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From: Greegor on 15 May 2010 05:05 On May 14, 4:49 am, Bill Sloman <bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: > On May 14, 7:16 am, dagmargoodb...(a)yahoo.com wrote: > > > On May 13, 5:02 pm,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: > > > > On May 13, 8:20 pm, dagmargoodb...(a)yahoo.com wrote: > > > The argument for progressive taxation is usually put in terms of those > > > with the broadest shoulders carrying more of the load. > > > Right. That's how the Little Red Hen got a hold of all the other > > animals' bread, greedy thing that she was. She had broad shoulders. > > I think you are mixing your metaphors. If you want to refer to > Orwell's "Animal Farm" you had better read it first. > > > > This falls a > > > long way short of Marx - JL > Marx was kind of an idiot. BS > The same kind of idiot as Darwin, who BS > laid out the obvious facts that BS > nobody had noticed before. Your knee jerks when somebody assails Marx. Then you compaare it to ... SCIENCE! LOL It's a cult like religion to you. > > "The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., > > that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely > > requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer." > > --The Communist Manifesto > > > See what I mean? > > That pretty much describes the state of industrial workers in > Victorian England before the trade union movement got under way. Marx > was describing the way the world worked at the time when he wrote > that, based - in part - on the data that he got from Friedrich Engels, > who not only supported Marx financially, but also provided a lot of > the social statistics on which Marx based his work. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels > > Marx's economic writings were much more evidence-based than those of > his contemporaries. If Marx is a kind of idiot, it is the kind of > idiot that we should see more often. > > Your comment demonstrates that you don't understand why industrial > workes are no longer paid a bare subsistence wage, and the > contribution that Marx made to the process that changed their > condition. > > > Of course Marx himself was a n'er-do-well who never earned his keep, > > a pseudo-academic parasite sponging off patron Engels. Engels in turn > > coasted off the family business. Marx made his living guilt-tripping > > Engels with econobabble, a fine tradition carried on by Marxists > > today. > > There was nothing pseudo-academic about Marx. He revolutionised > academic economics, in part by exploiting statistical data about the > actual economies of the time, quite a bit of which was collected by > Engels. Marx and Engels are like deities to you! You seem to prize academia over real world experience. Not every idea that enters the College (arena) of thought is inherently patently true. You worship Noam Chomsky too, don't you? > > "To each according to need" really means "From you to me." "Dear > > Fred, I need that grocery money, and I deserve it, luv Karl, xoxoxoxo > > P.S. Stop exploiting me! KM" > > Perhaps. Marx didn't have an appealing personality. But he was doing > important - ground-breaking - work, and Engels saw its value and > provided the financial and intellectual support that allowed Marx to > get on with it. > > That you don't see its value reflects your - negligible - intellectual > status as a right-wing nitwit. > > > Marx's moronic precepts ruined scores of countries, and killed tens > > of millions, maybe hundreds. > The Bolshevik version of Marxism, with its emphasis on the "leading > role of the party" has damaged a lot of countries, and killed a lot of > people. The problem isn't with Marxism, but the concentration of power > into the hands of an unrepresentative and irresponsible elite - the > Communist party in Stalin's Russian, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's > Cambodia killed a lot of people, but the Nazi Party in Hitler's > Germany, the Fascist parties in Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain > weren't far behind, despite their violently anti-Marxist ideologies. What? Your GOD didn't foresee the greedy limitations in the real world? An ACADEMIC?? Nah. > > "Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean > > the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form > > of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no > > need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a > > great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying > > it daily." --The Communist Manifesto > > But, dim-witted Marx had it exactly bass-ackwards--industry was the > > very salvation for the proletariat, pulling them up out of poverty. > Only after the trade union movement forced industrial employers to pay > their workers at above subsistence levels. Sometimes they achieved > this by direct strike action, but more often far-sighted employers > anticipated trade union activism by improving conditions of work to > make the jobs of trade union recruiters more difficult, in much the > same way as Bismark invented modern universal health care as a way of > stealing votes from his socialist political rivals. You think your attitudes are SCIENTIFIC FACT, right? > > "Industry?" you ask? Productivity-amplifying machines, powered by > > fossil fuels. Let's get rid of those, shall we? > > Why? You do like introducing silly straw-man arguments. Why do liberals accuse others of straw man arguments so frequently? Kinda stuck in a high school (ACADEMIC) debate society mode? > It would be a > much better idea to improve industry so that the machines didn't have > to be powered by burning fossil fuels, but understanding how one might > do this requires a better grasp of technological possiblities than you > have ever demonstrated. > > > > from each according to the abilities, to each > > > according to their needs - and is compatible with a society where some > > > people can afford fancier cars, bigger houses and finer wines than > > > their neighbours, though the rich no longer have access to the > > > services of a truly deprived under-class who will do almost anything > > > to save their kids from starvation. > > > Socialist countries are the ones who crush their peoples in poverty, > > and whose people flee to the USA, not the reverse. > > And your statistical evidence for this unlikely story is? > Forty years ago, the USA did offer a higher standard of living than > any other country in the world, but that hasn't been true for quite > some time now. It still offers respectable material prosperity, but > education and health care are both now so expensive that immigrants > from the more prosperous parts of Europe have to be confident of > getting very well paying jobs before they could contemplate making a > permanent move. You got rejected because you're a Marxist, Bill? The INDIANS are flooding in on tricked up H1b visas and most of them are very much CAPITALISTS! > > > > This guy makes your case for you:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0wwK7fggOs&NR=1 > > > > The link doesn't work for me, and if it had worked I imagine that its > > > content would be just as half-baked as your argument. > > > Pity. A conspiracy idiot. He makes your case well. > > And what is the "conspiracy" to which you think I might be referring? > You right-wing nut cases You DO realize that being a Marxist and citing Engels places you firmly into KOOK LEFT territory, right? To you, almost EVERYBODY is relatively right wing! It's not like Marxists are seen as main stream thought, Bill! LOL ----------------------------------------------------------------- BS > do seem to share a number of delusions, BS > but that can be explained without resorting BS > to any conspiracy - simple-minded nitwits BS > like simple solutions, and lack the historical BS > insight to realise that these solutions BS > haven't worked in the past and are even BS > less likely to work now. Translation: Your ( ad hom) opponents are short sighted and their solutions have failed, so we should do what YOU say. Isn't that what that paragraph of pseudo-intellectualism said? Your first language IS English isn't it??
From: Greegor on 15 May 2010 05:51 On May 14, 10:53 am, Martin Brown <|||newspam...(a)nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote: [...] MB > I presume that noone bothers in the US like buying MB > stuff from another state to evade state sales taxes. Yes, and states are quite testy about that! I'm not a smoker but there are some HUGE differences in state tax on cigarrettes, and there is a cottage industry of truckloads of cigs sneaking from low tax states into high tax states. VAT sounds like it involves an insane amount of paperwork which would increase the cost of production. I still favor the FLAT INCOME TAX with all of the thousands of exceptions, breaks and subsidies pared down to mere dozens. (handled by separate sheet or filing for each) No more logarithmic tax tables, just a minimum, a % and get rid of the left handed peanut farmer tax break, IRS can watch the FEW exception forms like hawks.
From: Martin Brown on 15 May 2010 06:08 On 14/05/2010 21:42, John Larkin wrote: > On Fri, 14 May 2010 17:53:22 +0100, Martin Brown > <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote: > >> On 14/05/2010 16:06, John Larkin wrote: >>> On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:31:49 +0100, Martin Brown >>> <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote: >>> >>>> Engels saw first hand what greedy industrialists were doing to their >>>> workers in the Lancashire cotton industry. Boiler explosions were >>>> commonplace up until the Vulcan insurers made a stand and insisted on >>>> proper boiler safety inspections. And in cases of tampering with safety >>>> relief valves they would not pay out. >>>> >> [snip] >>>> >>>> It makes reasonable sense to pay your workers a living wage for the work >>>> that they do rather than pay them less than they can sensibly live on. >>>> Ford was about the first in the USA to actually do this. >>> >>> It only makes sense if the money comes from somewhere. If all the >>> employers arbitrarily doubled wages, inflation would take it all away >> >> We are talking here of industrialised manufacture that was possibly two >> or more orders of magnitude more productive. All the profits went to the >> mill owners and their workers were left to starve on a subsistance level >> of pay because it was marginally better than being out of work. > > That effect was transient. The first mill owners could indeed hire > unemployed labor cheap. As other mill owners got into the act, they > had to compete for labor whether they were nice people or not. The That isn't how it worked at all. There were enough starving people migrating to the cities that the mill owners could fix the price they were prepared to pay and anyway preferred to employ children at roughly 1/10 of the adult rate where possible. The working day was unregulated but typically around 14 hours. A brief history of some of the worst areas of the country for these practices is online at: http://www.manchester2002-uk.com/history/victorian/Victorian1.html The poor were viewed as an underclass to be exploited for commercial gain like beasts of burden and kept poor. They lived in squalour and paid barely enough to stay alive. This "transient" situation persisted until the late 19th century which is how Engles came to observe it. The blockade of cotton during the American War of Independence led to mass starvation in Lancashire as without raw cotton the mills closed. Like all these things the reality was more complex than the simple anti slavery storyline history that is taught in schools. eg. http://www.spinningtheweb.org.uk/m_display.php?irn=10&sub=overview&theme=overview&crumb=Lancashire+Cotton+Famine And there was cotton available but spivs and speculators were holding it in warehouses waiting for the price to rise even more. > laborers benefitted on the other side as food, clothing, building > materials, all sorts of stuff, got cheaper because productivity and > transportation were indeed orders of magnitude improved by new > technology. No they didn't. The food was deliberately overpriced by way of the Corn Laws (which misleadingly apply to wheat) whereby rich land owners and the merchants in the cities could rip them off. It was paradoxically the more enlightened of the mill owners who fought back against this particularly nasty exploitation of the poor to keep their wage bills low by forming the anti-Corn-Law League in Manchester in about 1840. About the same time as the banking system crashed spectacularly as a result of a new cunning scheme by merchant wankers. It was indirectly related to the Mississippi banking crisis but effectively crippled global trade. I think in part triggered by a collapse in raliroad mania. There was even a similar letter from the Bank of England reprimanding the bankers for their "irrational exuberance" aka wild speculation. It led to a campaign against the gold standard. It seems that the global banking system has major crashes with an almost predictable period of 80-90 years - 1847, 1929, 2008 > > Productivity is the ultimate benevolence. Technology pushes > productivity. Increased productivity is good, but only when some of the proceeds are shared with the people who are doing the work. In the Victorian era most of the mill owners were out to exploit the poor for maximum profit. They had enough money to buy the capital kit to enter the market and were determined to keep it that way. The eventual rise of a powerful middle class of managers and administrators eventually broke the deadlock but the workers at the bottom of the pile had little option but to form unions if they were ever to get a fair deal. Ulitimately it came down to the golden rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Regards, Martin Brown
From: Martin Brown on 15 May 2010 06:26 On 14/05/2010 21:52, John Larkin wrote: > On Fri, 14 May 2010 11:29:35 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman > <bill.sloman(a)ieee.org> wrote: > >> On May 14, 5:18 pm, dagmargoodb...(a)yahoo.com wrote: >>> On May 14, 9:51 am, John Larkin >>> >>>> What created our modern wealth was engineers applying science. >>> >>> Yep. They made machines to relieve human toil, to improve the human >>> condition. That was not how it looked to the poor sods that had to work the machines. >>> >>> Evil capitalists. Marx the Moocher should've stopped 'em. >> >> Some of the capitalists were quite evil, as Martin Brown has pointed >> out elsewhere in this thread. Trade unions were one of the mechanisms >> that reigned in the greedy, evil, short-sighted minority. > > No. Competition did. But it didn't. The mill owners were small enough in number to form a cartel and fix the wages they were prepared to pay. Anyone that broke ranks by being too generous to their workers quickly found that their raw materials supply became erratic. The quaker firms tended to be the least bad employers but they were limited by the others. It would have stayed that way forever if there had not been some counter balance to the enormous power and influence that the ruling classes possessed. See the history of Manchester link I posted earlier for a fairly balanced account of what it was like in the Lancashire cotton industry that formed the basis of Engels observations. And it was frequently the exact opposite of competition. Effective monopolies were created when Pilkingtons, Chance & Hartley who were usually amongst the good guys but teamed up to drive other glass makers with a better process to the wall. Hardline monopolistic practices of undercutting and taking turns to make raw materials unavailable to competitors. Once they had established a monopoly prices for finished goods went through the roof and employee wages were driven downwards. Regards, Martin Brown
From: Bill Sloman on 15 May 2010 10:27
On May 14, 10:52 pm, John Larkin <jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > On Fri, 14 May 2010 11:29:35 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman > > > > <bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: > >On May 14, 5:18 pm, dagmargoodb...(a)yahoo.com wrote: > >> On May 14, 9:51 am, John Larkin > > >> <jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > >> > On Thu, 13 May 2010 22:16:49 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodb...(a)yahoo.com > >> > wrote: > > >> > >On May 13, 5:02 pm,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: > >> > >> On May 13, 8:20 pm, dagmargoodb...(a)yahoo.com wrote: > > >> > >> The argument for progressive taxation is usually put in terms of those > >> > >> with the broadest shoulders carrying more of the load. > > >> > >Right. That's how the Little Red Hen got a hold of all the other > >> > >animals' bread, greedy thing that she was. She had broad shoulders. > > >> > >> This falls a > >> > >> long way short of Marx - > > >> > >Marx was kind of an idiot. > > >> > >"The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., > >> > > that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely > >> > > requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer." > >> > > --The Communist Manifesto > > >> > > See what I mean? > > >> > Yeah, he wouldn't understand a female plumber making $150K. > > >> > What created our modern wealth was engineers applying science. > > >> Yep. They made machines to relieve human toil, to improve the human > >> condition. > > >> Evil capitalists. Marx the Moocher should've stopped 'em. > > >Some of the capitalists were quite evil, as Martin Brown has pointed > >out elsewhere in this thread. Trade unions were one of the mechanisms > >that reigned in the greedy, evil, short-sighted minority. > > No. Competition did. Comptetion was one of the other mechanisms, once anti-trust legislation had forced the greedy, evil and shorted sighted capitalists to compete rather than conspire. -- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen |