Subject:
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Re: stuff (was: Art Debate Was: [Re: Swearing?])
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sat, 22 Jan 2000 00:17:41 GMT
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Viewed:
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2810 times
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On Fri, 21 Jan 2000 14:14:24 GMT, Christopher Weeks
<clweeks@eclipse.net> wrote:
> Jasper Janssen wrote:
> Right, but you've set yourselves up for that. By having all those
> friendly social programs, you paint a great big target on your chest.
Yes, I know. I really do. But it's not just the dole. It's also
generally the better economic climate.
> If no one fed your refugees the problem would clear up in a couple of
> ways. They'd stop comming. And, they'd die off or work.
If the government stopped feeding them, they would be fed by
charities. Maybe. At least, that's what the libertarians keep telling
me.
>
> > On a micro-scale, you can see the same thing happening in the majority
> > of third-world countries. Only there it's the trek from the
> > countryside to the cities. The result? Vast slums, health problems, as
> > well as depopulation problems on the surrounding country. Not pretty.
>
> Why do they do it? If it weren't better for them, do you suppose they
> would continue to do it?
They _think_ it would be better when they move. This does not
necessarily bear any relation to how it really is. They go to the city
because they've heard of all these people driving (gasphorror) actual
_cars_.. and they end up cutting their kids' legs off to get a better
income from begging.
> Even if we hadn't butchered and concentrated the natives, you could
> still call the land essentially empty. I think the US could still do
> it. And should.
No, actually, you couldn't. You couldn't call it empty, because it was
occupied. They had large territories, and used it inefficiently, but
they did use it. You could possibly have bought it from them cheap,
though.
>
> > I don't know how the subsidies are handled near you, but the Eu does
> > it like this: they guarantee farmers a 'subsistance price' for their
> > produce (IOW, if you can't sell it for more than this, you can sell it
>
> All kinds of produce? What if the market decides that gourds are
> unpopular food (duh!) and a farmer could (ie the population wants more)
> make more on muskmellon, but farmer X feels like planting gourds anyway.
> Is the farmer subsidized for useless gourd production?
Hell, no. There's categories of stuff, mostly basic subsistence stuff.
Anything out of the ordinary is generally your call. Milk (leading to
the milksea and the butter & cheese mountains -- so called because,
well, if you'd put all of it together it'd do fair impressions of
those), wheat, potatoes, that sort of thing. And wine, curiously
enough. France is a nuclear power, which of course has nothing to do
with the last.
Now why don't they do the same for whiskey (Don't mind me. Bowmore,
Islay Single Malt. Mmmmm.)
> Yum! I'd like to be a European soldier when the gourd soup MREs come
> down the pike.
Not like MRE's (three lies for the price of one!) are ever edible
anyway.
> It still seems wasteful. Is the philosophy behind it 'we need to pay
> this to keep an agricultural infrastructure in case of war' or is it 'we
> need to pay this to keep those poor gourd farmers living high on the
> hog?' Out of curiosity, what do you think should be done with it afterward?
Dunno. But whatever it is, do it quickly because keeping it until it
rots in giant cooled warehouses is _very_ wasteful.
And I suspect a large part of the (admitted, anyway) philosophy behind
it is actually the latter -- though the former may be the real reason
everyone agrees with it.
> > How about regulatory tariffs, like tabacco, alcohol, and gas, to name
> > the three most wellknown ones?
>
> Well, what do you mean? I _think_ I think so in those cases too. In
> the case of gasoline, there are issues of how to pay for environmental
> damages and are taxes of some kind the best way. I'm not sure. Of the
> systems I've heard, a surcharge per gallon (or litre) is best because
> it's a user fee. A tax on owning a car is evil. Regarding tobacco and
A car produces pollution whether it runs or not.
> Minimum by whose standard? There were latinos in Chicago where I worked
> who were willing to live with sixteen people in a two bedroom apartment.
> That is well below the standard that we normally think of as minimal,
> but well above being homeless. And with a little care, they could
ITYM "barely above".
> probably keep that healthy. If that's what minimum wage did, I wouldn't
> be starkly offended by it, I would only be morally outraged ;-) I think
> it's a wrong thing to regulate, but I think most of the damage comes
> from people getting more than they're worth.
So what damage does it do? There are two or three effects: people lose
jobs and get replaced by more efficient machines. Good Thing. People
who may be "worth" a little less than minimum wage are paid minimum
wage, and as a consequence of the race to the bottom thing you get
with any and all standards, you'll also get a few people who are paid
a bit less than they might otherwise have been (markets are _never_
frictionfree..). That combination: also a good thing.
> > Cause, well, I'd rather see somebody starve fast than slow, if they
> > have to starve. Less chance of them taking up criminal lifestyle.
>
> I guess I think that's pretty poor reason to impose government regulations.
Oh?
> OK, good. Now we're on the same sheet of music. Democracy (such as
> we've enacted it) is a fairly liberal notion of how things should be run
> anyway. And it's inherently flawed. We can do better.
No, we can't.
And I don't think _anybody_ has ever suggested getting rid of
democracy. The only thing that would be remotely in line with
anybody's stated purpose _and_ getting rid of democracy would be
meritocracy. Presumably based on either income or wealth or both.
And the flaws in that are just too numerous and obvious to even start
on.
Jasper
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: stuff (was: Art Debate Was: [Re: Swearing?])
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| Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit (...) Right, but you've set yourselves up for that. By having all those friendly social programs, you paint a great big target on your chest. My grandfather expatriated to (...) (25 years ago, 21-Jan-00, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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