Posted on 12/06/2012 8:49:30 AM PST by Ohioan
The answer depends on whether we can resolve questions of purpose, priority & tactics, with far more clarity than we have in the last twenty-one years. Politics have always been about winning & the art of the possible; but to the true Conservative (which in the American context has always involved a major libertarian component), "winning" means preservation of a Constitutional heritage, never merely electing people with a particular label, nor those primarily identified with a single cause or the demands of any special interest. Winning is about preserving the multi-generational purpose & pursuits of a particular people--the mainstream Americans.
(Excerpt) Read more at truthbasedlogic.com ...
Depriving people of wages you think they’ve earned, but which have not been agreed upon, is not class warfare. Working for them is voluntary. You don’t like your wages, hightail it.
I don’t see that sentence excepting upper class failure.
Who says they don’t want to stop redistribution to Wall Street?
Slavery and sexism, seriously? You’re really stretching. Couldn’t come up with another out of left field slam against corporate welfare, or did you accidentally cut and paste a high school history textbook into that last paragraph?
I was in a rush to go grab some (free) lunch
Yes, you may assume that.
Yes, we have a nice form of 21st century feudalism going on here.
Of course they've earned more because workers' productivity has shot through the roof yet there has been no accompanying increases in their wages. Until the late 1970s wages and productivity moved along nicely together. If a good portion of that increased productivity isn't accruing to the one doing the producing who is it accruing to? (that's a rhetorical question, I already know the answer and so should you)
Which leads to a concentration of wealth and capital that is unhealthy for the economy. Right now we are stuck in a feedback loop of people not having enough disposable cash to purchase items which in turn causes businesses to slow down and look for ways to cut costs, normally in the form of cutting workers, which leads to people having less disposable cash, etc.
Going back to Clinton-era tax rates will not kill the economy or send us careening down the pathway towards your socialism bugaboo anymore then it lead to those things during the 1990s.
Since the Republicans don't want to do anything to curb Wall Street excesses, and in fact want change rules in order to give Wall Street the leeway to create even more havoc for the rest of the world, it's abundantly clear the Republicans are not interested.
Nice article. My solution is if you are on the government dole you don’t get to vote. In the interest of fairness to those that lose a job exclude unemployment up to a certain amount.
Letting the market determine what people receive for any given work is hardly a form of feudalism. It is the exact opposite. In the feudal period people did indeed have to work under whatever conditions were provided from above. Everything was from the top down. The aristocrats were under the will of the King, as their feudal over-lord; serfs were under the aristocrats. It was all premised on the idea that the King was annointed by God, etc.. It was this idea that Jefferson challenged in the preamble to our Declaration of Independence, in setting up a compact theory of Government.
But you also misunderstand the economics of so-called productivity gains. Much of those gains are from the increased use of ever more efficient equipment. The cost of utilizing those productivity gains involves both the physical labor, the cost of the equipment, the cost of the supervision of the meshing of the right equipment with the right labor, and the entrepreneurial cost of putting together the financing, etc., to bring the factors of production together in a working package.
Demagoguing the issues by focusing on only one factor of production, may suit Obama or your ideas of "fairness." It does not reflect economic reality.
William Flax
Of course, we should be careful, not to exclude someone who has been a responsible citizen, merely because of a temporary glitch. There are, on the other hand, those who make dependency a substitute for a life's work.
Look....here...is where what we deal with everyday ..today started....this stuff all started 100 years ago in 1912 with Teddy Roosevelt....and the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party
The Committee of 48 traces its roots to January 1919, when a gathering of individuals interested in public affairs gathered in New York City. Those so assembled decided that a formal organization should be sponsored and decided to issue a call for a National Conference. The name “Committee of 48” was chosen as a reflection of the desire to form a national organization bringing together interested representatives of each of the nation’s 48 states.
“La Follette’s Progressive Party, founded in 1924, was the out-growth of the progressive activism of the Committee of Forty-Eight, a political action group formed in 1919, and the Conference for Progressive Political Action. The new Progressive Party was a coalition of organized labor, farm groups, Socialists, and independent radicals, all of whom were dissatisfied with the two mainstream parties,..”
http://www.enotes.com/1920-government-politics-american-decades/national-politics-progressive-party
The Left has been chasing this 100 YEARS!!!
Point being...Conservatives are so little interested in Gov’mt that by nature they default the argument to those for whom it is a religion....and consequently the Church of Progressivism just re-elected its Pope, Barry Obama, this past November
Bill Buckley was “organized conservatism” in the last half of the 20th century.If it was not for his intellectual foundations, his cognitive efforts...and his independent wealth that allowed him these pursuits, the Progressives would have won the war 25 years earlier, right after dethroning Nixon.
Today there simply is not a grass roots conservative organization comparable to what the Progressives laid down 100 years ago. The closest to it is the Tea Party..which is being strangled in the cradle right as we speak.
What CAN be achieved, easily, and locally, by Tea Party minded individuals, are straight, clean elections. In a country largely “right-of-center” ...leftist government is not in power honestly. Rush was going on yesterday, citing poll after poll, showing how even those supposedly voting Obama in don’t even support his positions, making the very corruption alluded to even more of a probability.
That presumptive corruption is the lever, the only lever, We the People retain. Truth will always out when the spotlight is shown upon the deeds.
I could cite a bunch of other, further Left movements, active in the same era, who have led to a more serious role in producing the present Obamination.
But that would get me off of the immediate point; which is to produce a better understanding of how to argue the issues, we must now deal with.
You want to concentrate on local elections. Fine! You still need to better hone the way we argue at any election. That is what this thread is about. Better ways to focus the public on the real issues.
William Flax
While that sounds good on paper it does not match reality. There currently is no free labor market. All the power resides on the side of the "job creators." Now when the labor side of the market did have more power, back when unions were stronger, wages had no problem keeping up over time because workers were able to negotiate as a group and as everyone knows a bundle of sticks is stronger than just one stick. With the successful near-complete destruction of private-sector unions workers are forced to negotiate individually with organized capital and when that happens the individual has to take what is offered or they are $@!% out of luck. Which gives us, functionally, a quasi-feudal marketplace. You don't need aristocracy to have feudalism, all you need is for the owners of capital to have all the power. Which there is no denying they do.
But you also misunderstand the economics of so-called productivity gains. Much of those gains are from the increased use of ever more efficient equipment. The cost of utilizing those productivity gains involves both the physical labor, the cost of the equipment, the cost of the supervision of the meshing of the right equipment with the right labor, and the entrepreneurial cost of putting together the financing, etc., to bring the factors of production together in a working package.
Was there no labor-efficiency technologies before the late 1970s? Of course there was and yet wages still remained joined to productivity gains. Why? I think I know why but I'd like to read your answer. Besides if one worker can now produce the output of two or more workers why shouldn't why shouldn't he get monetarily rewarded for his increased output? Job creators do not have a divine right to keep all the productivity gains to themselves.
Demagoguing the issues by focusing on only one factor of production, may suit Obama or your ideas of "fairness." It does not reflect economic reality.
Accurately recounting reality is not "demagoguery."
Other than that, I will rest on my previous discussion.
You are simply making a verbal argument, which does not involve any indication that you understand the dynamic interaction of the factors of production. Concentrating on the demand for one of the factors, without fully understanding the function of the others, is never going to lead to understanding.
William Flax
I will keep checking back for your non-verbal argument that actually addresses the items I've brought up with something other than hand-waving.
Let me also add that “freedom” without the ability to say “none of the above” really isn’t freedom.
And before you try to tell me that workers are free to say “none of the above” let me know how you expect them feed their families with no work while they try to negotiate a wage they can live on.
Clinton era tax rates?
we could wish that were so
they will be much higher and more numerous than when Clinton was President
ObamaCare taxes for one thing
Solyndra and all those green subsidies are corporate subsidies that needed to be ended. I would support the end of all spending on anything but core constitutional government functions.
patently ridiculous. They are fleeing to China because they all the power? They are facing the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world because they all the power? They are being regulated out of business in some cases "war on coal" because they all the power?
Question, what is the tax rate paid by unions?
They are free to sell their considerable skills and irrepaceable talents to the highest bidder. They are free to launch their own enterprise and pay themselves anything they like.
Question, are you always this retarded?
Your position...that the soapbox is where we need to go to win elections is well taken. Clearly the need to evangelize the message of Freedom and Liberty to the non-white fraction of the USA is critical.
However...as long as hundreds of precincts now appear to be able to manufacture 100+ (D) votes with impunity..in a nation still putatively “right-of-center”..the “war” is clearly at the level of ballot box fraud. And refusing to engage it there..and prevail..leaves little alternative other than the cartridge box.
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