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[Montague]

One thing about the "wasteful" thing:

We live in a consumerist society. To keep everyone alive and relatively happy, only a tiny fraction of people would actually have to work. We've an excess of food, an excess of housing, lots and lots of excess. So then, if we don't have all the "useless" employment, how is everyone going to gain the capital necessary to survive in a capitalist society? There are less "useful" jobs than people.

Nowadays we solve it by making useless crap. I've got a bunch of novelty mugs on my desk, given to me by people as gifts. I don't really care for them. Is this sort of junk better than the junk the Soviets made? Yes, because they're not weapons, but it's pretty much equally useless employment. We're making tacky luxuries, and forcing people to make them just so they can survive.

So then, if we have so much excess, why not hand it out? Let people sit and be painters or whatever, giving them their necessities for free, and those who want extra luxuries can work for them by doing the actually "useful" employment.

You make a good point here and it's something I've thought about. I think the gov't of the UK and these other governments made the same argument for their welfare programs. More and more is being produced with less and less people, right? They just don't work out as well as you'd suppose it would. Welfare programs end up being relied on too heavily and become too expensive. It disincentives work. It's not clear how it should be distributed or who should pay for it. European governments are going broke trying to fund these things now.

I read that the Soviet economy was so rife with inefficient make-work in their economy, that they would have been better off extracting and exporting natural resources and cutting everybody else a welfare check, as the net of their industries for the most part was a loss of net value.

So it kinda seems silly to create make-work or stupid jobs for people, but cutting people welfare checks isn't ideal either. I think this is why the USA and developed countries have such a tertiary market, service or 'information' based economy. Not many people need to do anything productive, so they sit in call centers, toll booths and sit behind cash registers.

As for cheap crap people tend to accumulate, most of it is made in china. So even the Chinese are having problems finding productive things for their people to do, so they make cheap plastic crap and sell it to us and we buy it mostly because it's cheap.

For fun, I thought of what it would cost to cut everyone in the USA a welfare stipend check. Single people can get by relatively austerely on 12,000$ a year, which is around the gov't defined poverty line anyways. Kids are assumed to be dependents and the poverty line shifts up about 4,000$ per kid per year in a family. 27.3% of the US population of 315,000,000 people are 20 or under and assumed to be dependents. That's 229 million adults and 86 million minors. Retirees/ old people get the full 12,000 for simplicity.

Let's say everybody but the top 10% of adults gets this paycheck, regardless if they are working or not, so people don't get too butthurt and resentful of all the freeloaders. Say labor prices are reformed so wages in addition to the stipend is irrelevant. So that's 206 million adults receiving the stipend and 86 million for each minor dependent.

So the number I got was about 3.5 trillion USD (3,502,000,000,000$) a year, not counting any administrative costs associated with distributing the stipend. The total federal spending in comparison is about 7.5 trillion. GDP is 15.9 trillion. So there's that.

[Truean]

Habitat for Humanity....

It's amazing how effective, and how much better, a quasi government thing started by a politician who nobody said did anything worthwhile is. I've even heard very far right people say, "except for the habitat for humanity thing, he [Jimmy Carter] was the worst president ever." Funny how the thing he did on his own with like minded people involved flourished but when the government that had to respect the differing opinions of conservatives was run by Carter, nothing got done. Maybe he wasn't the problem....

Habitat for Humanity is a wonderful charity with some government sponsorship and is largely done on a voluntary basis. It rejects the capitalist notion of paying for a house, paying for a house to be built, using a bank to finance the house, and anything of that nature. Get land, build house, let someone live in it. It's that simple; it's been working for decades. Same could work for other things too, except we simply won't make it happen and nobody is going to pay for the required capital to produce things: no profit in it.

It isn't objective, in any sense, that profit is required as a markup on goods to make things and objectivism is dead wrong on this. What's required is a way to maintain the means of production and the people doing the production, which tragically we won't do in general these days.... The universe does not have physical laws of economics or money, those are human inventions. "Objective" means chemistry, physics, math, etc. Trying to apply that to human society is physics envy at best.

It is about what each human being is capable of and the fact that we don't / can't teach them to be capable of things in our current system. Human beings are bored (example, the internet) and have often chronic emotional problems from lack of security/fulfillment (drugs). If we could focus on meeting human needs instead of corporate needs, then things could work very, very well. Instead, let's please the unpleasable stockholders who want only one thing: more money no matter what.

And, as for everything else, let's live a life without meaning and full of debt. Let's work to pay for a house that isn't worth what we paid for it to hold shit we don't need to impress people who don't care....

[Frumple]

But yes, Rand would put the blame for homeless people directly on the homeless person themselves, kids being the responsibility of their parent. Your fault, no excuses. A lot of homeless have psychological problems, so obviously wouldn't work out so great in a job, so they really have nowhere else to be anyways. Some people are homeless out of choice even.

I'm 90% certain, though I'd have to do some number digging, that neither of those categories form a majority of the homeless population. To boot, in the case of psychological problems, most in that situation have those problems greatly exaggerated, if not outright caused, by the homelessness. Not to mention psychological problems is a textbook example of not their fault if there ever was one. From what I know, most the problems facing the homeless regarding unemployment is homelessness, not any other factor regarding the individual.

Put frankly, it's that kind of "observation" about the homeless that lead people to state that objectivists are making claims ignorant of the evidence. It's more bullshit than not. "Some of them have problems so none of them are worth consideration." Isn't that the basic claim being made by that kind of statement?

So even then, it's nobody else's responsible for making them homeless, it's not their problem to feed and clothe them either.

So, if it is someone else's responsibility for making them homeless, then it should be that other person's problem? What if the cause is dead, bankrupt, imprisoned, flown the country, or has the resources to prevent themselves from being censured over it? Still 100% the homeless person's fault for being homeless? Just SoL in that case?

[Montague]

But yes, Rand would put the blame for homeless people directly on the homeless person themselves, kids being the responsibility of their parent. Your fault, no excuses. A lot of homeless have psychological problems, so obviously wouldn't work out so great in a job, so they really have nowhere else to be anyways. Some people are homeless out of choice even.

I'm 90% certain, though I'd have to do some number digging, that neither of those categories form a majority of the homeless population. To boot, in the case of psychological problems, most in that situation have those problems greatly exaggerated, if not outright caused, by the homelessness. Not to mention psychological problems is a textbook example of not their fault if there ever was one. From what I know, most the problems facing the homeless regarding unemployment is homelessness, not any other factor regarding the individual.

Put frankly, it's that kind of "observation" about the homeless that lead people to state that objectivists are making claims ignorant of the evidence. It's more bullshit than not. "Some of them have problems so none of them are worth consideration." Isn't that the basic claim being made by that kind of statement?

So even then, it's nobody else's responsible for making them homeless, it's not their problem to feed and clothe them either.

So, if it is someone else's responsibility for making them homeless, then it should be that other person's problem? What if the cause is dead, bankrupt, imprisoned, flown the country, or has the resources to prevent themselves from being censured over it? Still 100% the homeless person's fault for being homeless? Just SoL in that case?

Afaik, most of the neuvu homeless are normal people who've gone broke through circumstance and can't afford rent and have nowhere else to go. Kinda like this guy http://guide2homelessness.blogspot.com/ but this guy didn't accept handouts and he even went to work while living in his car. Most people have enough control over their lives to do something about their situation, if they are not happy about it. Not everybody living on the street is a helpless victim in need of a hand out. I'm not sure what solution to homelessness anybody is advocating, besides accepting it. Ultimately, who is responsible for their lives besides themselves?

[kaijyuu]

The society around them is responsible for them too. I think we've went over that particular difference of opinion

[Reelya]

Remember montague said that people who are homeless due to mental problems preventing them holding down a job "didn't have anywhere else to be", therefore we should just let the rot in the gutter, where they naturally belong, since they deserve disease and death for not being "useful".

I'm out of this one. Objectivists suck.

[alway]

Or as I've said before, shit happens. A large portion, if not a majority, of how your life goes is based on random events that just happen, regardless of how hard you tried to prevent them or tried to make them happen. Most of what a person's life is like is not determined by their own actions.

People aren't poor because they woke up one day and decided "I want to be poor!" They're poor because their place on the widget assembly line was replaced by a robot, as have all similar widget assembly line jobs. They're poor because management decided they could squeeze enough extra effort out of everyone else that their position was no longer needed. They're poor because management sees the line of unemployed outside, and decided they should cut wages for employees who can't find a job elsewhere. They're poor because their wages were cut because they can't do anything without risking their pension. They're poor because they got cancer, their insurance dropped them, and they got a $100k hospital bill. They're poor because they came back from the war unable to sleep at night and unable to concentrate during the day. They're poor because they went to college in an attempt to better their situation, only to find themselves jobless and with $80k of debt. If policies are designed in such a way simply to spite the 'lazy poor people,' it's chasing ghosts which, for the most part, don't exist, and will cause even more problems for society as a whole.

[Montague]

Remember montague said that people who are homeless due to mental problems preventing them holding down a job "didn't have anywhere else to be", therefore we should just let the rot in the gutter, where they naturally belong, since they deserve disease and death for not being "useful".

I'm out of this one. Objectivists suck.

That's not really what I mean. The objectivist point is that this is something better handled by a charity or some voluntary and it isn't the job of the government. The gov't's job is forcible restraint of people, holds the monopoly on violence, rule of law. If people are so concerned about the homeless they can donate their own time and money on the problem, not expect the gov't to force others else to do it. That's really the main point here. Some people genuinely don't give a damn about the homeless and don't care to spend their money on them. Because objectivism considers involuntary confiscation of property to be immoral, it would be immoral to force people to pay for houses and food for these people.

Objectivists also think taxes should be voluntary too, like, funded through lotteries and court fees and such things and roads should be privatized. Sometimes they make sense, but their public policy ideas are often pretty absurd. In Randland homeless people would have a particularly hard time since they'd be trespassing wherever they went, but I digress, Objectivism is intended more of a philosophy then a blueprint for public policy.

[kaijyuu]

Court fees are voluntary?


I will forever hate Locke and the other enlightenment philosophers who said that "property" is an inalienable right. If there's one thing I agree with the anarchists with, it's definitely the removal of property as a concept. 'Cause seriously, it causes so many problems when people consider property more important than actual rights, like living.

[Montague]

Court fees are voluntary?


I will forever hate Locke and the other enlightenment philosophers who said that "property" is an inalienable right. If there's one thing I agree with the anarchists with, it's definitely the removal of property as a concept. 'Cause seriously, it causes so many problems when people consider property more important than actual rights, like living.

Can't live without property, mang. It's too fundamental of a thing to abolish, not even the radical leftist movements and communists figured out a way to eliminate property rights. How'd you like it if somebody just walked into your house right now and snatched your computer and drove off in your car, just because he felt like it and you had no right to it? Or somebody starts paving over your farmland to store their toxic gas collection?

Anarchy would be little bands of violent gangs trying to keep assholes from taking their stuff. Society would collapse without property rights, as much as there are problems with it.

[Reelya]

Nobody claims you can't own personal possessions, property in these discussions almost always refers to permanent ownership of land, ownership of corporations, and things like intellectual property.

Anarchism is definitely not about gangs running everything. If you're going to state "but that's how I define anarchy", then that's an invalid argument to use against others who call themselves Anarchists, yet use a different definition. You're talking apples and oranges then. Or a straw-man argument.

Here's the page on anarchy, so you can educated yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy

[kaijyuu]

I'd be mainly referring to resources.

You can have a family portrait or whatever in a property-less society, but you couldn't claim something useful to others as "all mine unless you give me something in return!"

[Montague]

Nobody claims you can't own personal possessions, property in these discussions almost always refers to permanent ownership of land, ownership of corporations, and things like intellectual property.

Anarchism is definitely not about gangs running everything. If you're going to state "but that's how I define anarchy", then that's an invalid argument to use against others who call themselves Anarchists, yet use a different definition. You're talking apples and oranges then. Or a straw-man argument.

Here's the page on anarchy, so you can educated yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy

I'm just stating the realities of how Anarchy would turn out and how it's happened historically. Can't change human nature. Some band of assholes would form an army and exploit everybody else and gangs and groups would form to defend themselves. Anarchy would need at the very minimum, a police and army to maintain monopoly of violence, then it'd be minarchy. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if people have live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. anyways.

As for property, like factories or farms or whatever but you get to keep the stuff you own? Where do you draw the distiction between personal possessions and things like cars vs tractors, little garage workshops and toolboxes vs huge factories, personal vegetable gardens and massive farms? When does your personal garden become too big and become collective property?

[Mutagen]

For any libertarian or Objectivist who agrees with the non-agression principle, yet is in favor of a minarchistic goverment, I recommend that you read Roy Childs Jr.'s "Open Letter to Ayn Rand". He presents a very lucid and concise argument which attempts (quite convincingly, I think) to show why any form of government, limited or not, is a contradiction to the NAP, and thus is immoral.

[Montague]

For any libertarian or Objectivist who agrees with the non-agression principle, yet is in favor of a minarchistic goverment, I recommend that you read Roy Childs Jr.'s "Open Letter to Ayn Rand". He presents a very lucid and concise argument which attempts (quite convincingly, I think) to show why any form of government, limited or not, is a contradiction to the NAP, and thus is immoral.

That is an interesting article, I was just reading the crap Rand wrote that Roy Childs is responding to, but it is tl;dr. I'll bookmark it.

So, people would hire security guards or mercenaries to replace the police and military? His language is obfuscating and paralyzing the mind with his pretentious and wordy language. That's what Rand would say.

Anyways, his brand of anarchy is even more extreme then Rand's ideas. I'm pretty sure his hired guns would turn into thugs faster then any government would.