Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
Originally posted by: Dissipate
Opportunity as a function of family wealth has always been an increasing function. What does this have to do with dragging the middle class down to the level of the poor? Rich people will always be able to afford private schools, so essentially you are advocating egalitarianism not between the rich and the poor but between the middle class and the poor. I find this view quite appalling.
Actually forcing everyone into the same school system would solve this, but note that I'm not advocating this in any manner. What I'm saying is that a school system which meets the standards of the middle class should be maintained, and made available to everyone.
Pray tell, what are the "standards of the middle class"? From where I'm standing there are millions of middle class people out there with their own standards. You are essentially advocating a system of cramming them all into the same government school system, or a highly regulated free market school system. There is no such thing as the "standards of the middle class" because everyone has their own preferences. How are you going to set up a government school system of "central authority" as you mentioned before that can provide the precise needs for every single middle class family? I would love to hear your "wonderful" theory.
None of your spurious arguments about overpaid teachers has any bearing on this; that's a swing and a miss.
Oh really? So you are going to claim that you need a master's degree and knowledge of useless child psycho-babble to teach children basic English and math skills?
You fail to recognize what the 'equilibrium' level of education is based on the value placed on education before public systems existed (which was none; you could *maybe* go to school until you were old enough to work for your parents, at age 6-10). Not to say the value would still be zero, but the old generation traditionally chooses an education target for their children of 'a little more than I had' and young people are generally ambivalent about education, at best. Under a free-market system, your country wouldn't be nearly as educated as it is now; how do you suppose that would play out for the future of innovation? Even under a subsidized system of education, can you name the one regret that most senior citizens express? It's: "Knowing what I know now, I wish I had gone to school longer". Yet another case of people being unable to make rational choices in situations where they don't know anything about 'option B'. You're about to claim that people should still be allowed to make choices, and I agree, they should, but providing incentives to make choices that you know will statistically make people happier and more productive in the wrong one isn't exactly my idea of appalling.
Under what theory do you come up with the claim that children would have less education under a free market? From where I am standing children would get precisely the education that they need, with parents spending as much or as little on education as they see fit for their children. Under your theory every child automatically benefits from public education. I could hardly imagine this being the case, simply due to the fact that there are so many different children out there, and the public education system is extremely homogenous. In fact, some children are better off in other pursuits i.e. acting or modeling just to name a couple of common examples. The problem with your theory is that you place infinite value on education, as if it is the ultimate end that man could ever attain. I place a high degree of value on education, but certainly not public education, and I certainly do not believe that it is the highest end that every man could ever attain, because every person is different.
Your statistical argument is completely inane. First of all, the public education system in its current form does not provide "incentives," it says: "You are going to school, or your parents are going to jail." Once again you admit to advocating dispensing with freedom for everyone, which inevitablely leads to misery for some. Your claim that as long as the statistics show that people are "better off," the government program is justified is quite dubious. Let's apply this logic to something else, namely theft. The government could seize all of Bill Gates' money tomorrow, and re-distribute it to everyone in America. Everyone would be "statistically better off," would they not? So why do we condemn this activity? Because it is immoral, and disruptive to society. Cramming millions of children in an extremely homogenous environment is exactly the same, it is stealing from some children in order to benefit others. Are there some children who excel in this environment? Yep. But not even the majority actually does.
Ok, so now you are claiming that somehow these Ivy Leaguers aren't letting poor people "enter the game," i.e. they are permanently shutting them out of certain fields that they already dominate. Nice try, but this argument falls flat on its face as well, because not only is the economy not a zero sum game (a fixed amount of wealth to go around), but it is not a static game (a fixed number of fields to enter). This is a fallacy that people run into over and over, especially when it comes to issues such as outsourcing and elimination of jobs by technology. The Ivy Leaguers can have their domination in whatever fields they dominate, we can even assume the worst, that they dominate these fields forever. Does this hurt the "poor guy" on the bottom? No, because new fields are always opening up, and there is no limit to the number of fields that are potentially profitable. The biggest example of this in recent history is the explosion of Internet commerce, an entirely new field. In order for your idea of the Ivy Leaguers to be valid, you would have to claim that they dominate EVERYTHING. This is clearly absurd.
None of what you claim is necessary is in fact necessary, and nothing that I said suggested that zero-sum or static apply to the economy. Nice try; you lose.
Then I must have been hallucinating when I read this:
There isn't a fixed amount of opportunity, but there are a fixed number of resources. To the extent that elite groups have initial control of resources, the cost of other people creating their own opportunities increases (diminishing marginal returns when not all inputs can be scaled). Therefore people who start off with control are naturally advantaged in their quest to retain and expand it.
I find it odd that you condemn parents who choose a career path for their children, but not parents who bring children into this world who they cannot afford to send to school. Instead you perceive them as "victims" and call upon the government to enforce egalitarianism.
Either way the child is being denied the freedom to do what they want with their life. I would certainly not call the parents victims, but the children clearly are victims of when and where they were born, and to whom. There's no way to break this moral deadlock; you simply advocate a hereditary class system, while I believe that more effort would produce an education system that gives everyone at least a minimum starting point. Your viewpoint has the disadvantage of private education systems not being responsible for the explosion of literacy and edcation in first world nations around the world. Sorry about that; it's a tough break for your argument.
So now you are claiming that the government needs to legislate morality. More dubious claims.
Oh brother, now we are back to the egalitarianism. There will ALWAYS be a "spread" between people, it is our nature, it is what makes us human. If there wasn't a "spread" we would all have the same interests, time preferences and careers. As a result, mankind would only demand and consume one product. This would be the most boring planet to live on that anyone could possibly conceive, but this is actually what you are advocating. If this "utopian" egalitarian society is not what you are advocating, then what degree of egalitarianism should we shoot for, and how are you going to quantify it?
Um, this is complete BS. You know exactly when and where I advocate free market allocation of goods. Go back to another one of our arguments and look it up if you can't remember.
I don't need to remember, the picture you have painted me is clear: a radical authoritarian who believes in extreme government enforced egalitarianism.
This is just like how communists now claim that the "true" communism was never practiced and that we should try again. Bureaucrats cannot properly manage education. They cannot properly manage education (or ANY human pursuit for that matter) because they literally do not have the means to efficiently allocate resources. Therefore, government run education will always have an extremely homogenous curriculim and never have enough money. These types of problems have plagued every bureaucracy that ever existed. Back to my point about having faith in government is having faith in the supernatural. Reformists like you are living in a dream world.
You're the one who can't see anything except 'n' lines crossing on a chart. (oh, wait, economics can't handle the infinite possibilities of the real world, so we'll pretend there are only 'm' finite possibilities, each with a known probability, and then we'll assume that it's obviously still completely accurate). So we'll make that an m-space vector that completely describes everyone's preferences, even though it can be shown that preferences aren't rational, especially in the face of uncertainty, and any situation that can be considered a 'gamble'.
Preferences aren't rational?? There is no objective rationality for preferences, but everyone certainly has a rational way of determining their own preferences. Your claims just keep getting more and more ludicrous.
I've never claimed that communism should be tried again; it really has never been practised as written, but I'm pretty sure that would be impossible, and I'm not sure it would be ideal, even if it were possible. Perfect capitalism has never been practised either, and certainly could never be without the informational, networking, and other confounds that bothered Debreau so very much.
Debreau was wrong.
Wow, you have perhaps some of the most evil ideas I could possibly imagine. A central system in order to enforce egalitarianism?? This reminds me of the short story Harrison Bergeron
I've read the story thanks; you havne't given an argument here though, so, moving on.
Well at least you do not deny that you believe in extreme government enforce egalitarianism.
I am not making assumptions, it is a fact of reality. These principles are established a priori from axioms of human action. Bureaucracy and central planning can never equal free market.
No, they can't; but wtf are you getting at with 'established a priori from axioms of human action'? Are you going to go back to claiming that everyone is perfectly rational and you can determine a value for everything, including information, before it is even produced? (oops - I'll admit I peeked, and you did do that!)
Man is rational, it is what seperates us from the animals. If man were not rational, then we would simply be beings that reacted to stimuli in our environment. This is clearly not the case.
Why are there guys Downtown picking up cans off the street then? Without minimum wage laws someone could at least hire them for $1.00 an hour doing SOMETHING.
And they still would make most of their money picking cans off the street. More importantly, most of the people doing this are not 'down and out' workers, they are individuals with serious psychological problems, and probably couldn't manage any job at all for any extended period. I know people like this; including an extremely intelligent woman with a top of her class MBA; psychotic episodes will do that to a person. Of course you don't have any solution except that they should crawl into a gutter and die, since clearly institutionalizing them if they can't afford to pay for it would be wrong. Get your head out of the clouds and have a look at the ragged edges around what you believe is a civilized world capable of self-regulating with no intervention.
So now you are claiming that people with psychological problems cannot perform some task that has value to someone? This is quite a claim due to the fact that there are virtually a limitless number of even ridiculously simple tasks out there that would have some value to someone somewhere.
Union membership is at an all time low. But anyways, the workers during the industrial revolution worked in poor conditions because those were poor times.
No, they were deliberately denied safe working conditions, and trapped into buying goods at prices above the open market price in factory stores, with debt not collected as long as employment was maintained. It's no different from factory conditions in China today, except this was private industry creating the problem, and in China it is the government which does so.
They didn't have the technology to insure safety in the workplace and all the things that we enjoy now. Therefore, even though conditions were bad, those workers were better of working in those factories or else they wouldn't have signed up to be employed there. The free market relegates exploitation to isolated incidents, because exploitation leads inevitablely to failure for any particular firm, due to the fact that firms have to compete for labor. Those workers were not exploited by the capitalists, it was just that those jobs were the best the capitalists had to offer at the time.
This is patently flase; have a look at how people who were once farmers were forced into cities
Forced into cities by whom? Did someone put a gun to their head and march them into the cities?
, making less money, and enduring worse conditions than previously. Firms at this time simply did not have to 'compete' for labour - just like the latter days of ancient Rome, the labour supply at this time was, for all intents and purposes, infinite.
Someone who has very little knowledge of economics can still tell you that messing with supply and demand creates shortages or oversupply, no matter how much supply or demand there is. Is it your claim that labor is an exception to this rule? Do you really think that if government regulation changed the price of labor that unemployment would not result? This goes back to Marxism, under the idea that labor is exploitation, and that by imposing these regulations you are simply re-distributing the exploited wealth back to the wage earners. Completely fallacious.
Go ahead and ridicule this; then go read a history book and see what unemployment was, even in the face of no regulations, no safety laws, no minimum wages, etc.
Information has a market all unto itself, and those who value it can take the time to seek it, those who seek less information will end up with worse results.
We've had this discussion before and you failed utterly to show that the marginal value of new information can be known. Therefore truly rational decisions about how much 'new' information to pursue become impossible.
I challenged you to show me a respectable economist who makes this claim multiple times, and everytime you failed to do so. Furthermore, I provided numerous examples of how information is bought and sold in the free market everyday. In none of these examples were consumers unable to determine the marginal value of such information. I can tell you one economist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on information: Hayek, and to my knowledge he did not come to anything remotely close to your conclusion on information. In fact, his conclusion was the opposite: the free market is the ultimate bastion of information. It has more information than any central authority could ever have.
No. I think workplace safety is great, but I think workplace safety LAWS are stupid.
Care to provide any reason for this?
Very simple. I have rejected Marxism and I know for a fact that the free market self regulates worker safety.
Especially when employers generally have more information about their business than prospective employees.
If one expends some of their time they can acquire information. Oh wait, under your theory no one would know exactly how much time to expend getting this information, because they would have no idea what its marginal value is. Give me a break.
I disagree with everything you put in this post, but this is the dumbest thing of all.
I think that Marxism and egalitarianism are some of the most misguided theories of all.
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