The Official Conservative Political Thread

Lyrical and his family have undoubtedly worked very hard. They've just taken for granted that this automatically results in social mobility.

Screamfeeder_sl said:

What. The. Fuck.

I bet you hoped no one would call you on this.

First off. The Ambassador (Hindustan Motors) and Mercedes were NEVER considered direct competitors.EVER. Who ever told you this is stupid and as wrong as wrong can be about cars. 2nd off (and this might be a typo) theAmbassadoris based on the Morris Oxford III which was transferred to Hindustan Automotive in 1957 NOT 1926. Before that, Hindustan was using the Morris Oxford II to base taxis and custom executive limos off of (the HindustanLandmaster, not Ambassador, which was a totally different car with multiple options). 3rd off, the Ambassador was NEVER intended to be a direct competitor to companies like BMW, Merc and other major auto manufacturers. It was used as a cheap and reliable (which it still is) taxi and limo service car.

What you are essentially doing is comparing a Toyota Corolla to a Ferrari 458 and saying Toyota is shit because OMFG LOOK AT THE FERRARI! Capitalism!

So you might have had some fancy assedumacatingin economics, but it sure as fuck skipped over automotive history because your example is fucking retarded and should never be used again...ever.

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*POW*

Lyrical_sl said:

40% of the world's population switched to capitalism, and that's no big deal? India can now pay it's bills, when it couldn't afford to even keep the lights on or pay policeman, and it's no big deal?

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You do realize that India previous to the "change to Capitalism" was quite Capitalist before as well, right? And that large swathes of the country are still terrible, right?

You can make some pretty great condemnation or complimenting to something when you completely distort reality to something that fits your predetermined destination in an argument.

42% of children in India are malnourished something that has INCREASED since that switch for example.

Sebudai_sl said:

Lyrical and his family have undoubtedly worked very hard. They've just taken for granted that this automatically results in social mobility.

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Some people get rich from hard work - some do not. My family is entirely semi-rich (low 8 figures holdings (not income) for the current gen is what we're all at I think - I don't talk money with my family though) because my grandfather was a miser and invested wisely.

I don't know enough about India but I wonder if that's a lack of regulation.

I heard a piece on BBC that was talking about farmer suicides in india. Traditional farming used a seed saving/seed bank approach. That means, basically, farmers never paid for seed and they had built up a diversity of seed tailored to different weather patterns. In the past generation industrial farming has taken hold in India and part of that (r)evolution is the deconstruction of traditional farming approaches. Not only do farmers pay for seed now (which is a huge deal in itself) but the stock itself isn't nearly as tailored. They've thrown away hundreds of years of selective breeding in favor of GMO seed. And (it would seem) in many cases been given no viable option to do anything but.

So I really don't know enough about India and the situation there, but I do wonder if that has more to do with it than anything else. Is it capitalism itself, or simplypoorly regulatedcapitalism in regards to food production/distribution? No one except for Robber Barons makes a case for unregulated capitalism... and even a lot of the Robber Barons make a case against it.

So I really don't know enough about India. I'm mostly askin.

India's income inequality has doubled in 20 years - The Times of India- Remember kids, India is all roses.

Lyrical_sl said:

Economics is in the school of liberal arts, I got a bachelor of Science in Accounting and Finance. Economists get too loosey goosey about things no one cares about. I'd rather learn about how to exploit this system to my advantage, than to sit around whining about this or that. A lot of it is nothing but pretentious intellectual masturbation. Maybe the first bit of advanced coursework is good, but my stuff in my Senior year made me walk. I kept asking myself what real world applications it had, and couldn't answer.

Who cares?

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Just want to chime in and say that whether econ is a A or S depends on the school and to some extent the level. I did undergrad econ for a BA for example but the masters program I did was an MSc. As you go higher up it's less theory and more and more math.

Just wanted to correct you for insulting my profession

"A rising tide raises all ships" is bullshit in this context - the more wealth there is the more currency deflates in value which makes it even worse for the lower tiers.

When there's twice as much money in the economy and the lower classes aren't moving up at all that's actually making it worse for the lower classes (as I stated earlier, the number of starving children has INCREASED during the timeframe in question) because of how things inflate in cost as there's more money in an economy.

(Not to mention if you actually read this, and other articles on the subject - it's largely NOT a ton of people coming out of poverty - the wealth is quite concentrated on a few tiers, and many estimates think their current poverty level figures are intentionally being deflated to give them a good statistic to point at since their inflation rose a ton without ANY adjustment to their poverty level figures)

Not sure if this got linked since I just popped in here, but if you want to see the latest data on social mobility in America, you should read these two papers (at least the intros, which summarize the findings)

http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty...ity_trends.pdf
http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_geo.pdf

Tl;DR - some areas in America have the highest social mobility in the world, others the worst recorded. On the whole, relative mobility in America has not changed in the last 40 years.

And to go on a tangent,here'speople that are still citing Einstein's paper from 1923, and there's quite a few

fanaskin_sl said:

yeah well people have been telling me inflation is good for the economy my whole life, I always said that was bullshit because it's regressive on the poor, but here we are, all the top democrats will say the same thing too.

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The source of inflation matters... if more money is going to the lower classes causes it it's quite different than the top tiers propelling it.

More money has never gone to the lower classes. Never.

Dumar_sl said:

More money has never gone to the lower classes. Never.

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Hypotheticals like "if we raise the minimum wage it would cause inflation" is definitely more targeted at the lower classes (at least directly speaking - indirectly it does tend to worm its way back to the upper classes due to economic movements) - that was the distinction I was trying to make to Garglechimp.

Democrats aren't OK with inflation in general, just they're OK with it when it's a side result of programs targeting the lower classes.

Wow, it was pretty incredible to watch Lyrical stroll in here and single handedly lose the capitalism vs. socialism argument in about 5 posts flat, despite most people here probably agreeing with his basic premise (pure Marxism is bad). Impressive!

Lyrical_sl said:

And some of those are less market driven, and the GDP growth rate tends to be much lower. Look at the countries with the larger growth rates, they moved to almost a naked capitalism (which I am not proposing). Look at a country like China, their factories literally spew toxic chemicals into people's drinking water, and the government turns its head.

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China is state-controlled capitalism. The vast majority of the large companies in China creating all that growth, are arms of the state. There's far more private ownership of the economy in so-called "socialist" Scandinavian countries right now than there is in China. China's cherry picked some aspects of capitalism sure, but it's still mostly controlled by the state. There's little or nothing "free market" about China's brand of capitalism. Unfortunately, there isn't a neat, single dimensional axis upon which you can compare various countries' socio-economic systems.

chaos_sl said:

Unemployment is down, the economy is recovering, and the deficit has been cut by a record margin. It isn't a stretch to say the economy has improved. By the metrics they use to measure the economy, it has improved. Period. And it is continuing to improve. There are plenty of things to pin on Obama but you are so intent on repeating right wing talking points that you are seriously barking up the wrong tree,

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Recoveries from financial crises tend to take 5-7 years to truly take hold. I'm not talking regular recessions, but financial crises where the financial system melts down or nearly melts down. The US has only had a handful of them (2007/8, Great Depression, and I think the one in the 80's qualifies, but as a small one), but other countries around the globe have had plenty, and that's what the research shows. It takes awhile for the financial systems to clean themselves up, it can't happen overnight.

Which means that the recovery is pretty much right on schedule. And if the Republicans hadn't been obstructive fuckheads for the past 6 years, the recovery might have been a little further along had Obama had a little more freedom of action to stimulate the economy.

Merlin_sl said:

Its quite a stretch to say what works for a region of 25 million people will work for 300 million people.

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Please explain in detail why total population is relevant when designing socio-economic systems. Further, please explain to me roughly where the dividing lines should be for the various aspects of socio-economic systems. For example, "national health care systems only work up to 100m people, while Scandinavian style social programs can only be effective in countries up to 25m people." And so on.

I want me some plagiarisms in there too.

Lyrical_sl said:

Actually, I'm wondering how you see to think that your argument about a system followed by countries not even the size of New York City have any relation to what we are talking about. These countries are are so teeny, that if that's the crux of your argument, you are just wasting our time.

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Congratulations! You have the same homework assignment as Merlin.

Iannis_sl said:

I don't know enough about India but I wonder if that's a lack of regulation.

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India's problems are if anything the opposite. There's still a huge need for massive reforms of the country's laws and regulations. They got partway there in the 90's, the economy took off, and then they got complacent. Now growth is slowing down again because there's still so much endemic corruption in numerous industries that is limiting growth. The power/electricity industry is a great example. How can a country develop if the fuckwads running the power grid can't keep the lights on?