Ron Paul has establishment support. PIMCO CEO considers him the best candidate.

it seems that youre grasping for straws here. I'd be thrilled to hear your explanation of how the candidate you support is not infinitely more corrupt than Ron Paul

 

I'm sure here were many Germans who felt that exact way.

 

I haven't been saying that Dr. Paul is corrupt. I was just saying that his economic plan is very pro- business and that he is not the great enemy of corporate America like you all paint him to be.

I'm almost certain that my candidate won't be getting any corporate support.

 

I'm having a difficult time trying to find his policies or if he has a plan or not can you link them? Alexander that is.

 

Right, because you say so. Standard socialist drivel.

Alright then. Please provide me with your infallible pay scale which dictates how much a given worker really deserves.

Oh, so you speak for "the customer" now? Who appointed you the God of customers?

Of course there is.

You see, mutually consenting individuals exchange money for goods and services at an agreed upon price. That's really all there is to it. Sorry if you don't like individual choice and freedom, but you'll just have to deal with it.

Blah blah blah.

This rant is irrelevant to our contention. It does nothing to address the fact that individuals IN THE REAL WORLD engage EVERYDAY in mutually voluntary transactions for goods and services. For instance, I'm sure you've eaten at a local restaurant, and I'm sure you were not forced to eat there. Now, in some delusional alternate universe, you might believe that you were coerced somehow into eating there, but, rest assured, that is nothing more than the manifestation of some incipient mental disorder.

There is such a thing as mutually voluntary exchange, and you have engaged in it hundreds of times throughout your life. We libertarians want to increase the frequency with which you engage in such transactions by decentralizing power to THE PEOPLE.

Extreme coercion by central governments, which libertarians seek to restrict and diminish, and which you seek to empower and expand.

 

Your article has some misinformation. Sound money was not "destroyed over the last decade". We have never had sound money in this country.

 

This is self-evident. A widget costs $5 in materials and $3 in its share of fixed capital costs. In total, all workers involved in its production are paid $4 to produce the item. By rights it ought to cost the customer $12. When a business owner instead sells it for $15, where did the extra $3 come from? Well, either the material costs were higher, the customer was overcharged... or the labor was underpaid. If the actual value of what someone produces is higher than their pay + material cost of the item, then there's a theft of labor going on.

Either the customer is getting screwed, or the worker is getting screwed, or both are. The fact that the customer is happy in his ignorance does not change the fact that he was taken advantage of. The fact that a worker may be desperate enough for work that he will accept the poor terms does not make them good terms. I'm not saying that I have any right to determine what is fair pay... I'm saying that fair pay is easily derived from the actual selling price of an item, minus the material and capital costs. It doesn't require some top down declaration of fair pay, all it requires is knowledge of the final selling price of the object you're producing, and the costs associated with the production of that item.

Customers are in the worst position, to be sure, because they have the greatest informational deficit. They know almost nothing about the back-end costs of an item, or about labor payments. They're the easiest to exploit in this, though certainly not the only ones who get exploited.

You can have mutual exchange without profit. I love the idea of individual choice and freedom... that does not mean I think it's acceptable for people to exploit informational disparities and difficult circumstances to steal from others.

Yeah, usual free-marketer response; you've got nothing.

"Voluntary" only in the most asinine sense. If you lack the necessary information to fairly bargain, you cannot give any meaningful form of consent to the transaction. If you're so desperate for a little money to keep food on the table that you'll sell your labor for way under what it is worth on a fair market, that's not meaningful consent to the transaction. The libertarian idea of "voluntary" is insane; it totally ignores soft power and context, limiting the definition only to coercion by physical force. That's not how real societies operate, and it's not where the majority of coercion comes from. Let the buyer beware is no decent way to organize society.

Irrelevant. Utterly irrelevant nonsense.

So what? Your definition of "voluntary" seems to be rather absurd.

No, you want to centralize power in the hands of the people who control capital. That's why you support asinine ideas like profit and usury. You object to the state only because it impedes your private masters in controlling your lives. Socialists like me? We really want to decentralize things, and even you right-libertarians object to that. No state, no private business, no concentrations of power at all.

Has got nothing to do with socialism, nor what I am proposing, which would dismantle the very basis of the state. You want to continue that pattern, by creating a government that does nothing but promote the concentration of power in the hands of private individuals. You support nothing but a modern feudalism, pretending that it is voluntary on the part of the serfs.

 

Obviously it's not, since every successful economy in the history of the planet is based upon markets and their ability to determine equilibrium prices through supply and demand.

The "extra" $3 is compensation for the entrepreneur and investor(s) who have brought the product to market with their labor and capital. Do you actually expect a business owner to work for nothing?

Again, who appointed you the spokesperson for the "customer"? Where do you derive the authority to dictate at what price a good or service ought to be sold and bought?

That is merely your subjective opinion.

There is no "theft" because the laborer is there of their own accord and they are being compensated for their labor at a mutually agreed upon rate.

You're not saying you have the right to determine fair pay or price, yet you are doing exactly that by characterizing profit as fraud and theft, which is the most juvenile, most asinine thing I've ever heard.

Of course it requires such a thing, otherwise how would it be enforced?

Virtually every transaction and interaction between individuals is characterized by some form of "asymmetric information", but that does not necessarily mean exploitation, fraud, or theft is occurring. Only in the grand Utopian delusions of economic ignoramuses is this the case.

Obviously you don't love it because you consider it theft and fraud.

People "exploit informational disparities" all the time. For instance, I'm sure you don't go around telling everyone that you're a rabid socialist who considers profit a form of fraud and theft; your failure to divulge this information is "exploitation" via an "informational disparity", according to you, at least. I'm sure if the people you met were privy to such information, they would reconsider the nature of their relationship with you.

Vague and meaningless tripe. "Necessary information" is a purely subjective term, and because it is purely subjective, true consent could only occur with "perfect information" which is an impossibility.

Just because one's choices are limited by their environment does not mean they are being coerced by an employer. The employer is not forcefully depriving the laborer of any choice, hence there is no coercion. If there is no coercion, then the transaction is consensual.

No, it does not ignore such things, nor does it limit the definition of coercion to physical force. Fraud is also a form of coercion; you've simply expanded the definition of "fraud" to include anything you arbitrarily deem to be "unfair", and THAT is no decent way to organize society.

Nope, it's totally relevant. When you order pizza to your residence, you are not being defrauded and the people making the pizza are not having their labor stolen.

Nobody is forcing you to call the pizza place and ask for their product, and nobody is forcing you to pay the price they are asking for that product.

Likewise, nobody is forcing the employees to make and deliver the pizza.

Every individual has consented to the arrangement. Whether or not they consider the arrangement "fair" is totally irrelevant as to whether or not it was voluntary.

My definition is the only one that actually applies in the real world and not in some delusional alternative universe where individuals are privy to perfect information and everyone gets to enforce their subjective conception of "fairness" on everyone else.

Absolutely delusional. Will never work.

Yes, would dismantle the basis for the state via the state, which is what socialism necessitates. You would turn over all private property to the state and then naively expect them to operate it efficiently and to distribute the proceeds equitably amongst the peons, er, I mean the populace.

Your anti-capitalistic rants sound nice in theory but have been disproven by real-world application.

Capitalist, market-based economies thrive and their peoples accrue wealth, whereas socialist economies stagnate and destroy wealth. The more a society moves away from markets and towards socialism, the more poverty and misery they experience.