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[PTTG??]

Y' see, I would much rather let China have all of the islands with China in the name AND give top-quality meals to all students. Especially since the alternative is everything is radioactive, including the islands and the students.

It just doesn't seem like a difficult choice to me.

[wierd]

Comfort now can mean misfortune later.  China is playing a long game, and any time you mess with social engineering, it is *ALWAYS* a long game.

Immediate results are distractions, and dangerous.

[Reelya]

School food = higher grades / lower dropouts etc. Letting them starve and fail at school isn't toughening them up in a useful way.

e.g. with school lunches it's "I got my lunch from the cafeteria" vs the relatively more well off kids "i got my lunch from my mother". In both cases the kid is "dependent" for lunch. So maybe we should throw kids out at age 9 and have them raised by wolves, perhaps that would avoid dependence.

[wierd]

Ensuring proper nutrition is required for a healthy society. Any society.

Social welfare might not be the best means of accomplishing that.

Don't conflate the two.

(additional hyperbole does not add weight there Reelya. The flipside is that some kids eat free, while others do not. There is no realistic way to make that system fair-- Either all lunches are free, unless they are packed by mom-- resulting in advantage to frugal but otherwise well off families who elect not to send lunches, or only the "disadvantaged" (where the term is difficult to apply, due to the wide sets of circumstances that this could involve, not all of which are related to being so poor they cant even have electricity. It ranges from "mom and dad have spending problems but otherwise have enough financial means" to "we make just a few hundred dollars a year too much for assistance but are starving" to "Herp, why should I work, when the state feeds me for free?" to "OMG! How will I feed my kids, AND avoid my pimp's razor blade this week?!", and everything between) get the free lunch program, at others' expense.)

[misko27]

Y' see, I would much rather let China have all of the islands with China in the name AND give top-quality meals to all students. Especially since the alternative is everything is radioactive, including the islands and the students.

It just doesn't seem like a difficult choice to me.

I don't think either side wants nuclear war, unless I've drastically overestimated Bannon's sanity. And it's not like nuclear war is the logical escalation either. "Oh no, they took over the islands by force, time to wipe 1 billion chinese off the face of the earth". It's not like people live there, or that there is a pressing threat to the territorial integrity of Japan or China. Naval and air skirmishing is the worst we can expect, and the ABSOLUTE worst scenario still is a far cry from global thermonuclear war.

Also if someone can explain what the fucking connection is between US welfare policy and war over the South China Sea, I would appreciate it, because it's two parallel conversations with inexplicably high levels of crossover.

[wierd]

State welfare and social welfare *ARE* inextricably tied.

China wants to increase its influence, to become a wealthier and more prosperous nation, at the expense of other nations.
It is doing so by trying to manufacture a 'justifiable' reason for exerting more control over international waters, for the purposes of military enforcement of what is sure to be future unfair trade practices, designed to enrich china, and by extension, its citizens.

Would you deny that increase to the poor chinese citizens?

It applies very well to the domestic social welfare dispute as well. Again, because the two are joined at the hip.

[Reelya]

China wants to increase its influence, to become a wealthier and more prosperous nation, at the expense of other nations.

There seems to be a fair amount of "zero sum game" logic at work here, and in the anti-welfare stuff as well.

Trade occurs when both parties believe that their personal interests are served by making the trade. If either party believes that a trade is not beneficial then trade volume will plummet. So rather than win/lose, "win/win" situations are in fact the entire basis of trade.

It's the same for welfare, the argument that if we feed one person, we must effectively take the food out of another person's mouth is also zero-sum game logic. But if such zero-sum logic actually held true, then there would basically be no economy in the first place. Society does in fact score an overall economic "win" for keeping all kids and educated. That's because better education grows the whole economy, and you avoid downsides (unemployable people, homeless, prison etc).

The big boost to USA historically has been argued to be the laws that mandated all kids school until 16. This was done partly to avoid massive unemployment when most farm labor was automated by tractors. But the net effect was that the USA went into the 20th century with a large literate workforce which was able to be soaked up by industry, and lead directly to America's lead in the tech revolution. I'd be surprised if Google/Amazon would be American if there was no spending on public education in the first place.

[wierd]

Aside from the miniscule quantities of new matter that falls on the earth from space each year, there is only so much material one can own within our immediate sphere of influence. (AKA, the earth.)

Given that vast amounts can be bought and sold as "mineral rights", in addition to other factors, yes-- Actual wealth very much is a zero sum game.  There is only so much value that can be added via a human process.

And no, debt is not wealth. Debt is currency.  There is no limit to the amount of currency.

[Reelya]

I don't really agree with that. Viewing wealth as ownership rights to a chunk of the Earth is nonsense. That would mean cavemen were richer than modern people. The whole idea of dividing the matter on earth up and calling that "your share of wealth" is really dumb. If your even going there, then there's no reason to have a conversation about economics, since nothing your saying makes a lick of sense.

If it's just ownership rights, why stop at Earth? Why not say we "own" the moon too, so we have that wealth. An so on. Who owns the sun? Therefore there's a finite amount of wealth in the solar system, and wealth is meaningless. It's just not a sensible basis for determining what wealth is, and who has it, and how much.

[wierd]

Aside from the banking industry, property rights are the only real wealth.

I am not alone in that statement. Most plutocrats agree. Go ask one.

A couple modern contemporary sources that appear to have agreement, some less dubious than others.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/the-illusion-of-money
http://www.economist.com/node/21557732
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth

[Reelya]

Aside from the banking industry, property rights are the only real wealth.

I am not alone in that statement. Most plutocrats agree. Go ask one.

Property in that context specifically means real-estate. Look up some economics.

But it's dumb to say that USA has not created any wealth in it's history because the amount of real estate hasn't increased. So your whole zero-sum basis for what wealth is clearly fails at the first hurdle.

I'd argue that a better measure of wealth isn't piles of stuff, it's your ability to marshall energy => work. e.g. money is just bits of paper, but it's vastly more valuable than a lot of actual valuable things per weight. So the idea that wealth is only how many atoms you own isn't really backed up by economics.

[wierd]

Wealth is not strictly land use.

As it is better defined, it is a stock of assets one my draw on or utilize.

Currency can be such an asset, but only in so far as it is accepted for other, actually useful assets. Its utility is as a medium of exchange. Moderating that exchange is how value is increased in a monetary system.

The accumulation of wealth is not really the accumulation of how many favors others owe you (how many dollar bills you have)-- but by how much actual holding you have. That big mansion of yours. The fancy car. That gold mine you own in africa. Etc.

edit:
You JOKE about owning the moon, or the other resources in our solar system, but that is *EXACTLY* what private space companies are seeking to gain possession of. Contract law with exclusivity agreements are a means of extracting that value, at the expense of all others who would come later. Zero sum.

[Reelya]

But the problem is that a lump of gold has no intrinsic value either. And all items are of variable value, depending on who wants them and how many there are. Wealth is not linear in terms of amount of things.

Also, we can make things that are more useful with less matter, thus creating value all the time. So there's no zero sum game.

Also, the car has more value than the materials in it. Because it's a car. It was the economy that created the value. it's the arrangement of atoms which matters, and that's not a zero-sum game. For each car you make you don't have to destroy another car.

Matter is constantly cycling in and out of usefulness. e.g. value is only value as long as it's maintained.

So that's back to my point: feeding school kids improves grades. this reduces costs later on. It costs a lot to hold just one bad kid in prison, as much as feeding thousands of school kids. If you only avoid 1 in 1000 going into the justice system, you saved resources. And saved resources = wealth growing, as we have more options of what to do with stuff.

[wierd]

I already addressed the "added value" of the car.  There is a finite limit to how much you can increase the value of the iron, carbon, copper, and silicon that comprise the car's material composition.  If there were an infinitely valuable configuration, money is worthless.

[Reelya]

But just because there's a limit on what you can do with one chunk of iron doesn't mean social spending is a zero-sum game. There's no tenable connection between those two facts.

Your theory would only work in a world in which literally 100% of atoms were optimally deployed. Then giving atoms to one person would take them away from another person. But we don't live in such a world. Our economic exploitation of the actual resources is quite low as a percentage of the mass of the Earth, so we do in fact have room for "economic expansion" meaning things aren't zero-sum-games.