Kevin O'Leary.. You have to love him

[Mbc]

We don't like paying taxes but we LOVE all the things the government has provided. Infrastructure, schools, safety, scientific/engineering advancement (government put a man on the moon, government developed the Internet, particle physics, nuclear fusion, etc)

 

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[Digamma]

We don't like paying taxes but we LOVE all the things the government has provided. Infrastructure, schools, safety, scientific/engineering advancement (government put a man on the moon, government developed the Internet, particle physics, nuclear fusion, etc)

The things you are enumerating are things that benefit society as a whole. I don't think anybody has anything against paying taxes for that, at least not from a moral standpoint.
The question is, how much of government spending goes in handouts, instead? That percentage becomes more staggering each year, in all the western world.

 

[SBS.95]

We don't like paying taxes but we LOVE all the things the government has provided. Infrastructure, schools, safety, scientific/engineering advancement (government put a man on the moon, government developed the Internet, particle physics, nuclear fusion, etc)

And in nearly all of these instances, a private company could do the same thing more efficiently for less money. Obamacare website, anybody? BILLIONS of dollars put into a website that a private company could have built for a couple million, and that's with a profit margin included.

Government developed the internet? Please, get out of here with the Al Gore logic. No single person or group developed the internet, it was a worldwide collaboration. And the internet would not be where it is today if it was not brought to the masses. Who brought it to the masses? Microsoft, Apple, IBM.... all non-government entities.

So no, forgive me but I'm not IN LOVE with all the government provides. Public schools are a joke, the highways near me are shit, and last I checked the funding to NASA was hacked pretty bad, though the same cannot be said for social welfare programs...

 

[mt_myke]

The question is, how much of government spending goes in handouts, instead? That percentage becomes more staggering each year, in all the western world.

See my earlier post. It's going to get worse. The dystopia (utopia) where machines do all the work and no one has (needs) a job is no longer in the far future, it's barreling down on us. What's really gonna grind your gears is, if you believe in free markets, then at a fundamental level you must also believe that capital spread across a large group of people is better allocated than that same capital allocated by a single individual or a small homogeneous group.

As a global society we're really unprepared for this. I try to strike up the conversation often, but most people cover their ears and come back with "technology always always always creates more jobs!!! LALALALA!"

 

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[mt_myke]

And in nearly all of these instances, a private company could do the same thing more efficiently for less money. Obamacare website, anybody? BILLIONS of dollars put into a website that a private company could have built for a couple million, and that's with a profit margin included.

Government developed the internet? Please, get out of here with the Al Gore logic. No single person or group developed the internet, it was a worldwide collaboration. And the internet would not be where it is today if it was not brought to the masses. Who brought it to the masses? Microsoft, Apple, IBM.... all non-government entities.

So no, forgive me but I'm not IN LOVE with all the government provides. Public schools are a joke, the highways near me are shit, and last I checked the funding to NASA was hacked pretty bad, though the same cannot be said for social welfare programs...

Can we kill this myth already? The really big stuff requires the government. A private company simply can not burn up that much money for that much time - the stockholders would put a stop to it. We had crappy little LAN protocols before and during the development of the internet - Win95 didn't even come with TCP/IP enabled by default, you had to manually install it. So why did a government-invented and sponsored protocol take over? Because companies can't look beyond the next quarter...in the 80s a global computer network was pie-in-the-sky, investors wouldn't stand for such tomfoolery. So we got the ONLY thing companies can do - small changes to existing products, not radical innovation.

Same with space exploration. Why do we only now have companies like SpaceX? Because it took 5 decades of government-funded research and experiments to get space technology to the point where a corporation could pick it up.

The free market is fabulously awful for certain tasks as well. You mentioned public infrastructure, and that's exactly it, we aren't willing to pay to get that fixed. How come there aren't private companies jumping in to build alternate roads and bridges? Because even a child can see that's insane nonsense.

Worshipping corporations is just as bad as worshipping government. They both have their place. Neither alone is sufficient.

 

[RogueInnovation]

Care less about what others do, care more about what you do.

Neither side is right or free of some delusionary aspect.
O'Leary is a such a windbag... Omg...
He just has one point "political intervention is BS" I think thats meh, because it creates a strawman arguement.

Here is what I like

Being creative and helping out, thats what we need.
Not guys like O'Leary sitting on his a## contemplating his navel and pretending no one has it tough

Its just like some people are so devoid of compassion, and its stupid, because business should and can be about protecting and giving, while so many just twist it into needlessly selfish combattive blaaaahk...

 

[Digamma]

What's really gonna grind your gears is, if you believe in free markets, then at a fundamental level you must also believe that capital spread across a large group of people is better allocated than that same capital allocated by a single individual or a small homogeneous group.

I have nothing against wealth distribution per se. I would like everybody to never need for anything.
What I am against is the distribution of wealth to scum that does not want to create wealth. Human nature always wins. You give handout, people will produce less and everybody will be poorer. Equality means that everybody is equally poor.

As a global society we're really unprepared for this. I try to strike up the conversation often, but most people cover their ears and come back with "technology always always always creates more jobs!!! LALALALA!"

I agree that we're unprepared.
But I think we'll be fine. Our nature is kill or be killed. Society is a constant struggle against this nature. Worse case, the weak get eaten for a couple of generation and something is rebuilt.

Neither side is right or free of some delusionary aspect.

This. It's very true.
Now this is gonna be an unpopular opinion, but as I see it, it's because everything outside of "kill enemy, eat prey" is arbitrary and unnatural. We can discuss all we want, but in the end, it's all a house of cards we invented, all of it. There is no "right", because it's all opinion.

 

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[mt_myke]

What I am against is the distribution of wealth to scum that does not want to create wealth. Human nature always wins. You give handout, people will produce less and everybody will be poorer. Equality means that everybody is equally poor.

The opposite end of this is no wealth distribution at all. In the US we tried that during the infamous "Gilded Age". What happened? A few people got insanely rich. Andrew Carnegie was worth $250 BILLION in today's dollars at the time of his death. Rockefeller nearly half a TRILLION. However their business practices would get them both hefty jail time nowadays. We will also never know how many geniuses and brilliant entrepreneurs never had a chance because the odds were just stacked too high against them. Everyone knows Andrew Carnegie worked 16 hour days as a child, but many miss that his big break came when a rich and successful businessman decided to help him out and show him the ropes, as well as investing in young Carnegie's initial projects. How would today's world look if we had 100 Carnegies that maybe only were worth $2.5 billion when they died but got 100x as much done? How many future "Great Ones" are stymied today due to roadblocks we could fix with very modest amounts of money? As a society we have to make this cost/benefit calculation. More specifically, how many "bums" is it worth floating to get one "Great One" we wouldn't have before? If you agree that it's fair for a single individual to amass billions of dollars because they've created that much value, then you must also consider that it's worth giving handouts to useless people - maybe even very many of them - if it means you have a chance of allowing more of the exceptional individuals to flourish.

But I think we'll be fine. Our nature is kill or be killed. Society is a constant struggle against this nature. Worse case, the weak get eaten for a couple of generation and something is rebuilt.

The fly in that ointment is that our highly technological society has also burned up resources more quickly than ever before. Let's imagine there's an apocalypse/total reset scenario. We can't just go thru the same steps again...the primitive oil derricks from the early 1900s (for example) would be utterly useless, you need today's infrastructure and technology to get ANY oil - and once that infrastructure is destroyed, you need the oil (as well as many other things) to get back to that level of technology in the first place. We're at a point now where we can permanently doom the human race if we screw up bad enough. Humans may survive for many thousands of years after such an event but be unable to ever get back to where we're at now.

 

[RHL]

The bit about his job, getting fired and never working for someone again

 

[csalvato]

If you agree that it's fair for a single individual to amass billions of dollars because they've created that much value, then you must also consider that it's worth giving handouts to useless people - maybe even very many of them - if it means you have a chance of allowing more of the exceptional individuals to flourish.

Interesting perspective.

That's a pretty big gamble you're taking, though.

Ignoring handouts, what about all the lavish spending on wars? That's way more than any government spend on handouts by far.

Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_budget_pie

As a taxpayer, we get very little say in that. Period.

So lets say you were taxed $1M this year.

Sure, $100,000 that goes into welfare sucks, but lets ignore that and say it is a "necessary evil".

And I think we all agree that the $150,000 that goes into running the government, education, protection, etc. is worthwhile.

BUT $220,000 of YOUR MONEY is going into killing people halfway around the world, in a war you didn't even want to participate in.

The moral here is that if you work hard, and become a wild success, a significant amount of your hard-earned cash WILL go to killing other people.

How does that sit with ya?

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Gonna close the thread due to the political ramifications. There's some great political commentary here from both sides, which surprisingly, went pretty well without a lot of flaming. I'd like to close it on that note.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Sorry to reactivate this thread but I couldn't let this awesome video go unnoticed....