Abraxas and WinePusher have agreed to do a head to head debate on economics. We will be tackling 4 major topics and I will present my arugments and evidence for why a free market approach is the best approach while Abraxas will present his arguments as to how his approach is the better approach.
This debate will consist of 4 Rounds consisting of 4 Posts. Each round will have its own topic.
Round 1: The Enviroment, Energy and Food Safety
Post 1: Abraxas presents an argument for why government intervention is needed
Post 2: WinePusher presents rebuttal
Post 3: WinePusher presents an argument for why a Free Market Approach is more fundamentally sound
Post 4: Abraxas presents rebuttal
Round 2: Poverty and Healthcare
Post 1: Abraxas presents an argument for why government intervention is needed
Post 2: WinePusher presents rebuttal
Post 3: WinePusher presents an argument for why a Free Market Approach is more fundamentally sound
Post 4: Abraxas presents rebuttal
Round 3: Labor, Discrimination and Civil Rights
Post 1: Abraxas presents an argument for why government intervention is needed
Post 2: WinePusher presents rebuttal
Post 3: WinePusher presents an argument for why a Free Market Approach is more fundamentally sound
Post 4: Abraxas presents rebuttal
Round 4: Fiscal Policy and Monetary Policy
Post 1: Abraxas presents an argument for why government intervention is needed
Post 2: WinePusher presents rebuttal
Post 3: WinePusher presents an argument for why a Free Market Approach is more fundamentally sound
Post 4: Abraxas presents rebuttal
Are Libertarian Economics Fundamentally Sound?
Moderator: Moderators
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WinePusher
Post #11
Once again, Abraxas is not saying what he means. He did the same thing with his last post and his vague allusion to AGW. Abraxas has no real issue with healthcare availability because no issue exists, if an individual needs care and cannot afford it the individual will still recieve it (I'd like to see him try to dispute that fact). Healthcare availability is as adequate as it can possibly be. The real issue is Preventive Care. Preventive care is a method of medicine by which disease and illness are prevented from ever occuring in the first place, thus eliminating the need for costly treatment. The consensus of thought, amoung liberals, is that preventive medicinal measures save costs, not lives which is contary to what Abraxas asserts. However, the problem with Preventive Medicine is really quite simple: it is a safe haven for waste. For example, a perfectly healthy individual going in for medical screening will be wasting the resources of the clinic/hospital because there is nothing wrong with him. In reality, the goal of medicine should be directed towards those who are already ill and sick, not those who are fine and healthy. In addition, there is a large faction of the population who possess no desire to proactively safeguard their body from potential illness. If the government imposes healthcare upon them against their will, it is a service they are bound to use infrequently.Abraxas wrote:Every year, over 100,000 Americans die needlessly from causes, that, with adequate health care availability, could be prevented.
I'm surprised at the slanted opinion you've presented.Abraxas wrote:Further, we lag behind every single one of the other 19 wealthiest nations in the most basic metric of keeping our own people alive.(1) Not coincidentally, we are the only nation on the list that lacks universal healthcare. We do, however, spend more than any other nation per capita on health care.(2)
1)You say that the United States lags behind the rest of the developed world in terms of life expectancy.
2)You imply that this is due to our lack of UHC.
3)And then you end it with a fun fact, that the United States spends more than any other nation on healthcare.
Here's why you're wrong:
1)Life expectancy of a nation is not the standard by which you judge the quality of their healthcare system because there are causes of death that extend beyond the scope and reach of healthcare. Judgement should be based upon the likelyhood of survival after an individual as been diagnosed with a fatal illness. If you get cancer, what is your likelyhood of survival and for how lon, in this department the United States is superior to 'the other 19 wealthiest nations.'
2)UHC has been documented to be nothing more than a failure. The 'preventable deaths' that you care about are ever more prevalent within a UHC system due to 1 primary factor: a disproportionate patient:doctor ratio.
3)Yes, healthcare makes up a large percentage of spending. I'd think you of all people should look upon this with pride, Abraxas. I thought liberals believed we should judge a countries 'standards' and 'morals' based upon its priorities.
Your methodology of citing particular examples to support a generalized conclusion is erroneous for the following reasons. (1) You have to apply this methodology across the spectrum. If a trend in poor performance by the free market indicates that it is inherently impracticable, then a trend in poor performance by the government should indicate that it is also impracticable, and I will continue to cite examples to counter yours. (2) You attribute said 'poor performance' to the failures of the market and fail to take other, more pressing factors into consideration. Would a trend in 'good performance' by the market indicate its practicability? Do you believe that the market has ever demonstrated 'good performance' and if you do, does it not reveal its 'bad performance' is merely the result of accidents that all economic systems are prone to?Abraxas wrote:Winepusher has indicated in the past he does not accept individual examples as evidence, I must wonder, if a trend of consistently poor performance as demonstrated by the above statistics qualifies as proof that leaving things to the market doesn’t work?
Here is a case where a specific example might be able to prove a general conclusion. Abraxas states the situation, that many people from other countries come to the United States for healthcare, but offers no explanation and is also unwilling to attribute this to the possibility that the United States privitized healthcare system is of extremely high caliber and outperforms the UHC systems of the rest of the World. But even if that's true, that only wealthy foreigners come to America for healthcare, how is it relevant. You and I both agree on the undisputable fact that people from other countries come to the United States for healthcare, but why does their social status within their indigineous country matter?Abraxas wrote:They point out how people from other countries come here for care, but they neglect it is almost only the wealthy, that standard of care not existing for the American public. How then, can we, the freest of the health care markets, be doing the worst of the wealthy nations?
Amazing, this claim is so much more distorted than the Heritage Report Abraxas takes umbrage with. When it comes to poverty, the market and society of the United States are not free due to the implementation of the welfare state in the early 1900's. So Abraxas is just wrong to say that the prevalence of poverty in America is the fault of the Free Market. It's quite the opposite actually, the prevalence of poverty shows that the entitlement system along with welfare state like policies are a failure. As for the free market solution to Poverty, I will be addressing that in my next post.Abraxas wrote:How is it, that in one of the freest markets in the world in the richest nation in the world consistently lags behind other first world nations in measures of poverty? The answer is simple, free markets left to themselves do almost nothing to reduce and remove poverty. There is nothing stopping the free market from working to solve poverty. Nothing to stop the greatly centralized money pools of America from donating or investing in causes that raise up the impoverished. Yet, as predictable as the sunrise, in the relatively free market, the poor continue to grow in number.
That is a mischaracterization of the Libertarian view of poverty. We should let Milton Friedman describe the Libertarian view; and in his book Capitalism and Freedom which sits upon my desk he devotes an entire chapter to the subect of Alleviating Poverty, surprisingly your idea of 'unrestrained capitalism creating jobs' doesn't seem to be in there. The problem of poverty is addressed by the Free Market primarily through private enterprise and charity. When governemntal welfare activity rises the activity of private charity declines, and when governmental welfare activity declindes the activity of private charity rises. Which system is more effective at alleviating poverty? Well, that depends on a variety of factors. A major negative factor that is absent from the free market solution but present within government welfare is the entitlement mentality, the idea that the government owes you something and you are entitled to these dues. We can already see what this dangerous mentality leads to, just look at civilized Europe, particularly Greece and England. Look at what happens when their governemtns need to reduce the amount they give out in handouts, the citizens violently riot in the street. Thus, when it comes to which is better for society and the individual, it's clear the private enterprise is superior to government welfare.Abraxas wrote:Frankly, the idea that the free market will help poverty doesn't make sense when compared with observed reality. The idea is that unrestrained capitalism will create jobs and boom the economy overall, thus resulting in less overall poverty.
That's an interesting point. I wonder how well that logic holds when applied to other areas. The goal of a healthcare insurance company is to insure their client against illness. However, it seems to be within the best interest of insurance companies to deny care, so the conclusion Abraxas reaches is that insurance companies will generally deny care at all oppurtunities. Similarly, the goal of Amtrack is to provide railroad transportation for their customers. However, it seems to be within the best interest of Amtrack to initially deny access to their trains and force their customers to go through an appeals process to gain access, so using Abraxas' logic the conclusion I reach is that Amtrack will deny access to their trains at all oppurtunites in order to increase profits. This logic is just absurd because Amtrack realizes that the cost of maintaining their services is lower than the money they recieve from clients needing to utilize their service, so any denial of their service would not be within their interest as a company.Abraxas wrote:Starting at the insurance level, it is worth noting that insurance companies make their money by denying care. They don't have to pay for your operation if you don't have an operation. As such, by the very definition of what it means to be a health insurer is to make money by preventing the sick from getting what they need to get healthy. Many insurance companies as a matter of routine will deny any and every initial claim to force policyholders to go through complicated, time consuming, and potentially expensive appeals processes to get any medical coverage from them.
If the pills pharmacies pushed out were actually this ineffective, they would have no customers. Do you really believe consumers are that dumb? The 'cure' is what ensures the pharmaceutical companies to be reliable and efficent places of businees.Abraxas wrote:Likewise, pharmaceutical companies make money from treatments, not cures. If you have someone who can take a pill for two weeks and rid themselves of a deadly disease, or has to spend the rest of their life shelling out for pills in order to not fall over dead, which is going to get your company the most money?
I actually addressed this same argument iussed by nursebenjamin in another thread: The cost of healthcare, or Healthcare Inflation (as you put it) is not judged by the cost of Emergency Care. Emergency Care is an unconventional manner of obtaining healthcare. When purchasing insurance, you are able to shop around. If I live in Ohio and can only purchase insurance out of this state, then that limits my choice. If I am able to reject the offers of insurance in my state and go to a state where insurance is cheaper, than those companies that work out of Ohio will lose businees because their prices are jacked up. Consumer choice is always a good thing, and sadly it's something liberals are always opposed to. Anyways, many of your other points will be basically addressed in my own post of this round which you can then rebutt.Abraxas wrote:Simple competition doesn’t work to improve this market sector like it does others for a number of reasons. Firstly, competition relies on the customer having both sufficient chance and sufficient knowledge to judge the different options presented to them. However, when a patient is having chest pains, they don’t have time to shop around, or call up a variety of doctors to ensure their insurance provider will pay for their visit to that care facility, or check the internet to see which doctors get the best reviews. Likewise, when patients are told what treatment they need, they tend to accept it, not having the extensive background in medicine necessary to make an informed judgment. Even getting a second opinion is often not practical due to the costs and time involved. If you collapse somewhere and are rushed to the nearest hospital, you still have to pay the bill whether you were even given the opportunity to agree to the treatment and testing or not.
Abraxas wrote:Example 1: Ephedra(35)(36)
In the late 90s, the public was becoming concerned about a drug ingredient called ephedra, a popular diet and body building supplement manufactured by Metabolife, among others, after more than 100 deaths emerged linked to the product. The result was clockwork predictable. The lobbyists were mobilized to Washington and after spending millions of dollars to persuade them to look away, the FDA backed off. They further acted to block research from being released demonstrating wild inconsistencies between the reported potency of ephedra products and the actual concentration as part of the manufacturing process. During the course of the investigation, Metabolife concealed more than 14,000 complaints about the safety of the drug they had received.
In 2000, the New England Journal of Medicine released a study that showed frequent occurrences of death or disability from use of the drug. It was not until 2002 the Department of Justice forced a turnover of 15,000 complaints, and a year later, after the death of a MLB player that the FDA began considered regulating Ephedra again. Ultimately, in 2004, the FDA decided to ban ephedra as it was hundreds of times more likely than competitors to cause adverse reactions and showed little long term benefit. It doesn’t stop there. Rather than moving on from a drug killing and crippling hundreds and causing harm to thousands, Metabolife fought onward in the courts to keep it rolling, until it was finally stopped in 2007 when the Supreme Court declined to review the case. Well surely Metabolife was entitled to pursue their legal options if they felt the ruling against them was unfair, right? Well, turns out they didn’t. After ephedra was banned, the founder was found guilty of lying to the FDA to deliberately hide the effects of ephedra and sentenced to a fine and imprisonment. Put another way, he was perfectly content to continue killing people with a product he knew to be lethal to countless people just to stay on the gravy train. Metabolife itself went under as it was dodging taxes through fraudulent tax returns.
What does this prove other than the already established fact that the 'founder' was a corrupt conspirator liable for the deaths of individuals? This example makes no sense whatsoever and does not even remotely bolster your case.
When it comes to a pandemic such as smallpox, the government does have a role to eradicate it.......Going off of what he's written above, I'm afraid Abraxas is beginning to see libertarianism and anarchism as the same thing. However, when it comes to actual and effective epidemology it is the private sector the is the most effective. I will go into more detail in my next post.Abraxas wrote:Example 2: Smallpox(37)(38)(39)
Smallpox has been one of the single greatest scourges upon humanity in the history of the species. Estimates place the cumulative death toll of the disease at upwards of 300-500 million in the 20th century alone, which is noteworthy not only for the body count but also for the fact that the disease had been completely eradicated by the last 20 years of that century, to date being the only human pathogen to be completely wiped out. What is also notable is how it was wiped out, that being a multinational government cooperative funded by taxpayer dollars to stamp this plague out of existence. The US, the UK, the Soviet Union, and countless other nations. Consider, the entire effort put forth by a multitude of governments cost less than 2 billion dollars and removed from the world a disease responsible for potentially billions of deaths. Indeed, it is estimate the US makes back everything it spent on smallpox treatment every 26 days as a result of not having to pay to treat it anymore. Efficient, effective, and not run by the private sector.
This is really the only example out of the other four that attempts to prove your case, and I'll concede it to you. The corruption and inefficency of IBM's management of Indiana's welfare system is well known, even more so than Harriet Myers ineligibility for a seat on SCOTUS. I really don't have any issue with what you say, other than the unwarrented assumption that after the contract between Indiana and IBM was terminated, the performance of the entitlement system 'sprang back.' I hope you know that the move to privitize welfare in the first place was not only because of Mitch Daniels conservatism, but because the system was massively burdening the states debt and was also inefficent, but probably less so than when it was taken over by IBM.Abraxas wrote:Example 3: Privatization of Welfare in Indiana(40)
In 2006, Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana, decided that the state’s welfare system needed to be privatized. The state already had an exceptionally efficient welfare system that was already performing well above national average but, in a scheme that was supposed to save taxpayer dollars, the state of Indiana turned over control of the state’s eligibility monitoring system to IBM starting in 2007. Within one year of service, the error rate had jumped to over 13%, more than double the previous year. Immediately there were problems with lost paperwork, huge backlogs, and IBM denying people just to reduce the paperwork load even though they actually qualified. In the process of all this, however, a number of companies who just so happened to be well connected to Daniels made huge amounts of money on the contract. Eventually, even the free market, privatize everything types come face to face with reality and after the appalling failure of privatization that wrongly cost thousands of Indiana residents access to vital and necessary resources, Daniels was forced to admit the attempt at privatizing welfare was a disaster, quote “just didn’t work�. Of course, the year after cutting IBM out and returning the system to state management over private companies, their performance has sprung back. Coincidence?
The middle class is not something that can be invented. It is simply a term used to describe the faction of people within a society whose social status falls inbetween that of the wealthy and the poor. The middle class is made up of self created individuals that are not the by-product of 'government intervention.' If Abraxa really believes this, would he also assert that the upper class and the lower class are also the result of government intervention.Abraxas wrote:Example 4: The G.I. Bills(41)(42)(43)
The reason America even really has a middle class, is in fact, government intervention.
You're interpretation of history is extremely skewed. First, government spending may or may not be effective depending on what it is being spent on. The history surrounding the economy of WWII is this: After Roosevelt delivered his Infamy speech, Congress declared war on Japan and the United States began to mobilize its military and devote large amounts of spending to create military equipment. During this time the United States manufactured literally thousands of new planes, armored units and sea vessels. This high scale activity cut the high unemployment and effectively ended the great recession, thus government military spending can effectively stimulate the economy and end unemployment. Second, as Abraxas says, after the war those manufacturing jobs that employed so many people disappered because there was no need for them. Thus, as Abraxas says, there were many 'young men' with to much free time on there hands. Thus, government spending on any section of the economy can and will only lead to short term job growth and short term economic growth.Abraxas wrote:Certain free market proponents like to argue that the government spending money, and most certainly spending money on the poor, does nothing to help our economy. From our own history we know this to be completely false. Following World War II, the US had an abundance of young American males with too much free time and not enough jobs and education, seeing as how we no longer needed to employ them all as soldiers to fight in Germany, Japan, and a number of other unpleasant places of the era. So, in order to help deal with that, and to give the soldiers a proper thank you for their dedication and sacrifice in spending the last four years ducking Nazi mortar fire, a G.I. Bill was created. It provided for funding for creating businesses, purchasing homes, seeking higher education out of the government pocket. Clearly with government hand outs being the source of the money, these bills taught our soldiers to leech off society and they all became hopelessly addicted to government money as the libertarian theory of welfare dependence holds, right? Right?
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WinePusher
Post #12
Round 2 Post 3.
Poverty
The economic principle that is relevant to the issue of poverty is this: whenever the government subsidizes something, they are promoting it, and whenever the government taxes something, they are discouraging it. A common talking point amoung the left is that Libertarianism is based in fantasy, as opposed to reality, but all one needs to do is look at real life to see how true this principle really is. When it comes to housing, the government actively puts money into the pockets of homeowners or potential homeowners to promote the buying of homes, but when it comes to cigarettes we are constantly seeing state officials trying to pass one tax after another to discourage the usage of cigarettes. What Abraxas has been arguing for in regards to poverty are welfare state policies, where the government actively subsidizes the costs of a poor individual. Going off the economic principle cited above, what Abraxas advocates for would not in any way solve the problem, it would only worsen it and encourage it. What he advocates for has proven itself to be an ineffective means to combat and alleviate poverty. When was poverty at its peak? During the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration, any history of this Administration will expose how severe poverty was at that time, yet historians should expect the opposite since FDR implemented such grand social welfare laws. Rather than poverty being at its peak under this President, it should have been at its lowest.
Let's turn to the free market/private solutions to Poverty. I said in my previous post that poverty is dealt with by the Free Market through Private Enterprise and Charity, but that does not necessarily imply only faith based charities and churches. One very effective tool of the Free Market is Microfinance. The concept behind Microfinance is that donors loan small-medium sums of money to people living in low income communities so that these people can use the money to invest in a long term-productive project. Essentially, Microfinance functions the same as Banks. A Bank will give you a loan for something like, a car, your ownership of this car enhances your net productivity as you can travel freely to and from work and not have to worry about paying for transportation. In the same way, a microfinance lender will lend, say, a former business owner who lost his assets in a stock market crash x amount of dollars and with this money he can invest it in another business or whatever best increases his productivity. Another strong poverty reducer is employment. When you look at the makeup impoverished people, the group of unemployed impoverished people heavily outweighs the group of employed impoverished people. Employment alleviates poverty. The question is, how are you able to create more opportunities for employment? It's an amazingly simple method. (1) A job can only be created by an individual with a reasonable amount of wealth at his disposal. (2) A job will only be created if this individual believes that hiring, paying, and maintaining workers will yield more money than the money he loses in keeping these workers. (3) A job will disappear if the worker stops being an financial asset and becomes a financial liability. Meaning, if the costs of maintaining workers superceeds the profits the business is generating, he/she will lay them off. How could scenario 3 possibly happen? Well, with the help of Abraxas' agenda scenario 3 is becoming a reality. Policies such as a progressive income tax or a high minimum wage will cause job loss, and only worsen the problem of poverty.
Now, nursebenjamin brought to my attention (in a personal message) that when citing the chapter of Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman that is devoted to the subject of alleviating poverty, I omitted Friedman's lengthy treastise on the Negative Income Tax. He's right, I did not pay any attention to that in my post, and I did so voluntarily. I'm arguing for Free Market principles, and even though Milton Friedman, who is the perfect representation of Libertarian thought and scholarship, proposes a Negative Income Tax the policy in and of itself is not in agreement with Libertarian Economic thought. I realize I'm debating Abraxas, but nursebenjamin naively cites Friedman's detailed summary of NIT as some type of whole hearted endorsement when it actually isn't. Friedman has admitted in more than one place that he is a reluctant endorser of NIT, his rational is that if redistribution must be implemented in a society, NIT would be the best route to go out of all the other options. But in the end, NIT is simply another form of socialism which I do not endorse and therefore will not argue on behalf of.
Healthcare
In regards to Healthcare, Abraxas' arguments for why government intervention is needed have been spurious, to say the very least. The only valid point Abraxas has made thus far is the need for government in disease control, however when it comes to healthcare access, primary care, healthcare inflation or the quality of healthcare government has no role and if it tries to assume a role the results would simply be ineffective. Let's run through the problems Abraxas perceives to be wrong with American Healthcare.
(1) He has a problem with inaccessibility to care, and the lack of universal coverage. I challenged him to prove that healthcare will be denied to an individual who does not possess the adequate funds to pay for it, and I challenge him to prove that once again. The fact is someone who can't afford healthcare but needs healthcare, will get healthcare. This makes our healthcare system inherently redistributive. Abraxas also fails to mention that the lack of universal coverage primarily due to the fact that individuals willingly choose not to be covered by an insurance plan. It is their choice not to purchase insurance, thus an individual mandate forcing insurance upon them inhibits their liberties and the principles the Free Society they inhabit. (2) Abraxas suggests that the United States lags behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to healthcare. Well, that depends on the standard of judgement. His argument does hold a certain amount of validity, but unfortunately it fails to take vital facts into consideration. The Swiss Healthcare model is a model the left admires, and is constantly cited as better than U.S Healthcare. But why is that? It's a small population that does not experience a large scale free movement of peoples and has suffered little to no confrontations in its history. You get a completely different situation in the United States: you have an extremely large and racially diverse population with people freely traveling inbetween states and immigrants freely crossing the north and southern border and a history of wars and confrontations that are likely to shorten the average life span of an individual. If the Swiss model were implemented in the US you'd get very different results because of those reasons listed above.
Now, onto the free market initiatives to improve healthcare. The first would be a universalization of Consumer Driven Healthcare. This plan is the most ideal because it makes the consumer the primary controller and decider of his or her own healthcare choices. The second has to do with reducing healthcare costs, and this includes two policies that Abraxas and I have debated extensively in the past: Interstate Insurance Competition and Medical Malpractice Reform. Why does Abraxas not believe these two policies will be effective cost reducers?
Case 1: The Great Society
The Great Society refers to a set of domestic policies aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice at the federal level. These policies were implemented by LBJ, who inherited his Presidency after the assassination of JFK. It appears that Abraxas believes that this so called 'War on Poverty' was a grand success, well it wasn't. Thomas Sowell notes that the Black Family began disintegrating at this time, and prior to the Great Society were doing comparatively well for themselves. Jonah Goldberg reinforces the same point I was arguing earlier, that welfare state policies, especially when implemented at a federal level, spawns an unhealthy and socially inept 'entitlement mentality.' If Jonah Goldberg is to partisan for Abraxas, than he should try Charles Murray
Case 2: The Fair Deal
The Fair Deal refers to a set of welfare policies under President Truman. What this deal basically did was enhance and improve already existing welfare policies started by FDR. So, my question to Abraxas is with the implementation of the New Deal, then the Fair Deal, and then the Great Society why is the left today, blaming the free market for the afflictions of poverty that they believe are so great? Essentially, Abraxas agenda has been implemented time and time again yet the problem trying to be fixed has not been. Has he reached the conclusion that welfare in the United States, even though it has been tried and tried over and over again, is not a practical policy?
Case 3: 2009 'Swine Flu Virus' Pandemic
While the eradication of Small Pox can be considered a success of cooperative national governments, the Swine Flu Virus Pandemic can been seen as the fault of the government. The problem was caused by the Federal Government because won't secure its own borders. The swine flu originated in Mexico and was brought to the United States because of unrestricted immigration, thus the failure of the federal government to secure and manage the borders caused this. Not only the, but the production and distribution of vaccines was equally deplorable. There were many instances of vaccine shortages in clinics and hospitals, and the timeline for a vaccine development was inconclusive.
Case 4: The Laffer Curve
This is more of a theoretical argument. A primary component of Welfare is redistribution, and it is the redistribution of income from the wealthy to the poor by means of taxation. What we constantly hear from the left is that taxes need to be raised on the rich at a high rate, perhaps even at a rate of %100. Well, the Laffer Curve begins with the premise that at a %0 tax rate, the government will yield no revenue (obviously) and since the government yields no revenue welfare cannot exist. Well, the model goes onto predict that a tax rate of or near %100 will also cause the government to yield no revenue:
Thus, there exists an optimal point of taxation that should be moderate-low that would allow government to generate revenue and at the same time, for taxes to be levied. However, the problem is that as the Welfare State is expanded, government needs to put more funds into it and therefore generate more funds and therefore raise taxes putting the curve closer and closer to that %100 mark, which would render the entire upper class (whose income is being redistributed) useless.
Case Citations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society
http://sumpolitics.wordpress.com/2008/0 ... t-society/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fair_Deal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
Poverty
The economic principle that is relevant to the issue of poverty is this: whenever the government subsidizes something, they are promoting it, and whenever the government taxes something, they are discouraging it. A common talking point amoung the left is that Libertarianism is based in fantasy, as opposed to reality, but all one needs to do is look at real life to see how true this principle really is. When it comes to housing, the government actively puts money into the pockets of homeowners or potential homeowners to promote the buying of homes, but when it comes to cigarettes we are constantly seeing state officials trying to pass one tax after another to discourage the usage of cigarettes. What Abraxas has been arguing for in regards to poverty are welfare state policies, where the government actively subsidizes the costs of a poor individual. Going off the economic principle cited above, what Abraxas advocates for would not in any way solve the problem, it would only worsen it and encourage it. What he advocates for has proven itself to be an ineffective means to combat and alleviate poverty. When was poverty at its peak? During the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration, any history of this Administration will expose how severe poverty was at that time, yet historians should expect the opposite since FDR implemented such grand social welfare laws. Rather than poverty being at its peak under this President, it should have been at its lowest.
Let's turn to the free market/private solutions to Poverty. I said in my previous post that poverty is dealt with by the Free Market through Private Enterprise and Charity, but that does not necessarily imply only faith based charities and churches. One very effective tool of the Free Market is Microfinance. The concept behind Microfinance is that donors loan small-medium sums of money to people living in low income communities so that these people can use the money to invest in a long term-productive project. Essentially, Microfinance functions the same as Banks. A Bank will give you a loan for something like, a car, your ownership of this car enhances your net productivity as you can travel freely to and from work and not have to worry about paying for transportation. In the same way, a microfinance lender will lend, say, a former business owner who lost his assets in a stock market crash x amount of dollars and with this money he can invest it in another business or whatever best increases his productivity. Another strong poverty reducer is employment. When you look at the makeup impoverished people, the group of unemployed impoverished people heavily outweighs the group of employed impoverished people. Employment alleviates poverty. The question is, how are you able to create more opportunities for employment? It's an amazingly simple method. (1) A job can only be created by an individual with a reasonable amount of wealth at his disposal. (2) A job will only be created if this individual believes that hiring, paying, and maintaining workers will yield more money than the money he loses in keeping these workers. (3) A job will disappear if the worker stops being an financial asset and becomes a financial liability. Meaning, if the costs of maintaining workers superceeds the profits the business is generating, he/she will lay them off. How could scenario 3 possibly happen? Well, with the help of Abraxas' agenda scenario 3 is becoming a reality. Policies such as a progressive income tax or a high minimum wage will cause job loss, and only worsen the problem of poverty.
Now, nursebenjamin brought to my attention (in a personal message) that when citing the chapter of Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman that is devoted to the subject of alleviating poverty, I omitted Friedman's lengthy treastise on the Negative Income Tax. He's right, I did not pay any attention to that in my post, and I did so voluntarily. I'm arguing for Free Market principles, and even though Milton Friedman, who is the perfect representation of Libertarian thought and scholarship, proposes a Negative Income Tax the policy in and of itself is not in agreement with Libertarian Economic thought. I realize I'm debating Abraxas, but nursebenjamin naively cites Friedman's detailed summary of NIT as some type of whole hearted endorsement when it actually isn't. Friedman has admitted in more than one place that he is a reluctant endorser of NIT, his rational is that if redistribution must be implemented in a society, NIT would be the best route to go out of all the other options. But in the end, NIT is simply another form of socialism which I do not endorse and therefore will not argue on behalf of.
Healthcare
In regards to Healthcare, Abraxas' arguments for why government intervention is needed have been spurious, to say the very least. The only valid point Abraxas has made thus far is the need for government in disease control, however when it comes to healthcare access, primary care, healthcare inflation or the quality of healthcare government has no role and if it tries to assume a role the results would simply be ineffective. Let's run through the problems Abraxas perceives to be wrong with American Healthcare.
(1) He has a problem with inaccessibility to care, and the lack of universal coverage. I challenged him to prove that healthcare will be denied to an individual who does not possess the adequate funds to pay for it, and I challenge him to prove that once again. The fact is someone who can't afford healthcare but needs healthcare, will get healthcare. This makes our healthcare system inherently redistributive. Abraxas also fails to mention that the lack of universal coverage primarily due to the fact that individuals willingly choose not to be covered by an insurance plan. It is their choice not to purchase insurance, thus an individual mandate forcing insurance upon them inhibits their liberties and the principles the Free Society they inhabit. (2) Abraxas suggests that the United States lags behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to healthcare. Well, that depends on the standard of judgement. His argument does hold a certain amount of validity, but unfortunately it fails to take vital facts into consideration. The Swiss Healthcare model is a model the left admires, and is constantly cited as better than U.S Healthcare. But why is that? It's a small population that does not experience a large scale free movement of peoples and has suffered little to no confrontations in its history. You get a completely different situation in the United States: you have an extremely large and racially diverse population with people freely traveling inbetween states and immigrants freely crossing the north and southern border and a history of wars and confrontations that are likely to shorten the average life span of an individual. If the Swiss model were implemented in the US you'd get very different results because of those reasons listed above.
Now, onto the free market initiatives to improve healthcare. The first would be a universalization of Consumer Driven Healthcare. This plan is the most ideal because it makes the consumer the primary controller and decider of his or her own healthcare choices. The second has to do with reducing healthcare costs, and this includes two policies that Abraxas and I have debated extensively in the past: Interstate Insurance Competition and Medical Malpractice Reform. Why does Abraxas not believe these two policies will be effective cost reducers?
Case 1: The Great Society
The Great Society refers to a set of domestic policies aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice at the federal level. These policies were implemented by LBJ, who inherited his Presidency after the assassination of JFK. It appears that Abraxas believes that this so called 'War on Poverty' was a grand success, well it wasn't. Thomas Sowell notes that the Black Family began disintegrating at this time, and prior to the Great Society were doing comparatively well for themselves. Jonah Goldberg reinforces the same point I was arguing earlier, that welfare state policies, especially when implemented at a federal level, spawns an unhealthy and socially inept 'entitlement mentality.' If Jonah Goldberg is to partisan for Abraxas, than he should try Charles Murray
Case 2: The Fair Deal
The Fair Deal refers to a set of welfare policies under President Truman. What this deal basically did was enhance and improve already existing welfare policies started by FDR. So, my question to Abraxas is with the implementation of the New Deal, then the Fair Deal, and then the Great Society why is the left today, blaming the free market for the afflictions of poverty that they believe are so great? Essentially, Abraxas agenda has been implemented time and time again yet the problem trying to be fixed has not been. Has he reached the conclusion that welfare in the United States, even though it has been tried and tried over and over again, is not a practical policy?
Case 3: 2009 'Swine Flu Virus' Pandemic
While the eradication of Small Pox can be considered a success of cooperative national governments, the Swine Flu Virus Pandemic can been seen as the fault of the government. The problem was caused by the Federal Government because won't secure its own borders. The swine flu originated in Mexico and was brought to the United States because of unrestricted immigration, thus the failure of the federal government to secure and manage the borders caused this. Not only the, but the production and distribution of vaccines was equally deplorable. There were many instances of vaccine shortages in clinics and hospitals, and the timeline for a vaccine development was inconclusive.
Case 4: The Laffer Curve
This is more of a theoretical argument. A primary component of Welfare is redistribution, and it is the redistribution of income from the wealthy to the poor by means of taxation. What we constantly hear from the left is that taxes need to be raised on the rich at a high rate, perhaps even at a rate of %100. Well, the Laffer Curve begins with the premise that at a %0 tax rate, the government will yield no revenue (obviously) and since the government yields no revenue welfare cannot exist. Well, the model goes onto predict that a tax rate of or near %100 will also cause the government to yield no revenue:
Thus, there exists an optimal point of taxation that should be moderate-low that would allow government to generate revenue and at the same time, for taxes to be levied. However, the problem is that as the Welfare State is expanded, government needs to put more funds into it and therefore generate more funds and therefore raise taxes putting the curve closer and closer to that %100 mark, which would render the entire upper class (whose income is being redistributed) useless.
Case Citations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society
http://sumpolitics.wordpress.com/2008/0 ... t-society/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fair_Deal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
-
WinePusher
Post #13
Round 2 Post 3.
Poverty
The economic principle that is relevant to the issue of poverty is this: whenever the government subsidizes something, they are promoting it, and whenever the government taxes something, they are discouraging it. A common talking point amoung the left is that Libertarianism is based in fantasy, as opposed to reality, but all one needs to do is look at real life to see how true this principle really is. When it comes to housing, the government actively puts money into the pockets of homeowners or potential homeowners to promote the buying of homes, but when it comes to cigarettes we are constantly seeing state officials trying to pass one tax after another to discourage the usage of cigarettes. What Abraxas has been arguing for in regards to poverty are welfare state policies, where the government actively subsidizes the costs of a poor individual. Going off the economic principle cited above, what Abraxas advocates for would not in any way solve the problem, it would only worsen it and encourage it. What he advocates for has proven itself to be an ineffective means to combat and alleviate poverty. When was poverty at its peak? During the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration, any history of this Administration will expose how severe poverty was at that time, yet historians should expect the opposite since FDR implemented such grand social welfare laws. Rather than poverty being at its peak under this President, it should have been at its lowest.
Let's turn to the free market/private solutions to Poverty. I said in my previous post that poverty is dealt with by the Free Market through Private Enterprise and Charity, but that does not necessarily imply only faith based charities and churches. One very effective tool of the Free Market is Microfinance. The concept behind Microfinance is that donors loan small-medium sums of money to people living in low income communities so that these people can use the money to invest in a long term-productive project. Essentially, Microfinance functions the same as Banks. A Bank will give you a loan for something like, a car, your ownership of this car enhances your net productivity as you can travel freely to and from work and not have to worry about paying for transportation. In the same way, a microfinance lender will lend, say, a former business owner who lost his assets in a stock market crash x amount of dollars and with this money he can invest it in another business or whatever best increases his productivity. Another strong poverty reducer is employment. When you look at the makeup impoverished people, the group of unemployed impoverished people heavily outweighs the group of employed impoverished people. Employment alleviates poverty. The question is, how are you able to create more opportunities for employment? It's an amazingly simple method. (1) A job can only be created by an individual with a reasonable amount of wealth at his disposal. (2) A job will only be created if this individual believes that hiring, paying, and maintaining workers will yield more money than the money he loses in keeping these workers. (3) A job will disappear if the worker stops being an financial asset and becomes a financial liability. Meaning, if the costs of maintaining workers superceeds the profits the business is generating, he/she will lay them off. How could scenario 3 possibly happen? Well, with the help of Abraxas' agenda scenario 3 is becoming a reality. Policies such as a progressive income tax or a high minimum wage will cause job loss, and only worsen the problem of poverty.
Now, nursebenjamin brought to my attention (in a personal message) that when citing the chapter of Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman that is devoted to the subject of alleviating poverty, I omitted Friedman's lengthy treastise on the Negative Income Tax. He's right, I did not pay any attention to that in my post, and I did so voluntarily. I'm arguing for Free Market principles, and even though Milton Friedman, who is the perfect representation of Libertarian thought and scholarship, proposes a Negative Income Tax the policy in and of itself is not in agreement with Libertarian Economic thought. I realize I'm debating Abraxas, but nursebenjamin naively cites Friedman's detailed summary of NIT as some type of whole hearted endorsement when it actually isn't. Friedman has admitted in more than one place that he is a reluctant endorser of NIT, his rational is that if redistribution must be implemented in a society, NIT would be the best route to go out of all the other options. But in the end, NIT is simply another form of socialism which I do not endorse and therefore will not argue on behalf of.
Healthcare
In regards to Healthcare, Abraxas' arguments for why government intervention is needed have been spurious, to say the very least. The only valid point Abraxas has made thus far is the need for government in disease control, however when it comes to healthcare access, primary care, healthcare inflation or the quality of healthcare government has no role and if it tries to assume a role the results would simply be ineffective. Let's run through the problems Abraxas perceives to be wrong with American Healthcare.
(1) He has a problem with inaccessibility to care, and the lack of universal coverage. I challenged him to prove that healthcare will be denied to an individual who does not possess the adequate funds to pay for it, and I challenge him to prove that once again. The fact is someone who can't afford healthcare but needs healthcare, will get healthcare. This makes our healthcare system inherently redistributive. Abraxas also fails to mention that the lack of universal coverage primarily due to the fact that individuals willingly choose not to be covered by an insurance plan. It is their choice not to purchase insurance, thus an individual mandate forcing insurance upon them inhibits their liberties and the principles the Free Society they inhabit. (2) Abraxas suggests that the United States lags behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to healthcare. Well, that depends on the standard of judgement. His argument does hold a certain amount of validity, but unfortunately it fails to take vital facts into consideration. The Swiss Healthcare model is a model the left admires, and is constantly cited as better than U.S Healthcare. But why is that? It's a small population that does not experience a large scale free movement of peoples and has suffered little to no confrontations in its history. You get a completely different situation in the United States: you have an extremely large and racially diverse population with people freely traveling inbetween states and immigrants freely crossing the north and southern border and a history of wars and confrontations that are likely to shorten the average life span of an individual. If the Swiss model were implemented in the US you'd get very different results because of those reasons listed above.
Now, onto the free market initiatives to improve healthcare. The first would be a universalization of Consumer Driven Healthcare. This plan is the most ideal because it makes the consumer the primary controller and decider of his or her own healthcare choices. The second has to do with reducing healthcare costs, and this includes two policies that Abraxas and I have debated extensively in the past: Interstate Insurance Competition and Medical Malpractice Reform. Why does Abraxas not believe these two policies will be effective cost reducers?
Case 1: The Great Society
The Great Society refers to a set of domestic policies aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice at the federal level. These policies were implemented by LBJ, who inherited his Presidency after the assassination of JFK. It appears that Abraxas believes that this so called 'War on Poverty' was a grand success, well it wasn't. Thomas Sowell notes that the Black Family began disintegrating at this time, and prior to the Great Society were doing comparatively well for themselves. Jonah Goldberg reinforces the same point I was arguing earlier, that welfare state policies, especially when implemented at a federal level, spawns an unhealthy and socially inept 'entitlement mentality.' If Jonah Goldberg is to partisan for Abraxas, than he should try Losing Ground by Charles Murray.
Case 2: The Fair Deal
The Fair Deal refers to a set of welfare policies under President Truman. What this deal basically did was enhance and improve already existing welfare policies started by FDR. So, my question to Abraxas is with the implementation of the New Deal, then the Fair Deal, and then the Great Society why is the left today, blaming the free market for the afflictions of poverty that they believe are so great? Essentially, Abraxas agenda has been implemented time and time again yet the problem trying to be fixed has not been. Has he reached the conclusion that welfare in the United States, even though it has been tried and tried over and over again, is not a practical policy?
Case 3: 2009 'Swine Flu Virus' Pandemic
While the eradication of Small Pox can be considered a success of cooperative national governments, the Swine Flu Virus Pandemic can been seen as the fault of the government. The problem was caused by the Federal Government because won't secure its own borders. The swine flu originated in Mexico and was brought to the United States because of unrestricted immigration, thus the failure of the federal government to secure and manage the borders caused this. Not only the, but the production and distribution of vaccines was equally deplorable. There were many instances of vaccine shortages in clinics and hospitals, and the timeline for a vaccine development was inconclusive.
Case 4: The Laffer Curve
This is more of a theoretical argument. A primary component of Welfare is redistribution, and it is the redistribution of income from the wealthy to the poor by means of taxation. What we constantly hear from the left is that taxes need to be raised on the rich at a high rate, perhaps even at a rate of %100. Well, the Laffer Curve begins with the premise that at a %0 tax rate, the government will yield no revenue (obviously) and since the government yields no revenue welfare cannot exist. Well, the model goes onto predict that a tax rate of or near %100 will also cause the government to yield no revenue:
Thus, there exists an optimal point of taxation that should be moderate-low that would allow government to generate revenue and at the same time, for taxes to be levied. However, the problem is that as the Welfare State is expanded, government needs to put more funds into it and therefore generate more funds and therefore raise taxes putting the curve closer and closer to that %100 mark, which would render the entire upper class (whose income is being redistributed) useless.
Case Citations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society
http://sumpolitics.wordpress.com/2008/0 ... t-society/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fair_Deal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
Poverty
The economic principle that is relevant to the issue of poverty is this: whenever the government subsidizes something, they are promoting it, and whenever the government taxes something, they are discouraging it. A common talking point amoung the left is that Libertarianism is based in fantasy, as opposed to reality, but all one needs to do is look at real life to see how true this principle really is. When it comes to housing, the government actively puts money into the pockets of homeowners or potential homeowners to promote the buying of homes, but when it comes to cigarettes we are constantly seeing state officials trying to pass one tax after another to discourage the usage of cigarettes. What Abraxas has been arguing for in regards to poverty are welfare state policies, where the government actively subsidizes the costs of a poor individual. Going off the economic principle cited above, what Abraxas advocates for would not in any way solve the problem, it would only worsen it and encourage it. What he advocates for has proven itself to be an ineffective means to combat and alleviate poverty. When was poverty at its peak? During the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration, any history of this Administration will expose how severe poverty was at that time, yet historians should expect the opposite since FDR implemented such grand social welfare laws. Rather than poverty being at its peak under this President, it should have been at its lowest.
Let's turn to the free market/private solutions to Poverty. I said in my previous post that poverty is dealt with by the Free Market through Private Enterprise and Charity, but that does not necessarily imply only faith based charities and churches. One very effective tool of the Free Market is Microfinance. The concept behind Microfinance is that donors loan small-medium sums of money to people living in low income communities so that these people can use the money to invest in a long term-productive project. Essentially, Microfinance functions the same as Banks. A Bank will give you a loan for something like, a car, your ownership of this car enhances your net productivity as you can travel freely to and from work and not have to worry about paying for transportation. In the same way, a microfinance lender will lend, say, a former business owner who lost his assets in a stock market crash x amount of dollars and with this money he can invest it in another business or whatever best increases his productivity. Another strong poverty reducer is employment. When you look at the makeup impoverished people, the group of unemployed impoverished people heavily outweighs the group of employed impoverished people. Employment alleviates poverty. The question is, how are you able to create more opportunities for employment? It's an amazingly simple method. (1) A job can only be created by an individual with a reasonable amount of wealth at his disposal. (2) A job will only be created if this individual believes that hiring, paying, and maintaining workers will yield more money than the money he loses in keeping these workers. (3) A job will disappear if the worker stops being an financial asset and becomes a financial liability. Meaning, if the costs of maintaining workers superceeds the profits the business is generating, he/she will lay them off. How could scenario 3 possibly happen? Well, with the help of Abraxas' agenda scenario 3 is becoming a reality. Policies such as a progressive income tax or a high minimum wage will cause job loss, and only worsen the problem of poverty.
Now, nursebenjamin brought to my attention (in a personal message) that when citing the chapter of Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman that is devoted to the subject of alleviating poverty, I omitted Friedman's lengthy treastise on the Negative Income Tax. He's right, I did not pay any attention to that in my post, and I did so voluntarily. I'm arguing for Free Market principles, and even though Milton Friedman, who is the perfect representation of Libertarian thought and scholarship, proposes a Negative Income Tax the policy in and of itself is not in agreement with Libertarian Economic thought. I realize I'm debating Abraxas, but nursebenjamin naively cites Friedman's detailed summary of NIT as some type of whole hearted endorsement when it actually isn't. Friedman has admitted in more than one place that he is a reluctant endorser of NIT, his rational is that if redistribution must be implemented in a society, NIT would be the best route to go out of all the other options. But in the end, NIT is simply another form of socialism which I do not endorse and therefore will not argue on behalf of.
Healthcare
In regards to Healthcare, Abraxas' arguments for why government intervention is needed have been spurious, to say the very least. The only valid point Abraxas has made thus far is the need for government in disease control, however when it comes to healthcare access, primary care, healthcare inflation or the quality of healthcare government has no role and if it tries to assume a role the results would simply be ineffective. Let's run through the problems Abraxas perceives to be wrong with American Healthcare.
(1) He has a problem with inaccessibility to care, and the lack of universal coverage. I challenged him to prove that healthcare will be denied to an individual who does not possess the adequate funds to pay for it, and I challenge him to prove that once again. The fact is someone who can't afford healthcare but needs healthcare, will get healthcare. This makes our healthcare system inherently redistributive. Abraxas also fails to mention that the lack of universal coverage primarily due to the fact that individuals willingly choose not to be covered by an insurance plan. It is their choice not to purchase insurance, thus an individual mandate forcing insurance upon them inhibits their liberties and the principles the Free Society they inhabit. (2) Abraxas suggests that the United States lags behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to healthcare. Well, that depends on the standard of judgement. His argument does hold a certain amount of validity, but unfortunately it fails to take vital facts into consideration. The Swiss Healthcare model is a model the left admires, and is constantly cited as better than U.S Healthcare. But why is that? It's a small population that does not experience a large scale free movement of peoples and has suffered little to no confrontations in its history. You get a completely different situation in the United States: you have an extremely large and racially diverse population with people freely traveling inbetween states and immigrants freely crossing the north and southern border and a history of wars and confrontations that are likely to shorten the average life span of an individual. If the Swiss model were implemented in the US you'd get very different results because of those reasons listed above.
Now, onto the free market initiatives to improve healthcare. The first would be a universalization of Consumer Driven Healthcare. This plan is the most ideal because it makes the consumer the primary controller and decider of his or her own healthcare choices. The second has to do with reducing healthcare costs, and this includes two policies that Abraxas and I have debated extensively in the past: Interstate Insurance Competition and Medical Malpractice Reform. Why does Abraxas not believe these two policies will be effective cost reducers?
Case 1: The Great Society
The Great Society refers to a set of domestic policies aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice at the federal level. These policies were implemented by LBJ, who inherited his Presidency after the assassination of JFK. It appears that Abraxas believes that this so called 'War on Poverty' was a grand success, well it wasn't. Thomas Sowell notes that the Black Family began disintegrating at this time, and prior to the Great Society were doing comparatively well for themselves. Jonah Goldberg reinforces the same point I was arguing earlier, that welfare state policies, especially when implemented at a federal level, spawns an unhealthy and socially inept 'entitlement mentality.' If Jonah Goldberg is to partisan for Abraxas, than he should try Losing Ground by Charles Murray.
Case 2: The Fair Deal
The Fair Deal refers to a set of welfare policies under President Truman. What this deal basically did was enhance and improve already existing welfare policies started by FDR. So, my question to Abraxas is with the implementation of the New Deal, then the Fair Deal, and then the Great Society why is the left today, blaming the free market for the afflictions of poverty that they believe are so great? Essentially, Abraxas agenda has been implemented time and time again yet the problem trying to be fixed has not been. Has he reached the conclusion that welfare in the United States, even though it has been tried and tried over and over again, is not a practical policy?
Case 3: 2009 'Swine Flu Virus' Pandemic
While the eradication of Small Pox can be considered a success of cooperative national governments, the Swine Flu Virus Pandemic can been seen as the fault of the government. The problem was caused by the Federal Government because won't secure its own borders. The swine flu originated in Mexico and was brought to the United States because of unrestricted immigration, thus the failure of the federal government to secure and manage the borders caused this. Not only the, but the production and distribution of vaccines was equally deplorable. There were many instances of vaccine shortages in clinics and hospitals, and the timeline for a vaccine development was inconclusive.
Case 4: The Laffer Curve
This is more of a theoretical argument. A primary component of Welfare is redistribution, and it is the redistribution of income from the wealthy to the poor by means of taxation. What we constantly hear from the left is that taxes need to be raised on the rich at a high rate, perhaps even at a rate of %100. Well, the Laffer Curve begins with the premise that at a %0 tax rate, the government will yield no revenue (obviously) and since the government yields no revenue welfare cannot exist. Well, the model goes onto predict that a tax rate of or near %100 will also cause the government to yield no revenue:
Thus, there exists an optimal point of taxation that should be moderate-low that would allow government to generate revenue and at the same time, for taxes to be levied. However, the problem is that as the Welfare State is expanded, government needs to put more funds into it and therefore generate more funds and therefore raise taxes putting the curve closer and closer to that %100 mark, which would render the entire upper class (whose income is being redistributed) useless.
Case Citations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society
http://sumpolitics.wordpress.com/2008/0 ... t-society/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fair_Deal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
Post #14
Before I begin my rebuttal, let me note that first, the major post of each participant in a round is for promoting your own ideas, not arguing with the person you are debating with. Much of this post belonged in the previous one. Secondly, I note, once again, nowhere did you provide any free market solutions to the problems, you simply attacked the government's ability to solve the problem. I believe your argument was supposed to be that free market principles could solve the problem or alleviate it, not that the problem was insurmountable.WinePusher wrote:Round 2 Post 3.
Not necessarily so. While this can be the case, the government taxes all kinds of things it also encourages, such as earning an income. You seem to be operating under an erroneous interpretation common to libertarians that taxes are some kind of punishment. Instead, taxes, for the most part, are more akin to fees for usage of the services of the government. Further, there exists a distinction between increasing price, which is what happens in the case of cigarette and gas taxes, and reducing added value, as is what happens with income tax. Taking your argument to its ultimate absurd conclusion, nobody should ever want to earn income, or at least not beyond a certain point, because when they do, taxes are higher. However, the thing is, while it costs more per dollar to be in a higher tax bracket, you have more dollars and so are still better off than you would have been under a lower tax bracket.Poverty
The economic principle that is relevant to the issue of poverty is this: whenever the government subsidizes something, they are promoting it, and whenever the government taxes something, they are discouraging it. A common talking point amoung the left is that Libertarianism is based in fantasy, as opposed to reality, but all one needs to do is look at real life to see how true this principle really is. When it comes to housing, the government actively puts money into the pockets of homeowners or potential homeowners to promote the buying of homes, but when it comes to cigarettes we are constantly seeing state officials trying to pass one tax after another to discourage the usage of cigarettes.
Complete nonsense. Per the above, the reverse is true. From the perspective of the individual, it doesn't matter a great deal the source of income so much as the quality of life. That the government pays a token amount to prevent you from ending up on the street and in starvation does not mean you would get anything comparable to a quality of life you would have with having the level of income you would from having employment. Poverty discourages itself by virtue of the fact it is poverty and your argument amounts to a government handing out flu shots encourages people to get the flu. Making the effects less damaging to those afflicted in no way encourages one to get the affliction.What Abraxas has been arguing for in regards to poverty are welfare state policies, where the government actively subsidizes the costs of a poor individual. Going off the economic principle cited above, what Abraxas advocates for would not in any way solve the problem, it would only worsen it and encourage it.
Actually, as demonstrated by statistical evidence from the US and the world as a whole in my first post, the exact opposite is true.What he advocates for has proven itself to be an ineffective means to combat and alleviate poverty.
If poverty laws worked on the principles of time travel and magic, yes, you would expect policies created between 1933 and 1936 would have retroactively solved the economic slide in 1928-1933 that began the Great Depression. Instead, what you saw was, a steady constant growth trend upwards between 33 and 40 with the brief exception of 37 to the point where by 1936 GDP had recovered to pre-Depression levels and by 1940 every job lost to the Depression had been replaced (though unemployment rates had not yet recovered fully before WWII).When was poverty at its peak? During the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration, any history of this Administration will expose how severe poverty was at that time, yet historians should expect the opposite since FDR implemented such grand social welfare laws. Rather than poverty being at its peak under this President, it should have been at its lowest.
What we saw was when the New Deal was implemented, the economy started to recover going forward, and we could use a little of that recovery right now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
You haven't demonstrated private charity helps at all, to what degree, and how much of that private charity exists for a cause other than the government offering tax breaks to those who provide it, which is yet another form of government regulation helping to fight poverty. I had hoped you would provide some facts and figures about how much private charity helps the poor, as I did with welfare, but alas, I don't see anything supporting this assertion; only the assertion itself.Let's turn to the free market/private solutions to Poverty. I said in my previous post that poverty is dealt with by the Free Market through Private Enterprise and Charity, but that does not necessarily imply only faith based charities and churches.
Further, actually you did imply that it only does it through private charity, as when I proposed that Libertarians hold the idea that a free market will create jobs to alleviate poverty, you called it, and I quote, "a mischaracterization of the Libertarian view of poverty" and "'unrestrained capitalism creating jobs' doesn't seem to be in there". Amazing, isn't it, that my "complete mischaracterization" is an upcoming argument of yours, isn't it?
There is no evidence microfinance can work in a country like ours where it takes thousands of dollars to start up businesses in most economic sectors and competition is so intense in the rest. Where it has been tried, the results have been less than impressive. Of the six quantitative studies done microfinance as of 2008, only one found it unambiguously helped with poverty to a significant degree and much of the research shows it ineffective unless the person receiving the finance already owns a business, where as it does not seem effective for starting new enterprise.One very effective tool of the Free Market is Microfinance. The concept behind Microfinance is that donors loan small-medium sums of money to people living in low income communities so that these people can use the money to invest in a long term-productive project. Essentially, Microfinance functions the same as Banks. A Bank will give you a loan for something like, a car, your ownership of this car enhances your net productivity as you can travel freely to and from work and not have to worry about paying for transportation. In the same way, a microfinance lender will lend, say, a former business owner who lost his assets in a stock market crash x amount of dollars and with this money he can invest it in another business or whatever best increases his productivity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfinan ... ng_poverty
Not actually correct. Groups can create jobs too, even where they don't have all that much spare wealth available, depending on the size, scope, and permanence of the job.Another strong poverty reducer is employment. When you look at the makeup impoverished people, the group of unemployed impoverished people heavily outweighs the group of employed impoverished people. Employment alleviates poverty. The question is, how are you able to create more opportunities for employment? It's an amazingly simple method. (1) A job can only be created by an individual with a reasonable amount of wealth at his disposal.
Again, not true. Police officers as a rule are not hired for their expected long term economic contributions to the community.(2) A job will only be created if this individual believes that hiring, paying, and maintaining workers will yield more money than the money he loses in keeping these workers.
See above.(3) A job will disappear if the worker stops being an financial asset and becomes a financial liability. Meaning, if the costs of maintaining workers superceeds the profits the business is generating, he/she will lay them off.
Hey look, it is that "complete mischaracterization" of the libertarian position I argued against in my first post of the round.How could scenario 3 possibly happen? Well, with the help of Abraxas' agenda scenario 3 is becoming a reality. Policies such as a progressive income tax or a high minimum wage will cause job loss, and only worsen the problem of poverty.
Income taxes have absolutely nothing to do with anything, as income only applied to how much of the payroll ends up staying with the worker. Regardless of how high or low it is, the business pays the same either way, what you are looking at is corporate taxes on profits, however, even then, if they reinvest the money in the corporation, they don't get taxed on it because it is a business expense. What you are talking about is the CEO having to pay a higher income tax somehow hurting the business, because, the CEO is incline to have the company overall make less money if he can't keep as much of it according to this argument.
The first problem is nothing about top company officials having to pay more of their income in taxes makes the workers as they are employed less profitable. Second, as you already pointed out, the company already gets rid of all unprofitable workers, per point three. Losing additional workers at this point would reduce the amount they end up earning. Sure, their taxes would go down, but only through a greater reduction in their income, leaving them worse off.
As for minimum wage, there is no evidence minimum wage has any significant effect on on employment. Some studies show it even has a positive effect on employment as by increasing the level of money in circulation for consumer spending, it increases demand in that market sector and others.
Put another way, and more accurately, your model of free market poverty alleviation has been determined to be completely and totally inadequate by the individual you cite as a sort of Paragon Libertarian and so he reluctantly agreed the best way to fight poverty is to have government redistribute wealth.Now, nursebenjamin brought to my attention (in a personal message) that when citing the chapter of Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman that is devoted to the subject of alleviating poverty, I omitted Friedman's lengthy treastise on the Negative Income Tax. He's right, I did not pay any attention to that in my post, and I did so voluntarily. I'm arguing for Free Market principles, and even though Milton Friedman, who is the perfect representation of Libertarian thought and scholarship, proposes a Negative Income Tax the policy in and of itself is not in agreement with Libertarian Economic thought. I realize I'm debating Abraxas, but nursebenjamin naively cites Friedman's detailed summary of NIT as some type of whole hearted endorsement when it actually isn't. Friedman has admitted in more than one place that he is a reluctant endorser of NIT, his rational is that if redistribution must be implemented in a society, NIT would be the best route to go out of all the other options. But in the end, NIT is simply another form of socialism which I do not endorse and therefore will not argue on behalf of.
You misrepresent his argument, implying he is against government intervention but the NIT is the way to do it if they do decide to intervene. This is entirely false. He said "Suppose one accepts, as I do, this line of reasoning as justifying governmental action to alleviate poverty; to set, as it were. a floor under the standard of life of every person in the community." Indeed, he explicitly endorses the justice of the government intervening, only expressing reluctance that the free market cannot and will not solve the problem.
http://books.cat-v.org/economics/capita ... chapter_12
Why do you break with him on this issue when appealing to his economic models for so much else?
Evidence begs to differ, as I presented. What evidence do you have?Healthcare
In regards to Healthcare, Abraxas' arguments for why government intervention is needed have been spurious, to say the very least. The only valid point Abraxas has made thus far is the need for government in disease control, however when it comes to healthcare access, primary care, healthcare inflation or the quality of healthcare government has no role and if it tries to assume a role the results would simply be ineffective.
I have before, I can again. Denying that rationing takes place in America is simple denial.Let's run through the problems Abraxas perceives to be wrong with American Healthcare.
(1) He has a problem with inaccessibility to care, and the lack of universal coverage. I challenged him to prove that healthcare will be denied to an individual who does not possess the adequate funds to pay for it, and I challenge him to prove that once again.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =106168331
The woman could not afford both food and medicine and because she chose to feed her family, she was denied the drugs she needed to not die.
Only to a point. They will get some care at a moment of crisis, but by that point is is often too late. They will not get things like ongoing medical treatments for things like AIDS antiviral drugs unless they can pay for them.The fact is someone who can't afford healthcare but needs healthcare, will get healthcare.
What an absolutely disgusting sentiment.This makes our healthcare system inherently redistributive. Abraxas also fails to mention that the lack of universal coverage primarily due to the fact that individuals willingly choose not to be covered by an insurance plan. It is their choice not to purchase insurance, thus an individual mandate forcing insurance upon them inhibits their liberties and the principles the Free Society they inhabit.
Choose not to buy health insurance? Like they choose Wheaties or Corn Flakes? At some point, they made the decision to not be covered in the event of a medical emergency that could ruin them and their family for as long as they live, assuming said emergency doesn't kill them first?
The fact is most people who don't have it in the US can't afford it or are uninsurable due to things like preexisting conditions.
What I find most disturbing about your post is this completely detached from reality way in which you speak about preventing people from getting the medicine they need to live or destroying their finances for decades as part of this utopian "Free Society". Nothing could be further from the truth. This isn't freedom you are talking about, it is slavery to accountants and adjustors who weigh life and suffering against piles of money and only the most blind fail to see which they will choose every time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninsured_ ... ted_States
I never mentioned the Swiss model, however, your reasoning doesn't hold up. If it did, the health systems of the European Union would have collapsed by now due to the free travel between member states and the much larger population. The rest of Europe, like France, has most certainly faced large scale conflicts before and yet still has a much better healthcare system. Why would the US be unable to implement a model like most of the EU members? What evidence do you have? Without evidence, as you have yet to present any this entire post, all you have is assertion.(2) Abraxas suggests that the United States lags behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to healthcare. Well, that depends on the standard of judgement. His argument does hold a certain amount of validity, but unfortunately it fails to take vital facts into consideration. The Swiss Healthcare model is a model the left admires, and is constantly cited as better than U.S Healthcare. But why is that? It's a small population that does not experience a large scale free movement of peoples and has suffered little to no confrontations in its history. You get a completely different situation in the United States: you have an extremely large and racially diverse population with people freely traveling inbetween states and immigrants freely crossing the north and southern border and a history of wars and confrontations that are likely to shorten the average life span of an individual. If the Swiss model were implemented in the US you'd get very different results because of those reasons listed above.
No, it makes the consumer's wallet the primary driver, a government funded healthcare system would give the consumer the greatest degree of control as they could select any system they needed without the restriction of coming up with the funds for it.Now, onto the free market initiatives to improve healthcare. The first would be a universalization of Consumer Driven Healthcare. This plan is the most ideal because it makes the consumer the primary controller and decider of his or her own healthcare choices.
Indeed, where this has been tried, it saw an increase in preventable death amongst low income families.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer-d ... on_impacts
"Most ideal" indeed.
Because they have studies the impact of both and found them to be only minimally influential. Tort reform would is estimated to maybe save 54 Billlion and Interstate Insurance Competition maybe a quarter that a decade of a 2,500 billion dollar hole. Tort Reform would be anti-free market anyway; it is by definition a government regulation of the market.The second has to do with reducing healthcare costs, and this includes two policies that Abraxas and I have debated extensively in the past: Interstate Insurance Competition and Medical Malpractice Reform. Why does Abraxas not believe these two policies will be effective cost reducers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort_refor ... state.html
I provided facts and figures and statistics, you provided one guy's opinion. I feel my case is already better supported without providing additional commentary here.Case 1: The Great Society
The Great Society refers to a set of domestic policies aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice at the federal level. These policies were implemented by LBJ, who inherited his Presidency after the assassination of JFK. It appears that Abraxas believes that this so called 'War on Poverty' was a grand success, well it wasn't. Thomas Sowell notes that the Black Family began disintegrating at this time, and prior to the Great Society were doing comparatively well for themselves. Jonah Goldberg reinforces the same point I was arguing earlier, that welfare state policies, especially when implemented at a federal level, spawns an unhealthy and socially inept 'entitlement mentality.' If Jonah Goldberg is to partisan for Abraxas, than he should try Losing Ground by Charles Murray.
I will, however, note, that among African Americans, poverty rates dropped from 55.1% in 1959 to 32.2% in 1969. You can try and point to nebulous things like the "black family disintegrating", but the fact is the statistics say real, tangible advances were made.
http://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60-179.pdf
Because it was working until we stopped implementing anti-poverty measures in a serious fashion under Nixon and the market was deregulated under Reagan. Countries that took it seriously dropped their poverty rates far lower than those of the US.Case 2: The Fair Deal
The Fair Deal refers to a set of welfare policies under President Truman. What this deal basically did was enhance and improve already existing welfare policies started by FDR. So, my question to Abraxas is with the implementation of the New Deal, then the Fair Deal, and then the Great Society why is the left today, blaming the free market for the afflictions of poverty that they believe are so great? Essentially, Abraxas agenda has been implemented time and time again yet the problem trying to be fixed has not been. Has he reached the conclusion that welfare in the United States, even though it has been tried and tried over and over again, is not a practical policy?
Has the private sector effectively regulated the border? No? Was the government manufacturing the vaccine or was it produced by the private sector resulting in shortages? Then in what sense has the market demonstrated more efficacy than the government in healthcare?Case 3: 2009 'Swine Flu Virus' Pandemic
While the eradication of Small Pox can be considered a success of cooperative national governments, the Swine Flu Virus Pandemic can been seen as the fault of the government. The problem was caused by the Federal Government because won't secure its own borders. The swine flu originated in Mexico and was brought to the United States because of unrestricted immigration, thus the failure of the federal government to secure and manage the borders caused this. Not only the, but the production and distribution of vaccines was equally deplorable. There were many instances of vaccine shortages in clinics and hospitals, and the timeline for a vaccine development was inconclusive.
This case is a red herring.
Not at all, all it indicates is that the Laffer Curve (if one accepts it) dictates there is an upper limit on government revenue and one would expect total government expenses to fall below it. Depending on the cost of your total government expenditures, welfare and healthcare included, this may or may not be an issue. You are building in the supposition that these programs would be on the wrong side of the tax line for cost while not providing any basis for doing so. Many countries with successful economies manage to pay for all of it, we can too.Case 4: The Laffer Curve
This is more of a theoretical argument. A primary component of Welfare is redistribution, and it is the redistribution of income from the wealthy to the poor by means of taxation. What we constantly hear from the left is that taxes need to be raised on the rich at a high rate, perhaps even at a rate of %100. Well, the Laffer Curve begins with the premise that at a %0 tax rate, the government will yield no revenue (obviously) and since the government yields no revenue welfare cannot exist. Well, the model goes onto predict that a tax rate of or near %100 will also cause the government to yield no revenue:
Thus, there exists an optimal point of taxation that should be moderate-low that would allow government to generate revenue and at the same time, for taxes to be levied. However, the problem is that as the Welfare State is expanded, government needs to put more funds into it and therefore generate more funds and therefore raise taxes putting the curve closer and closer to that %100 mark, which would render the entire upper class (whose income is being redistributed) useless.
I note once again you provided very little in the way of evidence, or, for that matter, even argumentation for the power of the free market to alleviate poverty or provide affordable healthcare for the American people, you also completely neglected to provide any kind of rationale for why the US is behind in quality of care nor why the European model wouldn't work here. Evidence and support are everything here and I hope next time out I will see a bit more of it.
Post #15
I apologize for the long delay in making this post, I had a medical condition that required surgery and haven't felt up to it until this point.
Now, on with the show.
Round 3: Labor, Discrimination, and Civil Rights
Once again I am faced with tackling a comprehensive view of two enormously complicated and detailed topics in the limited space of a single post and simply lack the room to do them justice. I do not believe the reasons for the necessity of government regulation of labor and protection against discrimination are necessarily closely related enough to warrant grouping them together, and so I will break them out into two separate segments.
Firstly, on labor, we need not look much beyond the history of the United States to see why regulation of the practices surrounding the treatment of workers. Both the first and second industrial booms of the United States were characterized by brutal working conditions, resulting in countless deaths of those sacrificed to the twin gods of cost cutting and profit boosting.(1) Child labor was rampant.(2) Pay was incredibly low,(1) even frequently relying on a trucking system in which the only compensation they received was the capacity to purchase more goods from their employer, often on a line of credit at prices that far exceeded their pay, ensuring they could never escape debt and debtor's prison should they try to work elsewhere.(3)(4)
Work days were extremely long, grossly curtailing the possibility of pursuing other interests.(5) Sick days and vacation time were essentially non-existent.(6) If you got crippled from a workplace accident, well, you just should have been more careful; you certainly wouldn't be compensated for it.(7) You were expected to be grateful you had any job at all with which to feed yourself and the fact you existed in a state of virtual slavery was immaterial.
It wasn't until employees were able to organize themselves lobby the government to intervene in this sorry state of affairs that things began to approach a state where individuals could expect to labor their way up from poverty.(8) Indeed, the entire concept of the American middle class owes its existence to government intervening in the labor market to ensure the employer initiated race to the bottom that invariably follows from their interests to maximize profits and minimize expenses has a floor below which they cannot legally venture.(9)(10)
What has followed since? If one accepts the idea that the free tide of capital raises all boats and attempting to regulate the fires of industry just burns all involved, one should expect the working conditions and levels of productivity in America to plummet. What do we see instead? The gross national product continued on a relatively steady upward trend until the Great Depression (exempting the civil war and the War of 1812 and the usual market fluctuations). We see this continue to build even through the Gilded Age as organized labor became more powerful and more government protections were afforded to them too.(11)
More recently, following WWII, when regulation of industry was the strongest in our history, we made enormous gains not only in our gross output, but also in the participation of the average American in that wealth. Real wages grew steadily, keeping pace with GDP and raising the standard of living.(12) However, when regulations were weakened during the Reagan "Revolution", what we saw is the GDP continue to grow and productivity continue to skyrocket to ever higher heights, however, for the first time in decades workers were not sharing in it. Real wages stagnated as runaway profit lust took over and the increasing levels of income were redirected to the shareholders instead of the employees.(12)(13) This can be directly traced to the weakening of union protections under federal law.
What we see now in the market and the state of the American worker, as a direct result of deregulation, is a situation where the US for the first time stands a very real chance of leaving the generations that follow in a worse off position than the generation that came before them. The regulation of companies does not inherently hinder economic growth, indeed as was observed by Henry Ford, things like lowering the number of hours worked per day creates a demand in the market as leisure time expands which helps drive the fires of industry.(14) When all employers play by the same rules, everyone can benefit, and sometimes the only way to get them to is to make a law. You see this in game theory, where maximum overall advantage is held if all parties cooperate, but there is a perceived individual advantage if you can get other parties to cooperate and then you do something else.(15)
More than that, who directly interacts with you regularly, has a greater power discrepancy than that of your employer? Your employer has a tremendous influence on whether you can afford to eat, afford to have housing, afford leisure activities, be permitted leisure time, afford medical care for you or your family, etc. They have strong influence on when you can get up every day, when you go to bed, who you spend your day with, and under what conditions you will spend that day. Who can honestly say they think society would be better off if this sphere that makes up such an enormous portion of the lives of hundreds of millions would be better off left to the whims of individual employers whose primary concern is necessarily the overall maximization of profit for the company as a whole rather than the well being of their employees? Instead, does it not make more sense to have the people, the democratically selected government, set the framework under which these interactions will take place?
I can hear two objections already, so I will address them now. Sure, an employee can leave employment to work either for another company or for themselves, but how practical is this? The majority of start up companies don't live much past five years(16), leaving the individual in generally worse position financially than they were before they started.(17) Further, every job opening today has roughly four Americans applying for it (not counting the "underemployed")(18). With those kinds of odds against finding other employment, how does one reasonably expect a person to abandon their posting when faced with the urgency of everyday life, such as acquiring the next meal, ensuring your medicine will be available, and keeping power to your heater going in the dead of winter?
Another objection might be that companies will automatically improve work conditions and pay in order to compete with each other to get the best talent. However, history shows us this is not the case. As we have already seen in this thread, companies as something of a routine will cut safety measures when left to their own devices for determining appropriate work place management, even in direct violation of federal law.(19) Can it seriously be contended that these conditions, when left to themselves, would get better when companies are willing to risk fines and penalties to save money in the short term already? Further, in a tight market, where workers are desperate, lacking in other options, and in competition for a fraction of the jobs available as those seeking them, not to mention the ever increasing role computers are having in taking over positions previously occupied by humans, they can reliably replace their labor force in many cases even under abhorrent work conditions because the alternative to working under bad conditions is in all probability not working, which means not eating. To think employers would be unaware of this and not use it to their advantage for improving profitability would be absurd. Equally absurd would be to think that companies would not follow each other further and further towards the bottom as by spending less money on working conditions, they become more competitive, at least initially, and can return more value to their shareholders. Once a company starts to get ahead by cutting their benefits or cutting their pay, it will quickly become the industry standard and because of this one can indeed expect a race to the bottom as companies probe just how little they can spend and still get away with it for the sake of profit.
The question is simple, do we want the government to be a force that promotes fairness in the interaction between its citizens? Even most libertarians to some degree recognize the government role of stopping explicit force from being used against citizenry, holding the government at the very least necessary for protecting through use of military forces for external force and police from internal. They further support the use of the government to prevent fraud, the simple act of deliberate miscommunication to get an unfair position over another. Why should we stop there, at the explicit force level, but not act also to balance the level of implicit force that can be applied? In the end, the employment agreement always carries with it an unequal power relationship and the implicit threat of force by cutting off the means of sustenance for the employee by the employer. Is it not then proper we determine, as a society, how that interaction is to take place to minimize exploitation of the vulnerable Americans?
This brings me to the second segment, how government intervention is necessary to protect minority rights when it comes to discrimination and civil rights. This, I think, should be fairly self evident. A large section of the country once attempted to break away and fought a civil war for the express purpose of denying civil rights on the basis of skin color. I ask that you not say it was for state's rights; if you look at the list of grievances presented for their succession, the one consistent theme among those states who listed such is slavery.(20) Further, look at many of the civil rights breakthroughs in American history, they came down as a court ruling from the US Supreme Court, (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, Boynton v. Virginia, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, Gates v. Collier, and countless more represent the fundamental necessity of federal court involvement)(21)(22), as legislation from the federal level (Civil Rights act of 1957, Equal Pay Act of 1963, Civil Rights act of 1960, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Civil Rights act of 1968)(23)(24), or an amendment ratified by some states over the express objection of others (13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, and 24th Amendments to the US Constitution)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29).
I'm not merely speaking of the civil rights of African Americans, but on things like women's suffrage and the rights of people of certain national heritage, disability, or homosexual rights as well. Time and time again we see the fastest and most effective way to put an end to things like segregation, denial of voting rights, ensuring fair opportunity to work and learn, and even bringing to justice those who would harm minorities has been the federal justice system.
What is more to the point, we have seen local governance can often not be relied upon to enforce those laws or even go so far as to actively attempt force to suppress those rights, in perhaps the most famous case deploying national guard forces to prevent African American children from going to a previously all white school in Arkansas.(30) There are still places in the US today where it is not safe to be what the locals consider the wrong color, where the locals do not even make the effort to disguise a deep racism and hatred.(31)(32)(33) Some places are more subtle than doing things like banning interracial couples from attending their church,(34) some will simply choose another applicant for a job or a home,(35)(36) some might pull you over just a little bit more or use a little bit more force when they do it,(37)(38) or maybe choose to approach that other couple about helping them find a car instead of you.(35)(36) Racism lives; the documentation of this is bountiful. If the free market can be relied upon to defeat it, why does it still remain with us?
The reason is simple, the free market does not necessarily encourage tolerance. While broadening customer base is often preferable, some businesses work on a model of exclusivity where the patrons don't have to deal with certain other people. You don't see a lot of working class people at the yacht club, and the very wealthy will pay a lot of money to keep it that way. Likewise, if you have a customer base that is racist, they may well choose to shop at establishments that are likewise racist over more liberal ones. In locations with a lot of racism, or few minorities or supporters of minority rights, there may well be no market incentive to change the objectionable behavior. Historically, this has extended not merely to cities, but to entire states. I again cite the case of the Little Rock 9(30) in which essentially the state of Arkansas itself a little over 50 years ago acted as an agent to enforce illegal and unethical racial segregation with popular support among the locals. Under those conditions, how does leaving it to the states or the private citizenry even begin to solve the problem? The answer is it can't. Very little economic pressure, very little internal social pressure, can be brought when most of the populace supports the repressive measures. For this reason, the federal government is a virtual necessity for fast acting, effective social change of this nature.
Now, it is worth noting that the government can be and often has been on the wrong side of civil rights in the past. Federal rulings were made in support of segregation, such as the infamous separate but equal ruling from Plessy v. Fergusson,(39) or when the Woodrow Wilson administration segregated Federal Departments in the 1910s that had never before been segregated,(40) or almost the entire history of the US as it applies to Native Americans.(41) As such, it must be noted the federal government cannot be counted on as the initiating force behind such social change. It is reported that when lobbied to pass legislation, FDR said, "I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it."(42) What we can learn from that is in order for the federal government to implement change, a pressure must be created from the common people, a national attitude in general that requires that the government do the right thing. It is only once it becomes politically inexpedient not to act for the good that the government can be reliably counted upon to create broad change for the better, and this is where private leaders and champions of civil rights come in, such as MLK. However, as we have also seen, private action alone is insufficient for national change, and so once the tipping point is reached and enough support exists to create and enforce laws that end segregation, for example, the federal government becomes the most effective tool for pushing the change into every corner of the nation.
Towards that end, I ask you, where do you think race relations would be today without intervention of the federal government? Do you believe that the dramatic changes seen in even just the last 50 years would have come about organically? Would segregation have come to an end as it did in all parts of the US? Would anti-miscegenation laws still exist but for a ruling of the Supreme Court (in particular since as recently as two years ago in Louisiana a judge refused to permit a marriage due to it being between different races?)(43) Would employers be able to hire or fire whoever they choose on the basis of race alone? I think you would be correct in answering that in the vast majority of the US would be as it is today, however, there would be very real pockets in which civil rights on the basis of race are denied, particularly in the south. Further, we already see that without federal intervention, rights are being denied on the basis of sexual orientation.(44)
Finally, along these lines, I would have to ask if nonintervention by the federal government, the trademark of the libertarian ideal of policy setting from the federal level could be counted on to reliably work better as a means to end the civil rights injustices that plagued our society up through the middle of this past century, why didn't they? Nothing was forcing businesses and local governments to discriminate against people, and yet they continued to do it until the government made them stop. I don't see how it can be argued here that the government does not have a legitimate role to play in ensuring that all citizens are given equal rights and as being the most effective way to do so on a national scale. At best you could argue that the injustices of discrimination are less problematic than the government intervening to end them or that specific implementations of law created to end discrimination were poorly thought out or poorly executed, however, I don't think you would find much traction for ending the practice of government involvement to protect the rights of the discriminated against on either of those grounds. Every once in a while you'll see an argument regarding "reverse racism", but that is patent nonsense as well, even at the most egregious only applying to a handful of poorly worded or poorly implemented civil rights measures and I sincerely hope this is not the counterargument you intended to make.
Truth be told, I am having a hard time seeing what the argument for anything other than government intervention would be. Even today, we see people being discriminated against for race, such as the recent declaration interracial couples were not permitted to attend church together in Kentucky,(34) the disproportionate sentencing of minority convicts(45)(46), the greater difficulties associated with getting a job or housing or even getting service at a store(35)(36). Many of these things take place in clear defiance of the law and so how can anyone claim that things would get better if we were to just leave things alone and let the market take care of it, when the market has been failing to take care of it for hundreds of years, is beyond me.
In keeping with tradition:
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Instance 1: The Ludlow Massacre and the Colorado Coalfield Wars (4)(47)(48)
In 1913-1914, Ludlow was a company town in Colorado, which meant everything that happened there fell under the direct control of the company and the man that owned it, in this case Colorado Fuel and Iron and John Rockefeller Jr. It was set up as a fiefdom, the workers were payed in scrip, were required to use the facilities (such as doctors) the company provided, they were not allowed to leave the compound and towards that end the perimeter was patrolled by guards with machine guns, your employer controlled where you ate, where you lived, how you spent your time, and if you complained the company could fire you and take back everything. To make matters worse, the company paid on a tonnage system (using rigged scales to deliberately underpay workers), which meant that they didn't get paid to do things like prop up mines so they didn't cave in on miner's heads resulting in Colorado having a fatality rate in their mines more than twice the national average.
In an effort to improve their lot, the workers attempted to unionize. Rockefeller hated unions with a passion and so used espionage, harassment, intimidation, outright assault, and even attempted murder to keep unions out of his kingdom. Finally, conditions got bad enough that the miners organized enough to present a series of demands to CF&I, including being able to officially unionize (as union mines were nationally 40% safer than non-union mines), pay for essential mine operations not directly related to coal extraction (removing impurities, reinforcing mining shafts), being able to hire independent weighers of the coal they were mining, and the removal of the armed guards, a pay increase, being able to purchase goods and services as they choose, and actually obeying federal and state laws. The demands were rejected and the workers went on strike and evicted from their homes.
They moved into a nearby tent city at the mouth of the canyon set up by a sympathetic union where they set up a picket line. To combat this, the mine owners hired thugs to snipe (literally) at the striking workers, eventually resulting in them bringing in an armored car with a machine gun to open fire on the striking workers. When this failed to break them up, the Colorado National Guard was called in (the national guard having been paid by Rockefeller. Eventually, as the situation continued to decline, the militia decided things had gone far enough and attacked the camp, killing 11 people. In retaliation, the miners armed themselves and set off for the next ten days destroying mine after mine, as well as waging a guerrilla war against the militia that would claim the lives of up to 199 people overall. This continued until Woodrow Wilson ordered in the US Military to disarm both sides. Charges were pressed but no real punishment came to either side. The conflict bankrupted the union, and the conditions for the miners would not improve until a nearby mine explosion three years later would kill 121 and trigger reforms that would go into effect in the 1920s.
Lest you think we're past all that:
Instance 2: Upper Big Branch Mine Explosion (49)(50)
In 2010, the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia exploded due to methane and coal dust build up, killing 29. The year prior, the mine was issued 515 citations for disregarding the health and safety of their miners, and 1342 over the previous five. However, possibly due to bribery (this is still under investigation), none of the citations issued reached the “flagrant� level which would have incurred hundreds of thousands in fines on top of what they had already built up, nor were the miners notified the mine did not even take basic safety precautions. In addition to the explosion, the owner of the mine, Massey Energy, frequently used intimidation tactics to force miners to work in unsafe conditions, including areas with insufficient oxygen, improperly supported mine shafts, and inadequate ventilation to remove toxic gasses.
In the end, MSHA determined the root cause was “a corporate culture that valued production over safety�, because, as with the Texas City Refinery explosion, dead bodies don't appear in expense reports. Due to the incident, the company that had since purchased Massey was forced to pay almost $220 Million in fines and settlements.
Instance 3: Little Rock Nine (30)(51)
After Brown V Board of Education, for the first time it was officially illegal nationwide to have segregated schools. This would be tested for the first time 3 years later in 1957 when nine African-American students were enrolled in Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. When they attempted to attend school on September 3rd, a line of National Guardsmen, under orders from Arkansas Governor Faubus turned them back. They continued to hold a presence there until September 20th, when they were replaced by police.
On September 23rd, as the students attempted to enter the school again amidst a hostile crowd of 1000 segregationists, another 150 Guardsman were placed on notice to potentially intervene again on behalf of racism. It was not to be, however. President Eisenhower, after having warned Faubus not to defy the court, federalized the entire Arkansas National Guard and ordered them to be ready to help integrate the school. He also deployed some of the 101st Airborne Division to act as guards and escorts for the students, who, gradually, passed the responsibility over to the still federalized National Guard. Despite the enormous difficulty, 8 of the nine students, due to federal intervention, were able to attend school that year.
Instance 4: Mississippi Burning Murders(52)
In 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared in Mississippi in Neshoba County. Due to the attention this received, creating a national outcry, President Johnson forced J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to investigate. One hundred and fifty FBI agents, as well additional personnel, including Navy divers, were sent in to attempt to find the then missing, presumed dead, workers. Initially, they weren't able to find the missing trio, but did find seven bodies of African-Americans that had been abducted and murdered.
Eventually, after issuing a twenty five thousand dollar reward, someone came forward and told them where the bodies were buried. It was determined the crimes had been carried out by the Ku Klux Klan and identified 18 individuals either directly responsible for or complicit in the killings, one of which was in fact the sheriff. The state of Mississippi refused to go forward with any charges, and so all that could be done was to charge them at the federal level with lesser crimes under the Force Act of 1870, which resulted in numerous convictions but no more than six years in prison for any of them. It wasn't until 2005, more than 40 years of a known killers walking free that a single one of those responsible was charged with murder.
------------------------------
I believe I have shown fairly conclusively why federal intervention is both good and necessary. In this post, and for that matter, the two previous ones, I have shown that businesses can and do abuse their workers when doing so increases their profits. Because of the enormous disparity in the amount of force wielded by employer and employee, coupled with the overwhelming portion of a worker's life demands that the boundaries in which those interaction take place be set by the people of the nation. As noted elsewhere, the owners of businesses are not accountable to the people of the country, certainly not in an age of globalization, but rather are only interested in keeping shareholders happy. Further still, even when a company is not morally bankrupt, local management may be in their efforts to come in on time and under budget to advance their own career. As such, in order to ensure the fair treatment, well being, and safety of every American in the work force, we require not only national laws enforcing a strict code of conduct and standards by which employers must abide, but also that these laws be enforced with due vigilance and necessary resources utilized.
Likewise, I have shown that local populaces and local governments cannot be counted on to end discrimination nor systematic racism on their own, and that at times they have been participants in a purveyors of these very things. The most powerful force in America for equality has been the American government when enough of the people decide that the rights of the other must be protected as surely as the rights of their own. Hatred, intolerance, bigotry; all these things can take deep root in an area, passed from generation to generation like a hereditary disease. If we are to root them out everywhere, remove them from the fabric of American culture, we must apply pressure towards that end. If the locals will not do it and the state will not do it, where does that leave us but to have the American people as a whole take charge of removing one of the ugliest warts of our nation?
Neither of these causes is automatic. Both require a populace that is willing to pressure the government into taking action they would not take on their own, in particular when powerful interests pump in boatloads of cash to be allowed to get away with murder, sometimes literally. However, in the end how we structure our society needs to be something we decide as a nation; it cannot be left to only those with money or those with hatred.
(1) http://www.academicamerican.com/recongi ... dage2.html
(2) http://www.eiu.edu/eiutps/childhood.php
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons#Authorship
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre#Background
(5) http://www.gobankingrates.com/history-o ... e-economy/
(6) http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_asset ... ppart2.pdf
(7) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27 ... ted_States
(8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_hist ... ted_States
(9) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill
(10) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Act
(11) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_h ... ted_States
(12) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80 ... _expansion
(13) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of ... ted_States
(14) http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/ford.htm
(15) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/
(16) http://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/sbfaq.pdf
(17) http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/ ... 29905.html
(18) http://www.labor.ny.gov/stats/job-seeke ... ening.shtm
(19) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City ... _explosion
(20) http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html
(21) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_v._Collier
(22) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._B ... _Education
(23) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-Am ... %931968%29
(24) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Pay_Act_of_1963
(25) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth ... nstitution
(26) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth ... nstitution
(27) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteenth_ ... nstitution
(28) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth ... nstitution
(29) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fou ... nstitution
(30) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
(31) http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/2 ... -Wisconsin
(32) http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jan/24 ... e-kaplan24
(33) http://newamericamedia.org/2011/10/will ... n-town.php
(34) http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-573 ... ncol;lst;5
(35)
(36)
(37) http://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/dwb01.htm
(38) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/nyreg ... gewanted=1
(39) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson
(40) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wi ... vil_Rights
(41) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Ame ... ted_States
(42) http://www.progressive.org/mag/nichols0109.html
(43) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Louis ... e_incident
(44) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_m ... ted_States
(45) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_pu ... mong_races
(46) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarcerat ... Minorities
(47) http://www.sangres.com/history/coalfieldwar01.htm
(48) http://www.du.edu/ludlow/cfhist3.html
(49) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Big_ ... e_disaster
(50) http://ehstoday.com/standards/MSHA/MSHA ... ssey-1215/
(51) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_N ... igh_School
(52) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississipp ... rs_murders
Now, on with the show.
Round 3: Labor, Discrimination, and Civil Rights
Once again I am faced with tackling a comprehensive view of two enormously complicated and detailed topics in the limited space of a single post and simply lack the room to do them justice. I do not believe the reasons for the necessity of government regulation of labor and protection against discrimination are necessarily closely related enough to warrant grouping them together, and so I will break them out into two separate segments.
Firstly, on labor, we need not look much beyond the history of the United States to see why regulation of the practices surrounding the treatment of workers. Both the first and second industrial booms of the United States were characterized by brutal working conditions, resulting in countless deaths of those sacrificed to the twin gods of cost cutting and profit boosting.(1) Child labor was rampant.(2) Pay was incredibly low,(1) even frequently relying on a trucking system in which the only compensation they received was the capacity to purchase more goods from their employer, often on a line of credit at prices that far exceeded their pay, ensuring they could never escape debt and debtor's prison should they try to work elsewhere.(3)(4)
Work days were extremely long, grossly curtailing the possibility of pursuing other interests.(5) Sick days and vacation time were essentially non-existent.(6) If you got crippled from a workplace accident, well, you just should have been more careful; you certainly wouldn't be compensated for it.(7) You were expected to be grateful you had any job at all with which to feed yourself and the fact you existed in a state of virtual slavery was immaterial.
It wasn't until employees were able to organize themselves lobby the government to intervene in this sorry state of affairs that things began to approach a state where individuals could expect to labor their way up from poverty.(8) Indeed, the entire concept of the American middle class owes its existence to government intervening in the labor market to ensure the employer initiated race to the bottom that invariably follows from their interests to maximize profits and minimize expenses has a floor below which they cannot legally venture.(9)(10)
What has followed since? If one accepts the idea that the free tide of capital raises all boats and attempting to regulate the fires of industry just burns all involved, one should expect the working conditions and levels of productivity in America to plummet. What do we see instead? The gross national product continued on a relatively steady upward trend until the Great Depression (exempting the civil war and the War of 1812 and the usual market fluctuations). We see this continue to build even through the Gilded Age as organized labor became more powerful and more government protections were afforded to them too.(11)
More recently, following WWII, when regulation of industry was the strongest in our history, we made enormous gains not only in our gross output, but also in the participation of the average American in that wealth. Real wages grew steadily, keeping pace with GDP and raising the standard of living.(12) However, when regulations were weakened during the Reagan "Revolution", what we saw is the GDP continue to grow and productivity continue to skyrocket to ever higher heights, however, for the first time in decades workers were not sharing in it. Real wages stagnated as runaway profit lust took over and the increasing levels of income were redirected to the shareholders instead of the employees.(12)(13) This can be directly traced to the weakening of union protections under federal law.
What we see now in the market and the state of the American worker, as a direct result of deregulation, is a situation where the US for the first time stands a very real chance of leaving the generations that follow in a worse off position than the generation that came before them. The regulation of companies does not inherently hinder economic growth, indeed as was observed by Henry Ford, things like lowering the number of hours worked per day creates a demand in the market as leisure time expands which helps drive the fires of industry.(14) When all employers play by the same rules, everyone can benefit, and sometimes the only way to get them to is to make a law. You see this in game theory, where maximum overall advantage is held if all parties cooperate, but there is a perceived individual advantage if you can get other parties to cooperate and then you do something else.(15)
More than that, who directly interacts with you regularly, has a greater power discrepancy than that of your employer? Your employer has a tremendous influence on whether you can afford to eat, afford to have housing, afford leisure activities, be permitted leisure time, afford medical care for you or your family, etc. They have strong influence on when you can get up every day, when you go to bed, who you spend your day with, and under what conditions you will spend that day. Who can honestly say they think society would be better off if this sphere that makes up such an enormous portion of the lives of hundreds of millions would be better off left to the whims of individual employers whose primary concern is necessarily the overall maximization of profit for the company as a whole rather than the well being of their employees? Instead, does it not make more sense to have the people, the democratically selected government, set the framework under which these interactions will take place?
I can hear two objections already, so I will address them now. Sure, an employee can leave employment to work either for another company or for themselves, but how practical is this? The majority of start up companies don't live much past five years(16), leaving the individual in generally worse position financially than they were before they started.(17) Further, every job opening today has roughly four Americans applying for it (not counting the "underemployed")(18). With those kinds of odds against finding other employment, how does one reasonably expect a person to abandon their posting when faced with the urgency of everyday life, such as acquiring the next meal, ensuring your medicine will be available, and keeping power to your heater going in the dead of winter?
Another objection might be that companies will automatically improve work conditions and pay in order to compete with each other to get the best talent. However, history shows us this is not the case. As we have already seen in this thread, companies as something of a routine will cut safety measures when left to their own devices for determining appropriate work place management, even in direct violation of federal law.(19) Can it seriously be contended that these conditions, when left to themselves, would get better when companies are willing to risk fines and penalties to save money in the short term already? Further, in a tight market, where workers are desperate, lacking in other options, and in competition for a fraction of the jobs available as those seeking them, not to mention the ever increasing role computers are having in taking over positions previously occupied by humans, they can reliably replace their labor force in many cases even under abhorrent work conditions because the alternative to working under bad conditions is in all probability not working, which means not eating. To think employers would be unaware of this and not use it to their advantage for improving profitability would be absurd. Equally absurd would be to think that companies would not follow each other further and further towards the bottom as by spending less money on working conditions, they become more competitive, at least initially, and can return more value to their shareholders. Once a company starts to get ahead by cutting their benefits or cutting their pay, it will quickly become the industry standard and because of this one can indeed expect a race to the bottom as companies probe just how little they can spend and still get away with it for the sake of profit.
The question is simple, do we want the government to be a force that promotes fairness in the interaction between its citizens? Even most libertarians to some degree recognize the government role of stopping explicit force from being used against citizenry, holding the government at the very least necessary for protecting through use of military forces for external force and police from internal. They further support the use of the government to prevent fraud, the simple act of deliberate miscommunication to get an unfair position over another. Why should we stop there, at the explicit force level, but not act also to balance the level of implicit force that can be applied? In the end, the employment agreement always carries with it an unequal power relationship and the implicit threat of force by cutting off the means of sustenance for the employee by the employer. Is it not then proper we determine, as a society, how that interaction is to take place to minimize exploitation of the vulnerable Americans?
This brings me to the second segment, how government intervention is necessary to protect minority rights when it comes to discrimination and civil rights. This, I think, should be fairly self evident. A large section of the country once attempted to break away and fought a civil war for the express purpose of denying civil rights on the basis of skin color. I ask that you not say it was for state's rights; if you look at the list of grievances presented for their succession, the one consistent theme among those states who listed such is slavery.(20) Further, look at many of the civil rights breakthroughs in American history, they came down as a court ruling from the US Supreme Court, (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, Boynton v. Virginia, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, Gates v. Collier, and countless more represent the fundamental necessity of federal court involvement)(21)(22), as legislation from the federal level (Civil Rights act of 1957, Equal Pay Act of 1963, Civil Rights act of 1960, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Civil Rights act of 1968)(23)(24), or an amendment ratified by some states over the express objection of others (13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, and 24th Amendments to the US Constitution)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29).
I'm not merely speaking of the civil rights of African Americans, but on things like women's suffrage and the rights of people of certain national heritage, disability, or homosexual rights as well. Time and time again we see the fastest and most effective way to put an end to things like segregation, denial of voting rights, ensuring fair opportunity to work and learn, and even bringing to justice those who would harm minorities has been the federal justice system.
What is more to the point, we have seen local governance can often not be relied upon to enforce those laws or even go so far as to actively attempt force to suppress those rights, in perhaps the most famous case deploying national guard forces to prevent African American children from going to a previously all white school in Arkansas.(30) There are still places in the US today where it is not safe to be what the locals consider the wrong color, where the locals do not even make the effort to disguise a deep racism and hatred.(31)(32)(33) Some places are more subtle than doing things like banning interracial couples from attending their church,(34) some will simply choose another applicant for a job or a home,(35)(36) some might pull you over just a little bit more or use a little bit more force when they do it,(37)(38) or maybe choose to approach that other couple about helping them find a car instead of you.(35)(36) Racism lives; the documentation of this is bountiful. If the free market can be relied upon to defeat it, why does it still remain with us?
The reason is simple, the free market does not necessarily encourage tolerance. While broadening customer base is often preferable, some businesses work on a model of exclusivity where the patrons don't have to deal with certain other people. You don't see a lot of working class people at the yacht club, and the very wealthy will pay a lot of money to keep it that way. Likewise, if you have a customer base that is racist, they may well choose to shop at establishments that are likewise racist over more liberal ones. In locations with a lot of racism, or few minorities or supporters of minority rights, there may well be no market incentive to change the objectionable behavior. Historically, this has extended not merely to cities, but to entire states. I again cite the case of the Little Rock 9(30) in which essentially the state of Arkansas itself a little over 50 years ago acted as an agent to enforce illegal and unethical racial segregation with popular support among the locals. Under those conditions, how does leaving it to the states or the private citizenry even begin to solve the problem? The answer is it can't. Very little economic pressure, very little internal social pressure, can be brought when most of the populace supports the repressive measures. For this reason, the federal government is a virtual necessity for fast acting, effective social change of this nature.
Now, it is worth noting that the government can be and often has been on the wrong side of civil rights in the past. Federal rulings were made in support of segregation, such as the infamous separate but equal ruling from Plessy v. Fergusson,(39) or when the Woodrow Wilson administration segregated Federal Departments in the 1910s that had never before been segregated,(40) or almost the entire history of the US as it applies to Native Americans.(41) As such, it must be noted the federal government cannot be counted on as the initiating force behind such social change. It is reported that when lobbied to pass legislation, FDR said, "I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it."(42) What we can learn from that is in order for the federal government to implement change, a pressure must be created from the common people, a national attitude in general that requires that the government do the right thing. It is only once it becomes politically inexpedient not to act for the good that the government can be reliably counted upon to create broad change for the better, and this is where private leaders and champions of civil rights come in, such as MLK. However, as we have also seen, private action alone is insufficient for national change, and so once the tipping point is reached and enough support exists to create and enforce laws that end segregation, for example, the federal government becomes the most effective tool for pushing the change into every corner of the nation.
Towards that end, I ask you, where do you think race relations would be today without intervention of the federal government? Do you believe that the dramatic changes seen in even just the last 50 years would have come about organically? Would segregation have come to an end as it did in all parts of the US? Would anti-miscegenation laws still exist but for a ruling of the Supreme Court (in particular since as recently as two years ago in Louisiana a judge refused to permit a marriage due to it being between different races?)(43) Would employers be able to hire or fire whoever they choose on the basis of race alone? I think you would be correct in answering that in the vast majority of the US would be as it is today, however, there would be very real pockets in which civil rights on the basis of race are denied, particularly in the south. Further, we already see that without federal intervention, rights are being denied on the basis of sexual orientation.(44)
Finally, along these lines, I would have to ask if nonintervention by the federal government, the trademark of the libertarian ideal of policy setting from the federal level could be counted on to reliably work better as a means to end the civil rights injustices that plagued our society up through the middle of this past century, why didn't they? Nothing was forcing businesses and local governments to discriminate against people, and yet they continued to do it until the government made them stop. I don't see how it can be argued here that the government does not have a legitimate role to play in ensuring that all citizens are given equal rights and as being the most effective way to do so on a national scale. At best you could argue that the injustices of discrimination are less problematic than the government intervening to end them or that specific implementations of law created to end discrimination were poorly thought out or poorly executed, however, I don't think you would find much traction for ending the practice of government involvement to protect the rights of the discriminated against on either of those grounds. Every once in a while you'll see an argument regarding "reverse racism", but that is patent nonsense as well, even at the most egregious only applying to a handful of poorly worded or poorly implemented civil rights measures and I sincerely hope this is not the counterargument you intended to make.
Truth be told, I am having a hard time seeing what the argument for anything other than government intervention would be. Even today, we see people being discriminated against for race, such as the recent declaration interracial couples were not permitted to attend church together in Kentucky,(34) the disproportionate sentencing of minority convicts(45)(46), the greater difficulties associated with getting a job or housing or even getting service at a store(35)(36). Many of these things take place in clear defiance of the law and so how can anyone claim that things would get better if we were to just leave things alone and let the market take care of it, when the market has been failing to take care of it for hundreds of years, is beyond me.
In keeping with tradition:
----------------------------------------
Instance 1: The Ludlow Massacre and the Colorado Coalfield Wars (4)(47)(48)
In 1913-1914, Ludlow was a company town in Colorado, which meant everything that happened there fell under the direct control of the company and the man that owned it, in this case Colorado Fuel and Iron and John Rockefeller Jr. It was set up as a fiefdom, the workers were payed in scrip, were required to use the facilities (such as doctors) the company provided, they were not allowed to leave the compound and towards that end the perimeter was patrolled by guards with machine guns, your employer controlled where you ate, where you lived, how you spent your time, and if you complained the company could fire you and take back everything. To make matters worse, the company paid on a tonnage system (using rigged scales to deliberately underpay workers), which meant that they didn't get paid to do things like prop up mines so they didn't cave in on miner's heads resulting in Colorado having a fatality rate in their mines more than twice the national average.
In an effort to improve their lot, the workers attempted to unionize. Rockefeller hated unions with a passion and so used espionage, harassment, intimidation, outright assault, and even attempted murder to keep unions out of his kingdom. Finally, conditions got bad enough that the miners organized enough to present a series of demands to CF&I, including being able to officially unionize (as union mines were nationally 40% safer than non-union mines), pay for essential mine operations not directly related to coal extraction (removing impurities, reinforcing mining shafts), being able to hire independent weighers of the coal they were mining, and the removal of the armed guards, a pay increase, being able to purchase goods and services as they choose, and actually obeying federal and state laws. The demands were rejected and the workers went on strike and evicted from their homes.
They moved into a nearby tent city at the mouth of the canyon set up by a sympathetic union where they set up a picket line. To combat this, the mine owners hired thugs to snipe (literally) at the striking workers, eventually resulting in them bringing in an armored car with a machine gun to open fire on the striking workers. When this failed to break them up, the Colorado National Guard was called in (the national guard having been paid by Rockefeller. Eventually, as the situation continued to decline, the militia decided things had gone far enough and attacked the camp, killing 11 people. In retaliation, the miners armed themselves and set off for the next ten days destroying mine after mine, as well as waging a guerrilla war against the militia that would claim the lives of up to 199 people overall. This continued until Woodrow Wilson ordered in the US Military to disarm both sides. Charges were pressed but no real punishment came to either side. The conflict bankrupted the union, and the conditions for the miners would not improve until a nearby mine explosion three years later would kill 121 and trigger reforms that would go into effect in the 1920s.
Lest you think we're past all that:
Instance 2: Upper Big Branch Mine Explosion (49)(50)
In 2010, the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia exploded due to methane and coal dust build up, killing 29. The year prior, the mine was issued 515 citations for disregarding the health and safety of their miners, and 1342 over the previous five. However, possibly due to bribery (this is still under investigation), none of the citations issued reached the “flagrant� level which would have incurred hundreds of thousands in fines on top of what they had already built up, nor were the miners notified the mine did not even take basic safety precautions. In addition to the explosion, the owner of the mine, Massey Energy, frequently used intimidation tactics to force miners to work in unsafe conditions, including areas with insufficient oxygen, improperly supported mine shafts, and inadequate ventilation to remove toxic gasses.
In the end, MSHA determined the root cause was “a corporate culture that valued production over safety�, because, as with the Texas City Refinery explosion, dead bodies don't appear in expense reports. Due to the incident, the company that had since purchased Massey was forced to pay almost $220 Million in fines and settlements.
Instance 3: Little Rock Nine (30)(51)
After Brown V Board of Education, for the first time it was officially illegal nationwide to have segregated schools. This would be tested for the first time 3 years later in 1957 when nine African-American students were enrolled in Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. When they attempted to attend school on September 3rd, a line of National Guardsmen, under orders from Arkansas Governor Faubus turned them back. They continued to hold a presence there until September 20th, when they were replaced by police.
On September 23rd, as the students attempted to enter the school again amidst a hostile crowd of 1000 segregationists, another 150 Guardsman were placed on notice to potentially intervene again on behalf of racism. It was not to be, however. President Eisenhower, after having warned Faubus not to defy the court, federalized the entire Arkansas National Guard and ordered them to be ready to help integrate the school. He also deployed some of the 101st Airborne Division to act as guards and escorts for the students, who, gradually, passed the responsibility over to the still federalized National Guard. Despite the enormous difficulty, 8 of the nine students, due to federal intervention, were able to attend school that year.
Instance 4: Mississippi Burning Murders(52)
In 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared in Mississippi in Neshoba County. Due to the attention this received, creating a national outcry, President Johnson forced J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to investigate. One hundred and fifty FBI agents, as well additional personnel, including Navy divers, were sent in to attempt to find the then missing, presumed dead, workers. Initially, they weren't able to find the missing trio, but did find seven bodies of African-Americans that had been abducted and murdered.
Eventually, after issuing a twenty five thousand dollar reward, someone came forward and told them where the bodies were buried. It was determined the crimes had been carried out by the Ku Klux Klan and identified 18 individuals either directly responsible for or complicit in the killings, one of which was in fact the sheriff. The state of Mississippi refused to go forward with any charges, and so all that could be done was to charge them at the federal level with lesser crimes under the Force Act of 1870, which resulted in numerous convictions but no more than six years in prison for any of them. It wasn't until 2005, more than 40 years of a known killers walking free that a single one of those responsible was charged with murder.
------------------------------
I believe I have shown fairly conclusively why federal intervention is both good and necessary. In this post, and for that matter, the two previous ones, I have shown that businesses can and do abuse their workers when doing so increases their profits. Because of the enormous disparity in the amount of force wielded by employer and employee, coupled with the overwhelming portion of a worker's life demands that the boundaries in which those interaction take place be set by the people of the nation. As noted elsewhere, the owners of businesses are not accountable to the people of the country, certainly not in an age of globalization, but rather are only interested in keeping shareholders happy. Further still, even when a company is not morally bankrupt, local management may be in their efforts to come in on time and under budget to advance their own career. As such, in order to ensure the fair treatment, well being, and safety of every American in the work force, we require not only national laws enforcing a strict code of conduct and standards by which employers must abide, but also that these laws be enforced with due vigilance and necessary resources utilized.
Likewise, I have shown that local populaces and local governments cannot be counted on to end discrimination nor systematic racism on their own, and that at times they have been participants in a purveyors of these very things. The most powerful force in America for equality has been the American government when enough of the people decide that the rights of the other must be protected as surely as the rights of their own. Hatred, intolerance, bigotry; all these things can take deep root in an area, passed from generation to generation like a hereditary disease. If we are to root them out everywhere, remove them from the fabric of American culture, we must apply pressure towards that end. If the locals will not do it and the state will not do it, where does that leave us but to have the American people as a whole take charge of removing one of the ugliest warts of our nation?
Neither of these causes is automatic. Both require a populace that is willing to pressure the government into taking action they would not take on their own, in particular when powerful interests pump in boatloads of cash to be allowed to get away with murder, sometimes literally. However, in the end how we structure our society needs to be something we decide as a nation; it cannot be left to only those with money or those with hatred.
(1) http://www.academicamerican.com/recongi ... dage2.html
(2) http://www.eiu.edu/eiutps/childhood.php
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons#Authorship
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre#Background
(5) http://www.gobankingrates.com/history-o ... e-economy/
(6) http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_asset ... ppart2.pdf
(7) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27 ... ted_States
(8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_hist ... ted_States
(9) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill
(10) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Act
(11) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_h ... ted_States
(12) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80 ... _expansion
(13) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of ... ted_States
(14) http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/ford.htm
(15) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/
(16) http://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/sbfaq.pdf
(17) http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/ ... 29905.html
(18) http://www.labor.ny.gov/stats/job-seeke ... ening.shtm
(19) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City ... _explosion
(20) http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html
(21) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_v._Collier
(22) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._B ... _Education
(23) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-Am ... %931968%29
(24) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Pay_Act_of_1963
(25) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth ... nstitution
(26) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth ... nstitution
(27) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteenth_ ... nstitution
(28) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth ... nstitution
(29) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fou ... nstitution
(30) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
(31) http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/2 ... -Wisconsin
(32) http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jan/24 ... e-kaplan24
(33) http://newamericamedia.org/2011/10/will ... n-town.php
(34) http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-573 ... ncol;lst;5
(35)
(36)
(37) http://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/dwb01.htm
(38) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/nyreg ... gewanted=1
(39) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson
(40) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wi ... vil_Rights
(41) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Ame ... ted_States
(42) http://www.progressive.org/mag/nichols0109.html
(43) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Louis ... e_incident
(44) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_m ... ted_States
(45) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_pu ... mong_races
(46) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarcerat ... Minorities
(47) http://www.sangres.com/history/coalfieldwar01.htm
(48) http://www.du.edu/ludlow/cfhist3.html
(49) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Big_ ... e_disaster
(50) http://ehstoday.com/standards/MSHA/MSHA ... ssey-1215/
(51) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_N ... igh_School
(52) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississipp ... rs_murders
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WinePusher
Post #16
Comparatively, labor conditions in the United States were far better off than the conditions that existed in many other countries at that time. Another factor that characterized the industrialization of America was immigration, and the magnet that attracted so many immigrants was labor. Immigrants came because working conditions were better than the conditions that existed in their own country. In a free labor market, child labor is not a problem. If a child wants to work, the government has no right to prohibit that choice. Unfortunately for the child, there is no demand among employers for child labor because child labor is not valuable. Children have very little skills and can perform limited tasks, and in light of this children would not be hired. Child labor laws are some of the most useless laws that have ever been implemented. And people like you are constantly saying that wages are stagnate and are to low. Can you actually define a wage that would be appropriate? Again Abraxas, in a free labor market wages are determined by an easy concept: supply and demand, the supply and demand for workers who are allocated to different firms through wages. If a firm has a demand for a particular skill, and the supply of workers who possess that skill is plentiful than the wage is necessarily low. Anybody off the street in 19th century America could work in a factory, meaning that the supply of factory workers was high which forced wages to be low. Wage controls merely distort the market mechanism and create unconventional problems. This is what ultimately confuses me, it's as if you believe the government knows everything. The government just knows the right wage that workers should be paid, the government just knows how many Americans ought to own homes. Matters like these are governed by market mechanisms.Abraxas wrote:Firstly, on labor, we need not look much beyond the history of the United States to see why regulation of the practices surrounding the treatment of workers. Both the first and second industrial booms of the United States were characterized by brutal working conditions, resulting in countless deaths of those sacrificed to the twin gods of cost cutting and profit boosting.(1) Child labor was rampant.(2) Pay was incredibly low,(1) even frequently relying on a trucking system in which the only compensation they received was the capacity to purchase more goods from their employer, often on a line of credit at prices that far exceeded their pay, ensuring they could never escape debt and debtor's prison should they try to work elsewhere.(3)(4)
Part of your problem is that your line of argumentation is messed up. I see what you're trying to do, show how working conditions were in the 19th century (a period where government intervention was minimal) were horrid and how working conditions in the 20th and 21st century are fantastic and attribute the change to government intervention and unionization. 19th century America was when the industrial core of America was being established and as time progressed industries evolved and adopted newer, preferable policies. Work days are not uniform across all firms, not every worker has the same hours as another worker. In a free market, workers negotiate their hours with their employer. More hours means more money Abraxas, perhaps some workers prefered working long egregious hours because it meant they'd earn more in their paycheck. You don't know, I don't know, only they know and they express their desires through negotiation. The government may think it's preferable to impose 40 hour work weeks, but this merely inhibits the freedom of workers during negotiation.Abraxas wrote:Work days were extremely long, grossly curtailing the possibility of pursuing other interests.(5) Sick days and vacation time were essentially non-existent.(6) If you got crippled from a workplace accident, well, you just should have been more careful; you certainly wouldn't be compensated for it.(7) You were expected to be grateful you had any job at all with which to feed yourself and the fact you existed in a state of virtual slavery was immaterial.
I don't know what this means. How was a race to the bottom initiated in the labor market by government intervention? Race to the bottom refers to a reduction of government intervention. Are you saying that because different industries had to compete with one another for labor they dismantled their regulatory policies??? What do you mean? But I'll address the issue of profits since there's so much confusion surrounding this issue. Profits aren't maximized by businesses through screwing their workers and placing them in hostile working environments. Profits are maximized by producing goods and products in demand. Profits are signs that indicate a positive feedback situation. A producer produces product X which is consumed by a consumer which allows the producer to continue producing more of product X. You're only fooling yourself if you believe that cutting minute expenses, like safety equipment or benefits, are on an entreprenuers 'top ten ways to generate profits' list. The entire concept of benefits and pensions were introducted as a way to attract workers to particular firms and industries. They were a market invention.Abraxas wrote:(8) Indeed, the entire concept of the American middle class owes its existence to government intervening in the labor market to ensure the employer initiated race to the bottom that invariably follows from their interests to maximize profits and minimize expenses has a floor below which they cannot legally venture.(9)(10)
I really don't think you know what you're talking about here. Real wages refers to the final wage earned after inflation has been incorporated. It's the same as Real GDP, where inflation has already been incorporated, as opposed to Nominal GDP, where inflation hasn't been incorporated. Real wages did decline under Reagan, but not because of the reason you've provided. If you know your history, you'd realize that inflation was rampant throughout the decades preceding Reagan and even into the early years of his presidency. Around that same exact time real wages began to decline. That's because inflation reduces real wages. It's the reason why inflation is a problem in the first place. If prices rise and real wages rise at the same time there would be no problem, but what happens is prices rise, nominal wages generally rise, and real wages almost always fall. So, the stagnation in real wages before and during the Reagan administration is traced back to inflation, not the 'weaking of union protections under federal law.'Abraxas wrote:More recently, following WWII, when regulation of industry was the strongest in our history, we made enormous gains not only in our gross output, but also in the participation of the average American in that wealth. Real wages grew steadily, keeping pace with GDP and raising the standard of living.(12) However, when regulations were weakened during the Reagan "Revolution", what we saw is the GDP continue to grow and productivity continue to skyrocket to ever higher heights, however, for the first time in decades workers were not sharing in it. Real wages stagnated as runaway profit lust took over and the increasing levels of income were redirected to the shareholders instead of the employees.(12)(13) This can be directly traced to the weakening of union protections under federal law.
A government imposed ceiling that lowers the number of hours and days an individual can work does nothing beneficial. All it does is hinder the freedom of the individual during negotiation. The number of hours and days a person is willing to work is determined by a market mechanism known as a labor/leisure trade off. An individual either has a choice to spend his time devoted to labor or devoted to leisure. If the wage being offered increases, the individual will choose to spend more of his time devoted to labor since the high wage acts as an incentive and if the wage being offered decreases the individual will choose to devote more of his time to labor since the low wage requires him to put in more hours as compensation. Either way, people choose to spend more of their time on work rather than on leisure, so for you to suggest that leisure is somehow more preferable and desirable is wrong.Abraxas wrote:What we see now in the market and the state of the American worker, as a direct result of deregulation, is a situation where the US for the first time stands a very real chance of leaving the generations that follow in a worse off position than the generation that came before them. The regulation of companies does not inherently hinder economic growth, indeed as was observed by Henry Ford, things like lowering the number of hours worked per day creates a demand in the market as leisure time expands which helps drive the fires of industry.(14)
Go ahead and show how the goal of profit maximization destroys the conditions in which people work, the wages people recieve, and the benefits and pensions people recieve. You think profits are the root of all societies problems and you have a biased and skewed understanding of what profits actually are. But aside from that, you have not really specified anything you'd like the government to do. What intiatives and policies would exist under this governmental framework?Abraxas wrote:More than that, who directly interacts with you regularly, has a greater power discrepancy than that of your employer? Your employer has a tremendous influence on whether you can afford to eat, afford to have housing, afford leisure activities, be permitted leisure time, afford medical care for you or your family, etc. They have strong influence on when you can get up every day, when you go to bed, who you spend your day with, and under what conditions you will spend that day. Who can honestly say they think society would be better off if this sphere that makes up such an enormous portion of the lives of hundreds of millions would be better off left to the whims of individual employers whose primary concern is necessarily the overall maximization of profit for the company as a whole rather than the well being of their employees? Instead, does it not make more sense to have the people, the democratically selected government, set the framework under which these interactions will take place?
It's very practical and done all the time. The frequency at which individuals are changing jobs and employers has been increasing over time, this is common knowledge. It's likely for one individual to change jobs at least four times over a ten year time span.Abraxas wrote:I can hear two objections already, so I will address them now. Sure, an employee can leave employment to work either for another company or for themselves, but how practical is this?
??? Start up companies don't employ everybody in the labor market. And as one company dies another company comes into existence to take it's place, it's a cyclical system.Abraxas wrote:The majority of start up companies don't live much past five years(16), leaving the individual in generally worse position financially than they were before they started.(17)
Well that's because we're in a recession Abraxas. That should be old news by now. Of course every job opening today has many applicants applying for it, that's because today we have a high unemployment rate. The higher the unemployment rate, the more people will be searching and applying for jobs. Again, it's simple supply and demand. There's a high supply of workers and a low demand for workers. At pre recession rates, what we generally see is equilibrium between the supply and demand for labor.Abraxas wrote:Further, every job opening today has roughly four Americans applying for it (not counting the "underemployed")(18). With those kinds of odds against finding other employment, how does one reasonably expect a person to abandon their posting when faced with the urgency of everyday life, such as acquiring the next meal, ensuring your medicine will be available, and keeping power to your heater going in the dead of winter?
This is a poor argument Abraxas. You happily attribute any advancement in civil rights to the federal government, but ignore the hinderences in civil rights that the federal government was responsible for. Many of the cases you cite are merely instances of the Court correcting or reversing the abborent decisions it made before. Brown v. Board of Education was merely a reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson. Had there been no Plessy v. Ferguson there would have been no need for Brown v. Board of Education. Had the Supreme Court not set the precedent of de jure segregation in Plessy there would not have been a need for half of the cases you cited. Using your logic, there would have been no Civil War had there been no Dred Scott v. Sandford. This is a classic example of starting the story in the middle. If you had began the story at the beginning, you'd realize that it was the government that was the primary entity responsible for segregation and racism and slavery and that these cases you cite are merely corrections of prior actions. It's like saying that a mother deserves an award for caring and attending to her mentally retarded child, when in fact the only reason why the child is retarded is that the mother drank and did drugs during her pregnancy.Abraxas wrote:This brings me to the second segment, how government intervention is necessary to protect minority rights when it comes to discrimination and civil rights. This, I think, should be fairly self evident. A large section of the country once attempted to break away and fought a civil war for the express purpose of denying civil rights on the basis of skin color. I ask that you not say it was for state's rights; if you look at the list of grievances presented for their succession, the one consistent theme among those states who listed such is slavery.(20) Further, look at many of the civil rights breakthroughs in American history, they came down as a court ruling from the US Supreme Court, (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, Boynton v. Virginia, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, Gates v. Collier, and countless more represent the fundamental necessity of federal court involvement)(21)(22), as legislation from the federal level (Civil Rights act of 1957, Equal Pay Act of 1963, Civil Rights act of 1960, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Civil Rights act of 1968)(23)(24), or an amendment ratified by some states over the express objection of others (13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, and 24th Amendments to the US Constitution)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29).
The 'federal justice system' has been responsible for more than half these problems. In a free society, where government intervention is for the most part non-existent, how would Jim Crow laws be enforced? How would segregated schools and bathrooms and restaurants be enforced? Segregation wasn't enforced by the market Abraxas, it was enforced by the government. Every single black individual who was denied access from entering a restaurant reserved for whites cost that restaurant owner his or her business. In a free market, segregation would have never manifested itself in society because it would not be profitable for a business owner to deny service to an individual on this basis of his or her race. It is not feasiable in a free market to open up a restaurant and only allow whites in, as it wasn't feasible to only allow whites to ride buses in the south. When blacks began to boycott public transportation, public transportation businesses began to incur huge losses and were eventually forced to accept their demands.Abraxas wrote:I'm not merely speaking of the civil rights of African Americans, but on things like women's suffrage and the rights of people of certain national heritage, disability, or homosexual rights as well. Time and time again we see the fastest and most effective way to put an end to things like segregation, denial of voting rights, ensuring fair opportunity to work and learn, and even bringing to justice those who would harm minorities has been the federal justice system.
This is an absurd argument. The market does not encourage any type of behavior. The market allows individuals to engage in whatever type of behavior they want as long as it doesn't harm or impede the freedom of other individuals. The reason you don't see very many working class people at yacht clubs is because most working class people can't afford memberships to yacht clubs, only individuals with disposable income can.Abraxas wrote:If the free market can be relied upon to defeat it, why does it still remain with us?
The reason is simple, the free market does not necessarily encourage tolerance. While broadening customer base is often preferable, some businesses work on a model of exclusivity where the patrons don't have to deal with certain other people. You don't see a lot of working class people at the yacht club, and the very wealthy will pay a lot of money to keep it that way. Likewise, if you have a customer base that is racist, they may well choose to shop at establishments that are likewise racist over more liberal ones. In locations with a lot of racism, or few minorities or supporters of minority rights, there may well be no market incentive to change the objectionable behavior. Historically, this has extended not merely to cities, but to entire states. I again cite the case of the Little Rock 9(30) in which essentially the state of Arkansas itself a little over 50 years ago acted as an agent to enforce illegal and unethical racial segregation with popular support among the locals. Under those conditions, how does leaving it to the states or the private citizenry even begin to solve the problem? The answer is it can't. Very little economic pressure, very little internal social pressure, can be brought when most of the populace supports the repressive measures. For this reason, the federal government is a virtual necessity for fast acting, effective social change of this nature.
Because segregation was enforced by the government. The concept isn't very hard to comprehend Abraxas, so I don't know why you're having such a hard time here. Civil rights injustices were the fault of the government. Segregation and institutional racism ended when the existing laws were changed.Abraxas wrote:Finally, along these lines, I would have to ask if nonintervention by the federal government, the trademark of the libertarian ideal of policy setting from the federal level could be counted on to reliably work better as a means to end the civil rights injustices that plagued our society up through the middle of this past century, why didn't they?
Reverse discrimination is the synonym for Affirmative Action. I didn't plan on debating Affirmative Action here but if you want to then I'd be happy to debate it. All you have done is dismiss any criticism of reverse racism as nonsense without providing any logical or intellectual argument. Racism, as it's defined, is merely discrimination based upon an individuals race. If an employer hires a white individual over a black individual solely because he's white, liberals like you would begin to indignantly scream racism at the top of your lungs. If an employer hires a black individual over a white individual solely because he's black, liberals like you start applauding and praising the decision. In your mind, the former is racism and the latter is 'affirmative action.' In my mind both instances are examples of racism. Do you see the inconsistency in your position yet?Abraxas wrote:Every once in a while you'll see an argument regarding "reverse racism", but that is patent nonsense as well, even at the most egregious only applying to a handful of poorly worded or poorly implemented civil rights measures and I sincerely hope this is not the counterargument you intended to make.
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WinePusher
Post #17
Comparatively, labor conditions in the United States were far better off than the conditions that existed in many other countries at that time. Another factor that characterized the industrialization of America was immigration, and the magnet that attracted so many immigrants was labor. Immigrants came because working conditions were better than the conditions that existed in their own country. In a free labor market, child labor is not a problem. If a child wants to work, the government has no right to prohibit that choice. Unfortunately for the child, there is no demand among employers for child labor because child labor is not valuable. Children have very little skills and can perform limited tasks, and in light of this children would not be hired. Child labor laws are some of the most useless laws that have ever been implemented. And people like you are constantly saying that wages are stagnate and are to low. Can you actually define a wage that would be appropriate? Again Abraxas, in a free labor market wages are determined by an easy concept: supply and demand, the supply and demand for workers who are allocated to different firms through wages. If a firm has a demand for a particular skill, and the supply of workers who possess that skill is plentiful than the wage is necessarily low. Anybody off the street in 19th century America could work in a factory, meaning that the supply of factory workers was high which forced wages to be low. Wage controls merely distort the market mechanism and create unconventional problems. This is what ultimately confuses me, it's as if you believe the government knows everything. The government just knows the right wage that workers should be paid, the government just knows how many Americans ought to own homes. Matters like these are governed by market mechanisms.Abraxas wrote:Firstly, on labor, we need not look much beyond the history of the United States to see why regulation of the practices surrounding the treatment of workers. Both the first and second industrial booms of the United States were characterized by brutal working conditions, resulting in countless deaths of those sacrificed to the twin gods of cost cutting and profit boosting.(1) Child labor was rampant.(2) Pay was incredibly low,(1) even frequently relying on a trucking system in which the only compensation they received was the capacity to purchase more goods from their employer, often on a line of credit at prices that far exceeded their pay, ensuring they could never escape debt and debtor's prison should they try to work elsewhere.(3)(4)
Part of your problem is that your line of argumentation is messed up. I see what you're trying to do, show how working conditions were in the 19th century (a period where government intervention was minimal) were horrid and how working conditions in the 20th and 21st century are fantastic and attribute the change to government intervention and unionization. 19th century America was when the industrial core of America was being established and as time progressed industries evolved and adopted newer, preferable policies. Work days are not uniform across all firms, not every worker has the same hours as another worker. In a free market, workers negotiate their hours with their employer. More hours means more money Abraxas, perhaps some workers prefered working long egregious hours because it meant they'd earn more in their paycheck. You don't know, I don't know, only they know and they express their desires through negotiation. The government may think it's preferable to impose 40 hour work weeks, but this merely inhibits the freedom of workers during negotiation.Abraxas wrote:Work days were extremely long, grossly curtailing the possibility of pursuing other interests.(5) Sick days and vacation time were essentially non-existent.(6) If you got crippled from a workplace accident, well, you just should have been more careful; you certainly wouldn't be compensated for it.(7) You were expected to be grateful you had any job at all with which to feed yourself and the fact you existed in a state of virtual slavery was immaterial.
I don't know what this means. How was a race to the bottom initiated in the labor market by government intervention? Race to the bottom refers to a reduction of government intervention. Are you saying that because different industries had to compete with one another for labor they dismantled their regulatory policies??? What do you mean? But I'll address the issue of profits since there's so much confusion surrounding this issue. Profits aren't maximized by businesses through screwing their workers and placing them in hostile working environments. Profits are maximized by producing goods and products in demand. Profits are signs that indicate a positive feedback situation. A producer produces product X which is consumed by a consumer which allows the producer to continue producing more of product X. You're only fooling yourself if you believe that cutting minute expenses, like safety equipment or benefits, are on an entreprenuers 'top ten ways to generate profits' list. The entire concept of benefits and pensions were introducted as a way to attract workers to particular firms and industries. They were a market invention.Abraxas wrote:(8) Indeed, the entire concept of the American middle class owes its existence to government intervening in the labor market to ensure the employer initiated race to the bottom that invariably follows from their interests to maximize profits and minimize expenses has a floor below which they cannot legally venture.(9)(10)
I really don't think you know what you're talking about here. Real wages refers to the final wage earned after inflation has been incorporated. It's the same as Real GDP, where inflation has already been incorporated, as opposed to Nominal GDP, where inflation hasn't been incorporated. Real wages did decline under Reagan, but not because of the reason you've provided. If you know your history, you'd realize that inflation was rampant throughout the decades preceding Reagan and even into the early years of his presidency. Around that same exact time real wages began to decline. That's because inflation reduces real wages. It's the reason why inflation is a problem in the first place. If prices rise and real wages rise at the same time there would be no problem, but what happens is prices rise, nominal wages generally rise, and real wages almost always fall. So, the stagnation in real wages before and during the Reagan administration is traced back to inflation, not the 'weaking of union protections under federal law.'Abraxas wrote:More recently, following WWII, when regulation of industry was the strongest in our history, we made enormous gains not only in our gross output, but also in the participation of the average American in that wealth. Real wages grew steadily, keeping pace with GDP and raising the standard of living.(12) However, when regulations were weakened during the Reagan "Revolution", what we saw is the GDP continue to grow and productivity continue to skyrocket to ever higher heights, however, for the first time in decades workers were not sharing in it. Real wages stagnated as runaway profit lust took over and the increasing levels of income were redirected to the shareholders instead of the employees.(12)(13) This can be directly traced to the weakening of union protections under federal law.
A government imposed ceiling that lowers the number of hours and days an individual can work does nothing beneficial. All it does is hinder the freedom of the individual during negotiation. The number of hours and days a person is willing to work is determined by a market mechanism known as a labor/leisure trade off. An individual either has a choice to spend his time devoted to labor or devoted to leisure. If the wage being offered increases, the individual will choose to spend more of his time devoted to labor since the high wage acts as an incentive and if the wage being offered decreases the individual will choose to devote more of his time to labor since the low wage requires him to put in more hours as compensation. Either way, people choose to spend more of their time on work rather than on leisure, so for you to suggest that leisure is somehow more preferable and desirable is wrong.Abraxas wrote:What we see now in the market and the state of the American worker, as a direct result of deregulation, is a situation where the US for the first time stands a very real chance of leaving the generations that follow in a worse off position than the generation that came before them. The regulation of companies does not inherently hinder economic growth, indeed as was observed by Henry Ford, things like lowering the number of hours worked per day creates a demand in the market as leisure time expands which helps drive the fires of industry.(14)
Go ahead and show how the goal of profit maximization destroys the conditions in which people work, the wages people recieve, and the benefits and pensions people recieve. You think profits are the root of all societies problems and you have a biased and skewed understanding of what profits actually are. But aside from that, you have not really specified anything you'd like the government to do. What intiatives and policies would exist under this governmental framework?Abraxas wrote:More than that, who directly interacts with you regularly, has a greater power discrepancy than that of your employer? Your employer has a tremendous influence on whether you can afford to eat, afford to have housing, afford leisure activities, be permitted leisure time, afford medical care for you or your family, etc. They have strong influence on when you can get up every day, when you go to bed, who you spend your day with, and under what conditions you will spend that day. Who can honestly say they think society would be better off if this sphere that makes up such an enormous portion of the lives of hundreds of millions would be better off left to the whims of individual employers whose primary concern is necessarily the overall maximization of profit for the company as a whole rather than the well being of their employees? Instead, does it not make more sense to have the people, the democratically selected government, set the framework under which these interactions will take place?
It's very practical and done all the time. The frequency at which individuals are changing jobs and employers has been increasing over time, this is common knowledge. It's likely for one individual to change jobs at least four times over a ten year time span.Abraxas wrote:I can hear two objections already, so I will address them now. Sure, an employee can leave employment to work either for another company or for themselves, but how practical is this?
??? Start up companies don't employ everybody in the labor market. And as one company dies another company comes into existence to take it's place, it's a cyclical system.Abraxas wrote:The majority of start up companies don't live much past five years(16), leaving the individual in generally worse position financially than they were before they started.(17)
Well that's because we're in a recession Abraxas. That should be old news by now. Of course every job opening today has many applicants applying for it, that's because today we have a high unemployment rate. The higher the unemployment rate, the more people will be searching and applying for jobs. Again, it's simple supply and demand. There's a high supply of workers and a low demand for workers. At pre recession rates, what we generally see is equilibrium between the supply and demand for labor.Abraxas wrote:Further, every job opening today has roughly four Americans applying for it (not counting the "underemployed")(18). With those kinds of odds against finding other employment, how does one reasonably expect a person to abandon their posting when faced with the urgency of everyday life, such as acquiring the next meal, ensuring your medicine will be available, and keeping power to your heater going in the dead of winter?
This is a poor argument Abraxas. You happily attribute any advancement in civil rights to the federal government, but ignore the hinderences in civil rights that the federal government was responsible for. Many of the cases you cite are merely instances of the Court correcting or reversing the abborent decisions it made before. Brown v. Board of Education was merely a reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson. Had there been no Plessy v. Ferguson there would have been no need for Brown v. Board of Education. Had the Supreme Court not set the precedent of de jure segregation in Plessy there would not have been a need for half of the cases you cited. Using your logic, there would have been no Civil War had there been no Dred Scott v. Sandford. This is a classic example of starting the story in the middle. If you had began the story at the beginning, you'd realize that it was the government that was the primary entity responsible for segregation and racism and slavery and that these cases you cite are merely corrections of prior actions. It's like saying that a mother deserves an award for caring and attending to her mentally retarded child, when in fact the only reason why the child is retarded is that the mother drank and did drugs during her pregnancy.Abraxas wrote:This brings me to the second segment, how government intervention is necessary to protect minority rights when it comes to discrimination and civil rights. This, I think, should be fairly self evident. A large section of the country once attempted to break away and fought a civil war for the express purpose of denying civil rights on the basis of skin color. I ask that you not say it was for state's rights; if you look at the list of grievances presented for their succession, the one consistent theme among those states who listed such is slavery.(20) Further, look at many of the civil rights breakthroughs in American history, they came down as a court ruling from the US Supreme Court, (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, Boynton v. Virginia, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, Gates v. Collier, and countless more represent the fundamental necessity of federal court involvement)(21)(22), as legislation from the federal level (Civil Rights act of 1957, Equal Pay Act of 1963, Civil Rights act of 1960, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Civil Rights act of 1968)(23)(24), or an amendment ratified by some states over the express objection of others (13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, and 24th Amendments to the US Constitution)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29).
The 'federal justice system' has been responsible for more than half these problems. In a free society, where government intervention is for the most part non-existent, how would Jim Crow laws be enforced? How would segregated schools and bathrooms and restaurants be enforced? Segregation wasn't enforced by the market Abraxas, it was enforced by the government. Every single black individual who was denied access from entering a restaurant reserved for whites cost that restaurant owner his or her business. In a free market, segregation would have never manifested itself in society because it would not be profitable for a business owner to deny service to an individual on this basis of his or her race. It is not feasiable in a free market to open up a restaurant and only allow whites in, as it wasn't feasible to only allow whites to ride buses in the south. When blacks began to boycott public transportation, public transportation businesses began to incur huge losses and were eventually forced to accept their demands.Abraxas wrote:I'm not merely speaking of the civil rights of African Americans, but on things like women's suffrage and the rights of people of certain national heritage, disability, or homosexual rights as well. Time and time again we see the fastest and most effective way to put an end to things like segregation, denial of voting rights, ensuring fair opportunity to work and learn, and even bringing to justice those who would harm minorities has been the federal justice system.
This is an absurd argument. The market does not encourage any type of behavior. The market allows individuals to engage in whatever type of behavior they want as long as it doesn't harm or impede the freedom of other individuals. The reason you don't see very many working class people at yacht clubs is because most working class people can't afford memberships to yacht clubs, only individuals with disposable income can.Abraxas wrote:If the free market can be relied upon to defeat it, why does it still remain with us?
The reason is simple, the free market does not necessarily encourage tolerance. While broadening customer base is often preferable, some businesses work on a model of exclusivity where the patrons don't have to deal with certain other people. You don't see a lot of working class people at the yacht club, and the very wealthy will pay a lot of money to keep it that way. Likewise, if you have a customer base that is racist, they may well choose to shop at establishments that are likewise racist over more liberal ones. In locations with a lot of racism, or few minorities or supporters of minority rights, there may well be no market incentive to change the objectionable behavior. Historically, this has extended not merely to cities, but to entire states. I again cite the case of the Little Rock 9(30) in which essentially the state of Arkansas itself a little over 50 years ago acted as an agent to enforce illegal and unethical racial segregation with popular support among the locals. Under those conditions, how does leaving it to the states or the private citizenry even begin to solve the problem? The answer is it can't. Very little economic pressure, very little internal social pressure, can be brought when most of the populace supports the repressive measures. For this reason, the federal government is a virtual necessity for fast acting, effective social change of this nature.
Because segregation was enforced by the government. The concept isn't very hard to comprehend Abraxas, so I don't know why you're having such a hard time here. Civil rights injustices were the fault of the government. Segregation and institutional racism ended when the existing laws were changed.Abraxas wrote:Finally, along these lines, I would have to ask if nonintervention by the federal government, the trademark of the libertarian ideal of policy setting from the federal level could be counted on to reliably work better as a means to end the civil rights injustices that plagued our society up through the middle of this past century, why didn't they?
Reverse discrimination is the synonym for Affirmative Action. I didn't plan on debating Affirmative Action here but if you want to then I'd be happy to debate it. All you have done is dismiss any criticism of reverse racism as nonsense without providing any logical or intellectual argument. Racism, as it's defined, is merely discrimination based upon an individuals race. If an employer hires a white individual over a black individual solely because he's white, liberals like you would begin to indignantly scream racism at the top of your lungs. If an employer hires a black individual over a white individual solely because he's black, liberals like you start applauding and praising the decision. In your mind, the former is racism and the latter is 'affirmative action.' In my mind both instances are examples of racism. Do you see the inconsistency in your position yet?Abraxas wrote:Every once in a while you'll see an argument regarding "reverse racism", but that is patent nonsense as well, even at the most egregious only applying to a handful of poorly worded or poorly implemented civil rights measures and I sincerely hope this is not the counterargument you intended to make.
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WinePusher
Post #18
Abraxas and I have agreed to a revised format for this debate to allow for more posting and rebuttals.
The current format:
Post 1: Abraxas presents an argument for why government intervention is needed
Post 2: WinePusher presents rebuttal
Post 3: WinePusher presents an argument for why a Free Market Approach is more fundamentally sound
Post 4: Abraxas presents rebuttal
will be changed to this format:
Post 1: Abraxas initial argument
Post 2: WinePusher rebuttal
Post 3: Abraxas Rebuttal
Post 4: WinePusher final rebuttal
Post 5: WinePusher initial argument
Post 6: Abraxas rebuttal
Post 7: WinePusher rebuttal
Post 8: Abraxas final rebuttal
for the remainder of the debate. So the next post in this thread will be post 3, a rebuttal by Abraxas.
The current format:
Post 1: Abraxas presents an argument for why government intervention is needed
Post 2: WinePusher presents rebuttal
Post 3: WinePusher presents an argument for why a Free Market Approach is more fundamentally sound
Post 4: Abraxas presents rebuttal
will be changed to this format:
Post 1: Abraxas initial argument
Post 2: WinePusher rebuttal
Post 3: Abraxas Rebuttal
Post 4: WinePusher final rebuttal
Post 5: WinePusher initial argument
Post 6: Abraxas rebuttal
Post 7: WinePusher rebuttal
Post 8: Abraxas final rebuttal
for the remainder of the debate. So the next post in this thread will be post 3, a rebuttal by Abraxas.
Post #19
Thank you WP, I appreciate you posting this. It would have felt in appropriate, as the first person to post under the new format, for me to make the announced change in rules or to make another post without announcing it.WinePusher wrote:Abraxas and I have agreed to a revised format for this debate to allow for more posting and rebuttals.
...
for the remainder of the debate. So the next post in this thread will be post 3, a rebuttal by Abraxas.
I don't see how any of this changes my argument. I think our bar can be a bit nigher than not the worst in the world.Comparatively, labor conditions in the United States were far better off than the conditions that existed in many other countries at that time. Another factor that characterized the industrialization of America was immigration, and the magnet that attracted so many immigrants was labor. Immigrants came because working conditions were better than the conditions that existed in their own country.
How do you figure? Do you think low skill jobs have gone away? Crops pick themselves, floors wash themselves, boxes move themselves, and shelves stock themselves now? The reason child labor laws were implemented is because businesses were hiring children, which kind of makes it likely they might do so again if doing so drives down the price of labor. More competition for jobs means jobs can pay lower wages, and so businesses that create openings that can exploit this larger labor pool will do better than those that don't.In a free labor market, child labor is not a problem. If a child wants to work, the government has no right to prohibit that choice. Unfortunately for the child, there is no demand among employers for child labor because child labor is not valuable. Children have very little skills and can perform limited tasks, and in light of this children would not be hired. Child labor laws are some of the most useless laws that have ever been implemented.
Forced them to be low? Yeah, I'll bet the industrialists in the day suffered much arm twisting and lamentation before they were cruelly forced to make more money by cutting the wages of their workers. No, the industrialists took advantage of a large labor force that allowed them to cut wages, in some cases to levels that amounted to virtual slavery, such as Ludlow. Can I define what wages are appropriate? Probably not. Can economists find an appropriate minimum wage? Yes, they have before, they can again. But more to the point, not all government controls require direct caps. Things like guaranteeing union protections can help give workers the tools they need to help keep their own wages fair.Can you actually define a wage that would be appropriate? Again Abraxas, in a free labor market wages are determined by an easy concept: supply and demand, the supply and demand for workers who are allocated to different firms through wages. If a firm has a demand for a particular skill, and the supply of workers who possess that skill is plentiful than the wage is necessarily low. Anybody off the street in 19th century America could work in a factory, meaning that the supply of factory workers was high which forced wages to be low. Wage controls merely distort the market mechanism and create unconventional problems. This is what ultimately confuses me, it's as if you believe the government knows everything. The government just knows the right wage that workers should be paid, the government just knows how many Americans ought to own homes. Matters like these are governed by market mechanisms.
I also don't accept the idea distortion is inherently bad. A natural, undistorted market is an ugly, bloody, brutal thing and I see nothing wrong with distorting that aspect of it.
Yes, they did. However, you fail to mention why. The reason why in large part is that workers were able to organize and were able to do so in large part because of government protections. This forced industry to evolve.Part of your problem is that your line of argumentation is messed up. I see what you're trying to do, show how working conditions were in the 19th century (a period where government intervention was minimal) were horrid and how working conditions in the 20th and 21st century are fantastic and attribute the change to government intervention and unionization. 19th century America was when the industrial core of America was being established and as time progressed industries evolved and adopted newer, preferable policies.
Excuse me, on what basis do you assert more hours means more in their paycheck? Very often this wasn't the case and workers had to engage in unpaid labor or get fired. But hey, that's the free market, right? Work longer hours for nothing or get the axe and lose the ability to feed your family, choose freely. I do know, Winepusher, because I know what rights workers pushed for when they did unionize and among those rights were standardized hours and pay for overtime. If workers did not want these things they would not have unionized to demand these things. Who do you think pushed the 40 hour work week to begin with if not labor unions, aka laborers?Work days are not uniform across all firms, not every worker has the same hours as another worker. In a free market, workers negotiate their hours with their employer. More hours means more money Abraxas, perhaps some workers prefered working long egregious hours because it meant they'd earn more in their paycheck. You don't know, I don't know, only they know and they express their desires through negotiation. The government may think it's preferable to impose 40 hour work weeks, but this merely inhibits the freedom of workers during negotiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
I think you misread what I said. Once again:I don't know what this means. How was a race to the bottom initiated in the labor market by government intervention? Race to the bottom refers to a reduction of government intervention. Are you saying that because different industries had to compete with one another for labor they dismantled their regulatory policies??? What do you mean?
Indeed, the entire concept of the American middle class owes its existence to government intervening in the labor market to ensure the employer initiated race to the bottom that invariably follows from their interests to maximize profits and minimize expenses has a floor below which they cannot legally venture.(9)(10)
Really? You don't think cutting expenses is one way companies boost profits and that one of the largest expenses is labor? Really? You don't think if product X can be produced more cheaply either by getting rid of workers and making the survivors work harder or by cutting their pay they don't make more profit? Really???But I'll address the issue of profits since there's so much confusion surrounding this issue. Profits aren't maximized by businesses through screwing their workers and placing them in hostile working environments. Profits are maximized by producing goods and products in demand. Profits are signs that indicate a positive feedback situation. A producer produces product X which is consumed by a consumer which allows the producer to continue producing more of product X. You're only fooling yourself if you believe that cutting minute expenses, like safety equipment or benefits, are on an entreprenuers 'top ten ways to generate profits' list.
Come on, WP, you know as well as I do that profit is revenue minus expense and that you can increase profit by both raising revenue and lowering expense and the business will always try to do both.
A market invention arising from protections afforded to the unions that negotiated for them by the government.The entire concept of benefits and pensions were introducted as a way to attract workers to particular firms and industries. They were a market invention.
Sorry, reality disagrees. If what you are saying were true, we should expect real wages to start increasing again once inflation was reversed by the mid eighties, and, behold, it slowed to a fraction of the rate before the inflation crisis. Inflation was not the cause of the stagnation in real wages, if it were you should see a consistent change across all tiers in reduction of real income, instead, you see the very wealthy go up and the poor fall flat. That is a result of the destruction of regulation of industry.I really don't think you know what you're talking about here. Real wages refers to the final wage earned after inflation has been incorporated. It's the same as Real GDP, where inflation has already been incorporated, as opposed to Nominal GDP, where inflation hasn't been incorporated. Real wages did decline under Reagan, but not because of the reason you've provided. If you know your history, you'd realize that inflation was rampant throughout the decades preceding Reagan and even into the early years of his presidency. Around that same exact time real wages began to decline. That's because inflation reduces real wages. It's the reason why inflation is a problem in the first place. If prices rise and real wages rise at the same time there would be no problem, but what happens is prices rise, nominal wages generally rise, and real wages almost always fall. So, the stagnation in real wages before and during the Reagan administration is traced back to inflation, not the 'weaking of union protections under federal law.'
Yes, because the 40 hour work week ended overtime, nobody works that anymore.A government imposed ceiling that lowers the number of hours and days an individual can work does nothing beneficial. All it does is hinder the freedom of the individual during negotiation. The number of hours and days a person is willing to work is determined by a market mechanism known as a labor/leisure trade off.
You completely missed the point. Henry Ford predicted that for an industrialized nation, production wasn't enough. If everyone spends all their time working, they do not have any need for luxury goods. A lack of need kills demand, a lack of demand kills sales, a lack of sales kills profits, a lack of profits kills jobs, etc. He decided because of this that leisure time was necessary to drive demand for luxury goods, and demand would drive prices and sales and industry as a whole.An individual either has a choice to spend his time devoted to labor or devoted to leisure. If the wage being offered increases, the individual will choose to spend more of his time devoted to labor since the high wage acts as an incentive and if the wage being offered decreases the individual will choose to devote more of his time to labor since the low wage requires him to put in more hours as compensation. Either way, people choose to spend more of their time on work rather than on leisure, so for you to suggest that leisure is somehow more preferable and desirable is wrong.
Wages are costs, cutting costs raises profits, raised profits is good for the employer, and so cutting wages as much as you can get away with is good for the employer.Go ahead and show how the goal of profit maximization destroys the conditions in which people work, the wages people recieve, and the benefits and pensions people recieve. You think profits are the root of all societies problems and you have a biased and skewed understanding of what profits actually are.
Much of it is or was being done, formalize protections for unions, legislate things like minimum safe work conditions, minimum wage laws, socialized medicine, etc. I feel many of these things should be expanded in certain ways. The current minimum wage is insufficient, inspections should be more complete and inspectors have more authority to cite companies for dangerous behavior; things of this nature. Companies will learn how to be more competitive in that environment or they will leave it and a niche will open up and new companies will come in. If they can't operate fairly and safely, maybe they shouldn't operate at all.But aside from that, you have not really specified anything you'd like the government to do. What intiatives and policies would exist under this governmental framework?
It is practical for a few people to do it under the right circumstances, yes. It is not practical for large sections of the labor force to do it simultaneously. For every one it works out for, how many end up in a worse job or no job at all and how many can afford to take that risk?It's very practical and done all the time. The frequency at which individuals are changing jobs and employers has been increasing over time, this is common knowledge. It's likely for one individual to change jobs at least four times over a ten year time span.
I never said they did and they don't always. Sometimes the void is left or one company fills the role of several dead ones, reducing the number of niches. I'm not sure what your point here is anyway.??? Start up companies don't employ everybody in the labor market. And as one company dies another company comes into existence to take it's place, it's a cyclical system.
No, never complete equilibrium. Even during the tech bubble in the 90s we had 1:1 as a ratio to of jobs to seekers (counting only unemployed figures, not underemployed), however, what that neglects is you still end up with competition in that environment for the low paying, low skill jobs with most openings being for high skill or highly specialized jobs which still renders the mass movement needed to create economic fairness by this method grossly impractical on a widespread individual scale.Well that's because we're in a recession Abraxas. That should be old news by now. Of course every job opening today has many applicants applying for it, that's because today we have a high unemployment rate. The higher the unemployment rate, the more people will be searching and applying for jobs. Again, it's simple supply and demand. There's a high supply of workers and a low demand for workers. At pre recession rates, what we generally see is equilibrium between the supply and demand for labor.
You are completely misrepresenting what happened there. Plessy v. Ferguson was a (bad) ruling that a state law in Louisiana did not violate constitution. It was not, as you are representing, a federal enforcement of segregation, but rather gave states the power to create their own laws, which states and local jurisdictions used to create their own segregation laws.This is a poor argument Abraxas. You happily attribute any advancement in civil rights to the federal government, but ignore the hinderences in civil rights that the federal government was responsible for. Many of the cases you cite are merely instances of the Court correcting or reversing the abborent decisions it made before. Brown v. Board of Education was merely a reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson. Had there been no Plessy v. Ferguson there would have been no need for Brown v. Board of Education. Had the Supreme Court not set the precedent of de jure segregation in Plessy there would not have been a need for half of the cases you cited. Using your logic, there would have been no Civil War had there been no Dred Scott v. Sandford. This is a classic example of starting the story in the middle. If you had began the story at the beginning, you'd realize that it was the government that was the primary entity responsible for segregation and racism and slavery and that these cases you cite are merely corrections of prior actions. It's like saying that a mother deserves an award for caring and attending to her mentally retarded child, when in fact the only reason why the child is retarded is that the mother drank and did drugs during her pregnancy.
Put another way, this was an instance of the federal government not making something which is reprehensible illegal, in other words, leaving it to your free society, and they took it and ran to make racism over and systematic. Had the government ruled initially it was in violation of federal law, it would have solved the problem then instead of waiting until Brown. This is a case of insufficient government intervention, certainly not too much as you are pretending.
You seem to be confusing state governments with the federal government in an effort to equivocate the two. The fact of the matter is, while there were instances of the federal government doing terrible things (and I did not ignore them, I spent considerable time talking about them), most of their efforts, especially after WWII were spent correcting those evils, whereas most of the new state laws concerning race during this period were promoting them.
State and local governments, and private citizens exercising the right to remove people from their property for any reason.The 'federal justice system' has been responsible for more than half these problems. In a free society, where government intervention is for the most part non-existent, how would Jim Crow laws be enforced?
State and local governments, and private citizens exercising the right to remove people from their property for any reason.How would segregated schools and bathrooms and restaurants be enforced?
Enforced by state and local governments, and private citizens exercising the right to remove people from their property for any reason.Segregation wasn't enforced by the market Abraxas, it was enforced by the government.
I don't believe you honestly think this is true. You know, as well as I do, the vast, vast majority of Jim Crow laws came from the state and local level, not federal.Every single black individual who was denied access from entering a restaurant reserved for whites cost that restaurant owner his or her business. In a free market, segregation would have never manifested itself in society because it would not be profitable for a business owner to deny service to an individual on this basis of his or her race.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ji ... s_by_State
It was a free market and segregation did manifest itself in society. You think things like sundown towns were the result of government intervention, no, they were the result of a deeply racist society willing to absorb any minor economic impact, assuming there even would be one to begin with, in order to ensure their racist views were the defacto law of the land.
Excuse me, but that simply is untrue. It may not work now due to social changes, but until the 60s businesses could and did as a matter of routine.It is not feasiable in a free market to open up a restaurant and only allow whites in,
http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhist ... B0527200A7
http://www.picturehistory.com/product/id/3521
http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb0b69n6qr/
Yes, they did, eventually. Up to that point, the free market buses were still segregated however. Interesting story about why blacks began to boycott them, maybe you should look into it before claiming the market won't allow segregation.as it wasn't feasible to only allow whites to ride buses in the south. When blacks began to boycott public transportation, public transportation businesses began to incur huge losses and were eventually forced to accept their demands.
This is an absurd claim. The market most certainly does encourage behavior that maximizes profits.This is an absurd argument. The market does not encourage any type of behavior.
Because they keep membership fees high to keep those people out, aka catering to exclusivity.The market allows individuals to engage in whatever type of behavior they want as long as it doesn't harm or impede the freedom of other individuals. The reason you don't see very many working class people at yacht clubs is because most working class people can't afford memberships to yacht clubs, only individuals with disposable income can.
Wrong! Segregation was ended when federal laws overruled state laws. The states did not change their laws, the feds simply ruled they could not be enforced. You keep conflating state government and federal government, this is an equivocation fallacy, and it is naughty. Bad Winepusher, bad.Because segregation was enforced by the government. The concept isn't very hard to comprehend Abraxas, so I don't know why you're having such a hard time here. Civil rights injustices were the fault of the government. Segregation and institutional racism ended when the existing laws were changed.
A complete misrepresentation of the position. Due to centuries of abuse, African Americans are at a disadvantage. Statistically, they come from poorer neighborhoods, haven't had access to the same educational facilities, are still widely and actively discriminated against. Affirmative action helps to narrow the gap created by a circumstance beyond their control that was inflicted upon them by Jim Crow and segregation. There is a systematic disadvantage to being black in America, it seems only fitting we take systematic action to overcome it.Reverse discrimination is the synonym for Affirmative Action. I didn't plan on debating Affirmative Action here but if you want to then I'd be happy to debate it. All you have done is dismiss any criticism of reverse racism as nonsense without providing any logical or intellectual argument. Racism, as it's defined, is merely discrimination based upon an individuals race. If an employer hires a white individual over a black individual solely because he's white, liberals like you would begin to indignantly scream racism at the top of your lungs. If an employer hires a black individual over a white individual solely because he's black, liberals like you start applauding and praising the decision. In your mind, the former is racism and the latter is 'affirmative action.' In my mind both instances are examples of racism. Do you see the inconsistency in your position yet?
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WinePusher
Post #20
WinePusher wrote:Abraxas and I have agreed to a revised format for this debate to allow for more posting and rebuttals....for the remainder of the debate. So the next post in this thread will be post 3, a rebuttal by Abraxas.
Sure. If you want to bring up unresolved issues in the comments thread I'd be happy to participate there also. I'll probably be doing that myself with the upcoming posts.Abraxas wrote:Thank you WP, I appreciate you posting this. It would have felt in appropriate, as the first person to post under the new format, for me to make the announced change in rules or to make another post without announcing it.
WinePusher wrote:Comparatively, labor conditions in the United States were far better off than the conditions that existed in many other countries at that time. Another factor that characterized the industrialization of America was immigration, and the magnet that attracted so many immigrants was labor. Immigrants came because working conditions were better than the conditions that existed in their own country.
You have to compare something with something Abraxas. I'm making realistic comparisons between the working conditions of industrialized countries at that time and all you're doing is using some unrealistic arbitrary standard. Yea, it would have been ideal if working conditions and worker's rights were perfect at the inception of the industrial age. But society doesn't operate like that. When a new phenomona, such as industrialization, comes into existence problems with this new phenomona, such as the maltreatment and safety of workers, will also come into existence. These problems are dealt with gradually. During the time periods you base your argument on, industry was just beginning in America. As industry developed and expanded, working conditions also rose. Capitol goods are a product of production and are themselves subject to innovation. Somebody has to produce the machinery used in producing automobiles, somebody has to produce the electrical wiring used to power the building. As industry expanded things like machinery were innovated to accomidate things such as safety, as industry expanded it created demand for specialized labor which lead to the creation of things like benefits and insurance and pensions.Abraxas wrote:I don't see how any of this changes my argument. I think our bar can be a bit nigher than not the worst in the world.
WinePusher wrote:Can you actually define a wage that would be appropriate? Again Abraxas, in a free labor market wages are determined by an easy concept: supply and demand, the supply and demand for workers who are allocated to different firms through wages. If a firm has a demand for a particular skill, and the supply of workers who possess that skill is plentiful than the wage is necessarily low. Anybody off the street in 19th century America could work in a factory, meaning that the supply of factory workers was high which forced wages to be low. Wage controls merely distort the market mechanism and create unconventional problems. This is what ultimately confuses me, it's as if you believe the government knows everything. The government just knows the right wage that workers should be paid, the government just knows how many Americans ought to own homes. Matters like these are governed by market mechanisms.
The reason you're confused is because you're not looking at the situation in terms of supply and demand. Wages are merely prices, specifically they are the price of labor. If there's a huge supply of labor then the wage is going to be low no matter what. Why do you think there's a wage discrepency between physicians and hospital cafeteria workers? Because almost anybody can be a hospital cafeteria worker, meaning the supply of hospital cafeteria workers is huge which is why they are paid a relatively low wage.Abraxas wrote:Forced them to be low? Yeah, I'll bet the industrialists in the day suffered much arm twisting and lamentation before they were cruelly forced to make more money by cutting the wages of their workers. No, the industrialists took advantage of a large labor force that allowed them to cut wages, in some cases to levels that amounted to virtual slavery, such as Ludlow.
Unions don't fight for wages that are fair, a wage that's fair is determined by the market. Unions fight for wages that are above the market value. And how do you think a wage increase is paid for? If a company raises the wages of their employees because they are forced to at gun point rather than raising the wages voluntarily because of increased revenue, who makes up the difference? Free lunches don't exist Abraxas. You can't simply raise the wages of unionized workers without creating negative effects elsewhere. When unionized workers get a wage increase, the difference comes out of the wage of non union workers. Unions raise the wages of their members and at the same time lower the wages of non union workers. Another thing is that if a business is forced to pay a higher wage to a group of unionized workers, they will most likely raise the price of whatever good or service they offer in order to compensate for the difference. If you only look at the surface, you see that unions do alot of beneficial things for their members. If you look below the surface, you'd see that unions do alot of harm to nonunion workers and average consumers who suffer from higher prices.Abraxas wrote:Can I define what wages are appropriate? Probably not. Can economists find an appropriate minimum wage? Yes, they have before, they can again. But more to the point, not all government controls require direct caps. Things like guaranteeing union protections can help give workers the tools they need to help keep their own wages fair.
WinePusher wrote:Work days are not uniform across all firms, not every worker has the same hours as another worker. In a free market, workers negotiate their hours with their employer. More hours means more money Abraxas, perhaps some workers prefered working long egregious hours because it meant they'd earn more in their paycheck. You don't know, I don't know, only they know and they express their desires through negotiation. The government may think it's preferable to impose 40 hour work weeks, but this merely inhibits the freedom of workers during negotiation.
Whether you're paid by the hour or on comission, the more time you put into your job the more money you get.Abraxas wrote:Excuse me, on what basis do you assert more hours means more in their paycheck?
It's funny how every argument you make has already been refuted. The fact that we both accept is that work hours declined over time. What we apparently disagree on is what caused the decline. You attribute it to unions as you've done with nearly everything, I would say it's because of the fact that over time worker productivity increases. In a given hour, an individual worker might be able to produce 2 automobiles and if the quota is 10 automobiles per day the worker would have to work 5 hours per day. Over time, the productivity of the worker increases so that he might be able to produce 4 cars in a given hour which would reduce the number of hours he would have to work to about 2 and a half hours per day. Shorter work weeks are the result of a gradual increase of worker productivity, not unions.Abraxas wrote:Very often this wasn't the case and workers had to engage in unpaid labor or get fired. But hey, that's the free market, right? Work longer hours for nothing or get the axe and lose the ability to feed your family, choose freely. I do know, Winepusher, because I know what rights workers pushed for when they did unionize and among those rights were standardized hours and pay for overtime. If workers did not want these things they would not have unionized to demand these things. Who do you think pushed the 40 hour work week to begin with if not labor unions, aka laborers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
WinePusher wrote:I really don't think you know what you're talking about here. Real wages refers to the final wage earned after inflation has been incorporated. It's the same as Real GDP, where inflation has already been incorporated, as opposed to Nominal GDP, where inflation hasn't been incorporated. Real wages did decline under Reagan, but not because of the reason you've provided. If you know your history, you'd realize that inflation was rampant throughout the decades preceding Reagan and even into the early years of his presidency. Around that same exact time real wages began to decline. That's because inflation reduces real wages. It's the reason why inflation is a problem in the first place. If prices rise and real wages rise at the same time there would be no problem, but what happens is prices rise, nominal wages generally rise, and real wages almost always fall. So, the stagnation in real wages before and during the Reagan administration is traced back to inflation, not the 'weaking of union protections under federal law.'
This would be a good argument if it were actually true, but it isn't. You can't expect real wages to rise back up right away. Nothing operates instantly like that. It takes time for the different variables to react to one another. Real wages began to rise gradually after inflation was wrung out, not instantly. Look at whatever graph you want and it will correspond to what I'm saying. And besides, you've made no logical argument explaining how weakening unions causes real wages to decline. What you're saying is nonsense. Unions do nothing to benefit workers. They are worthless institutions that are only good at vandalizing neighborhoods and harassing communities.Abraxas wrote:Sorry, reality disagrees. If what you are saying were true, we should expect real wages to start increasing again once inflation was reversed by the mid eighties, and, behold, it slowed to a fraction of the rate before the inflation crisis. Inflation was not the cause of the stagnation in real wages, if it were you should see a consistent change across all tiers in reduction of real income, instead, you see the very wealthy go up and the poor fall flat. That is a result of the destruction of regulation of industry.
WinePusher wrote:Go ahead and show how the goal of profit maximization destroys the conditions in which people work, the wages people recieve, and the benefits and pensions people recieve. You think profits are the root of all societies problems and you have a biased and skewed understanding of what profits actually are.
Abraxas wrote:Wages are costs, cutting costs raises profits, raised profits is good for the employer, and so cutting wages as much as you can get away with is good for the employer.
They're miniscule costs when compared to all the other costs employers have to pay for. I'm not a business guru, but generally speaking wage cuts and layoffs come very last. That shows that there are other more effective ways to maximize profits rather than cutting wages or laying off workers. But really, your alternative scenario is not realistic. The higher a minimum wage, the more people lose out on jobs. Despite what you may think, there is alot of value in a job that pays virtually nothing, especially if you're just entering the abor market. It gives you experience and an oppurtunity to climb the ladder. Minimum wage laws destroy these oppurtunities that would otherwise be available to individuals without any experience or skills and makes it much more difficult for them to get a strong foot in the job market.
WinePusher wrote:But aside from that, you have not really specified anything you'd like the government to do. What intiatives and policies would exist under this governmental framework?
I broght up the minimum wage in another thread and you seemed reluctant to debate it. If you want to debate it, I'll be happy to participate in the comments thread. But the minimum wage, along with unions, end up hurting workers rather than benefiting them. This has been a motif of government intervention that you haven't caught onto yet. Whenever the government intervenes, you get results that are opposite of what was expected. Minimum wage laws are expected to benefit workers, they do the exact opposite. Rent control laws are expected to benefit consumers, they do the exact opposite. If you actually cared about workers, you would be behind a national right to work law and I doubt you are.Abraxas wrote:Much of it is or was being done, formalize protections for unions, legislate things like minimum safe work conditions, minimum wage laws, socialized medicine, etc. I feel many of these things should be expanded in certain ways. The current minimum wage is insufficient, inspections should be more complete and inspectors have more authority to cite companies for dangerous behavior; things of this nature. Companies will learn how to be more competitive in that environment or they will leave it and a niche will open up and new companies will come in. If they can't operate fairly and safely, maybe they shouldn't operate at all.
WinePusher wrote:This is a poor argument Abraxas. You happily attribute any advancement in civil rights to the federal government, but ignore the hinderences in civil rights that the federal government was responsible for. Many of the cases you cite are merely instances of the Court correcting or reversing the abborent decisions it made before. Brown v. Board of Education was merely a reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson. Had there been no Plessy v. Ferguson there would have been no need for Brown v. Board of Education. Had the Supreme Court not set the precedent of de jure segregation in Plessy there would not have been a need for half of the cases you cited. Using your logic, there would have been no Civil War had there been no Dred Scott v. Sandford. This is a classic example of starting the story in the middle. If you had began the story at the beginning, you'd realize that it was the government that was the primary entity responsible for segregation and racism and slavery and that these cases you cite are merely corrections of prior actions. It's like saying that a mother deserves an award for caring and attending to her mentally retarded child, when in fact the only reason why the child is retarded is that the mother drank and did drugs during her pregnancy.
Ok Abraxas, I guess you need a crash course on federalism. Whenever the Supreme Court rules on a case, that ruling becomes binding law at the federal level. Knowing this, why would the Supreme Court of the United States (an institution of the federal government) take up a case concerning state law? Because the issue was a federal issue, the issue was the 'Seperate but Equal' doctrine which was a federal statute, not a state statute.Abraxas wrote:You are completely misrepresenting what happened there. Plessy v. Ferguson was a (bad) ruling that a state law in Louisiana did not violate constitution. It was not, as you are representing, a federal enforcement of segregation, but rather gave states the power to create their own laws, which states and local jurisdictions used to create their own segregation laws.
You have it all backwards. If there were no laws enforcing segregation in the first place, there would have been no need for any of this. You forget that the primary place where segregation occured were in the public schools, schools run by the government. There would have been no need to make it illegal because it wouldn't have been legal to begin with.Abraxas wrote:Put another way, this was an instance of the federal government not making something which is reprehensible illegal, in other words, leaving it to your free society, and they took it and ran to make racism over and systematic. Had the government ruled initially it was in violation of federal law, it would have solved the problem then instead of waiting until Brown. This is a case of insufficient government intervention, certainly not too much as you are pretending.
WinePusher wrote:Every single black individual who was denied access from entering a restaurant reserved for whites cost that restaurant owner his or her business. In a free market, segregation would have never manifested itself in society because it would not be profitable for a business owner to deny service to an individual on this basis of his or her race.
I'm well aware of the fact that Jim Crow laws were primarily state and local laws. I've never argued against that. What I'm saying is you have is a combination of two evils: state and local governments actively enforcing segregation and the federal government permitting state and local government to enforce segregation. You still haven't adequately answered my question. Absent government at any level, how would it be possible to enforce segregation? It wouldn't, structural segregation would dissolve if there was no government involved. If schools were private and didn't have a steady and reliable source of funding coming from the government, they would have to appeal to every single family and child out there regardless of their race. If the school was picky and only admitted white students they would be losing out on the tuition fees of the black students they rejected. By discriminating against blacks they are imposing a cost upon themselves that they would not have had otherwise. I suggest you start looking at this issue in terms of opportunity costs Abraxas, it'll clear up alot of things for you.Abraxas wrote:I don't believe you honestly think this is true. You know, as well as I do, the vast, vast majority of Jim Crow laws came from the state and local level, not federal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ji ... s_by_State
It was a free market and segregation did manifest itself in society. You think things like sundown towns were the result of government intervention, no, they were the result of a deeply racist society willing to absorb any minor economic impact, assuming there even would be one to begin with, in order to ensure their racist views were the defacto law of the land.
WinePusher wrote:It is not feasiable in a free market to open up a restaurant and only allow whites in,
Then tell me what exactly has changed in society between then and now.Abraxas wrote:Excuse me, but that simply is untrue. It may not work now due to social changes, but until the 60s businesses could and did as a matter of routine.
WinePusher wrote:as it wasn't feasible to only allow whites to ride buses in the south. When blacks began to boycott public transportation, public transportation businesses began to incur huge losses and were eventually forced to accept their demands.
You didn't refute my point. This is a classic example of segregation being dealt with by market mechanisms. Busing companies began to suffer a loss because they were engaging in segregation. They stopped segregating buses because their base of consumers was limited only to whites. This is why segregation isn't feasible in a free market.Abraxas wrote:Yes, they did, eventually. Up to that point, the free market buses were still segregated however. Interesting story about why blacks began to boycott them, maybe you should look into it before claiming the market won't allow segregation.
WinePusher wrote:This is an absurd argument. The market does not encourage any type of behavior.
Abraxas wrote:This is an absurd claim. The market most certainly does encourage behavior that maximizes profits.
Hahaha!!
This is only true for For Profit institutions. What about Not For Profit institutions, are they encouraged by the market to 'maximize' profits? Of course not. I'm talking about individuals, not businesses. In a free market, or perhaps to be more clear, in a free society racism is not encouraged or discouraged. In a free society you can harbor any opinions and beliefs you want to. If you are racist, you have a right to cling to those beliefs. You, however, do not have a right to exercise those beliefs because they impede the freedom of other individuals. And since you bring up the subject of profits, I'll go back to my original argument. In a market governed by Profit and Loss, excluding a large group of people from partaking in the service or product you provide would not maximize profits, it would instead minimize profits. WinePusher wrote:The market allows individuals to engage in whatever type of behavior they want as long as it doesn't harm or impede the freedom of other individuals. The reason you don't see very many working class people at yacht clubs is because most working class people can't afford memberships to yacht clubs, only individuals with disposable income can.
I'm sure you actually believe this, which is sad. Working class people generally have a lower amount of disposable income than the upper class do. So of course you're going to see more upper class people at plaes like yacht clubs because they have more disposable income. But let me guess, your liberal mentality leads you to believe that everybody should have a right to have yacht club memberships, and if someone can't afford the membership fees I and the rest of society should subsidize them?Abraxas wrote:Because they keep membership fees high to keep those people out, aka catering to exclusivity.
WinePusher wrote:Reverse discrimination is the synonym for Affirmative Action. I didn't plan on debating Affirmative Action here but if you want to then I'd be happy to debate it. All you have done is dismiss any criticism of reverse racism as nonsense without providing any logical or intellectual argument. Racism, as it's defined, is merely discrimination based upon an individuals race. If an employer hires a white individual over a black individual solely because he's white, liberals like you would begin to indignantly scream racism at the top of your lungs. If an employer hires a black individual over a white individual solely because he's black, liberals like you start applauding and praising the decision. In your mind, the former is racism and the latter is 'affirmative action.' In my mind both instances are examples of racism. Do you see the inconsistency in your position yet?
Have you ever analyzed the logic of the talking points you just posted? Blacks do come from poorer neighborhoods, many of these neighborhoods are located in populated urban cities such as chicago and new york city where progressive policies, such as government housing, welfare and rent control are ubiquitous. Blacks do attend poor quality schools that set them up for failure in life, these schols are government run and blacks are forced to attend them. Blacks are institutionally discriminated against by employers because the government forbids an employer to pay a young black individual with limited skills the market value of his or her labor. In some aspects blacks are a disadvantaged group, but that's because they are a group that have been subject to the tyrannies of government throughout their history in this country.Abraxas wrote:A complete misrepresentation of the position. Due to centuries of abuse, African Americans are at a disadvantage. Statistically, they come from poorer neighborhoods, haven't had access to the same educational facilities, are still widely and actively discriminated against. Affirmative action helps to narrow the gap created by a circumstance beyond their control that was inflicted upon them by Jim Crow and segregation. There is a systematic disadvantage to being black in America, it seems only fitting we take systematic action to overcome it.
There's an interesting book by Thomas Sowell called Affirmative Action Around the World where he analyzes preferential policies in various countries. One country he examines is India, where you would think Affirmative Action would be the most appropriate due to their caste system. You have a small faction of people, called untouchables, who are worthless members of society that don't and can never amount to anything. Guess what, the untouchables in India are far more disadvantaged than the blacks have ever been in America, yet as a collective group they have not benefited from AA. The society has merely harbored additional resentment against them because they are occupying positions they are unqualified to occupy. If a university has a certain limit on how many students they can admit, and they base their admissions criteria on not only academics but also ethnicity, you would have academially qualified students being rejected because they don't belong to a ethnic group. You cover your ears all you want Abraxas, but that's racism defined. If you were a great student in high school and were rejected from Yale only because they had to set aside a certain number of slots for black people and you weren't black, you would rightly feel angry. Anybody in that situation would be angry. All AA policies do is increase social tensions between racial groups.
Note: I just got home from break and had some spare time to respond to our head to head. Unfortunately tommorow I'm returning to my regular schedule and don't know when my next post will be up. But if you want to respond to some things I've written her in the comments thread I'll make an effort to participate there.
