Monday, October 27, 2008
- Obama's Dedication To 'Redistribution Of Wealth'
This is the 2001 audio of Barak Obama that you've probably been hearing all about if you follow alternative media, and that you've heard nothing about if you stick to the mainstream news. If you can't stand to listen to the guy (like I honestly can't) then it can be tough to get through, but basically he's saying what a "tragedy" he thinks it is that the Supreme court didn't focus more on "wealth redistribution" as part of the civil rights movement.
It doesn't mean that he's going to embrace the stupider ideas of the victim-ologists like Slavery Reparations, (although if I'm not mistaken he stopped just short of supporting the idea early in the campaign) but it does give you an idea of what he thinks is fair. I think it makes it pretty clear that the doesn't think the people who earned the money have as much right to it as the people that didn't, and he will more than likely take it from the first set of people for no reason other than to give it to the second.
This is profoundly bad economics and will only result in job loss, and slower economic growth. That may not seem like a big deal to you today, but in three months when the credit crisis is no longer a theoretical concept and is being felt by the man on the street, all of America will realize what a mistake Obama's economic outlook for America is.
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7 comments:
he doesn't think the people who earned the money have as much right to it as the people that didn't
That's funny. I read his remarks, and his policy positions and votes, as supporting just the opposite proposition: that the people who've earned the money have more right to it than the people who didn't. In other words, Obama clearly believes that people who earn money have more right to it than anyone else, and should keep most of it.
He does believe that some of what people earn should be taken for essential government services, including helping those less fortunate. But so does, for example, John McCain, who differs only slightly from Obama in what he wants to tax citizens in each income bracket.
Perhaps you mean to object to the idea that any money should be taken from "who earned" it for those who "didn't."
The mistake there is in ignoring the context of the remarks. Obama isn't talking about situations where inequality results not from laziness or stupidity or even bad luck. He's specifically, and explicitly, talking about a situation in which inequality resulted from widespread bigotry, backed by government authority, and benefited the rest of society.
As for your economics, I would respectfully disagree that carefully addressing past wrongs, so that all groups in society finally have (relatively) equal opportunities to work hard and prosper, would in any way harm our economy.
It absolutely will hurt our economy. This isn't a point upon which you can disagree... it's simple a fact of life. It's like disagreeing with gravity, or that the sun will rise in the east. The market is selling off right now in an attempt to get that point across to him.
If Obama supported the idea the people had the right to their own money, he wouldn’t be so anxious to spend it for them. He thinks he would be better at spending their money than they would … and that leads to a less free economy and less prosperity for everyone. This isn’t my opinion. This is basic, simple free market economics…you’d be very hard pressed to find someone who knows anything about it, willing to burn their credibility to disagree with that.
Obviously the disagreement we have is what would be considered an ‘essential government service’. While I’m not specifically opposed to ‘helping the less fortunate’, I would argue that not only does government not actually achieve that goal; they don’t even really set out to.
Government only has one way to motivate people to do anything and that is by force. It forces people to hand over tax money whether they like it or not. It forces people to obey laws and to resolve differences. In fact that is, in my opinion the only ‘essential’ government service… they are the arbiter of force.
Any other service can be performed much more efficiently and with greater success by other institutions. Government has an abysmal record of actually ‘helping the poor. Most of the energy and money spent toward that goal has been wasted and the only actual result was shattered families, and generations of government dependence.
And the reason that’s so is because they were always liberal programs base don the intent of the programs and not their likely effect. Giving something to someone for free doesn’t’ help them, it makes them a dependant. It’s far better to give them an opportunity to help themselves by creating an environment where they can get a job. But high taxes case fewer employment opportunities so Obama’s plan, like all the plans that came before it of a similar vein, will have the opposite effect of its intent. This isn’t really subject to debate. Anyone with any serious background in economics can confirm all of what I say.
And since we’re having an “economics 101moment, try thinking about it this way:
There are lots of ways money can be spent. You can spend your own money on something you want, or someone else’s money on what you want, or your own money on what someone else wants, or someone else’s money on what someone else wants.
If you send your own money on what you want, then you are worried about price and quality so the money will be spent well. If you spend someone else’s money on what you want, you still care about quality but you no longer care about price. If you send your money on what someone else wants you care about price but no longer care about quality, but if you spend someone else’s money on what someone else wants, you care about neither and the money will be largely wasted.
If you let people keep their own money they will spend it the first way leading to an efficient economy and growth. If you tax people and let government spend it, they’ll spend it the last way… someone else’s money on what someone else wants. So you will get neither an efficient economy nor growth.
Obama’s ideas have all been tried before and they don’t’ work. They’ve all failed, every time they’ve been tried, and until I actually see the guy walk on water (like the media has been acting like he can) then I’m not going to believe that he can make it work this time either.
As for addressing past wrongs… I haven’t seen anyone present any evidence of them so I do not acknowledge their existence.
It absolutely will hurt our economy. This isn't a point upon which you can disagree... it's simple a fact of life.
See, I would totally understand if you said that you understood the point, but disagreed with it.
But counter-cyclical spending is a standard concept in economics, and has been since Keynes. So to say that believing in it is "like disagreeing with gravity, or that the sun will rise in the east" makes no sense. It's like saying that you disagree with gravity, but can prove that you're right about that.
The market is selling off because the sub-prime market tanked, and the cascading effects have caused credit to dry up.
This isn’t my opinion. This is basic, simple free market economics…
No, it's not. Even conservative economists call for government taxing and spending at roughly the levels Obama does.
Any other service can be performed much more efficiently and with greater success by other institutions.
Let's say that's true (which it often is, I'll readily agree).
These other institutions, however, don't actually perform many of these services. Either we try to make the government force them to do so, or else we admit they aren't solving the problems that haven't been solved yet, and we search for another way to get the job done.
high taxes case fewer employment opportunities .... This isn’t really subject to debate. Anyone with any serious background in economics can confirm all of what I say.
Another with a serious economics background can confirm that high taxes don't necessarily reduce employment opportunities.
If higher taxes in a particular situation are such as to cause businesses to fail or shrink, employment goes down. If higher taxes cause businesses to prosper, on the other hand, employment goes up. This can happen, for instance, if the economy is heading into a recession, and businesses are shrinking their operations, because the credit markets are too tight and taxes will be used to generate temporary sources of capital and credit.
As for addressing past wrongs… I haven’t seen anyone present any evidence of them so I do not acknowledge their existence.
Okay. I'm not going to lecture you on the evidence for past wrongs in this country. If you don't know that history, and its impact on the present day, then no wonder you don't support addressing those wrongs, or creating equal opportunities to make all Americans productive citizens.
I very much support equal opportunity, I simply don’t subscribe to the view that the government needs to punish successful people to make that happen. In fact I can’t imagine anything better than having our economy be fair. But in my mind fair is defined as everyone playing by the same rules and those that produce the most get the most. If I work harder or smarter than you than I should get a greater reward, but if you are more productive than me than you should get the greater share. That’s how a free economy works.
As for the rest of your rambling, it’s all just liberal bait and switch. You say that some economists think taxing at the level Obama is campaigning with is fine so Obama must be proposing sound economics. One doesn’t’ follow from the other. You say that under very particular (purely theoretical) circumstances higher taxes can help business, so higher taxes are good, but in the real world they never can. And by the way, your theoretical example won’t work either, but to be fair, I don’t expect you to understand the credit crisis.
As for higher taxes and employment, I spent most of my life working in labor economics. And I defy you to provide me even a single example in history where all other things being equal, higher taxes helped either business or employment. It simply doesn’t work that way and by refusing to accept that you only set yourself up for disappointment.
The truth is, I don’t really mind that so many of the things that liberals believe turn out to be untrue, I only object to the fact that they always want to seem to experiment by taking more of my labor from me.
As for why the market is selling off …. Since that’s precisely how I learn my living I think I can confidently claim to more about that than most. The reason the markets are selling off is because they believe that the next president is going to nationalize some industries and highly regulate others. It’s purely a risk aversion issue and hasn’t had anything to do with the credit market for weeks.
I spoke about the market as a feedback mechanism which was also probably a little too technical for you since you aren’t in the business, but that’s the role it plays in the broader economy. It is a means for letting corporate mangers know if they’ve made prudent decisions or imprudent ones. And right now the message it’s sending is loud and clear for all the people who know how to listen. That message is, in spite of all the carefully verbalized delusion on the left, the market is scared to death. To be fair I don’t think it’s Obama specifically they’re really that afraid of because John McCain has some equally bad ideas. The people the market is really afraid of is Nancy Pelosi, and Barney Frank. And if Obama gets elected then they get a free hand to shatter capitalism and stack the deck so it never comes back.
One more thing on the subject of past rights and wrongs. I am completely familiar with American history. It’s the base assumptions of victim-ology that I don’t subscribe to.
You say you don't subscribe to "punishing successful people," and that those who "work harder or smarter" or "are more productive" should get a greater share of the wealth.
However, we're not talking about any of those things. Give everyone an equal starting point, and outcomes will depend on those factors (plus luck, which we can let fall where it may).
It's a fact that there aren't equal starting points in this country, and that this inequality affects people's chances of success (or how hard they need to work to be successful).
You say that some economists think taxing at the level Obama is campaigning with is fine so Obama must be proposing sound economics.
I said neither of those things. Who's engaging in bait-and-switch?
You say that you "work in" labor economics, yet you don't just state that you believe that higher taxes can never help business or employment. (This is, of course, nonsense. A rise in the average effective tax rate from 1% to 2%, for instance, would clearly provide a net benefit to business.)
No, you go further, and claim that this is simple economics. If you really know economics, then you know that this is widely disputed.
Likewise, you claim to have special expertise that tells you the real reason for the current market sell-off is the anticipation of investors that Obama will be elected president and will have a disastrous effect on the economy.
Yet most experts don't believe this to be true. Now, that's fine. They might be wrong, and you right. You might even know that, from your job as a quant on Wall Street. But you insist you don't have to demonstrate that you're right, because of your expertise!
You go even further and claim that I'm not "in the business." Which business is that? Economics? Political science? You're making claims to expertise in these areas and more. Or in the field of labor economics specifically?
An expert doesn't have to simply assert that his conclusions are correct and that no other ones even have credibility in economics.
An expert would, first, acknowledge that many economists hold different views--not deny this fact. Then, he would offer a cogent argument for why his beliefs are correct rather than theirs. Assertion is not an argument, and neither is an appeal to authority or personal knowledge.
Is it a coincidence that the dogmatic beliefs you express as fact--such as the notion that the current crisis was caused by highly regulated institutions, rather than poorly regulated financial instruments, which most economists believe can be easily disproven--happen to coincide perfectly with your personal employment interests and the perspective of your industry? I can't help but wonder.
I am completely familiar with American history.
Good. Then you know that there are past wrongs in American history.
Why, then, did you say that "I haven’t seen anyone present any evidence of them so I do not acknowledge their existence"?
James,
For some people there are no real consequences to being wrong so they can believe whatever they like. In our society we call them academics, actors, civil servants or journalists. But for most other people there are very real and usually ever present consequences to being wrong. Those people typically work in industry or in the military. They are the people upon whom the rest of those people live like parasites.
Invariably the people who still believe that warmed over 60's twaddle about social justice are people who have few consequences to being wrong. That isn't because they're smarter or 'more enlightened' but because they’ve been operating without consequences to being wrong for so long that, they never learned how to be right. Their thought processes and decision making don't push them in that direction. But in industry, where there is a constant competition and a constant demand for 'being right' about the causes and effects of the world, most people have given up on your view along time ago. Find someone who’s figured it all out well enough to be successful and ask them what they think about wealth redistribution and they’ll probably laugh in your face.
The fact is, the government lacks the capacity to do the thing you hope it will. It cannot make everyone’s starting point the same. It cannot make the short man tall, the ugly woman pretty or the stupid man brilliant. If life seems unfair to you it’s seems to me that it’s actually because it is unequal. But that doesn’t mean that we should make it worse by imparting over it that inequality the vision of someone who clearly has no chance in improving it. You cannot make all men equal in height by chopping off legs, and that’s precisely where your worldview leads. It’s all been tried before and it’s all failed. Don’t think so? Try looking up the 100 million people who were killed by their own government trying to make everything turn out equal for everyone.
Anyway I guess my point is that you can believe anything you want to. But those of us who live with the consequences of being wrong know that we don’t have any choice about it. We don’t have the luxury of believing the world is just some parlor game where if we pick the right person to be in charge everyone will get to win. The world doesn’t REALLY work that way. And if Obama is elected he’s going to try all the same stupid things that have all been tried and have failed before, by all the other perfect worlder’s before him. And it will have the same disastrous consequences for him (really I mean for the us) as it did for all the others.
And if you want to go on pretending that there is some great injustice that the government needs to make right, it’s fine with me. Just don’t put a gun to my head and make me pretend too. I came from as destitute an upbringing as anyone in this country ever has so I don’t have any patience for your silly stories of imagined injustice. the success I've achieved has come because I've worked all the other people around me into the dust. And you can only do thast if you're prepared to take responsibilty for yourself and your own life. You can't do it while you're sitting around waiting for the guy with the gun to fix all the injustice first.
You may not like it but the fact is, you need guys like me. Guys like me are the guys that make the world run. And if you try to make all of us the slaves of our neighbors we might decide not to play your game anymore. That’s kind of where all this is going I think. That’s what I think you really want. You want me and the people like me to go do all the work, while you and the other people you choose reap all the benefit from it.
That’s the real problem with you perfect worlder’s… you always expect someone else to pick up the check.
Thanks for your honesty, Tom, about social justice and who you think faces real consequences in this world.
For me, those who deal with real consequences are those who have very little, whether because of poor luck or because of injustice.
I think that those who, like you and me, have the luxury of working in high-paid endeavors are able to believe what we want--often this happens to be what serves our interests--without much in the way of consequences.
I believe I was clear that I wasn't looking to make everyone's starting point the same. Luck, for instance, can't be equalized, and we shouldn't try. But that doesn't mean we have to look at crimes which have benefited some of us, and set back others, and simply ignore them because life will never be perfect.
As for your claim that there are no great injustices in our history, I'm certainly familiar with monstrous injustices in our history, ones I can't merely dismiss as just "silly stories."
You may not like it but the fact is, you need guys like me.
Maybe if you didn't assume that other people don't do the same work you do, you could consider a few other facts. Like the fact that your comfortable job wouldn't exist without large numbers of people doing much more difficult work for much less pay. That's a simple economic fact, isn't it? Without those laborers, your Wall Street job couldn't exist.
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