Socialism is legalized theft.

In a competitive economy such as the one we have, do you recognize how your avaliable capital (obviously enough to afford amenities like a computer and internet access) drives up prices, harming those with less money?As a have, your very participation in a free market harms those who are have-nots. Therefore things like progressive taxation (and by extention, to a limited degree, socialism) are theft, but restitution for the economic damage you do to the poor.

Abandon the free market rhetoric and look at what you're saying. If what you said was true everything would cost nothing. In reality, prices for basic things are higher than they've ever been, and they keep going up.The reality is that competitive economy drives prices towards the maximum profit for sellers, because they're setting the prices. In most situations, buyers have choice, so prices trend towards the minimum profit per sale for the seller to ensure greater sales volume.Sometimes buyers have no choice because of scaricty, or because what they're selling is a basic need. This is most prominent in the case of rents. EVERYBODY needs a place to live, so it's a renter's market. There's been a housing shortage for 20 years now, in most places of the country. Renters know they can gouge prices because there's enough middle-income people to pay those prices. The poor simply can't compete.If competitive economy drives down prices, then answer this: Why have rents been at record highs for the past 5 years, even in the face of significant economic downturn? Why haven't rents responded to the economy?[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 04-24-2003]

So do prices go up, or down? You don't seem to know. It can't be both. Oh, really? Nobody works harder than the poor. Most poverty-line people are putting in 60 hours a week to be able to afford sub-standard housing. In Minneapolis at least, a one-bedroom apartment costs something like 70-80 percent of the wages of a single adult working 40 hours a week at minimum wage. That barely leaves money for food (which costs the same no matter how poor you are), much less health insurance and vehicle maintainence (try holding down a job in this country without access to a car). Face it - the poor make our stuff, serve our food, and sell us all our daily needs, and they can't even afford a place to live. And your answer is "they're not productive enough?" Puh-lease.Anyway, why don't you tell me who was more productive: Ken Lay, or the guy who put your shoes together? Ken Lay ruined the lives of thousands. But at the end of the day he still made more money in a year than you will probably ever have.Maybe if you stopped listening to Rush and starting thinking about the realities of economic life in America, you might have a clue. You might start with the book "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenriech. Very illuminating. This isn't entirely true. There's only so much money to go around. That's what the US Treasury keeps tabs on, right? So there's a limit to how much wealth can be produced. it's gotta come from somewhere - if you have more, somebody has less. That's ok up till the point that people have less than they need to even survive. In a civilized world, I think we can do better?I'm not saying socialism is better. Clearly it never has been. But the free market can't be trusted to supply everything people need to live at a price everyone can afford. Thus some things should be heavily regulated by the government, and progressive taxation (taxing the rich) should continue to offset the negative effects caused by the rich.

oh, so now we've gone from "poor don't produce" to "well, they produce, but not well enough." That's moving the goalposts, pal. The truth is, you rely on poverty-level workers every day, for hundreds of things you take for granted. I'd say they produce well enough for your purposes, don't they?I only brought up Ken Lay as an example that production and wealth have nothing to do with each other. it's almost axiomatic that the richest people in this country are the ones who produce the least and work the least.Sure, a person can start at the bottom and succeed. That it happens at all is indeed a testament to our free market. But they don't do it without a lot of luck, and for every self-made man you can produce I can find ten rich men who are wealthy simply because they were born into it. I think we can do better than a totally free market.

Or simply their parent's bad or good luck. Skill has less to do with it that you might think. You might consider the biographies of major business figures. Then honestly assess how large a role luck played. Go ahead, I dare you.Sure it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tunnel. But just because somebody isn't a rocket scientist, do they deserve to be homeless? Aren't we all capitalists, living in a capitalist economy? I'm not sure who you're referring to. Anyway, fine. So a capitalist created the job. Does that entitle him to make 20 times more than the wage of the job he created?

On this we agree. But everyone who works full-time deserves a wage sufficient to provide for their needs. We certainly don't have that these days. Rights? They're certainly things people need to survive, and I believe that in this country people have the rights to things they need to live, regardless of economic luck. To advocate anything else is cruel and barbaric. I'm ashamed that people like you exist in these enlightened times.

Think about competition. Business don't compete for your benefit, they compete because they want to win. Competition drives down prices, sure. But the ultimate goal of all business is to defeat competition. Ultimately, comptetition leads to monoploy, which you must realize is very, very bad for the consumer.Competition is good but it's not a state that can be prolonged indefinitely. Well, a state is made up of individuals, right? So if you're on the side of the individual, you must favor that which aids the most individuals? It's only logical.ultimately, there will always be situations where the good of the majority is weighed against the good of the individual. It only makes sense to consider what's good for the most individuals. That's all very well and good, but what about when your prosperity comes at a cost to the prosperity of others? Doesn't society have a right to rectify that imbalance?

Now you're just not making any sense. How can you have the right to life if you don't have the right to things that you need for life?You say the right to "defend it". If you were starving me to death with intent to kill me - or even through negligence - I have the right to escape that situation to save my life, right? What we're doing to low-wage workers is the same thing. We're starving them to save a dime. I think they have the right to defend themselves. did I say free food? Did I say free housing? Now you're putting words in my mouth. That's called the "Straw Man fallacy". All I advocated was that food, housing, and health care should be affordable for all workers. Right now, they're not. Do you disagree?Who decides what wage fits the job? if you say "the free market", you're wrong. The job market isn't free because there's a number of restraining factors on worker mobility. The job market isn't free, no more than the housing market is. Workers don't have the kind of choice that a free market requires. At best they have a kind of Hobson's choice.And you still haven't provided rationale for why workers DON'T deserve a livable wage. it's immoral for our society to be based on the backs of workers we won't even feed or house decently. When somebody does a job for us at a wage far less than they deserve, THAT's the legalized theft. We're stealing THEIR wages!

But that's not who we're talking about. We're talking about the Americans who work and work and work, doing jobs you depend on every day, and still can't afford nutrituous food, safe housing, and basic health care. Why should they be dependant on the whims of public charity to survive?

If somebody isn't paying his workers enough to feed themselves, then their actions are threatening the workers right to life, by your own definition! There's no difference between violent murder and death by wage slavery. You assume options of worker mobility that simply don't exist. People don't leave jobs because it takes so long to find them. And it's next-to-impossible to work 60-hour weeks and have any time left over to find a new job - they're using all their time to work!

How the hell does that help? Going from a sub-standard wage to no wage at all doesn't help anything. Do you think about things before you type them? No one's arguing that communism was better. While capitalism is better, it's not the best. Capitalism still leaves too many of our most important workers behind.Anyway, this is all just a slippery-slope fallacy. "Paying our workers a livable wage will make us Communist Russia!" Nothing could be further from the truth. Like I said, a guy working 60-hour weeks doesn't have time to go search for a job during business hours. so your worker mobility arguments don't hold water.Right to have a job? No, I don't think so. People who contribute nothing don't deserve anything, although provision should be made for victims of economic downturn. Nobody deserves a free ride. But people who make the goods we depend on every day deserve better than starving on our behalf.The more you post, the more you appear to be out of touch with the reality of the working person. I suspect you're some kind of young republican college student or something. or maybe you'd like to tell me how you worked hard for every penny you have? Look, get your head out of Ayn Rand and Rush Limbaugh's world of infinite capital and benevolent business leaders. The real world is one where the people you depend on the most get the least of your money, and business is largely a predatory affair.

Maybe we should stop replying to each other's posts one by one. I'll try to address more points per post.

Oh, really? What woods are those where you can just go live? All the woods in America are either private property or national parks, neither of which places take kindly to squatters.Those days are long gone, dude. There's no more wilderness, not really. It's comments like these that suggest (again) that you're divorced from economic reality.

What I can't get over is how he expects the working poor to just roll over and die, or leave, or whatever, without a fight. Plus these people are like the backbone of our economy. Who does he think is going to serve his food, clean his carpets, and make his clothing if the working poor all go away?

On another topic entirely - does anyone else think that the vast majority of corporate fraud could be eliminated by mandating that all corporations be privately owned? I think a lot of our problems stem from the conflict of interest posed by public stockholders. I don't really see what the benefit for the average person is to have public companies.