/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.3237516]

Don't mind me. Just being the true definition of a liberal.

[Anonymous No.3237521]

>its my bro addam smith
>the guy who believed in capatilism and how great that system was
>what do u know about him /sci/ ?

[Anonymous No.3237531]

>>3237521
>the guy who believed in capatilism and how great that system was


except capitalism didn't exist in his time. He had some theories that sound like capitalism but he never flat out said the rich should be filthy rich and fuck the poor.

[Anonymous No.3237532]

I'd love for his ideological descendants in the teabagger ranks to meet him. He'd be horrified.

neolibs gonna lib.

[Anonymous No.3237552]

>>3237531

Agreed. From wikipedia:

Again and again, Smith warned of the collusive nature of business interests, which may form cabals or monopolies, fixing the highest price "which can be squeezed out of the buyers".[73] Smith also warned that a true laissez-faire economy would quickly become a conspiracy of businesses and industry against consumers, with the former scheming to influence politics and legislation. Smith states that the interest of manufacturers and merchants "...in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public...

[Anonymous No.3237566]

>>3237516

Don't mind me, just being better than you and your silly LTV.

>>3237532

>He actually thinks Neoliberalism was "Liberal" at all, rather than just more Interventionist-Corporatism rebranded as being "Laissez-Faire".

[Anonymous No.3237568]

>>3237552
The opposition of capitalism largely stems from those who would rather everyone live in poverty, instead of living in comfort while watching others living in luxury.

[Anonymous No.3237570]

What's going on in this thread?

[Anonymous No.3237576]

i hope ur not one of those fag liberals who pretend liberalism today has anything to do with liberalism of the past

[Anonymous No.3237577]

>>3237570

Sup Friedman.

[Anonymous No.3237583]

>>3237568

>>implying cutting wages will cause living standards to rise

what drugs are you on, anyway?

[EK !EKFQQAJWYU No.3237589]

>>3237570
Oh please.

[Anonymous No.3237593]

>>3237589

[Anonymous No.3237598]

problem, econofags?

[EK !EKFQQAJWYU No.3237606]

>>3237593
Not mad, just smarter than you. U jelly?

[Anonymous No.3237608]

>>3237583
I have no idea how you got that out of what I said or what you mean by it. Real wages have been going up since at least since we began collecting stats.

[Anonymous No.3237614]

>>3237608
Actually real wages have stagnated for the majority of Americans.

[Anonymous No.3237638]

>>3237614
That's not panel data. Imagine a situation where the initial wage distribution is uniform, and that every year everyone gets a 3% raise - but the population grows by 3% from Mexicans who start at the bottom of the income distribution. So everyone's wages are continually growing, but the median wage is constant.

[Anonymous No.3237639]

>>3237614

>Mfw the stagnation of real wages has a strong correlation with the increasing size of the Government and the Welfare-Corporatist State.
>Mfw Mises, Hayek and Friedman have already given a causation to the correlation.
>Mfw Keynesians only explanation to this is "Government doesn't spend/regulate enough!" when spending and regulation have only increased, and the Socialist explanation always falls back on the already debunked LTV or the Broken Window Fallacy.

Sure, market economies are horrible. But they're still the best thing we have.

[Anonymous No.3237647]

Smith's system works quite well... assuming everyone is moral, as described in his earlier work, "Theory of Moral Sentiments".

Veblem says "conspicuous consumption".

[Anonymous No.3237653]

>>3237608

Are you talking about the results of union action or employer action? Because raising wages is no way to be competitive, especially since the 80s.

[Anonymous No.3237657]

>>3237639
Brofist

[Anonymous No.3237660]

>>3237647
That's not at all what Moral Sentiments says. And the idea that conspicious consumption is important at all is hilariously wrong.

[Anonymous No.3237692]

don't mind me. Just thinly disguising laissez-faire as communism.

[Anonymous No.3237706]

>>3237692

Well hello there.

[Anonymous No.3237724]

>>3237660
Free market capitalism, as Smith describes it in Wealth of Nations, only produces an optimal outcome when everyone is self-interested and behaving in a moral way.

If a company makes a rational financial decision, like dumping mercury in a river and paying settlement money rather than paying the slightly higher price to treat the waste, you get a sub-optimal outcome from societies perspective.

Conspicuous consumption:
Also, think of the ink that goes into printing a logo on a candy wrapper, the machinery for cutting and gluing, the resources spent on marketing.

All that labor, electricity, fuel, and steel could have been used for the production of medicine, education, etc.

You run into the lower marginal value per dollar when few people have most of the wealth.

The unregulated free market has flaws. Not terminal, as they can be corrected with wise regulation. Pity that there's no way to enforce property rights and rule of law *without* a significant government presence.

[Anonymous No.3237758]

>>3237614
>Actually real wages have stagnated for the majority of Americans.

Um, your graph clearly says "income", not "wages". Income includes all sources of revenue, including wages AND capital income (stocks, bonds, etc). Capital income is primarily recieved by the rich. So looking at income is completely different from looking at wages.

Of course, neither wages nor income include nonmonetary compensation for work (such as the value of employer provided health insurance, which has risen steeply as healthcare costs have risen). Compensation is what you really want to look at.

Unfortunately, I cannot find any data on historical growth labor compensation by income percentile. So I think your claim is unsupported by evidence.

[Anonymous No.3237765]

>>3237724
Okay, so you concede that Moral Sentiments is not relevant to this discussion. Progress.

Advertising is not conspicuous consumption, so you don't understand that, either. Advertising plays a role in spreading knowledge about quality and prices and promotes competition. Imagine if nobody was allowed to 'waste' resources on telling people their product was good - it would be a lot easier to sell shit.

The lower marginal utility per dollar is only an issue if you (a) you think it's moral to take money from people who earned it to give to people who didn't and (b) you have a mechanism for costless redistribution that doesn't affect anyone's incentives. Let me know if you have one.

With respect to your property rights argument, there are of course lots of examples of property right enforcement without government, and privately-run courts existed throughout America before government. Further, in light of the Kelo decision and the government's continued abuse of eminent domain and search-related laws, it's difficult to argue the government does a great job in enforcing property rights.

[Anonymous No.3237775]

>>3237758
Almost forgot. You need compensation *per hour*. Income doesn't take into account changes in the number of hours worked.

Also your graph is *family* income. So it's dependent on marriage rates and such, which are unrelated to compensation per hour.

[Anonymous No.3237777]

>>3237724
And just to follow up on your only government can protect property rights bit, government is generally recognized as whoever has taxation authority, i.e. is legally codified to be able to ignore property rights....

[Anonymous No.3237786]

>>3237777
You talk like society is full of people who're clamoring to pay non-mandatory taxes.

[Anonymous No.3237796]

This looks like an interesting thread.

[Anonymous No.3237809]

I'll just leave this here.

[Anonymous No.3237810]

>>3237765
>you concede that Moral Sentiments is not relevant to this discussion.
> you think it's moral to take money from people who earned it to give to people who didn't

You can have it one way or the other buddy, fucking pick one. We're either talking morals as related to the economy or we're not.

I'm pointing out that Smith advocated his economic ideas as being optimal *if* people were moral. If people aren't moral, the system isn't optimal.

I never said give money to the poor. It's simply the fact that if the rich benefit more from a society that has roads, highways, well educated workers, and other forms of quality infrastructure, then they get to pay more in taxes to support that infrastructure.
Sounds moral to me.

"BAWWW! I'm only taking home $500,000 after taxes! Make it stop mommy! I want MOAR! I don't want to pay for the functional highways that transport my company's goods, customers, and workers! I don't want to pay for the police and court and patent systems that protect my companies assets!"

[Anonymous No.3237815]

>>3237810

I'm sure they just need to find a good accountant. With a little shady juggling, they too can pay less taxes than their secretary.

[Anonymous No.3237840]

>>3237815
Well, a lower percentage of their income. The secretary probably still pays less in absolute dollars.

[Anonymous No.3237844]

Ideally:

Liberals - let's make things better for everyone!
Conservatives - let's not throw out the good with the bad!


In America:


Liberals - everyone who disagrees with us is a fascist!
Conservatives - things were better fifty/two-hundred-fifty/two-thousand years ago, let's do that again!

[Anonymous No.3237848]

>>3237840

Flat tax FTW.

Rich people should be paying AT LEAST the same as poor people in taxes. And the simpler the tax code, the more likely they will have to.

[Anonymous No.3237852]

>>3237848

No, the entire point is to have a progressive tax system that people can't evade.

Poor people can't spare much income, and if they do the economy goes down the shitter (propensity to consume and all that).

[Anonymous No.3237859]

>>3237852
>>3237848

Yeah... progressive is superior to flat, due to marginal value per dollar.

[Anonymous No.3237863]

>>3237852

That would be better, perhaps, but far more complex. And the more complex, the longer it's in the hands of politicians who are on the payroll of the very rich people who want to fill it with loopholes.

Start fresh with a flat tax. Now everyone pays the same, which is an instant improvement over the situation now. We all know that the top twenty percent pay less taxes as a percentage than the rest.

Once we have this, then we can start to think about charity.

[Anonymous No.3237873]

>>3237809

Cool strawman bro

[Anonymous No.3237875]

>>3237863

>>progressive taxes

>>charity

fullretard.jpg

[Anonymous No.3237880]

>>3237848

As a rich person, I would love a flat tax instead of the current system.

[Anonymous No.3237887]

>>3237875

It's charity in so far as stealing less money from someone than you steal from someone else is charity.

Or in so far as providing services to someone without charging them as much as you charge someone else is charity.

[Anonymous No.3237888]

>>3237724

>If a company makes a rational financial decision, like dumping mercury in a river and paying settlement money rather than paying the slightly higher price to treat the waste, you get a sub-optimal outcome from societies perspective.

Free-Markets require strong enforcement of property rights, it dumping mercury in the river caused damage to anyone, any firm that did this would have to be harshly punished.

>Also, think of the ink that goes into printing a logo on a candy wrapper, the machinery for cutting and gluing, the resources spent on marketing.
>All that labor, electricity, fuel, and steel could have been used for the production of medicine, education, etc.

All of them are the result of consumer selection and demands. Consumer masses can tell their subjective Marginal Utilities for goods better than what a Central Planner can. If you knew anything about Marginal Utility and the price mechanism, you'd know that the resources are first used in the most urgent needs and subsequent resources are then used in the less urgent needs. What you are proposing is for bureaucrats to overproduce things that you think are more important ( which is kind of what they do now, only they do the opposite, taking resources away from where they should be).

>>3237810

>I never said give money to the poor. It's simply the fact that if the rich benefit more from a society that has roads, highways, well educated workers, and other forms of quality infrastructure, then they get to pay more in taxes to support that infrastructure. Sounds moral to me.

First, you are commiting a Broken Window Fallacy and assuming that only the State can supply these services. Second, you are forgetting that the LAST thing Laissez-Faire people complain about are roads/highways/education, their main problems are Protectionism, Keynesianism and etc. Completely different situations. You aren't even arguing against Free-Markets, only against Anarcho-Capitalism.

[Anonymous No.3237889]

>>3237873

Do you know how hard it was to get the right to strike, the 8 hour day and safety/anti-discrimination laws?

The capitalists hired frickin' goon squads to attack strikers, way into the 20th century.

I'd say it doesn't go far enough.

[Anonymous No.3237897]

>>3237887

sure is tax protestor in here

[Anonymous No.3237902]

>>3237889

You think any of those laws actually did anything positive?

[Anonymous No.3237913]

>>3237888

There's no broken window fallacy there. That's when destruction is assumed to be economically beneficial because it requires labour to fix things up.

"If you knew anything about Marginal Utility and the price mechanism, you'd know that the resources are first used in the most urgent needs and subsequent resources are then used in the less urgent needs."

This is a generalization that misses some key issues. People can't buy something they can't afford. Healthcare for instance. Education. Without assistance from the government, these would be luxuries due to their high cost. Sure they might be needed, but the demand is not there, because demand is only present if someone can afford to pay.

[Anonymous No.3237934]

>>3237902

Okay, so you'd prefer the working classes to work 12-16 hours a day, 6 day work-week, no safety laws meaning there's a good chance you could get infected, mangled or poisoned. You can't bargain for better conditions because unions are illegal. Your pay is utter crap because people are scrambling for even shit jobs like yours. You can be replaced at a moment's notice, fired without a given reason on a whim.

Enjoy that.

[Anonymous No.3237938]

>>3237888
Nice trips.

Good luck getting someone to apply rule of law better and cheaper than the state, to all economic parties.

I'm all for the free market, and I know damn well that snickers sell because consumers want their fucking snickers.

However, a system without Keynesian measures and some regulations that balance out the excess will lead to a harsher business cycle. See: great depression, Veblem's prediction thereof.

The free market does correct itself in the long run.
But in the long run, we're all dead.

[Anonymous No.3237939]

>>3237934

Cool strawman bro

[Anonymous No.3237943]

>>3237889

>Do you know how hard it was to get the right to strike,

The freedom to form groups, negotiate your pay and strike if necessary are a natural part of a free market. Government was the one banning/not protecting the right to strike in the first place, he wasn't the one that granted it.

>the 8 hour day and safety

Worket-safety should be done through the enforcement of property rights/right to live. The fact we can work less than 8 hours a day has more to do with the advanced state of our economy than with State-Decree, and it's silly to think we'd suddently go back to the 19th century if it weren't for the State. A market economy has a natural tendency for working hours to fall as production and technology get better.

>anti-discrimination laws

Although those laws have a noble cause, market and societal pressures have done better to kill discrimination than what laws do, discrimination doesn't end because the Govt. said so. If anything, forcing association may have slowed the proccess of killing discrimination.

>The capitalists hired frickin' goon squads to attack strikers, way into the 20th century.

This is the use of violence, which is against the Free-Market. If the State - the monopolizer of Justice and entity supposed to protect individuals from each other and thus maintain the free market - didn't do anything to stop it, it wasn't the market's fault, now was it?

The worker's greatest conquests were achieved through market, voluntary means. State methods and coercion were against them all along, and it's silly to attribute workers conquests to State intervention.

[Anonymous No.3237947]

>>3237939

You mean you'd prefer laws against these conditions to exist?

But that's contradictory to what you just said.

[Anonymous No.3237948]

>>3237902
Given labor conditions prior to those laws, I'd say yes.