Protests in France

[taiyuu_otoko]

I would lump the right to be free from easily preventable communicable disease under "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness."

Where does the money come to pay for this?

What happens if the money runs out?

What happens of the cost of the stuff people claim as rights is MORE than the amount of money?

What happens if printing MORE money to pay for these rights has adverse and unexpected affects?

If the government can print money to pay for stuff, why do people need to work?

If the government prints money to buy things beyond what is produced, where does the EXTRA STUFF come from?

What is the actual, physical, economic limit? Why does anybody have to work? Who gets to work for the government, who gets to print money to buy stuff, and who has to work in the actual factories and fields to produce stuff? Wouldn't everybody eventually want to work for the government? What if everybody DID want to work for the government?

How would they choose WHO worked for the government (and got to buy stuff with printed money) and how had to actually work in factories and fields making stuff?

 

[AttackFormation]

Maybe, but you still ignored it. Is that because you don't know the answer, or you don't like the answer?

But I'll make it easier on you.

Suppose you have 200 million poor people and 100 million rich people.

And the 100 million people are absolute EXPERTS at gaming the system.

What good does it do the 200 million poor people to know the money can be created AT WILL by the government if it will have little effect on their lives?

I did answer the question and won't repeat my answer, but now you ask a different one so I'll answer this one too I guess.

I'm not sure what you want to relate this question to in reality? You've defined that the only thing that can change is whether the government creates money or not, and you've not said anything about its allocation or whatever, and then you've defined that creating money will have little effect. So by your question's definition, it's really not a question in the first place and more of a statement. Leading me back to square one, what do you want to relate this statement to in reality?

 

[AttackFormation]

Where does the money come to pay for this?

What happens if the money runs out?

What happens of the cost of the stuff people claim as rights is MORE than the amount of money?

What happens if printing MORE money to pay for these rights has adverse and unexpected affects?

If the government can print money to pay for stuff, why do people need to work?

If the government prints money to buy things beyond what is produced, where does the EXTRA STUFF come from?

What is the actual, physical, economic limit? Why does anybody have to work? Who gets to work for the government, who gets to print money to buy stuff, and who has to work in the actual factories and fields to produce stuff? Wouldn't everybody eventually want to work for the government? What if everybody DID want to work for the government?

How would they choose WHO worked for the government (and got to buy stuff with printed money) and how had to actually work in factories and fields making stuff?

1. The government creates the money that society needs, tracks the flow of funds, and then like a recycling mechanism taxes the money back from where the money accumulates (you don't want to tax those who the money doesn't go to). In theory if the government uses a rotting currency, or user fees instead of services, then there doesn't need to be a tax system but that's not how our economies are set up so not really worth talking about.

2. The money can't "run out".

3. Then you first do what classical economists and 19th and early 20th century American school of economics did: analyze the difference between the cost of production and the price and remove the economic rent. If there is no economic rent, then you create more money and recapture it with taxes on where the money goes so there's no inflation, no change in purchasing power, but more funding/growth to provide the freedoms/liberties.

4. Then you read and listen to stuff like this instead of using garbage theory.

5. That's right, a monetary exchange system relies on scarcity. So the challenge was/is, would it eventually be possible to transition to a post-scarcity economy?

6. "If the government prints money to buy things beyond what is produced" makes the question unanswerable by definition, which at this point one may suspect is your intention, because no one would advocate that. They would advocate investment to increase production.

7. The physical limit is the ecological capacity combined with technological ability to both produce and to improve that capacity. People have to work because societies have a technological ability and a social organization, and our social organization requires scarcity to function, we have not developed it beyond that. Commercial banks are already creating credit to buy stuff while other people have to actually work in factories and fields to produce stuff, so any such organizational challenge is a question today as well. Again, these are questions that go into post-scarcity society which we sadly aren't developing our social organization for yet. And there's no one saying people who work for the government should be able to "buy stuff with printed money", of course you need to regulate this, and we already do one way or another. The regulation today is for the bankers to get the money that the government creates from central banks "independent" of democracy, but not society. But that could be changed through social struggle.


Don't take my word for it..... read what some of America's own economists used to say. Over 100 years ago Simon Patten wrote "The New Basis of Civilization" where he combated assumptions of scarcity with assumptions of abundance from technological progress. Some day or another our social organization will have to catch up, and releasing the chokehold that bankers have on the world today will be part of the transition. The question is how to organize this new society, a question that fascists, communists and neoliberals (like Patten's contemporary JB Clark) have been fighting to prevent people from asking ever since.

 

[AttackFormation]

This is what i was talking about earlier. I hope I'm not taking you out of context here, so if I am, please let me know.

By "the government creates the money" what do you mean? It prints it? And taxing is recycling the money, i.e. bringing it all back home? I won't suppose anything in the meantime.

Yeah, the government prints the money, and then it uses taxes to recycle it. The government doesn't need taxes to fund itself, because it creates the money. Taxation is a way of administrating the money to maintain spending on various programs without having to create more of it all the time.

Say there's Bob, Rob and Government. Government creates 1000$ and puts it into the economy, Bob and Rob each get 500$ and they can do whatever they want with it. Government then decides it wants to fund things like education, healthcare, R&D, environmental care, space and earth exploration, infrastructure, industry, and the likes. So it spends 1000$ on this which then ends up in the economy, and it watches the flow of funds - who ends up with this money? it turns out the money goes to Rob. Bob and Rob already have all the money they need*, that's what their 500$ each earlier was for. So although the government could simply create 1000$ more again, it instead taxes Rob to get back the 1000$ it already created. But if Bob and Rob needed more money because say, they want to create new investments, then Government could put 2000$ into the economy instead and only tax 1000$ back. The point is that the government will give Bob and Rob as much purchasing power as they need, and the "extra" money in the economy is there to be taxed for the government to recycle it into providing services and development.

This is what money creation, taxation and government spending is supposed to be like, but it's not how oligarchic societies like ours operate.

* Unless they suffer from Affluenza and social atomism. And also, by definition money needs to be scarce in order to be valuable, that's why no matter whether there's taxation or not you can't simply give Bob and Rob 1 trillion dollars each just because they'd still like to buy more stuff and call it a day. Our economies are organized on the assumption and requirement of scarcity, especially because we let the things everyone needs be privatized and managed oligarchically for profit under neoliberal capitalism, and we have not started transitioning to a post-scarcity economy yet so if no one needed to work for more money society would stop. So social stability is the other reason for taxing the assets where the money flows to apart from economic efficiency and fairness of doing so - the owners of the assets will stop having to work because they have so much money, and if everyone stopped having to work, society collapses because of our very primitive organization of our technological ability. They'll also use their vast excess of money basically to privatize government in the meantime and form an oligarchy. At the same time prices don't inflate simply because of "printing money", but because real people raise their prices or extract more money for various reasons that can be analyzed, and this is where economic analysis comes in... this is where the ideas of rentiers and economic rent, earned and unearned income, technological cost of production compared to price originate. Ideas that plutocrat-sponsored maggots like JB Clark, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Mises and others that unfortunately form the economic orthodoxy today, fought hard to bury.


I hope I managed to answer your questions haha.

 

[AttackFormation]

You did, and thank you. But this is where I see a problem. You seem to be saying that wealth is generated by the government in the form of currency, which it gives to Rob and Bob to use for trade. Then the government takes back the money through taxation.

If the government can simply create this wealth, why not fund itself directly to whatever limits imaginable?

Why bother filtering this money through Rob and Bob?

What is the difference, in this simple model, between giving them $500 each and $1 trillion each?

How is capital created?

A technical distinction but still one that needs to be made - money isn't wealth, it's a tool to allocate wealth. And also, the vast majority of "money" in circulation today is interest-bearing credit created by private banks every time they give a so-called "loan", it's not government-created currency. The credit is merely denominated in the currency. This distinction is rather important to make because then you will realize and be aware of the fact that almost every "dollar" that circulates in the economy is actually a debt that someone owes to some bank, and it gets passed around like an IOU.

The government does fund itself directly, when it creates the money it spends it on stuff and that's how it enters the private sector. The reason to filter the money back with taxation is to maintain a more stable amount of money in circulation. Otherwise (unless it used either "rotting money" or user fees instead of taxation) it would have to create new money all the time, and this would in its logical extreme result in one of two scenarios:

1) Collapse of the social organization. The difference between giving them some limited amount of money, and infinite money, is that capitalist market economies require scarcity in order to function. If people have all the money they need to pay for what they want and need, then they won't need to work. If they don't work, they won't keep doing all the things that keep society running. So we can't give everyone 1 trillion $ because our primitive social organization would become dysfunctional, or collapse, due to no one being coerced into working anymore and having no new system in place. Post-scarcity/post-capitalist economics encompasses solutions to this.

2) Price inflation. If rentiers and economic rent are not eliminated, then prices will simply be raised. This is what has happened in our world. There is vastly more credit in the economy now than there was 60 years ago in both the financial economy of assets and the real economy of goods and services, but because of rentiers and the economic rent they load society down with, prices simply increase because they can extract more. Even if businesses didn't want to charge more, they will have to because the rentiers will raise society's cost of living and doing business - that's where it starts, and then wages and prices have to be increased to match. This is especially the case under regimes of neoliberal austerity, because the fees and interest that banks charge for creating credit can't be paid back without government money as more debt is always owed to the bankers than there is money to pay it. Thus one of the results of government austerity and central bank "independence" from government (so it can more effectively lobby for its banker cronies) is the economy "borrowing its way out of debt", enslaving it to the private bankers.

By capital I assume you mean physical products. These are of course, created by human labor, planning, and resource allocation. In every society since the dawn of civilization, somebody is doing the planning and somebody is allocating the resources. Every economy is a planned economy. The question is who is going to do it and for what?

 

[AttackFormation]

This is what I've been saying. As Phil Hartman once said, it's not just about the money, it's about the things you can buy with the money.

You chose $500 and not one trillion, I'm guessing based on our current economy and also as a simple number to wrap one's head around. But for instance imagine how much $500 would be worth 220 years ago. Or how little 200 years from now.

Anyway, since we agree that money isn't wealth, I've been trying to get people to see where wealth is generated. As far as I can see, it's generated by Rob and Bob, not the government. Keeping things simple, if Rob is a farmer and Bob is a grocer, Rob produces, Bob buys from Rob and sells to, uh, Tom. Tom is a courier, so both Rob and Bob pay Tom for his service. They use the currency printed by the government to settle debts and amass wealth. In fact, Bob, Rob, and Tom ARE the government of their own community; they thus agree to tithe 10% of their profits toward running their three-man town. If one of the men falls on hardship, he is granted a break or the other two pay a little more. They agree on a currency to keep bartering simple. The better things are for their businesses, the more they can contribute toward paving roads, building a wall (ha), stockpiling medicine, even negotiating trade with other communities. Etc., etc., etc. They could, in theory, print plenty of bills, but this would not create more food, or faster delivery.

I think you are conflating the government's ability to facilitate currency with creating wealth. But again, maybe I'm misunderstanding.

"The government" is an organization, of course it's real people who create wealth. But the government allocates resources and provides certain common standards, both of which improve the efficiency of a society at doing various things precisely because the government is a large organization that connects different people and channels them and society's resources to improve society. Every society is governed, but not every society is governed by a "state", which is a top-down authoritarian structure. The libertarian socialist idea was to replace the state with council democracy, which what you describe is the first seed of.

Here's a shorthand of how modern government and money originated: https://michael-hudson.com/2018/04/palatial-credit-origins-of-money-and-interest/

It went from credit>money>barter, and not barter>money>credit as the Austrian school fancifully imagines. Barter happens in civilizations that collapse; earlier cultures don't use barter, their societies are more sophisticated than such a crude, market fundamentalist delusion of anthropology. So without a civilizational government, those guys in our examples wouldn't be acting the way we talk of in the first place.

 

[EyeBRollin]

Poor people get sick and die because they can't afford health care. This happens in every country. This has happened in every country. This will happen in every country. There will always be poor people and poor people will always suffer in part because they are poor.

No it doesn’t happen in every country.

What is your definition of a "right" when so many people don't have access to this "right?"

I'll suggest that what you are calling a "right" is really a political promise that is IMPOSSIBLE to deliver no matter how much you wish it so.

Your framing is based on a false premise. People in Canada arent going bankrupt because they can't afford health insurance.

As far as governments issuing currency.

Suppose you have a million people, and only enough food, arable land, production etc. to feed 500K people.

Will printing more and more money solve this problem?

Printing money was not implied to be a solution to this problem. You fundamentally misunderstand why the government prints money. Money is just a point system. We have an expansionary money system to grow the economy. There always has to be new dollars to chase for the system to work, otherwise there is no incentive to buy today vs. waiting until tomorrow (which would be deflation).

 

[EyeBRollin]

Maybe, but you still ignored it. Is that because you don't know the answer, or you don't like the answer?

But I'll make it easier on you.

Suppose you have 200 million poor people and 100 million rich people.

And the 100 million people are absolute EXPERTS at gaming the system.

What good does it do the 200 million poor people to know the money can be created AT WILL by the government if it will have little effect on their lives?

This is a conceptual issue you are having trouble grasping. 1/3 of a population is never "rich." Being "wealthy" or "rich" is based on the gap, not the point system. It's really a simple concept when you exercise critical thinking.

If there are 10 people, 10 slices of pizza ,and I have 5 of them, I am wealthy. If I have 2 slices of pizza and everyone else has just under 1 full slice, am I still wealthy?

 

[AttackFormation]

No it doesn’t happen in every country.




Your framing is based on a false premise. People in Canada arent going bankrupt because they can't afford health insurance..

I call this the "good cop bad cop" right wing dichotomy. We can't improve society for humans either because we can't first because of economics, then because of laws of nature, and this is the "pragmatist" good cop. Then when the arguments for that run out, the bad cop comes out and it's revealed we simply shouldn't because Those People are better off dead/don't deserve it/they don't care about society etc.

 

[EyeBRollin]

I call this the "good cop bad cop" right wing dichotomy. We can't improve society for humans either because we can't first because of economics, then because of laws of nature or, when the arguments for that run out, because we simply shouldn't.

Yup.

@AttackFormation already explained at length how the government works with the banking system in issuing money.

I used the Monopoly money example as the simplified version. The bank in monopoly never runs out of money. It has the legal authority (based on the rules) to issue more money at will. The bank issuing money does not affect the price the players are paying for property. Now imagine for each transaction in the game, the bank must take 20% of the funds as taxes. What happens to the bank's need to issue more money?

 

[EyeBRollin]

Government "not creating anything" is also bull****.

People work in government jobs and on government contracts. The government's contribution to the economy is mostly through spending money on these contracts and public works projects. Money is created by deficit spending. The difference between a Republican government and a Democratic government is the Republicans create the deficit by simply showering the rich with tax breaks. Democrats spend more on social programs and public works projects. The difference is, the economy does better under Democrats because more is being produced. Corporations just use the tax breaks to inflate their stock and move operations overseas. Enjoy the upcoming recession brought to you by Republicans.

 

[AttackFormation]

Here we seem to agree. This is what I meant by "redistribution." Government takes and redistributes, allocates if you will, aside from proscribing and enforcing laws, etc. But even for that it needs money to function. But I don't see it as this separate entity, as cynical as I sound from time to time. It's the people of a tribe or society pooling resources (generated without) and establishing laws.

We seem to disagree on the merits of barter and capitalism, but that's simply a difference of opinion or viewpoint.

Yes, government is supposed to be the people coming together to organize themselves. To me as a libertarian socialist, top-down authoritarianism is an aberration. But whoever controls that state gains its power. That's why the existence of a state is critical to any privileged class that maintains itself at the expense of the commons, such as a capitalist class. This was recognized way back. John Locke when he was formulating his philosophy, had no illusions about what a state really existed for, and what it needed to keep existing for for the sake of people like him. The neoliberals in the Mont Pelerin society advocated for a strong state for the same reason. The idea that capitalism is antithetical to a strong state is just a red herring/disinformation.

I don't think barter is wrong, but I wanted to point out the historicity of credit, money and barter which neoliberal orthodoxy gets backwards in order to show that human civilizations and the societies before them don't originate as barter economies. As for capitalism, I don't think that things which nature created, or things that are necessary for society to function at its optimal technological capacity for human welfare, or things that society actually funds and supports directly or indirectly, should be privatized. So I don't think a country's banking system should be privatized for profit, for example. Again, I'm a libertarian socialist. People and society should have their means to a living and progress free of individual or collective coercion to wage slavery which requires scarcity to function. This is the same view that lots of earlier 19th and early 20th century economists had. Again, the first economics professor at America's first business school the Wharton school endowed by Joseph Wharton was Simon Patten, and he had these same kinds of views. What was common American economic thought then would be called socialist today. The American population itself largely thought the same thing, if you go back and read what they said about capitalism in the 19th century when the factories and stuff were emerging.

Glad we could actually discuss something for once... most people just want to parrot their own preconceived dogmas.

 

[EyeBRollin]

1. I did not say this, please fix the quoting so you are not putting words in ny mouth.

2. You are making a GREAT point on why the "wealth gap" is meaningless and will never be addressed. Because there will always be rich and poor. This is an invented problem for the purpose of stealing money.

Right wing capitalist economies have a history of growing and creating wealth.

Left wing socialist eceonmies inevitably collapse.

Thus this "dichotomy" you speak of makes no sense.

Everything with the right wing is in absolutes. Your argument that countries can only be "right wing capitalist" or "left wing socialist" and not a combination shows you have no interest in honest intellectual debate. You also make no mention of gini coefficient and how it illustrates how free or restrictive a society is. Neither of those fall into right-wing talking points, so it's no surprise there.

 

[EyeBRollin]

I am using the spectrum as an example to illustrate my point, I never said it had to be one extreme or the other.

My point still stands, capitalist societies (right wing) have generated more wealth than all ither countries in history.

Socialist economis (left wing) self destruct due to socializing and consuming their seed caputal, just like Venezuela right now.

These are basic facts observable throughout history.

There you go again parroting more right-wing propaganda. You lack the nuance to understand that socialism comes from failed capitalism. By the time a country becomes "socialist" it's already rife with corruption and political instability due to extreme consolidation of wealth under capitalism.

 

[EyeBRollin]

No need for making personal remarks (I lack the nuance?).

I only go off what you post.

1. That corruption and political instability are caused by a wealth gap (consolidation of wealth under capitalism).

Correct.

2. That if a nation only started as socialist, then it would generate wealth since the corruption would not exist.

This is a textbook strawman argument. I can't even fathom how anything I posted could lead to this statement.

 

[Trump]

I don't trust a man who married a women that might even be older then his own mother.

He goes against his biology.

And I've heard from colleagues that he "needs" his wife to mommy him when he goes campaigning/ground visits etc.

Disgusting. Boggles the mind to think people voted for a deviant to be a president.

Would you consider Trump a deviant?

 

[Spaz]

Would you consider Trump a deviant?

No. I do however consider Hillary a deviant.

You could write to her that Spaz said so.

 

[EyeBRollin]

2. And how does the wealth gap cause corruption?

3. I am only asking if that is what you meant, no need to get angry. Can you explain what you mean with "By the time a country becomes "socialist" it's already rife with corruption and political instability"? It seems reasonable that your statement here is suggesting that if a nation started as socialist that the corruption would not occur.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why consolidation of wealth causes corruption. Pleading ignorance is not a credible argument. You do know what corruption is right?

 

[EyeBRollin]

No need to be condescending.

You said the wealth gap causes corruption, this does not make sense to me. Can you please explain how?

Naw, you can figure it out. Do some reading on gini coefficient and democracy.

 

[EyeBRollin]

Shocking

Read.