Steven Crowder showing his true self

Author: TheRealNihilist

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#121
Snoopy
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@ResurgetExFavilla
UBI would be a lot more acceptable if it didn't discourage charity within the community.  If under a certain threshold of income, people could opt out and get full tax refunds for their charity, what have you, this would make a lot more sense to a lot more people.
I think that this is entirely wrongheaded; how do you figure that it discourages charity? I would certainly give more if I had more to give. To my church, and to the poor in general.

Maybe you are right.  I'll cover one point for now.  I'm not too proud to accept help for my own sake and others, but I am sure not interested in other people's earnings, not that way.  I find the prospect of it disgusting, would rather go hungry.  I don't think that's all that uncommon right now. On this one, its the mentality that strikes me most, that we have to come to feel entitled as a people, to other people's earnings.  There's nothing charitable about that, and our children may be surrounded by people satisfied that someone committing evil according to our wants is considered as "charity" enough.  Now that I think about it, I wonder if it coincides with our defeat as a society.  Maybe we're giving up on justice, and the bastards just wrote a check.  How do you justify this?
#122
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@TheRealNihilist
Ask yourself this: Republicans, who want to privatize social security, often try to get rich people to be exempted from receiving Social Security. Democrats vote to stop that from happening. Why is that? It's because, even though rich people receive SS, SS is still a net transfer away from the rich towards to more poor. But as long as everyone receives it, it remains popular and is politically difficult to attack. By making it a naked wealth transfer from the rich to the poor, you instantly make it more politically attackable. You aren't really giving Jeff Bezos $1,000 dollars a maonth, because the VAT that will fund UBI is going to hit him like a truck, to the tune of billions of dollars. But if UBI is universal, even the upper middle class will defend it, because they will be receiving it. If it isn't, then the rich and middle classes will oppose and undermine it. Also, means testing causes huge bureaucratic bloat. The upkeep cost of that bloat is also money that could be going to people who need it. And that number is way more than 1k for the 1%.
Social Security is a capped flat tax, somewhere north of $100,000.  There is no "net transfer".  The maximum threshold is sustained by a fat middle class.  The deal is, that your earnings go in, and whatever your kids make comes out.  Everyone is exempted from receiving it if they so choose, but its a mandatory form of insurance.  Since social security is designed to be a separately funded program, reducing the social security benefits from people with cushy retirements would properly facilitate a greater distribution of limited funds to those in need.

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#123
TheRealNihilist
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@Snoopy
 reducing the social security benefits from people with cushy retirements would properly facilitate a greater distribution of limited funds to those in need.
I don't think that is necessary when you can simply put more money into social security that are for people in need. 
#124
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@TheRealNihilist
Snoopy: reducing the social security benefits from people with cushy retirements would properly facilitate a greater distribution of limited funds to those in need.
I don't think that is necessary when you can simply put more money into social security that are for people in need. 
Of course

To put more into social security, we can
A) Expand average earnings under $130,000
B) Increase the social security tax
C) Raise the cap

While I'm not making any particular point in that sentence it does happen to contradict a point made earlier in this thread.

Resurgent: often try to get rich people to be exempted from receiving Social Security. Democrats vote to stop that from happening. Why is that? It's because, even though rich people receive SS, SS is still a net transfer away from the rich towards to more poor.

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#125
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@Snoopy
B) Increase the social security tax

#126
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@Greyparrot
I look at the economy like like bookies at a racetrack. Rich people line up to deal with the bookies and racers, who get a guaranteed risk-free cut from every bet placed and every race raced. Some of the rich people lose money and some gain money. The bookies and the racers get the same amount no matter what the rich people win or lose.

One day the bookies and the racers say they want more than their guaranteed cut, and they are going to take it from the rich people who won at the racetrack. The rich people say the risk isn't worth the reward, so they stop going to the racetrack. The bookies and the racers now have no job. The bookies and the racers also refuse to risk their own money the same way the rich people did at the racetrack. The bookies and the racers are now generationally poor with a racetrack of plenty of labor, but nobody to sell it to.
This is where you are completely wrong. Without labor, there is no value. Labor creates value, and the market sets a price. If no one is working in the vineyard, a bunch of gold or fiat money sitting in the vault will not create wine. This is a basic fact of economics understood since Aristotle: money is sterile. Labor doesn't need to be sold to have value; it is only within a system like capitalism that labor is exploited to create value for usurers in a legally justified theft of surplus value. It's really telling that your analogy of choice is a racetrack: an economic endeavour which creates nothing but indebtedness, olfactory money, and moral collapse. What a poignant portrayal of capitalist systems ;)

#127
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@ResurgetExFavilla
Labor does not create value. Consumers create value.
#128
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@Snoopy

UBI would be a lot more acceptable if it didn't discourage charity within the community.  If under a certain threshold of income, people could opt out and get full tax refunds for their charity, what have you, this would make a lot more sense to a lot more people.
I think that this is entirely wrongheaded; how do you figure that it discourages charity? I would certainly give more if I had more to give. To my church, and to the poor in general.

Maybe you are right.  I'll cover one point for now.  I'm not too proud to accept help for my own sake and others, but I am sure not interested in other people's earnings, not that way.  I find the prospect of it disgusting, would rather go hungry.  I don't think that's all that uncommon right now. On this one, its the mentality that strikes me most, that we have to come to feel entitled as a people, to other people's earnings.  There's nothing charitable about that, and our children may be surrounded by people satisfied that someone committing evil according to our wants is considered as "charity" enough.  Now that I think about it, I wonder if it coincides with our defeat as a society.  Maybe we're giving up on justice, and the bastards just wrote a check.  How do you justify this?
I think that you've adopted a set of conceptions about how labor, value, and production work that have made you easy to exploit. Capitalism, as a system, accumulates money in the hands of usurers, while, economically, value is created by laborers and prices are set by the market. This is all explored in Adam Smith, and the economic history of Florence is a great example of how this confiscatory process plays out. How is it just for the surplus value created by labor to accumulate disproportionately in the hands of people who had nothing to do with that labor? I find that very difficult to justify, and I find the idea that trying to get a bigger share is unjust to be heinous. Because it assumes that an economic and political system founded on usury is just, when I hold that it is the opposite. The Marxists were wrong about a lot of things, but their criticisms of capitalism, which raped and pillaged the cultural and material treasures of Europe, and later the world, were often spot on. It is an evil system because it pretends at amorality, enables dispossession, and then pretends that dispossession is some unavoidable, natural consequence. It isn't, because economics isn't a naturalistic science, it's a moral one because it concerns man's interaction with the material world. We get to decide what that interaction looks like because economics are inextricably tied to politics.
#129
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@Greyparrot
Labor does not create value. Consumers create value.
So consumers gathering in a barren field and thinking together 'I am thirsty' will create bottles of wine? What value is created by their longing in the empty field? Please; that is a patently absurd statement.
#130
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@ResurgetExFavilla
Evidently its still valued if they are longing for it, right? I don't see the issue here.
#131
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@ResurgetExFavilla
Labor creates products and services. Consumers create value and sets the price for those products and services. Laborers never set the value.
#132
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I am a Progressive but I respect Crowder. He's an honourable opponent of the Conservative agenda.
#133
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@TheRealNihilist
What did Louder with Crowder say that you didn't like?
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#134
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@Alec
Read the Opening statement. 
#135
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@TheRealNihilist
At the beginning of the video or the section that you pointed out?
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#136
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@Alec
Just read Post 1. 
#137
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@TheRealNihilist
I think they misspoke.  They were probably making a point about identity politics hijacking much of the left.  Misspeaking in general happens when your drunk which I think they were at the time.
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#138
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@Alec
I think they misspoke.  They were probably making a point about identity politics hijacking much of the left.
Misspoke and trying to make a comment about the left are two different things. You are making two different excuses for Crowder.