If people don't want help, why force it upon them?
Disclaimer: I love Android and 100% of my slates are running it. I love that it's free. Check my profile, it's all I do all day.
I'm just calling out your "Joe the Plumber" reference.
Here's how I see Joe: he gets upset that Obama is going to raise taxes on the rich to give benefits to the poor, because he thinks he's rich. But as it turns out, he's poor: he makes $40,000 a year and would greatly benefit from Obama's tax cuts. This confuses me not because of the politics, but because he is acting against his own self-interest because he thinks his self-interest is something that it's not. If he did own his plumbing company, he'd see a little less profit due to Obama's tax increase. But he doesn't own the company and probably will never will; he wasn't even a licensed plumber and he left his job there.
To apply this to phones, people imagine themselves in the position of being a phone software company, when they are really phone developers or users. In this case, Android is good, because it means more users will be using their phone, and that means more apps or more users buying your apps.
EDIT: to bring this closer to topic: is it really "transfer of wealth" if the wealth was never really there? Most new cool gadgets get commoditized. If anything, Android is probably one of the better-designed systems under the hood (at least as far as the app API goes). Either way, the first smartphones were themselves incremental improvements and iterations over prior things like PDAs, etc.
The same link as above: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_the_Plumber#Personal_contro...
The comparison to Obama's tax plan was not off topic, because "Joe the Plumber" was in fact characterized and quoted by the media as someone who was going to have his life changed for the worse due to Obama's tax plan, when in reality, nothing in his life would have changed, but he still argued against the tax plan.
""I'm getting ready to buy a company that makes 250 to 280 thousand dollars a year. Your new tax plan's going to tax me more, isn't it?""
The answer to his question is A.) No, you're not buying that company. And B.) Yes, each dollar you made above 250K would be taxed at a 3% higher rate than normal, if you did. So $3,000 per $100,000.
Misunderstandings abound about economics. It does not mean all opinions flow from misunderstandings, but many are colored by them. Most people (regardless of their opinion on taxes and spending) do not realize that federal revenues as a percent of GDP are at 20 year lows. Which is not surprising, as taxes have been cut systematically over the years.
Yet people generally "feel" like the federal gov't is taking in more than ever as a percentage.
My criticism is towards the parent's specific argument. I saw a strawman, and felt that it was doing a disservice to the topic.
First, you have to define "bad". It's not bad for the planet, or bad for society as a whole. It's bad for the person who has that belief, because it leads him to act against his self-interest (as a poor person) and making him act for the interest of richer people.
Shouting "Why should the rich pay higher taxes so the poor can get better healthcare?" when you're yourself poor isn't "good" for you, is it?
It depends on how important your principles are to you. One expression of altruism that the left in the US doesn't seem to respect at all is the idea that someone who's poor or unemployed might still believe that it's not healthy for society to grant him all sorts of entitlements.
Put another way, apparently "voting for your own self interest" is a good thing only when the lower and middle classes do it. I find this hypocritical in the extreme.
Shouting "Why should the rich pay higher taxes so the poor can get better healthcare?" when you're yourself poor isn't "good" for you, is it?
I'd like to think that my bank balance doesn't determine my political thinking, with regard to what I believe is the best way to run a society for the long term benefit of all of its members.
I wholeheartedly reject the notion of 'class' when applied to productive adults in the United States. So the rhetoric of rich versus poor means nothing to me, beyond referring to an unreasonable concern that some people seem to have with numbers stored in a bank's database under keys associated with other account holders.
So if you're poor and left-wing nobody should take you seriously? What if you're rich and left-wing?
And I don't think a lot of people have a problem with the rich voting in their self-interest. It's when they control the airwaves and purchase the government that people get upset.
(Needless to say, I'm not referring to people in the 250k-500k band here, but rather that 1% that controls half the wealth of the nation.)
You lost me. Can you rephrase that point (or maybe I should)?
Trivializing money by referring to it as "just numbers in a bank" is surreal. Those numbers in a bank are the #1 determinant of whether you will do things like: eat, have a roof over your head, or pass on your genes.
It's pretty much impossible to overemphasize the importance of those numbers.
You're pretending that class doesn't exist while you pretend that money doesn't matter. Class is real. And class is important specifically because money does matter. A lot.
As for Joe the Plumber syndrome, there's a relevant quote from Vladimir Nesov. Something along the lines of "revealed preference is not a very charitable way to interpret people's actions."
If the Joe the Plumber wants to support tax cuts for the rich and he's fully aware of his situation, then there is no issue having that opinion. But if his self-image is distorted (as was implied by the media reports), then it is bad to posses that as it means you will be making wrong decisions based on incorrect understandings.
The issue isn't his desire to aspire to greater wealth, it's his unrealistic understanding of what his actual financial status is.
For example: I don't make 250k/year, but I'm opposed to increasing the taxes of that income bracket. Perhaps a true value driven person sees taxes not as a way to get more of what they didn't earn, but as something that isn't morally right.