The GOP tax bill would be very bad for the economy.

Then how did the standard of living increase to the highest point in the US ever for the greatest number of people after WWII when the deficit was higher than it's ever been?

I predict that whatever your answer is, it will not falsify my refutation of your premise, i.e. that high debt and deficits cause a lower standard of living.

 

Obviously paying off debts used to finance s...hole Chi-Raqs all over America lowers our standard of living and degrades our culture but, thanks to the miracle of Republican capitalism, not enough to prevent all economic growth. Now do you understand?

 

100% absurd of course. Imagine Africa not trading for cell phones computers solar power clothes medicine etc. Trade is life for them! Hard to imagine you didn’t know that.

 

If a person felt he was going to be worse off as a result of engaging in a trade, then that person would not engage in trade. If a person engages in trade, then that is proof that he considers that trade to be beneficial to attaining his ends.

 

so now libcommies want to make trade illegal at gunpoint so populations will be better off!! Yet another way to interfere with freedom! So everyone should be a skilled artisan making everything they need? Sounds really time consuming.

 

That works ok only when the people that are trading have had their basic needs met and are trading as reasonably equal. In other words, there is nothing that Gates Has that I need he only has things I want. The moment that one person has only wants and the other has both needs and wants is where the problem comes in.

If one person, who is wealthy is happy, healthy, and experiencing well-being and other is poor in pain or suffering or a state of hardship caused by internal or external factors, if money is the key to solving persons suffering, then the parties are not trading as equals. For this reason, those with sufficient wealth are incentivized to create states of misery, suffering and hardship so that their trades with those experiencing those states are willing to do more for less.

For that reason, while your claim may be correct, it really makes no difference to me as long as people have the incentive and the capacity to make the lives of others harder for no other reason than to maximize the value of trades.

 

The claim is still correct. If a person felt he was going to be worse off as a result of engaging in trade, then that person would not engage in trade.

 

wrong of course bottom 50% pay only 2.8% of tax revenue not 50%. They are free rider leeches and libcommies only want to encourage more of this creating always more problems.

 

Good point. Without reference to power relations, our understanding of economic relations is pitiful. Check out Bond's book Looting Africa. Its full of examples of how trade, due to the impact of hegemony, have left people worse off. He even can quote the World Bank (who admitted the same in their study Where is the Wealth of Nations). Here's a snippet:

"The Bank report, Where is the Wealth of Nations, makes several crucial adjustments to gross national income and savings accounts, and by subtracting fixed capital depreciation, adding education spending, subtracting resource depletion and subtracting pollution damage, the Bank finds that some countries are vast losers via export processing. For example, according to this methodology, Gabon’s citizens lost $2,241 each in 2000, followed by citizens of the Republic of the Congo (-$727), Nigeria (-$210), Cameroon (-$152), Mauritania (-$147) and Cote d’Ivoire (-$100)"[/QUOTE]

 

Gee what a great discovery for the communists to make. Freedom does not work and so we need a libcommie govt to step in to make it fair and to suit the communist bureaucrats. Too bad it killed 120 million.


Jefferson:
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

 

Well nothing like making a bad deal to teach you what to do better the next time. Thats the beauty of free trade: the game is never over and each time you have the opportunity to learn. Protect people from their own ignorance and you merely enable more of it

 

Check out Easterly's books to see that World Bank welfare programs have crippled Africa just the way USA welfare programs have crippled blacks and others in America

 

When one engages in trade, he necessarily makes himself better off. Otherwise he wouldn't engage in trade.

 

And it's still immoral.

 

Employing someone is immoral? How so?

 

how in a capitalist county is a rich man selling something to a poor man immoral when the poor man would prefer buying something to keeping his money? Obviously the poor man is better off. Making a poor man better off is not immoral but very moral.

it might be immoral in a socialist/communist country where the poor man was forced to pay a high price for low quality due to no competition among sellers.

 

There's certainly a morality standpoint. To exhaust mutually beneficial exchange orthodox economics will refer to pareto efficiency. It then suggests that any point on the contract curve (i.e. all possible pareto efficiency outcomes) can be achieved by simply redistributing initial endowments. What that approach fails to take into account is that efficiency and equity often go hand in hand. In severe inequality, choice is typically illusionary: it is eat or die. That necessarily creates a hierarchy where one benefits from rent as the other's expense. A zero sum game of course cannot be deemed to be mutually beneficial. It is a polite way of referring to theft.

 

That sounds like government violence used to interfere with people's economic choices. Another example, from the statists, of anti-economics.

 

Eat or die? In a capitalist country there is tremendous competition to serve the poor. A days food now takes 1/100 the time it took 100 years ago to produce the food or earn the money to buy it.

 

[QUOTE="Reiver, post: 1068540267]. It is a polite way of referring to theft.[/QUOTE]


So, to a libcommie capitalism is theft and socialism after it starved 120 million to death is???

 

Government manipulation bad, economic manipulation good...lol

 

yes govt monopoly manipulation is very bad since it reflects only desires of monopoly, economic manipulation by millions of free people in a capitalist market place is good since no one participates unless their situation is improved!!

 

Imagine what would happen without government intervention: stagflation, depression and economic collapse. There's a reason that capitalism has always gone hand in hand with government. There's a reason that only the hard right, without any economic backbone, pretend otherwise.

 

capitalism and socialism both go hand and hand with govt. the issue is whether the hand supports socialism or capitalism.

 

these are national or international disruptions caused by national govt control. Capitalism is local or even individual so does not produce national or international disruptions. 1+1=2