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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (1056632)	2/23/2018 4:59:18 PM
From: James Seagrove	Respond to of 1575725

"Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously." Chesterton

To: koan who wrote (1056632)	2/23/2018 5:00:09 PM
From: James Seagrove	Respond to of 1575725

"Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all." Chesterton

To: koan who wrote (1056632)	2/23/2018 5:01:31 PM
From: James Seagrove	Respond to of 1575725

“Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other's." Chesterton

To: koan who wrote (1056632)	2/23/2018 5:02:12 PM
From: James Seagrove	Respond to of 1575725

"If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it...The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." Chesterton

To: koan who wrote (1056632)	2/23/2018 5:04:21 PM
From: James Seagrove	1 Recommendation Recommended By Tenchusatsu Respond to of 1575725

"No society can survive the socialist fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them." Chesterton

To: koan who wrote (1056632)	2/24/2018 8:22:53 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575725

Keynes was a charlatan. He sold the idea successfully that you could spend your way to prosperity. I've read Keynes. The other half of what Keynes told people was that you save during good times, but that message was conveniently ignored by all politicians. The people who lost the popularity contest of those days were the Austrian economists. Austrian economics explains the business cycle and impacts of money printing and interest manipulation to a tee. But of course, we all like to ignore those things because being responsible is no fun. It's far more fun to party today and deal with consequences later on, hoping that those consequences can be delayed forever. Your misunderstanding of capitalism is epic, koan. Capitalism is nothing more than you deciding you are going to make a beautiful chair out of wood and sell it. I come by your workshop and decide I really want to have that chair. You set a price, perhaps a bit too high, so we negotiate until we meet at a price you are willing to part with it and a price I'm willing to buy it for. Then we part company, you with my money and me with your chair. You pay a small tax to the government to provide you with strong property rights and a legal system to protect you and your property and to ensure no one defrauds. This is capitalism: free people negotiating the fair price for goods freely made and freely purchased. We are free men making free market decisions with no very little help from the government, aside from protecting our rights. Capitalism is freedom and freedom is capitalism. It is the only moral economic system that exists. Socialism and Communism are not just immoral, they are horrific in the number of people those systems have killed. But let's continue with this story. Now let's contrast Capitalism with Socialism. Same chair scenario above...you are in the chair making business. You made the chair and have put it up for sale. Unfortunately, your liberal friends run the government, a Democratic Socialist regime, and they don't think it is fair that you get to keep all the profits from your chair making business and they despise people like me because I'm one of the "lucky" people who have enough money to buy your wonderful chair. They ignore the fact that I earned my money just like you did, by working hard. So they decide to tax you at 75% of your profits to redistribute your profits to a lot of people who aren't working for a variety of reasons, some legitimate and some just abusing the system. You realize that the remaining 25% profit you made does not cover the cost of living for your family, so you raise your prices to cover all these new taxes. I no longer can afford your chair at the new elevated price, but fear not, the top 1% in this country can. The government just achieved the opposite of what they wanted, because now even fewer people can afford your chairs. Unfortunately for you, your market got a whole lot smaller too because of your high prices, so your sales volume times price = revenues aren't as high as they once were, so you raise prices again to make up the difference. Eventually, your democratic socialist friends decide you are price gouging, so they decide to go further down the path of Socialism and they start setting the prices of your chairs at a price they feel is reasonable, so more people can afford to own them. I mean, we should all be equal in our comforts, right? You decide that you cannot make a reasonable profit for all your efforts at these mandated low prices, because the cost of making the chair exceed the prices the government is setting, so you quit the business and go do something else, which you are less qualified for, which means you are making less money for your family. You are now poorer. I am too, because I am deprived of your high quality chair for a reasonable price we used to be able to negotiate together. Also, now there is a shortage of high quality chairs, so prices go back up for the remaining chair vendors. The New Socialists next decide to take it one step further than price setting to get the other vendors in line. They implement the final plan of Socialism by taking over the chair manufacturing industry, then they set prices very low everywhere and subsidize the losses from costs exceeding revenues by taxing all the other "rich" people who make things. They do this, until those "rich" people are driven out of business like you were or they use their riches to move their businesses and homes to another country. Tax revenues dry up and social services decline into the toilet. Chaos and lawlessness breaks out due to underfunded law enforcement. Dictatorship and increasing militarism takes over. Then we have another Venezuela, where exactly what was described above happened to toilet paper, pampers, and other necessities of life. The people lost 24 pounds on average from starvation last year. The Venezuelan scenario happens so often in history that it can no longer be disputed by anyone who is well read in historical political economics. Only people who are uneducated or the educated who are ignorant of history and economics still try to buy into the idea that Socialism or Communism or the many flavors of either like Democratic Socialism will bring about a utopian ideal and lift people out of poverty. No system ever devised by man has beaten the unblemished track record of capitalism for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and creating incredible wealth. Even China, a self-avowed Socialist Communist country has turned to limited Capitalism to lift their own poor people out of poverty when their Maoist Socialism and Communism drove them to terrible standards of living. Why would we want to turn our back on what made this country the wealthiest on the planet and the wealthiest in history?