-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 11/21/2016 05:17 PM, jim bell wrote:
*From:* Steve Kinney <admin@pilobilus.net> On 11/21/2016 01:11 PM, jim bell wrote:
In the United States, 500 billionaires presently own about 1/2 of the capital assets;
Did they obtain them legally or illegally? If illegally, enforce the law. If legally, change the laws if necessary.
Under the jurisdiction of State institutions created for the benefit of the very rich, anything they agree among themselves to permit is "perfectly legal."
Okay, then. legal. But it sounds like you simply resent the fact that people can become wealthy.
It sounds like you believe critics of today's economic power structure are opposed to anyone getting rich. This belief is systematically indoctrinated in Libertarian propaganda, borrowed from anti-Communist propaganda from days gone by. The meme in question is keyed to create maximum animosity because after all, every Libertarian who's worth a shit aspires to become "wealthy." By some piss-ant peasant standard of wealth, of course. If you want to turn a few million a year providing a product or service to appreciative customers I'm all for it, make a sales call. But don't confuse that with Big People money. At risk of being repetitious: http://www.lcurve.org/ Note the quantum discontinuity of the top half-percent or so, relative to the human species as a whole.
That includes running a rigged house game supported by massive deception and economic coercion, and assuring that theirs are the only games in town.
I don't like government either. I want to have it eliminated. But somehow, most of the people who resent government don't act as if they want to see it eliminated. They LIKE big government. It's just, they want that big government to work for THEM, and people who think as they do.
Sorry, I wasn't talking about Government, I was talking about the private sector, a.k.a. economic ruling class. Deception and economic coercion are their primary tools. Courts and cops are necessary to the survival of their enterprises, but may occasionally restrain some of them from "irresponsible" abuses of power. That's why total deregulation of everything and reduction of rule of law to civil cases is a prime Libertarian platform plank: The government serves our rulers well, but under present conditions it would serve them better if it was less protective of the health of the workforce and more engaged in putting down civil uprisings caused by those abuses of power. The traditional Far Right shares the Libertarian deregulation agenda, and is making slow but steady progress implementing it. Libertarian contributions to propaganda on this topic are more than welcome; that's one of the reasons the Party exists. Progress has been slow because a large faction within our ruling class believes maintaining a stable, productive workforce, keeping up morale in the managerial class, and preventing major civil uprisings is better for business than a "reign of terror" approach. Nonetheless, the power players who like "stable" markets are aging out, a new generation that thrives on chaos is rising, and the parable of the boiling frog describes the present situation of "regular folks" who just want to be left alone to tend their vinyards: Jump out or die. There's a significant trend among our Millinials toward jumping out, and if they are not provided with a safety net by established economic institutions they will do just that. No such safety nets are visible now, nor any signs that they are under construction. When steam engine time comes, people railroad. We are getting there fast right now, with regard to wholesale rejection of ruling class authority among the "best and brightest" of our young adults. So you old farts out there in radical-land better get busy, nobody was born knowing how to Smash The State™ with love in their hearts, a tear in their eyes, martyrs to mourn and a new world to build.
to retain control of those assets they need a legal system that defines their rights of ownership and enforces them,
I thought that personal property is to be considered a "right", rather than a "privilege". I guess you have a different opinion.
Libertarian ideology relies heavily on false context.
Chuckle. Vague.
Nope. Express and explicit. Libertarian propagandists sell their propositions with abstract arguments grounded in false assumptions supported by cognitive biases. This is consistent across their messaging, and in the ideology of the True Believers. It indicates that the Party is dominated by propagandists with hidden or dual agendas, not by idealists struggling to solve real problems in the real world the old fashioned way, by working on them. I won't bother to cut and paste my text that followed the sentence quoted above, it was an explicit deconstruction of propaganda presenting forced conclusions based on creating a manipulated context for evaluating statistical data.
When people hear "personal property" the think "physical objects under my control, and the fruits of my personal labors."
That's part of it.
This context is not comparable to possession and trading of legal instruments defining ownership over geographically dispersed industries, vast tracts of land, anticipated profits from as yet unexploited resources, etc., in locations occupied and facilities operated by what the commies call "wage slaves."
Sorry, I disagree that it "is not comparable". It's called personal property, what distinguishes freedom from slavery, for instance.
Abstract absolutes: Libertarians excel at using them to sell their agendas, because that's the language that attracted and recruited them in the first place: Simple, easy to understand, easy to remember and repeat, the very STUFF of propaganda. By contrast, real world cases tends to make the propositions "proven" by ideological arguments fall apart on inspection. Did the indigenous people of the U.S. eastern seaboard own the land they lived, worked and died on, or did the holders of Crown charters? Can a hunting party from the mainland "sell" Manhattan Island for $24.00 worth of glass beads and junk jewelry - a fortune in trade goods - to some stupid whitemen? Conflating the common sense meaning of property with the enforcement of legal abstractions regarding corporate assets, is like asking someone who knows nothing about electricity except Ohm's Law to analyze the power dynamics of a three phase electric motor: They just have to take your word for how it works .
In the U.S., most people's personal property is actually a collection of legal instruments specifying the rent they pay on a finance company's car, a mortage company's house, etc.
Actually, I'd call that "other people's property". If you want to buy an item, but you don't have the full price, there are arrangements which can be made.
Consumer credit is paying more than it costs to buy things you don't need because you can't afford them. (I made that up years ago and never tire of repeating it.) But as a fact of life, once an unwary person gets on that treadmill, it becomes a trap - especially if they have children to raise. They end up working at jobs they hate for wages just sufficient to keep them "up even" with their "payments," and the penalty for withdrawal from that closed loop is often prohibitiv e.
Low wages
How do you define, "low wages"? Low, compared to what?
Compared to the economic value delivered to their employers, and to the cost of living. Splitting the difference on the first item usually covers the deficiencies on the second; that's what trade unions were for - and they were instrumental in creating economic boom times. Happy, healthy workers add value like nobody else. Desperate workers turn sullen and under-produce as best they are able, even when that is to their own long term disadvantage.
plus expensive Real Estate creates forced dependency on land lords for the majority of Americans.
If you want to buy property, paying for it over time, you can do so. Why resent this?
People with landlords don't buy property and pay for it over time, they buy the right to sleep indoors one month at a time. It's called rent. I don't "resent" anything. Being told that I do is an instance of Name Calling, which anyone can look up in any list of classic propaganda techniques. In front of an audience of True Believers or easily influenced rubes, it always works. That's why it a go-to option; even in front of an audience that's up for grabs, it often works: Change the subject and denigrate the other party. Everyone's attention is pulled off the change of subject by the Name Calling.
Ah so: Taxation is payment for services rendered when that supports a Libertarian argument, otherwise not. :D
I'm not sure what you mean by "supports a Libertarian argument". I'm objecting to others (such as Obama) who tried to use the existence of roads (which are generally not financed by a single entity, as being justification for taxation. There is a valid system in place to allocate the costs of road-building and maintenance between users of those roads. It's not perfect, but at least it should prevent the argument that roads are solely constructed by public funds.
Wait, what? A valid system? I was under the impression that "taxation is theft," but maybe I am over-generalizing. :o) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJYM5UaAAoJEECU6c5XzmuqdJYH/1ErhE7irTlNOmOouljDpDCZ 8cd/E93lAaxzbZCFs5rE9Kzkgft7BbgF9fT1of/uT0s4JnzyQCSo3aurb+TDdM5N VsPBAMOyF24mkj0LY8UQqRMh3k0RlxPnIZatfIJ9H3Y96/KMXuruYuvlDzxMIjc2 RCGIaYs3eBGKcYSdDXqzSNXmOJ0ChxJPYjC/f5DOaeBZ7AlPlQJCyJCs8/9qlShN WBrYzx8GAMflc1l1fONY7/SaPa4dTSC/q+9wXE+H5vNqvyPYTS0WmhKP5tLEF/3N e/erl93U0mBRJA8MVYatjJAdiFzyiC6eeyozvBqLF27BiilJLAnSDAs5Bsz9fBY= =awpB -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----