Man Protect Land. Woman Welcome Refugees.

[Spaz]

I knew you were loyal to your own people, and you just proved my point. I trolled it out of you

Tribalism is inescapable. You can move workers from one country to another, but you can't change the allegiance in their heart.

I hv never hidden it.

Somewhere in this forum, I've stated that I am a tribal chieftain, a position that I inherited.

 

[user43770]

You want me to talk economics, I'll talk economics.

Talking about employment is just a charade. The fact is there is always enough work for everyone to do who can reasonably work, we just don't share the work and so there is an artifical "jobs shortage". I'm talking about the work which is necessary to keep human civilization running, not stuff like sales, advertising, marketing, restaurant and fast food jobs, administrative bloating, finance jobs and other things that can be eliminated or made voluntary without breaking down civilisation. Instead we are put in competition with each other to survive, because of how we convert work into jobs, when there is no need to.

Anyway, cost of living..... devaluation of the dollar? that's a smaller factor for cost of living increase. Devaluation does make imports more expensive, but devaluation is not the fundamental reason for cost of living increases (unless there is hyperinflation in an import-dependent country).

The cost of living keeps increasing for 6 main reasons I can think of off the top of my head:

1) The debt-based monetary system of private bank credit creation which both causes its own creditor-debtor polarisation and fuels more of it through fueling finance and real estate speculation. A small minority makes the overwhelming majority of capital gains/passive income which the rest of the population pays into. This polarises the economy between creditors and debtors and means more and more of the income of people, businesses and governments goes to paying financial rent and debt, either directly or, through costs that are baked into prices and so you don't see, indirectly.

2) Owners of property (patents, real estate, corporations) simply raising prices because they can. See the Blackstone Group for example. This happens for two reasons, one is simply because profit seeking is the goal of our economy, the second for the abstract economic tendencies I describe in the quote you posted which enables it. This includes the education and healthcare debt bubbles in the US guaranteed by the state... countries without such bloated, for-profit education and healthcare systems don't have debt bubbles like that.

3) Consumers effectively accepting #2 by being willing to pay more rent and take on more debt, and even cheering on real estate price increases and financial speculation as they think this means they can pass the price inflation on to someone else like a ponzi scheme. They may also think their pensions have to depend on such ponzi schemes. This mindset is consumerism and conspicuous consumption on one hand and "people's capitalism" on the other, where everyone thinks they're a little atomised capitalist.

4) Weakened labor movements that have a low membership and grassroots organisation and little to no direct action. This means they can't demand wage increases to keep up with price inflations caused by #1, #2 and #3, let alone strive toward economic democracy. Weak tenant unions count too connected to #2.

5) The implementation of regressive taxes like income tax and VAT on labor and necessities, with the concurrent removal or evasion of progressive taxes on finance and property (capital/capital gains) which is where the flow of funds actually goes (and increasingly so, as you know). This may be justified with rhetoric effectively saying that our owners are so powerful that if we don't do what they want, they will sink the country, kind of like how a slave would be dissuaded from attempting freedom.

6) Devaluation (war spending tends to be a strong cause of it, but so can economic policy choice like here in Sweden). Like I said in the beginning, this is not a main factor unless there is hyperinflation in an import-dependent country, but you don't live in a country like that. Your cost of living rises mainly because of #1, #2, #3 and #4. #5 and #6 also contribute to exacerbate the problem, but are not the fundamental reasons.

I don't want to belittle your response here.

One big difference in the past 70 years was adding women to the workforce. They may now outnumber men, even! They definitely outnumber men now in college degrees, and the contrast is only getting bigger.

Obviously, when you almost double the supply of workers, you're going to suppress wages. What nobody talks about is how this also increased taxes. Government spending tax dollars, I'm sure that will be responsible.

Women entering the workforce in mass, and thus becoming more politically minded, coincided with the rise of feminism. Which also aligns with the rise of the nanny state.

Taxes are gradually increased for social programs across the board. They increase to this day. There will never be enough tax dollars to satisfy the apparent needs of ever more social programs.

You've now created a huge government entity that will never go away. This has to be funded now, as a matter of course. It's devoid of argument.

So you have all of these tax dollars being spent in various directions, which somebody has to pay for. Obviously, you raise taxes on businesses first, as you want to get re-elected, but then you eventually have to raise taxes on the individual, too.

Combine this with reckless government wars, the FED changing interest rates, your elected officials watching your jobs outsourced

Lemme stop

 

[user43770]

I hv never hidden it.

Somewhere in this forum, I've stated that I am a tribal chieftain, a position that I inherited.

I know, brother. I used to pick on you when I was trolling hard

 

[AttackFormation]

I don't want to belittle your response here.

One big difference in the past 70 years was adding women to the workforce. They may now outnumber men, even! They definitely outnumber men now in college degrees, and the contrast is only getting bigger.

Obviously, when you almost double the supply of workers, you're going to suppress wages. What nobody talks about is how this also increased taxes. Government spending tax dollars, I'm sure that will be responsible.

Women entering the workforce in mass, and thus becoming more politically minded, coincided with the rise of feminism. Which also aligns with the rise of the nanny state.

Taxes are gradually increased for social programs across the board. They increase to this day. There will never be enough tax dollars to satisfy the apparent needs of ever more social programs.

You've now created a huge government entity that will never go away. This has to be funded now, as a matter of course. It's devoid of argument.

So you have all of these tax dollars being spent in various directions, which somebody has to pay for. Obviously, you raise taxes on businesses first, as you want to get re-elected, but then you eventually have to raise taxes on the individual, too.

Combine this with reckless government wars, the FED changing interest rates, your elected officials watching your jobs outsourced

Lemme stop

Women in the workforce aren't a fundamental wage suppressor for two reasons we can observe:

1) Wages are still stagnant in the jobs that are heavily male-dominated. This means that something else is stagnating the wages in those jobs - something more fundamental.

2) When women mostly worked outside of the money economy in the past, and I'm talking 19th and early 20th century, wages and the cost of living still had a terrible ratio in Europe (it was a bit different in USA because there there was "The Doctrine of High Wages" to a greater extent, backed up by economists like Simon Patten). This again shows that womens' participation is not a fundamental driver of wage stagnation or price inflation. If women working outside of the money economy would fix the economy, nearly half of Sweden wouldn't have emigrated to America from 1860-1914 to escape the economic conditions here, which by the way was also a time with as good as zero "social programs" here.

Your theory of a higher supply of workers meaning that wages get lowered makes sense intuitively, and is obviously true - IF those workers are competing against each other for work. That's the point. If workers compete against each other, instead of cooperating with each other like the owners do, then they will lose. "Exclusionist" craft unions in the past used the kind of theory you are thinking of, that they needed to define an exclusive cooperative in-group and then keep people out of it and restrict the amount of workers, but that doesn't work because A) those people still need incomes, B) smaller unions are weaker unions, weak unions lead to workers competing against each other, and workers competing against each other instead of cooperating means they lose. And more broadly, workers don't need to have a society where they compete against each other for survival, if they organise a different kind of society. Difference in labor organisation is the reason why service workers in USA get paid poorly compared to countries with collective bargaining, for example, but that's just a start.

About women in the workforce increasing the tax base, there are two problems with this:

1) It doesn't work with your first point. If there are a fixed number of jobs that workers compete for, and wages stagnate because women compete for them, then the tax base from those jobs and wages would stagnate too. To make it coherent, you have to decide which point you are going to believe - either women working was to increase the tax base (which I will get to in the next point), or it was to stagnate wages (which I've already talked about), but those points are logically incompatible with each other, they can't both be true.

2) If there are consumption taxes like VAT, and taxes on business income from what they make when consumers (non-working women spending household income) pay, then women working wouldn't have increased the tax base from their new wages being taxed- because it would just mean the proportion of tax income for the state shifts from VAT and/or business tax, to wage tax. The proportion shifts, but not the amount.

You are right that subsidising the Walmart-style food stamp, medical insurance, education and housing rackets with taxes is bad. We do the same thing here in Sweden, giving people tax money so they can pay the rent. The problem is that as long as the reason why the prices increase and you need rent support in the first place is because for-profit owners control the assets to the degree they have monopoly power over them, and there is no economic democracy, you are feeding the monster by throwing money at it. Price inflation is solved by keeping prices down, not by increasing spending on prices.

But the reason why you can't just solve this by eliminating the rent subsidy, is the same as why the rents increase in the first place: people have no choice but to live somewhere. Real estate has a supply which is both inelastic (you can't create more land), has a high barrier to entry (building a house and the infrastructure to service it has a very large barrier to entry for a normal person) is asymmetrically valuable (land in Stockholm's city center is vastly more valuable than land in Lappland's interior wilderness), and is necessary for people to access, which is why it's such a favorite speculation object.

But in order to keep prices down you need a theory of prices. And different schools of thought have different "ideas" on what that should be. The idea I follow is that you need to separate COST from PRICE, the point was to separate "earned income" from "economic rent", and you need to identify the economic effects that drive price. Now we have the opposite theory where any income is earned and productive by definition. The problem is our whole financial, corporate, real estate economy is based on this, your view that "social programs" are the fundamental problem for the economy is too narrow and shallow. You need to start reading economist Michael Hudson's stuff, here is an example article for you... from USA's own history.

Your elected representatives watching your jobs get outsourced is just a symptom. The actual problem is that you, your community, and your class as a worker don't control the economic assets, which means you are subject to the whims of whatever your masters want. You don't control your means to a living or your circumstances of living, that's the real problem that gives rise to the symptom.

 

[user43770]

Women in the workforce aren't a fundamental wage suppressor for two reasons we can observe:

1) Wages are still stagnant in the jobs that are heavily male-dominated. This means that something else is stagnating the wages in those jobs - something more fundamental.

2) When women mostly worked outside of the money economy in the past, and I'm talking 19th and early 20th century, wages and the cost of living still had a terrible ratio in Europe (it was a bit different in USA because there there was "The Doctrine of High Wages" to a greater extent, backed up by economists like Simon Patten). This again shows that womens' participation is not a fundamental driver of wage stagnation or price inflation. If women working outside of the money economy would fix the economy, nearly half of Sweden wouldn't have emigrated to America from 1860-1914 to escape the economic conditions here, which by the way was also a time with as good as zero "social programs" here.

Your theory of a higher supply of workers meaning that wages get lowered makes sense intuitively, and is obviously true - IF those workers are competing against each other for work. That's the point. If workers compete against each other, instead of cooperating with each other like the owners do, then they will lose. "Exclusionist" craft unions in the past used the kind of theory you are thinking of, that they needed to define an exclusive cooperative in-group and then keep people out of it and restrict the amount of workers, but that doesn't work because A) those people still need incomes, B) smaller unions are weaker unions, weak unions lead to workers competing against each other, and workers competing against each other instead of cooperating means they lose. And more broadly, workers don't need to have a society where they compete against each other for survival, if they organise a different kind of society. Difference in labor organisation is the reason why service workers in USA get paid poorly compared to countries with collective bargaining, for example, but that's just a start.

About women in the workforce increasing the tax base, there are two problems with this:

1) It doesn't work with your first point. If there are a fixed number of jobs that workers compete for, and wages stagnate because women compete for them, then the tax base from those jobs and wages would stagnate too. To make it coherent, you have to decide which point you are going to believe - either women working was to increase the tax base (which I will get to in the next point), or it was to stagnate wages (which I've already talked about), but those points are logically incompatible with each other, they can't both be true.

2) If there are consumption taxes like VAT, and taxes on business income from what they make when consumers (non-working women spending household income) pay, then women working wouldn't have increased the tax base from their new wages being taxed- because it would just mean the proportion of tax income for the state shifts from VAT and/or business tax, to wage tax. The proportion shifts, but not the amount.

You are right that subsidising the Walmart-style food stamp, medical insurance, education and housing rackets with taxes is bad. We do the same thing here in Sweden, giving people tax money so they can pay the rent. The problem is that as long as the reason why the prices increase and you need rent support in the first place is because for-profit owners control the assets to the degree they have monopoly power over them, and there is no economic democracy, you are feeding the monster by throwing money at it. Price inflation is solved by keeping prices down, not by increasing spending on prices.

But the reason why you can't just solve this by eliminating the rent subsidy, is the same as why the rents increase in the first place: people have no choice but to live somewhere. Real estate has a supply which is both inelastic (you can't create more land), has a high barrier to entry (building a house and the infrastructure to service it has a very large barrier to entry for a normal person) is asymmetrically valuable (land in Stockholm's city center is vastly more valuable than land in Lappland's interior wilderness), and is necessary for people to access, which is why it's such a favorite speculation object.

But in order to keep prices down you need a theory of prices. And different schools of thought have different "ideas" on what that should be. The idea I follow is that you need to separate COST from PRICE, the point was to separate "earned income" from "economic rent", and you need to identify the economic effects that drive price. Now we have the opposite theory where any income is earned and productive by definition. The problem is our whole financial, corporate, real estate economy is based on this, your view that "social programs" are the fundamental problem for the economy is too narrow and shallow. You need to start reading economist Michael Hudson's stuff, here is an example article for you... from USA's own history.

Your elected representatives watching your jobs get outsourced is just a symptom. The actual problem is that you, your community, and your class as a worker don't control the economic assets, which means you are subject to the whims of whatever your masters want. You don't control your means to a living or your circumstances of living, that's the real problem that gives rise to the symptom.

Let me preface this by saying I haven't read your entire post yet. I found errors immediately, so I'm going to address them. I'll save the rest for later, baby girl.

Once women started entering the workforce in mass, the government began to create positions for them to fill. This is flippantly referred to as a bureaucracy now.

But let us not forget the past 30 years of affirmative action. The only people I see driving mail trucks are black women. They make up like %10
of the population in America, so why do they drive %75 of trucks?

If the grid dropped off tomorrow, and there was no more facebook, who do you think is gonna repair roads, power lines, plumbing, electrical?


I'll respond to the rest later, bud.

Love ya

 

[AttackFormation]

Let me preface this by saying I haven't read your entire post yet. I found errors immediately, so I'm going to address them. I'll save the rest for later, baby girl.

Once women started entering the workforce in mass, the government began to create positions for them to fill. This is flippantly referred to as a bureaucracy now.

But let us not forget the past 30 years of affirmative action. The only people I see driving mail trucks are black women. They make up like %10
of the population in America, so why do they drive %75 of trucks?

If the grid dropped off tomorrow, and there was no more facebook, who do you think is gonna repair roads, power lines, plumbing, electrical?


I'll respond to the rest later, bud.

Love ya

If the state created jobs for them to fill, then they weren't competing with existing jobs and so they couldn't have stagnated the wages of those jobs. Again, you'll have to make your position consistent with itself. I guess you could say that more tax money was needed to fund the new bureacracy and it was taken from the wages, but this doesn't add up either, because the divergence between productivity growth and wage growth in 1971 or so shows that "productivity" - whatever that is - kept growing, but the share the workers got of it didn't.

Plus, "lack of money" is not a real scarcity in the first place as long as you are not import-dependent (and thus need foreign currency but don't make enough of it), because states are sovereign in their own currencies. That means in theory they can create as much of it as needed to match the scale of the economy as it grows.

No prob sweetie, respond at your own pace or don't respond at all, I have no hope of anything changing, certainly not through just typing about it. The only reason I'm even writing here is because I care about you and Mike from previous exchanges.

 

[user43770]

You are right that subsidising the Walmart-style food stamp, medical insurance, education and housing rackets with taxes is bad. We do the same thing here in Sweden, giving people tax money so they can pay the rent. The problem is that as long as the reason why the prices increase and you need rent support in the first place is because for-profit owners control the assets to the degree they have monopoly power over them, and there is no economic democracy, you are feeding the monster by throwing money at it. Price inflation is solved by keeping prices down, not by increasing spending on prices.

My opinion, governments should stop being in the business of maintaining and furthering people that can't help themselves.

But the reason why you can't just solve this by eliminating the rent subsidy, is the same as why the rents increase in the first place: people have no choice but to live somewhere. Real estate has a supply which is both inelastic (you can't create more land), has a high barrier to entry (building a house and the infrastructure to service it has a very large barrier to entry for a normal person) is asymmetrically valuable (land in Stockholm's city center is vastly more valuable than land in Lappland's interior wilderness), and is necessary for people to access, which is why it's such a favorite speculation object.

Real estate is basically a government asset, as they can always find "your" land to be sacred somehow...and steal it from you. But also because you pay taxes on it every year. To feed immigrants kids!

But in order to keep prices down you need a theory of prices. And different schools of thought have different "ideas" on what that should be. The idea I follow is that you need to separate COST from PRICE, the point was to separate "earned income" from "economic rent", and you need to identify the economic effects that drive price. Now we have the opposite theory where any income is earned and productive by definition. The problem is our whole financial, corporate, real estate economy is based on this, your view that "social programs" are the fundamental problem for the economy is too narrow and shallow. You need to start reading economist Michael Hudson's stuff, here is an example article for you... from USA's own history.

Macro economics is for fags. How can you look at something as simple as doubling the workforce and make an argument against it? Only a macro fag would even attempt it.

Your elected representatives watching your jobs get outsourced is just a symptom. The actual problem is that you, your community, and your class as a worker don't control the economic assets, which means you are subject to the whims of whatever your masters want. You don't control your means to a living or your circumstances of living, that's the real problem that gives rise to the symptom.

Responses in bold.

I love you buddy. I've had a few drinks

 

[user43770]

If the state created jobs for them to fill, then they weren't competing with existing jobs and so they couldn't have stagnated the wages of those jobs. Again, you'll have to make your position consistent with itself. I guess you could say that more tax money was needed to fund the new bureacracy and it was taken from the wages, but this doesn't add up either, because the divergence between productivity growth and wage growth in 1971 or so shows that "productivity" - whatever that is - kept growing, but the share the workers got of it didn't.

But the state is in the process of shipping all real jobs to China. The jobs the state created, don't actually produce anything. They're pushing paper around. Eventually you have to pay the piper

Plus, "lack of money" is not a real scarcity in the first place as long as you are not import-dependent (and thus need foreign currency but don't make enough of it), because states are sovereign in their own currencies. That means in theory they can create as much of it as needed to match the scale of the economy as it grows.

No prob sweetie, respond at your own pace or don't respond at all, I have no hope of anything changing, certainly not through just typing about it. The only reason I'm even writing here is because I care about you and Mike from previous exchanges.

Response in bold.

A lack of money doesn't mean anything until it does.

And i say that as someone looking at America's debt.

Will it ever mean something? Will it never?

I guess we will find out.

 

[Mike32ct]

If a man goes out to the woods to chop firewood, and someone offers to help him, he will be glad.
If a man goes to a JOB, but someone else offers to do the job too, he will be angry.

Agreed.

There is plenty of work around that needs to be done, and people like to cooperate to do work. But the way we as a society divide work into jobs puts people into competition with each other instead of cooperation. It's a kind of artificial scarcity, as is the "scarcity of domestic currency" to pay people enough to live on. At the same time there is an ever growing monopolisation of finance and property, either through mergers and acquisitions or through cartels.

No doubt.

This happens naturally in capitalism because privatised natural monopolies like credit-creating banks and other infrastructure, platform monopolies and the network effect, inelastic supply and asymmetric location value of real estate, anticompetitive practices, the compound interest effect and polarisation between creditors and debtors, and the economics of scale making big business more efficient than small business, all mean a natural tendency toward monopoly of profits and power.

When the Great Depression hit and millions everywhere became jobless despite there still being work to do, no war, no plague, no infrastructure collapse, no natural disaster, no material problem, it was because of the way the economy is structured and operated in tandem with these natural economic tendencies... not because of "globalisation". It's the same thing today. It will never change, until we work for economic democracy. Here's a question for you - if a community controlled its own jobs, would they outsource them? "Outsourcing" is just a symptom of an economic structure in which you and your community have little to no power over your circumstances and means to a living.

PS. USA has a very weak labor movement in the present (as a % of workers who participate in grassroots unions) and this has heavy consequence. It's not much better here either, but at least we still have collective bargaining. Everything workers have today in USA they have not because of the magnanimousness of the state and private owners, but because millions of people took grassroots direct action for it in the past despite being repressed by pinkerton agents, state militia and police. Stop reading this stupid forum and read some god damned labor history instead...!

Yes, union membership as a percentage of the workforce has been in decline for quite some time.

Until there is economic democracy... nothing will change.

No disagreement here.

 

[Who Dares Win]

If the final goal was simple artimetics we wouldnt need presidents or political parties, we would only need accountants to make the math and had numbers to work.

Such vision is typical of collectivist societies that dont value the single individual nor personal culture or people choices, think of asia think of china were people see them as part of a group before than single individuals, its a different view and life style than us in the west.
Also these societies strongly limit personal freedom expecting anyone to fit a certain role and strict rules when it comes of everyday life.

If 1 missing western citizen could be simply substituted from 1 random somewhere else citizen we wouldnt have western europe in deep troubles when it comes of welfare or public safety.

I dont recall groups of people claiming neightbourhoods in poland and throwing rocks at the police for going there nor I recall any group spawning kids then expecting the public welfare to feed them all while forcing other cultural views on others.

Tell me how this benefits the economy unless you are selling safes, iron gates, providing private security and so on...the everyday tax payer surely doesnt benefits from that.

Those are facts and numbers and since they cannot be fought with facts what remains to dumb people is throw some moral and ad hominem attacks in that.

Try to reason with an open borders activist and you will realize that most of them have very low knowledge of economy and once they feel unprepared they will turn aggressive.

Women are the ones less likely to be interested in economy and finance, they also happen to be the most pro border group for many reasons apart territory control...clearly not a coincidence.

The real demographic problems western nations have is a very old average age population, the number itself is fine and it will be even better if it slowly decreases till the environment and the new economy can sustain it...western nations are not made to be anthills so when overcrowding happens the population self regulate unlike other people.