Political compass test

[TheDarkestOfAngels]

If the market was truly free there would have been no gamblers with safety nets, no quick profits, no cheap and easy money, no deposit free housing, no housing bubble, no stupid risk taking, no sub prime loans and no stimulus package to keep good on the governments promise.

Oh please. This libertarian dream land you speak of is just as dangerous as its opposite.
Just replace government dictator with "CEO" and you get the same damn thing.

False analogy.

Baseless statement.

All CEOs produce supply, supply is contingent upon demand. The consumer holds the demand. It's the ultimate balanced system of checks and balances. Unlike a government dictators there is nothing stopping a new (or a thousand) CEO('s) from stepping up and catering to the demand.

I don't know if this is just naivety or what this is but this certainly a result of having zero knowledge of history and human nature.
I get basic economics. Supply and demand - one determines the other.
What you don't get is that unfettered Capitalism is a game that can be won and the reason the US is headed as far away from unfettered capitalism as possible is because people were winning and taking far too much control of their share of the market for competition to a concern.

Not to mention the fun, fun times in US history when working 16 hours a day and 7 days in dangerous conditions with children as co-workers a week was considered normal. ... or at least too normal in respect for common human rights to live and live a decent life.

I would have responded with this post much sooner than I did, but clearly all of this is going to get ignored if I don't back up my statements. Ergo, let's talk US history, which many of you libertarians seem to forget when talking about how awesome it would be if the government just kept it's hands off of business interests.

So where do we start? How about the History of Illegal US Monopolies.

So how do monopolies form? Well, let's look at the above link.

The early industrial era was filled with brisk, unregulated competition. In the mid-19th century, numerous small firms sought to exploit resources and production for their own gain. Successful companies edged out their competitors and began to take over local markets. The New York Stock Exchange provided financing together with opportunities for further expansion. Men like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie strove to dominate particular fields, buying up shares in rival companies and soon coming to control entire industries.

So what happened when the US did unfettered capitalism? A few companies just fucking took over.
They didn't have complete control of the country or anything like that, but all of those people were already pretty much corrupting the system and eliminating competition, which just dead stops things like

All CEOs produce supply, supply is contingent upon demand. The consumer holds the demand. It's the ultimate balanced system of checks and balances.

utterly fails.

So there you have it right. This was tried, failed, and corrected in the only manner in which this problem could be corrected. The government passed a law that said "No, this shit stops here."

One such solution being the The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 because railroad company liked to fix prices without all that pesky competition that would their profit margins suffer.

Of course, even that failed as the banks and railroad owners worked together to eliminate competition and set prices despite the law.

It only helped cement their positions because...

the railroad companies were able to finance political campaigns through whatever and whomever was needed in government. With this control in Washington, there was no way to stop the overwhelming control of this industry over society. The entire nation was subject to the whims of this monopoly.

What's worse is that the railroad's practices had effects on other areas of industry that were far from healthy for the United States' continued economic and social health.

The effects on society were widespread and deeply influential in the way individuals carried out their lives. The most poignant example is effect railroad rates had on the Grange Movement. During the second half of the 19th Century, farmers increasingly relied on the railroads to transport their crops to the rest of the nation. These individuals were powerless to avoid the exorbitant rates of the railroad companies. The dominant analogy of the industry at the time was that of the Octopus. This beasts' tentacles control several different fields which feed on "the flesh of the yeoman farmer, diligent artisan, and honest merchant" (Chalmers).

Thanks to public backlash, the government had to get involved *twice* to stop this shit and get them to charge something reasonable (sounds a LOT like the problem with the healthcare industry right now given that the insurance companies are setting their own prices and Obama signed a law that forces them to set their rates in a particular way. Funny how history repeats itself.

... no... what's that other word? Stupid.

But there is also another major thing that "The History of Illegal Monopolies" covers that I frequently refer to when having this arguement against others on this forum. That being that of employee-worker relationship without the benefit of 'child labor laws' and 'employee safety laws' and other such nonsense that only gets in the way of the free market.

Andrew Carnegie's steel empire was central to the battle between producers and workers. Though later famous for his philanthropy, the Scottish-born entrepreneur built up the Steel Trust through a concerted campaign to control both prices and wages. Carnegie was quick to lock out workers who struck for higher pay and shorter hours. The result was the famous Homestead Strike of 1892. In a show of Carnegie's immense power, his Homestead Steel Works was able to call in the Pennsylvania State Militia to fire at the striking workers and disperse them. Seven strikers and sympathizers were killed in the bloody encounter. Carnegie finally settled the matter by cutting wages even further than prior agreements had permitted and by allowing back only nonunion employees.

Yeah, as you can see, ... well... this just reminds me of what happens when a government is so anti-government that they just tell their citizenry that they can pay whatever taxes they want and are shocked... SHOCKED... that no one (and I mean NO ONE) bothers to pay taxes.

This isn't even going into all the environmental abuses and the reasoning that created the current healthcare reform (I'll give you a hint: the Insurance Industry people give bonuses for rejecting the most claims. Plenty of internet-based examples of such rejections that were lethal to their customers.)

In any case, the oil trust was broken up by one republican Theodore Roosevelt - one of my favorite Presidents in US history. Reagan broke up the AT&T phone company for a number of abuses.

After all,

For most of this century both political parties pretty much agreed: government should keep corporations from becoming too big and powerful.

and

In an era of bitter ideological disputes, public opinion was virtually unanimous on the need for the national environmental policy NEPA would generate. Turning his reluctant consent into a show of visionary statesmanship, President Nixon chose to sign NEPA on New Year's Day, 1970--thus making the signing his "first official act of the decade."

So I'm rather confident in the following things:
1) History shows that unfettered/unregulated capitalism doesn't work
2) People have demanded that the government intercede on their behalf to get the regulatory environment the US has today (and I'm certain that this is true for most of the European Nations as well - particularly France).
3) Companies, if they can't, won't compete if they don't have to. It's bad for the profit margin.

I only referred to a few websites, but I could go so much further in research in this, but I've already made and proven my point.

Introduce a system where someone can send their police force in and tell you where to distribute your supply and what you can and can not demand and what healthcare you have to buy and how much of your income you have to give away upon punishment of imprisonment to pay welfare to junkies and other lazy scumbags and you get a corrupt system - Now the CEO has the ability to buy-off the government and bypass the checks and balances of supply and demand.

This statment is as filled with tripe as it is ignorance about how things work.
Again, know your goddamned history.

Great, that's why you need someone who spends less than they gather in tax revenue to develop a surplus to maintain all of the things deemed important and maintain a fixed supply of money so in a few generations everything you saved isn't worth 1/4 of what it should have been thereby creating the need for the ponzy-scheme called social security.

Oh, and the Dems would have borrowed and spent all by themselves.

...more pointless and largely baseless anti-government rhetoric...

China is a socialist nation with total government control over their economy.

Wake up, it's not the 1970s no more. Hong Kong and Beijing are amongst the most capitalist cities in the world. China have been heading rapidly towards capitalist totalitarianism since the 1970s and they show absolutely no sign of slowing down.

Hong Kong isn't a chinese city and it hasn't been for more than a decade. It is effectively like the Guam of China. It's run by its own government with its own ideas on economics. It is doing well as an economy, but mostly because it's still butt-buddies with China and benefits from their heavily-controlled economy.
That said, instead of starting at unfettered capitalism and moving towards a more regulated environment, they started at a total government control and working toward less regulation.
I'm sure they're benefitting from that as much as we benefited from the same thing, considering that we started at opposite ends of the spectrum and appear to be moving toward the same goal considering the result is a system that maximizes the personal freedoms and liberties of all of its citizens.

Income Tax Rates in China

* The tax on an individual's income is progressive. As at 2010, an individual's income is taxed progressively at 5% - 45%.
* The 2010 corporate tax rate for domestic and foreign companies is 25%.
* Small companies pay 20% corporate tax in certain cases. Qualified new hi-tec companies pay 15% corporate tax.

Yeah that's really socialist.... Keep dreaming mate.

What the hell was the point of that? An attempt to prove that China wasn't a socialist nation because it has a progressive tax code?
Do you know how socialism works? Because I'm pretty sure even Soviet Russia's citizens had an income of some sort that was taxed when that nation existed.
Socialist nations are socialist because they control their economic means of production, services, and businesses. It has nothing to do with personal income, which still exists in socialist nations to varying extents.

Were it not for their lack of social liberty it wouldn't be a half bad place to live, give it 20 years and it'll probably be pretty decent in terms of social and economic liberty.

I'm sure China will be a very nice place to live.
I'm also sure that the economy will still be more socialist than ours will be.

Government would be 10x better if it weren't so damn corrupt - thanks to those with money and power buying politicians who are elected on fantastic fantasy voodoo economics where republicans think cutting taxes and deregulations mean more freedom and more money and democrats are too spineless to have their own ideas.

No, they're just BOTH keynseians. That's the only fantasy voodoo economics here.

I can't even begin to tell you how much I don't care about economic theory.
The arguement is retarded and neither theory has utterly destroyed a first-world nation to my knowledge that wasn't also attributed to other major factors that have anything to do with the economic system chosen.

The more power the government has in terms of regulations the more opportunities there are for them to be corrupted and for that corruption to have impact.

The amount of regulations and restrictions have clearly been irrelevant in terms of a company's ability to corrupt what they need to corrupt to maximize the control they have over their slice of the economy.

And like fuck the republicans deregulate. They aren't as bad as the dems but they still do it.

Yes, like fuck they do. They have. They will. They've been singing this shit for more than ten years about how there is too much regulation on the market and it needs to be stopped and all that BS.

Really, the only amusing thing is the absolute lack of reason any of you display when arguing for big government. In a religious debate you'd be posting facts and trains of though and making arguments with established premises and reasons, when it comes to politics and economics it's just "Waaah waaah ceo totalitarian no prosperity corruption corruption!"

Posts where I have to do research take time and religious-oriented ones are interestingly less difficult to work on because scientific facts are vastly less debatable than political points.
Another major point of difficulty is that we both know that if I don't watch my sources, a political debate will much more quickly turn into an arguement over policial bias in the sources brought up.
Further, I have done so before and when I have those arguements abruptly ended after the post in which I did. One of which involved teacher's salary and another with this topic and there was a third I don't remember as well. It may have been an economics arguement with you or someone else, but I stopped because there was a long video involved from a boring-ass lecture about something I could care less about other than the novelty of making fun of the idea of going back to the gold standard.
Finally, I'm not arguing for big government or total socialism or communism or anything like that. Governments that become too powerful are the things of science fiction nightmare scenarios where lives, from birth to death, are given for the state and freedoms are at the whim of the state and its leaders. What you need to understand is that human nature doesn't reverse to goodness when small/low/zero governance is applied. People are smart and when they have too much power, they will take advantage of it. They always have and they always will. When a government can't intercede on the behalf of its citizenry, you get things like big oil being able to set their prices however they want. Health Insurance companies able to set their own prices and reject people for needing a life-saving treatment. Railroad companies able to extort customers because they're the only trains in town. Airlines with the ability to molest you and your family legally and store naked pictures of you. You get people working nearly endless days in unsafe conditions to go home and eat unsafe foods and operate faulty and dangerous products because there are no standards whatsoever that they can't control. Regardless of who is doing it, it's always the powerful taking advantage of the powerless.
Neither of these things result in a livable society. What I believe in is medium government. Government should be powerful enough to protect its citizens and afford them the freest and healthiest life possible.
Neither big government nor small government would allow the kind of personal liberty affordable to those in a medium government society.

I've provided plenty of reasons for my arguements - even if they were simply stated reasons of what I think and without links but what reason do you have for

1)

1. Less government = less legislation and bureaucracy = more liberty.

or
2)

Hong Kong and Beijing are amongst the most capitalist cities in the world.

or
3)

Great, that's why you need someone who spends less than they gather in tax revenue to develop a surplus to maintain all of the things deemed important and maintain a fixed supply of money so in a few generations everything you saved isn't worth 1/4 of what it should have been thereby creating the need for the ponzy-scheme called social security

or
4)

All CEOs produce supply, supply is contingent upon demand. The consumer holds the demand. It's the ultimate balanced system of checks and balances. Unlike a government dictators there is nothing stopping a new (or a thousand) CEO('s) from stepping up and catering to the demand.

1) is total bullshit for the reasons I stated and linked earlier in this post.
2) I honestly don't know much about Hong Kong. I'm aware it's a free market economy in some respect because that's what the CIA factbook stated, but beyond that I have no idea and I don't have the hours of time I need to read up on Hong Kong's economy in any detail. China does not have a market that is more free than hours or France's or anyone else's. They're heading toward a free market society from the previous position of "total economic control" and have been loosening their collective belts ever since.
However, it is plainly obvious that the Chinese government still exerts much more control over their economy than most of the rest of the world does and they still have numerous state-owned enterprises, unlike the US and European nations.
3) This doesn't even have a point in relationship with your post beyond a baseless assertion about social security based on what I can only assume is ignorance or kool-aid fed to you by people who obviously hate social security.
4) covered earlier

So yes, yes, I bitch about corruption and going (apparently) "Waaah waaah ceo totalitarian no prosperity corruption corruption!" but I stated my premise, gave my reasons, and when pushed, I can provide facts and figures when necessary, despite being more difficult to do and I can still continue to do so.