It's a funny feeling, when you understand all by yourself that something is not right, based on your own intuition, rather than on information that was already analysed and exposed by somebody else.
It's obvious that the elite are afraid of conspiracy sites, therefore it was no surprise that popular search engines owned by the elite are busy with hiding independent sources of informations that are being censored by mainstream mass media in first place.
What was not obvious yet for me, is that the elite are not only afraid of straight talking conspirologists, but they are afraid of any kind of intelligent people in general.
I have discovered that the elite are censoring even entertainment sites, and even shutting them down, because creative people are able at thinking too.
First IMDb have shut down their forums, which was explained as a mere logistic choice based on the fact that they were too much expensive to keep on line. Next, Metacritic not only closed their forums too, but also closed the section about books reviews. Also Rotten Tomatoes closed their forums too.
Since I was feeling too much paranoid about seemingly harmless entertainment forums, I have contacted Mark Doyle, the founder of Metacritic, since he is the most likable of the three web site creators, and just asked him straight to the point about why these changes suddenly took place on his site.
Mark Doyle told me that Metacritic is no longer his property, that it was acquired by somebody else. Also he added that shutting down the forums had no big impact on the financial part of running an already huge web site. Also he added that he has no idea why the new owners quit publishing reviews about books, since there is always obvious demand in book reviews.
The only rational explanation is that all the three most popular sites were acquired by the elite, who decided to eliminate platforms of discussions for the thinking people. Anyway, the most obviously absurd clue is that Metacritic has no more book reviews, which is completely irrational and goes against the site's purpose. People who read are the most dangerous.
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emperorbma ago
Company acquisition is the path from capitalism to corporatism. It's an important distinction to make, too.
Capitalism is the economy of the workers trading the fruits of their labors to acquire for their needs. The "farmers' market" or the "mom and pop" selling stuff to their community.
Corporatism is the ramrod of an ever growing "big business" maximizing their profit at the expense of everyone else so that shareholders can get a bigger cut.
This is the logical difference that socialists don't understand. Socialists conflate the latter with the former. But that's as dumb as suggesting that all lung tissue is cancer because you can get lung cancer.
Ultimately, the difference between corporatism and socialism is little to none. Both are giving more power to middle managers with no regard for anyone but themselves. The socialist (fake) "workers' revolution" gives power to a political Politburo. The capitalist amalgamation becomes cancerous when it turns into corporate crap.
Small businesses are real capitalism. Small businesses are the real "worker's revolution" because it takes power out of the hands of the managers and puts it into the hands of the people. We need real capitalism, not socialism or corporatism. People working for themselves and their community, not for an anonymous "investor" somewhere that serves "powers unknown."
Mylon ago
Large corporations are more efficient than mom and pop shops. That's how they manage to muscle out the mom and pop shops. We should be able to wield this increased efficiency for the greater good. Rather than allowing these corporations to amass enough wealth to steer the government (corporatism), we should use the government to steer these massive corporations, aka Socialism.
emperorbma ago
Large corporations may indeed be more efficient in some respects, but they're less humane and socialism doesn't really address the core problem.
When you introduce regulation, you introduce an incentive for special interests to manipulate the government. This is an inherent problem with even the most well-intentioned forms of socialism. The managers of socialism always have to deal with the Economic calculation problem of "who produces what" and "how much" which lead to unintended consequences. And crafty businesses find ways to manipulate this in their favor. Regulation leads to regulatory capture where agencies meant to rein in the corporation soon become its watchdog, guardian and eventually slave as more bribery and corruption takes control.
Furthermore, socialism itself is not immune to the single corrupting force in all of this: human nature. Humans will choose convenience over stability no matter what system you choose. With socialism, however, you have people punishing you for making different decisions. With capitalism, you have the freedom to do something else as long as you can find somewhere to try. Where capitalism's incentives fail in collectivization, they excel in individualization. The question really becomes: would you much rather be free to do something else or be locked into the whims of a manager who is just as human as you are and doesn't necessarily have your interests at heart?
Mylon ago
The real answer is a mixed economy. Socialism isn't "your job is assigned to you at birth", but could be something like a Universal Basic Income, where some income is redistributed and then spent in the free market system. This way the efficiencies gained by large corporations can be taxed (but not completely so, so there's still incentive to shift towards efficiency) and spread around so that there's still sufficient exchange to keep the economy going. Contrast this with supply side economics, which has the same goal but expecting an overabundant supply of goods to stimulate the economy because people will just buy them. And it clearly hasn't worked for the 40 years we've tried it.
That's why it's time for a Universal Basic Income.
emperorbma ago
I completely disagree with the mixed economics you're proposing on the basis of Economics. This is like the first thing they teach in Economics 101: Supply and demand curves. If you artificially increase the supply for money by force of government action, the corresponding demand for money will go up everywhere. UBI is structurally the same concept as a minimum wage or printing more currency: A principle called inflation. It is what happened in Germany in the 1930s. In those days, people burned Deutschemarks to heat their homes because they were so worthless. This is why even with "minimum wages," there are still poor people.
The thing about it is when the poorest person gets a guaranteed amount of currency, the value of each piece of currency goes down by a corresponding amount. The differential between rich and poor is ideally a metric of ability to acquire currency but in practice it also involves the ability to shakedown people to giving up their shekels. We want the former to be a disparity. We do not want the latter, and that's the point where nobody disputes a legal action of the government and even the most hardcore anarcho-capitalist agrees that some kind of Public defense agency is needed; although I think that the idea of using paid Mercenaries to do this is silly too because that's just going to create warlord factions that have blood feuds.
Yes, there's a balance to be maintained. The balance is specifically defending the individual's rights to life, liberty and the goods needed to survive and grow. The first two nobody objects to. It's the third principle that we're squabbling over. The real world is about distribution of scarce resources using a medium of trade. Giving people more currency just makes the resources cost more.
But you don't need to take my word for it. People are doing experiments with UBI in various places. We'll see exactly what happens. Who knows, maybe someone defies the first law of economics? But I'm not gonna bet on it.
Mylon ago
You mean like how the government has been doing it for the past 40+ years under the guise of Reganomics? We've been injecting cash into the economy for decades and it's not having the desired effect. Maybe if we inject it into the hands of consumers instead of bankers we might see a real impact. But that's only assuming UBI is entirely funded by printed money. Increasing progressive taxes could make it revenue neutral.
But most of your concerned are old stuff addressed in this handy faq. These questions have been asked thousands of times before.
emperorbma ago
Why'd you stop with Reagan? The government has been doing it for much longer than that. Ever heard of the New Deal? It's the exact same thing. Reagan didn't invent the problem. Reagan's policies are merely a symptom.
So let me get this straight. Instead of the government just throwing money at businesses to hire people, the government will now just throw money at people. And somehow this is magically going to get a different result? Somehow the laws of Supply and Demand will no longer apply when ordinary people get the money instead of corporations of people.
I think you'll have to forgive my incredulity. I'm not convinced the problem is with the currency. Well, in a sense it is but that's a symptom of the real problem. The other symptom is the fact that so many people that think government handouts are a panacaea for the problem.
As I've stated, the real problem is actually inherent in human nature. Humans excel at subsistence, not abundance. In states of abundance, we tend to overaccumulate in anticipation of a subsistence scenario. Those who have faith that ANY government giving handouts will fix this problem are making the same mistakes under a whole slew of different names.
Yes, you can give everyone a stipend. But once everyone gets a stipend, people will all expect the stipend and the economy will adjust. The value of all the goods will increase proportionally to the taxes being paid to redistribute the income. Someone has to pay for all this and it's very clear you are making the businesses (and/or their owners) pay for it. These progressive taxes will merely disincentivize the supply side which will correspondingly drive up the price.
You cannot balance a system that is fundamentally destablilized by the natural actions of the fundamental primary agent the system. The same desire to gain profit that causes people to invest is precisely what you're undermining with such measures. For the diligent, they see that everyone gets a cut of their work and stop working. For the lazy, they see a free meal ticket while it lasts. And at the end of this all will be a net increase in costs for everyone. You're relying on the fox to guard the hen house and we all know it wants some dinner.
As I said before, there's only 2 real answers: Rewrite human nature or design the system to compensate for these issues as best as you can until corruption overtakes it and we need to inevitably restart the system as it collapses due to the sum of the errors. The former is intrinsically inhumane and undesirable. The latter is the inevitable end that we always seem to recapitulate throughout history after flirting with the former.
Mylon ago
Wrong. The New Deal laid the foundation for the golden era of the 50s and 60s. Infrastructure projects were one way to stimulate demand (aka what I'm arguing for, demand side stimulus). The government said, "We now going to spend a bunch of cash, and we have to hire people to do it." This made the market for workers more competitive and raised wages. Businesses bitched because they didn't have the cheap labor they were used to so of course they badmouthed it.
Another key factor of the New Deal is that it laid the groundwork for freeing people from wage slavery. The 40 hour workweek and Social Security played a large part of rationing jobs, and thus forcing businesses to compete for workers. Once the immigration and nationality act of 1965 passed, businesses once again had access to cheap labor and we see the resulting stagnation in wages since.
Now kicking them out won't have the desired effect because automation is here. Just as we had the combine harvester to replace a lot of farm jobs. We need more measures for rationing jobs and stimulating demand, mirroring the New Deal.
The welfare state as it exists is a large part of the problem. Welfare cliffs trap people in poverty. For a better example of what it should look like, consider Negative Income Tax, which was supported by the free market proponent Milton Friedman. Instead governments saw a chance to use it as a tool of control and they did.
A moral judgement. You may as well proclaim that humans only thrive when working up a sweat on a farm and demand that those city dwellers have to grow their own food. Government intervention was necessary to transition from an agriculture economy and because the government is not acting now, we're regressing to a servant economy.
Not true. If the UBI is funded by taxes, inflation won't happen and instead more jobs will be created to service the increased demand. Which is kinda the whole point of this: Stimulating the economy via demand. This is addressed in depth in the FAQ.
How many Einsteins are too busy flipping burgers to research the secrets of the universe? Not everyone has the means to invest, and the means seem largely based on lineage. For all of your moral judgments, economic mobility in the US is decreasing and more hands-off capitalism is only going to give us more of the same.
It's fine to look at history and say collapse is inevitable, but for millennia the solution to an ailing economy has been demand side stimulus coupled with the culling of workers, aka war. The last 100 years have been especially troublesome as war has changed to be LESS deadly (1-5% attrition rate per year for modern warfare versus 15%-80% attrition rate per BATTLE in ancient warfare) and much more destructive to capital. But it still fulfills the role of stimulating demand, thus the US's military industrial complex. The New Deal was revolutionary because it was a means of stimulating demand without a massive war.
For a great example of how the predictions of stimulus side economy works: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-24/what-minimum-wage-foes-got-wrong-about-seattle
emperorbma ago
According to the UCLA, the New Deal’s policies extended the Great Depression.
Robin Hood robbed the rich and gave money to the poor. You probably think that this is moral but you don’t consider the broken window fallacy that you are defending. You break the baker’s windows and loot his drawers because he has some money and then he can’t get shoes for his children. Socialism is envy masquerading as compassion.
The fair way isn’t compelling spending of compulsory appropriations but decreasing unnecessary appropriation and encouraging voluntary charity. People are much more generous when you don’t threaten them with jail for not paying exorbitant taxes.
I don’t buy this. You are making an argument extraordinary claim and expecting that people agree with you just because your vision superficially resembles charity. Charity doesn’t take others money by taxation to fund it. It is extortion with a lipstick gloss disguising it by piggy backing on a legitimate social contract that is established between the citizens and the state to defend and promote the basic principle of life, liberty and fair exchanges.
As Frederic Bastiat rightly implies, the government should not be coercing charity.
You do realize that the social engineers have selected the least likely Einsteins as beneficiaries of the social programs, right? Let’s give welfare to those on the low end of the intelligence Bell Curve. That will fix everything. Right? You social democrats have been throwing money at things that break the system worse and worse for a century at least.
Dude, I am not a fan of that. Instead of sending our military to meddle in other countries it should be used to fill the single legitimate objective of defense of our borders according to the social contract and its stipulation of protection of the lives and freedom of its citizens.
If I don’t buy it when you say it what makes you think I will buy it from a known left wing propaganda site?
Mylon ago
... economists that have a vested interest in pushing neoliberalism. Yes, modern economists LOVE to shit on the New Deal. They also love to shit on Unions and border security. These people have an agenda and they are not operating in your best interest.
The Broken Window fallacy is an oversimplification. If the cobbler doesn't buy a window from the windowmaker, then the window maker can't buy bread from the baker, and then the baker can't buy shoes from the cobbler. Why might this all happen and lead to deadlock? Because during their previous round of transactions, too much money got siphoned off by the rich. Currency is extremely powerful at facilitating trade. Without it, a three way trade like above is difficult to arrange.
Yes, the window maker breaking windows is the wrong way to drum up business, but when times are harsh, because money has been sucked out of the system by the oligarchs, people will look for rent-seeking behavior to create more business.
News alert: All government is extortion. But the sad news is without government, some thugs will come along and offer to "protect" your business for a fee. Government is the least worst option.
That's the whole fucking point of UBI. Replace our backwards welfare system that 'rewards' being poor and give the money to everyone. If you work hard and put in the effort, but make less than the median wage, with a UBI you benefit. If you fall on hard times, it's harder to end up in debt slavery. UBI is more about welfare reform than it is about more welfare.
A fine idea, but that would suffocate the economy. Our economy is built around the demand that the Military Industrial Complex generates and without that demand our country would shrivel up in the same way that countries adopting austerity have. Is what I'm saying is that it is possible to supplant this demand with a UBI such that we reap the economic benefits of stimulated demand without having to stir shit up and make a bunch of enemies across the world.
Fucking data man. You might not like Bloomberg, but the doom and gloom expected of higher minimum wage and what actually happened are night and day. It's hard to dress that up. I don't know what sources you want to cover it, but lying by omission is one of the ways MSM controls you and thus they likely won't.
emperorbma ago
As a minarchist I found this study plausible but I guess you can suggest it’s s a conspiracy if you like. I have my own share of conspiracy theories that I subscribe to, myself. I won’t begrudge you yours even if I disagree.
Ok, I can tell you have at least looked at this pattern before so I will need to adjust my argument. Yes, side effects can alter the scene somewhat. But my target of opposition is the mechanism that the plutocrats are using. The problem with using a tax is that it is a system controlled by the plutocracy and is never going to impact the intended target of the measure: those oligarchs.
I see what you are trying to say but I cannot forget about the Pareto principle. Those who will be in debt in one system will likely be in debt regardless of the measure. The only thing that I believe this does is mask the problem further. What we actually needed to do is abolish fiat currency and the artificial creation of money, basing the currency on something of real value which is not subject to the issue of human opinion. Until we can do that, the plutocracy will continue to ratchet to the inevitable collapse at an ever increasing rate. Actually, those preppers have the right idea: making their own food and living off the grid.
The petrodollar is the biggest impediment to this, actually. We are reliant on our control of foreign commodities and we did a boneheaded thing exporting our local production to other countries due to lower wages in other countries. Perverse incentives suck. The goal now is inverting them into proper incentives. It’s part of why a minarchist ex-libertarian like me can tolerate Trump. He’s actually succeeding at flipping some of these incentives. Not a libertarian but I had to drop that pipe dream after HRC bought Gary Johnson’s campaign and the party started harping on the open border crap.
There’s no disputing that lying by omission is a manipulation tactic and I despise the MSM for it. But the issue is one of a systematic disagreement about what the proposed answer implies. I don’t buy the idea in general. I guess we can do the experiments that are underway and we’ll see who is right. Maybe I am proven wrong. But I cannot foresee that being the case at this point.
Mylon ago
Not necessarily. In the past, people had access to land and could live by the sweat of their brow (aka subsistence farming). In this day and age, that kind of farming is inefficient and would destroy the environment (see Dust Bowl, which was man made). Plus it's totally unnecessary. UBI can also be seen as compensation for that loss of autonomy. A means to attempt to restore it. You can engage in basic subsistence, or you can get a job and aim for something more. But without that floor, many will be at the whims of those that do own capital and that is slavery. Wage slavery or debt slavery or chattel slavery.
Gold (or some other commodity) backed currency simply isn't going to happen. Gold is difficult to trade with and banks learned back in the middle ages that people would rather deal with checks than actual coins and they would never withdraw their coins so they started writing more checks than they actually had. Modern financialization takes this a step further using derivatives and other means to invent more wealth and this all can happen regardless if you're using a commodity backed dollar or not.
And even if it did solve the problems of our exploitative financial industry, gold historically has been used as a labor sink. Specifically, if you have an abundance of labor you send them into the mines to dig for gold and this produces "wealth", but essentially it becomes a dystopian makework job. Solving this problem by regulating the financial industry is a much simpler approach.
That's just classic neoliberalism. "Comparative advantage" is their go to catch phrase to justify sidestepping local labor regulations by exploiting foreigners instead. The "free market" rewards slavery. Regulations exist to add some kind of honor to economic transactions, but they don't mean anything if there are means to bypass them.
emperorbma ago
It’s hard to crawl away from zeros. I get the idea. It just seems to be a bit too easy to me. Maybe I am just a cynical person but it doesn’t seem to be a good way of defeating the perverse incentives of greed. It’s actually addiction to wealth that builds the incentives here. The wealth addicts deflect the lower classes to fight amongst themselves by manipulating the envy the lower class feels for them by convincing them the others are really the guilty party.
I honestly don’t see how the UBI would actually get rid of this cycle. It seems to be a perennial issue with human nature.
As I said, I would be pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong here. But I have 3500 years of cynical history in my mind saying “this looks too good to be true.”
The free market excels, as I’ve said elsewhere, in the individual incentives. Capitalism fails in a large corporate aggregate but it really excels in the small mom and pop structure. The perverse incentives to maximize profits lead to the excesses that are gumming up the system. This bootstraps the aforementioned greed cycle. Also the Cabal, but that’s another can of worms for a different discussion...