Craigslist Exec To Soon Catch Bullet With His Forehead

[_JS]

Brass stated:

Nobody CHOOSES a lifestyle.

Ami replied:

Sure they do.

Only to a degree Ami. Otherwise your choices are very much limited by society, environment, and your own inner workings.

For example, nobody chooses to be schizophrenic, yet it happens. If it happens to you or someone you love then you know that it is a lifestyle change. Nobody chooses to be bipolar, but it happens. Children don't choose for their parents to be divorced, killed, or criminals - but that is sometimes the case. They don't choose to be molested, but it happens. It typically has an effect on lifestyle too.

For those of you who are married you find out that your choices are not always compatible with your signifcant other. She may not want to make the same consumer choices that you always have (amazingly she doesn't like to eat Ramen noodles four times a week or drink 12 packs every night). You'll likely find yourself purchasing some things you'd never considered (or heard of - I'm still not sure what the hell a "duvet" is or why I'd ever want one). If you have children you'll be further amazed at what you'll purchase and why.

Furthermore, you might work in a nice city, but housing may be too expensive for you to make use of the mass transit system. Or, the school system may not be up to par with a nearby city or county. Or perhaps your wife works in a different city and you need to be closer to one or half way in-between.

My point is that choices are part real and part illusory. I think Brass has made some very good points here. What he is really discussing, as I said earlier, are goods with inelastic demand. Electricity, water, natural gas, milk, gasoline, grains, tobacco, some minerals, are items that have a generally inelastic demand and do not suffer when the price is increased either through supply shortages or collusion. Saying that you have a choice through taking drastic measures is only an argument that makes that point all the more clear.

[Universe Prince]

Choose your goals and pursue them, yeah, sure.

Luck is probably more important than any other single element here.

Yes, choose your goals and pursue them. If you don't, luck won't get you there. Winning the lottery is, I think we would all agree, a luck based situation. But if you don't buy at least one lottery ticket you will never win the lottery, and luck has nothing to do with that. One of the few clichéd sayings that really has much merit is this: fortune favors the prepared mind. Pasteur said that about "fields of observation" but the basic concept holds true in other areas. One does not become a doctor by luck. One does not become a computer programmer by luck. One does not find employment by luck. You have to actually do something toward achieving the goal. Yes, luck may play a part in how successful one ultimately becomes, but that doesn't mean pursuing a goal is a waste of time.

[Universe Prince]

On the contrary, I believe that capitalism and political freedom are very much connected. Where brutal regimes attempt to control trade, blackmarkets arise and prosper.

I'm just curious then does this mean that anything is for sale?  The "black market" for marijuana just exceeded hay and corn.  By your measure then, potheads of the world are having the precious freedoms tread upon the restriction of their trade.

I don't know that I would say anything, but most things can be for sale. As for "potheads" having their freedoms trampled by the restriction of the trade of drugs, yes, actually that is the case. Whether or not that is a good thing is another discussion entirely.

Heroine addicts and terrorists seeking nuclear bomb suitcases are being oppressed.  My hyperbole has purpose.

Okay, but how did heroin addicts get conflated with terrorists seeking nuclear weapons?

Clearly, terrorists are not being oppressed because their capitalist freedoms are busily being interrupted.  So what we can see is that there are cases in which capitalism causes harm in the way it is used.  So, by that token we should control aspects of it where it causes harm.

This is why gas companies should be nationalized.  The arbitrary pricing of gas is harmful to people who need it.  So, we should either set price ceilings for gas (I'd say a dollar a gallon is more than fair) or simply use our taxes to pay the employees of the industry and have gas be free.

Wow. Drug users to terrorists to oil companies. You're just hopping all over the place. Apples, oranges and bananas. Let's take this a little slower.

Clearly, terrorists are not being oppressed because their capitalist freedoms are busily being interrupted.

Terrorists are people engaging in criminal behavior, attempting to interfere with basic human rights like the right to life. And to be clear here, my support for capitalism does not extend to support for criminal activity or the abuse of rights. I realize you're trying to make a cute and clever point here by talking about capitalism and terrorists so that you can then move to equating capitalism with criminal behavior, but that is a crock.

So what we can see is that there are cases in which capitalism causes harm in the way it is used.  So, by that token we should control aspects of it where it causes harm.

Whoa. Technically and specifically speaking, buying a weapon is not a point of capitalism causing harm. The use of the weapon causes harm, and that is not capitalism. You're deliberately trying to confuse capitalism with violence, and they are not the same thing at all, as anyone with a modicum of thought on the matter can figure out.

This is why gas companies should be nationalized.  The arbitrary pricing of gas is harmful to people who need it.  So, we should either set price ceilings for gas (I'd say a dollar a gallon is more than fair) or simply use our taxes to pay the employees of the industry and have gas be free.

I could never parody you because I doubt I could ever come up with the sort of economic inanities you seem to imagine with ease. You're making all kinds of really stupid assumptions here. One is that gas prices are set arbitrarily. Another is that government setting a price ceiling for gas would be both useful and not arbitrary. Yet another is that gas would be free if paid for with tax dollars. It's all so ridiculous, I don't know where to begin.

Gasoline prices are not set arbitrarily. No one is throwing a dart at a dart board of prices and setting the price of gas at wherever the dart lands. No one is making up prices randomly off the top of his head and setting the prices that way. There are multiple considerations that go into deciding the price for gas, like the costs in making it and the location of the gas station (not a consideration I think they should use, but they do). You deciding that gas prices should have a ceiling of a dollar because you think that is fair is, however, nothing if not arbitrary.

If you really want to hurt people, by all means set a price ceiling for gasoline. Set it so low that the gas stations and oil companies don't make a profit on it. And when we have a gas shortage because gas production became cost prohibitive, you can take all the credit. And that partnership between Ford and BP to research alternative fuels, say good by to it. BP won't have the resources to contribute anything. And of course, there is the matter of the people who will end up out of work due do a loss of revenue. Yes, you're just overflowing with compassion for the workers. And naturally, you'd blame capitalism again because of course the negative consequences of policies in line with your ideas would never ever be the fault of the policies or the ideas behind them.

Oh, and speaking of compassion for people, I "love" your final suggestion of using taxes. Nothing says "I have no real concept of compassion" like taking money away from people by force. Yes, I know you mean well, but taking money away from people is never going to help them achieve financial security or success. Nothing has ever seemed more asinine to me than the notion that we need to help the supposedly financially struggling middle class by taxing them. You might as well suggest that we help people struggling to get three decent meals a day by taking away some of their food. But maybe you meant using tax dollars from the rich. Yes, we're going to help the middle class and the poor rise up financially by punishing with higher taxes anyone who does start to rise financially. And of course, we're going to do this in the name of "fair". "Fair" as decided by you, because you care and you know best how other people should live. Indeed, nothing says "I care about others" like tyranny. (Oops, I dropped into sarcasm mode there didn't I? Oh well.)

Taxes do not make anything free. Taxes in this scenario would just make paying for gas compulsory. What you complain about the gas companies doing, forcing you to buy their product, your plan of taxes for gas makes a reality. A more hypocritical solution could not be imagined.

[Universe Prince]

Clearly, Domer, the answer lies in one's own ideology.  The predominant two can easily be summed up in these ways. 

The conservative/capitalist "MINE! Get your own!"

The liberal/socialist "We're all in this together."

These are absolutes and regardless of a conservative's adherence to "charitable organizations lending a hand" idea or a socialist's desire for toys of every stripe, the two ideology's will remain at core.

A more inaccurate description of the situation I doubt I could find if I spent the rest of the year scouring the internet for it. The part that is most interesting is where you insist that even if a conservative believes in giving to charitable organizations as a means of helping other, they are still, according to you, really just selfish people who only want to get for themselves. You're like the Christian fundamentalist who insists that even if Pagans don't believe in satan, they're really satan-worshippers anyway. You just refuse to accept the idea that someone might actually care about helping others and just not agree with you that socialism or the RBE is the best way to get there. You're showing us dogmatic judgmentalism at its "finest". Which means you're not a liberal. You're just a left-wing version of conservative.

[Universe Prince]

It is the exchange of privately owned property. Why shouldn't it be considered capitalism?

I don't recall Brass saying that it was privately owned.

If it was not privately owned, why the need for an exchange? People would just take what they wanted otherwise, would they not?

Regardless, it could occur in a capitalist system but it isn't the definition of capitalism.

Of course bartering is not the definition of capitalism. But bartering privately owned property is still capitalism. You have yet to give me a reason why it is not.

If we're talking about publicly owned property or socially owned or something like that, then bartering is not needed. There would be no need to exchange items or even a basis on which to make such an exchange. If you had carrots in a society where there is no private ownership, and I wanted the carrots, I could simply take them because they would belong to me as well, would they not? There would be no need or way to barter with a watermelon that everyone also owned and could therefore take anyway.

Yes, yes I know that Friedman only spoke there once, but his students were the economic advisors to Pinochet and Augusto loved the little economist. I've heard this defended from more directions that I'd ever thought possible, from complete non-association (Pin-who?) to intense worship of both (And lo, the Lord came and tooketh both Augusto and Milton into paradise). OK, I exaggerate a little. Yet, monetarism proved costly to many people both in Chile and around the world.

I'm not defending anything. I think the link between Friedman and Pinochet is exaggerated, but clearly Friedman gave Pinochet advice. That said, to say that Chile's economic problems arose from Pinochet following Friedman's advice is nonsense. Chile's economic problems arose from departures from Friedman's advice. If you want to say Friedman is responsible for Pinochet's actions because Friedman took an hour of his time to answer economic questions honestly, I can't stop you, but don't expect me to take you too seriously in a discussion of Friedman's relationship to Pinochet or Chile's economic problems. I know it seems like a prime situation to support the idea of capitalism as oppression, but the facts simply do not support this. And I am not excusing Pinochet at all. The man was a despicable tyrant.

By that same notion, money and property are not naturally occurring things. Both are concepts created by man.

Money is a concept created by man. I would say property is a naturally occurring thing in that there has always been a concept of property even back in mankind's most primitive days. Property even exists as a concept among animals. Animals mark territory, keep and protect food and lairs, et cetera. Property seems like a perfectly natural concept.

To remove interest rates and exchange rates, cornerstones of today's financial sector as not being central to capitalism strikes me as being intellectually dishonest.

They are central to how capitalism operates in our society yes. But they are not necessary for people to own property or to chose to exchange that privately owned property for mutual benefit. Interest rates and exchange rates exist within capitalism, they do not define capitalism. And I want to add here that I am having trouble understanding why you get to claim the exchange of private property in a bartering situation can happen in a capitalism but does not define capitalism while I get called intellectually dishonest for saying that interest rates, which are based on an artificial concept within capitalism, are something that happens within capitalism but does not define capitalism. This double standard hardly seems intellectually honest.

There must be a reason to invest money, right? Without that, how does capitalism function? You shouldn't mistake capitalism for a simple bartering society. It simply does not function that way.

Okay, let's be clear here. If we all lived in a barter system where privately owned property was traded item for item, we would still have capitalism. The farmer would be able to trade food for farm tools. The hunter or cattleman could exchange meat for clothing or building materials. But you are correct in that capitalism as practiced in our society is not a simple bartering system. It is like a complex bartering system. It is not technically a bartering system because we use money rather than direct exchanges of work for food or food for tools, et cetera. But capitalism still functions as a system of mutual exchange of privately owned property, in one form or another, for privately owned property resulting in mutual benefit. The farmer grows corn and rather than use the corn to barter for tools or clothing, he sells the corn for money. The money he then exchanges for tools or whatever. Or he gives his money to a bank in exchange for an interest rate that provides the farmer with a benefit. The bank, meanwhile, exchanges the payment (interest rate) to keep the money for having the money to use in loans or mortgages, which in turn are exchanges of money for interest rates. But however you want to describe the situation, it is still a series of voluntary exchanges for mutual benefit.

Ultimately, however, it should be noted that something being or not being capitalism is not due to whether the system of exchange can be regarded as simple or complex. Capitalism is not an economic system based on interest rates or currency exchanges. Money and things like interests rates greatly facilitate the process of capitalism in action, are extremely useful and are an integral part of how capitalism functions in our society. No one is arguing that interest rates and the like are not important to how capitalism functions in our society. However, It is not interest rates that make capitalism. Exchange rates do not make capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system based on property and means of wealth production being privately owned as opposed to being owned collectively by society or owned by the state.