Does the right think scarcity and the left think abundance?

[Bullseye]

There are plenty of countries who economies faired the pandemic just fine. It was Trump and republicans horrible leadership and recklessness that are turning this into a long term depression.

Name them.

Tell that to all the small businesses that have been shut down by Walmart, Amazon, Subway and McDonald’s.

Most were shutdown by Dem Governors.

Tell that to all the employees of these mega corporations who are on welfare and food stamps despite the fact that they work 40 hours/week.

LOL, yet another loony left cliche’. Dude, you weren’t educated, you were indoctrinated.

Wow! What a pile of trash. Not to mention misplaced egotism. Most of those businesses have been in the county for decades. Biden had nothing to do with it.

 

[MrWonka]

So, because Trix’ donation to DP benefits her AS WELL AS THE REST OF US she doesn’t get credit? She’s got a badge on her avatar for God’s sake, it’s not like she telling us anything most of us don’t already know.

It's not about whether you deserve credit, it's about whether you actually did it for yourself or whether you did for the general good.

That's why conservatives hate taxes so much. You don't get credit for paying them because it wasn't your choice to do so. It's an obligation. The entire nation gets credit for feeding the poor and giving shelter for the sick even though it used your resources. As a result you don't get any sense of pride out of it.
Whereas a liberal like me doesn't really care who gets credit for feeding the poor I just want it done. I don't have a problem with it being an obligation because I consider it to be one.

 

[MrWonka]

Name them.

Japan, South Korea, New Zealand...

Almost all of them really. Most of Europe had far more brief lock downs and were then able to open back up once the surge had passed. They just opened up more carefully and didn't have a bunch of assholes refusing to wear masks.

Most were shutdown by Dem Governors.

Small business have been shutting down for decades before COVID. Ronald Reagan and Trickle down Economics insured that.

LOL, yet another loony left cliche’. Dude, you weren’t educated, you were indoctrinated.

These are facts whether you like them or not. There is an enormous number of both Walmart employees and McDonald's employees who are in fact on welfare, food stamps and health care subsidies. You do not get to disregard facts.

 

[Antiwar]

AKA the fixed-pie fallacy. Leftists overwhelmingly believe someone getting rich makes everybody else poorer, hence their obsession with equality of outcome and taxing rich people.

"equality of outcome"

Do you misrepresent things on purpose?

 

[iguanaman]

For clarity, I'll use this first post to define the scarcity mentality versus the abundance mentality:

Scarcity mentality refers to people seeing life as a finite pie, so that if one person takes a big piece, that leaves less for everyone else. Most people, particularly in the corporate world, have been conditioned to have a scarcity mentality.

A person with an abundance mentality focuses on the limitless opportunities available in business and life. They choose to focus on the positive things in their life rather than the negative things. People with an abundance mentality are more grateful, more creative and focused on collaboration.

Some people claim that most Republicans and conservatives have a scarcity mentality, while Democrats and liberals more often have an abundance mentality. Agree or disagree? Discuss.

It is not about the amount of wealth, it is about how the wealth is distributed. Why this "pie" stuff got started I do not know. When more and more of the increased profits go to fewer and fewer people capitalism is in trouble. The road that we are on now will lead to ruin and we know that from history. The only question now is whether we will learn from it or just repeat it.

The gulf between the richest 1 percent and the rest of America is the widest it's been since the Roaring '20s.
The very wealthiest Americans earned more than 19 percent of the country's household income last year—their biggest share since 1928, the year before the stock market crash. And the top 10 percent captured a record 48.2 percent of total earnings last year.
U.S. income inequality has been growing for almost three decades. And it grew again last year, according to an analysis of Internal Revenue Service figures dating to 1913 by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University.

Richest 1% earn biggest share since Roaring '20s

The gulf between the richest 1 percent and the rest of America is the widest it's been since the Roaring '20s.

www.cnbc.com

 

[Antiwar]

Nature has some resources that aren't renewable, that's true. It also has many resources that are. Maybe even including some that haven't yet been discovered. I think most policymakers throughout the political spectrum are aware of all this.

They are, but they're not doing much about it.

 

[Bullseye]

Japan, South Korea, New Zealand...

Almost all of them really. Most of Europe had far more brief lock downs and were then able to open back up once the surge had passed. They just opened up more carefully and didn't have a bunch of assholes refusing to wear masks.

Got any numbers to back that up?.

Small business have been shutting down for decades before COVID. Ronald Reagan and Trickle down Economics insured that.

You really need to get your money back from whoever taught you that.

These are facts whether you like them or not. There is an enormous number of both Walmart employees and McDonald's employees who are in fact on welfare, food stamps and health care subsidies. You do not get to disregard facts.

Still peddling the LW tripe, eh?

 

[Jack Hays]

For clarity, I'll use this first post to define the scarcity mentality versus the abundance mentality:

Scarcity mentality refers to people seeing life as a finite pie, so that if one person takes a big piece, that leaves less for everyone else. Most people, particularly in the corporate world, have been conditioned to have a scarcity mentality.

A person with an abundance mentality focuses on the limitless opportunities available in business and life. They choose to focus on the positive things in their life rather than the negative things. People with an abundance mentality are more grateful, more creative and focused on collaboration.

Some people claim that most Republicans and conservatives have a scarcity mentality, while Democrats and liberals more often have an abundance mentality. Agree or disagree? Discuss.

You have it exactly backwards. The late Julian Simon was/is revered on the right and hated on the left.

 

[Bullseye]

It's not about whether you deserve credit, it's about whether you actually did it for yourself or whether you did for the general good.

And what qualifies You to pass judgement on the motivations of someone you’ve never met?

That's why conservatives hate taxes so much. You don't get credit for paying them because it wasn't your choice to do so. It's an obligation. The entire nation gets credit for feeding the poor and giving shelter for the sick even though it used your resources. As a result you don't get any sense of pride out of it.
Whereas a liberal like me doesn't really care who gets credit for feeding the poor I just want it done. I don't have a problem with it being an obligation because I consider it to be one.

God, not only should you get your money back from whoever taught that idiocy, the school should be destroyed and torn to the ground.

Do you grasp that what you’re staying supports the thesis that libs favor scarcity? You’re calling for money to be taken from productive people. Conservative argue that money is more productive, e.g. bigger pies, when left in the hands of productive people.

 

[DifferentDrummr]

It is not about the amount of wealth, it is about how the wealth is distributed. Why this "pie" stuff got started I do not know. When more and more of the increased profits go to fewer and fewer people capitalism is in trouble,

No disagreement here.
The "pie stuff" came from psychology studies and originally had nothing to do with politics or economics. It wasn't until later that some opinion writers began to point out a correlation.

 

[DifferentDrummr]

You have it exactly backwards. The late Julian Simon was/is revered on the right and hated on the left.

So was Joe McCarthy, but that, too, proves nothing.

 

[Jack Hays]

So was Joe McCarthy, but that, too, proves nothing.

I take it you are unfamiliar with Professor Simon's work. That's surprising because it's central to your topic.
Julian Simon - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Julian_Simon
Julian Lincoln Simon (February 12, 1932 – February 8, 1998) was an American professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute at the time of his death, after previously serving as a longtime economics and business professor at the University of Illinois at ...

You should pay particular attention to his famous wager with Paul Ehrlich.

And here are his own words.

“This is my long-run forecast in brief:
The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards.
I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.”
― Julian Simon

 

[Antiwar]

Here's the dingbat AOC falling for it:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez falls for the 'fixed pie fallacy'

“Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another” - Milton Friedman

www.americanexperiment.org

It sure looks like you fell for that article leading you to believe their strawman argument of what AOC said:

Freshman democratic lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday appeared to agree with the idea that a world that allows for billionaires is not moral.

The question was put to Ocasio-Cortez by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates at a Martin Luther King forum in New York City.

When asked whether “a world that allows for billionaires” is “a moral outcome,” Ocasio-Cortez responded: “No it’s not. It’s not.”

She then said that she does not believe all billionaires “like Bill Gates, for example, or Warren Buffett are immoral people.”

“I’m not saying that, but I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

The article then states:

There is no ‘fixed pie’

This argument rests on the notion that these folks in Alabama can’t get access to healthcare because Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are rich. But this is wrong. The two things are totally unrelated. Neither Bill Gates nor Warren Buffett got rich by making these folks in Alabama poor. The poverty of Alabamians is not a function of the wealth of Gates or Buffett.

To think otherwise, as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez does, is to fall victim to the ‘fixed pie fallacy‘. As the economist Milton Friedman explained, “Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez sees wealthy people and assumes that their wealth must have been taken from somebody else ...

She didn't make that claim. She made a claim similar to: The wealthiest country in the world ever shouldn't allow people to be living in poverty.

The article took the freedom to link AOC's statement with the knowledge that we know she is for increasing taxes on the wealthy, pushing for policies that reduce wealth and income inequality, etc and made a false misrepresentation.

 

[ttwtt78640]

For clarity, I'll use this first post to define the scarcity mentality versus the abundance mentality:

Scarcity mentality refers to people seeing life as a finite pie, so that if one person takes a big piece, that leaves less for everyone else. Most people, particularly in the corporate world, have been conditioned to have a scarcity mentality.

A person with an abundance mentality focuses on the limitless opportunities available in business and life. They choose to focus on the positive things in their life rather than the negative things. People with an abundance mentality are more grateful, more creative and focused on collaboration.

Some people claim that most Republicans and conservatives have a scarcity mentality, while Democrats and liberals more often have an abundance mentality. Agree or disagree? Discuss.

I see the reverse (of the bolded above) as being the case. The objection to wealth/income inequality is (entirely?) based on a having a fixed pie - if some (the top 1%) have too much then many (the remaining 99%) will by necessity end up with too little. The focus (government’s mission?) then becomes imposing wealth/income redistribution schemes (mandates?) to achieve a (more) “fair” allocation of that fixed pie.

 

[DifferentDrummr]

I take it you are unfamiliar with Professor Simon's work. That's surprising because it's central to your topic.
Julian Simon - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Julian_Simon
Julian Lincoln Simon (February 12, 1932 – February 8, 1998) was an American professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute at the time of his death, after previously serving as a longtime economics and business professor at the University of Illinois at ...

You should pay particular attention to his famous wager with Paul Ehrlich.

And here are his own words.

“This is my long-run forecast in brief:
The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards.
I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.”
― Julian Simon

Whether I'm familiar with his work is hardly the point. I was simply attempting to get you to elaborate for the benefit of public debate, and I succeeded.

As far as the quote you supplied, I would imagine that most historians, regardless of politics, would agree. Innovation always grows with time, and generally it is beneficial to the population's standard of living. (shrug) Of course, there will always be negatives, and there will always be those to point them out. It puzzles me why Professor Simon would have been so unsettled by this.

 

[Jack Hays]

Whether I'm familiar with his work is hardly the point. I was simply attempting to get you to elaborate for the benefit of public debate, and I succeeded.

As far as the quote you supplied, I would imagine that most historians, regardless of politics, would agree. Innovation always grows with time, and generally it is beneficial to the population's standard of living. (shrug) Of course, there will always be negatives, and there will always be those to point them out. It puzzles me why Professor Simon would have been so unsettled by this.

Simon might be called the godfather of the growing pie thesis, and as I said, he's revered on the right, hated on the left.
From the link in #62:
". . . Simon wrote many books and articles, mostly on economic subjects. He is best known for his work on population, natural resources, and immigration. Simon is sometimes associated with cornucopian views, but he denied the label.[3] Rather than focus on the abundance of nature, Simon focused lasting economic benefits from continuous population growth, even despite limited or finite physical resources, empowered primarily by human ingenuity which would create substitutes, and technological progress.

He is also known for the famous Simon–Ehrlich wager, a bet he made with ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich. Ehrlich bet that the prices for five metals would increase over a decade, while Simon took the opposite stance. Simon won the bet, as the prices for the metals sharply declined during that decade. . . . "

 

[MrWonka]

And what qualifies You to pass judgement on the motivations of someone you’ve never met?

Because I know who you vote for and I listen to your arguments. They tell me everything I really need to know about you in order to pass judgment.

God, not only should you get your money back from whoever taught that idiocy, the school should be destroyed and torn to the ground.

This was not taught. This is what I have observed and derived by listening to conservatives cry on forums like this.

Do you grasp that what you’re staying supports the thesis that libs favor scarcity? You’re calling for money to be taken from productive people. Conservative argue that money is more productive, e.g. bigger pies, when left in the hands of productive people.

No, it is you who fail to grasp what is being discussed here. I am saying that it is taking excess from those who don't need it and investing it in those with out necessary resources that both grows the pie and also insures each person gets enough of it to eat.

Think of it more like a garden. If you plant a garden and see that water tends to pool in one corner of the garden causing plants in that corner to grow larger you don't put even more water in that corner in the hopes that they will grow bigger. Excess water
on one plant doesn't make it produce enough fruit to cover the the remaining plants that die. The solution is to level off the ground so that all plants get enough water to grow. That is the best way to increase your yield. Liberals understand that the water
is the abundant resource. Conservatives feel the need to hoard the water for themselves treating it like it is scarce when it is not.

If conservatives were truly stupid enough to believe that pies grow bigger when left in the hands of productive people then they would never under any circumstances donate money to charity as that would hinder their ability to grow the pie. The fact that
on average conservatives contribute more to charity proves that deep down inside even you realize trickle down economics are bullshit.

 

[What if...?]

Someone lied to you; you aren’t in the same time zone as reality.

Y'all need to stop trying to use our words for you about us.

It's too transparent an attempt to conflagration your nonsense with our consensus reality, shared by the rest of the world.

Your "reality" is exclusive to consumers of conservative media. And you never seem to notice how unnaturally consistent it is across all platforms.

 

[Antiwar]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez falls for the 'fixed pie fallacy'

“Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another” - Milton Friedman

www.americanexperiment.org

The linked article goes on to describe the voluntary exchange of goods with stories that grossly oversimplify economics by only focusing on luxury spending, while completely omitting that many people cannot afford necessities.

 

[Integrityrespec]

Says a follower of the party claiming election fraud with no valid evidence! Ah sweet irony!

Please post the copies of the evidence you have seen to determine none was valid.

 

[Bullseye]

Y'all need to stop trying to use our words for you about us.

It's too transparent an attempt to conflagration your nonsense with our consensus reality, shared by the rest of the world.

Your "reality" is exclusive to consumers of conservative media. And you never seem to notice how unnaturally consistent it is across all platforms.

LOL, sure. Tell yourself what ever LW fairy tale makes you feel better.

 

[iguanaman]

I take it you are unfamiliar with Professor Simon's work. That's surprising because it's central to your topic.
Julian Simon - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Julian_Simon
Julian Lincoln Simon (February 12, 1932 – February 8, 1998) was an American professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute at the time of his death, after previously serving as a longtime economics and business professor at the University of Illinois at ...

You should pay particular attention to his famous wager with Paul Ehrlich.

And here are his own words.

“This is my long-run forecast in brief:
The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards.
I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.”
― Julian Simon

He clearly learned nothing from history. We have had multiple events in the past that belie the idea that things get always better. In fact economies collapse rather often sometimes with disastrous results for the quality of life for billions of people.

 

[Bullseye]

Because I know who you vote for and I listen to your arguments. They tell me everything I really need to know about you in order to pass judgment.


This was not taught. This is what I have observed and derived by listening to conservatives cry on forums like this.


No, it is you who fail to grasp what is being discussed here. I am saying that it is taking excess from those who don't need it and investing it in those with out necessary resources that both grows the pie and also insures each person gets enough of it to eat.

Think of it more like a garden. If you plant a garden and see that water tends to pool in one corner of the garden causing plants in that corner to grow larger you don't put even more water in that corner in the hopes that they will grow bigger. Excess water
on one plant doesn't make it produce enough fruit to cover the the remaining plants that die. The solution is to level off the ground so that all plants get enough water to grow. That is the best way to increase your yield. Liberals understand that the water
is the abundant resource. Conservatives feel the need to hoard the water for themselves treating it like it is scarce when it is not.

If conservatives were truly stupid enough to believe that pies grow bigger when left in the hands of productive people then they would never under any circumstances donate money to charity as that would hinder their ability to grow the pie. The fact that
on average conservatives contribute more to charity proves that deep down inside even you realize trickle down economics are bullshit.

Conservatives know that productive people create jobs and pay wages. Those wages go into the hands of OTHER productive people and create more products and wages. And the pie gets bigger and bigger. And more jobs create more demand for labor which creates wage growth - which creates more demand which creates more jobs which . . . well you get the idea.

 

[DifferentDrummr]

I see the reverse (of the bolded above) as being the case. The objection to wealth/income inequality is (entirely?) based on a having a fixed pie - if some (the top 1%) have too much then many (the remaining 99%) will by necessity end up with too little. The focus (government’s mission?) then becomes imposing wealth/income redistribution schemes (mandates?) to achieve a (more) “fair” allocation of that fixed pie.

Major strawman. No educated person on the left supports "wealth equality" or "income equality." They are all well aware that such types of planned economies don't work. What they support is that all people have the human right to live with a certain level of shelter, nutrition, and safety.

 

[MrWonka]

They’re not after me, They’re after you
I’m just in the way -
Donald Trump

Oh, and by the way... That's exactly what Hitler told the people of Germany about the Jews and the rest of the world.