #197
sebastian_dangerfield
Moderator
 
sebastian_dangerfield's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Monty Capuletti's gazebo
Posts: 26,077
Re: We are all Slave now.

Quote:
Sebby: Rich people need to keep exploiting poor people, because every time a country tries to treat poor people equally, it inevitably results in societal collapse.
That's not at all what I said. I said when a democracy allows the rich, or the poor, or the middle class, to liberally vote themselves transfers, it's on the road to bankruptcy.

The .0001% is voting itself, via bought and paid for representatives, significant wealth transfers. What would normally be taxed is not. The rich get much richer much faster than in the past. Hand in hand with that, the poor and middle class demand more in the way of transfers, wealth being relative.

Now, of course, we could tax the top 5% at 100% and probably not dent the promises our govt makes to the poor and middle classes. But we make those promises nonetheless. ...Govt debt doesn't matter, so who cares, right? (Larry Summers and Dick Cheney both agree.)

Quote:
Me: Like when?
I can't give you an example of a pure democracy that fell. But I didn't offer one, either. I said any pure democracy will spend itself into the shitter. You demanded an example. I gave no example, but instead explained how the process is inevitable (and I think I have Plato, or maybe Aristotle, and a bunch of other important dead people on my side in the "democracy is not the optimal state" argument).

I am not able to provide you with the example you want. That doesn't mean my point doesn't hold, however. That probably means no pure democracy has ever existed because:

(a) It's pretty clear to those establishing states that such a system is built to fail; or,
(b) Every state that started out as one was later converted to a form of govt that could actually survive.

Quote:
Sebby: Did I say inevitable? I meant hypothetical. Same thing, really. Stop paying attention to my words.
How are inevitable and hypothetical mutually exclusive here? (Or ever?)

Quote:
The important thing is, poor people need to keep getting screwed, for their own good and everyone else's. Also, none of you people understand that ordinary people voted for Trump because the economy is so awful, and the current system is broken. We to tear it all down in an orgy of creative destruction. But not by letting poor people have an equal say in the government. That's much too dangerous.
Me: X

Ty: Repackaged X.

Me: That's not what I said.

Ty: I'll tell you what you said. And now here's why you're wrong in saying what I've said you said. And further -- when you say something, understand that I will select the criteria on which to judge whether what you've said holds water, not you. So when you say something like, "as a general proposition, pure democracy will cannibalize itself," I'll demand an example. If you don't give me one, I'll then frame the issue as one where we debated whether there are historical examples of pure democracies failing. (Knowing full well that one has never existed, for pretty obvious reasons.)
__________________
All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
sebastian_dangerfield is offline  
 
Powered by vBadvanced CMPS v3.0.1

All times are GMT -4. The time now is 07:13 AM.