The Most Patriotic Thing You Can Do
blogmaverick.com
blogmaverick.com
Corruption (both Dems and Reps are guilty of this) is the disease will kill capitalism as it clogs the arteries of the economy.
I also love Cuban's logic - be happy you have a large tax bill to pay for that is a good problem to have.
Believe it or not, the government does not alway's have the country's best interests in mind. The example I always use is the Wall Street bailouts. Tax-payer dollars were used (mostly against tax-payer will) to bail out reckless banks and provide golden parachutes for undeserving CEOs. Sometimes the government will even hurt the country when it is trying to do the right thing - it was one of the major catalysts in the current recession, because it backed entities like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and their "toxic" mortgages.
If you want to do something good with your excess money, the government probably is not the best charity to donate to. A simple rule of thumb: the more hands that money passes through, the less money comes out the other end. If you want to be patriotic, give your excess money DIRECTLY to those who need it most.
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/10/12/53802/private-sector-l... http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/10/12/53802/private-sector-l...
The only respect in which Fannie and Freddie were public (prior to being nationalized) is that they were federally-backed. What happens when you have lenders backed by government dollars? They take in riskier loans and leverage the hell out of their credit line. In reality, it is much more complex than that though - there are many layers on which debt is traded. But the end message is that private companies should never be federally backed!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Mae http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Mac
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were not the sole catalysts, but they were silos for toxic debt.
Then check your facts, and the "facts" others post before preemptively determining what you think is based on rhetoric and dogma.
For most businesses this is the case. If you manufacture something or provide a service then you are adding to the overall wealth of the nation. Making a lot of money from something that does not provide a valuable service to society actually detracts from the wealth of the nation because you are extracting resources (people, natural resources, time, etc) that could be assigned to more productive uses.
Remember is money is not wealth.
Just because you need consumers to become wealthy doesn't mean that you're exploiting them... wealth creation is NOT a zero-sum game. Becoming wealthy is the reward you get for making consumer's lives better.
Edit// For clarification, I'm fine with paying taxes. But I don't owe a debt to society just because of my success. I'm an equal citizen with everyone else, and we all benefit from the stability that government provides. I would also say that if the concept of "societal debt" is legitimate, then the poor have accrued much more debt anyway.
(I'm fine with the downvotes. My highest net-point posts usually start with some downvotes.)
Just because some of humanity are dicks, doesn't mean that you didn't benefit from the people who aren't dicks.
And i'll reiterate what was said above. Just because you're making bank doesn't mean you're making people's lives better. You can make money making the lives of others awesome. But making bank doesn't necessitate that you're making the lives of others better.
That's the same logic that was used to over-inflate the sub-prime mortgage bubble. If you want to make the lives of others better, make sure you're doing that, rather than walmarting your customers.
Both of these things were born out of war. I'm of the opinion they would have happened anyway.
If you live in a first world country, you should realize that the difference between your country and Somalia is a result of government work and is funded by taxes.
Secure borders, police guaranteeing your property rights, courts, lack of bribes and corruption (relatively!), good roads, good lines of communications, educated people to hire. They don't just show up randomly in places.
That said, this article is basically politics, and should be flagged as such.
Most people fail to recognize that a big function of civilized society is to shift the power from the physically-strongest to economically- (or politically-) strongest. Enforcing property rights, keeping the horrible realities of war out of your life, building and maintaining the infrastructure that allows you mobility and access to goods and services, keeping the poor happy enough to avoid revolting against the (evolutionarily unnatural) rich, and maintaining a mostly fair capitalist market are major functions of government that the majority of us take for granted.
The rich benefit from these functions significantly more than the poor, so it makes a lot of sense for the rich to pay more taxes.
In this case, civilian presented interesting points regarding independent accomplishment and his own feelings of disenfranchisement. I can't come up with a very good explanation for a downvote.
It doesn't follow, however, that if you make money then you must be providing something that is valuable overall.
Hypothetical example: I find a completely undetectable way to steal money from poor people and transfer it to rich people, except that 25% of it vanishes on the way. I offer my services to someone rich and unscrupulous. Although poor people don't have much money, there are a lot of them, and I am able to get my client $10M/year. She pays me $1M/year. (For some reason my method is only capable of enriching people who are already rich, which is why I don't just take the $10M myself directly.)
In this situation, I have provided something that someone finds valuable. It is unlikely, however, that I have made the world a better place (because of the diminishing marginal utility of money, etc., etc.), my actions would generally be considered unethical, and I wouldn't want to argue that I deserve all the money I'm getting that way.
(Some people would say that what I just described is the standard operating procedure of the financial industry. That may or may not have some truth to it, but all that matters for the point I'm making is that that general kind of thing can happen -- some jobs can be negative-sum but provide some people with enough benefit to make them well paid.)
But I haven't furthered the conversation because anyone familiar with the system of capitalism, i.e. everyone, knows this.
More to the point, a large fraction of the taxes that we pay go to things that have nothing to do with a civilized society.
"Three generations of imbeciles are enough" - Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Buck vs Bell.
It's also very naive to think that your own bottom line and tax bill are in any way a measure of your patriotism. Is shipping jobs overseas to increase profit more patriotic than maintaining a more modest business while providing jobs in your country?
Associating patriotism with profit is just a psychological tool for justifying your own desire to have more things than everyone else.
The most patriotic thing you can do is love your country.
What does that actually achieve or change for anyone in a broader sense? Patriotism is by definition a kind of love for your country. Now what you do as a result is what actually matters.
Alternatively, can you love your country without striving to make it better in some way? Is an own love for the country without any action a valid concept?
People who talk about it otherwise just have something to sell.
I don't necessarily disagree with the advice, but his sentiment toward it feeds his own feelings more than anything else.
But not feeding the monster is also patriotic.
Fundamentally, if I knew tax dollars were were being spent efficiently, I wouldn't have a problem paying 'higher' taxes.
Corruption, inefficiency make it impossible to support tax increases.
What you are talking about is a problem of government accountability. What you are suggesting is fighting fire with fire.
1) Government knows how to spend our money wisely on things that improve the quality of our lives
2) Getting rich equates to improving the quality of lives of society, as a whole. I know several industries where this isn't the case.. (gambling, cigarettes, fast food)
Yes, it's based on my opinion. Yes, I'm generalizing, and I bet the majority of human beings on this earth would agree there are industries that make people rich and are harmful to the general public. In fact, I'd argue there's a TON of them. Humans love to self destruct (ie. get fat, kill themselves, get addicted, overspend, etc)
This is the premise of a democratic government, when you realize that you will not always do the best thing for yourself or your neighbors, but you still know what the best thing is and have a government that enforces it, knowing it could come for you if you break the contract.
Obviously it is not a perfect system and we must be vigilant to improve it constantly, but anarchy is not a viable option.
In many cases government does spend more wisely than any single individual, but that may not be the cheapest approach, there is a difference. Look up the "Price of anarchy".
Then, instead of my spending an hour or two educating all the kids in the neighborhood, in the hope that the next generation of people aren't morons, they take some money from all property owners and use it to build schools. Those schools to ensure that a very wide swath of the population, even the poor and stupid, meet minimum education standards. That way, at the very least they can go and do the service jobs that I don't want to do, and so many of them meet that minimum education level that they can be hired for a low wage, thus keeping the price I pay low.
But the reason there aren't private security companies working like that is because the police exists.
I know places (not in the 'States) where the police is grossly underfunded, and the local shop owners do exactly that: they all contribute some amount to a fund that pays a private security company to drive around in the area. It also protects the homes, which is good PR for the local shops.
I agree in principle that it's generally beneficial for individuals to pool resources in order to address common needs. But this happens on its own in a marketplace. It's called the division of labor.
Do you have actual facts to supply here? Can you provide an a legitimate comparison for us, or are we supposed to simply accept your free market mantra?
The existence of waste and inefficient behaviors does not mean that the system is wasteful.
A competitive marketplace.
> Do you know of any other organization that provides essential social services to hundreds of millions of people?
I would categorize food, clothing, furniture, and housing as essential needs. They're all provided for by competitive markets.
There's nothing unique about health care, education, fire, power, water and roads that these couldn't be provided by competitive markets, too.
> Do you have actual facts to supply here?
I think the price tag on the Middle East war(s) is over 1 trillion dollars. This expenditure is done under the umbrella of "defense."
If your local security company told you they think it will make you safer if they expand their operations to the Middle East to seek out shady characters, and oh by the way, we need to charge you 10 times as much to pay for these new operations, you'd take your business elsewhere.
The inherent danger in government programs is that there is no effective check on expenditures save the restraint of the government itself.
There is certainly waste in a free market, but in a free market the waste is isolated to individual firms. If they lose money, they go out of business.
There is a good case that the cost of the war(s) is so high because the administration which prosecuted them relied so heavily on private companies for services. Donald Rumsfeld came into the DoD with an ideological belief that private companies could do the job more efficiently, and, based on that belief, he turned the DoD into an ATM for the largest defense and security contractors.
And waste in free markets definitely is not isolated to one firm. Ask a bank.
The government has never made its own guns, bombs, planes, tanks or any other tool of the trade.
> And waste in free markets definitely is not isolated to one firm. Ask a bank.
The banks are not a free market! They were all bailed out by government. In a free market they'd all be gone.
When I say "one firm" I mean "one at a time." Instead of systemic waste like in a government-run industry.
The food industry is a good example. Unless you don't consider food essential.
Without subsidy, food would be as expensive at Safeway as it is at your local farmer's market -- which varies drastically by location. In Sacramento, fresh fruit is <$1/lb; in SF it can be triple that, or more.
Maybe that's not a bad idea to have people pay what food really costs, but it's not a free market success story in any way.
And a government can't just make something cheaper by edict. All a subsidy does is shift the burden of cost from the consumers to the taxpayers, or more likely anyone holding a dollar because most of these government programs are funded through deficits.
To be fair, I used to advocate public works projects and argued for smarter spending of public money. I changed my mind drastically after studying a bit of basic economics.
If you're really interested in exploring these principals and have an open mind, I recommend "Economics in One Lesson."
Piece of unsolicited advice, take it or leave it:
I would suggest that, if you want to be taken seriously, you present your ideas in a way that demonstrates your understanding of the nuance involved. When you say things like "all a subsidy does is X" and imply simple A-B causal relationships between the public and private sectors, it's hard to believe that you have considered these issues thoroughly, as opposed to merely another axe grinder.
These are real-world systems, which deeply impact the lives of millions of people. To simply dismiss them or force them to fit into Platonic molds is silly.
> I've studied economics well, I just haven't come to the same conclusion as you.
What are your conclusions? It would be more fruitful to hear your thoughts on the issue rather than a critique of my presentation style.
I'm not trying to grind an axe by stating that a subsidy "shift[s] the burden of cost from the consumers to the taxpayers." Wikipedia's statement on the impact of subsidies is nearly identical to mine:
"Farm subsidies have the direct effect of transferring income from the general tax payers to farm owners."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#Impact_of_...
I agree with you that the system is complex. The complexity is precisely what makes it difficult to identify the hidden costs of subsidies.
A subsidy takes taxpayer money and transfers it to producers of a certain good. I think this is inherently unfair, regardless of whether it's done with good intentions. I think the only fair method is to let people choose for themselves how they want to spend their money without coercion.
I'm a vegan, and believe my food choices make a positive impact in terms of the environment and reducing environmental cruelty. But I think it's immoral to force that same belief on others using the apparatus of government. It would be unfair for the government to intervene and make it prohibitively expensive to buy meat or animal products.
In addition to being inherently immoral (IMHO), subsidies have unanticipated costs and unforeseen consequences. Some examples:
- The artificially low price of the subsidized good leads to an artificially high demand for the subsidized good at the expense of demand for competing goods that are not subsidized. This hurts the producers of those unsubsidized goods.
- The corn subsidy has driven the price of corn syrup below that of cane sugar, making corn syrup the sweetener of choice in mass produced foods. Corn syrup is an inferior sweetener and leads to health problems such as obesity.
If you require links to supporting commentary I'm happy to provide them.
I don't doubt that many subsidies are created with good intentions, but because of the unseen costs and consequences, it is prudent, for the long term health of an economy, to avoid them.
This thread is getting out of hand for HN but I'd like to continue it; if you'd like to also, my email address is in my profile. Thanks,
One counterargument in the case of addictive drugs or "vices" is that transactions aren't completely voluntary, since you are acting under the influence. In gambling you might also not act rationally. Nevertheless these are still a subset of all transactions, and taking your argument to the extreme of outlawing these industries would prevent a decent number of society-bettering transactions from taking place.
Our modern society is set up so that it takes our primal urges to the extreme, making it BAD for the individual, but probably good for the overall economy. Our choices are hardly rational because we don't understand how our genes and primal urges work subconsciously. That's why men cheat, do drugs, and self sabotage ourselves.
War is lie and Capitalism is parasitism.
In a country founded by patriots protesting taxes, I find his rhetoric tiring. Patriotism doesn't create jobs, capitalism does.
Taxes, legal fees and regulation can all kill a start up. The government has a money printing machine, it's not like a fledgling startups is the only source of revenue to finance endless war. If we want to create jobs, it should be free to start a company, sell shares, and start doing business.
Actually, it's all quite complicated, but to say that this was a country founded by patriots protesting taxes and then to complain of tiresome rhetoric is to illustrate how little you understand both American history and rhetoric.
That's arguably wrong as well. A large number of American colonists (particularly in Boston; esp John Hancock) made a living as smugglers bypassing English tax laws and circumventing the EITC's trade monopoly on tea. The administrative changes that parliament made in that time included not only new taxes but better enforcement of laws which were already on the books and this nearly drove many prominent Americans out of business.