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Old 04-05-2018, 01:38 PM   #136
sebastian_dangerfield
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop View Post
I think populism was caused much more by the elite's failures in
- failing to protect the country from Al Qaida on 9/11
- leading us into a war in Iraq to protect us from non-existent WMD, a war we have never stopped fighting
- the financial crisis

You're pointing your finger at an inadequate solution, not at the real problem(s). Note that other countries are struggling with similar issues, e.g., Brexit.
9/11 caused the country to rally together.
Iraq only split those smart enough to realize it was predicated on lies from the rest (it's still a niche gripe).
The financial crisis and its cure (which further galvanized class divisions) destroyed trust at almost all levels and stoked the class envy that led to Trump.

Brexit was xenophobia-driven.
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Old 04-05-2018, 01:44 PM   #137
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop View Post
Legal questions from today's headlines: A contract that requires someone to lie under oath has got to be void against public policy, yes? Shouldn't a lawyer who drafts such a contract face ethical charges for suborning perjury?
Of course, and yes.

An (only somewhat) tougher question: on what grounds would you disbar the attorneys who agreed to represent Bill O'Reilly on sexual harassment matters as part of a settlement for a client suing Bill O'Reilly and Fox News?
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Old 04-05-2018, 01:55 PM   #138
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Re: Quadfecta!

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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop View Post
The skills that lawyers, brokers and hedge-fund analysts have makes them more valuable in a market economy than teachers. The only crisis I can think of that has been severe enough to cause people to rethink that was when the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia, which was certainly a shock to the system but actually didn't turn out all that well for pretty much anybody. And in Cambodia today, I will wager that lawyers are paid more than teachers.

I know many of my kids' teachers. I like many of them. I am pretty sure that I could do what they do passably well. I am pretty sure that they could not do what I do. I am sympathetic with your notion that what they do is, on some level, more important. I do what I do partly in order to be able to pay to live in a nice neighborhood with good schools and better teachers. If I didn't have them to support, maybe I'd quit my job and write a novel.
This is a neat way of writing the obvious. But my comment was a response to GGG's post in which he criticized low teacher pay. "Low" is relative, gauged against "high," and the high pay crowd includes, as you note, people like lawyers. So when a lawyer says, "It's greedy people who starve teachers," he's referring in part to himself. Teachers are paid what they can extract from the system, and the system - which benefits the lawyers here (and many other places) - has enormous leverage over teachers, and so pays them shit. If you really want to pay teachers well, you have to remedy the market structure that allows us to pay them so little. That would involve goring the oxe of people like, lawyers.

And I'm not talking about merely taxing lawyers more to pay teachers more. That would only drive up lawyer salaries even more. I mean reevaluating what's important, and paying people more based on actual societal value.

Salary disparities like those between teachers and merchant class professionals result from policy choices, not pure market dynamics. We could pay teachers a ton and lawyers like shit. The average teacher could go to law school and do what we do. We've decided to set up a license leveraging system (Milton Friedman's term for law and other non-hard science/non-physical-trade professions requiring licensure) that has caused the value of lawyers to rise much higher than that of teachers. That could be cured.
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Old 04-05-2018, 02:02 PM   #139
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy View Post
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The filing from Smith and Mullin asserts that Mackris' attorney at the time, Benedict Morelli, switched sides and agreed to become O'Reilly's lawyer while negotiating the agreement.
"This profoundly unethical conflict left Ms. Mackris virtually without legal counsel," the filing said.
Morelli disputed those assertions in a statement.
"We worked extremely hard to secure a significant financial settlement for her (Mackris)," he said. "The claim that I did not vigorously represent her, or that I represented O'Reilly during or after the settlement process, is absolutely false."
If the filing is right, he gets disbarred. If Morelli is correct, not sure there's an issue.
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Old 04-05-2018, 02:07 PM   #140
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Re: Quadfecta!

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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield View Post
This is a neat way of writing the obvious. But my comment was a response to GGG's post in which he criticized low teacher pay. "Low" is relative, gauged against "high," and the high pay crowd includes, as you note, people like lawyers. So when a lawyer says, "It's greedy people who starve teachers," he's referring in part to himself.
Oh, bullshit. Has GGG ever, to your knowledge, voted against higher pay for teachers, or for the sorts of things (Prop Two and a Half in Massachusetts) that squeeze the governments paying them?

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Teachers are paid what they can extract from the system, and the system - which benefits the lawyers here (and many other places) - has enormous leverage over teachers, and so pays them shit. If you really want to pay teachers well, you have to remedy the market structure that allows us to pay them so little. That would involve goring the oxe of people like, lawyers.
I think this, too, is bullshit. Teachers get paid very little because the entry barriers are low and because the benefits of good teaching are hard to measure, diffuse, and a common good.

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And I'm not talking about merely taxing lawyers more to pay teachers more. That would only drive up lawyer salaries even more. I mean reevaluating what's important, and paying people more based on actual societal value.
Explain this notion you have of transitioning from capitalism to paying people more based on actual society value. I'm all ears.

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Salary disparities like those between teachers and merchant class professionals result from policy choices, not pure market dynamics. We could pay teachers a ton and lawyers like shit. The average teacher could go to law school and do what we do. We've decided to set up a license leveraging system (Milton Friedman's term for law and other non-hard science/non-physical-trade professions requiring licensure) that has caused the value of lawyers to rise much higher than that of teachers. That could be cured.
On the margin, maybe, but as you look back through history I do not think you will ever find a time and place where teachers were paid more than lawyers, and there might be reasons for that other than policy choices.
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Old 04-05-2018, 02:07 PM   #141
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Re: Quadfecta!

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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop View Post
The skills that lawyers, brokers and hedge-fund analysts have makes them more valuable in a market economy than teachers. The only crisis I can think of that has been severe enough to cause people to rethink that was when the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia, which was certainly a shock to the system but actually didn't turn out all that well for pretty much anybody. And in Cambodia today, I will wager that lawyers are paid more than teachers.

I know many of my kids' teachers. I like many of them. I am pretty sure that I could do what they do passably well. I am pretty sure that they could not do what I do. I am sympathetic with your notion that what they do is, on some level, more important. I do what I do partly in order to be able to pay to live in a nice neighborhood with good schools and better teachers. If I didn't have them to support, maybe I'd quit my job and write a novel.
You written plenty of fiction here, although mostly pretty transparent.
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Old 04-05-2018, 02:20 PM   #142
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Please think about what you're saying. The issue you're trying to put your finger on is a necessary attribute of government, not a peculiar aspect of democracy. Government is a tool to, among other things, impose a social order and redistribute. Throughout history, most governments have redistributed from the bottom to the top. In other words, exploitation. Rich people tend not to see any problem with this. When poor people want to have an equal say, rich people conjure up just-so stories, like you are now, to explain that it won't work. Crucially, these just-so stories mask the redistributive piece, and make things sound like a mechanical problem that just exists in nature. "if you create a system where people vote themselves benefits, they'll do so until the system collapses." Really? Where has that happened? The system collapsing, I mean. Just to take a popular counterexample, look at the Nordic countries, where the people have voted for social benefits much richer than you see in this country. Denmark, for example, hasn't collapsed.
I think all government has authoritarian tendencies within it. For this reason, I think it's healthy to always distrust it. And be thoroughly suspicious of those who seek to work in politics.

On point two, we are not Norway. Or Denmark, or Sweden.

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It's freakishly odd to me that you can sound off here *all the time* about how the political system doesn't serve ordinary people, causing them to lose jobs and vote for Trump and all sorts of other horribles, and then give this explanation of how giving ordinary people more political power can't work. Dude, it's almost like the noblesse oblige approach that you are advocating right now doesn't actually work. News flash: Affluent suburbs have well-paved roads and good schools, and poor suburbs don't. But you keep worrying about how democracy will collapse if we trying to treat people more equally.
Again, it's a balancing act. You can only give the people so much power. It has to be checked or men will simply vote for policies that aid themselves until the thing craters. Tragedy of the Commons at the voting booth. Applies to the rich, the poor, the middle... literally everyone. Equally.

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Right. I understand that you agree on a fundamental level that libertarianism is profoundly misguided, but because you are rolling out the libertarian claptrap and there is no one else here to defend it, I'm letting you have it. Thanks for playing.
I'm highlighting the good and bad of the ideology.

Quote:
What were Rockefeller Republicans are today's affluent Democrats, and when they vote for higher taxes -- which they often do -- they are in fact hurting their bottom line. You're getting the Stupid Talking Point (tm) wrong -- the hypocrisy charge against them is not that they won't vote against economic self-interest, which they do, it's that they are somehow not to be taken seriously because they don't give up all their wealth like St Francis of Assisi.
I'd say half of the people I know are affluent Democrats, or Republican Hillary voters (there are a lot of those). They didn't vote against self-interest. They voted, and generally vote, for continuity and predictability. They vote for what they think will keep the stock market rolling. They're as selfish as the GOP voters. These people long ago calculated that stock markets tend to do better in Democratic administrations (they do), and that whatever little increase they see in taxes will be eclipsed by gains.

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You can use words however you like, but if you want to use them to communicate with other people then it helps to use meanings that other people use too. This version of "authoritarian" that you've hatched has little or nothing to do with the way that other people understand the word, and also is so broad as to be meaningless. Anyone who has every worked in a government, or a company with more than one employee, or a non-profit, or who has been a part of organized religion, or youth sports -- they're all "authoritarians" in your book. If that's how you're writing your book, I don't think I want to read it.
If you're prosthelytizing, you've got some authoritarian stuff going on upstairs.

Quote:
More interesting question here, but I think that self-interest trumps a desire to control other people's behavior as a relative explanation for most political behavior -- but for various reasons, people want to justify their positions based on abstract principles, not self-interest, so they often dress up the former as the latter.
In this basket, one will find more limousine liberals and conservative republicans than any other stripe of voter.

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Do you have a good example of someone acting in politics out of a desire to control other people's behavior that is not also motivated by self-interest?
Ralph Nader.

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You fetishize the creative destruction of a recession all the time without ever explaining why it would be good for everyone to see more bankruptcies and monetary loss. The system clears out dead weight all the time. What happens in a financial crisis is that good stuff gets burned down too. How does a recession give a little guy a chance?
He can compete. He's not blown out by larger competitors before he can even get a start. The smart little guy who bet on the collapse and avoided exposure to the risks does even better. He gets asymmetrical returns picking up assets at next to nothing.

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I understand where the populism comes from. It would have been worse if we'd had a big recession. See, e.g., the 1930s.
Again, it's a balancing act. We balanced nothing. Now we have populism.
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Old 04-05-2018, 02:38 PM   #143
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop View Post
Just to take a popular counterexample, look at the Nordic countries, where the people have voted for social benefits much richer than you see in this country. Denmark, for example, hasn't collapsed.


http://www.thepovertyline.net/united-states-of-america

http://www.thepovertyline.net/norway

Maybe it's Chicken/egg, but comparing us to Nordic countries is either stupid or contrived. Our poverty level is twice theirs, and we are way more spread out.
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Old 04-05-2018, 02:57 PM   #144
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski View Post
http://www.thepovertyline.net/united-states-of-america

http://www.thepovertyline.net/norway

Maybe it's Chicken/egg, but comparing us to Nordic countries is either stupid or contrived. Our poverty level is twice theirs, and we are way more spread out.
(1) Sebby says democracies collapse. The Nordics haven't. So either he is just plain wrong, or a Nordic-style democracy is not sufficiently democratic to induce collapse, in which case it's an academic point not worth discussing.

(2) Maybe our poverty level is higher because our system of government doesn't sufficiently represent the needs of the poorer and do more to elevate their condition.
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Old 04-05-2018, 03:13 PM   #145
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield View Post
I think all government has authoritarian tendencies within it. For this reason, I think it's healthy to always distrust it. And be thoroughly suspicious of those who seek to work in politics.
OK, whatever. Libertarians, of course, are in favor of government, just one that uses authoritarian methods (courts, police) to protect their rights (property, tort, contract).

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On point two, we are not Norway. Or Denmark, or Sweden.
See my response to Hank. When you said that democracies collapse, you sounded like you were making some kind of point about democracy as a system of government, rather than a point about how the American poor in particular can't be trusted with self-governance, as compared to poor people in other countries. Make up your mind.

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Again, it's a balancing act. You can only give the people so much power. It has to be checked or men will simply vote for policies that aid themselves until the thing craters. Tragedy of the Commons at the voting booth. Applies to the rich, the poor, the middle... literally everyone. Equally.
This would be a more interesting point if you weren't saying it to urge that only people with more money be given the power to vote for policies that aid themselves, which means exploitation of those who aren't voting. Actually, check that -- it's not an interesting point at all. No one ever said the point of government is altruism.

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I'm highlighting the good and bad of the ideology.
I'm still waiting for the good part, unless you're saying that letting rich people exploit poor people is per se good.

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If you're prosthelytizing, you've got some authoritarian stuff going on upstairs.
If I'm prosthelytizing? I like it when you make up new words instead of repurposing existing words with new meanings.

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In this basket, one will find more limousine liberals and conservative republicans than any other stripe of voter.
You missed my point. Try again, or don't bother.

Quote:
Ralph Nader.
When Ralph Nader ran in 2000, he clearly was trying to inflate his own importance rather than to control anyone's anything. The earlier Nader is an example of what I said with environmentalists -- someone who sees serious harm in the world, in his case externalities caused by companies which didn't have to bear the costs of their businesses rather than pollution. Because you are unsympathetic to his view of the harms, you dismiss what he's doing as an exercise in trying to control people, rather than a good-faith effort to stop a harm in the world.

It's odd for you to point to Nader as an authoritarian, even with your idiosyncratic definition, since he has never (to my knowledge) held political office.

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He can compete. He's not blown out by larger competitors before he can even get a start. The smart little guy who bet on the collapse and avoided exposure to the risks does even better. He gets asymmetrical returns picking up assets at next to nothing.
No he can't, because he doesn't have money. And in a recession, he can't borrow, because the whole point of the recession is funding dries up. Your "little guy who bet on the collapse" is a rich person who uses everyone else's poverty to get richer because he has liquidity when others don't -- not an example of anyone making the actual economy function better by creative anything.
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Old 04-05-2018, 03:18 PM   #146
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop View Post
(2) Maybe our poverty level is higher because our system of government doesn't sufficiently represent the needs of the poorer and do more to elevate their condition.
Or, so you're saying maybe is's a chicken/egg thing?
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Old 04-05-2018, 03:57 PM   #147
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski View Post
Or, so you're saying maybe is's a chicken/egg thing?
I suspect causation goes both ways.
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Old 04-05-2018, 04:29 PM   #148
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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I suspect causation goes both ways.
Whifferooooski
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Old 04-05-2018, 07:50 PM   #149
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Whifferooooski
Sorry, my ESP must have been on the fritz.
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Old 04-05-2018, 08:57 PM   #150
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Sorry, my ESP must have been on the fritz.
I SAID "MAYBE IT'S A CHICKEN/EGG THING" IN MY O.P. you think you invented the thought? We already have a Paigow.
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