Myths of rich and poor

[davinxtk]

Originally Posted by Preechr

Let it be said I totally get where you're coming from. This post was really well made as well, though possibly moreso than most for you. I've honestly been laboring under the impression that you really weren't ever gonna see eye to eye with me enough to phrase your comments with such determined civility.

I honestly thought you'd be kicking my ass by now.

Thanks for not doing that.

I've come to respect your opinion on a great deal of things; even where I don't agree with you, you seem to have at least thought about things before coming to a conclusion. You're one of the few people on here that can be expected to have a solid foundation to what they're saying even if it's pretty extreme.

You riffed on the concept of "healthy." I said: "I like human nature, when it's healthy." . . . you're basically saying that consideration for the weakest of the community is primary over consideration for the individual needs of the strongest producers within that community, right?

Not... really. The argument for a greater distribution of wealth is a rather nuanced one, provided you're trying to keep some semblence of a capitalist free market alive in your theories. It's not that consideration for the weakest of the community is primary over that for the strongest producers, it's that production is accross the board a rather abstract concept. You can't use the same scale of production for a waiter as you do for a coal miner or a deli clerk or a CPA or a mechanic or a dry-cleaner or a cabbie. Does every one of them need food? Do many of them have families that as well need food? Health care? Housing? Running water, electricity, heat, clothing? Do you think enough consideration is given when setting wages to cover these aspects for everyone who works a full time job? Do you think it's directly related to productivity in even fifty percent of circumstances?

The subtext here is that I feel your devotion to a free market clouds your judgement about the healthiness of its practices. We'll get to this in a moment, though.

I'm fine with [communist principles], at least in one half of my life. That's exactly how I feel about dealings with my family. Most families run on communist principles. I have a complex life, however. When I get out of bed in the morning, and decide what I want to do on any given day, most days I go to work. See, some of my family obligations require money to fulfill. For that, as well as the ever present requirement to feed, shelter and clothe my own self, I need to sell some of my free time in the form of a job well done in exchange for cash.

When I leave the house in my work clothes, I am sacrificing part of my life to fund another. Since work, though rewarding for some (very much so for me,) is generally less fun and fulfilling than hanging out at the house with friends and family, I cannot very well take the for-home attitude about life with me outside now, can I? I need to adopt a less giving, more taking attitude, one of a very competitive point of view. I owe this to my first priority: my private life: the reason I go to work. I need to become a capitalist pig. We all do.

For the most part I agree with the concepts presented here. I must concede to the fact that a decent work ethic is hard to find among many citizens, but in a society that attempts to teach us from day one that we can "do whatever we want" in this "free country" only to be delivered to harsh economic realities often in our teenage years you have to expect at least some discontent. If your argument is that Americans need to toughen up and get down to business, quit fucking around with popular culture and advertisements and bling and cribs and the like and actually do what's best for themselves... how can I argue with you? But this isn't going to be spurred by the poor suddenly waking up and correcting their horrendous spending habits, getting second and third jobs, and finding the motivation (and job openings) to move into management from entry-level positions. The trickle-down economy isn't quite working right, too much of the resources flow immediately back to the top. The initial sacrifices are going to have to be made by the rich, as it's the poor who need the leg-up..

A competitive, capitalistic economy, well maintained by all of us, will provide the most for all of us, right? If we are gonna spend time NOT doing what we love, then we owe it to ourselves to get the biggest economic bang for each of our incremental bucks... and such. So, while we're at home, we are free to live however makes us most happy, and that's typically in a more or less communistic fashion. When we leave our homes, however, we enter the cold, hard world of capitalism, and we are only hurting ourselves if we fail to make that transition gracefully and readily.

Once again it's hard to argue these points. There is, however, quite a difference between trying to provide for your family and trying your damnedest to live like a king.
These people are approaching "Let them eat cake." status.
I caught about five minutes of MTV at a friend's house, and found out that John Travolta's daughter, on a first-class commercial flight, asked "Who are all of these people on the plane?"
This isn't because she's unfarmiliar with flight, it's because she's used to Travolta's private Boeing 707 that he flies them around on. It had never occurred to her that that's NOT how the majority of people travel.
Not only are these people privileged, they don't know how privileged they are. Remember when Bush said at a press conference that that lady lived a "uniquely American" life, working three jobs to feed her children? This capitalist economy has become little more than modern feudalism. The upper echelon of the economy hordes the wealth and lets just slightly less enough than the barest essentials slip out to keep us working.
This is where your naivete complicates things. Business isn't the root of all evil, Preechr, this 'human nature' is.
In the kind of economy where you can either give two employees raises or take another $5,000 into your bonus salary for keeping your profit margins high, the capitalist component of human nature is going to be the cause of your problems.

I'm not really talking much about economics. This is gonna have to be a long conversation, as it really only concerns the future. Economics is a branch of the science of life. If you don't understand how we live, you can never hope to understand how we might live better, right?

I'm not having a hard time here, I find this to be a very relevant and rather fascinating conversation. We both seem to agree that things aren't even pretending to work the way they're set up currently, but where to go with it is the debate.

Ultimately, I'm gonna try to convince you that libertarianism (notice, not capitalized) is the ultimate form of govenrment, and that my fundamentalist attitude toward our American Constitution stems not from some sort of loyalty to tradition, but to a concept that was only hinted at briefly in a long age of various experiments in human slavery.

We are in such an age now. Misunderstanding vital components of human nature any further won't be getting us to the place we need to be any quicker.

Bring it on