The difference is that force would only be used to remedy violation of rights, not to take away rights. Freedom should be the baseline. Instead of government bureaucrats coming up with a list of what can or cannot be done, everything can be done that doesn't interfere with the rights of others. When rights are violated, that is the time for force to be used to remedy the violation. The residents of Palau could sue Shell as a class, though they would have trouble proving Shell is responsible for rising oceans. The EPA can't really stop global warming anyway, seeing as how 1) we don't have near as much control of the climate as some would like to think, there are much bigger natural changes than anything which could be attributed to man, and 2) the EPA's jurisdiction is limited to the United States, so they can't really affect the behavior of the other six billion or so people on the planet. What the average consumer might care about is pollution in general, and not specifically one aggrieved group. I think we have seen that people generally do not care that much about it, but you certainly should have the freedom to try to convince them to care. But consumers can sue. If Tom Cruise overuses his bargaining power, the producer can simply choose not to make the movie. Just like people can choose not to buy a product that is too expensive. There are only two major CPU makers in the world, but they don't charge a million bucks a chip because for one thing they still have to compete against each other, and for another, people would simply not pay that much. If a monopoly overreaches, a new start-up with be formed that will fill the gap. If he is shirking so little that you don't even know it, then there really isn't a problem. What is he spending 10 minutes extra in the trailer? You can educate yourself and not enter into any contract in which you don't have enough information. Maybe you care enough to do that. Maybe you pay a price for your ignorance. I think you are misusing the term moral hazard BTW. Moral hazard means that you take more risks when you are insulated from the consequences. Unknown shirking would not be an example of moral hazard. If you insured the actor for the expected profit of the movie, letting him do all of his own stunts without any kind of safety precautions would be an example of moral hazard. Or you could just sue the broker for breach of fiduciary duties. You can't just handwave the impact of bailouts. Huge portions of the financial sector would be gone if there where no bailouts. Who knows what other companies would have gone under. Certainly Detroit would look a bit different. You can't have a non-free market and then blame failings on a free market. That would be like blaming Daryl Morey for not getting Pau Gasol, as though Stern had no impact on that. A step back to a better time, IMHO.
You're a lawyer, right? I really think that's the only person who can think of such a litigious system as "ideal". You basically said, if people have problems, they can sue...uh, notwithstanding the fact that going through a justice system deliberately designed to be obscure and to extract billable hours from unwitting clients makes it extremely difficult for anyone to sue (and would definitely lead to situations of injustice where the poor and exploited, exactly the type of people that would fall victim to a pure free market, would be unable to get anything), this kind of answer seems to smack of the "get a jobism" that defines modern conservatism. Got poisoned from bad well water? Sue. Don't know who caused it? Sue. Don't have the resources or time to sue since you're dying from being poisoned from bad well water? Sue. What's the difference between that and a government agency internalizing pollution costs? Lawsuits can be just as arbitrary, and inaccurate. Your notion of government/regulation by litigation is as much forceful and arbitrary as EPA action, just about 50 times less efficient, lest we forget aggrieved consumers suing millions for hot coffee being dumped on their laps, while the Mexican people can sue Wachovia for laundering drug money that ends up in the hands of murderers---haha, no, the SEC can and did do that though. But I would love to see "class action against one of the most sophisticated institutions in the world, dealing with matters that require years of training in law and finance, mounted by the concerned citizens of Ciudad Juarez, in between the time they spend not getting murdered." Yes it would be, if a contract was signed, and the agent behaved differently as a result in terms of unobservable behavior. http://www.jstor.org/stable/135634 Sure, a time of wildcat banks and no child labour laws, females unable to vote, blacks quasi-enslaved. Why not? Look, I get that you are all for "freedom", just like neo-Marxists are for "justice". Maybe you were born into fortunate circumstances, or have it going good. The flipside to your idea of "liberty" however is the "tyranny" of the free market. Ignoring even the obvious failures (let's assume litigation solves everything), the whole thing about voluntary contracts is baloney. Do you really think that, given the choice, Foxconn workers choose to work in a suicide-inducing factory? Okay, fine, yes. The choice between death by starvation, and death by overwork might swing to the latter, but how in the hell is this in any way a fair notion? Given the massive power of capital, and the minute power of labour, freedom is simply the tyranny of capital, whose holders do not produce; they merely own. How do you justify a "free market" that demonstrates significant discrimination in terms of differing rates of returns on human capital characteristics, significant across race and gender lines, and is harsh enough so that the term "homeless veteran" is not an oxymoron? You don't. Long ago, effective public policy learned to anchor the dual and naive visions of total freedom, and total justice, to create the system we have now. While it is not perfect either, it is a hell of a lot better than the idealistic visions of the two extremes---one that has never been truly implemented before (pure Marxism), and another that has, and was replaced (voluntarily, I might add---hooray freedom!).
On ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Occupy is about transparency and information. If Coal companies were honest about what they were doing to water quality the market would say "I'm not buying your energy of death". Maybe they don't know or don't want to know, but someone should be preemptively looking out for The People. That is why they band together to ensure the health safety and welfare and why they agree as a society to pay for it. The society exists first, the 1% are subset of it. The rules are established, the system is proven. To claim it is overly predatory in the face of the facts is just ludicrous.
Except that statistics show that it is a zero sum game. The wealthy are getting wealthier while the rest of us are seeing stagnant or falling incomes. It has been this way for decades and is accelerating.
Rowdy in the system of economics it doesn't have to be. Leveraged investment does create wealth. But the investment has to be within the system: better education, better housing, better infrastructure, better machinery, continually improving to absorb the new population and obsoleted workers. The problems happen when the investments move outside the system like off-shoring to improve profitability for the top, or when a stoppage of lending occurs like the over-hyped profit sucking mortgage market caused in the housing industry, or a lack of innovation by regulation cause the money to be sent overseas like the carbon based energy industry and their lobbyist control or tax avoidance by heavy service users so that infrastructure projects get a lack of funds. Pretty much everything the Republicans and the 1% advocate, it turns out is bad for the country in general.
If it were a zero sum game, as you claim, the wealthy getting wealthier would mean everyone else on average would be getting poorer, not remaining stagnant. That is what zero sum means, there are no net gains or losses just changes in distribution. In fact, any change in the total would prove that it is in fact not a zero sum game (which it is not). Think of it as slicing a pie. If someone gets a bigger slice, there is less left for everyone else, but there is still exactly one pie. If the wealthy get wealthier and on average the others stay the same, that is growing the pie, with the new growth all going to the wealthy, not the wealthy getting a bigger cut of the same pie.
so your defense is that because other wages are stagnant or going down instead of all going down, that it's OK?
No. GR was arguing that tallanvor was wrong when he said it was not a zero sum game. I was merely pointing out that tallanvor was right, in that the US economy is not a zero sum game. That is not an argument, it is a fact. If there is any change in GDP, which there has been, it cannot be a zero sum game. That statement makes no value judgments. I am not making a defense of the system. I am merely pointing out that GladiatoRowdy was not properly using the term zero sum. If you really want a defense of increasing wage or wealth disparity, it would look more like this: Complaints about wage disparity are rooted completely in envy and are thus immoral under a Judeo-Christian moral code. In the ten commandments God passed down to Moses a law which forbade his followers from coveting any property of his neighbor. Thus, envy of a group on the rise while we are not is specifically forbidden. For those whose wages are stagnant, there would thus be nothing they could morally complain about. They are no worse off than they were before. What matter that someone else has had a ten fold increase. Would their life be better if there wage remained stagnant, but so did the top 1%. All that would change is that there would be less to envy.
OK fair enough, although that is not a good defense of the wage disparity. It isn't about envy it is about what is fair, and also healthy for the nation. If you look at what caused most governments to collapse a factor was almost always corruption and wage disparity of some form.
Nobody cares about wealth disparity, have you not watched TV in America? We love rich people. We want to be rich people. What knowledgeable people care about is the wealthy using their inordinate political and public information power to skew the laws and attitudes continually more in their favor. Without some protectionism, some unionization, some progressive taxation, some social safety net, some government supported industrial innovation within the borders, some educations programs, a large percentage of the people are going to be paycheck to paycheck, no healthcare, rental home, Walmart shopping third worlders; a distinct departure from the American dream and the real values the country was founded on.
Real wages have decreased. Stagnation implies that. So, no, this isn't about envy. It's about threatening the very notion of the American dream; upward mobility. Couple that with the fact that increasing wage disparities are based on inequality within college-educated groups---implying increased returns to unobservable skills/traits (number of yachts daddy owns, Harvard connections, the "charm" that comes with being a WASP "elite"? who knows) http://www.terry.uga.edu/~mustard/courses/e8420/Juhn-Murphy-Pierce.pdf Even if we're assuming Judeo-Christian values apply here (Wall Street sure as hell doesn't), this isn't an anger based on envy. It runs deeper that that simple reason. This is about a set of values that has defined the American nation---the strong middle class, and the hope of upward mobility, that is being pulled away from them year by year. No wonder people are angry.
Boom! a round house punch! (In China their consequences would never be the same) Subprime scandal: ex-Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac execs accused of fraud! The SEC filed a civil fraud lawsuit Friday against six former top executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying they misled investors about the subprime-loan risks they faced. By Mark Trumbull, Staff writer / December 16, 2011 (read in the voice of Edward Murrow) Six former top executives at the housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac misled investors about the subprime-loan risks they faced, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged in a civil fraud lawsuit Friday. Those charged include the men who were chief executives of these government-chartered mortgage enterprises. Daniel Mudd headed Fannie Mae and Richard Syron led Freddie Mac as the housing boom ended and the financial crisis began. The lawsuit is significant because some finance experts have sharply criticized the federal government for failing to prosecute more executives who may have contributed to the financial meltdown, and because the future of Fannie and Freddie is now a matter of hot political debate...... http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justic...Fannie-Mae-Freddie-Mac-execs-accused-of-fraud And transparancy begins! call in the lawyers, let's have lots and lots of depositions!
The market is fully aware of the pollutants created by coal. In fact, the lawsuits are baked right into the stock price of Duke Energy, AEP, etc. Americans like cheap energy. In the end, they'll look the other way.
Stagnation means to stay the same. It comes from the Latin for a pool of standing water. Not flowing. Unchanging. All of the charts posted seem to show middle class wages keeping pace with inflation. I'm sure it is possible to cherry pick numbers to suit your purpose though. You can't use the gap between the middle class and the upper class to argue about a threat to the American dream. Upward mobility is about individuals moving up. Wealth disparity is about the gap between classes. You can look at the ease or difficulty of moving between wealth strata, but a rising gap between the haves and the have nots has little to do with the dream of moving from one to the other, especially when the gap is not so much between the haves and the have nots as it is between the quite well off and the preposterously wealthy.
Have you seen the numbers? The "zero sum" part is that all of the gains in the economy are going to the top of the income distribution. Hadn't you noticed that the bottom of the income distribution has seen falling wages over the last 30 years? So, yes, the pie is getting bigger, the rich are getting all of those gains AND the people at the bottom end are getting less. I guess you're correct that it isn't technically "zero sum," but it is actually worse than that.
So, you admit that everyone in the bottom 80% have seen, at best, stagnant wages, but you think it's OK because poor people in America are better off than their counterparts in other times and/or places? It is quite simple wrong that all of the gains in the economy over the last 30 years have gone entirely to the top of the income distribution. Class warfare at its worst.
Actually, what I mean is that because the middle class were happy at a certain income relative to inflation 10 or 20 years ago, there is no reason for today's middle class not to be happy at the same level now. Even though someone else has 30 billion dollars instead of 26 billion dollars, or whatever astronomical amount some random top 1% person has, if the say 55% person now has about the same as the 55% person then had, that should be fine for them. America has a very high standard of living. Why is it necessary for that already high standard of living to be increased in order for people to be happy? To me massive unemployment is a much bigger issue than the wealth gap. I personally don't care how much more than me Bill Gates has. What difference does it make to me if he has $50 billion, or $200 billion, or $1 trillion?
A majority of Americans probably could not tell you where the electricity running their own TV comes from. A majority probably could not even tell you how electricity is made, much less what the environmental and health costs are and where those costs show up in the economic system (it's not on your electric bill). It's the corporate CEO's and lobbyist that like cheap energy. Like cheap gasoline, the more that the people can afford now, the more they use and the more dependent they become on it, insuring the junkie will keep buying from the pusher. We have known we needed to push efficiency since the 70's; Jimmy Carter said energy policy was the moral equivalent of war. But it was counter to the profit of the energy companies to pursue it, so they bought the Congress and the Press and made Jimmy Carter look like a fool for wearing a sweater. That's the way this country works. Stupid for a profit.
In economic terms, nominal stagnation is real decline, keeping into account inflation. Besides which, I suppose I'll cherry pick the following figures--- http://www.theatlantic.com/business...suffers-from-a-crisis-of-productivity/242704/ http://retailtrafficmag.com/mag/retail_twilight_middle_class/ http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/college still best option.pdf http://www.epi.org/publication/webfeatures_econindicators_income_20080826/ http://tv.globalresearch.ca/2011/07/end-american-dream Uh--- reposting this from my previous post, as the following quote was the basis of my argument. I realize most of my stuff is TL;DR, but if you're actually interested in informing yourself, these are pertinent facts, and exactly the reason why Occupy Wall Street has sprung up.
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2007.pdf Hell, even the "master" himself--- http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011...vernment-policy-is-increasing-inequality.html
