Wednesday, December 09, 2009

The right-wing mindset

Math is hard. Much better to just accept whatever our Rushevik commissars tell us on faith. Facts are overrated anyhow, where facts contradict faith, faith must rule out or you're the Antichrist.

And that is the snarkarific summary of the right-wing mindset on all this economics stuff dealing with employment and how to increase employment when the economy is stuck in a deflationary spiral / liquidity trap. Their Party commissars, not mere things like math, are what possesses truth in their alternate universe. Their Party commissars tell them that the problem is not a lack of consumption thus meaning that businesses have no need to hire workers. Rather, the Rushevik Party commissars say to their constituents that the problem of unemployment is that people want too much money for their labor, that if people would simply accept less money they could find employment. Of course, in our real universe things are different, but they live in a fictional universe where all markets are perfect and where there is no lower bounds to the marginal cost for human labor because in their universe (unlike ours) human beings willingly starve to death if they do not possess sufficient market value for basic subsistence.

Of course, in this universe, there is a lower bounds on the wage that a human being will accept, thus the notion that the solution to our unemployment problem is lower wages is nonsense. If a wage is below the subsistence level needed for basic survival, the person will not accept it because the way a human being works in this reality is that if you're going to die, you might as well die doing something useful like storming Congress with pitchforks and torches demanding assistance. I.e., the Rushevik Party's "Let Them Eat Cake" attitude leads directly to a re-enactment of the French Revolution. But wait, I'm talking about real life now, not the fictional reality that wingers live in... my bad!

-- Badtux the Economics Penguin

10 comments:

  1. "you might as well die doing something useful like storming Congress with pitchforks and torches demanding assistance."

    And from whence, or from whom, comes the assistance?

    Just askin'!

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  2. Uhm, in case you don't know, Mr. Duff, we have plenty of food here in the United States. If people are starving for lack of food, what we have is a distribution problem, not a production problem.

    And if you say "but taking from those who have too much food to give to those who have too little food is class warfare!", what the fuck is a financial system that was based entirely upon stealing billions of dollars from Americans' pension funds by selling them bogus "mortgage-backed securitieds" that the financial institutions knew were worthless, if not class warfare? What the fuck is foreclosing on people's homes because they deliberately raised interest rates to the point where the mortgages could not be repaid, all for billions of dollars in bonuses to rich bastards who would rape their own mother if there was money in it, if not class warfare? What we have had this past thirty years, Mr. Duff, is a complete collapse of the social contract that made this country great. Our leaders and our wealthy once said they would take care of us from their wealth if we worked our tails off to help them become wealthy, not that we'd ever get rich but at least we'd have a decent life. Today, we're being fucked up every anal cavity by these same rich motherfuckers, they took that social contract and ripped it into shreds.

    Look, Americans are THE hardest working people on this planet. PERIOD. There is no statistic in which Americans aren't the hardest workers. We are the most productive workers of any nation. We work more hours than any other nation. We work our fucking *tails* off, no other nation has harder workers or more productive workers, then these rich leech motherfuckers come in and *STEAL* the fruits of our labor via fraud and laws that unfairly enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us? And you claim that's not class warfare? If so, you're either the dumbest motherfucker to ever walk this planet, or you're so fucking crooked and dishonest that you better not come anywhere near me. 'Nuff said on that.

    So you ask "from whom comes the assistance?" What about we take back all that shit that those rich greedy motherfuckers STOLE from us, first of all? Would you agree that would be a start? Huh? Oh of course not, that would require, like, actually ADMITTING that you've been gulled, that you're a victim of fraud, and any cop will tell you that fraud victims will never admit it because they know admitting that they've been defrauded means admitting they're stupid. So it goes...

    - Badtux the Class Warfare Penguin

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  3. You really must try and calm down, you make Steve Bates look like he's in a Zen trance!

    When you have stolen, oops, sorry, retaken, all the wealth from the plutocrats and spent it, what then? I mean, where is the next lot of wealth going to come from? Who is going to create it - er, given that you and your comrades are standing by to re-take it the minute it is created?

    Just wondered.

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  4. Uhm, me and my comrades *created* this wealth. We're talking about taking back our OWN wealth that these bastards stole. Why do you think we'll quit creating wealth once we take previous wealth stolen from us back from the people who stole it? I've created a dozen different products over the past 15 years, why do you have the deranged notion that I would quit creating products just because some thieves and leeches got their due?

    As I've repeatedly pointed out, the people who create and make and grow stuff here in our nation are not our wealthy. They don't make shit. You look at any rich person in our society, not a single one of them knows how to do anything of value other than rip other people off in order to enrich themselves. They don't get their hands dirty making cars, or designing computer programs, or anything like that. They have people for that. The sole thing they do is sit there at the top getting rich off the labors of others.

    Somebody has to be on top because humans are hierarchical monkeys (a matter of genetics), so that was acceptable back when we had a social contract in this country that said yes, the rich leech class could enrich themselves off of the labors of the people who actually produce wealth as long as they redistributed a significant proportion of that wealth to improve the lot of workers. Back in the Eisenhower era when we had 90% taxes above a certain limit, the wealthy knew that it made no sense trying to enrich themselves unfairly off the wealth of their workers past a certain point because the government would simply take it and redistribute it themselves if the wealthy did not do so. But that social contract got torn up by Ronald Fucking Ray-Gun, and instead what we have is a bunch of thieves who've gone way beyond what's reasonable and acceptable and descended into pure rape of the workers of America. That's what it is, pure and simple, class warfare by the leech class (those rich thieves who do not create wealth but merely manage it) against those who actually create wealth (the workers of America, those of us who actually create or manufacture or grow or distribute stuff).

    And does being raped anally by worthless rich leeches piss me off? Why do you think it *shouldn't* piss me off?

    - Badtux the Raped Penguin

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  5. "They don't make shit. You look at any rich person in our society, not a single one of them knows how to do anything of value other than rip other people off in order to enrich themselves. They don't get their hands dirty making cars, or designing computer programs, or anything like that."

    Bill Gates?

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  6. Bill doesn't know how to do shit. He didn't write the original Microsoft BASIC, he paid someone to modify a public domain BASIC to run on the 8080 processor using Mommy and Daddy's money. Bill didn't write a single line of MS-DOS, he ripped off the guys at SWSOFT who wrote it then used Mommy's connections at IBM to sell it to IBM. Bill didn't write a single line of code in Windows, the engineers he hired did that. Bill Gates is a winner of the Lucky Sperm Club in the end, just Paris Hilton with better PR. Every dollar he has was earned by his employees who created his actual product -- Bill is utterly incompetent at computer programming and hasn't written a line of code since he was a freshman in college (he dropped out shortly afterwards, after he decided his lack of coding skill wouldn't be a problem in the microcomputer industry).

    That said, I respect Bill a lot more than I respect most of the leeches. Bill might be a winner of the Lucky Sperm Club who got filthy rich from exploiting the output of his employees at Microsoft who created the actual product, but he did a pretty good job of spreading the wealth around. There was a whole lot of Microsoft employees who retired at the 20 year mark with enough money to take them through the rest of their life if they spent it wisely, which is the way it should be -- they created the product that runs most of the computers in the world now, why *shouldn't* they be adequately rewarded for that?

    So yeah, I respect Bill, but not because he knows how to actually produce stuff, but, rather, because he did a good job of redistributing his wealth (and is still involved in doing so -- see the foundation he and his wife run). And while he's a jerk, Microsoft produced some great product while he was there, and has produced crap since he retired as CEO, so obviously he did *something* to help Microsoft produce good product even if his contribution was not easily visible. So should he be rewarded for that? Sure. That's not the question. The question is, should he be rewarded far out of proportion to the rewards that the rest of the workers got for creating those excellent products? I say no -- he didn't write a single line of code in those products, so he should share the profits from those products with the people who actually created them. Which is what he did, though he did keep a huge chunk for himself, but what the hey, perks of being on top, eh?

    - Badtux the Labor Penguin

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  7. "I respect Bill a lot more than I respect most of the leeches."

    Hmmn, could have fooled me!

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  8. Bill doesn't know how to do shit.

    Actually, he is a very good bridge player.

    Cheers!
    JzB the poor bridge playing trombonist

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  9. David -

    You have to realize that the slightest modicum of grudging respect
    is a lot more than utter contempt.

    These things are relative, ya know.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Duff, Bill did add value to Microsoft. Not enough value to justify being paid 1,000,000 times more than the people who created the actual product, but value nonetheless, in much the same way that Steve Jobs adds value to Apple -- i.e., for some reason that cannot be easily quantified given that he has absolutely no hands-on part in creating the actual product, they just make better product when he's around.

    But contrast that with, say, Carly Fiornina, who ran HP into the ground and got a multi-million dollar golden parachute for that task. She should have gotten bupkus, zip, zilch. She added no value to that company, created no product, is utterly incompetent at anything other than scamming and cheating people out of money. She ought to be in prison and all her millions distributed to her victims, rather than running for governor of California. Sorry, but that's the facts.

    - Badtux the "Most of the rich are leeches" Penguin

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