New here. Are there any liberals who could explain their economic theory to me?

I understand basic economics just fine. Do you? Wealth is created when someone provides a good or service of value to someone else. Pray tell, what difference does it make if the person providing that good or service works for the government or some corporation? Or perhaps you think that police and fire protection is not of value? Or roads and bridges and clean drinking water and safe food and sewage systems and military protection have no value? And that's just for starters.

 

Because they don't produce anything. Of course I'm speaking of personal wealth, not public infrastructure, obviously.

Police, fire departments, etc. only serve to protect wealth. But if there isn't any wealth to protect, there isn't a need for these departments.

Wealth is created when private individuals make stuff that people accumulate as part of their portfolios. They take a cheap resource and turn it into an expensive item, like trees into homes, or iron ore into cars.

 

Oh, of course, personal wealth is the only thing in the entire universe that matters. People, family, friends, community, the country, the world, none of those mean a thing. The only thing that matters is how big your fraking bank account is.

How old are you? Five? Grow up already.

That sort of idiotic, selfish, egocentric worldview will bring you nothing but grief.

Do you know what intrinsic value private wealth has? Absolutely none whatsoever. What good does a big number on your balance sheet do you? None at all. What real use is a fancy car or an absurdly huge house? Not a thing. So why do people want those things? Simple. Social status. Whether you're willing to admit it or not, the only reason you want any of that stuff is because of other people.

Okay, enough ranting. As far as economics is concerned, it doesn't matter whether something is public or private. So long as it's of value to someone, that's all that matters. Police, firefighters, etc, serve to protect people, not wealth. Wealth is just stuff, things, at most. Things don't matter, people do.

 

Then why complain about the poor not being in absolute poverty, but only relative poverty in the US; shouldn't you be for increasing programs for poverty elimination that can enable the poor to become more productive citizens instead of merely spending our tax monies for "anything and everything" that promotes the general warfare and common offense, instead of the general welfare?

 

Hoover Dam is still generating revenue today. How much infrastructure did we get under any republican administration in modern times for a similar outlay?

 

Nice rant, from the perspective of someone who hasn't accumulated a decent portfolio, obviously.

Lots of private wealth has intrinsic value: homes, buildings, livestock, land, gold, manufacturing machinery...

If "things" didn't matter, then government shouldn't be taxing folks to build things.

 

"Common offense"? What? You're obviously confused.

When you subsidize anything you get more of it. That includes poverty.

 

Hoover Dam is still generating revenue today. How much infrastructure did we get under any republican administration in modern times for a similar outlay? I believe our Founding Fathers wisely enumerated the end for which our Tax monies are to be raised.

By what latitude of construction is there any specific enumeration for the general warfare or the common offense?

 

An excellent example of the government competing unfairly with private corporations, eliminating personal wealth.

 

Why subsidize a warfare-state regime by claiming the general power to provide for the general welfare includes "anything and everything" necessary to prosecute it, instead of specifically, the general welfare and the general prosperity?

 

How is it an example of "competing" unfairly if it could be considered a natural public sector monopoly, simply because the private sector had not the means to do it, just like the Space Race.

 

Obviously there is no "general welfare clause" as some insist.

 

Liberal economic theory, everywhere, is called capitalism. Conservatives who oppose it are in favour of feudalism, the Inquisition and so on. Grow up, children!

 

You don't know that the private sector had the means or not. Here in The South, we have literally thousands of privately owned dams, and dozens of very large ones owned by private companies built for the purpose of producing hydroelectric power.

 

You've got the modern US definitions of conservative and liberal reversed.

 

I wasn't aware of any private companies that were planning on building the Hoover Dam. Maybe you can enlighten us.

As for wealth, clearly it created individual wealth, in the form of lower electricity bills for the millions it provided power to.

The difference is, with the Govt doing it, the benefit went to the millions of power users, as opposed to a vast portion of the benefit going to the person or few persons who own the company that would have built it (if any could have).

 

See post 489.

 

It doesn't. Now if we can just convince your union bosses...

 

There are some things that the government can do that private corps would steer away from - or find impossible due to interstate issues or find cost prohibitive due to task scale. But, there are some tasks (most, IMO) that the private sector can do that government would only muck up with bureaucratic nonsense & red tape, off the wall environmental impact studies for decades, cost overruns, etc. The fact is, we need both for their respective abilities.

I can't understand why we at PF (and probably everywhere else) want to go bonkers over A or B rather than take the pragmatic approach of A and B, each in its proper proprtion and utility. It's that proportion between A and B and the specific utility that each possesses that really matters. The public and private sectors aren't mutually exclusive.

[I'm not chastising you for your post. It just reminded me of the either-or way we seem to approach these two sectors, as if they really were mutually exclusive.]

 

Uh-huh. So we should disband the US military then, since it's unfairly competing with private mercenaries, eliminating personal wealth? And it was wrong to fight the Second World War, since that was again cutting into those poor, poor mercenaries' business? Your only objection to Hitler's death camps is that he should have contracted them out to private companies?

What sort of inhuman monster are you?

So the sum total of your response to my previous post amounts to, "Well, you must not be rich, therefore I don't have to listen to you." Bravo, such eloquence, such piercing insight, such flawless logic and rhetoric. You're a real credit to the human species, you know that?

As for my portfolio, when I need to carry around loose sheets of paper, I generally use a loose leaf binder. Works quite well for my purposes. Now if someone who weren't a pompous idiot were to ask me about my finances, I'd say that no, I don't have much money, but I have more then enough for my needs. I have neither any desire nor any need for more. In fact, I periodically wind up giving some away because I simply can't think of anything to do with it.

I will agree with you that livestock has intrinsic value. As living sentient beings, they have intrinsic value to themselves. Beyond that, all I can say is, dear gods, not another fluffybunny who thinks there's something magic about gold. It's just a metal. If there's some mystical inherent value in it, how do you measure it? What properties does it relate to? As for the rest, everything is worth what its purchaser is willing to pay for it. A bit of wisdom that goes back at least to Ancient Rome, btw. If a piece of manufacturing equipment is sitting in the middle of a forest, abandoned and forgotten, for all practical purposes it's simply a rock with an unusually high metal content and some peculiar morphologies. Things only have value in relation to people.

Taxation takes money. Money is a category of thing. The government takes money in the form of taxation in order to provide for the common good and the general welfare. Well, at least in theory, obviously the practice sometimes gets messed up. That is, they are using the money to create things that are of value and benefit to people. And since the government is providing goods and services of value to people, they are creating wealth, by definition.

Caring only about what's of direct benefit to you personally. Seeing no value in the welfare of others. Being unable to conceive of the notion of a common good. These are the values of an uncivilized barbarian - the sort of people who will loot and sack a great city, leaving nothing but smoldering ruins in their wake. I believe they also fit the definition of a sociopath.

 

Yeah, and there in the South, you don't bother with little things like safety inspections. Who cares if a dam collapses and kills hundreds of people? So long as someone made a buck off of it, it's fine.

 

Then why are we wasting the Peoples' tax dollars on "anything and everything" instead of that which is specifically enumerated by the specific powers? Is not that point of view disingenous in modern times?

The specifically enumerated general powers enumerate, specifically, why our federal Congress is even delegated the Power to Tax.

 

Why is there any poverty at all, in any red states and even Right to Work States, if according you, those States should be employing everyone through those forms of investments in the private welfare instead of the general welfare?

 

No, since it is a Constitutional role of the feds.