CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

[Kadriana]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

A friend of mine had posted this. He's running for office as a libertarian.


ETA:http://howconservativesdrovemeaway.b...tea-party.html

[dcarrigg]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Which numbers and graphs are those?

The ones in the article that started this thread.

Does that mean you'll defend me now?

And yes, if you actually pay your taxes and are a citizen I will defend you now.

I got the idea that you had renounced your citizenship when we were debating about the estate tax and you pointed out that NZ had none. I figured you 'took the money and run.' Now that I look back on it, you didn't comment one way or the other.

Sorry about that.

[dcarrigg]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

A friend of mine had posted this. He's running for office as a libertarian.


ETA:http://howconservativesdrovemeaway.b...tea-party.html

That chart is gold.

[dcarrigg]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

More graphics:

This is just as ridiculous as this:




Neither one explains why it is that people are actually upset now. Both views reductionist.

Neither points out the common thread of TARP and government corruption by big banks etc. etc.

Kadriana posted this, which is closer to right:



I will never for the life of me understand why libertarians are skeptical of government power, but at the same time proponents of monopolies and massive conglomerated corporate power.

In any case, the point here is that something's rotten in Denmark - and everywhere else in the first world. And it has TBTF bank stink all over it. And governments were complicit, enabling, and fanning the FIRE.

The Occam's Razor solution would seem to be fixing the problem rather than arguing to end all corporations or end all government.

So let's focus on that, shall we?

[Ghent12]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

I will never for the life of me understand why libertarians are skeptical of government power, but at the same time proponents of monopolies and massive conglomerated corporate power.

I don't know about all libertarian-leaning people, but for me it's rather simple. I am not a proponent of monopolies, but I don't know of any monopolies that exist without the enforcement of government (legal) power. Monopolies are only bad if they exercise their monopoly pricing power, but that is far more difficult under a truly uninhibited market than it is right now.

[dcarrigg]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

I don't know about all libertarian-leaning people, but for me it's rather simple. I am not a proponent of monopolies, but I don't know of any monopolies that exist without the enforcement of government (legal) power. Monopolies are only bad if they exercise their monopoly pricing power, but that is far more difficult under a truly uninhibited market than it is right now.

Yes, and no corporation can exist without a government granting it legal authority.

But in practice, I have almost never heard a libertarian complain about monopolies. Or giant conglomerations that kill competition. Only government. And taxes.

[Munger]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

I am not a proponent of monopolies, but I don't know of any monopolies that exist without the enforcement of government (legal) power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

[c1ue]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

Indeed, amusing how neither education nor real life examples are acknowledged by those who believe destruction of the government will solve all the ills today.

[Ghent12]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Munger, I had never heard of the water problems facing Britain in the 19th Century. Thanks for enlightening me. Are there any other natural monopolies? If so, why should those examples be used to justify anything outside the realm of natural monopolies? What does the circumstance of a natural monopoly have to do with the enormous magnitude of legal monopolies? If one complains about monopolies in general, hardly any of that complain can be directed at natural monopolies which appear to be quite rare compared to the government-backed ones.


c1ue, who on Earth believes that, "destruction of the government will solve all the ills of today," hm? I expect that you would know a great deal about the market price of straw and hay, given that you are perhaps the most prolific manufacturer of strawmen I've ever witnessed.

Yes, and no corporation can exist without a government granting it legal authority.

But in practice, I have almost never heard a libertarian complain about monopolies. Or giant conglomerations that kill competition. Only government. And taxes.

Well, a "legally incorporated enterprise" cannot exist without the legal context, but people can obviously form their own entities for their own purposes outside of government if such an environment existed.

What libertarian-minded people are concerned with the most, given that they are libertarian-minded, is freedom. That means freedom of commerce and of association and of personal life. While a true "libertarian" may be indistinguishable from an anarchist, I'd like to think that most libertarian-minded people do see some value in some government in establishing a framework to allow for maximized liberty by law. This is not an irrational opinion. Given the system in place now, government poses a much more obvious and tenable threat to freedom than do monopolies or giant conglomerations.

A lot of the angst that most/all libertarians have against taxes has to do with the method of their collection--through the threat of violence, technically. With corporations, even monopolies viciously exploiting their pricing power, the commercial exchange occurs without threats of violence (any system that recognizes any government will recognize a type of "monopoly of force" that the government possesses, and hence a corporation using threats of violence to coerce is abhorrent to any system and/or indistinguishable from government).

[Sharky]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

The ones in the article that started this thread.

I don't see any charts or numbers there that I materially disagree with. Some of the text is misleading, but that's a different story.

And yes, if you actually pay your taxes and are a citizen I will defend you now.

OK, cool.

I got the idea that you had renounced your citizenship when we were debating about the estate tax and you pointed out that NZ had none. I figured you 'took the money and run.' Now that I look back on it, you didn't comment one way or the other.

Sorry about that.

NP. Yes, NZ doesn't have an estate tax. Unfortunately, that doesn't help me, even though I live here.

[Sharky]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

A friend of mine had posted this. He's running for office as a libertarian.


ETA:http://howconservativesdrovemeaway.b...tea-party.html

The diagram's on the right track, but I think it confuses cause and effect. For the central part, I would say:

Governments have the power to damage or destroy corporations through targeted taxation or regulation, so corporations react by trying to influence elections and legislation, often with the net effect of favoring themselves at the expense of competitors or would-be competitors and the general public.

[WDCRob]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

That's one view, but I'm also seeing lots of anger focused against the "top 1%" and generic "corporations," with no mention of TBTF / TBNTD.

No doubt this is why it's called 'Occupy Wall Street' and is taking place in lower Manhattan.

[WDCRob]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Because corporations have historically pillaged the less powerful - literally killing them for profit until stopped by a countervailing force - democratic governments, elected by the people, have enacted laws giving them the power to regulate and punish corporate malfeasance -- so corporations react by trying to influence elections and legislation, often with the net effect of favoring themselves at the expense of competitors or would-be competitors and the general public.

Fixed your post.

Did EPA come before or after the nation's air was unbreathable and rivers were on fire?

Did FDA come before or after the nation's meat was disease-ridden, falsely packaged and rotten?

Did OSHA come before or after workers were dying of chemical exposure and losing limbs in unsafe machinery?

Did the Mine Safety and Health Administration come before or after thousands of miners died of black lung, were forced to live in company towns and shop in company stores and routinely subject to mine explosions and cave ins?

Did child labor laws come before or after eight year old children were working 60 hour weeks?

We've seen the Libertarian wet dream and it's really pretty ugly for, say, 99% of us.

[Sharky]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Fixed your post.

Did EPA come before or after the nation's air was unbreathable and rivers were on fire?

Did FDA come before or after the nation's meat was disease-ridden, falsely packaged and rotten?

Did OSHA come before or after workers were dying of chemical exposure and losing limbs in unsafe machinery?

Did the Mine Safety and Health Administration come before or after thousands of miners died of black lung, were forced to live in company towns and shop in company stores and routinely subject to mine explosions and cave ins?

Did child labor laws come before or after eight year old children were working 60 hour weeks?

We've seen the Libertarian wet dream and it's really pretty ugly for, say, 99% of us.

It is a fallacy to rip these things out of their historical context and analyze them independently from their causal factors.

Take child labor as an example. Before children were working 60 hour weeks in the days before child labor laws, what were they doing? There were high rates of starvation and death, particularly among parish/poorhouse children, where the remnants of feudalism thrived. In England, government (not corporations) actually sent or sold children into involuntary servitude, such as through the Guild system of legally enforced apprenticeships.

In America, cotton mills were one of the largest employers of children. Yet before kids had factory jobs, some of them were doing the same type of work at home. The equipment provided in the mills increased their productivity, and thereby their wages. Parents preferred factory work over agricultural work for their kids, because it was less physically demanding and paid better. These families were not coerced by the mills; tens of thousands of them actively chose factory work. If the choice is between work and death, work is a better option.

As society became more wealthy, child labor was fading away on its own without legislation. In England, children under age 10 were 6.8% of the cotton industry's work force in 1816; by 1835, around the time child labor laws were introduced, it was already down to 0.3%. The child labor laws may in fact have hurt more children than they helped -- not unlike minimum wage laws today, where government says it's better to starve (or to suck on the welfare teat if you can) than to work for a low wage. If child labor laws were the solution, then why not just pass them in all of the many countries today that still use child labor? Or just outlaw poverty, for that matter.

With pollution laws, a typical scenario is that one company pollutes somewhere, and rather than addressing that specific issue on the basis of property rights, an entire industry is regulated as a result -- increasing barriers to entry, decreasing competition, and favoring certain industries over others -- not on the basis of how much they pollute, but on how well they can snuggle up to the regulators. Which is one reason why we still have industries that pollute massively, and which do so with full government knowledge and permission.

[Sharky]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

No doubt this is why it's called 'Occupy Wall Street' and is taking place in lower Manhattan.

I tend to share Karl Rove's view about the protestors:

http://rove.com/articles/345

I thought the following factoid was particularly revealing: "A third of the protesters polled by New York magazine say the United States is as bad as al Qaeda."

Then, of course, there are the supposedly sympathetic "occupy" protests in other cities, such as San Francisco:

http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2011/...py-movement-0/