Political one liners

dscott8 wrote:

WeirdlyWired wrote:Remind me next time to use emojis So I don't get these rants back.

My least favorite Supreme court Justice of all times: Antoin Scalia.

Rant? Not so much. Two sentences of my response with a supporting quote. But if you like, I can rant at length about many subjects.

Was mostly referring to: Defending Marriage Against an Activist Judiciary.

Loving v Virginia, Griswold v Connecticut, Lawrence v Texas, et cie. Totally in agreement with you. More Cognitive dissonance from the GOP keep government out of our lives by sticking it into our bedrooms.

WeirdlyWired wrote:Publius, somewhere around Federalist Papers #10 [IIRC] Ultimately there are two classes of citizens: the haves and the have nots. It shall forever be the purpose of government to protect the property of the former from predation by the latter.

Which is pretty much the purpose of conservatism.

The purpose of a government is to protect the rights of its citizens. That includes property rights. Everybody’s property rights.

The basis of property rights is the notion that the wages you are paid for your labor, and the things you buy with them, are yours by right and can not be arbitrarily taken away from you. Unjustly taking the money you have earned, or the things you have bought with it, is equivalent to taking your labor, to forcing you to work without pay. We used to call that slavery.

There is no right that allows you to take things from other people, no matter how rich they are or how much you envy them. If you allow the ‘have-nots’ to take from the ‘haves’, what is to stop the ‘have-even-less’s’ taking from them in turn? No matter how little you have, somebody somewhere has even less. If you start down that road it’s a very short trip to the bottom.

That is why I am so violently opposed to robbery, theft and fraud. What they take from you is not ‘only money’, it is the part of your life you spent working to earn that money. It’s a kind of partial murder.

The issue is not 'the rich', it's how some of them got that way. Unjustly enriching themselves at the expense of others, conspiring with those in power, selling government favors...
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I could be arguing in my spare time.

Imaginos1892 wrote:

WeirdlyWired wrote:Publius, somewhere around Federalist Papers #10 [IIRC] Ultimately there are two classes of citizens: the haves and the have nots. It shall forever be the purpose of government to protect the property of the former from predation by the latter.

Which is pretty much the purpose of conservatism.

The purpose of a government is to protect the rights of its citizens. That includes property rights. Everybody’s property rights.

The basis of property rights is the notion that the wages you are paid for your labor, and the things you buy with them, are yours by right and can not be arbitrarily taken away from you. Unjustly taking the money you have earned, or the things you have bought with it, is equivalent to taking your labor, to forcing you to work without pay. We used to call that slavery.

There is no right that allows you to take things from other people, no matter how rich they are or how much you envy them. If you allow the ‘have-nots’ to take from the ‘haves’, what is to stop the ‘have-even-less’s’ taking from them in turn? No matter how little you have, somebody somewhere has even less. If you start down that road it’s a very short trip to the bottom.

That is why I am so violently opposed to robbery, theft and fraud. What they take from you is not ‘only money’, it is the part of your life you spent working to earn that money. It’s a kind of partial murder.

The issue is not 'the rich', it's how some of them got that way. Unjustly enriching themselves at the expense of others, conspiring with those in power, selling government favors...
----------------------
I could be arguing in my spare time.

Which is why I oppose the concept of "The Market" setting the value of people, education, etc The market has no morality, no sense of right and wrong, only of profit and loss. The ultimate dystopia.

WeirdlyWired wrote:Which is why I oppose the concept of "The Market" setting the value of people, education, etc The market has no morality, no sense of right and wrong, only of profit and loss. The ultimate dystopia.

'The Market' is composed of people. I would rather see prices set by people with some stake in the process, some interest in seeing the market remain functional, than by other people interested in pushing a political agenda at any cost.
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At my house, the 'things that go bump in the night' are cats.

Imaginos1892 wrote:

WeirdlyWired wrote:Which is why I oppose the concept of "The Market" setting the value of people, education, etc The market has no morality, no sense of right and wrong, only of profit and loss. The ultimate dystopia.

'The Market' is composed of people. I would rather see prices set by people with some stake in the process, some interest in seeing the market remain functional, than by other people interested in pushing a political agenda at any cost.
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At my house, the 'things that go bump in the night' are cats.

Not according to Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, et al. "The mrketplace" is this great abstraction of laissez-faire capitalism composed of either gnomes or angels that self-corrected, punished cheats and manipulators, was entirely rational, thus not subject to lemming like runs on stockand commodity prices. Friedman even wrote a bok or more about this god-like economic entity.

Interesting post Imaginos1892. I have pondered the same topic. A simplistic example would be - a person works hard to get paid $50k a year, after paying the basic essentials he ends up with $10k of disposable money. If someone steals $10k from him that is a little murder equal to one year in eighty. If he has a house that he has over time built up a $200k equity in, and a fraudster caused him to lose it due to being conned into remortgaging in order to invest in a dodgy scheme, then the fraudster has actually quarter killed him.
A different comparison is that a mad gunman kills ten people, meanwhile a fraudster causes a thousand people to lose their life savings, and twenty subsequently commit suicide. Should both get a similar sentence?

"Salman Rushdie is angling for a Trumpwa!"

Sent from my SM-G920I using Tapatalk

WeirdlyWired wrote:Which is why I oppose the concept of "The Market" setting the value of people, education, etc The market has no morality, no sense of right and wrong, only of profit and loss. The ultimate dystopia.

'The Market' sets price, not value. Big difference.
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Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

Imaginos1892 wrote:

WeirdlyWired wrote:Which is why I oppose the concept of "The Market" setting the value of people, education, etc The market has no morality, no sense of right and wrong, only of profit and loss. The ultimate dystopia.

'The Market' sets price, not value. Big difference.
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Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

This is correct. A bureaucrat in the government who sets a price in a centrally controlled economy can set it too high (surplus), too low (shortage), or just right. Changes can obsolete the last. Has anyone been able to get a bureaucrat to act fast to correct his error?

A businessman with a shortage can reduce demand by a price increase, or with a surplus hold a sale, and do it quickly.

Imaginos1892 wrote:

WeirdlyWired wrote:Which is why I oppose the concept of "The Market" setting the value of people, education, etc The market has no morality, no sense of right and wrong, only of profit and loss. The ultimate dystopia.

'The Market' is composed of people. I would rather see prices set by people with some stake in the process, some interest in seeing the market remain functional, than by other people interested in pushing a political agenda at any cost.
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At my house, the 'things that go bump in the night' are cats.

This assumes that the people at the top of the market care about it remaining functional as opposed to just getting as much money as they can as quick as they can without caring about the long term consequences. Some/most of them probably are interested in the long term health of the system, but the counterexamples are highly visible and cause people to lose faith in the entire system.