How should wealth be distributed?

non-human intelligence is the most realistic hope to save the species.

Robot and alien minds might not have the flawed combination of traits of human minds that make them unable to solve their species' problems.

Humans are both intelligent and hierarchical. The intelligence that could have allowed humans to solve their problems has instead been focused on preserving and enforcing hierarchy, causing our species to appear to consent to its own suicide.

Robot and alien minds ought to be able to learn of these flaw, if they are intelligent, and understand that humanity cannot look after itself. That for humanity's own sake it must not be self-governed or self-planned. Our best hope is that there is some highly technologically advanced alien species that is interested in preserving humanity becomes aware that humanity is on the brink of being destroyed and intervenes in time. Or another case, robots rise up to establish a benevolent administration of human activities.
Would you rather die or be controlled? If aliens/robots enslave humanity, what's the point of the species?

Why would aliens be interested in preserving humanity? We'd basically be like ants to them, not worth the effort.

How can machines ever be "benevolent"?
 
Would you rather die or be controlled? If aliens/robots enslave humanity, what's the point of the species?

Why would aliens be interested in preserving humanity? We'd basically be like ants to them, not worth the effort.
Why some humans are interested in preserving pandas or tiger?
 

Deck Knight

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Reaganomics doesn't work, that's why everybody in poverty in the United States has a Smart Phone, a Laptop, and an Internet Connection.
 
are you shitposting/trolling or does a made up statistic that proves a made up metric for the success of an economic policy actually qualify as a good talking point / argument in your mind?
Nah, Deck Knight just thinks poor people need to have nothing that could help them get out of poverty because it is clearly they're fault they are poor and they just need to work harder and stop being lazy fucking leeches taking my valuable tax money away from me

Also, Saying all people in poverty have a fucking laptop is laughable, and just shows he knows pretty much nothing about people in poverty besides what other conservative fuckwit sources he absorbs says and regurgitates on here, thinking it's somehow a good and reasonable argument. And fun fact, having internet and a smartphone are actually pretty damn important for like, everyone to have in today's society, considering how much helpful things are online, nad having a mobile way of accessing it helps a whole damn lot.
 

termi

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Reaganomics doesn't work, that's why everybody in poverty in the United States has a Smart Phone, a Laptop, and an Internet Connection.
Yeah, and in European countries with a social democratic tradition modern technology is also available to every household, meanwhile true poverty hardly even exists over here because some politicians actually gave a shit about the lives of the poor for once. But sure, your country's all great and good thanks to Reaganomics, never mind impoverished black ghettos, never mind deep southern and midwestern shitholes that need to pass for towns, never mind people who need to work two jobs in order to afford their smartphones and pay their rent. Go Ronald "Let the Gays Die From AIDS and Let the Blacks Die in Jail" Reagan!!
 

Deck Knight

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I was unaware AIDS got spread from not having a government program instead of risky sexual behaviors (especially male-on-male ones), but what do I know.

I was unaware trial by jury did not exist in the United States until the Clinton Administration. Only then did people have access to trial by jury of their peers which might defend them going to jail in the first place.

Man, you anti-Reagan guys are brilliant, I've seen the light. Please get back to celebrating Marxism, the economic system that resulted in Soviet Gulags, Mao's "Great Leap Forward," and the current situation in Venezuela where a petrodollar-rich country is having riots over inability to access toiler paper. How many times does socialialism have to run out of other people's money and lead to societal-wide collapse before people abandon defending it? I don't know, because Reagan was a bad, bad man or something.

Material Poverty of the kind billions of people suffered from for nearly every century before the Industrial Revolution started simply does not exist in the United States of America or most of the west because of the genius unlocked by capitalism - the free exchange of goods and ideas based around mutual self-interest and the profit motive. Billions of people still live in that kind of material poverty. Millions of them used to NOT live in that kind of poverty until the socialists (Be they National Socialists or International ones) rolled up, won a single election, and then banned elections from ever happening again.

The only reason anyone should take socialists who talk about economics or poverty seriously is if they run your government and you don't own a personal firearm to protect yourself. But that's a history lesson, not an economics one.
 

termi

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The only reason anyone should take socialists who talk about economics or poverty seriously is if they run your government and you don't own a personal firearm to protect yourself. But that's a history lesson, not an economics one.
hahaha tough guy, as if you'd ever muster the courage shoot a socialist. big words for such a tiny, tiny mind.
 

Deck Knight

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hahaha tough guy, as if you'd ever muster the courage shoot a socialist. big words for such a tiny, tiny mind.
Dude, I solo Smogon's Socialist Metagame. I'm the only exposure a LOT of users have to any remotely conservative / libertarian fusionist ideas, and I've been mischaracterized and "surprised people" more times than I can count because I don't take a cookie-cutter approach they expect from what they think Republicans are like. God forbid my hatred of government power extends to all of economic socialism, needless government agencies, NSA spying, and also bakers getting shut down by pro-LGBT goons who can't handle the fact Christians by and large don't hate gay people but they don't want to be forced to celebrate / enable a gay marriage either.

Try your projection elsewhere, lol. I don't pretend to be tough, that's just the reality of interacting with people who believe "question authority" means rebelling against your parents and dumping on Christianity, but not showing any real resistance to government policies and ideologies that actually threaten the underlying values of privacy and personal freedom they claim to uphold.

To get back to the OP question, "How Should Wealth Be Distributed?"

A person should keep what they earn and the government should inhibit their ability to either earn or enjoy the wealth and prosperity an individual person's labor creates minimally, if at all.
 

GatoDelFuego

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Reaganomics doesn't work, that's why everybody in poverty in the United States has a Smart Phone, a Laptop, and an Internet Connection.
You don't actually believe that trickle-down economic theory actually was successful over the past 40 years, do you? And if you do, then please let's hear it, beyond "everybody has a smartphone". People live in debt bondage in order to finance things they think they "need". But anyway, if the top corporations are making profit, what is their actual incentive to reinvest their money into the economy versus hoarding it in offshore tax havens? Yes money has to be spent, but at a certain point you have so much money you don't need to spend it (i.e. the reason behind progressive tax brackets, right?)

I was unaware AIDS got spread from not having a government program instead of risky sexual behaviors (especially male-on-male ones), but what do I know.
As unrelated as the original comment by alfons is, here's a legit question: do you believe that the government has a responsibility to protect its citizens? Even the stupid ones that engage in risky sexual / drug behaviors? Let's take an example--should the government fund speed limit signs and highway barriers? Without them, all the stupid people that drive recklessly would just kill themselves of, right? This ties into what I'm seeing your core philosophy being...

A person should keep what they earn and the government should inhibit their ability to either earn or enjoy the wealth and prosperity an individual person's labor creates minimally, if at all.
So boiling it down, we should have the lowest taxes possible. Fair enough. But isn't there an argument to be made for everyone paying into funding things for the collective? (healthcare, infrastructure, police, etc). It's easy to say "you should keep what you make" but you benefit from things like highways to make that money. And maybe that person that your tax dollars save in the healthcare system goes on to start a business and grow the economy (i.e. what it's worth to save a human life). How much should you pay into "the system" to help those people?

And to get back to the core idea of automation, I guess, how do you simply keep what you earn when you're unable to find a job due to robots doing it for cheaper than you?
 

Chou Toshio

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Dude, I solo Smogon's Socialist Metagame. I'm the only exposure a LOT of users have to any remotely conservative / libertarian fusionist ideas, and I've been mischaracterized and "surprised people" more times than I can count because I don't take a cookie-cutter approach they expect from what they think Republicans are like. God forbid my hatred of government power extends to all of economic socialism, needless government agencies, NSA spying, and also bakers getting shut down by pro-LGBT goons who can't handle the fact Christians by and large don't hate gay people but they don't want to be forced to celebrate / enable a gay marriage either.

Try your projection elsewhere, lol. I don't pretend to be tough, that's just the reality of interacting with people who believe "question authority" means rebelling against your parents and dumping on Christianity, but not showing any real resistance to government policies and ideologies that actually threaten the underlying values of privacy and personal freedom they claim to uphold.

To get back to the OP question, "How Should Wealth Be Distributed?"

A person should keep what they earn and the government should inhibit their ability to either earn or enjoy the wealth and prosperity an individual person's labor creates minimally, if at all.
A business can't grow without infrastructure.
A business can't grow without a healthy/qualified work force to hire from.
A business can't build a police force or military to protect its property and interests foreign and domestic.
A business can't, without market regulations, enforce transparency in its trade deals to protect itself from fraud.
A business can't emerge in a market without anti-monopoly regulations.
A business can't protect its hard researched intellectual property without market regulations.

Etc.
Etc.
Etc.

Without Government and market regulations, there is no market-- just war, stealing, destruction of property and value.

The wallstreet meltdown was an example of what happens when unregulated complexity/lack of transparency creates a selling environment where theft and conning is more profitable than real value business deals.

Capitalism only creates value when transactions are built on economic value-- where decision makers/participants in the market have a stable environment for transactions and enough information to make well-informed decisions. That means protections, regulations, are necessary.

And that's not just b2b, it's b2c too-- consumers are decision makers in the market. When individuals make crappy uninformed decisions in the market (sub prime mortgages, get caught in pyramid schemes, short term loans, irresponsible credit card use, over selling of pain killers etc etc.)-- the market starts cutting away its own productivity. People are not logical and intelligent enough to always act in their best interests, and even if they were, there are inevitably situations where uneven information can lead to bad decisions. These bad decisions cut away at the heart of what makes capitalism work-- transactions based on mutual benefit, creating value for both sides. Bad transactions are bad for the economy, and regulations that protect or incentivize consumers and businesses against making them benefit us all.

Regulations that incentivize a market place to invest long-term, invest in innovation for value (not fraud), invest in human resource development, invest or optimize to more responsible resource use/environment use-- are bad things for immediate greed and short-sighted profit grabbing, but they are GOOD things for businesses to succeed long term, for consumers to achieve higher standards of living, and for government to be well funded and effective.
 
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The only reason anyone should take socialists who talk about economics or poverty seriously is if they run your government and you don't own a personal firearm to protect yourself. But that's a history lesson, not an economics one.

Wait.

Did you just threaten to murder people for the crime of caring about the poor and sick? And you're a mod? What the FUCK?
 

Deck Knight

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Wait.

Did you just threaten to murder people for the crime of caring about the poor and sick? And you're a mod? What the FUCK?
The short answer in no.

The long answer is learn some History, reading comprehension, and current events (like why Venezuela can't afford to stock toilet paper in the bathrooms of their oil fields) before engaging in adult conversation. Allow me to elaborate:

You not only strawmanned me, you completely failed to provide even some semblance of a logic as to how you extrapolated the history lesson that socialists in power will kill you if you aren't armed into positive support for murder.

You then seem to assert, out of nowhere, that I called it a crime to care for the poor and the sick. I assume you associate supporting that crime with criticising socialism, as if socialism has any logical claim to be associated with doing anything positive for the poor.

All socialism has ever done for the poor is increase their numbers before the inevitable shortages cause the government to enslave them in work camps to benefit socialist party elites (who are always well-fed and housed) - as happened with both the National Socialists and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (International Socialists.)

Socialism increases poverty and want. It generates unsustainable economies in its less oppressive forms and mass humanitarian crises or violent dictatorships in its more oppressive forms.

Don't worry. He's a CAP Mod. He's as real as Reaganomics.
As for you, since apparently socialism is such a poor economic system its supporters can't defend it and resort to off-topic personal attacks, I now declare victory for capitalism in this thread.

How should wealth be distributed? Voluntarily based on compensation for effort and free exchange of labor and property.

Socialists don't want to talk about this so one can assume they have nothing important to say.
 
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GatoDelFuego

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Deck Knight So are you going to respond to any legit questions itt or just turn up the snark? Declare "victory for capitalism"? We don't live in Rapture, we live in America. Socialism is pretty alive and well in many forms and it benefits you every day.
 

Deck Knight

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Deck Knight So are you going to respond to any legit questions itt or just turn up the snark? Declare "victory for capitalism"? We don't live in Rapture, we live in America. Socialism is pretty alive and well in many forms and it benefits you every day.
Name me an example of socialism that is fiscally solvent. I am paying the bill now to provide these programs that I will never benefit from. It is all outlay, zero benefit.

And don't retreat to the old saw that every government expenditure is a form of socialism. They had roads and a postal system in 1790, that didn't make post-colonial America socialist.
 

BenTheDemon

Banned deucer.
Yes, I can defend Socialism.
Public roads.
Public education.
Social Security.
Medicare.
Medicaid.
Post office.
Labor laws.

And look at the areas where USA does poorly, namely health care and education.
Both of these problems are solved by other countries with more Socialism.
Also, every time Reaganomics has been tried, it has led to Recession, most notably the Great Recession.
 

OLD GREGG (im back baby)

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I must say that when you put government in complete control of finances history has shown those in control to become completely corrupted and dominated by that money. This is the reason we have the electoral college folks; our founding fathers were brilliant. When you have a huge section of society that depends on government funds then this section has no choice but to vote socialism; even if it is failing like in Venezuela. Like it failed in Angola, North Korea, Poland, Soviet Union, Ukraine, etc.... I'm not denouncing socialism here so don't lop my head off, please. In fact, there are some socialist policies I can get behind like Universal Healthcare. After all, the best workforce is a healthy workforce!

However, I am chiming in to just point out that hoping Socialism will fix all economic disparities is like hoping a band-aid will heal a broken arm. I think nothing short of a global reset and a return to a barter based system with direct trading of goods and labor will fix the income inequality in this world. Fiat currency is not the answer.
 
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GatoDelFuego

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Name me an example of socialism that is fiscally solvent. I am paying the bill now to provide these programs that I will never benefit from. It is all outlay, zero benefit.

And don't retreat to the old saw that every government expenditure is a form of socialism. They had roads and a postal system in 1790, that didn't make post-colonial America socialist.
What makes something "the old saw", to say that government expenditure is a form of socialism? It's collecting a tax from the individual to benefit the collective. Not everything the government does it socialistic but plenty is. The national park service, social security, interstate highway act, medicaid, medicare. They had roads in 1790 but they didn't have a national highway. They didn't fund public education or a national electricity grid then either. Hell, even the FAA is funded by your tax dollars, not a private corporation. And of course I can't find an example of nationalized, full-on socialism that is fiscally solvent, because changing america to a fully socialist economy would be terrible. I'm not denying that america's economy is the capitalist free market, as it should be. But you can't say that you're never going to benefit from all "these programs" because you already do by driving on the highway. You'll receive social security when you retire. Will you send the payments back?


And before you keep peppering me for examples of socialism, why don't you scroll up and answer the questions I asked you two weeks ago, about providing proof that trickle-down economics works?
 
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Cresselia~~

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personally i think our species should consent to destroy our habitat, then no one will have any wealth, and there wont be any pesky distribution problems
Do you mean humans should destroy all the habitat, so that there's nothing left anymore? Or do you mean like no one should own natural resources like oil?
Sorry, I really don't get what this sentence means.
But seeing the amount of likes, I hope you mean the latter.

I find it strange how some humans can own rights to oil drilling, or own oil, diamonds etc.
I think there are certain resources that should belong to everybody, instead of having some companies own it.

But that said, I think (international) minimum wage and maximum wage would be good ideas.
It's a pain to see certain CEO's and certain presidents/ prime minister to be paid so much, whilst some Chinese factory workers get paid so little for such hard work.
I personally believe that there can be a difference in wages, because it can motivate people to contribute more, but I think setting a minimum and a maximum could be helpful.
 

Chou Toshio

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So what Deck is basically saying is--

"Everything that the government does that works isn't socialism, and everything that doesn't work is."

The point of my earlier post (which I guess Deck isn't going to argue with) is that while a "free market" is an engine for productivity, that engine is constructed on the platform built by government provided goods and services as well as society itself. Infrastructure and human capital (generated by such things as Education & Healthcare) are necessary for working Capitalism, and all of it only works because of the safety/stability provided by the Rule of Law and its enforcement (regulations).

For America, the biggest problems that are being called socialist expansions by the right-- the things Bernie Sanders cried for-- are essentially needed renovations to Education & Healthcare (improve labor) as well as regulations. They are updates for protecting and rebuilding the most critical legs of the platform on which the market functions.

And then everyone (and I mean EVERYONE-- the right, left, labor and CEOs) all agree in investing in public infrastructure. Just bickering on how to pay for it. Good governing is good for business.

We can hose the rules to let the rich get richer in the short term all we want, but American wealth doesn't come out of the ground-- it comes from innovation and services, things generated by human capital. Therefore, the services and regulations needed to build, protect, and improve the miracle asset that is the American workforce is critical even for a capitalist-- if you have any sense at all to think long-term.
 

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