--continued from post #125 above --
SimpleDon said:
Theories that caused the Great Financial Crisis and Recession of 2008. Theories that have proven to be disastrous for the economy.
Stop with the liberal talking points. Stick with education. You're attempting to change the subject.
The OP that you wrote references Milton Friedman as authority for your assertion of an inverse relation between the amount of money spent on education and achievement. You didn't explain why you thought that though. If you present him as an authority for your argument, and especially when you don't detail Friedman's views that you feel supports your case, you have to accept someone questioning that authority.
You even invited us to argue with Milton Friedman's ideas and followers. That is all that I was doing.
I am not liberal and I bend over backwards to not just recite talking points, a policy that you might consider following yourself.
But there obviously are limits to doing this, every post can't be about everything. I was listing some of Friedman's more obvious failures . I can back up any of them that you want me to, but it would be best if we didn't do it in this thread.
Since you brought him into the discussion you might consider listing what it is that convinced you that Friedman and his theories support your assertion that more money spent on education results in lower achievement.
SimpleDon said:
cheerleader for the very rich. And that they paid too much of their passive, unearned incomes in taxes.
There you go, down the Stalinist track as liberals always do. For decades, a majority of the twenty richest congressmen have been
Democrats. Can you say Rockefeller? Kerry? Outside congress, we have Obozo flying to California to fete rich Democrats paying $40,000
a plate for dinner.
Once again, I am not a liberal. The quote that you cut out of my response said that Milton Friedman finally found fame and fortune not as an economist but in the political area by catering to the biases of the rich. I can explain the point further. But I need a little more from you than middle school playground name calling, "liberal," "Stalinist," to convince that you are worth the time. I am disabled, I can't use the keyboard and these posts take me hours to do.
Ah, why not?
Friedman was, and his followers still are, anti-Keynesian Keynesians. They accept Keynes' argument that the government has to intervene in the economy in order to stabilize it and to help the economy recover from a serve recession. But Milton Friedman was only a half Keynesian, he believed that monetary policies would always be sufficient to do both, to stabilize the economy and to recover from recessions.
As I said Friedman was proven wrong on both counts. His monetarism failed recovering from the oil price shock inflation of the 1970's and from the deregulation derangement financial crisis and recession of 2008.
Later Friedman embraced Reaganomics accepting that the government should intentionally increase income inequity, extremely pleasing to the already wealthy but a disaster, as we have seen, for the economy. But it does mean he accepted that Keynes was right about the need for the government need to use fiscal policy to control the economy, taxation, but Friedman limited the use of fiscal policy to lowering taxes on the very rich and raising them on everyone else. Policies not meant to have a positive impact on the economy but to please the very wealthy who in gratitude made him very wealthy.
And it is also certain that thirty five years into movement conservatism's dominance in the government and the economy that virtually all of the problems that we see now are the failures of conservatives and of conservative policies
Republicans tax and spend too much, as they try to be everything for everyone. The only problem is, that Democrats are far, far worse. Take Obama, please. Conservatives have been FAR from "dominant," in politics, in the media, in education. Stop with the liberal talking points.
Please list for the me all of the tax increases proposed and passed by the Republicans on their way to tax and spend. Most people would say that the Republicans borrow and spend. But no one that I can think of who say that that the less we spend on education the better results we will see. Maybe you are trying to be completely wrong about everything. You are well on your way.
I would be interested in how you characterize the policies that we are running under right now. If they aren't mainly conservative ones what are they? Are they liberal ones?
Do you believe that the majority of people in the country are conservatives or are the majority liberals? That Republicans are secretly liberal and that they only only pretend to be conservative? That the Democrats haven't been becoming increasingly conservative over the last thirty five years?
You accused me met of using liberal talking points but here in a single sentence you managed to reel off three talking points that are wrong. That politics, the media and education are liberal.
Liberal Education
I did address your contention that universities convert overwhelming conservative high school graduates into flaming liberals in four years, presenting UC Berkeley as your one piece of evidence of this. You didn't comment on my response that the majority of universities in the country are actually politically conservative, with a list of those. Possibly you are still formulating your response. If that is the case I can hardly wait.
Since you don't seem to reach even the most obvious conclusion on your own I will do that work for you. Berkeley and the liberal arts in general aren't inclined to be liberal because the professors are liberal and indoctrinate the students with liberal dogmas. They are liberal because these are the types of studies that attract people who are already liberals. In the same way that business, economics, engineering, religion, law, agriculture, etc. attract conservatives to study those disciplines.
The Liberal Media
Conservatives are those who want to maintain the status quo. The problems that we see in the country are largely caused by the failures of the status quo. The media's job is to report the problems in society so that the status quo can be changed. In this regard the media can be considered to be liberal. Certainly conservatives advance their views by ignoring or by trying to explain away the problems as something other than failures of the status quo.
Liberal Politics
Politics has become more conservative over the last thirty five years. The Democrats have become more conservative in the last thirty five years, largely in an effort to 'box in' the Republicans. In response the Republican have become increasingly conservative. They have expelled the moderates and the liberals from the party and embraced the far right. To the point that arguably the party has become largely a reactionary one. Reactionaries want to rollback progress to some point in history that they claim was a better time, with no justification, not just to prevent change but to rollback previous change.
Conservatives have a lot of advantages in politics. Since they want to prevent change they can accomplish their goals through obstruction. Since everyone is a least a little afraid of change conservatives can play on this fear to gain political advantage. They only need a boogeyman to present to instill fear in the voters. They can manufacture conservatives in this way, using fear.
Conservatives have one major problem in politics. Their inability to face the realities of the problems we have means that they are structurally incapable of governing. The problems just continue to get worse. Additionally conservatives inability to accept change where it is obviously required means that they constantly have to lie to themselves. They have to construct lies to justify to themselves why the problems that we have in society aren't the failures of the status quo.
They then act on these lies, producing more problems. For example, they declare crime has run a muck and because of it we now imprison more people per capita than any other country in the world. When the problem is the ever increasing of the number of the poor caused by the obsession conservatives have with increasing wealth and income inequality.
Once again you have to understand that I am not a liberal.
Liberals are people believe that the only answers to our problems is change, usually involving the government. It isn't always, the society and especially the economy is capable of self-correcting some times.
Liberals also lie to themselves. But they do it to prove that the government has to get involved to prevent harm and that corporations are evil. This is evident in the anti's; the anti-GMOs, the anti-Vaxx, the anti-Nukes, etc.
Historically these two extremes, the conservatives and the liberals, haven't been able to do as much damage as they would like to do because of another group in between them, the moderates, who took the best ideas of both and ignored the rest.
The moderates accept that change is some times needed, but who realize that change is not always needed, that it involves risks and that it should be introduced in measured steps to allow people to get use to it to avoid a backlash. Moderates held the balance of the power and in most cases the elective offices, pretty much for the whole history of the US.
The moderates, which is what I consider myself, have largely disappeared. They couldn't attract campaign funds to stay in office. They were replaced in office largely by conservatives who were willing to cater to the rich who provide the majority of the non-union campaign funding. The Liberals are largely irrelevant, they can't convince more than say 20% of the voters that they are relevant.
