If SDA Trolls are any indication of the Leftist mindset, then they truly aren’t remotely aware of how [small-c] conservatives think. Member of the European Parliament, Daniel Hannan, has penned a simple memo to help the comrades better understand.
Here’s a snippet:
Those of us who believe in small government are not motivated by the desire to make the rich richer. We’re really not. We are, in most cases, nowhere near having to pay top rate tax ourselves; our most eloquent champions over the years have been modestly-paid academics. We believe that economic freedom will enrich the country as a whole. Yes, the wealthy might become wealthier still, but we don’t see that as an argument against raising living standards for the majority.
“…to help the comrades better understand.”
Robert at December 1, 2011 9:57 PM
Sorry, won’t suffice.
It’s analytical thought and honesty that’s lacking, not an explanation.
Greed and envy.
Occupiers and socialists in general want what belongs to someone else.
Eloquent champions = modestly-paid academics = I call b.s.
Try modestly-paid citizens.
Touché Jamie!
With it being December 1st, I was in a pre-Christmas charitable mood.
As if these cretins care about reason ….?
Hey blorrrp,
Quit whining. Work harder.
P.S. – You’re so wrong.
You are aptly named blorrrp. You regurgitate the leftist cant marvellously.
blorrrp, you start with a year and finish with an intergenerational timeframe.
Would you agree that 99% of people living in free market democracies are wealthier than the top 1% were several generations previous? (health, health care, life expectancy, food, access to education/information, quality of shelter, transportation, sports, entertainment, technology, gadgets, etc)
There may be a finite amount of wealth that can be created in one year just as the amount of water people in Ontario can drink in one year is limited by the size of the Great Lakes. I.e. the limit is set by the individuals themselves.
Robert, your post reminds me very much of this marvellous performance by Margaret Thatcher:
http://youtu.be/rv5t6rC6yvg
Enjoy.
Hey blorrrp, bin there, done that, it doesn’t work. Everybody ends up in the bottom layer, well almost everybody, except for those who are more equal than others.
I’m sure Daniel Hannan understands that reason does not work with the ideological descendants of Lenin and Stalin.
blorrrp, a big pyramid of exploitation is socialism. In free markets people on both sides of a transaction increase their wealth. The state should step in to prevent and punish fraudulent trade, but people should also responsible for due diligence in not being victimized by con artists such as Michael Moore and Al Gore. If you’re chafing under the other wealthy elites, quit wasting time and money on “hollywood” entertainment and pro sports.
Sophistry. The US, Britain and Canada have been deregulating and cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy for nearly 30 years. And yet, instead of economic improvements for ALL of society, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.
“The state should step in to prevent and punish fraudulent trade,”
isn’t that called ‘big government’?
that’s the flaw in right wing thinking. you want the freedom to engage in commerce but it must be unregulated.
a recipe for all manner of fraud, deception, criminal irresponsibility and exploitation in the area of workplace safety for instance. BUT, it all gets swept away in the face of an unfettered ‘free’ market.
no more CSA product standards.
no more building codes hampering development
no more health and safety departments
no more ANYTHING resembling measures to ‘even things out’.
and supposedly we’re all to blame if we happen to not have a whole goddam product safety lab in our pocket to make sure that toaster oven isnt going melt the plastic parts and kill everyone in a fire.
etc. etc.
we choose 1 year.
why is it that such a minute number of individuals keep such a huge portion merely because that’s what they did the previous period?
Answer:
The minute number of individuals don’t keep a huge portion because that’s what they did the previous time period, because there isn’t a previous time period.
It’s year one, remember? If you can’t consistently play by your own rules then piss off, mmmkay?
The minute number ‘just happen’ to have their huge portion because everyone is born with more of some things and less of some things than everyone else.
Playing along, if it was year one and everyone started with the same material pile of chips the ‘minute number of individuals’ would still have more than anyone else by year 10 because they were born with strong impulse control and the ability to have more tomorrow through sacrifice and hard work today.
The others , who have no self control and need instant gratification, need outside control to produce anything of value and that’s where the minute number of individuals with ‘self control to burn’ and a vision for the future earn those extra chips.
Any questions? See: The Marshmallow Experiment
People who have a lot of envy are typically people with poor impulse control and seek instant gratification now at the expense of their own future tomorrow.
These envious people are likely to want to steal what other people with more impulse control have earned through sacrifice.
“The state should step in to prevent and punish fraudulent trade,”
isn’t that called ‘big government’?
No.
It is “the” fundamental purpose of government to protect the governed and their property from outside theft, fraud, and destruction.
It is why people allow themselves to be governed at all.
Everything else is Big Government.
Fair trade regulation has been a responsibility of government going back centuries before the existence of socialism.
To state that conservatives want totally unregulated commerce and trade is a lie which cannot be supported by evidence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DioQooFIcgE&feature=youtu.be
Sophistry. The US, Britain and Canada have been deregulating and cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy for nearly 30 years. And yet, instead of economic improvements for ALL of society, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.
~lberia
Actually, unions and their members have been getting richer too, which is why governments have been cutting any taxes or giving tax holidays or grants to corporations.
You see, because of unions and their ever increasing demands, tax cuts to corporations were necessary to keep them from moving offshore for cheaper labour.
Corporate tax holidays were bribes made so that citizens could have jobs so that they could earn income to pay taxes at all.
Tax cuts specifically for the wealthy that didn’t include everyone else?
Cite some of those, if you can. I’ll check back just for a laugh.
Leftists are looters of others work & sweat. Nothing more, nothing less. In their chests beats the heart of slavers.
Unions and their memebers have been getting richer? Ummm…no. Unionized workers have always done better than their non-unionized counterparts, but that’s one important reason to belong to a union. The difference in wages has been more or less static and certainly doesn’t compare to the huge wage increases executives have received in the past 30 years.
As for tax cuts, check out the results of Gordon Campbell’s tax cut…sure, lower income earners may have received the same percentage cut as high income earner, but the difference was in the amount saved: a couple hundred dollars vs. thousands. So who really benefitted?
@ Iberia: “As for tax cuts, check out the results of Gordon Campbell’s tax cut…sure, lower income earners may have received the same percentage cut as high income earner, but the difference was in the amount saved: a couple hundred dollars vs. thousands. So who really benefitted?”
Maybe you have never been poor. When I lived at the bottom, I literally counted every dollar. And by that I mean my budget was so strict it was specifically allocated at that level. When tax rates started to decrease, saving an extra couple hundred a year was very noticeable and it meant actually being able to breathe a little more. Anyhow I worked my way up through hard work and sacrifice – more study, less TV, working and going to school at the same time. Studying all the time. It was exhausting but it worked out.
I notice those tax rate decreases a lot less now than I did at the bottom, thanks very much.
Hey “Iberia” you think “Unionized workers have always done better than their non-unionized counterparts, but that’s one important reason to belong to a union”? The same can be said of thieves everywhere. Unions are nothing but criminal organizations that try to hold a monopoly on labor. Just because the criminals are winning doesn’t mean you should join them. Unless of course if you’re a progressive, those are always pretty hot to join whatever gang of thugs seem to offer the most loot.
Socialists and unions, insert themselves as middlemen in all trade and transactions.
Their rightous rhetoric suggests ALL trade needs to be monitored(regulated) by outside third partys.
They have invented a way to extract bounty(dues) as middlemen, their only product is envy, which is used to perpetuate their intrusive, hollier than thou, false support of the downtrodden.
IoW
Two farmers are conducting a trade, horse for a cow.
The socialist accosts one farmer after their deal, sowing mistrust, envy, all he has to do is convince one of them the other was trading in bad faith ….presto instant invented (NOT) needed job for the socialist parasite.
Socialisms ONLY product is envy, used to mobilize the gullible.!
“and supposedly we’re all to blame if we happen to not have a whole goddam product safety lab in our pocket to make sure that toaster oven isnt going melt the plastic parts and kill everyone in a fire.”
It might be hard to understand, but businesses have a vested interest in not killing their customers. Ones that do tend to not stay in business very long. Also, product safety organizations pre date government mandating them. Its good for business to have “the good housekeeping seal of approval” on your product.
I have always found socialists and bureaucrats to be the same ilk as brigands and hiwaymen….feeding off the efforts of others…pirates.
Some bureaucracy is necessary but it is glaringly obvious that whatever agency, founded for whatever merit, swiftly mutates into an agency with one real purpose..to perpetuate itself and gain more power and influence.
“… it is glaringly obvious that whatever agency, founded for whatever merit, swiftly mutates into an agency with one real purpose..to perpetuate itself and gain more power and influence.
Posted by: sasquatch at December 2, 2011 7:50 AM
Yup. The organizational behaviour of publicly-funded agencies is just like that of their private sector counterparts: they want to wake up tomorrow morning in better shape than they are today. But their is one BIG difference:
Private sector agencies ensure their survival by efficiency and inovation – growth is geared to success.
Gov’t departments do it by expanding in size and influence – it’s a lot harder to axe a Ministry with 10,000 employees than it is to get rid of 100.
So efficiencies and inovations (which would entail massive staff cuts) have no place in the bureaucratic world.
And, when governments play favourites by providing certain private sector industries monopoly status or government grants, their organizational behaviour starts to look an awful lot like the government’s.
Rob, William, minuteman, sasquatch and Jamie, you all sum up this thread well.
It is unfortunate that there are those in every society that would prefer re-educational labour camps to force people to think the way they do.
My favourite complaint of the Left is that right-wingers are fascists. That’s right, we’re “fascists” — who want government to be LESS powerful. Makes total sense, doesn’t it?
Which brings me to another leftist fallacy: that they’re the “smart” ones….
The progresses see a problem and try to fix it without the knowledge or fore thought to see what harm fixing the problem can cause. Or how good intentions can cause more harm. How their ideas and theories sound great on paper and in their own minds. They can’t understand why these theories and ideas after implantation keep failing, Causing more problems or failure to remedy the original problem.
So their solution is to these failures is to implant these theories and ideas on a bigger scale
Yes, they want to make to government less powerful… by spending more tax dollars on the military, police and prisons and less on education and social programs.
Commies, Socialists – all lefties, really – should know that their programs are destructive, eventually murderously so. Unless I’m missing something, the inescapable conclusion is that they are a gaggle of the ignorant, stupid, or malignantly narcissistic.
Iberia
“Yes, they want to make to government less powerful… by spending more tax dollars on the military, police and prisons and less on education and social programs.”
Who TF are they?
Putting more thieves and violent criminals in jail enhances my individual rights at the price of lessening yours.
Dick’s nailed it!
“—you don’t, and can’t, reason with traitors and communists”
This is the grim reality that so called “Independents” refuse to come to terms with. They will rationalize until the death of us.
Iberia – “the west has been deregulating…” LIE. I work in resource extraction. The approvals process for a new mining area is approaching 20 4″ 3-ring binders for all of the plans and studies required. 30 years ago it would have been one or two. 100 years ago it was zero. We are much more responsible in our approach now, and look at a lot more things before we develop, but these all add costs to our production. Not just doing the right thing, but the delays while bureaucrats look at what we have considered and try to determine if it’s enough, and Sierra Club/ Greenpeace etc make money off of trying to shut us down because of how things were done 50 years ago. The government folks who regulate us have the ability to ask for whatever they decide they need to do their “checks”.
In recent years, government regulators increasingly have decided they need more and more information, and as a result their turnaround time is getting slower and so they need to hire more people and their empires must grow. The original intent of the Alberta regulations for the Energy Resources Conservation Board was to make sure that us profit-seeking miners didn’t leave any product in the ground that we could mine, because the royalties are based on the quantities we produce (and they wanted to maximize the royalties, putting them head-to-head with Ministry of Environment, who want to minimize disturbance areas). The newer generation coming in to regulate us are straight out of school and have no real-world experience to temper their demands. It’s a good thing that we as Canadian miners are good at what we do, because we have a lot of parasites hanging off of us.
I should have mentioned for the economically illiterate (yes blorrp, I’m thinking of you as I say this) that the way we profit-seeking miners make money is the maximize the quantity and quality of good-stuff that we mine for the costs we incur. The government assumes that we’re unable to do this, so they must impose commissars to tell us how profitable our mining should be. If the commissars don’t think we’re being greedy enough, they can force delays in our projects until we answer all of their questions and change the designs according to their directives. This is a form of lawfare, if we don’t do what they want up front, everything gets legally delayed and the time value benefits of the money that would be used in the project are delayed (think of how much of a starting mortgage’s payments are actually interest. Now think about having the full mortgage to pay, but not being allowed to move into the house for 2-3 years after it’s complete. This is a common situation for businesses with big projects when they have to set aside money that could be used elsewhere. The entire time the company is waiting for the legal license or decision, that “mortgage” is building up on them for no benefit because they can’t use the funds for something else but there is no benefit available for the funds until the decision is made.)
Well said C_Miner.
“And yet, instead of economic improvements for ALL of society, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer” that is not so.
It is very clearly not so down here on the Rock. It is probably not true in much of North America.
Read Victor Hanson on poor Mexicans in the Central Valley in California where he farms.
It’s easy to say, the poor are getting poorer, but my grade school in Ottawa drew pupils from mixed backgrounds,
and one simply doesn’t see the poor dirty clothes, dirty ears, and holes in teeth that used to be common.
John Lewis – from one viewpoint, the rich are getting richer. The total amount of wealth generated is growing exponentially. If the goods owned by the “poor” are the same as those owned only by the rich 15 years before, then they are better off. If the wages of the “poor” have doubled from $20,000 per year to $40,000 per year in the same time frame that the absolute wealthiest has gone from $10 billion to $100 billion (just guessing) then the poor have “only” doubled while the richest has increased by 10 times. Never mind that both are better off, leftists insist that the because difference has grown, the “relative” poverty must be worse.
When will the liberano’s get it?
Government has only 2 legitimate functions.
1) to provide for the common defense (i.e. the military)
2) to create and enforce the laws (i.e. Parliament, courts, police, jails etc)
Anything beyond that turns into the nightmare we see in Europe and repeated throughout history (i.e. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, the muslim brotherhood, etc)
How many must die to placate these self destructive fools?
“Conservative Academic”? That note must be from a fairy tale about a land far far away and a long time ago…
Having grown up in socialist Saskatchewan under Tommy Douglas’ CCF (later the NDP)it didn’t take long for me to realize that socialists want everybody to be equal, alright, equally poor. So I moved to Alberta and have enjoyed freedom. The National Post’s George Jonas wrote recently that socialism needs capitalism to be successful; to finance their statist utopian dreams. If not, you’ve got Cuba. China has a thriving economy because of America. While most pundits think Obama is changing America into socialism, European-style, I think the Obama machine (George Soros, Maurice Strong et al) is steering the U.S. toward Communism, Chinese-style. Obama has bought Wall Street, the banks, industry (GMC) and its unions without worry re. the $15 Trillion (and rising) debt because its current gunsights are trained on the oil industry (Alberta’s ‘tar’sands will do nicely, valued as it is today at $14 Trillion). Hello Pierre Elliot Trudeau and his National Energy Plan. Get the picture?
I might add — The Obama machine’s most urgent thing was, and no doubt is, nationalized single-payer medical (ObamaCare). Has anyone considered how huge a union machine would be created – huge enough, perhaps, to ensure that Obama would have an unbeatable base of voters and fund-raisers. Bye-bye Republican irritants in Congress or the Senate. Bye-bye democracy as we’ve kniown it.
Harper has more flunkies than anyone. He’s another phoney christian.
ok4ua: WTF? Did you come up with that profound post between tokes? Your hated for Harper, and Christians, is because they’ll never legalize marajuana, right? Poor baby! I feel your pain (not)!