Don't they all? Bush too?

Get used to it. When the government spends the kind of money they have on elective war, these little fiscal crises are bound to occur regardless of who is sitting in the big chair.

At this point, the budget's so fracked up we'll be lucky if global warming puts us out of our misery.

 

Totally agree with you about the War spending Bertie, but it is incorrect to tie this proposed tax hike to that. No universal health care a la Edwards, no tax hike needed to pay for it. How Edwards, having earned about 1/2 a billion dollars litigating very dubious medical cases, can propose anything about healthcare with a straight face is totally beyond me.

Edit: in case you are wondering who he is gunning for too, here's another quote:

Presidential candidate and former Sen. John Edwards calls for higher taxes on those making over $200,000 a year to pay for his universal healthcare plan Sunday.

Let me tell you, this is not going to hurt the truly wealthy, like Mr. Edwards. This is only going to hurt those that are the hard working affluent, i.e. 200-400k / year types. Mr. Edwards is worth about $60 million it seems. I wonder if that is jointly with his wife or if she has seperate assets, being she was/is also successful at exhorting millions through medical malpractice. Site for Edward's worth: https://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/06/13/senators.finances/

 

I honestly can't believe that people still buy into the myth of socialized medicine when we see what a disaster it is everywhere else. Canada was so paranoid about maintaining the myth that it was only recently when the law had to be changed to allow people to buy their own private medical insurance.

 

I beleive we should raise taxes, but only on the poor. They use more of the Government resources than the rich, and need to pay their fair share.

 

I'm for taxing public lavatories as well.
That would be a real "pay-as-you-go" plan.

 

Of course he does. Edwards has his already (look at his new house). He'd be thrilled to take yours, too.

 

Wayfarer, in the words of Curly, " you worry about a lot of crap." I want you to enjoy www.burlingtonnews.net/arizona.html Then I prescribe taking your bagpipes out to the desert in full kilt and freak out some snowbirds from OH CANADA! at 2 in the morning. Take lots of water, chapstick and a field guide to AZ flora and Fauna. Edwards is a wus.

 

I beleive we should raise taxes, but only on the poor. They use more of the Government resources than the rich, and need to pay their fair share.

I assume you're kidding.

If not, how do you propose to quantify who "uses" more of such government resources as the national defense, highways, securities regulation, trade regulation, law enforcement, and the myriad of other activities that our tax dollars fund?
Who derives more financial benefit from public education: a factory worker, who may have learned his skills in the public schools, or the factory owner, who is able to employ thousands of workers because of the public investment in their education?
Who derives more financial benefit from the transportation system: the poor person riding the bus to work, or the business owner who uses the transportation system to get raw materials and ship finished goods?

 

I beleive we should raise taxes, but only on the poor. They use more of the Government resources than the rich, and need to pay their fair share.

I assume you're kidding.

If not, how do you propose to quantify who "uses" more of such government resources as the national defense, highways, securities regulation, trade regulation, law enforcement, and the myriad of other activities that our tax dollars fund?
Who derives more financial benefit from public education: a factory worker, who may have learned his skills in the public schools, or the factory owner, who is able to employ thousands of workers because of the public investment in their education?
Who derives more financial benefit from the transportation system: the poor person riding the bus to work, or the business owner who uses the transportation system to get raw materials and ship finished goods?

I assume he was joking. The answer to your question is both benefit. However, taxes don't just appear from nowhere. It is the capitalist who creates the conditions that allow for taxes to be collected, not the worker. The capitalist can easily move his capital to other, more friendly countries and therefore leave the worker and the government in a lurch. There is no doubt that we all benefit from a strong defense and rule of law as seen in very few countries however much of our prosperity is derived from the capitalist.

Its only when we begin to view government as an active participant that we begin to ask questions like should the rich be taxed more and so on. Instead of asking "what can government do" we should be asking "what should government not be involved with". Government should only insist on a fair field of play.

 

I assume he was joking. The answer to your question is both benefit. However, taxes don't just appear from nowhere. It is the capitalist who creates the conditions that allow for taxes to be collected, not the worker. The capitalist can easily move his capital to other, more friendly countries and therefore leave the worker and the government in a lurch. There is no doubt that we all benefit from a strong defense and rule of law as seen in very few countries however much of our prosperity is derived from the capitalist.

Its only when we begin to view government as an active participant that we begin to ask questions like should the rich be taxed more and so on. Instead of asking "what can government do" we should be asking "what should government not be involved with". Government should only insist on a fair field of play.

In other words, government should insist upon maintaining existing imbalances of power, and allow the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, that kind of thing. Excellent, because this is what government does. It is good to know that, contrary to many complaints that one hears, government performs it job competently. Your observation that the capitialist can simply go elsewhere is a declaration of the neo-liberal ideal, and has been the goal of a relentless 35-year counter-revolution that a forbidden subject in mainstream political discourse, although it is the core of any coherent left/right discussion; everything else is just cosmetic. The worker creates virtually all value; the capitalist creates virtually none. If the capitalist created value, i.e., "the conditions that allow for taxes to be collected," the capitalist wouldn't move his capital to another country; he would bury it in his backyard. The capitalist moves his capital to another country in order have the same or greater value created by more impoverished workers for less cost. In either place, it is the worker, not the capitalist, who is creating value.

 

Mr. McCullough, I will confound you by agreeing with you. (Centrists can do that, you know!)

I only pray that the post previous to yours is a joke.

I will agree with the equal playing field theory, if it TRULY is an equal playing field and includes an adequate education for everyone.

On the otherside, I totally distrust nationalized health care.

 

I wouldn't say you confounded me, but you did surprise me. I guess that's the benefit in keeping talking.

 

Here's the thing on this particular iteration of this issue:

Edwards, shyster lawyer, millions for very dubious med-mal lawsuits.

Edwards, Presidential candidate, raise taxes for universal healthcare.

Can you imagine if Cheney ran for Prez wanting to raise taxes to fund more Haliburton contracts? Edwards embodies much that is broken about the healthcare system in the US.

 

I assume you're kidding.

If not, how do you propose to quantify who "uses" more of such government resources as the national defense, highways, securities regulation, trade regulation, law enforcement, and the myriad of other activities that our tax dollars fund?
Who derives more financial benefit from public education: a factory worker, who may have learned his skills in the public schools, or the factory owner, who is able to employ thousands of workers because of the public investment in their education?
Who derives more financial benefit from the transportation system: the poor person riding the bus to work, or the business owner who uses the transportation system to get raw materials and ship finished goods?

Jack:

You repeatedly state how you have me on ignore. I therefore find it in bad taste for you to post on a thread I started. Just my $.0003 (post tax, all I have left).

 

The worker creates virtually all value; the capitalist creates virtually none. If the capitalist created value, i.e., "the conditions that allow for taxes to be collected," the capitialist wouldn't move his capital to another country; he would bury it in his backyard. The captialist moves his captial to another country in order have the same or greater value created by more impoverished workers for less cost. In either place, it is the worker, not the capitalist, who is creating value.

Tired, old Marxist claptrap like this has a way of hanging around like a bad case of foot fungus. The Labor Theory of Value was disproved by Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk something like 100+ years ago.

The entrepreneur creates value by identifying a good or service that he predicts other people will pay to obtain, will pay him as opposed to someone else, and will pay more than the cost of producing it. There is, of course, no guarantee that his predictions will be correct, hence the inherent risk.

Entrepreneurs are like economic antennae, filtering massive amounts of information, analyzing prices, and searching out the best use of capital. The entrepreneur's successes and failures are the only way that we can possibly know what the economic realities are at any given moment, what people's preferences are (i.e., measure demand), what the ordering of their priorities are, as well as their time preferences. None of these things can be known without their constant testing and experimentation.

But in any event, the worker gets paid well in advance of the receipts from the ultimate consumer, thus satisfying his desire for the relative security of a less risky and quicker payment.

In other words, labor is just labor. It has no intrinsic value. Value (and broad-based economic improvement in the quality of life of everyone involved) comes from the direction of labor toward the most profitable activities. These activities are, by definition, the ones that satisfy the greatest amount of consumers' unmet needs. The person who can successfully identify these unmet needs, and then actually do the work of engaging all of the factors that go into satisfying them, does everyone involved a great service.

Yammering fools like Edwards understand none of this, and will apparently always be around to propose to lead us all, by force, into economic decline.

 

In either place, it is the worker, not the capitalist, who is creating value.

Sorry but 100 years of economic trial and error have proven you incorrect, with devastating results. The value of anything the worker does is determined by the demand for that product, not just some arbitrary formula resting on the sweat equity of the worker. The worker is a tool. A cog in the machine. No? how else does one explain industrial robotics. Do the robots create value as well? The capitalist cannot be replaced however.

Like Phinn said, the capitalist recognizes the need in the marketplace for goods and/or services and then endeavors to fill that need. Marxism has been tried and has failed miserably yet I'm always amazed at those who insist on resurrecting it.

 

I'm confident Edwards will never be in a position to execute his plans. When members of his own party still call him "Breck Girl" I think we have nothing much to worry about. That kind of 'marginalization' is unrecoverable. Ask Dan Quayle.

 

I'm confident Edwards will never be in a position to execute his plans. When members of his own party still call him "Breck Girl" I think we have nothing much to worry about. That kind of 'marginalization' is unrecoverable. Ask Dan Quayle.

 

I'm confident Edwards will never be in a position to execute his plans. When members of his own party still call him "Breck Girl" I think we have nothing much to worry about. That kind of 'marginalization' is unrecoverable. Ask Dan Quayle.

You are no doubt correct there ksinc, but by staking out such a position, he then makes other positions, still objectionable to me, appear more reasonable to the average sheeple by comparison. The real danger is the increased levels of big government and/or socialism I am hearing these days, from George Bush on down.

 

In other words, labor is just labor.

And capital is just capital. Both capital and labor may be efficiently or inefficiently allocated; but, ultimately, without the value created by labor the entreprenuer has no product or service to sell or offer to meet unmet consumer demand. The labor theory predated Marx, and even Marx did not claim that all value was created by labor. The neoclassical critique of Marx is intended to reduce labor to a nullity, as you and pt4u67 apparently contend, and one needn't be a marxist to dispute this. The capitalist cannot be replaced? Absurd. The capitalist scarcely existed five hundred years ago. Did the world not exist at that time? This view of capitalism is simply a variant on the "Great Man" theory of historical development, with the entrepreneur filling in for Caesar, Christ, Luther, Napoleon, Lenin, etc. Caesar was nothing without his legions, Napoleon nothing without the Grand Armee, and the entrepreneur is nothing without the workers that produce his product or deliver his services. Of course, it is imperative that workers not recognize this, and continue to believe that without Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and such-like persons all would fall to ruin. However, there is no law of nature, mathematics, or economics that precludes an entirely worker-based and implemented system of production that seeks to create and satisfy consumer need in a similar manner as modern capitalism. After all, most persons who create or identify consumer demand are simply workers, albeit fairly well-compensated workers. On the other hand, there is tremendous ideological and political resistance to such a system, which, in the end, will probably prove decisive. One of the virtues of neoclassical theory is its tendency to posit as inevitable that which is only ideologically convenient. The superfluity of much of market-based capitalism is demonstrated by the manner in which capitalist societies respond to periods of genuine crisis and emergency: they largely abandon the uncertainties and risks of the market in favor of a command economy that will allocate resources towards specific societal ends. Of course, what constitutes a crisis is often subject to the whims of poltical will, as the Katrina disaster indicates.

 

Interesting discussion here guys. Old and derivative, but interesting. Let me ask you folks this: was it brawn that built the modern world or brains? No need to parse the statment, the meaning of my question is clear. Once clear of the barbaric phase, say into highly developed agrarian, is brawn or brains the driving force behind societal advancement?

 

without the value created by labor ...

No value is created by the labor. A valuable object might be created by a laborer, but that is not the same thing at all.

The value of an object is created when it satisfies someone's want or need. And unless the manufacturer of this object relies entirely on luck to match his productivity with consumer demand, the value of the object is created by the decision-making process to produce the object, the process that identifies that want or need, and the direction of the resources in an attempt to satisfy it.

The capitalist scarcely existed five hundred years ago.

Untrue. Capital, in the most basic sense of the term, exists wherever there is a surplus (i.e., savings) and the division of labor. No city could have been built without capital. Cities have existed for thousands of years.

This view of capitalism is simply a variant on the "Great Man" theory of historical development, with the entrepreneur filling in for Caesar, Christ, Luther, Napoleon, Lenin, etc

This makes no sense. An entrepreneur can just as easily be the self-employed plumber as Warren Buffet. Entrepreneurship is defined by the entrepreneurial function -- being the one who evaluates potential consumer demand, decides what good or service to market, markets it, marshals the resources to be able to produce it, and then directs its production.

The person who actually does the physical labor may also be the same person performing these all-important decision-making functions. It makes no difference. The value-creation lies in the direction of the labor, not in the labor itself, even if the decision-maker and the laborer happen to be the same person.

The idea that there is one all-powerful god-like Great Entrepreneur is just weird. That's a uniquely governmental mode of organization, not a commercial one. In fact, the freer an economy is, the more decentralized it is.

there is no law of nature, mathematics, or economics that precludes an entirely worker-based and implemented system of production that seeks to create and satisfy consumer need in a similar manner as modern capitalism. After all, most persons who create or identify consumer demand are simply workers, albeit fairly well-compensated workers.

Then they are performing the entrepreneurial functions. Of course, you can't leave out one crucial element -- the marshaling of resources. The organized production of goods requires initial resources, which can obviously come from only one place -- savings from prior productivity. If these workers you describe are able to voluntarily pool their own savings in order to begin production, then they will have performed all of the entrepreneurial functions all by themselves, and a productive, socially-beneficial enterprise may result, if they've done it all reasonably well.

The superfluity of much of market-based capitalism is demonstrated by the manner in which capitalist societies respond to periods of genuine crisis and emergency: they largely abandon the uncertainties and risks of the market in favor of a command economy that will allocate resources towards specific societal ends.

The extent to which "they" turn to a command economy is precisely equal to the extent to which "they" are no longer capitalistic. There is a spectrum, of course, from free to totalitarian. But a free economy is, by definition, founded on voluntary association. A command economy, as you put it, exists for the express purpose of forcing people to act in certain ways involuntarily. It exists to coerce.

Of course, what constitutes a crisis is often subject to the whims of poltical will, as the Katrina disaster indicates.

One of many failures of government. Of course, it was certainly not the first. Having lived through 5 or 6 hurricanes, including an earlier one in New Orleans, I can say with absolute certainty that Katrina saw the largest, fastest federal disaster response in US history. (And it was still a total fiasco!)

And yet, John Edwards wants to put this same organization in charge of health care, year round! If he succeeds, we can expect the same level of service, and the same level of cost-efficiency with doctors and hospitals as we saw in New Orleans, or with the Big Dig, or the Pentagon, or airport screening, or the Post Office ...

Unless you think that he, or someone like him, can play the role of the Great Man of History and, through the sheer force of his mighty, noble willpower, make the behemoth federal government perform as no government has ever actually performed.

But that would be silly.

 

is brawn or brains the driving force behind societal advancement?

Clearly, both are needed, just as with any division of labor, or in this case, the division between labor and decision-making.

But the decision-making is the unique factor. Baboons have brawn. Ants have brawn. Sea anemones survive through physical violence.

But only humans can decide how they will act. Only a human can envision the probable outcomes of various potential courses of action and select the one he prefers. Which is why only humans have civilizations.

 

No value is created by the labor. A valuable object might be created by a laborer, but that is not the same thing at all.

The value of an object is created when it satisfies someone's want or need. And unless the manufacturer of this object relies entirely on luck to match his productivity with consumer demand, the value of the object is created by the decision-making process to produce the object, the process that identifies that want or need, and the direction of the resources in an attempt to satisfy it.

We can, of course, break things down into smaller discrete units of meaning. When speaking of "value" created, I am referring to value as measured by market exchange, not an abstract value existing in a purely notional sense. Still, your insistence that the direction of labor is superior to the labor itself is unpersuasive. I don't believe that even the most doctrinaire Marxist would argue that an activitiy such as digging a hole in the ground in a remote desert, and then filling it in, has the same value as labor expended in the production of desireable commodities for the marketplace. The market utility of labor is generally assumed in most analyses. Addressing that assumption is worthwhile, but I don't believe it is decisive to the discussion.

Capital, in the most basic sense of the term, exists wherever there is a surplus (i.e., savings) and the division of labor. No city could have been built without capital. Cities have existed for thousands of years.

I disagree. Capitalism is not characterized merely by surplus/savings/profit. Capitalism is characterized by what Ellen Meiksins Wood has described as market imperatives; i.e., a matrix of social relations that exalts competition, accumulation, profit-maximinzation, and increasing labor-productivity. Ancient urban societies may have featured trade, commerce, entrepreneurship, and other commerical activities, but the absence of market imperatives prevented the development of capitalism as we have come to know it. As Wood herself explains:

[T]here have been societies with advanced urban cultures, highly developed trading systems, and far-flung commerical networks that have made ample use of market opportunities but have not systematically experienced what we [call] market imperatives. . . The critical factor in the divergence of capitalism from all other forms of 'commerical society' was the development of certain property relations that generated market imperatives and capitalist 'laws of motion', which imposed themselves on production. . . . The great non-capitalist commerical powers . . . were not systematically subjected to the pressures of competitive production and profit-maximization, the compulsion to reinvest surpluses, and the relentless need to improve labor-productivity associated with capitalism. (Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, pp. 75 -76, original emphasis.)

Thus, the rise of capitalism had to wait upon the development of legal and social relations in early modern Europe that favored market imperatives.

This makes no sense. An entrepreneur can just as easily be the self-employed plumber as Warren Buffet. Entrepreneurship is defined by the entrepreneurial function -- being the one who evaluates potential consumer demand, decides what good or service to market, markets it, marshals the resources to be able to produce it, and then directs its production.

The person who actually does the physical labor may also be the same person performing these all-important decision-making functions. It makes no difference. The value-creation lies in the direction of the labor, not in the labor itself, even if the decision-maker and the laborer happen to be the same person.

The idea that there is one all-powerful god-like Great Entrepreneur is just weird. That's a uniquely governmental mode of organization, not a commercial one. In fact, the freer an economy is, the more decentralized it is.

This perhaps makes no sense because my meaning was unclear. I was answering pt4u67's contention the "the capitalist", meaning the capitalist class, was indispensible. I was not referring to a single, omniscent Entrepreneur.

Then they are performing the entrepreneurial functions. Of course, you can't leave out one crucial element -- the marshaling of resources. The organized production of goods requires initial resources, which can obviously come from only one place -- savings from prior productivity. If these workers you describe are able to voluntarily pool their own savings in order to begin production, then they will have performed all of the entrepreneurial functions all by themselves, and a productive, socially-beneficial enterprise may result, if they've done it all reasonably well.

I agree completely, with the exception that the initially marshalling of resources, the initial capital investement, need not come from the workers' own savings. There are other sources of investment. David Schiewkart's compelling work on Economic Democracy makes a very strong case that such an egalitarian mode of production could easily supplant current forms of authoritarian capitalism if the ideological and political will could be marshalled.

The extent to which "they" turn to a command economy is precisely equal to the extent to which "they" are no longer capitalistic. There is a spectrum, of course, from free to totalitarian. But a free economy is, by definition, founded on voluntary association. A command economy, as you put it, exists for the express purpose of forcing people to act in certain ways involuntarily. It exists to coerce.

The concept you adduce here is an article of faith in neoclassical theory, but I find it most unconvincing. Capitalism, even as practiced in a more or less free, democratic society, is highly authoritarian and highly coercive. Corporate organization, to take but one example, is typically highly authoritarian, and only the inteference of the state prevents it from evolving into a totalitarian system of extreme coercion. This is something that virtually everyone overlooks, that virutally everyone accepts as function of the natural order of things. Until that pernicious form of false consciousness is corrected, little systemic change is likely to occur.

One of many failures of government. Of course, it was certainly not the first. Having lived through 5 or 6 hurricanes, including an earlier one in New Orleans, I can say with absolute certainty that Katrina saw the largest, fastest federal disaster response in US history. (And it was still a total fiasco!)

Where were the entrepreneurs to fill the market niches created by this fiasco? Katrina may well have seen the largest, fastest federal disaster response in US history, but it still wasn't large or fast enough. Disaster preparedness is precisely the kind of activity that experiences "market failure" because there is little profit to be made from it.

And yet, John Edwards wants to put this same organization in charge of health care, year round! If he succeeds, we can expect the same level of service, and the same level of cost-efficiency with doctors and hospitals as we saw in New Orleans, or with the Big Dig, or the Pentagon, or airport screening, or the Post Office ...

Unless you think that he, or someone like him, can play the role of the Great Man of History and, through the sheer force of his mighty, noble willpower, make the behemoth federal government perform as no government has ever actually performed.

But that would be silly.

Edwards is not my candidate so I have nothing to say about him. And, as I mentioned above, I don't envision a Great Entrepreneur.

 

Disaster preparedness is precisely the kind of activity that experiences "market failure" because there is little profit to be made from it.

I think there are a lot of insurance companies that would disagree with this. It's the potential for disaster, though usually on a scale smaller than Katrina, that drives the 'need' for insurance. Health insurance has become an exception, as the consumer usage has drifted far from its roots of protection against disasterous high-costs, but that's another thread entirely.