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Why shouldn't capitalism be better regulated?

weaver2 said:
You will never see the flag or the cross and you will never understand what he is leading you into.
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Unless you have done what I have, you have no standing in this discussion and are speaking from your ignorance. I HAVE seen the flag and the cross, and I know where I am going.
 

Spoken like a good little Socialist....

Do you just want to take what they earned?
 

The worst thing is that you're throwing insults over an empirical problem. The argument I put forward is simple: there is a lot of circumstances where racism is costly and that tends to work against it. I quote Sowell merely because he gave interesting empirical cases where my claim actually touched on to something real that happened in the world. It doesn't mean that the argument will always work and where, when and how much it works is an empirical problem. I have even other things to say about this, not all of which supports this view and certainly some of which you have never heard, but you apparently know what I have to say.

Just take a minute to reflect on that last sentence you wrote. Just to be clear, you didn't say that conservatives are explicitly proselytizing on behalf of a racist dogma. You said that their comments about freedom veil an otherwise racist agenda. If you really believe that, you will never be able to have a serious discussion with a conservative. You cannot take them seriously because you have convinced yourself they are malign and dishonest.
 
I didn't "cherry pick". I did choose the year that had the highest relative minimum wage, if that's what you're saying, but you can't honestly believe the government was "thinking ahead" when it chose that particular number?! You know full well that Uncle Sam was not giving away any kind of "great deals" to the worker's of this country in 1980 or any other year for that matter.

But, hey, let's go back to 1938 and say "hallelujah!" our wages are now 63% higher than they used to be --- regardless of the fact that $4.51/hr is now 77% of poverty level for a single person and not even close to a living wage. I mean, seriously? What year would YOU like to "cherry pick"??


PS I don't mind debating honestly but I'd expect the same. Why would you believe ANY US Government minimum wage was some kind of give away??
 
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bongsaway said:
My personal opinion is Reagan started the decline of the middle class and the push for money going from the bottom to the top and the republicans have carried on that mantra ever since.
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We have data on real average personal income and on real median personal income and we can use it to get a sense of how the asymmetry in the income distribution has evolved over time.

Now, before I talk about that, I need to make a very important point almost everyone seems to get wrong. When you compare the income of, say, the bottom 20% in 1980 to that of the bottom 20% in 1990, you are not comparing the same people in 1980 and in 1990. You are comparing what it means to be relatively poor in 1980 versus what it means to be relatively poor in 1990, but people move in an out of income brackets far more than you probably think they do. If you care about flesh and blood human beings, social mobility is also important. It's one thing to be poor and it is another to always stay poor. Because we also have data on that, we can also try to worry about people being able to improve their own lives.

With this disclaimer, the data on mean and median income can be found here:
Real Median Personal Income in the United States (MEPAINUSA672N) | FRED | St. Louis Fed

You can click on the EDIT graph button. Put the series in percentage change from last year. Add another series: MAPAINUSA672N (real median personal income). Put it also in percentage change from last year. At the bottom, where it says formula, you can write a-b. If anyone is curious, FRED draws its table from data gathered by the US Census Bureau. Here is how the Census defines income: About

The resulting series is positive when the median grows faster than the mean. When the median grows faster than the mean, the bottom half of the distribution is gaining ground. And the opposite is true when it is negative. Reagan was president from January 20th 1981 to January 20th 1989. To be fair, say that the results of his policies are 1982 to 1989 (we assume his policies had an impact with a year of delay, in other words). There are 5 years out of 8 where the bottom half lost ground, though only 4 of them really mean something (1984 through 1987) as the 1989 point is a -0.07 percentage point gap -- we might as well say median and average income grew at the same pace that year.

So, there is at least a presumption that your charge might be justified. However, if you look at the worst point of the Reagan administration (about -0.6 percentage point gaps), it pales in comparison to what you can see in the 1990s or 2010s. Things were worst from this point of view in the 1970s, got better in the 1980s, got way worse in the 1990s and after the 2008 recession. There is comparable evidence of the same thing happening under the Carter administration. There also are two worst years under Bill Clinton and years that are many times worse under both Georges Bush (Father) and Barack Obama.


It's not clear what is the problem with Reagan specifically. The dates do not match neatly enough.
 

and for the last and final time for me

MW is NOT supposed to be a career, or a LIVING wage

it is a stepping stone wage, and people need to learn from those positions

if unable to learn...then those individuals HAVE ISSUES

either mental or physical difficulties...and those we do need to assist

but those who refuse to learn, refuse to show up and work....they can starve as far as i am concerned

my $ 9.00 wage is better than it is, a nice raise for some...and from there we can look at the COLA every 2-3 years to keep pace
 
So you expect 18yos to move out and live on minimum wage? Or do you expect Mom&Dad to continuing caring for them? Not all 18yos have that option. And if they're doing what you expect - making themselves better in some way (e.i. attending college or tech school) then they don't have time to work 60+ hrs a week at MW and still do well at school.
 
smallvoice said:
Spoken like a good little Socialist....

Do you just want to take what they earned?
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Spoken like a person who votes against their own best interests. No, I want the rising tide to lift all the boats, not just the yachts.
 

2 of my 3 kids stayed at home while attending school....why do they NEED to move out

why is any 18 year old out on their own?

it all goes back to parents, and their upbringing....

yes, i expect mom and dad to help for a couple more years....especially if the kids are attending community college, or going to a trade school

that is what parents are SUPPOSED to do
 
Marx was one of the founders of Sociology. He is better remembered for that than for his contributions to Economics.

bongsaway said:
Spoken like a person who votes against their own best interests. No, I want the rising tide to lift all the boats, not just the yachts.
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Then make sure they are not tied to the pier with too many regulations.
 

I'm not throwing insults. I'm stating facts. Sowell used the situation of black owned banks turning down more black loan applications than white banks. Somehow he thought that proved there wasn't any discrimination that all the transactions were profit driven. Sowell never brought in any data on size of bank vs amount of risk, the demographics of the borrowers, location of homes, cost of house vs appraised cost. Nothing just white banks turned down fewer black mortgages therefore discrimination doesn't exist in any business. All business decisions are based on profit. And that just isn't so. (see below) Many of Sowell's arguments are unsupported and unexplored.

There are quite a lot of recent examples that prove even though bigotry may cut profits people and businesses are not deterred from indulging their bigotry even though it costs them. Racists quote Sowell all the time. That's a fact. No, not all conservatives are racist but all racists are conservatives and I've had plenty of conversations with the bigoted who in their minds can justify their bigotry. ...... by quoting Sowell!

Profit doesn't always drive corporate decision making:

Paper mills in Maine treated rivers like their personal sewers. They dumped arsenic, soponifiers, acids, chlorine, clay, dyes, and sewage. Around the 1980 people got some laws passed that prohibited the dumping. The protests from mill owners was long, loud and acrimonious. The laws stuck and the mills reluctantly complied and started recycling effluent instead of dumping. They found that they saved more money than it cost to re-cycle. Were they happy? No. They kept right on trying to repeal the recycling laws.

Another example: The Indian tribes in Maine won a land claims suit in which the were given all the islands in the Penobscot River. Living on islands they were interested in the cleanliness of the river and the health of the fish they were eating from the river. So they hired professional environmental monitors. They kept records, very detailed records, they knew when the mills up stream were illegally dumping and what they were dumping and they would notify the state. This infuriated Georgia Pacific. They tried to stop the monitoring. They tried and succeeded in forcing them to turn over all their data in a suit and then getting the information dismissed. When Koch Industries, no fan of powerful minorities, oversight or environmental laws bought out G-P one of the requirements was that G-P had to close the Maine mill throwing 400 workers out of jobs even though the mill in Maine was the highest producing most profitable mill in New England. G-P enthusiastically declared bankruptcy and closed the plant.
 
weaver2 said:
The writers of the Constitution had never heard the word capitalism. The system in use during their time was mercantilism.
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To my best knowledge, the word "capitalism" dates back to the 19th century as you pointed out, but it was advocated long before it bore its name. To be fair, capitalism essentially means an economy centered on individual property rights. If you recognize individuals have a right over their property and are therefore the rightful judge of how to best use that property, you are advocating capitalism no matter how you call that.

I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but it does sound like an exaggeration to argue there was not a capitalistic slant in the American project.


"The Wealth of Nations" was published in 1776. Its core thesis is that the division of labor and voluntary transactions are the primary drivers of wealth creation. Although Smith never called this capitalism, it is clear to a modern reader that Smith was extolling the virtues of capitalism. Other very finely related ideas were then commonplace. The famous phrase "laissez-faire" also predates the creation and adoption of the US Constitution. It is a term the physiocrats such as François Quesnay used in France during the 1750s and 1760s.

Much earlier, John Locke wrote his famous book, "Two Treatises of Government" a whole century before. His core argument involves private property and voluntary association: (1) people own their labor and all fruits thereof, which includes soil; (2) people may give up on some of their autonomy to secure their rights by associating with others; (3) that contract implies their property be covered by the authority they grant to a common government. Without the private property, Locke's argument for the legitimacy of the authority of a government falls apart. His defensive of private property is quite extensive and it was something 20th-century libertarians took at heart (Robert Nozick referenced Locke on that point).

A great sociologist, Max Weber, argued that the core of market economies is a form of the individualism which emerged as religious dogma in the late 15th and early 16th century. There was an insistence by people such as Martin Luther that we all should individually read and understand the bible for ourselves, for example. He gives the detail of that argument in "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."
 

Sowell's arguments aren't always completely satisfying, in part because he is not conducting a proper empirical analysis. This charge is justified because Sowell sometimes jumps the gun. However, we have to be careful not to do the same ourselves. In his defense, he is often answering to especially idiotic arguments that are commonplace in the media and sometimes even within the academia. With the case of banks, the claim that was made in a New York Times Op-Ed, if I am not mistaken, is that on average black get rejected more often than whites when applying for loans, therefore banks discriminate against black applicants. The points Sowell raises are that (1) black-owned and white-owned banks seem to show the same patterns and (2) Asians get rejected even less often than whites.

You are perfectly right to point out that (1) and (2) do not conclusively prove that banks in general or some banks, in particular, discriminate based on the skin color of applicants. We cannot leap from (1) and (2) to "all banks responded only to actual risks when approbating loans." Sowell also pointed out that blacks tend to apply for larger loans and with less collateral. The claim goes in the direction of his main argument, but one big problem with verbal arguments is that you lose the quantitative aspect: chances are, many factors are at play, not all effects push in the same direction and the outcome depends on how big is each effect. There is also an endogeneity problem -- the missing variables you listed matter.
 

One of the problem of the argument I laid out is that suitable conditions make some criteria for making business decisions costly. Some people might be willing to pay them if they are small enough, or if they are themselves not sufficiently wealthy. Everybody has a price, but some people have a very high price. Religious extremists in the Arab world are disposed to die, to kill and to wage war on behalf of their ideals. Libertarians donate funds to have regulations repealed, even when they are not personally concerned. People sometimes march in the street for free to pressure governments to change laws on behalf of ideas about which they care.


Are you both able and disposed to pay those costs? Depending on how many people say yes and how the number of such people evolves, free transactions may prevent discrimination, marginalize discrimination or do almost nothing.
 


Sowell can be forgiven his attempts to show that discrimination against blacks is just a case of economics not racism. He was traumatized 1969 by the black Cornell students take-over of Willard Straight Hall. Hostages were taken, people were killed. It was violent and traumatic and wrong. Sowell distanced himself from the black students. He characterized them as "hoodlums" admitted under lower academic standards". He dismissed the racism the blacks encountered on campus by saying he didn't see any in his four years teaching at Cornell and living in Ithaca.

However, he wasn't looking. Ithaca was and still is a racist town. They have problems with race in schools and in town and blacks are still pretty much ghettoized on the inlet flood plain along Floral Avenue. Cornell students at that time were almost all white upper middle class and very wealthy except for a small number of exotic foreign students and the NYSU ag. students. The fraternities were incredibly racist.
 
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I didn't say anything about a capitalistic slant or not. Some misinformed poster was claiming that capitalism was at the heart of the Constitution and that the founding father wrote endorsement of capitalism into the Constitution. I said the founding fathers economic system was Mercantilism and the word capitalism wasn't used until mid 19th century. And, yes Adam Smith essentially described capitalism but he didn't call it that and Wealth of Nations wouldn't have been a reference source for the Constitution since it wasn't published until 1776.
 

Mercantilism relies on colonial possession which means that a group of colonies breaking away from their metropolitan overlords can hardly be charged with either promoting or defending a mercantile system.

As for your comment about the Wealth of Nations, the US Constitution was written and presented for ratification 10 years after the publication of Smith's most famous book. It could have influenced the Founding Fathers, although I didn't make exactly that claim. I said it's an example that related ideas about individualism were commonplace in that era, especially in England, the Netherlands and the American colonies.

I am not an expert on what the Founding Fathers wrote, but I am under the impression that the question of how to best organize production in a country was not commonplace in the 18th century. You have Smith and Quesnay who explicitly does it, but they come quite late as you pointed out. Although it might be not fair to put the problem of the US Constitution as trying to answer the question of how to best organize production since that question seems to really take off only later in the 19th century with Ricardo, Marx, Mills, and Marshall, among others. However, if you create a Constitution whose explicit purpose is to limit the power of governments and then adopt bills meant to protect individua rights, you don't really have many choices left as to how this question can be answered: you just have voluntary associations and voluntary transactions.
 

Mercantilism relies on colonial possession which means that a group of colonies breaking away from their metropolitan overlords can hardly be charged with either promoting or defending a mercantile system.

As for your comment about the Wealth of Nations, the US Constitution was written and presented for ratification 10 years after the publication of Smith's most famous book. It could have influenced the Founding Fathers, although I didn't make exactly that claim. I said it's an example that related ideas about individualism were commonplace in that era, especially in England, the Netherlands and the American colonies.

I am not an expert on what the Founding Fathers wrote, but I am under the impression that the question of how to best organize production in a country was not commonplace in the 18th century. You have Smith and Quesnay who explicitly does it, but they come quite late as you pointed out. Although it might be not fair to put the problem of the US Constitution as trying to answer the question of how to best organize production since that question seems to really take off only later in the 19th century with Ricardo, Marx, Mills, and Marshall, among others. However, if you create a Constitution whose explicit purpose is to limit the power of governments and then adopt bills meant to protect individua rights, you don't really have many choices left as to how this question can be answered: you just have voluntary associations and voluntary transactions.
 


There are no references by Thomas Jefferson or any others to Wealth of the Nation. In fact there really are no references to the economics system of a country in any of the founding fathers writings or in the Consitution. It was a time of questioning the individuals relationship to government not to economic theory. That came later.
 
bongsaway said:
Spoken like a person who votes against their own best interests. No, I want the rising tide to lift all the boats, not just the yachts.
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.....spoken like a person who doesn't know a thing about Fluid Dynamics, as well as being a Socialist.
 

I do not dispute that. I said the ideas were damningly similar.
 
weaver2 said:
No, not all conservatives are racist but all racists are conservatives.
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The most radical racists you can find in America today hold beliefs that are antithetical to the beliefs held by conservatives. Did you ever read or heard someone such as the very despicable Richard Spencer talk about his political positions? Or maybe the organization of the Neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville.

We're not talking about small bits and unimportant details. Spencer believes that rights do not come from God but are endowed by the State: "No individual has a right outside of a collectivity. (...) Ultimately, the State gives those rights to you." He is heavily critical of the Founding Fathers, the US Constitution, and Ronald Reagan, all for that reason. He explicitly said he doesn't oppose socialism, that he supports nationalizing health care, that national parks should be massively expanded, and he also explicitly said it is the State that he would use to change the world.

That doesn't sound like a conservative. So, you at least have one. My suspicion is that this is typical among some of the most racist people in America -- neo-nazis. They abhor the idea of treating people equally, they love the idea of promoting their social vision through a big government, they hate the idea of human rights and even argue it is a fiction, etc. It doesn't ring "conservative" to me. It doesn't mean that no conservative is a racist, but it does mean quite a few radical racists are really not conservative.
 




We've wandered pretty far off from the topic of "Why shouldn't capitalism begetter regulated"
 
weaver2 said:
We've wandered pretty far off from the topic of "Why shouldn't capitalism begetter regulated"
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It is closely related as sustained discrimination is a motivation frequently offered to legitimize governmental oversight, but also because racism is a common accusation levied against people who oppose regulations.
 
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