isn't there something fundamentally wrong?

[birdog1960]

Let's make my question a hypothetical one then. What's your response?

hypothetical assumes it's possible. why hypothesize something that's impossible. oh, ok, so you can make some point that requires an impossible hypothetical...um, no.

[Jauronimo]

Go pick up a copy of "The World's Most Dangerous Places". Its basically Cliffs notes to every shithole in the world. Nice overview on the history and the main players. If you really care to know why half the world doesn't live as well as you do, read and find out. Or don't bother. If you do it will be pretty hard to continue to believe in a shadowy cabal of world bankers bent on keeping Zimbabwe down.

[ExiledInIllinois]

Just think about it. Earlier in this thread I stated that the state of Illinois is pulling 30 million pounds of Asian carp out of the lower Illinois river alone each year and shipping it off to China. The fish are still popping like corn and reproducing. That 30 million pounds is just scratching the surface. Just imagine if we let them into the Great Lakes. Now factor in the other big rivers in the commercial production with an A-1 protein/omega-3 food source. We could feed the world! Or, @ least make a dent in it. Oh wait, the elitists don't want to feed the world if their vacation is wrecked by fishing popping out of the water @ Grand Traverse Bay or in the Kawarthas.

 

Let them eat insects! LoL...

 

This is where I break from the libs and tree huggers. We have the means to help the hungry and it starts with our cleaned up environment. Of course I am half joking about the above paragraph, we can be reasonable and still make lemonade when life throws us lemons. Yet, we sit on our cleaned up resources while watching the rest of the world becomes more polluted. Then, the elitists scream bloody murder that we can do more to help the hungry... Just NIMBY!

Edited June 3, 2013 by ExiledInIllinois

[birdog1960]

Economics does not dictate that all should have as much as they need. Neither does math. One again, you've built your house on sand that is on fire and underwater at the same time. Its confusing, I know, but so is your argument.

 

Which singular system are your referring to that is applicable the world over? This "phenomenon" you're referring to isn't a mystery.

 

The poorest nations on earth all typically have one thing in common: resource based economies run by a despot. For examples, see Africa. Pretty much any nation on the continent is a prime example and all share the same story. If you want to know why people are poor Nigeria, open a book. Its all right there on the surface and it has !@#$ all to do with LIBOR, HSBC, the U.S. housing market or any of your other boogey men.

no the phenomenon is not a mystery. the solution is. or it may just be a lack of will to solve it. either way the solution wil likely require unconventional thought. something i don't think comes easily to most on this board.

[ExiledInIllinois]

 

no the phenomenon is not a mystery. the solution is. or it may just be a lack of will to solve it. either way the solution wil likely require unconventional thought. something i don't think comes easily to most on this board.

 

I gave you some unconvention... LoL... ;-) :-P

[birdog1960]

Just think about it. Earlier in this thread I stated that the state of Illinois is pulling 30 million pounds of Asian carp out of the lower Illinois river alone each year and shipping it off to China. The fish are still popping like corn and reproducing. That 30 million pounds is just scratching the surface. Just imagine if we let them into the Great Lakes. Now factor in the other big rivers in the commercial production with an A-1 protein/omega-3 food source. We could feed the world! Or, @ least make a dent in it. Oh wait, the elitists don't want to feed the world if their vacation is wrecked by fishing popping out of the water @ Grand Traverse Bay or in the Kawarthas.

 

Let them eat insects! LoL...

 

This is where I break from the libs and tree huggers. We have the means to help the hungry and it starts with our cleaned up environment. Of course I am half joking about the above paragraph, we can be reasonable and still make lemonade when life throws us lemons. Yet, we sit on our cleaned up resources while watching the rest of the world become more polluted. Then, the elitists scream bloody murder that we can do more to help the hungry... Just NIMBY!

not to defend those awful traverse city elitists (nice place btw) but wouldn't it make more sense to farm fish where the major food shortages are?

[ExiledInIllinois]

 

not to defend those awful traverse city elitists (nice place btw) but wouldn't it make more sense to farm fish where the major food shortages are?

 

Somalia is a stones throw from the Nile. Look it up, they tried that sh*thole 30 years ago. No go. Why are they taking off in the big rivers of North America?

Edited June 3, 2013 by ExiledInIllinois

[Jauronimo]

no the phenomenon is not a mystery. the solution is. or it may just be a lack of will to solve it. either way the solution wil likely require unconventional thought. something i don't think comes easily to most on this board.

Thats bull ****. Why did you even bother to type that?

 

The solution is a no brainer. The problem is the implementation involves human beings. Fixing Nigeria requires Nigerians. Not just one Nigerian, but thousands of them. Thats a major obstacle.

 

Fixing Sierra Leone and Liberia requires the cooperation of thousands of people who'd sooner hack each others arms off then sit and talk. And they're all fighting for the opportunity to brutally oppress their people for financial gain. Think outside the box all day, and you cannot even begin to address the fundamental problem that human beings are vicious animals with limited capacity for reason.

[birdog1960]

Somalia is a stones throw from the Nile. Look it up, they tried that sh*thole 30 years ago. No go. Why are they taking off in the big rivers of North America?

so i guess were back to insects...

[ExiledInIllinois]

 

so i guess were back to insects...

 

No. Let them pop here. Flash freeze and ship them. Kill two birds with one stone. Create an industry and jobs while supplying a cheap food source to the world. Let our clean environment work for us. It is better to canoe than motorboat anyway. That is, they only jump out of the water @ higher rpms.

 

Anyway... I am mostly joking. We are staring @ a huge protein/omega-3 food source right in the kisser and what are we doing? Spending more money on infrastructure that is already bought and paid for while chasing jobs overseas that in turns harms more of the world's environment. Can't you see our militant enviro policy is creating this whole world hunger mess.

 

You are right, we gotta start thinking out of the box...

 

"Dabrowski, on the other hand, said efforts to introduce Asian carp to the Nile River in Northern Africa as a food source have been unsuccessful for 50 years."

[3rdnlng]

hypothetical assumes it's possible. why hypothesize something that's impossible. oh, ok, so you can make some point that requires an impossible hypothetical...um, no.

 

You are an ideologue pure and simple. Your thoughts and solutions are not driven by any humane reasons but by your insistance that you will not only level the playing field, but the results too, Comrade Birdog.

[OCinBuffalo]

Hypothetical:

Imagine a world where the wealth was perfectly distributed. Everyone had the exact same everything. How would it look? How do you make it work?

I have a better one. It's based on yours, but it's temporal. Imagine a world where we snap our fingers one time, and the wealth was perfectly distributed. Now, re-imagine that world in a year, but observe the delta in net worth of it's inhabitants, and map their cultural background, IQ, single parent home, and whatever else you think is relevant. Do it again, in 2 years. Now 5. Iterating over time, as we approach a generation(20 years) would that world look any different than it is today?

 

No. Would we see the same causal behavior producing the same results we have today?

 

Yes, of course, human behavior patterns, and individual irrational choices trump social engineering, and always have. Therefore, is the grand plan to redistribute the wealth pointless? Yes.

 

This is my main issue with birdog and his ilk: it's not that I don't admire his compassion(but only when he's not LAMPing it), it's that his compassion is mostly pointless. These aren't disaster victims, these people are the disaster. No matter how hard you try, liberals, will the "virtuous victims" you claim to represent end up in disinheriting themselves of the wealth you've so compassionately distributed, in a generation?

 

Well, have you ever seen somebody who is neither didactically or culturally prepared to handle wealth....win the lottery? How does that turn out?

Or, when birdog and his idiot pals, demand that we build another housing project, only to find that in 5 years, none of the copper wiring remains? How does that turn out?

 

See? Pointless Compassion. Edit: Carrots are pointless, if you completely remove the stick, or, think the stick == an opportunity to create 100k government jobs(ahem, HHS), and that becomes the priority, while rendering the stick a pointless, bizarre exercise in abstracting reality into useless not-standards instruments like the MDS, "meaningful use", etc. The "stick" becomes a punishment for everyone, including the people who require neither carrot or stick to conduct their lives in a orderly fashion.

i'm guessing you had a few drinks before you left for the bar. the loincloth was a major achievement? as far as italian renaissance figures, it doesn't surprise me that you're a machiavelli fan. i'm not. and i'm not buying the idea that robber barons (the prince) need rule for great thinkers and art to flourish. i'd bet their work would have been even more fantastic and imaginative in a more open and equitable society.

Moving on from the pointless, now we have both ignorance and idiocy.

 

Rather than dealing with history....your argument is for us to make up, and then focus on the non-history you would rather: "buy"?

 

Either you don't like the history, or, you wish it wasn't, or better, you are saying that "something" would have happened...that you could have "bought", but that you aren't "buying" what actually did happen? And even better, you replace the actual cause...with a made up one, which you do not define, but that you immediately conclude would provide better results?

 

"Show your F'ing work, clown" is the least there is to say.

 

How about we start with what did happen? Wealth was CREATED, not redistributed, which created the conditions for the Renaissance to happen. These conditions could have created lots of things, the Renaissance was what they did create. This is reality. Any argument or counter argument, that denies, or...in birdog fashion, attempts to exclude or obfuscate or abstract these facts(I call this bridogging) is a waste of our time.

Edited June 4, 2013 by OCinBuffalo

[birdog1960]

Thats bull ****. Why did you even bother to type that?

 

The solution is a no brainer. The problem is the implementation involves human beings. Fixing Nigeria requires Nigerians. Not just one Nigerian, but thousands of them. Thats a major obstacle.

 

Fixing Sierra Leone and Liberia requires the cooperation of thousands of people who'd sooner hack each others arms off then sit and talk. And they're all fighting for the opportunity to brutally oppress their people for financial gain. Think outside the box all day, and you cannot even begin to address the fundamental problem that human beings are vicious animals with limited capacity for reason.

at what point in wealth concentration would you consider massively unequal wealth distribution to be a likely cause of poverty in those sharing the residual "wealth"? 50%? 70? 90% 99%? 99.9%? surely, you must admit there's a threshold where wealth concentration affects the well being of everyone else. if not 40%, what evidence do you have for a different percentage? might it be that unrest and barbaric acts are at least in part precipitated by poverty and lack of opportunity? might this also be the result, in some measure, from a wildly disproportionate allocation of resources?

[meazza]

at what point in wealth concentration would you consider massively unequal wealth distribution to be a likely cause of poverty in those sharing the residual "wealth"? 50%? 70? 90% 99%? 99.9%? surely, you must admit there's a threshold where wealth concentration affects the well being of everyone else. if not 40%, what evidence do you have for a different percentage? might it be that unrest and barbaric acts are at least in part precipitated by poverty and lack of opportunity? might this also be the result, in some measure, from a wildly disproportionate allocation of resources?

 

Does wealth inequality drive poverty? I don't really think it does. I think restrictions and lack of rights does more to create poverty than inequality ever did.

[GG]

Does wealth inequality drive poverty? I don't really think it does. I think restrictions and lack of rights does more to create poverty than inequality ever did.

 

Forget about it. He's latched on to his shiny object and can't process rational responses.

[meazza]

Forget about it. He's latched on to his shiny object and can't process rational responses.

 

Eventually he'll figure it out. He's a doctor so he can't be that dumb.

 

Let's not forget that I was a lefty in my darker days.

[birdog1960]

Does wealth inequality drive poverty? I don't really think it does. I think restrictions and lack of rights does more to create poverty than inequality ever did.

if 99% of wealth was held by 1% of the worlds population and supply of goods remained constant wouldn't that necassarily mean shortages for those sharing the 1%? wouldn't that be attributable to wealth inequality? if you think not, why not?

Forget about it. He's latched on to his shiny object and can't process rational responses.

show me the fallacy in my logic. alternatively, present a rational counter argument. rejecting mine out of hand isn't an argument. it's easy but not persuasive.

[Jauronimo]

at what point in wealth concentration would you consider massively unequal wealth distribution to be a likely cause of poverty in those sharing the residual "wealth"? 50%? 70? 90% 99%? 99.9%? surely, you must admit there's a threshold where wealth concentration affects the well being of everyone else. if not 40%, what evidence do you have for a different percentage? might it be that unrest and barbaric acts are at least in part precipitated by poverty and lack of opportunity? might this also be the result, in some measure, from a wildly disproportionate allocation of resources?

At no point would I consider unequal distribution to be a cause of poverty. Its not a cause. In some cases its a symptom of an ill functioning system, but its never a cause.

 

Stop thinking about global wealth distribution as an abstract concept. Its very simple. If you're actually interested in learning why the world looks the way it does today then pick up a history book and study a map.

 

Here's a little homework. Explain to me why Papua New Guinea is poor. A high level overview of why the average citizen is destitute. Then do the same for Nigeria. Lastly, explain why the United States is one of the wealthiest nations on earth. Once you understand these concepts you will still be screwed because you refuse to examine your fundamental belief that wealth should be created and distributed equally across the globe.

Edited June 6, 2013 by Jauronimo

[DC Tom]

Isn't birddog the guy who paid his office employees minimum wage with no benefits?

[GG]

show me the fallacy in my logic. alternatively, present a rational counter argument. rejecting mine out of hand isn't an argument. it's easy but not persuasive.

 

This has been discussed ad nauseum on this site for years. You can also take a page out of the adhoc helicopter discussion in the other thread on the difference between causation & correlations. Never mind that you, along with the rest of the "fairness" crowd can't stick with consistent terminologies and data samples and you jump from income to wealth, from US to global like they were completely interchangeable. But the biggest flaw in your logic is that you assume that the evil 1% is a static set of people who did nothing to earn their wealth but win a sperm lottery.

 

Only when you can look at the data, and recognize what that data says, then you can have a normal discussion.