Billionaires Blast off

[laughing dog]

When someone trots out the libertardian rhetoric for tax rates (i.e. taxes = working for the government), you know rational discussion has left the room.

That's the figure of speech you had a problem with? Should we take it, then, that you regard "I, for one, am proud to have helped pay the tax burden of billionaires" as a case of rational discussion staying in the room?

IMO, it is less irrational/more rational than "working for the government", since the discussion is about the appropriate tax burden for billionaires. Clearly if one feels billionaires are not paying enough in taxes, then it is reasonable to think one is shouldering some of the billionaires' rightful burden.

 

[Bomb#20]

No, you have missed the implications of your position. You take away the wealth, you take away what that wealth produces.

Nobody is proposing taking away all their wealth. Why do you keep trotting out that stupid straw man?

It's not a strawman. Plenty of people are proposing taking away over 99% of their wealth -- Bilby, for instance -- and LP's point remains whether it's 99% or 100%.

99% of a billion dollars taken in tax leaves them with only $10,000,000.

I can see how that's an awful impost that leaves someone at genuine risk of starvation, homelessness, and destitution.

Oh, wait.

<expletive deleted> off.

Progressivism is a religion, which is to say, it's a contagious mental illness that attacks the moral sense. It cripples the ability of the people it spreads to to do moral reasoning, sort of the way schizophrenia can induce paranoia by crippling its victims' ability to model other people's minds. One of the things progressivism does to its infectees' moral sense is to massively ramp up the significance they attach to feelings of pity relative to every other consideration. It pretty much makes progressives think their tear ducts are better judges of morality than their brains.

Once that's happened to a disease victim, garden variety projection takes care of the rest. When such a person encounters a moral argument, he takes it for granted that the argument is an appeal to pity for some suffering soul, because that's the only kind of moral case that still resonates with him and he takes it for granted that the author of the argument thinks the same way he does. But if it's not an argument for an opinion he agrees with, then it evidently can't be an appeal to pity for a suffering person he cares about, since he agrees with appeals to pity for suffering people he cares about. So by process of elimination, he deduces that it's either an appeal to pity for a suffering person he doesn't care about, or else an appeal to pity for a non-suffering person. Then all that remains is to look around for a suitable candidate to make believe the imagined request for pity is on behalf of.

Anyway, that's my theory for why you responded to my argument that ZiprHead was making a false accusation and Loren's argument that taking away billionaires' wealth would stop projects like SpaceX from ever happening, to the general detriment of mankind, as though we were making appeals for everyone to pity Elon Musk's poverty and suffering, and for why you felt I deserved to have you swear at me over it.

If you disagree with my diagnosis, what's your theory for why a man as smart as you are would write a post so mind-blowingly stupid?

 

[bilby]

Nobody is proposing taking away all their wealth. Why do you keep trotting out that stupid straw man?

It's not a strawman. Plenty of people are proposing taking away over 99% of their wealth -- Bilby, for instance -- and LP's point remains whether it's 99% or 100%.

99% of a billion dollars taken in tax leaves them with only $10,000,000.

I can see how that's an awful impost that leaves someone at genuine risk of starvation, homelessness, and destitution.

Oh, wait.

<expletive deleted> off.

Progressivism is a religion, which is to say, it's a contagious mental illness that attacks the moral sense. It cripples the ability of the people it spreads to to do moral reasoning, sort of the way schizophrenia can induce paranoia by crippling its victims' ability to model other people's minds. One of the things progressivism does to its infectees' moral sense is to massively ramp up the significance they attach to feelings of pity relative to every other consideration. It pretty much makes progressives think their tear ducts are better judges of morality than their brains.

Once that's happened to a disease victim, garden variety projection takes care of the rest. When such a person encounters a moral argument, he takes it for granted that the argument is an appeal to pity for some suffering soul, because that's the only kind of moral case that still resonates with him and he takes it for granted that the author of the argument thinks the same way he does. But if it's not an argument for an opinion he agrees with, then it evidently can't be an appeal to pity for a suffering person he cares about, since he agrees with appeals to pity for suffering people he cares about. So by process of elimination, he deduces that it's either an appeal to pity for a suffering person he doesn't care about, or else an appeal to pity for a non-suffering person. Then all that remains is to look around for a suitable candidate to make believe the imagined request for pity is on behalf of.

Anyway, that's my theory for why you responded to my argument that ZiprHead was making a false accusation and Loren's argument that taking away billionaires' wealth would stop projects like SpaceX from ever happening, to the general detriment of mankind, as though we were making appeals for everyone to pity Elon Musk's poverty and suffering, and for why you felt I deserved to have you swear at me over it.

If you disagree with my diagnosis, what's your theory for why a man as smart as you are would write a post so mind-blowingly stupid?

Perhaps I am right in what I said, and you are wrong on a number of levels - wrong about what I am addressing, wrong about my reasoning, and even wrong about the meaning and target of the phrase "fuck off" in my post.

Certainly I see no reasons why you have dismissed that possibility.

 

[lpetrich]

(ants around a droplet)

And it's not right anyway. The ants are spread around the drop because that's how they fit. Each ant uses up a certain amount of the border, there's little more border than the 12 ants need. Besides, the ants are even being fair--look at the two ants closest to the 12 o'clock position--the left ant is too far to the right, somewhat excluding the right ant.

Yeah, this whole business about ants co-operating, drinking water together while singing Kumbaya is a bit of a myth. Just ask any 10 year boy what he saw happen when he mixed a bunch of red ants and black ants together in a jar. Its a horror show. Ants decapitating and dismembering each other.

Ants cooperate with with fellow ants from their hills, but they often fight ants from other hills. In some species, some workers ants become specialized as soldier ants. - Division of Labor - AntWiki

Some ants take care of their hills, while others forage for food and supplies. Ants mark out trails for fellow ants to find food that they found, and they carry their food in their stomachs, vomiting it up for their fellow ants ("trophallaxis").

Ants often maintain garbage dumps near their hills where they dump dead fellow ants and various junk. Also, The secret life of ants and their toilet habits - The Washington Post - Nest Etiquette—Where Ants Go When Nature Calls

Worker ants, like worker social insects more generally, don't have any incentive to freeload because they are not the reproducers in their groups. So they are much like body cells in a multicellular organism.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Disagree. Private enterprise has competition that drives efficiency. Government does not. Government policy is often driven by other factors, also. Compare SpaceX vs the Space "Launch" System. Or the other launch programs that served their real purpose of being pork and finally got cancelled.

There was bugger all evidence of competition driven efficiency in the twelve years I worked for IBM. Just bloated bureaucracy, excessive management, and all the usual hallmarks of an organisation grown too large to be efficient at anything other than crushing competition by sheer size and inertia. If they couldn't crush their competitors by using their deep pockets, they just bought them and assimilated them into the Borg.

And note that IBM isn't a dominant player anymore--they fell behind because of becoming a bloated bureaucracy.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Congratulations, you killed SpaceX.

GOOD.

Why the fuck would you expect me to see that as a problem?

I thought I had been quite explicit that I believe that big projects (like space exploration) should be done on the basis of society deciding to do them via the democratic process.

Government rocket programs are basically pork these days.

Constellation: Cancelled
Orion: Cancelled
Space Launch System: It might get off the ground but it's never going to fly much as it's 10x the price per kg of the Super-Heavy.

The choice is whether to allow a handful of neo-aristocratic individuals to decide whether and how society should go into space; or whether to make those decisions democratically.

The decision made "democratically" is to waste the money on pork--the worst possible outcome.

 

[bilby]

Government rocket programs are basically pork these days.

Constellation: Cancelled
Orion: Cancelled
Space Launch System: It might get off the ground but it's never going to fly much as it's 10x the price per kg of the Super-Heavy.

The choice is whether to allow a handful of neo-aristocratic individuals to decide whether and how society should go into space; or whether to make those decisions democratically.

The decision made "democratically" is to waste the money on pork--the worst possible outcome.

"Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried" - Winston Churchill

When your democracy is broken, the solution is to fix it, not to just replace it with an aristocracy.

Dictators, autocrats, and aristocrats are quite capable of doing stuff that their people would have wanted, had they been asked. But that doesn't make dictatorship, autocracy, or aristocracy better than democracy.

 

[DBT]

We had a new Aristrocracy emerging in comparatively recent times, a very, very rich and privaliged class.

Including a modern version of feudalism.

 

[Derec]

When your democracy is broken, the solution is to fix it, not to just replace it with an aristocracy.

Governments not having a monopoly on space is not autocracy. WTF?

 

[bilby]

When your democracy is broken, the solution is to fix it, not to just replace it with an aristocracy.

Governments not having a monopoly on space is not autocracy. WTF?

Governments not having a monopoly on the expenditure of billions (for any project, including but certainly not limited to, space travel) is plutocracy, which is a subset of aristocracy.

If any civilisation spends billions on anything on the say-so of a tiny group of unelected individuals, then it's clearly and unequivocally an aristocracy.

That you can't see that surprises me less than I might have hoped.

 

[Derec]

Governments not having a monopoly on the expenditure of billions (for any project, including but certainly not limited to, space travel) is plutocracy, which is a subset of aristocracy.

It is not. The governments command a lot more money, not to mention power, than even the richest of billionaires. Even an idiot freshman congresswoman like AOC is orders of magnitude more powerful than Bezos et al. Btw, Bezos is not the richest man in the World right now. But Bernard Arnault doesn't get the hate Bezos gets, probably because he does normal rich person stuff (like collecting art) and is not starting space companies that employ 1000s. Go figure!

By the way, I read your sentence to mean that private sector should not be able to do any multibillion dollar projects at all, as your sentence is not limited to just companies started by billionaires. Was that your intention? Should Toyota not be able to do this?

Toyota Boosts Investment in US Manufacturing to $13 Billion, Adds Another 600 Jobs

Now, that may not happen, or be delayed, due to the pandemic, but as a matter of principle, should the private sector be allowed to do that?

If any civilisation spends billions on anything on the say-so of a tiny group of unelected individuals, then it's clearly and unequivocally an aristocracy.

It is not the civilization spending billions, it is the individuals investing their own money in companies like Blue Origin or Space X.
And being an "elected individual" is not a be-all end-all when most people are idiots. Elections gave us idiots like AOC, Cori Bush, Louis Gohmert and Sheila Jackson Lee in the US House of Representatives and Donald Trump in the White House. Democracy may be the least bad way of running a government, but that does not mean governments should get a monopoly on doing important things. Past basic research stage, the private sector does tech better.

That you can't see that surprises me less than I might have hoped.

Neither does it surprise me that you don't realize that going your way lies Soviet Union.

 

[bilby]

It is not. The governments command a lot more money, not to mention power, than even the richest of billionaires. Even an idiot freshman congresswoman like AOC is orders of magnitude more powerful than Bezos et al. Btw, Bezos is not the richest man in the World right now. But Bernard Arnault doesn't get the hate Bezos gets, probably because he does normal rich person stuff (like collecting art) and is not starting space companies. Go figure!



It is not the civilization spending billions, it is the individuals investing their own money in companies like Blue Origin or Space X.
And being "elected" is not a be-all end-all when most people are idiots. Elections gave us idiots like AOC, Cori Bush and Sheila Jackson Lee in the US House of Representatives and Donald Trump in the White House. Democracy may be the least bad way of running a government, but that does not mean governments should get a monopoly on doing important things. Past basic research stage, the private sector does it better.

That you can't see that surprises me less than I might have hoped.

Neither does it surprise me that you don't realize that going your way lies Soviet Union.

Money isn't property. Nobody except dictators has 'their own money'.

Money is entitlement to the products of a society. It's debt. A personal wealth of a billion US dollars is a statement by the US government that that person is entitled to a billion dollars worth of stuff. And taxes are the way that governments prevent the amassing of entitlement beyond what it's reasonable for a person to be given.

Allowing a person to amass such wealth as to be able to do things normally only possible for governments, is anti-democratic.

The private sector doesn't do it better. Government put twelve men on the moon, and in the process developed dozens of new technologies, and advanced thousands of pre-existing ones. The private sector gave a handful of folks a suborbital thrill ride. They'd have been better off spending a few thousand on a VIP trip to Disneyland.

The Soviet Union ceased to exist three decades ago. You can stop being afraid of it now

 

[Derec]

Money isn't property. Nobody except dictators has 'their own money'.

I did not say they have their own currency. In any case, little of their wealth is in cash or cash-like money. Most of it is is in stock.

Money is entitlement to the products of a society.

And your point being?

It's debt. A personal wealth of a billion US dollars is a statement by the US government that that person is entitled to a billion dollars worth of stuff.

It is legal tender for all debts, public and private. But it is not itself debt. But yes, if you have a billion dollars in US currency, US government guarantees that it will spend.
If you have stock, it's not quite the same.

And taxes are the way that governments prevent the amassing of entitlement beyond what it's reasonable for a person to be given.

Who decides what is reasonable? And the tax system does not do that, as it does not have a 100% tax rate beyond a certain income level deemed "not reasonable" and there is no wealth tax at all.

Allowing a person to amass such wealth as to be able to do things normally only possible for governments, is anti-democratic.

Why? On the contrary, it is sign of progress. At first, only the governments owned computers, then large businesses. Now we all have powerful computers in our pockets.

The private sector doesn't do it better. Government put twelve men on the moon, and in the process developed dozens of new technologies, and advanced thousands of pre-existing ones.

The private sector was intimately involved in the Apollo program. The first stage of the Saturn V rocket was built by Boeing. Third stage was built by Douglas. The instrument unit? IBM. Among many others.

But yes, it was directed by NASA. And we stopped at 12 people. By the end of this century, there will probably be 100s of times as many people who have been on the Moon, most of them paying customers.

The private sector gave a handful of folks a suborbital thrill ride.

That is not the only thing private sector is doing in space. Space X is providing cost-effective orbital launch vehicles for example.
And as far as space tourism, this is just the beginning. I do not for a second think short suborbital jaunts will be the apex of space tourism. Not by a long shot.

They'd have been better off spending a few thousand on a VIP trip to Disneyland.

Why?

The Soviet Union ceased to exist three decades ago. You can stop being afraid of it now

And yet its failures should be a lesson to us today.
You have not answered the question about Toyota. Should private sector car companies be allowed to invest billions or should they have to leave such decisions to "elected individuals" of the government.

 

[Jayjay]

We had a new Aristrocracy emerging in comparatively recent times, a very, very rich and privaliged class.

Including a modern version of feudalism.

What do you mean by feudalism in this context? I just don't see it. Feudalism emerged because the leaders didn't have the reach or power to rule directly, so they deputized vassals to rule the people for them. Technology has pretty much made this kind of hierarchies obsolete.

If the current situation was feudal, that would mean that e.g. Jeff Bezos would have a cadre of mere non-multi billionaires doing his bidding, who in turn have multimillionaires doing theirs, all the way to us peasants (or you peasants, depending your status in the hierarchy). But that's not the case. There are specialized servants who leech off billionaires (hedge fund managers, etc) but they have no power themselves and the relationship is not hierarchical.

 

[DBT]

We had a new Aristrocracy emerging in comparatively recent times, a very, very rich and privaliged class.

Including a modern version of feudalism.

What do you mean by feudalism in this context? I just don't see it. Feudalism emerged because the leaders didn't have the reach or power to rule directly, so they deputized vassals to rule the people for them. Technology has pretty much made this kind of hierarchies obsolete.

If the current situation was feudal, that would mean that e.g. Jeff Bezos would have a cadre of mere non-multi billionaires doing his bidding, who in turn have multimillionaires doing theirs, all the way to us peasants (or you peasants, depending your status in the hierarchy). But that's not the case. There are specialized servants who leech off billionaires (hedge fund managers, etc) but they have no power themselves and the relationship is not hierarchical.

Not meant to be taken absolutely literally, somewhat rhetorical, which is why I said 'modern version.' Feudal in the sense that we apparently have one class of people working to enrich a hierarchy while they themselves struggle to make ends meet. Another quip could be another version of 'robber barons.'

''In feudal society, power was exercised primarily by two classes—what the French referred to as the First Estate, the clergy, and the Second Estate, comprised of the warrior-aristocratic elite. Everyone else, even successful merchants, resided in the Third Estate, and most were peasants living at subsistence levels. This was a society, noted historian Pierre Riché, composed of “those who prayed, those who fought, and those who labored.”

 

[barbos]

I understand feudalism developed when peasants started to pay warriors for protection from other warriors. I basically was similar to today's mafia. No?

 

[DrZoidberg]

I understand feudalism developed when peasants started to pay warriors for protection from other warriors. I basically was similar to today's mafia. No?

Feudalism developed when Charlemagne had to quickly figure out a way to keep Gallic/French society from collapsing in the absence of the Roman bureaucracy. It was essentially a quick fix that stuck around.

I think you're thinking of early pre-Roman tribal societies. Warriors from a dominant group would show up to collect "taxes". Which was nothing but a protection racket of sorts. They were nominally supposed to protect those they extorted for money. The Apache of USA is an example of this kind of an economy.

Feudalism is a lot more sophisticated.

 

[bilby]

I understand feudalism developed when peasants started to pay warriors for protection from other warriors. I basically was similar to today's mafia. No?

Feudalism developed when Charlemagne had to quickly figure out a way to keep Gallic/French society from collapsing in the absence of the Roman bureaucracy. It was essentially a quick fix that stuck around.

I think you're thinking of early pre-Roman tribal societies. Warriors from a dominant group would show up to collect "taxes". Which was nothing but a protection racket of sorts. They were nominally supposed to protect those they extorted for money. The Apache of USA is an example of this kind of an economy.

Feudalism is a lot more sophisticated.

Feudalism is more like modern corporatism. A hierarchy of bosses, each owing fealty only to those higher in the structure, and demanding it from everyone below them.

With the bosses auditing and occasionally spot-checking their juniors to keep them in line. And management at every level in cutthroat competition for promotions. Although these days fewer throats are literally cut.

 

[DBT]

Not to mention those at the very bottom of the heap, the lowly workers, very little status or power, in effect a modern day version of serfdom. Fifty cents an hour pay rise?...oh, no, we can't afford that. [/sarcasm]

 

[DrZoidberg]

Not to mention those at the very bottom of the heap, the lowly workers, very little status or power, in effect a modern day version of serfdom. Fifty cents an hour pay rise?...oh, no, we can't afford that. [/sarcasm]

In the Roman imperial system the rules were, by design, made so that the peasants would in hard times, be pressed to sell their lands and join the army. Which provided a perpetual source of troops with which the empire could continually expand. It also, over time, concentrated land among the senatorial (equivalent of an count) and equestrian (equivalent of a lord) classes. When Rome stopped expanding this design acted to destabilize the empire, as hordes of impoverished commoners flooded into already overcrowded cities. These joined private armies of the wealthy which only furthered destabilized the empire. The Byzantine half of the Roman empire manage to fix it in time. The western half of the empire didn't.

Serfdom is actually a reform intended to benefit the peasants. They couldn't leave the land. But they also couldn't be kicked off it. The Christian ban against usury was intended to prevent the wealthy amassing more land over time. Both of these reforms were intended to prevent the inherent instability of the Roman empire.

The church is an important factor of European feudalism. On this forum they're so very often vilified. But they were actually a great benefit to the common people, after the Roman empire fell apart. That's why they grew in importance and finally managed to take over the Roman empire.

And to be perfectly frank, the Catholic church IS the Roman empire. When Rome became Christian a lot of government functions, of benefit to the people, were transferred to the church. And all of that kept going after the fall of the Roman empire, right through the age of feudalism and keeps going into modernity.

Post Roman Europe had a Roman imperial superstructure in the church that was propped up (due to mutual benefit) by the kings and feudal lords. Stability was good for the economy which was good for the feudal lords AND the peasants. The church was awarded considerable amount of power to maintain that stability in exchange for them not using it to get too involved in the power games of the nobility.

Japanese or Chinese feudalism wasn't at all like this. It was a quite different system.