Nobody stops you from paying $1000 for a shirt made by artisans right now. Do you want to?
> Our governments and society have made it clear, if you don't produce value, you don't deserve dignity.
It's not somebody else who decided that. It's you.
If you don't do <insert extreme edge case> then your point is invalid. /s. Look, you dont have to pay $1000 for a shirt made by an artisan to get a quality shirt. It can be a bit more expensive, but much cheaper than that. And this can be true while being fair/reasonable to the artisan and also to the person acquiring it.
> It's not somebody else who decided that. It's you.
And what about my decisions? Or your decisions. Or anyone who is reading this's decisions? Surely the person you're replying to isn't some dictator who is deciding everything. It's not just the parent comment then. It's not just "It's you"
> If you don't do <insert extreme edge case> then your point is invalid. /s.
> Look, you dont have to pay $1000 for a shirt made by an artisan to get a quality shirt. It can be a bit more expensive, but much cheaper than that. And this can be true while being fair/reasonable to the artisan and also to the person acquiring it.
In the ideal case, this would be true: Following classical economics, there would be some predictable demand left as you go up the price curve, assuming genuine quality & labour.
However, this doesn't seem to be the case. The existence of low-cost mass-produced options leads to the satiation of demand above that spot of the curve. There still exists demand, but it's weirdly lower than predicted. People can shop down the price curve, but relatively fewer would do the opposite.
Aside from that I do think you make a good point and I'll need to think about it.
That was five years ago, with a recent re-sole this past summer.
This isn't an exaggeration by the way, but the cobbler who did the resole thanked me for bringing him the job, as it was a genuinely enjoyable experience for him. I assume most of his work is repairing suitcases going by the other clientele in the shop.
But sure, exaggerate that to be an artisan you need to be selling 1000 dollar shirts, rather than doing a 100 dollar service that doubles or triples the life of a decently made item.
> It's not somebody else who decided that. It's you.
No. The Republican National Convention cheered the idea of letting the poor and sick just die off in the streets. They cheered. Ron Paul asked "what are we supposed to do? Let our sick and poor just die cold in the streets?" and they cheered.
Jobs are sacred in the U.S. Job creators must be worshipped. Hard-working Americans are the lifeblood of yadda yadda. As soon as you don't have a job: fuck you, scum, you deserve to die in the streets. You are no longer of use to the wealthy, so you do not even have the dignity to sleep on benches or under bridges: they add spikes to any area you might find any comfort. Your children cannot receive an education. You get to disappear from view into some secluded slum until you die of the cold. It's not GP that decided that. It's tens (hundreds?) of millions of Americans who will cheer on your death if you lose your job. Most of which, of course, are a couple paychecks or a major illness away from being homeless themselves. Do not act like that's not a real thing.
The (very clear) point of Dr. Paul's RNC speech was that regular people are better at solving problems than the government. If the government stopped taking tax money to monopolize "helping the poor" (while wasting most of that money on ever ballooning bureaucracy) then churches and other private initiatives would step in to do the job better, and at better value for the money. We wouldn't just let our sick and our poor die in the street, because unlike a faceless bureaucratic machine that inevitably comes to exists only to perpetuate itself and its own power, we are humans who care about other people.
The people at the RNC were cheering for the goodness of regular people, for the fact that Americans give more to charity than any other nation, and for the positive libertarian vision championed by Dr. Paul.
When the government gets in the way, and makes everyone poorer (by excessive taxation and bureaucracy), however, people become colder, and they can always excuse it to themselves by pointing out that the government promised to solve the problem, and they already forced us to pay them to solve it. So now it is the government's responsibility, but a bureaucracy cannot have any feelings of responsibility, because it is a machine and not a human.
This is also what happens in communist countries like China and the USSR before it.
Unfortunately, many people will probably just read deceptive statements like feoren's, and never go listen to the actual speeches. The left loves to dissuade people from actually listening to conservatives. Just see how they are shamelessly lying right now about Trump's "bloodbath", hoping to stir up actual political violence from people who they manage to trick and frighten.
The left is always trying to use 1984 style newspeak to prevent people from having an honest debate, so naturally they talk as if it was an established fact that either a government bureaucracy must continuosly rob Peter to pay Paul, or everyone starves.
This is because the left wants as big and powerful of a state apparatus as possible, because they intend to use it as an army against their political enemies. A recent example of how the left sees the role of the government is Letita James' lawfare against Donald Trump.
Ron Paul's message was that whenever the government tries to "help", it always backfires. Expecting the government to solve social problems, and allowing them to take money from regular people, leads to financial ruin for the country, and it won't even fix the very problems it claims as the reasons why we must give up our freedom and prosperity. In fact it always manages to make the problems worse.