Democrats keep proving how detached they are from reality

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That pertains most every major politician.



That sounds idealistic.

63% of Americans can't cover an unexpected $500 expense, 40 million Americans are hungry, and , a minimum-wage full-time worker can't afford an apartment anywhere in the US.
Meanwhile, America's military budget is up 23% to $716 billion, which is more than the next 12 largest militaries combined, and they drop a bomb somewhere on the planet every 12 minutes.
If that's your idea of "peace and prosperity", you're the one who is "detached from reality"!

Damn right.

And none of that existed a couple of years ago before Trump was president? Seems unlikely. What about those who can't afford $200 monthly mandatory obamacare premiums having to pay a $650 tax penalty?

We agree that perfect competition cannot happen. We disagree why perfect competition cannot happen. I believe it's because a company or an individual or an organization lobbies a member of Congress for favorable treatment. I'm not referring to loopholes, which are deductions that are completely legitimate, I'm referring to preferential treatment.

I think pure capitalism is actually a good answer to human greed because it doesn't attempt to equalize the pie and recognizes one's enlightened self-interest, but instead to grow the pie. The more productive individuals can be, the more resources there are available in the economy that are distributed between people in the economy based on what is bought and what you're paid for the value of your work. Ukraine, where my wife's heritage is from, is poor due to low productivity and even if you attempted to divide the pie via a social welfare state, people would unfortunately be equally poor. Low productivity is the availability of high-tech jobs and some skill required.



I think you're referring to a social welfare state sometimes known as Democratic Socialism. The problem in socialism like Venezuela where the government controls the means of production are there are people exempted from their own rules and when an individual doesn't control how they produce or earn an income, you make it impossible for them to grow within an economy from poor to wealthy based on their own efforts and abilities.

I agree with a safety net; the big question is how to pay for it? Usually the safety net can be quite large if people are encouraged to work via a market economy but those who are unable to work thru no fault of their own receive a generous social welfare package. The problem with the social welfare package being generous is the encouraging of low-skilled workers to not work because it's more lucrative than what they can earn in the marketplace given their decided level of effort (i.e. work part-time, work full-time, or work 60+ hours a week).



You're correct. But I think people better command capital when taxes are very high than when taxes are low. People are wealthy because of underspending their income and low taxes encourages competition and allows people to keep more of what they earn. Those who have already accumulated their money only have to pay taxes on what they earn on their money not on what they previously earned, thus they are less effected than a high-income individual subject to a high tax rate.



I can see where you're coming from on this. Believing in Genesis is to rely on faith. But to rely on evolution is also a reliance on faith. You're relying that your understanding of the facts is correct: i.e. the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago because it is 13.8 billion light years away for example.

I can appreciate that you view it as a mistake if you don't believe the Bible to be an infallible (i.e. without error) text. If you do believe it is, you need to come up with reasons why what we observe scientifically may differ from what's written in the Bible and the best way I can speculate is that our definition and that of God's might be different or not understood by mere mortals.

Unfortunately if you cannot afford a $200/monthly premium, you probably need public assistance. If you factor in the average cost of employer provided health insurance, it's really expensive! Part of the reason for this expense is the administrative costs in disputing how much the insurance company should pay for each case as well as each doctor office having to have half their staff handle insurance claims. In my case, for me and my wife, it's $1,700/month (at my employer, we need to contribute $500/month of that amount, in my wife's case, $400/month of that amount). If we could only standardize how prices were charged, we could slash the administrative costs; not talking about price controls but referring to price equality regardless of who purchases care.

People unfortunately want to complain about the profits of insurance companies, but it's the administrative costs that are the true burden in terms of healthcare cost and why we pay about 17% or 1/6 of GDP on healthcare vs 9% for OECD countries. We also take care of the sickest of the sick even when such care may be to merely provide comfort to the individual or even family members. Life support during the last days of one's life is really expensive and definitely contributes to its cost.

No, I agree totally that the principle reason - though not the only one - that perfect competition is impossible is corruption, and yet corruption is a fact of life which one has to deal with. The only solution is an as it were preemptive socialism which, in codifying control of certain industries in legislation prevents, before the event, any attempt to hijack those industries for undesirable ends.



The trouble is that human behaviour tends to boil down to the lowest common denominator; for every man who sees his self interest in productive work, there will be a hundred who see it in, to modify your phrase, "unenlightened" self interest. Again, this is an unfortunate fact of life that one must deal with and again, the answer is a socialism which prevents the few from obtaining economic power over the many.

Even if a completely laissez-faire system were viable, however, without degenerating into the corporatism that it inevitably does (and it's important to note at this point that the west doesn't have laissez-faire capitalism, which is physically impossible to realise, but corporatism), it still wouldn't solve the problem of those who, through no fault of their own, are not capable of productive work. And this is the fact that those who haven't outgrown eighteenth century superstitions in economics tend to gloss over - we cannot expect the minimal welfare of the dispossessed to be guaranteed by market forces alone - or even private charity. Presumably, libertarians think that we should just let these people die, though they of course never admit that. The more sensible (humane?) free marketers get around this hole by claiming the compatibility of a minimal welfare state with the laissez-faire system (somehow). This is a (welcome) departure from the inhumanity of unbridled capitalism, but it still leaves a number of problems in place. For one thing, that of the disproportionality in economic power, which is just as coercive in nature as legislative power, between the rich and the poor.

Ultimately, the "libertarian" wakes up to find that not only are the people, on the whole, no wealthier, but that they're also less free, because they've been enslaved by those who have the economic power to command the forces of capital and to buy influence. And no "invisible hand" will prevent this from happening.

In mathematical terms, the laissez-faire state is an unstable equilibrium, insofar as the closer an economic system approximates to the laissez-faire ideal, the greater the incentive for corruption and monopoly and so the shorter its lifetime.



Re your first paragraph, I don't know a great deal about the system in Venezuela; my statement was about the democratic Socialism which prevailed in the United Kingdom, where I live, from the end of the Second World War until 1979, when Thatcher became prime minister. I'm not a supporter of Marxism in its traditional sense, and this is what your objections here seem to be aimed at - not socialism.

On the question of the affordability of a welfare state, a gentleman posted earlier in this thread that the US' military budget is close to a trillion dollars. Given that the US hasn't been in any war that wasn't a disaster for both sides since the 1940s, I suggest that, given more sensible levels of military spending, the US could afford to ensure a decent standard of welfare state for its citizens. The other side of this coin is the trillions of dollars in Wall Street bailouts and other backhand deals with big business, as well as the fractional reserve banking system (alchemy for billionaires) - all a drain on the working man to the tune of many trillions. I think if we can afford to provide a welfare state for billionaires, we can afford it for the ordinary man.

Of course, the same sort of thing applies elsewhere in the western world, too.



Yes, there is an element of faith in scientific belief, too, but this is really only a pedantic technicality. We can never KNOW anything about the physical world with certainty - we cannot even know the truth of a priori propositions with certainty, as far as I can see - but to suggest that belief in evolution implies the same type of faith as is implicit in religious belief, particularly in its more ridiculous forms, frankly strikes me as wilfully dishonest.

We perform an act of faith every time we make the judgement that the bottle of pills in the medicine cabinet reads "aspirin" and not "poison" but this is hardly the same type of faith as the man who prays for a million dollars and believes - faithfully - that someone is there listening to him. It's certainly not the same type of faith as someone who could believe that the Earth is six thousand years old, in spite of everything he knows about the nature of the physical world - JUST BECAUSE it's written in such and such a book which such and such a person has told him is the word of God.




I am an atheist, but not of the Dawkins variety - I'm deeply sympathetic towards Christianity for various reasons. Nevertheless, even if I were a Christian, I should have to admit that the Bible is not INFALLIBLE. First of all, our oldest manuscripts are not themselves textually consistent with one another, and second of all, we know that for the most part those to whom the books of the Bible are attributed were not their real authors. In particular, the Books of Moses (Pentateuch/Torah) were written sometime, as I recall, in the first Millennium BC, making a Mosaic authorship impossible.

We also know that the Old Testament borrows heavily from the mythology of the surrounding tribes of the day. The Genesis creation myth is in many parts almost a carbon copy of Mesopotamian creation myths; the Flood myth is so ubiquitous as to be almost proverbial (no pun intended). Even Jesus' mythology recycles the motif of the Virgin Birth, known to Egyptians at least a thousand years earlier. The dead and reborn god is also a perennial motif in myth, as is the god who died for our salvation.

Frankly, as someone who went into theology and philosophy seeking justification for renewing lost faith, I think any attempts to preserve the mythological elements of the Bible are not only doomed to failure, but will actively put people off.

I could not agree more.

And where does corruption come from?

Do you believe in to each according to their needs from each according to their ability?