Rationality in Spades
These are possibly the 5 best sentences you’ll ever read
1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.
Someone sent me this. I simply can’t find any argument with the ideas.
There IS merit in striving to negate each idea, mind you, but the simple truth is that none of them works in real life… if you need to read about the failures then you won’t get it.
Category: Pointless blather, Politics, Who knows
This could be entitled “Why a rational thinking person can’t be a liberal”…
There’s broad assumptions needed on the part of the reader wrapped in each of these but #4 is transparently wrong. Quite a few people over the centuries have made quite a bit of money through the efficient division of wealth to mitigate risk and reallocate capital to more efficient areas of production. These days they’re often called Hedge Fund Managers.
Five is also a straw man.
NSOM #2: So essentially yer saying each is the truth, but…
Here’s the simplified version. Is there enough wealth in this country to make every (legal) citizen equal financially? I do believe that the concept is in error.
NB: I did not say equal in fact.
I rather strongly disagree that 5 is a straw man argument. It IS a potential argument, but you’ll have to prove it isn’t valid.
As far as #4… YOU are raising a straw man to knock down. There are certainly some who make their bucks through fancy dancing. But even if you take every nickel back and distribute it across the board… where will we be?
#5 is why the Soviet Union collapsed. I’ve been there and talked to the people there.
Strawman … whatever, dude.
Maggie Thatcher had a saying that went something like this “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples money”. It’s just as true today. There was a little enclave here in this country, way back in the day, that tried the communal way of life and they were nearly wiped out due to the fact human nature reared its head and the ones who worked the hardest noticed that they got the same out of the “community pie” whether they worked their butt off or not. Why would someone want to work harder to provide for other peoples lack of effort? The only way to have true communism or socialism is by force, either of arms or law backed up by arms, because no one wants to work to not only provide for his family, but have to take care of others that don’t want to put forth the same effort and those that don’t want to put forth the effort, or have made bad decisions in life, are really for being given some of what someone else worked to get. Wouldn’t you?
NotSoOldMarine…
You cannot go to East Berlin anymore, but that you believe 5 is a farce tells me you are blind. I challenge you to read “Defying Hitler” by Sebastian Haffner and tell me that when the government has taken from those who produce to make sure that those who do not produce are equal that it does not cause collapse…
When a person no longer has to think because the government “provides” for all then it takes away the need to think, to dream and to live. It means that one merely exists. THAT is what communism does to people. Open your eyes.
“Five is also a straw man.” Cogent, fact-filled argument there. I yield, you’ve convinced me with your logic that, #5 is, indeed, a strawman./sarc
And, I think that #4 is actually addressing the involuntary division of wealth amongst those who do nothing to earn it, not the individual who divides his wealth in investments.
Just my “broad assumptions”, FWIW.
Re #3
I’m saying there is an element of truth in each or some scenarios where they are true. Hedge Fund Managers and other people who manage diverse portfolios of capital are not working any kind of magic, they’re not necessarily getting over on people. The investment industry, particularly big players in the bond and value investment markets take capital and efficiently invest it into different markets increasing overall productivity, mitigating risk and creating wealth were it otherwise did not exist before. A $1 invested in two efficient firms generates more wealth that $1 invested in one ineffiecent firm.
re #4
The idea that the Soviet Union collapsed because nobody was working because they thought they were getting jipped is clearly not true. There were a lot of systemic issues with their economic model and political apparatus but a work stoppage was not one of them. The single greatest failing of the Soviet Union’s economic model was the inability of the state to manage production to meet demand. Productivity was lower than in the most places in the West but it didn’t trigger a collapse.
re #7
Right, broad assumptions.
Five is a straw man because it sets up a neatly constructed scenario of doom asserted to be the position (or end result) of anyone who wants to “redistribute” or “reallocate” any amount of wealth. That’s the definition of a straw man argument.
Even the involuntary part isn’t true. The history of anti-trust law, modern game theory and economic problems like the Tragedy of the Commons all demonstrate that. It sounds good and often times it’s true but it’s not ALWAYS true.
Sorry, but I concur with the idea that, if someone gets something for nothing, and the guy producing the something sees that he can get something for nothing,too, then eventually the producer will stop producing, sit back and say, “hey, I want mine too, just like him”.
If I earn my money, and you don’t want to earn yours, you have no right to mine, or claim to it. To say otherwise is to buy into the something for nothing mindset.
re #9
That too is a straw man argument by arguing that all programs to redistribute wealth carry with them the eventual goal of total entitlement. You’re also implying that any reallocation or redistribution of wealth will eventually result in a productive stasis across an entire society. That’s clearly not true, every modern society redistributes wealth. All of them.
If you’ve ever collected a military paycheck you are the recipient of involuntarily redistributed wealth. You get up and you work for it and it’s in the national interest but it’s still the result of the compulsory seizure of other people’s money. Business and the rich pay the lion’s share of taxes and it’s not a democratic system. One man one vote, we don’t live in a plutocratic society. The total hostility to any reappropriation of monies from one party to another is an illogical ideology that doesn’t mesh with the practical needs of our nation. It feels good to rage on “moochers” but don’t get all twisted up in things that, even on the surface, doesn’t make any sense.
* I meant is “IS” a democratic system.
Military pays is not an entitlement/something for nothing proposition. Welfare is. We’re talking welfare is as the problem here.
Also, why couldn’t the Soviets “manage production”? Answer? There was no incentive for the workers to be better than anyone else… If they were better, they still didn’t get rewarded for it, so why bother?
Re #12
No, but it speaks to what UPNorth was talking about, the simple opposition to redistribution. It also speaks to # 3 and my point about broad assumptions.
The Soviet Union’s production was not based on consumer level demand, it was planned by a council of economists employed by the state. There were a lot of problems with the quality of consumer goods caused by the lack of continual incentive for the state run firms to cut costs and increase quality to compete in the market (crystallized by P.J. O’Rourke’s assertion that Communism failed because “nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes”) but there wasn’t a lack of incentive by the individual that caused production or labor market shortages. In the Soviet Union you had to go to work, it wasn’t really an option.
Fundamentally the Soviet Union collapsed because of the political crisis prompted by Glasnost which was prompted by the USSR’s inability to create firms which could meet the needs of its population and that population’s desire for more social and political freedom. It wasn’t welfare or disincentive to work which triggered the Soviet collapse, it was social unrest caused by massive inefficiencies in their central planning models.
Something like military pays is still not redistribution. It is an agreement between Society at large and those who choose to serve. The military gets paid to perform a task Society wishes it to perform: provide for the common defense. With welfare, there is no exchange of something of value. It is strictly taking from the haves to give to the have-nots, requiring nothing in return.
Back to the USSR: all that central planning you talk about, IMO, has EVERYTHING to do with redistribution of wealth. Why didn’t anyone want Bulgarian shoes? Because they were crap. Why were they crap? No incentive from the work to perform the job well. Yes, everyone had to go to work. But nothing was able to make the workers take pride in a job well done in order to excel and be rewarded for excelling.
re #14
Of course it’s redistribution. There’s no contract between people who pay taxes and the government. It’s simply, “you will pay me this much or you will go to jail.” Ask Wesley Snipes. There is a process in which we elect people who then write tax law but in the end that still doesn’t serve proportionally the people who pay in the most and just as often doesn’t work out how we want anyway. Even if you’re doing something for that money that the government deems beneficial (like the Pell Grant) it is still the forced appropriation of people’s money. It’s part of the insidious problem with public sector unions collectively bargaining for pay and benefits: only one party is voluntarily associated with the association.
You’re missing my point on the Soviet Union. There’s an argument being out forward here that the rational individual actor will simply cease to work when they are in a society that provides welfare. While it creates a free rider problem in portions of the labor market the evidence doesn’t support the collapse of society.
The Soviet Union had poor quality consumer goods but that didn’t trigger the collapse. Like the war in Afghanistan, corruption in the Party, overheated defense spending prompted by the Cold War and the increasing desire for autonomy in Central Asian republics, it helped it along but it wasn’t the cause. People had had enough when there simply was NO milk or coats or TVs but there was 5,000 surplus Bulgarian shoes at their local store. These faults were caused by the inefficiency of central planning realized by things like price controls (causing shortages) and projected production quotas. The USSR was the model for the reality that the state cannot respond quickly enough to the needs to market demand to efficiently allocate production outputs.
Yes, everybody was going to work every day but nobody had any incentive to do their job better. We knew that if you do something better, your salary would be the same as the guy working the machine next to you; if you produced more widgets in a shift than was your quota, your pay rate would be recalculated so you would be still getting the same amount of money as a guy working the machine next to you who only fulfils the quota; if you came with some idea to better the whatever process you were working on, you still would be getting the same salary as an office bee next to you. So, we ended up in the situation when everybody pretended that they were working while the government pretended that it was paying us.
I wish we had Bulgarian shoes! Everything from the East Europe was actually better quality and style than the Soviet-made crap.
Actually, there was milk and bread but no coats, shoes, TVs and furniture in the Soviet Union; in fact, the basic food products were readily available through 1992. It was the 1993 when even bread did not get to the stores because the bread factory (yes, a factory, that made millions of loaves) “businessmen” would sell it off the truck at the metro stations.
I really “love” when Americans and Western Europeans give me “true” reasons why the Soviet Union collapsed…
“Olga”,
The consumer products were broad, off the cuff illustrations. And as a former citizen (right?) you know that there were chronic shortages of a variety of basic food stuffs in many parts of the USSR over the course of its lifetime, often despite large agricultural surpluses from the Ukraine. Everything you say may be true, but its true that its one of the reasons why you weren’t happy, not why the Soviet Union fell apart. You also know that they “equal compensation” concept was corrupted early in the lifespan of the USSR. There were “those jobs”, the ones that people who wanted to be powerful or well off pursued, generally within the bureaucracy. The idea that there was no shifting compensation from one profession to another is not true.
We also both seem to agree that the central planning of the Soviet Union as the problem. The shortages you talk about were not caused by individuals actors “dropping out” or becoming so unproductive as to be useless. They were caused because the economy was so grossly mismanaged from the top. I seriously hope you’re not asserting that the USSR fell apart because it’s citizens weren’t sufficiently incentivized to meet minimum productivity. There is no historical evidence or other tangible set of facts to back that position.
NSOM,
I agree that the final clause in the fifth statement is a strawman. The fifth statement is an encapsulation better described as ‘Going Galt.’ Is there potential for the nation to be destroyed? Certainly – half pitted against half.
Is it the beginning of the end of the nation? Only if another country allies itself with half of the people against the other half, and then gobbles up the remainder. The potential is there, but like Michigan – who would willingly accept becoming responsible for the health and welfare of the indolent half?
The more likely solution is another country allying itself with the productive half to eliminate the lazy, and then subjugating the remaining producers.
As far as the USSR goes – no argument with either NSOM or Olga over centralized planning and Bulgarian shoe quality. I will note that the apparatchiks and party elite of 1989, along with their children, are counted among Russia’s many billionaires. I don’t believe this is an accident.