You obviously thing that you’re going to win this argument by sheer attrition by posting semi-literate excepts from your addle-brained economics text-books till everyone give up on you and stops posting.
Just so you know, that doesn’t mean you’ve won, just that sane people don’t beat their heads up against brick walls for any longer than they can help.
Here we go again: cleaning up the bullshit factory.
(You have to actually PROVE CAUSATION with your statements. America was a socialist country during WWII but it had become the most prosperous country in the world before it was socialist. Somehow the workers always had enough money to buy all the goods to the market, and the capitalists made it a point to cut prices on their goods as much possible. Henry Ford actually bragged about cutting prices on the Model T.)
No, I don’t actually. Keep your pompous imperatives to yourself. I merely note that before and after Social Democracy growth rates were a fraction of what they were during. Just before WW II America was the global HQ of the Great Depression, a rather nasty manifestation of the glories of the unrestrained Free Market, which even one so historically illiterate as yourself must have heard of.
It was Keynesian or Social Democrat economics that got us out of that one, with a little help from the Second World War.
I note also that if growth rates under Neo-Liberalism had been twice that of Social-Democracy you and your kind would be cowing like a cock with two tails. Alas that it just didn’t happen that way, so you can’t. Figures do not lie. My system works for the masses, yours simply enriches billionaires.
(Socialism in America turned out to be a failure and led to the malaise of the 1970's when the short-run union policies and inflationism of the government to mask their ill effects came together to create stagflation.)
What actually happened was that in 1971 Nixon abandoned the Bretton Woods System that had prevented speculation in currencies in the post war era and let the speculative demon out of its prison. This enabled banks to put pressure on national governments to conform to their dictates. Were that not enough during this decade OPEC raised the price of oil something like six times. These phenomena together are quite enough to explain what happened at that time.
(This had all been predicted by liberal economics, but the labour advocates declared it invalid for the real world, dismal scientism and all kinds of fallacious deceptions.)
Yes, they were in the background whining and bleating because no one was taking any notice of their drab, elitist plutocratic ranting. It was not a systemic failure of SD that caused this: it was thieving Arabs, the cost of the Vietnam War, and the low machinations of that crook Nixon.
SD did not die, it was murdered.
(Socialism in England was an even worse failure and ended with an IMF bailout and a violent confrontation between unions and Margaret Thatcher's government. The socialists want a return to these glory days? Are you out of your mind?)
It was very successful for the mass of the people. The ones you speak of are a tiny elite of over-privileged toffs and miserable tax-exiles. That confrontation was provoked by Thatcher in pursuit of her ruthless Neo-Liberal agenda. She was saved by North Sea Oil and the Falkland’s War from certain defeat and oblivion. That oil’s running out. Guess what happens next? We shall soon see that apart from lining the pockets of her reptilian supporters Thatcher solved nothing.
Once again, the destruction of Bretton Woods and the Oil Crises were what wrecked SD in Britain. We shall soon see if Neo-Liberalism is any more resilient. I wouldn’t put good money on it.
(The argument that socialism is necessary because workers won't have enough money to buy goods is COMPLETELY fallacious. In a capitalist economy it is suicidal to produce goods that people will not be able to pay you for. You must always produce the goods that people want the most.)
Duh! And the more money the masses have to spend, the more goods they can buy. The whole thing rises to a new level. It’s all about Demand and Supply. That’s what happened 1945-80. Your grasp of the bleeding obvious is wonderful to behold.
(Large corporations and banks are no different from the small businessmen. They work just as hard to provide services to consumers. They have become large because they have been successful in the past at doing such things. You cannot draw a distinction between a large business and a small business and say that one type is good and one type is bad.)
Well, duh, one has the resources to corruptly lobby politicians, grind down critics with law suits, hire academic and scientific whores to endorse their dangerous and poisonous products, produce reams of propaganda, advertising and other lies to distort markets, create needs where none existed before, bust unions and so on ad nauseum and forever.
You think the man down the corner shop can do these things? Hello?
(Giving privileges to small businessmen would have the effect of taking from the most productive big businesses and giving to less productive small businesses, meaning the consumers will become worse off by an increase in prices.)
Small businesses provide most of the employment in society and their people help hold society together. Compared to this productivity is of little moment. We need jobs and we need people with a stake in society. Small business achieves this. Big business would rather cut their throats than give anyone a job. In fact they’ve spent the last twenty years sacking people moving, manufacturing to low wage countries, lobbying for more pollution, and engaging in irresponsible, useless, unproductive speculation on the stock exchange—that is they have shown themselves to be wholly unworthy to exercise the authority people like you have insisted they have. People who exercise power irresponsibly deserve to lose it. And they will
(This is no better than giving tax breaks to big businesses to attract 'jobs' which is a popular measure of left-wing governments these days. You are taking money that people earned and giving it to people who did not earn it.)
As capitalist society is so grotesquely unjust and exploitative this leaves me completely dry eyed. Capitalism itself is all about taking money from people who earn it and giving it to those who do not. If taking money from parasites produces a just, cohesive, fair and honourable society I care nothing for your whimpering on their behalf. I believe in “User Pays.” Capitalists use society, so they have to pay.
Not everyone has equal capacity to earn money. Not everyone is a rich white male American in good health. Society must be protected. The unfortunate and the indigent must be cared for. Public infrastructure must be maintained and extended. By virtue of our common humanity we have certain inalienable rights, most notable the right to physical survival and a dignity. Only a Social Democratic Welfare State achieves this.
(It is also false that the economy is 'dominated' by big businesses. There are all types of businesses of all sizes. There are probably a hundred more dental offices in America than there are corporations listed on the NYSE.)
This is one of the most inane things you have ever said, and you’ve said a few. Try comparing net worth rather than raw numbers. Check out the number of lobbyists employed in Washington by huge multinational corporations as compared to provincial dentists. You are no longer making any effort to argue honestly.
(I am talking about the poverty of those who are excluded from high-paying jobs because unions have increased their own wages by force and put their employers in a position where the only way to be profitable is to reduce their workforce.)
So it’s those evil Unions who force benevolent bosses to fire people. Oh I see. How silly of me. And all the time I thought it was greedy shareholders, corporate raiders, removal of tariff protection from national economies, CEOs and executives in receipt of obscene remuneration packages and grasping Neo-Liberal ideology!
I’d almost be inclined to believe it if I were a deluded simpleton. Fortunately I’m not. We don’t need your insecure, low-paid, sweatshop jobs, which is all that’s ever been on offer from your beloved free market. You do them if you want to. Give me Unionism, stable employment and high pay any time.
(I am talking about the poverty of those who are unemployed because unions have made it impossible to fire employees, thus employers don't want to give a chance to anyone who might possibly be a risk.)
Poor employers, our hearts bleed for them. How dare anything restrict their power, ever? While we’re at it, let’s try a little workplace sexual harassment. “Put out or find another job, bitch! Har! Har! Har!”
Funny thing is they seem to be firing people on mass anyway, at pleasure, for the last twenty years since the eighties, and pardon me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t that when Neo-Liberalism started and Unions started being busted? Where are all these high-paying jobs the evil Unionist were stopping people getting?
Once again, you deal in theoretical gibberish, I in historical reality.
(You are a fool who hasn't given any thought to the issues you contend to be so knowledgeable about. There is no 'middle-ground' between socialism and capitalism just like there is no middle-ground between heads and tails.)
Black and white thinking, militant ignorance, simplification of complex issues = dogmatism, religion, inhumanity.
Ah, I know what it is. It’s economics, the last resort of the medieval scholastic.
If people believe absurdities they will perform atrocities.
Well you’re wrong, of course. There is such a system and it gave the human race the best time it ever had for over thirty years. Incidentally you confirm my hunch that the problem is that you are too bigoted to recognise SD as a separate socio-economic arrangement distinct from laissez-faire and socialism. Bigots can’t see anything other than black and white. This has suddenly become all about your mental shortcomings. This is a lot less interesting than I thought it would be.
Ah well you know the old saying: “Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservatives.”
(Property is either owned by individuals or it is owned by the government. It cannot be a third way.)
Well actually there is. No society has ever given property rights the absolute status you postulate. Not since the Enlightenment anyway. Private property is always to be balanced against social utility and peace. People who use their property to oppress and exploit deserve to lose those aspects or their property rights which permit it.
A good example of this is slavery. And by the way slavers used just those sorts of arguments against the abolitionists as you advance here. Why don’t you show us where you’re coming from and knock together a little argument for slavery based on absolute property rights?
It will help people see the skull grinning beneath your smooth-sounding dogma.
(Social-democracy is just like any other socialism except the dictator who appoints the bureaucrats is elected.)
So you have a fascist, elitist contempt for democracy as I long suspected. You are condemned out of your own mouth. In fact SD is not a form of socialism any more than it is a form of capitalism. It is a compromise between the two that is the most successful socio-economic arrangement ever devised. Its day is not yet over. Just wait and see. It’s the only thing that will get us through PO for instance.
(Given the choice between socialism for the proletarians or socialism for the elite, I will choose rebellion.)
Go ahead. Watching some fat, white boy rebelling might be fun. If you're as bad at rebelling as you are at arguing, they'll round you up pretty quick.
(People thought the world was faced with the same choice in the 1930's, but freedom won in the end. It will again.)
What they actually chose was Social Democracy, just about anywhere they had the power to chose anything, you silly person.
There, I’ve completely demolished your historical arguments, your socio-economic, arguments, your moral arguments (such as they were), you philosophical arguments and exposed repeatedly your corrupt, fallacious reasoning and psychological difficulties.
I’ll leave my little acolytes to finish you off as I’m writing a major piece for a PO website.
I’d like to say it was nice disputing with you but actually it’s been rather boring, as repeatedly elucidating the obvious to a person too woodenheaded to understand, and too bigoted to try to, must inevitably be.
Are there no intelligent, principled conservatives left?
God knows there are plenty of ignorant reactionaries.
by jaws » Sun 18 Sep 2005, 01:29:38 
Cute
*sniffle*
