Characterize Republicans/Democrats (1 Viewer)

[Adam Caramon]

I apologize if I disrespected you in an attempt to set the record straight, especially when I feel that they (the Democrats) are not heroic in their attempt to redistribute wealth ... especially since they are announcing to do it on a global scale.

No apology needed, I didn't feel disrespected, just wanted to explain why I thought it was an apt analogy.

If your opinion is that tyranny is good and wish to propel the notion of a twisted story and elevate the looters of productive people to heroic status, then that too, is your opinion and I hope that you come out for the better when it happens - even though history has told us that noone except for the elite few make out and the rest suffer as noted in the stories past down to us.

I hereby award you the longest run-on sentence in the world trophy .

On this subject I am pretty far outside of mainstream thought:

Wealth is represented by pieces of paper in our society. People will do things for you if you give them some of your pieces of paper. If you have enough pieces of paper, you never have to work a day in your life. You can live in a life of luxury, simply because you have a lot of pieces of paper.

The number of pieces of paper you have is largely determined by how many your parents had. If your parents had a lot of pieces of paper, you have a significant edge over other children who's parents didn't have as many pieces of paper. You will be more likely to succeed in life, and thus obtain more pieces of paper than others.

This system works great, assuming you're one of the people with a lot of pieces of paper. However, if you do not have a lot of pieces of paper, you start to wonder why someone, based soley on birth, is entitled to live a better life than someone who doesn't.

There's a big difference between "taking back" and "taking from anybody who has more than I do".

That's true, but it is all a matter of scope. History is full of people taking things from other people. After enough time is passed, they feel that they then own whatever it was they took. Most wealthy families, where money is handed down generation after generation, took from people (exploited them) along the way to obtain their fortunes.

 

[MSAccessRookie]

One of the differences between Republicans and Democrats can be seen in this post made by an AWF member in 2004.

http://www.access-programmers.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=53847&page=80

 

[dkinley]

Woot! Finally won something! I'd like to thank the academy and am glad to see public education is working!

Wealth is represented by pieces of paper in our society.

How very .... Douglas Adams-esque.

But what do those pieces of paper mean? Where does those pieces of paper come from? I would defer to the Franciso d'Anconia character's speech about money to make my argument ... and to make the argument of those born rich verses those who are not.

There are plenty of people we can hold up in our history who started with nothing but became extremely wealthy and vice versa. Does having money mean you die with money? Certainly not ... there are no guarentees.

History is full of people taking things from other people ... it is usually called robbery or war ... but does that make it right? By what right does another person have to take something from someone else? Does might make right?

Does the system work great? I like the papers written analyzing this aspect of the business owner verses the worker. Is the worker exploited or the owner? Using the American automobile industry as an example, someone took an idea and established a business. How many people benefited from that business? How many people provided for their families and their retirements from that business? The numbers show that there is more exploitation by the worker than an owner. In my opinion, the owner earned it.

When so many had benefited and thought they were being exploited, they sought to take over the business. If the workers truly, without error, felt they were being exploited - why didn't they quit and start their own company and let free enterprise put their previous boss out of business? We see what the final result was and still is ... it has dipped into everyone's wallet ....

I am not claiming that some people have been downrighted exploited in history but what may be seen as an exploitation on the surface could be an extreme benefit after final analysis. I urge you to read some Nathaniel Branden to get another take on some ideas ....

In the hiring situations I have been in, which is the norm, businesses never came asking me to work for them - but I made a choice and asked them for a job.

-dK

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I will clarify just a little bit on one comment.

When I said that saved money does nobody any good once the amount saved gets big enough, I meant this: Unless you are allowing the saved money to act as a ballast for a bank's loans, keeping large amounts of money out of circulation does nobody any good.

When money was backed by gold or silver (which ended in the USA some time before 1950, I think) then paper money was worth something. The problem that caused us to deviate from a gold standard was that you could not print money unless you could back it up with something material. When the country grew big enough, the USA starved itself for money. We had to keep on passing laws to change the backing ratio because the economy had grown too large.

Look at it this way... money represented gold. So let's take paper money out of the picture and return to gold coinage. When you work you want to get paid. But if all the gold coinage is already in circulation and your employer happens to not have any of it, you cannot get paid. So if you didn't have paper money, you would have an I.O.U. note... written on paper, and there you go to paper money anyway.

Now money is a symbol on paper representing work. The problem comes in when the government prints money NOT backed up by the work of those who earned it. To me, the money supply should not be allowed to grow larger than the GNP or GDP. But again, we run into the issue of needing more money than is in circulation.

Credit cards actually are helpful here as long as the card issuer doesn't go nuts and demand too high a fee. Credit cards are actually a way to make temporary money (in economics terms).

Here again, republicans and democrats have different ideas on how best to manage this issue. Democrats want to go on credit more. (And maybe repudiate some debts now and then.) Republicans (used to) prefer to stay within the cash we had. The modern problem is the insidiousness of spending. It's SO much fun to spend money that you don't have when you don't personally have to pay for it later, and that is where the US Congress takes us. I'll lay odds that our friends on the eastern side of the pond see similar situations with the UK government.

 

[Rabbie]

Surely money is just a way of making barter work when there isn't a direct swap between two parties. The main advantage of using gold for coinage is that it prevents governments from producing too much money at any one time. Paper money is always able to be over produced

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Rabbie, you are quite right: Paper money is just an accounting tool to keep track of trade balances of different objects and object types. How DO you reconcile the values of food vs. electronics when that is what countries exchange with each other? Answer: Assign monetary values to each commodity.

But the catch is the rate of exchange between two countries - since USA paper money is not legal tender in, say, India, whereas the rupee is not legal tender here in the USA, you run into the susceptibility of the method to manipulate money. The People's Republic of China tried to do that several months ago, artificially maintaining a value for their money that did not represent the relative labor values. The variability of rates of exchange add yet another factor to the mix.