A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:Why, you Marxist/Leninist, you!
Originally posted by second:Quote:I'll give you some examples of real Capitalism in action. The first is from a news story this week:
Originally posted by SignyM:
It's so annoying when people use terms they don't understand and couldn't define if challenged: Nazi, fascism, democracy, liberal, freedom, man, woman, racism ... capitalism...
Words don't mean whatever you "want" them to mean. Unless there are commonly accepted definitions, communication is impossible.
Your examples of "real" capitalism lack the one thing that makes capitalism work better than feudalism or socialism (at least in theory): competition. Bc your "real" capitalists have done all they can to eliminate the competition as much as possible.
Some of them produce nothing of value, like Buffet (who got wealthy simply by buying stuff) and Gates (ditto. Gates BTW started out with a million dollars and his mom's contacts into IBM).
They could be variously described as monopolists and/or financialists, and - since our government bends over backwards to promote these monopolists, our entire system might be described as fascist or oligarchy, but "capitalism" isn't the word to use.
Two cases of Predatory Capitalism, but unless some external force intervenes, all Capitalism becomes Predatory.
You have just removed all justification for capitalism. And libertarianism, BTW.
I've posted... many times... that money and power behave gravitationally (that is,the more they accumulate the more they accumulate). There's no such thing as "trickle down" or "market forces" leading to a happy ending for most people.
Thank you for providing stellar examples.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
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Quote:Capitalism is no different than electricity: useful and dangerous. Double A batteries are useful and hardly at all dangerous, unless you swallow the battery. But as the voltage increases, electricity gets more dangerous in the hands of fools. I know one person that was partially blinded by a 12 volt car battery. I know a guy who died because he bypassed a safety interlock on 120 volts. He habitually bypassed and eventually his risky behavior killed him. Now there are power lines operating at over a million volts. Those certainly should not be operated by fools. What is the connection to Capitalism? Some very high tech, very high voltage Capitalistic systems have been built, but the safety interlocks are being bypassed by fools. People are being blinded or even killed by Capitalism. It should not be happening, but it is. People who imagine themselves to be Capitalists, but are really only enormous fools, should not be operating the machinery of Capitalism while they are drunk with delusions of power or under the influence of myths about their competence to handle dangerous technology.
Originally posted by SignyM:
Why, you Marxist/Leninist, you!
You have just removed all justification for capitalism. And libertarianism, BTW.
I've posted... many times... that money and power behave gravitationally (that is,the more they accumulate the more they accumulate). There's no such thing as "trickle down" or "market forces" leading to a happy ending for most people.
Thank you for providing stellar examples.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Since we're talking about free money, Joe* is about to give a bunch of college loans away.
Maybe you get that youth back that is pissed off at all of your lies so far, but you're going to lose even more of the blacks and Mexicans than you've already lost, as well as everyone who paid off their college loans.
This is a tax break for the most upwardly mobile white youth in the country.
Now inflation is going up even higher to pay for this.
And if you thought college was expensive before, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Democrats are cancer.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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Quote:If Biden forgives all college loans to people who already graduated, what does he do for people who are still in college? Their loans don't get forgiven? How about people who are still in high school? Will their loans be forgiven when they go to college? If Biden cancels a few loans, he needs a program that pays for all college for everyone, forever. Biden won't be going to that place where education is free for everyone. It is as politically crazy as giving every descendant of slaves 40 acres and a mule as compensation for slavery. What Biden should be talking about, rather than cancelling loans, is:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Since we're talking about free money, Joe* is about to give a bunch of college loans away.
Maybe you get that youth back that is pissed off at all of your lies so far, but you're going to lose even more of the blacks and Mexicans than you've already lost, as well as everyone who paid off their college loans.
This is a tax break for the most upwardly mobile white youth in the country.
Now inflation is going up even higher to pay for this.
And if you thought college was expensive before, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Democrats are cancer.
“For years Republicans told us that they opposed abortion, and many people, frankly, did not believe them. But then the Supreme Court overturned Roe, and now Republicans are outlawing abortion even when a woman’s life is at risk, or when a child has been raped. They are prosecuting women and doctors.
For years senior Republicans have been telling us they want to cut, privatize, or eliminate Social Security. We should believe them. This is not a joke.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:You're misusing the term capitalism again. Capitalism, like all systems, evolve. What starts out as capitalism turns into something else. Monopolism. Imperialism. Financialism. Fascism. Not capitalism.
Originally posted by SignyM:
Why, you Marxist/Leninist, you!
You have just removed all justification for capitalism. And libertarianism, BTW.
I've posted... many times... that money and power behave gravitationally (that is,the more they accumulate the more they accumulate). There's no such thing as "trickle down" or "market forces" leading to a happy ending for most people.
Thank you for providing stellar examples
SECOND: Capitalism is no different than electricity:
If "capitalism" stayed at the level of small businesses competing against each other there would be no need to guard against it.
Unlike "capitalism", which is a self-evolving complex system, electricity doesn't evolve (altho its technical uses do). That's a really bad analogy. Even voltage is static (pardon the pun) characteristic.
Whatever capitalism evolves into, its most negative characteristic is NOT the concentration of wealth, because that can be imitigated by redistribution. The most pernicious and damaging economic effects have to do with the loss of resiliency and ruggedness, the most damaging political effect is the loss of agency by the many and the concentration of power/influence in the hands of the few, the most damaging social effect is progressive atomization, and the most damaging environmental effect is rampant consumerism.
Taxes are not the answer.
Here lies a fallen god.
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal
A narrow and a tall one
BTW, MOST human "isms" seem to behave gravitationally and concentrate/integrate, borg-like. Feudalism evolves from chiefdoms to lords to kings. Kingdoms to empires. Mercantilists to monopolies. Money-lenders to globalist financiers. Local newspapers to social media. And at some point, either social inequity or environmental catastrophe steps in and it ll comes crashing down.
That's not Marx, that's me. The problem of greater integration is a slippier problem to define and guard against, especially since it also has apparent benefits at the same time. I think if we were to disentangle the benefits related to technology ... which allows for greater production with less work through the greater use of energy sources outside of human labor ... the apparent benefits of concentration/integration might disappear, or at least diminish considerably.
Well, that's an interesting line of thought to pursue.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
If "capitalism" stayed at the level of small businesses competing against each other there would be no need to guard against it.
THIS.
And if our Government did ONE OF THE FEW JOBS IT WAS SUPPOSED TO DO which is to shut down monopolies, we wouldn't be in the situation we are in now.
But it's too busy making sure there are gender neutral toy aisles in WalMart and that white males faces are stomped into the ground every day until their backs break and they live with their face at the right height to kiss the jackboots.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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I suppse back in the days of feudalism we actually had a more divided government. The military (knights) were under control of lords who controlled the land, the Church controlled "the media' (they controlled history, morality and how the natural and spiritual world were viewed) and merchants (such as the merchant-princes of Venice) and money-lenders controlled coin. It wsan't entirely separate: the Church had a fair bit of wealth and the Knights Templar actually did the precursor to international banking since they protected wealthy pilgrims (and their money) during their trips to the Holy Land (long story*). Even so, there was a pretty significant division of power.
But today, everything - the military-industrial complex, the government, the media, morality and our view of society - is all controlled by money. At least, in the west.
One legitimate function of government COULD be to limit the growth of monopolies/ oligopolies but once money owns government, the media and the church it's like snowball rolling downhill.
* Instead of taking their portable wealth with them, pilgrims would take scrip with them, issued by the Knights Templar and based on their at-home wealth, and the Knights would extend credit to the pilgrims and deduct it from their scrip. Of course, they would take a cut, and they got pretty wealthy, until one of the French kings rounded up most of the Knights, stole their wealth and had them put to death. On Fiday 13th, no less. https://worldhistory.us/medieval-history/the-destruction-of-the-knight
s-templar-the-guilty-french-king-and-the-scapegoat-pope.php
There were, they say, a considerable number of Knights who escaped with their wealth, and finding that treasure has occupied movies including the da Vinci Code and National Treasure. But the story that makes most sense to me is that the remaining Knights took their treasure to Switzerland and transformed that region from primitive goat-herding into banking.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
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Funding the tax police is very good
Republicans need to stop coddling criminals
By Matthew Yglesias
In April of 2021, I argued that boosting IRS funding would have two major benefits: it would more than pay for itself through increased tax revenue, allowing the government to do useful things without raising tax rates, and it would allow the IRS to invest in customer service, better serving the average taxpayer. https://www.slowboring.com/p/irs-budget
Now that this funding increase has come to pass as part the Inflation Reduction Act, Republicans have made it the focus of their complaints about the law.
And I think it’s worth diving into because on the merits, this is probably their least valid complaint, but by the polling, it’s their politically strongest argument. If you think that spending a few hundred billion subsidizing zero-carbon energy production is a bad idea, then that’s fine. But the government collecting the tax revenue it’s owed is unambiguously good, and the Republican Party’s opposition to it is telling and disturbing.
After all, they wrote a tax reform bill in 2017, and even though their bill cut taxes on net, it did raise a bunch of revenue (most famously from curbing the SALT deduction) to partially offset the cost of the tax cut. The GOP could have increased tax enforcement as another offset, and instead of letting Democrats spend the revenue, they could have used it to make the cuts in the Trump tax bill even bigger.
But they didn’t. Because separate from the party’s overall view on the desirable level of taxation, they’ve developed a peculiar soft spot for tax cheats.
Don’t be like Italy
Because taxes are levied on broad macroeconomic categories, it’s possible to predict, in a top-down kind of way, how much taxes should theoretically be coming in. And in every country I’ve seen data for, actual revenue received is less than this top-down analysis predicts.
A lot of that is fairly banal — people getting paid in cash transactions that aren’t recorded or reported — but most of it stems from the complexities of small business taxation.
The good news, as this Tax Foundation report shows, is that the American tax gap is on the lower side.
https://taxfoundation.org/tax-gap/
I think Republican Party elected officials and their non-specialist allies in the conservative movement are underrating how bad it would be for the United States to migrate closer to the top of that list. The countries with huge tax gaps are not dynamic, business-friendly free market societies — they tend to be stuck in a dysfunctional paradigm in which businesses struggle to grow or adopt professionalized management because so much money hinges on their ability to keep two different sets of books. Italy and Greece are dominated by small, closely held businesses with family-centric management that are reaping huge economic gains by cheating on their taxes. Even the best-run of those companies tend not to expand or professionalize because to do so successfully, they’d have to actually pay what they owe.
If you believe that taxes should be low, the goal is to be like Ireland or New Zealand, where taxes are low but compliance is very high. Or you could be like Denmark, where tax compliance is very high and the taxes are high. But you don’t want to be like Italy where everyone is cheating on their taxes. As I wrote in “What’s Not Wrong With Italy,” there’s actually a bunch of good stuff happening in Italian public policy. But it’s swamped by this trap of bad government and small, badly managed companies.
On another recent trip to visit my in-laws in the Texas Hill Country, I met a lawyer from Dallas. He was there vacationing with his family at his country house, or at least that is what we in the northeast call a second home owned by a rich person and used as a family vacation destination. He called it his “ranch” because he keeps cattle on the property, not so much to make money but so as to create a situation in which a lot of the money spent on the upkeep of the property can count as bu
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Looks like now the insane and mentally challenged ultra-Leftists aren't just swatting online personalities they don't like and they're targeting politicians.
Hopefully now legislation is introduced that makes such behavior a mandatory life sentence in prison for attempted murder.
That will stop this behavior immediately.
Make it retroactive and throw every single one of them who did it in a cell and throw away the key and we wouldn't even have to wait for the next eventual brain damaged Lefty to do it again.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Funding the tax police is very good
No it's not.
Fuck your gaslighting.
No worries though. Once Trump's back in office the IRS is getting gutted.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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