And the comedy just keeps on coming.

far inferior to cooperation in getting the kind of life a person can take pleasure and pride in living.

you are objectifying the definition of pleasure and pride when the two are very much subjective experiences.

my experience in keeping most of what I'VE EARNED gives me a feelings of pleasure (utilizing the resources I've earned) and pride (knowing the efforts of my labor have paid off).

your pleasure may be giving half of what you've earned to those that have less than you. but perhaps the recipients of your earnings will not take pride in what you and your compelled neighbor are granting them. maybe there is an element of shame experienced by the recipient, who realizes they did not earn the resources and therefor cannot experience pride in having them.

and maybe your sense of pride is rooted in feelings of superiority you feel each time you stoop to help the less fortunate.

Are Brazilians racist? Better believe it. I was told it straight up by the Brazilian Ambassador (not to the USA) who is a conservative white guy. It also fits with everything I have learned about Brazil over 50 years, except that for a while in the 90s and 00s they actually tried to provide comparable education for the poor black Brazilians in the Northeast.

Here's something ironic

While democratic socialist Bernie Sanders was warning his flock about the dangers of the ruling 1% he was busy joining their ranks for the second year in a row:


https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/06/bernie- ... rcent.html


What about full disclosures of Bernie's tax returns? While most of the 2106 presidential candidates were busy disclosing as much tax history as possible, Bernie was noticeably lagging behind because, according to him, "my wife does my taxes"


https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-mete ... ns-compar/


Bernie's wife is not a tax professional. As of 2107, Jane Sanders is being investigated for bank fraud in relation to Burlington College.


But let's all be concerned with the elite men like Bernie warn us about.

ant wrote:

far inferior to cooperation in getting the kind of life a person can take pleasure and pride in living.

you are objectifying the definition of pleasure and pride when the two are very much subjective experiences.

my experience in keeping most of what I'VE EARNED gives me a feelings of pleasure (utilizing the resources I've earned) and pride (knowing the efforts of my labor have paid off).

You mistake my meaning, Ant. Fair enough, since I didn't spell it out. I am an economist as well as a liberal Christian, and I was referring to cooperation as the general overall process of people working together through exchange, rather than brawling for a slightly larger share of a fixed pie of resources. The pie is much, much bigger than it used to be, because people learned to create value through cooperation.

Domination, by contrast, has a very bad track record. Putin and his ilk get our attention by seizing control of, say, oil resources, but with few exceptions, such resources have generated internal conflict that holds a country back rather than making it grow. Few countries have done a good enough job of using their oil money for, say, education, to offset the damage done by the conflict. Far better to have an economy that depends on many, many people's motivated efforts, like, say, Korea's, than one that depends on oil.

ant wrote:your pleasure may be giving half of what you've earned to those that have less than you. but perhaps the recipients of your earnings will not take pride in what you and your compelled neighbor are granting them. maybe there is an element of shame experienced by the recipient, who realizes they did not earn the resources and therefor cannot experience pride in having them.

and maybe your sense of pride is rooted in feelings of superiority you feel each time you stoop to help the less fortunate.

My students rather like the way I help them. They don't feel insulted at all. Helping doesn't need to be humiliating.

I take your point, here, and have always thought it was properly debatable to what extent the government should provide assistance for the indigent. I think the right wing portrayal of that process has been just as distorted as the typical left wing version, but the evidence is actually quite ambiguous to what extent assistance really helps the long-term dependent. Of course, most recipients of "welfare" are not long-term dependent. Even before welfare reform, half to three-quarters of recipients, at any given moment, would be off the program in two years.

I completely agree that giving people competence and job experience is far better for their pride and long-term well-being than giving them the equivalent in "free money." I think if we elected a Bernie Sanders liberal we would have so much commitment to that goal that the rolls of indigent would drop by half in 10 years. That is hunch, not evidence-based, but I am making an educated guess.

As for your feelings of pleasure, you are, obviously, entitled to feel how you want about the system you engage with, as long as you are understanding it correctly. (I'm not saying you don't, only that people are not entitled to make stuff up, Dear Leader style, just because they prefer to.) I did not mean to imply that people will be happier in a liberal system with more welfare support (although actually I do think, on average, non-recipients will be happier - a long discussion if you want to take it up.) What I was asserting is that the foolish focus on win-lose ideology, in which people assume that, e.g. providing Medicare benefits means money out of the pockets of someone more deserving, is wrong-headed entirely on pragmatic grounds. We are all better off in a society in which people are healthier, less stressed, better educated and more trusting. The benefits in capacity far outweigh the burden imposed on folks like you who are less happy if they are being forced to help others out.

That's why public education, America's great contribution to the world, was such a success.

.
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Move over, Hondurans; Brazilians are lining up behind you, and don't forget the Venezuelans.

ant wrote: Bernie's wife is not a tax professional. As of 2107, Jane Sanders is being investigated for bank fraud in relation to Burlington College.

Looks like a nothing-burger to me. A Trump operative in Vermont claimed it was bank fraud that Jane Sanders used pledges to the college to secure a loan for a building, and not all of the pledges came through. No one alleges that she misrepresented them as contractual obligations, or otherwise distorted the facts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pow ... 62f3adc71e

Choosing a family member to calculate your top 1% "elite" finances/taxes for your public servant life is not my idea of a good look, or a wise decision.
He's free to make that choice, but it's a utterly stupid choice when you're in the arena of high scrutiny and transparency.

Also, poisoning the well does not invalidate the allegations. The matter has been deemed investigative worthy and has yet to play out. Again, it's not a good look

I was referring to cooperation as the general overall process of people working together through exchange, rather than brawling for a slightly larger share of a fixed pie of resources. The pie is much, much bigger than it used to be, because people learned to create value through cooperation.

Fine. But your points of a "general overall process" are abstractions that do not match or align with anything real. It is a generalization and nothing more. Some cooperation works, of course. Cooperation forced does not. A smaller Scandinavian model of "cooperation" is not a "one size fits all" model for, say, a country as large and multicultural as the United States, for multiple reasons.

Personally, I experience more meaningful value when I am free to allocate any extra resources in whatever manner I choose.

Domination, by contrast, has a very bad track record. Putin and his ilk get our attention by seizing control of, say, oil resources, but with few exceptions,

Not sure why you've chosen to select a very extreme example of resource domination. I don't think it's really necessary here.

My students rather like the way I help them. They don't feel insulted at all. Helping doesn't need to be humiliating.

I think that's great, but this really is a bad example. If anything, it would actually bolster more of my position: In essence, you are teaching your students to "fish", rather than make them dependent on your fishing skills. But we agree on this point, I think.

The father of the immigrant family my uncle sponsored told him that although he always appreciated my uncle's financial help, he was very happy when he no longer needed it. That was a very meaningful event in his life.

I take your point, here, and have always thought it was properly debatable to what extent the government should provide assistance for the indigent. I think the right wing portrayal of that process has been just as distorted as the typical left wing version, but the evidence is actually quite ambiguous to what extent assistance really helps the long-term dependent. Of course, most recipients of "welfare" are not long-term dependent. Even before welfare reform, half to three-quarters of recipients, at any given moment, would be off the program in two years

.

I think we mostly agree here, although I'm uncertain of the accuracy of your last sentence. I haven't seen the latest related data. I trust you'd be able to verify it. You're a sharp guy.

I completely agree that giving people competence and job experience is far better for their pride and long-term well-being than giving them the equivalent in "free money." I think if we elected a Bernie Sanders liberal we would have so much commitment to that goal that the rolls of indigent would drop by half in 10 years. That is hunch, not evidence-based, but I am making an educated guess.

Agree with the first part. I personally doubt the second part.


I am not entirely against the social programs we have in place. They obviously help and I've used a couple in my lifetime and know other that have.
In my opinion, it's about achieving the proper balance.

ant wrote:

The pie is much, much bigger than it used to be, because people learned to create value through cooperation.

Fine. But your points of a "general overall process" are abstractions that do not match or align with anything real. It is a generalization and nothing more.

Well, no, actually it is applicable to a number of economic issues. One of them is international trade. By allowing trade, both countries are better off. This probably sounds like an eye-glazing emptiness to the average person, but it played a much larger role in defeating communism than the missile defense systems so beloved by hawks.

A conflictual mindset like that of our Dear Leader insists on finding a winner and a loser in trade, but the truth is both win. There is a secondary issue about the effects within an economy, and Chinese success at manufacturing is clearly hurting a certain slice of the unskilled labor market. But it is easy to show that the damage is small compared to the gains for those who get income from the export industries. The rest of the country could have created enough investment in their lives to let them be at least as well off.

Trade is also the policy area in which the pre-WWII corrupt system of special-interest tariffs is making a comeback thanks to Dear Leader. Legislators of a certain mindset like having more favors they can claim to be dispensing to their constituents, and so if trade barriers are not bound by rules they have a bigger sandbox in which to play that game. Dear Leader plays it pretty well. Pick a fight, claim a victory, appear to stand on the side of "us" rather than "them". What could go wrong?

Creating enemies and conflict where there was none is a specialty of narcissists. They can't help it, but they get amazingly clever and resourceful about it. To see one in action is to begin to realize how there are cracks in all our social structures, and people dedicated to forcing those wider. Right now we have an entire class of super-rich who are mainly dedicated to behaving in such a fashion just to get taxes down. And as you see, that is an easy division to exploit. They have brought a large segment of American society to the point of accepting cuts in Medicare and Social Security for ideological reasons, something that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

So when I see a systematic exploitation of conflict at the expense of institutions of cooperation, I ask myself whether people appreciate the role of economic cooperation in their prosperity, and I have my doubts. (Lest you think I am just arguing for globalization here, let me point out that the prosperity of the U.S. is partly due to it being the largest tariff-free zone in the world, so that the states could interact in a cooperative manner. The EU is in large part a product of the vision of European leaders who wanted the same economic flexibility for their economies that Florida, Michigan and Missouri had for theirs.)

There are similar demonstrations of mutual gain to be made about women having equal access to the work force, and about immigration (at least small amounts of immigration - we don't have experience with massive immigration unless you count the immigration from Europe to America in the 1800s, but that was pretty clearly an unusual case). The rule of law is a fundamental for a cooperative system, but Dear Leader has made a career of chiseling out bits that exploit unclarity in the law, in classic narcissist fashion. Rule of law is the enemy, like truth, when you are the biggest gorilla on the block and think you are better off whenever you pick a fight and win.

ant wrote:

Domination, by contrast, has a very bad track record. Putin and his ilk get our attention by seizing control of, say, oil resources, but with few exceptions,

Not sure why you've chosen to select a very extreme example of resource domination. I don't think it's really necessary here.

It isn't an accident that Dear Leader admires Putin greatly, and trucks with Persian Gulf oil magnates by preference. Domination is not just a system, it begins as a mindset, and resource economies are congenial to such a mindset succeeding. Dear Leader likes their style. Journalists getting in your hair? Cut off their fingers, so the other journalists will get in line. Or just body-slam them. That might be enough.

My point is that the immorality of such an approach is quite secondary to the impracticality of it. The world economy is not about conflict and resources, and has not been for a long time now. But some people are still longing for the days of divide and rule, because rule naturally appeals to them.

ant wrote: In essence, you are teaching your students to "fish", rather than make them dependent on your fishing skills. But we agree on this point, I think.

The father of the immigrant family my uncle sponsored told him that although he always appreciated my uncle's financial help, he was very happy when he no longer needed it. That was a very meaningful event in his life.

I think that captures the matter very well. The reason most people get off welfare as soon as they can is that they know they are competent and resent the implication that they are not just because they are down on their luck. Unemployment insurance is a more dignified program mainly because it makes that approach explicit. Those who can't get off of welfare quickly usually feel bad about that (I know a few).

Welfare reform was supposed to provide support for moms to get off of welfare. Some states did that, and the results were generally pretty good. But of course the economy was also good then. I think we need a comprehensive program to move people from a dependency mindset to solid competency, and I fear many liberal programs end up being a case of "here's some money, fix yourself."

ant wrote:

Even before welfare reform, half to three-quarters of recipients, at any given moment, would be off the program in two years

.

I think we mostly agree here, although I'm uncertain of the accuracy of your last sentence. I haven't seen the latest related data. I trust you'd be able to verify it. You're a sharp guy.

Well, I appreciate the Benefit of the Doubt here, but just as a matter of full disclosure this is one of many cases where I work from my memory of the last time I looked at a problem in depth, which is in this case my teaching Urban Economics in about 1992. I am more lazy than sharp, and did not go looking it up, but it is what I remember of the data.

ant wrote: I am not entirely against the social programs we have in place. They obviously help and I've used a couple in my lifetime and know other that have.
In my opinion, it's about achieving the proper balance.

Yes, I think that says it well. If we are not ambivalent on the subject, we are in denial about one set of issues or the other.