If the American's would slash their military budget to 2% of GDP (they'd still surpass China's spending by >100 bn) they just might find the money to properly fund education and healthcare.
Still hoping to get an individualists' opinion on that.
I think this is the perfect time to introduce the absolute necessity of a universal basic income scheme into this conversation. I expect everyone's all on board with that idea?
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Your darn right! my least favorite example of "the collective working together" is laborers fighting for the 40 hour work week and minimum safety equipment , what a bunch of commie propaganda that is am I right?
You can't force somebody to work for you at a given wage, the market will dictate what somebody will reasonably work for and it's completely voluntary. Yeah labour practices use to be brutal, that was long ago.
People working minimum wage generally do have tough jobs and do work hard. But they also lack qualifications and certain abilities to get better opportunities. There has to be incentive for people to provide innovations that produce these jobs and employ these people. Capitalism isn't a perfect system, but it's the best flawed system that anybody has come up with.
To get better opportunities so they can live off of the results of someone else's effort?
I think this is the perfect time to introduce the absolute necessity of a universal basic income scheme into this conversation. I expect everyone's all on board with that idea?
This is a horrible idea. A bunch of bored young men with no opportunity isn't going to be a good thing for a stable society. Not to mention, where's that money going to come from and at what cost?
Hey the military spending is clearly out of control and it shouldn't be like that. Blame the military industrial complex and these lucrative weapons contracts that the government hands out tax payer money to. This is a giant issue but also comes with some economic benefits.
The problem with public healthcare is you are forcing somebody to pay for somebody else's healthcare. It's not voluntary and very costly.
All of that is though. Why pay for anybody elses' anything, right? Why is healthcare the thing that people find exception to? Do you begrudge everybody who takes a road that you don't use?
This is a horrible idea. A bunch of bored young men with no opportunity isn't going to be a good thing for a stable society. Not to mention, where's that money going to come from and at what cost?
Better get on board before the self driving cars get here and you're out of work begging on the streets with the rest of the plebians, friend.
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Originally Posted by longsuffering
If the American's would slash their military budget to 2% of GDP (they'd still surpass China's spending by >100 bn) they just might find the money to properly fund education and healthcare.
It's currently 3.3%? Down from 8.5% in the 1960's? So you know, progress. They're getting there.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
To get better opportunities so they can live off of the results of someone else's effort?
Yet you can't find a better example of a society where an individual can be born into abject poverty, and rise up to the wealthiest class then in a capitalist society. I think the individual makes their own opportunities, luck also can play a big role.
The country will pay off its last foreign currency loan worth $1.5bn today – ridding itself of any FX debt obligations for the first time in at least 183 years.
Denmark’s overall debt-to-GDP ratio is one of the lowest among Europe’s major economies, standing at 38 per cent and is expected to fall to around 36 per cent in 2018 according to the European Commission.
Meanwhile the U.S. stands at 73.8%.
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Look at how the USSR turned out.
Okay but the USSR was a command economy that spent a fortune on their military and whose funds were also often redirected to their corrupt, authoritarian oligarch. Not really a shining example of Marxism or modern day democratic socialism.
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What great innovations come out of Socialist countries? There needs to be incentive.
The following Soviet scientists were recipients of a Nobel Prize.
Physics[edit]
1958 Pavel Cherenkov, Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm "for the discovery and interpretation of the Cherenkov effect"
1962 Lev Landau "for his theories about condensed matter, particularly about liquid helium superfluidity"
1964 Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov "for fundamental work in the area of the quantum electronics, which led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers on the basis of the maser laser principle"
1978 Pyotr Kapitsa "for his fundamental inventions and discoveries in Cryophysics"
2001 Zhores Alferov (RU) "for the development of semiconductor heterostructures for high-speed and opto-electronics" (working in the time of the USSR)
2003 Alexei Abrikosov (RU), Vitaly Ginzburg (RU) "for innovative work in the theory about superconductors" (working in the time of the USSR)
Chemistry[edit]
1956 Nikolai Semenov For outstanding work on the mechanism of chemical transformation including an exhaustive analysis of the application of the chain theory to varied reactions (1934–1954) and, more significantly, to combustion processes. He proposed a theory of degenerate branching, which led to a better understanding of the phenomena associated with the induction periods of oxidation processes.
And that doesn't even address the fact that the Soviets basically went from what was essentially a completely agrarian society to a fully industrial one in one generation. That's ridiculous by any measurement, and doubly so when you consider the size of the country.
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You posted a measure that doesn't have an equal playing field and doesn't represent the whole picture.
Okay, so I'll ask you again, what is a better statistical measurement? Your argument seems to boil down to "if a socialism country fails, it's because of socialism, but if a capitalist country fails, it's because of other underlying problems."
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Yet you can't find a better example of a society where an individual can be born into abject poverty, and rise up to the wealthiest class then in a capitalist society. I think the individual makes their own opportunities, luck also can play a big role.
Statistically speaking, it doesn't really happen in capitalist societies, but hey at least we know that propaganda and modern mythology works on this side of the world as well.
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All of that is though. Why pay for anybody elses' anything, right? Why is healthcare the thing that people find exception to? Do you begrudge everybody who takes a road that you don't use?
That is a ridiculous comparison. You are free to travel on any road you like, certain restrictions for engaging in commerce apply. The tax on fuel is what primarily pays for the roads.
The problem is that certain people don't take good care of themselves and get more out of system then somebody else, that's a big issue with socialized medicine. Plus where is the money going to come from? And at what cost?
Better get on board before the self driving cars get here and you're out of work begging on the streets with the rest of the plebians, friend.
It's currently 3.3%? Down from 8.5% in the 1960's? So you know, progress. They're getting there.
Yeah when one door closes another one opens. There will be other job sectors that open when the self driving cars get here. Nobody knows exactly how this will play itself out.
Yet you can't find a better example of a society where an individual can be born into abject poverty, and rise up to the wealthiest class then in a capitalist society. I think the individual makes their own opportunities, luck also can play a big role.
While I agree, let's not pretend that rising up to be wealthy is solely due to their own effort. It usually involves many people working together to make a great end product.
This is even true for sports athletes. While they are the performers on the stage, they need coaching and a wide variety of others who all come together to make the whole package valuable.
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Minimum wage results in job loss and costs that get passed on to the consumer or business. It doesn't solve anything, it makes things worse. It's already hard enough for small business to compete, if you tax the heck out of them it will make it impossible soon.
One of the favourite platitudes of the right: minimum wage killz jawbs!!!
Actually, if you look at places like Australia, a substantial minimum wage has not killed jobs. In fact, paying decent wages generates job satisfaction, which in turn increases productivity. Consumers, including those who make min wage, who can afford to spend more on products, generally do. Not only that, but inflation happens irrespective of the minimum wage. It's not as simple as saying prices go up only because of some damn law. How much they rise depends on a variety of factors, of which minimum wage is just one.
Or, if you're going to imply that the minimum wage is bad, then logically it must hold true that not having a minimum wage is good. Well, paying men and women pennies a day for their labour may have somehow gotten us through the 19th century, but there's no proof that abolishing the minimum wage works well in the 21st. It's kind of ironic that North Korea, which has no minimum wage if I remember right, is further proof of that.
The problem is that certain people don't take good care of themselves and get more out of system then somebody else, that's a big issue with socialized medicine. Plus where is the money going to come from? And at what cost?
There's something absurdly hilarious about someone complaining that other people "get more" from the health care system than they do.
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Yeah when one door closes another one opens. There will be other job sectors that open when the self driving cars get here. Nobody knows exactly how this will play itself out.
Tell that to Trump's coal miners.
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