I thought I might suggest a few premmisess and clear up a few things to keep the discussion progressing.


1. any economic system is redistributing wealth/ fruits of labour.

this is intrinsic to any system, and is one of the reasons why there is no perfect system.

An example;
our current system with fiat currencies is redistributing money from everywhere to society to the rich. the argument for this is simple; if the currency is fixed, the natural change in prizes is that everything becomes cheaper. but still we have inflation. why do we have inflation? simple, money supply is increasing. Now, inflation does not occur at the moment the money is printed, rather later on. so the people in the buisnesses that work with "new" money, will get the profit, because they get to use the money, before the inflation of the money they use occur.

just imagine a real estate broker. he will help someone sell a shopping mall. lets say the real value of the mall is 15 million USD, if there where no expected inflation, or prize increase. But because there is inflation the value will be, lets say, about 18 million (this means that investing 18 million in the shopping mall will have the same expected payout as investing 18 million anywhere else). so the buyers lend 19 million, and pay the broker 1 million, for broking the deal (5% commision, many take up to 20 %).

they can all do this, because the money they will be paying back in a few years will be less worth. and they will probably be able to sell it for like 23 million in 5-10 years. so combined the broker and the buyer have made 5 million in profit from inflation alone. and who pays for it? the middle class, who have to fight every year for wage increase to pay for rising costs, because of extra money. While they should have been able to just keep their salary while prizes goes down. and the kicker is; the wage increase they get to compansate for inflation is always lagging by at least 6 months, this means that they will be staticly underpaid by about 0.7- 2 %.



2. it is fundamentally wrong to label any policy that is to the left of the current as socialistic, any that are the same as current as centrist, and any to the right as conservative/captialistic/free marked.

in fact, this is the thing I dislike the most about political discussions in USA. there is for example a fundamental difference between social democracy, and socialism. socialism is based on ideas like , "work what you can, get what you need" and "every person has equal value, and should therefor get the same". while the modern social democratic idea is based upon an idea about a competativeness. the idea here is often that if you supply free high quality, good education, a social welfare system, and free public health. the society as a whole will be healthier, and you will get a big and strong, highly educated middle class. and the middle class is perhaps the most productive of the classes in society, because every rich person require many people working for him, and he relies on their productivity.

this may have been my biggest wall of text yet :D

Finally my very own 100+ thread! Thanks everyone for your contributions... I really thought somebody would call me out for trying this but no one did.

Hope everyone has a good weekend,
Veta


P.S. Anyone that actually thinks arguing politics online is a good idea fails to realize how abundant logical fallacies are and as a consequence how much more abundant they are on the Internet. Anyone can strawman, ad hominem, or even simply ignore your points. There's no point arguing politics with someone committed to their beliefs in real life and it's even more so true on the Internet where both parties can find evidence for anything they want with a simple google search. But anyway, good post Kreuz.

i 100% knew that once it hit 100, my man was gonna be like hah thanks for letting me tool y'all into my own 100 thread

really, i did :)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this wasn't my thread Jesse. But thanks for playing!

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/12/09/billionaires-agree-away-fortunes/?test=latestnews

Thought I'd throw a FoxNews article in the mix.... : D

These are the "greedy", "selfish" people that are rich in the world. That group is 50 strong now and their money will go to worth-while charities.

Old news, but the irony of Thraxle posting this is that he forgot to mention that every single one of these billionaires votes Democrat. Google it if you don't believe me. Not a single conservative is on that list.. and there's a reason for that: Republicans are generally selfish, Democrats are more altruistic.

id have to say that chloe > veta after reading everything from this thread.

Well I haven't seen the whole list, but the people named in that article are all historically democrat voters, including Carl Icahn, although my understanding is he was for Hillary instead of Obama and has been critical of Obama.

thanks Monte for summarising this thread, now I don't have to read it all (or maybe just a few points that Chloe made)

Not everyone on that list is a democrat. And besides, these people are making so the government WON'T SEE THEIR TAX MONEY. It will be a write off as a charitable contribution. These people find loopholes in the tax code anyways, so the government doesn't really see the cash anyhow.

A consumption tax would be nice, but the poor would bitch about that too, even though it would force the rich to pay whatever share of taxes they wish to purchase.

Anyways, I'll go through the list person by person if you like, but I already saw a name or two that I know isn't democrat just from past readings.