mmmmmm first of all allow me to thank you for entertaining me by making such good arguments i need to take myself a time to actually give a reply. also allow me to ask that as an intelligent person, someone who (according to your avatar) served the armed forces, and someone who takes his time to join an argument, how did you end up here on narutobase?
There are quite a few anime nerds in the military, even amongst the grunts. I picked up an addiction to anime forums back when 56K modems were as good as it got unless you were on the backbone of a corporation of university. That was back when I was a wee young lad in high school.
I enjoy discussions, or, more precisely, in challenging my own viewpoints. It's kind of interesting to see how I've changed, and how I haven't over the years, in terms of where I stand in debates. My morals and ethics have not changed as much as they have encompassed issues I consider to be more important.
For example - I believe homosexuality is 'wrong' in the sense that I believe that there exist members of the opposite *** that could appeal to a person who believes him/herself to be homosexual, and that the two could share a much deeper bond. Almost a decade ago - I would have supported a ban on homosexual marriage.
My opinion on homosexuality hasn't changed, but my concept of ethics and morals has grown to encompass the legal process. Plenty of heterosexual couples are 'wrong' in their relationships - in them for the wrong reasons, picked a person they could control, etc - should I support a ban on those people getting married? How would I even begin to do that? What... What if someone else thinks my desire to share my life with a particular woman believes it to be destructive and manages to pass a law forbidding me from marrying her?
Perhaps it is moral and ethical to say that the law should have no bearing on who can and can not get married, and should simply allow people to outline, in official terms, how they wish to join their physical assets and legal rights. The law only needs to get involved in cases of fraud and abuse, which I believe all reasonable people would agree can be defined and agreed upon.
The more I thought about it - the more I realized we use laws and government as an expedient way to force our ideas upon others. Our intentions may be good - but our methods are an evil we are often blinded to.
Social security - the idea that we should take care of our elderly - was a good intention. When it was first enacted, even Roosevelt never intended it to last beyond his administration.
But it stayed, and it has become evil. The government 'borrowed' (took) money from the working population with the promise to put it into an account and pay it back as a retirement supplement. This was done as a temporary means of securing funding to keep many of the retired people who lost their mutual funds during the Stock Market Crash from losing their homes. Social Security would be collected and eventually ended 'once the danger had passed.' The money owed would then be returned to those who paid into the system many years later, giving the government plenty of time to space out the debt repayment.
But that never happened. By now, an entire generation was born into the system and died under the system. A second generation is passing out of the system, and a third is not far behind it. Several generations have, since the day they began working, had a portion of their income siphoned off by the government. "It is just the way it is" - and we have learned through school and through watching our parents that we are guaranteed our Social Security. We have our money taken away so that it can be paid back to us at a later date - it is 'ours.' 'We earned it.'
But the reality is that there is no account. The revenue from social security goes directly into paying off debts on social security bonds issued decades ago while new social security bonds are issued to cover the revenues consumed. The money you and your parents pay into social security is going directly to subsidize the payments being made to the people drawing social security. If you cease to pay into social security, bond buying will cease and the social security system will simply evaporate unless revenue is drawn from general funding to cover
both the debt of the issued bonds
and the debt owed to those drawing social security.
Which means, in order to get: "what I earned" under Social Security, my children and your children must have a portion of their income confiscated.
I'm not all that pleased by that idea. If I'm worth having around at that age, and my retirement efforts have failed, I will be able to survive through a combination of work on my own part and charity on the part of others (assuming they want me around - if they don't - why should they be forced to pay for me?).
But if I suggest putting an end to Social Security... I propose putting an end to the retirement that people were promised. Not only were they promised - they were taxed for it. They were forced to give up considerable portions of their income that they are now going to never receive when they are least capable of working.
This makes the system the white elephant in the room with a suicide vest strapped to it that no one wants to address. It will eventually explode.
Which is why it is more important that we focus on what it is ethical to do and not do to each other rather than to focus on what is an is not ethical behavior of our person. By focusing on the ethics of the individual, we naturally gravitate toward attempting to govern and rule the individual - which inevitably leads to fascism and totalitarianism.
so, 1- it seems i indeed missed the point and i i support "the argument that the country does something worth taxing people for". i thought you were talking about a state - not a State
The question is still very important. What does any government do worth allowing it to confiscate a portion of your earnings?
Is it necessary? Is it a 'good deal?' What data supports the argument that it is either?
Government should always be approached from a minimalist attitude. If it cannot be shown that it is absolutely necessary or an overwhelmingly good economic move for the government to take your money and that of your neighbors to re-appropriate it according to the decisions of a bureaucracy... then it shouldn't out of principle.
2-no, i'm not saying that without a government there's no society, i'm saying that without jobs there's no society.
Where there are people there are jobs. The only reason why people would not go to work to satisfy the needs and wants of others in a process of mutually beneficial exchange is if there is another group of people that makes it not beneficial to do so.
Like a government demanding money or sending armed people to close your business down.
3- the problem of other countries making cheaper products is exactly unemployment. since china makes good stuff and we buy that good stuff, we will stop buying stuff made in USA and american industries will lose money which means they cant hire people and if a company can't hire employees you'll have unemployment and when you have unemployment you have several other problems.
I believe I explained this, before (though it's been a day since I started this reply - so it may have been above and I just didn't see it).
China is not only having to supply our consumer demands, but also the growing consumer demands of their economy. Developing economies always produce the 'primitives' of larger economies. Basic fittings for infrastructure, consumable items, and simplistic devices/tools (silverware) - those types of things are always built by developing industries. By building them cheaper for us, those countries allow our lower income groups to afford a similar quality of life to that previously enjoyed by higher earning groups.
The exchange also fuels growth within the developing economy. Chinese people begin to have greater wealth to demand higher standards of living. Our industry re-tools to provide for that demand. Meanwhile, their own population begins to demand larger amounts of the goods that we are purchasing from them - which does mean that some of our domestic production will remain (they simply will have to match the market demands carefully).
Many of those will be side-jobs for industry that has already re-tooled to produce more advanced products for both our own society and China.
Jobs are not static things. The presence of people, products, skills, trades, ideas, ambitions, materials, and methods means that there will always be jobs that can be done, and can be part of a network of mutually beneficial exchanges.
I am looking at that very same thing in my current line of work.
I work in Dialysis - we keep people with acute kidney failure alive. But the industry is poised to rapidly change. They are able to print kidneys and potentially remove genetic causes of kidney failure from those printed organs. It's only a matter of time before the need for clinics dedicated to pumping and cleaning people's blood becomes a part of medical history or a brief intermediary while awaiting a printed replacement.
I cannot expect to do one thing for my entire life. I have to be flexible if I wish to be successful - to be willing to apply my knowledge, skills, and trades in new ways and in new places.
Sure - there are always your 'basics' - farming, mining, prostitution - but those things change, too. Agriculture has become a sprawling field of science and research, Mining methods and technologies have changed countless times with recycling and recovery of materials becoming a powerful new force, and prostitution has gone largely digital and far more efficient than walking the streets.
There's an old Tracy Lawrence song about how time marches on.
4- economies are simple in theory. when it comes to pratice, it is very hard to do something here without affecting that something else there
Everything is simple. It is simply a matter of varying degrees of intricacies to account for.
Why does it matter, though?
The only reason to want to try and figure out how specific actions at one end of the economy will affect things on the other side of the economy is to manipulate that economy - to control that economy.
It is a mentality that was only made worse by Wall Street investors who have horribly perverted the concept of investment (which is the subsidizing of a company, government, individual, etc for ownership in their company that you believe will be able to grow and become productive enough to sell that ownership at a later date for greater purchasing power in a future market). They have gone so far as to install fiber-optic lines to increase transaction speeds to within the millisecond. They have computers that buy and sell several times a second.
Which is partially why bubbles and bursts happen in an afternoon, these days. It exacerbates investor trends, usually to a net detriment.
Either way - those are the types of people that want to be able to figure out how they can put money in one side of the economy and get some kind of return on the other side with some kind of guarantee.
And they sell governments on this idea. Governments then turn around and sell security: "If we have this kind of control over what you all do, then we can keep anyone from losing money in the long run."
It'd be hilarious if it weren't so insidious.
Generally speaking - the working parts of the economy do not need to have vast amounts of intimate information about how the economy works to function to the net benefit of the economy. If the baker is able to sell his bread to the factory worker for a mutually agreeable price that leaves both able to provide for their needs and save for their wants/improvements, then that is all that portion of the economy needs to know in order to make the grand scheme of the economy work.
It is only when you want to try and seize control of the economy that you start generating problems. When governments act to protect large businesses - that prevents smaller and more innovative industries from filling the collapse. When governments attempt to prop up new markets, they end up becoming stagnant (just look at how long GE has been putting out the same shitty wind turbines... because they get tax credits).
simple