On poverty

The issue is indisputably real. I would abolish the privileges that legally force productive people onto the treadmill for the unearned profit of the privileged on the escalator. Why not let everyone rise or fall by their own choices and effort on one staircase that gives equal opportunity to all?

 

But what will be the shape of the distribution? The distributions of income and wealth are not normal, they are inverse exponential. International studies have found inverse exponential distributions of wealth and income in all countries, with the exponent ranging from 2 to 3. The only difference is in the exponent. A smaller exponent gives a more unequal distribution. The natural inverse exponential distribution seen in nature as a result of certain grinding and accretion processes has exponent e, the natural logarithm base (~2.7182. When a country's inverse exponential wealth or income distribution has an exponent smaller than e, as most do, it indicates that artificial intervention is making the distribution unnaturally unequal.

Right: the minimum wage is nothing but a distraction, a band-aid solution that will have minimal effect.

We can take steps to increase the exponent of the inverse exponential distribution, making it more equal.

 

Political pressure and keeping the government operating can force a President to do something unless they are just die hard ideologs who do not care about the country. Do you even know what is negotiation and bringing everyone together to get something done? Do you advocate the President shutdown the government every year until the Congress tosses their budget and passes his? You would have supported Trump doing this? For Clinton it was choice negotiate and work with the Republican Congress else not get reelected. His plan, increase taxes, didn't work. So he signed on to the Republican budgets with him not getting everything he wanted and the tax rate cuts worked and the economy took off. Back then they called it triangulating, to avoid "giving in".

 

What makes you think I want to go up YOUR staircase.

 

Like what and why? Why should you be able to earn as much as you want, why would I want someone to be inversing exponentials on my freedom of choice in a free market?

 

Like by reducing the legalized stealing by the privileged because it is unjust.

Because earning is just whereas legalized stealing is unjust.

I didn't say you would want it. Obviously, those who profit from injustice do not want justice. You profit personally from injustice, so you hate justice.

The fact that the exponent is less than e indicates it is not a free market. It is a privilege market, in which people's rights to liberty are owned, bought and sold by others -- i.e., a slave market.

 

I didn't claim that those who prefer injustice to justice -- evil to good -- are on the side of good. They are not. They are on the side of evil, and against good.

 

So, giving in equals 'caring about country', and sticking to one's guns does not?

In my book, it's the other way around.

 

I'm not talking about the endless array of 'reasons' that individuals have for making poor choices (how can we ever hope to address every reason of every individual - it's a nonsense to even discuss it as though it's doable thing), I'm simply reiterating the reality.

IE, careful choices when it comes to food and health are of paramount importance if you're poor. That's where the buck stops. People are perfectly free to take work with that reality, or against it. I'm not interested in forcing people to be 'good', I'm interested in honesty about where the buck stops.

FTR, I agree that those forces exist and can be very compelling. But at the end of the day we're fully functioning adults, and we have all the information needed - so we don't act in ignorance like small children. We make informed choices.

There's a terribly hubristic privilege in thinking we can choose to submit to those forces and survive, incidentally. That's an ugly First World habit, and is viewed very unkindly by people without such endless safety.

 

Actually they're struggling on the treadmill because they eat expensive junk food and don't stay fit.

 

Well, such a person is clearly evil.

 

We've had equal opportunity for years. That's why so many ambitious people from outside the First World want to migrate to our nations, obviously. They want the opportunities that they're quite prepared to make the most of.

 

You clearly do not understand. No offence intended but having been through it the crushing weight of debt and unpaid bills is all consuming.
Try to imagine living in a war zone with bullets flying around you and someone accusing you of not looking after your money and diet.
Hopefully you can, and we can discuss how that could be managed so we can both get what we want from this conversation.

 

Look, friend ... it's not me, and it's not 'accusing'. It's plain old reality showing those who mismanage their limited means, exactly where they went wrong. If you enter the lions den despite people (maybe people like me) saying "hey guy, that's a really bad idea because REALITY tells us that lions kill people", will you blame the lions, yourself, or the people who tried to warn you? .. as you bleed out.

Meantime it's a bit silly to go invoking extreme situations like a war, don't you think? The vast majority of people living in First World 'poverty' are not dodging bullets. They're living remarkably safe lives, in the scheme of things.

 

And what if you tripped and fell into the lions den and some people like you start talking about the most economical way to get out.
Doesn't matter who I blame, my interest is in escaping the lions and not the most economical way to do it. If there's a guy one side offering me a ladder for $50 and you the other shouting how I could build my own ladder for half that, guess where my focus is.

The solution is to keep the lions away from me so I have time to make the sensible decisions. Then if I still insist on the easy option you would have every right to refuse me the $50.

I felt my war time example was better as it offered more closer options and better reflected how it feels to be in debt with not enough money.

 

People who 'trip' are falling as a result of something they didn't put in their own path. It's these people we should focus our 'ladders' on. If we give all our ladders to the people who deliberately fall, then that first guy misses out - and the people who deliberately fall learn that they can do so with impunity, and some sucker will always come along and give them a ladder. That's a bastard act all around.

You're looking at symptoms, instead of cause. WHY is the person in debt? Is it because they kept making bad choices? Or were they forced by law or natural disaster to live so far beyond their means that debt was required?

 

There is a huge difference between unavoidable events that cause a stumbling block in life, and a self-imposed stumbling block. Those that make bad choices, and compound them, should not be an ongoing burden on society. Those that encounter the 'forces of nature' and need a temporary helping hand are the ones society should be helping. As a dear friend said to me, when I needed it the most is 'Stumbling block or building block, choose.'

One of the biggest issues in society in general is understanding the difference between need and want. A simple example is You (generic) need a phone, but you want the latest and greatest smart phone.

For background, and yes a personal anecdote, about 25 years ago, my spouse could not find work, the company I was working for was circling the bowl, we had just built a small house. We were living on a credit card for a year and ended up $30,000 in debt. We ate cream of chicken soup over rice 3-5 nights a week for dinner, sold everything we could, and eventually scraped enough together to pay down the credit card, and the spouse found work. We were about 2 months from filing personal bankruptcy. I made a vow that I would never be there again, and I've done without luxuries and fun toys to make sure that I wouldn't be there again.

I do not have a right to make your choices for you, nor you me. That also means I should not be punished/taxed to support your choices.

 

Excellent, Stage 1
We agree that people aren't perfect and can trip.
Can we also agree that some people trip accidentally in a way more sensible people might consider careless?

I assure you I am aware of the other group we have yet to discuss.

 

No, that's indisputably false as a matter of objective physical fact because even those who do not eat expensive junk food and do stay fit also struggle on the treadmill:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed

They are struggling on the treadmill because the privileged who are riding up at their leisure on the escalator are legally entitled to force working people onto the treadmill that powers it. The privileged force working people onto the treadmill because they do not want to expend the effort to walk up stairs by their own efforts.

 

Can you explain how employers are legally entitled to force working people onto the treadmill?
I think I know but want to be sure.

 

No, that is just another objectively false claim from you. When the privileged own the opportunities and everyone else must pay them full market value just for permission to access those opportunities, that is not equal opportunity.

No it isn't. The obvious reason ambitious people from less democratically accountable countries want to migrate to more democratically accountable countries is that more democratically accountable governments have to rescue the landless from enslavement by landowners or lose power. Your claims are just objectively false.

No, there's just as much opportunity in their own countries: in both cases, the opportunities are owned by the privileged, especially landowners. The difference is that the governments of their own countries legally entitle the privileged to enslave them, but unlike democratically accountable governments, make little or no attempt to rescue them from that enslavement.

 

Who said anything about employers? I'm talking about the privileged, while you, by contrast, are just makin' $#!+ up.

 

No one has suggested addressing every reason people make poor choices. We are talking about the specific institutional conditions that unjustly force people into disadvantageous situations that make it harder for them to make good choices. You just have to contrive some pretext on which to evade that fact.

No you aren't. I am, and I will thank you to remember it.

Which is why our institutions should not be forcing them into disadvantageous situations where those choices are more likely to be bad.

Already comprehensively and conclusively refuted. The buck stops at the institutional arrangements we force on people.

They are not perfectly free, as I have proved to you many times and you always just ignore. Their rights to liberty have been forcibly stripped from them and given to the privileged as their private property.

No you aren't. You are only interested in disingenuously exculpating the evil by blaming their victims.

No you don't. If you did, you would not always blame the victims by pretending those forces do not exist and are not compelling.

Except those whose mental functions are impaired by forcing them into disadvantageous conditions that make it harder for them to make good choices.

No, we have much more information than needed, and much of it is false and designed to get people to make bad choices by misinforming those choices. That is very much part of the problem.

Then it is time they devoted some thought to how to rein in their own privileged elites.

 

You said workers, so unless these are self employed people then you must be referring to employers.

 

No your not I am and I will thank you to remember it.

This is fun.