patrick.net

What you guys refuse to acknowledge is that the cream always rises to the top. "You can't keep a good man down". "He raised himself by his own bootstraps". "He did it as a walk-on". "She made it to the top without affirmative action". "He became successful without a college degree".

You guys can have all the pity parties you want, but you won't have any successful people in attendance. Good day.

OK Dan, you're right. Government - our wonderful, kind, caring, benevolent government has succeeded in preventing people from succeeding as you pointed out. Does that mean government is NOT our friend?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ideas-that-made--100-million.html

Darn, yet more stories surfacing about ordinary citizens overcoming the roadblocks imposed by govenment intervention and still becoming successful, self made men (or women).

I formally declare the myth of debunking the selfmade man myth is debunked. Its nothing more than liberal hogwash.

Honest Abe says

OK Dan, you're right. Government - our wonderful, kind, caring, benevolent government has succeeded in preventing people from succeeding as you pointed out. Does that mean government is NOT our friend?

You are misinterpreting what I've said. Of course our government is evil as I've said in many posts.

You keep thinking that our society either has to be Communistic with zero wealth difference and collective ownership of everything, or absolute fascism with no restraints on corporations. This is simply a false dichotomy. There are an infinite number of alternatives.

The fact is that any government or law is, by definition, socialism. The mere presence of government or law is the restriction of an individual's freedom to perform actions for the benefit of others. Laws that prevent stealing and burning down your neighbor's house are socialism.

The question is not whether we should have a socialistic economy or a capitalistic one. Nor is the question how much socialism or capitalism we should have. The question is how to structure socialism and capitalism within our economy.

Remember, that maintaining a military or a road system is socialism by definition!

What I want, is to eliminate the parasites who prevent individuals from succeeding by monopolizing public resources, bribing senators to pass laws they wrote for themselves, and otherwise preventing an even playing field. How exactly is this incompatible with your political and economic beliefs?

Honest Abe says

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ideas-that-made--100-million.html

Darn, yet more stories surfacing about ordinary citizens overcoming the roadblocks imposed by govenment intervention and still becoming successful, self made men (or women).

I noticed that every single one of those stories is about inventors, not the CEOs of fortune 500 companies. I've always said that the only way to truly produce millions of dollars of wealth is to invent something or be an entertainer.

Inventors and entertainers are not parasites. Even the baseball player who makes millions is producing the wealth he takes home. Contrast that to a Goldman Sachs CEO who destroys the economy, causes mass unemployment, wrecks people's retirement accounts, and still walks away with $18.6 million in compensation for one year. How exactly did he produce that wealth?

Finally, even those of us who do produce great wealth, can only do so because of the countless generations that came before us and brought us from the Stone Age to the Internet Age. We can only live in luxury instead of fighting for basic survival and dying horribly at 30 because of their efforts. That is why every generation, even yours, has a duty to make the world a slightly better place than you found it. What exactly about this philosophy do you find objectionable?

Dan, thanks for your well stated posts. I'm going on vacation. I'll respond when I return. DOWN WITH THE TSA.

Honest Abe says

I formally declare the myth of debunking the selfmade man myth is debunked.

I don't think that anecdotal fallacies can debunk anything.

Honest Abe says

DOWN WITH THE TSA.

On that we agree 100%. The TSA is pure evil.

John Bailo says

This is what Holden Caulfield would have said in 1989.

More like Tony Montana in 1983.

leoj707 says

Honest Abe says

I formally declare the myth of debunking the selfmade man myth is debunked.

I don't think that anecdotal fallacies can debunk anything.

I don't think Abe was using an anecdote. He was using some counter-examples, which is perfectly valid. However, this counter-examples don't represent the ruling 0.1% class. The counter-examples are inventors, not capital, and by that I mean

- venture capitalists
- speculators
- brokers
- financial product "developers"
- executives including CEOs
- lobbyists

I would say that all of the examples were workers, i.e. producers of wealth, rather than people who controlled funding, distribution, or a scarce resource (typically a public resource or one that is artificially scarce like land or diamonds).

The best thing about our economy is that inventors and real innovators -- and I say real because that term is often co-op'd by charlatan -- can still make it big. Of course, they don't make it 0.1% big. Even the best inventions don't make their inventors into billionaires.

So I would say that the noble success stories do not reflect the parasites that the 99% are upset with. They are entirely different groups.

I don't mind reducing regulation to help the small guy. There's a theory that states regulations actually help large corporations by eliminating competition from smaller firms that can't absorb the cost of regulation. And to a large extent, that is true.

However, "regulation" is just another word for "law". Don't you hate all those copyright/trademark regulations, those regulations preventing you from making "unauthorized" withdraws from banks, regulations preventing you from taking your next door neighbor's shinny things?

However, I would rather replace the existing regulations, which are simply micromanagement attempts, with smaller and simpler laws that address the fundamental problems rather than the symptoms. If a bill has a thousand tiny rules, big corporations will have the time and money to find loopholes. If a bill is short, simple, and to the cause of the problem, then big corporations can't avoid it.

The best example I can give is changing the capital gains tax to be: max(0.0, 1.00 - 0.01 * m) where m is the number of months an equity/property is held. This would eliminate all bubbles, micro-trading, and speculation as it would be impossible to profit from them. At the same time, it would greatly encourage real investment by making it tax free. And in doing so, it would greatly increase the stability and productivity of the economy.

And the reason it works is that it addresses the root cause of the problem. The problem is that short-term zero sum games dominate our financial markets. The solution is therefore to eliminate the very motivation for short-term zero sum games without harming long-term, positive sum games.

leoj707 says

John Bailo says

This is what Holden Caulfield would have said in 1989.

More like Tony Montana in 1983.

I thought the reference was obvious, but evidently not everyone got it, which surprises me because it's such a long quote that it goes a little too far for what I was using it for.