Peter Hume,

It's known as social democracy, and it maintains the plebs in a buoyant enough condition to take part in the capitalist orgy.

It also produces cookie-cutter versions of humanity fashioned in the required mindset.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/dec/17/what-is-living-and-what-is-dead-in-social-democrac/

Poirot
What's "it"?

The unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security in the USA are greater than the rest of the world's GDP, and the Scandinavian welfare states rank higher than the USA in the Index of Economic Freedom - in other words they are more capitalist than the USA, not less, so if you are trying to suggest that that the USA represents the epitome of the free market, that is just more confusion coming from the statists, more of the idea that the source of wealth is capital consumption.

For your belief system to be true - that government interventions make society better off - there would need to be some reason to believe that government has the ability, by taking resources from A, and giving them to B via a bureaucracy, to create net real wealth for society. But no-one will ever venture to describe *how* this happens. You don’t seem to be even aware of the economic problem you are facing.

That is why you have been unable to answer my question which disproves your entire belief system about the Industrial Revolution:
If, following your line of reasoning, in order to improve the conditions of the working class, the legislature in 1842 had passed a law mandating the minimum wage be 50 pounds per day in 1842 money, do you think the resulting condition of the working class would have been better, or worse?

The reason you didn't answer, let's face it, is because it's obvious that such a measure would have caused *greater* unemployment, poverty and hardship, not less. But if 50 pounds would, what about 49? At what level would government interventions *not* have been counter-productive? *Any* imposition above the market rate must have had a greater corresponding disadvantage, otherwise we're back to the irrational belief that we can create wealth by passing laws. We can't, else why not make us all millionaires and have done with it?

Peter Hume it is not only my belief that government interventions make society better off, it is my experience. I would not be an educated misfit if schools and higher education had not been government funded. I am better off and not a crime statistic, because of that government intervention My children are better off and my community is better off.

I do believe that government has the ability, by taking resources from A, and giving them to B via a bureaucracy, to create net real wealth for society. The wealth I am talking of, is the real wealth that comes from living in a society where people care for each other and co-operate, where people are happy to be their 'brother's keeper' via the tax system.

You seem worried about the economic situation but I am not. I am far more worried about the poverty of our lives and the growth of psychological disorders that has accompanied the increasing implementation of your cruel economic system and the stupid striving for more and more superficial crap it encourages.

And your economic system is cruel. I know that, as a misfit, I wouldn’t survive in your world. I have been desperately scared of your economic system ever since I read “The Road to Serfdom”. On page 123, Hayek writes “Independence of mind and strength of character are rarely found among those who cannot be confident that they will make their way by their own effort.”

So that leaves me out in the cold because I am not now and never have been, confident that I could or can make my way by my own effort. At least you'd make drugs and euthanasia legal in your system so some comfort there but ... without government funding I probably wouldn’t be able to afford them.

Mollydukes
“I would not be an educated misfit if schools and higher education had not been government funded.”

How do you know?

Anyway that would only prove, at best, that *you* were made better off. You’re not “society”, so you haven’t proved your point or disproved mine.

At issue is only whether provision for education should be by voluntary means, or based on coercion. You’re the one standing for coercion – i.e. unprovoked aggression, remember?

So how you managed to jump from that anti-social premise, to a belief in your own moral superiority; how you managed to cast “voluntary” as meaning “cruel”, and “coerced” as meaning “caring and sharing”, is a mystery, or rather, simply nonsense.

But you have admitted and illustrated the statist mindset very well: “If social co-operation were based on voluntary arrangements, I’m afraid I, or society, wouldn’t get as much benefit as if it were coerced”.

Your mindset is a bit like when I was a kid, out with my mother.
“Mu-um? Can we have this?”
“No.”
“Oh! But why no-ot?”
“Because. We don’t have enough money.”
“But why can’t you just get some money from the bank?”

That, in a nutshell, is the statist belief in the State. It’s just such an open-ended sense of entitlement, married with a complete incomprehension about the facts of social co-operation that produce the wealth that the statists want to consume. Statists invest the State with the same open-ended credulity, as a child does to its mother, or the religious do to God.

But I note you *haven’t made any attempt* to explain how the central planning bureaucrats are going to have the knowledge to provide better solutions than the people they are trying to provide solutions for - by overriding their wills?

To be in favour of pro-state compulsory indoctrination of children, when you are unable to rationally defend your ethical or practical beliefs in it - after having received 10 years of it - what makes you think you don’t have Stockholm syndrome?

Mollydukes,
I found your post inspiring, and Peter is just baying for the wolves.
For him, anyone who can't fashion themselves an economic predator, is a bludger.
It's only your delusion, Peter, that socialism must be the kind of bottom-feeding society you find so distasteful. I believe in a genuine meritocracy--its own reward.
I don't believe in any "open-ended sense of entitlement", nor do I believe exploitative innovation is the apex of human accomplishment.
I think there's room for compromise in economics. With a wealth cap of say a million dollars, plus assets, there's still room for the no-hoper to expose himself, and the entrepreneur to shine. I'm only saying we should keep the bludger, and genuinely disadvantaged, according to a minimal standard, thus maintaining our own legitimacy and self-respect in the process. Similarly, the entrepreneur, and unimpeded, should know there are just limits to their natural advantage and self-agrandissement, and that there's more to life than acquisition. Neither should their progeny be entitled to any heredity of privilege--like Gadafe's corrupt sons for instance, but they should suffer the same process of sorting the chaff from the corn as th erest, so that they may earn their success, or learn to resent the unjust law of Mammon.
Finally, Peter, it's the rule of law that preserves your precious free market, and underwrites your "values", howevermuch you affect to despie it.

I seem to recall that "market value" made the *assumption* of a willing but not desperate seller and a willing but not desperate buyer.

Funny how exponents of the "free market" often oppose measures that soften "desperation", let alone prevent it.

Then again, the strong have always resented the weak forming alliances, even in the schoolyard.

Rusty