What about the person born into such riches that they do jackshit - surely this is a greater travesty stressed?

Stressed... I don't think your lifestyle is seriously impacted by what kind of government you live in (obviously dictatorship and republic, sure, but not really welfare and total free market as much). Maybe I don't understand what you're going for...

I would disagree with you on both fronts:
"According to all of you, thinking optimistically while maintaining a realistic view on what I can get is naive."
I would 100% disagree, for most of history life has been getting better and for all of history people think life is getting worse.

A majority of Americans think life was better in the 80s then it is today:
The conservatives site the lower real GDP, the socialist youth site the lack of a USSR, the libertarians complain about the ever expanding surveillance state, the environmentalists complain about rising temperatures.

The only one of those 4 people who have any merit are the environmentalists, but I would differ from most environmentalists on how to solve environmental issues and would also differ on how sever the problem is. But that is another topic for another day.

However, if you look at technology, life expectancy, access to consumer goods etc. life is better, I would like to see a legitimate argument about why life is worse today then in the 80s or why life is getting worse today.

"So what's the negative that I apparently don't get about socialism or corporatism? "
To name a few:
1. Ethics: The government doesn't know whats best for me, so why should I trust them for my best interest. The advantage of the free market is that you can decide for yourself what you think you need and want and get it for yourself.
2. Less efficient: The advantage of the profit motive is that unnessacary costs can be cut.
3. Innovation: Capitalist countries always have more innovation, for less costs, then countries that don't. The smart phone market is currently the most competitive market, its also the one that is innovating the mos. Competition breeds innovation.
4. State capitalism vs Liberal Capitalism: Early last year, the economist wrote a special report on state capitalism. It examined countries like China that are rising economic powers who haven't adopted the liberal capitalism model that the USA has embraced. The central argument is that state capitalism is good at playing catch up, China, being less technologically advanced and per capita poorer then the USA means that they are playing catch up, they can then do what components of capitalism worked in America, and using subsidies and regulations, they can't prevent what didn't work. Per capita China will never be richer then the states. China's GDP growth is falling, due to their one child policy they have bigger problems with a retiring workforce and declining population and lastly there is no innvation. China is simply copying America so it can catch up, but when it does catch up, what then? the USA has been innovating every step of the way, while China has not.
5. The issue of money. People on the left complain about the defence budget, now let me show you a reality in terms of % of the US federal budget:
Defence: 20%
Welfare: 54%
The USA is considered to be one of the most capitalist countries in the world that doesn't care about its poor, but 22% of Americans GDP is welfare (welfare being medicare, medicaid, social security, government issues unemployment insurance etc).
At the moment the cost of welfare is growing at something like 4 times the rate of inflation. If welfare started growing at the rate of inflation, America wouldn't need to raise taxes or cut spending and the budget would be balanced by 2024 (based on the CBOs projections of economic growth)
6. Ethics II: As stressed pointed out, why pay people to sit around and do nothing all day?
7. Employment opportunities: There is a direct correlation between welfare benefits and the % of the work force employed. If you give out nice welfare benefits, then the incentive to find work goes down, and so does the # of people working. Less workers means less consumer goods means more expensive conumer goods.

"What about the person born into such riches that they do jackshit - surely this is a greater travesty stressed?"
Rags to riches and back to rags in 3 generations. In both cases the wealthy doing jack shit because they're rich and the poor doing jack shit because they're on welfare, the benefits don't last long, the difference is the wealthy are wasting their parents money while the poor are wasting everyone elses money.

"Stressed... I don't think your lifestyle is seriously impacted by what kind of government you live in (obviously dictatorship and republic, sure, but not really welfare and total free market as much). Maybe I don't understand what you're going for..."
sure it does, higher taxes means less money for you to spend, needless regulation means less things you are allowed to do, less innovation means less cool toys for you to play with and the ballooning welfare state means that these problems will grow at an ever expanding rate.

Just a note: I am not saying that life will get worse under the welfare state, what I am saying is that life will get better faster under the invisible hand of the free market.

rereading my post I think it wasn't clear about why I went on the rant about pessimism. My point was is your allowed to be both realistic and optimistic.

Life has not gotten better in relative terms which in many respects is more important than absolute terms. And please enough of this invisible hand bullshit, and your arguments against socialism are poor. That said I'm tired of constantly rehashing the same pro/anti socialist argument.

"The government doesn't know whats best for me, so why should I trust them for my best interest. The advantage of the free market is that you can decide for yourself what you think you need and want and get it for yourself."

I don't think that a government trying to provide for everyone is an insult toward you. It's simply upholding the nation. The United States has been a federalist nation throughout every part of its history; the individual has always been overlooked on the basis of maintaining the nation. Britain's the same. The only thing that's different is that a welfare state doesn't try to hide that through a list of unalienable rights; rather, they use that list of unalienable rights to promote the concept that everyone should have the opportunity to have these no matter how much money they've got.

"Capitalist countries always have more innovation, for less costs, then countries that don't. The smart phone market is currently the most competitive market, its also the one that is innovating the mos. Competition breeds innovation."

Welfare states, in a general sense, are exporters. Capitalist nations couldn't live without them and welfare nations couldn't live without capitalist nations to buy. That's a moot point; the same can be said for any system of government.

"Ethics II: As stressed pointed out, why pay people to sit around and do nothing all day?"

Nobody is. Welfare in a welfare state isn't providing for the poor, it's providing for everyone. It allows people to go out and get their coverages and make some use of themselves.

"Employment opportunities: There is a direct correlation between welfare benefits and the % of the work force employed. If you give out nice welfare benefits, then the incentive to find work goes down, and so does the # of people working. Less workers means less consumer goods means more expensive conumer goods."

Yet Germany, in "crisis" with the rest of Eurozone, and a prominent welfare state, has a lower unemployment rate than the United States.

"sure it does, higher taxes means less money for you to spend, needless regulation means less things you are allowed to do, less innovation means less cool toys for you to play with and the ballooning welfare state means that these problems will grow at an ever expanding rate."

If the taxes are put into things that you use - such as healthcare and higher education - then what's the problem? That's what these nations do. They filter higher taxes into their funds so that basic services can be less expensive. That's why colleges in many of these nations is around $200 a semester. That's why you can have a major surgery for $500. You pay higher taxes so that you don't have to worry about going bankrupt when you have to pay for 12 cancer surgeries and three oral surgeries in a single year as my family is trying to go through while also putting my sister in a great college and pay $16,000 tuition for my school. It is cyclical in that way.

"Rags to riches and back to rags in 3 generations. In both cases the wealthy doing jack shit because they're rich and the poor doing jack shit because they're on welfare, the benefits don't last long"

Not really. I could live fairly comfortably on the bank interest alone (3%?) of a million dollars for the rest of my life. If you're rich and want to stay comfortable and do zero work, all you need to do is be careful. If you're poor and want to be comfortable, tough shit.

@yellowjacket: $30,000/year doesn't go a long way if your trying to be rich. Sure you can comfortably live off of it, but you can't really be considered rich.

@Socrates: The invisible hand works. And if you don't want to argue then I wont force you. Just be thankful that you live in a relatively capitalist country.

@bo_sox: Respond to the cost component of my argument, then I will respond to you. Since innovation and cost are the 2 main points I use in my argument. If you can't afford a welfare state then you can't be one.

Fasces, if you post something, it's gonna be used against you. You don't get to choose what can be rebutted.

Fine bo_sox to answer your question in the opening post:
The reason we can't have a welfare state is that we can't afford it, People on the left complain about the defence budget, now let me show you a reality in terms of % of the US federal budget:
Defence: 20%
Welfare: 54%
The USA is considered to be one of the most capitalist countries in the world that doesn't care about its poor, but 22% of Americans GDP is welfare (welfare being medicare, medicaid, social security, government issues unemployment insurance etc).
At the moment the cost of welfare is growing at something like 4 times the rate of inflation. If welfare started growing at the rate of inflation, America wouldn't need to raise taxes or cut spending and the budget would be balanced by 2024 (based on the CBOs projections of economic growth).

If you're going to claim that a welfare state works, then you have to have a reasonable answer to EVERY one of my reasons for why it wont work.

The burden of proof falls on you because your the one trying to prove that something works and I am the one trying to prove that it does.

If 9 out of 10 of my reasons are wrong, but the 10th stands as true, then my argument is still true because I have still proven that it doesn't work.

also lastly I said I will rebut all your arguments once you rebut the important ones of mine

Stopped reading halfway Fasces speech. Socialism isnt Communism.

^

Corporatism also isn't socialism.

Fasces, if they aren't important, don't post them. Welfare states make money through a free market economy. It's not socialism; it's not communism. It's corporatism where there is still private industry and there is still competition between people. It simply provides that the poor will be sustained and assumes that the rich can sustain themselves.

bo_sox: I was refuting both socialism and corporatism. "I apparently don't get about socialism or corporatism?"
you asked me to refute both.

Fasces is right about one thing. People bitch about defense spending, but the military doesn't spend that much compared to welfare, two wars included. Furthermore, the military gives a very real and noticeable return on investment by providing education and job security for the nation's youth (many of whom hail from underprivileged but hardworking backgrounds) , good jobs for defense contractors, and military security for not only America but the Western Hemisphere in general.

Is there a lot of pork and corruption in the military-industrial complex? Absolutely. The Zumwalt-class destroyer, F/A-22, F/A-35, and V-22 Osprey projects are all good examples of greedy defense contractors and unrealistic military strategists. But it still pales in comparison to the waste, fraud, and corruption in the welfare system.

I am opposed to the concept of welfare. NO ONE should EVER get something for NOTHING, especially from the federal government. If you are a veteran or otherwise gave your time and effort to the government in some capacity, then you should get benefits if you need them. If not, you should not get anything.

See, Gun, you could make a case on that one. Welfare in welfare states isn't the exact same as welfare around here, but I get what you're saying.

Fasces, you attempted to refute both, and then I rebutted that. Rebut mine instead of whining about what I did and didn't respond to.

bo_sox: by refusing to respond to the main component of my argument you are acknowledging that I am right.

It always amuses and frustrates me in equal measures that the supporters of unfettered capitalism don't seem to realise that full employment is a socialist myth. Not only will there NEVER be enough jobs to go round, there cannot be enough jobs to go round, as that would tip the supply and demand balance too far in favour of the workers, forcing up wages excessively. A level of unemployment is required for a functioning capitalist society.

Given that, I would argue that it is moral for the system that requires a level of unemployment to provide a basic level of support to those in that position.

@Pete: full employment doesn't mean 0% unemployed. I already know this, but the difference between an unemployment rate of 3% vs an unemployment rate of 9% is a difference for 6% of people.

but you still refuse to give ground to the 3%? I haven't heard Pete's argument in a long time, and never really thought about it - but if you concede that it is true, that the very system that brings you your glorious wealth requires some percentage of people to be without - don't you think we should help them out just a little bit?

Pete's argument is pretty darn interesting. I'm gonna have to think about that for awhile. Thanks for opening my brain, Pete.

@Fasces - I do think there is a debate to be had about how to minimise long term welfare as a lifestyle (sadly I think there will always be unemployable people). However, I would contend the way to do that is to make working clearly beneficial rather than eliminate the safety net. Unless you think leaving 3% of your population with no means of support is acceptable (which I don't)

@Fasces... you know my little sister is twelve and she says that all the time, right? You must not realize how pathetic that is. Unless you're twelve, in which case I understand completely...

You obviously don't realize how little you've differentiated between socialism and corporatism. Unnecessary spending *can* be cut in any corporatist welfare state... that's called independent funds.

You must think I am in favor of increasing welfare costs... I don't see any reason to do that - here. The welfare here serves a very different purpose. It feeds those that either don't or can't work for a living. Those that can't work is one thing; those that don't is another. That's why the benefits in any of these nations increase as the contributions increase as well... it's an incentive system.

Pete put it well... I don't think I can beat what he said.

Pete's argument doesn't work. While it's true that at 100% employment, workers would be noticeably more expensive, this is not some feature of the system that is enforced by anybody to keep things working. Nor is "employment/unemployment" a binary thing. I'll elaborate on both points.

Say we got down to 1% employment, and economists noticed that if it went lower, workers got more expensive. Would there be some kind of coordinated agreement or perhaps law not to hire more people? No, there would not. Each company would still hire whomever it needed if the cost were affordable.

Now Pete might say, "But that's the thing. At 1% employment or below, the cost wouldn't be affordable, so those people would not be employable by anybody." That's nonsense, and completely misses how capitalism works. The only reason wages might go up would be if LOTS OF COMPANIES wanted to hire the last 1%. If they weren't getting hired because nobody could afford them, they could always just agree to work for less, just like always.

So if there were full employment, would workers be more expensive? Of course, because we wouldn't get there unless the economy were doing great and lots of companies needed workers and could pay a lot for them. But there isn't any argument to show that the economy can't do that great. If there were, it would also have to show exactly what the best possible employment is, and that is obviously nonsense. As shown above, your argument fundamentally misunderstands capitalism -- it views it as a controlled economy, like socialism.

There are two more points to be made. First, as I mentioned, employment is not a binary thing. If I'm an engineer, and can't find a job as an engineer, I might take one as something that makes less, say a janitor. I would still count toward employment numbers. But then even at full employment, if somebody needed an engineer, I would be available, and would probably be willing to leave my job and move up. (Now, of course, this would indeed ultimately lead to both higher wages for, and a shortage of janitors, but a shortage of janitors is not something that cannot possibly exist).

What would probably happen in practice is that there would be huge pressure to increase immigration, and that would happen. The system might indeed then find an equilibrium at a few percent unemployment (most likely, given the chance, more people would want to compete for the now-decently-paying janitor jobs than there were jobs). But it would actually have expanded the number of employed beyond what the working populace was before.

So your controlled-economy, fixed-pie-size analysis misses the boat of how capitalism works, I think. In order to argue that what you say would happen would actually happen, you have to establish that the motivations of the various actors would actually work that way, and they would not.

Err, Semck, it appears you just used a whole lot of fancy words to, in effect, agree with Pete.

Who cares if we make up the difference by importing labor? We're still running at 3% unemployed. What you call "equilibrium" and you think Pete is calling "controlled economy" are functionally the same thing.

If capitalism *requires* unemployment (and I'm not saying it does, but that's Pete's argument and nobody has bothered to refute it), what's the difference? I can guarantee you the ones who can't find work don't care.

That notwithstanding, if you buy Pete's premise, how are you going to get to 1% unemployed in the first place? It's not like you flip a switch and all of a suddenly the cost of labor is "unaffordable." It's a steady tradeoff depending on supply and demand -so it doesn't seem likely to me you'll ever get to 1% in the first place.

At the end, it appears to me your just reduced to arguing over what percentage of people it's OK to have "unemployed," (and thus, if you're a real conservative, totally fucked with no safety net).

There's one other problem I might point out with Pete's argument. After all, so far, I have only argued against the theoretical _impossibility_ of full employment in capitalism. We can probably both agree that it's not very likely -- as I said myself, if it gets close to 0%, it will likely hit an equilibrium point of slightly greater than 0% unemployment (though it will improve many workers' lives in the process).

But Pete commits a subtle fallacy when he says that you thereby "[leave] 3% of your population with no means of support...." The fact is, you don't necessarily leave ANYBODY with no means of support. Say you get down to a 2% unemployment rate. What exactly shows that that 2% is static? At any given time, 2% of the populace may be unemployed, but that doesn't mean that there's even one single person who has to remain unemployed for a year. Much of the unemployment will be new entries to the workforce -- young people and new immigrants -- before they find jobs, and some of it will be people between jobs. This may be a good argument for short-term assitance, but it's certainly not an argument for more, at least without additional statistics or arguments that Pete hasn't provided.

So to summarize, even if Pete's earlier assertion were accepted, it wouldn't mean ANYBODY was condemned to be jobless. In fact it's hard to imagine, at 98% employment, that anybody could in the long term fail to find employment at some salary, unless there were serious issues. Such issues are probably matter for another post.

YJ, what I was arguing in my first post was that what Pete calls impossible is merely unlikely. There is no a priori reason why it can't happen, and as I showed there, even if unemployment got very low, if it caused the last few percent not to be affordable, then they could always just agree to work for less. So the essential employment issue Pete is arguing for is just fictitious.

I expanded on perhaps the more relevant point in my second post, which I think addresses your concerns.

As for "who cares if you make up the difference by importing labor"? If you do that for a long time, keeping steady at 3% (say) while importing lots of labor, then you're creating jobs for more and more of the world. I would say there is reason to care quite a lot.

Finally, you say capitalism *requires* unemployment, or that nobody has bothered to refute Pete's argument. I did in fact refute it. Supposing immigration dried up or were for some reason unavailable, you will see that my first post does refute the idea that full employment would somehow be magically impossible under capitalism.