Universal Basic Income vs Universal Basic Assets

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Re: Universal Basic Income vs Universal Basic Assets

Post by dualstow » Thu Dec 06, 2018 1:48 am

Q: Popeye, what is the secret to your longevity?

Ans.:
Kriegsspiel wrote:
Wed Dec 05, 2018 3:58 pm
I takes my lulz where I can.
RIP Marcello Gandini
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Re: Universal Basic Income vs Universal Basic Assets

Post by Maddy » Thu Dec 06, 2018 4:56 pm

moda0306 wrote:
Wed Dec 05, 2018 11:17 am
MangoMan wrote:
Tue Dec 04, 2018 2:38 pm
You LOL now, but when the idiot leftist protesters here start destroying our cities, it won't be nearly as amusing. The stupidest thing Macron could have done was give in to the protesters, and that's exactly what he did. What happened to never negotiate with terrorists? Now the mobs here will be emboldened by the results there. This can't end well.
People give into terrorists all the time. Neoliberal state capitalism is essentially that on an economic level. They do it cuz Profits. If you're going to do that for Profits with foreign elites & governments but have a hard-nosed approach towards your own populations, it's clear what your agenda is...

By "your" I don't mean you, but governments and elites in-general.

But there is no marginal benefit to ones-self by joining a protest. People do it as an irrational response towards a supposed problem. Responding with a police state to change already emotionally charged incentives isn't the correct one, IMO.
The modern phenomenon of "protesting" shouldn't be viewed as a negotiation strategy, the latter of which assumes some degree of power or influence and the intelligence to put it to good use. To the contrary, your typical protest represents the primal scream of a self-disenfranchised segment of the population that's been so coddled and catered to that they're incapable of functioning in a truly diverse world where their wants and needs are in conflict with those of the next guy. (Again I'm reminded of Harry Browne's "How I Found Freedom," and his rebuke of the self-defeating habit of wasting energy thrashing about in angst over how others are limiting you rather than finding ways of getting what you want out of life despite the things you can't change.) Anybody who's spent any time with a badly socialized two-year-old can immediately relate; the strategy is one of maximum annoyance, not some kind of bargained-for exchange. At least the two-year-old wields some power by virtue of the fact that the weary parents have no choice but to deal with him. The protester, whom the rest of the world would just as soon see run over, is laughably devoid of even that bargaining chip.
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Re: Universal Basic Income vs Universal Basic Assets

Post by moda0306 » Thu Dec 06, 2018 5:11 pm

Maddy wrote:
Thu Dec 06, 2018 4:56 pm
moda0306 wrote:
Wed Dec 05, 2018 11:17 am
MangoMan wrote:
Tue Dec 04, 2018 2:38 pm
You LOL now, but when the idiot leftist protesters here start destroying our cities, it won't be nearly as amusing. The stupidest thing Macron could have done was give in to the protesters, and that's exactly what he did. What happened to never negotiate with terrorists? Now the mobs here will be emboldened by the results there. This can't end well.
People give into terrorists all the time. Neoliberal state capitalism is essentially that on an economic level. They do it cuz Profits. If you're going to do that for Profits with foreign elites & governments but have a hard-nosed approach towards your own populations, it's clear what your agenda is...

By "your" I don't mean you, but governments and elites in-general.

But there is no marginal benefit to ones-self by joining a protest. People do it as an irrational response towards a supposed problem. Responding with a police state to change already emotionally charged incentives isn't the correct one, IMO.
The modern phenomenon of "protesting" shouldn't be viewed as a negotiation strategy, the latter of which assumes some degree of power or influence and the intelligence to put it to good use. To the contrary, your typical protest represents the primal scream of a self-disenfranchised segment of the population that's been so coddled and catered to that they're incapable of functioning in a truly diverse world where their wants and needs are in conflict with those of the next guy. (Again I'm reminded of Harry Browne's "How I Found Freedom," and his rebuke of the self-defeating habit of wasting energy thrashing about in angst over how others are limiting you rather than finding ways of getting what you want out of life despite the things you can't change.) Anybody who's spent any time with a badly socialized two-year-old can immediately relate; the strategy is one of maximum annoyance, not some kind of bargained-for exchange. At least the two-year-old wields some power by virtue of the fact that the weary parents have no choice but to deal with him. The protester, whom the rest of the world would just as soon see run over, is laughably devoid of even that bargaining chip.
That's a pretty broad generalization. Does that include Tea Party Protesters? Does that include folks in Iceland who peacefully protested when their government was going to engage in a massive banking bail out?

What about other forms of gathering in the streets? Is a parade or fair more desirable because a local government wants to do it and a certain segment of the population doesn't mind streets being shut down for that purpose rather than some form of holding the powerful accountable?

Of course it's not a negotiation strategy. It's far-too decentralized for that. But it sends messages about the degree to which masses of people are willing to behave irrationally to their best interests for a given principle (same with voting). It either lends or removes legitimacy to power structures.

For someone who constantly berates a segment of political power as being so disgusting as to not even be legitimate in holding that power, you seem to have a very passive attitude towards more active forms of civic participation.

While on an individualist basis I agree with HB on protesting, the same could be said for voting. If we want to talk about entitled folks, let's look no further than the baby boomers that vote in droves to keep the massive amounts of public benefits flowing towards them, issuing nary a peep when a massive theft of the American people occurs (bank bailout), and then lecture protesters about how entitled and short sighted they are.

When a crowd drags Tim Geithner, Dick Cheney or Scott Pruitt to the bottom of a guillotine, maybe then they'd have a point. Until then, keep em coming. Fewer parades. More protests.
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Re: Universal Basic Income vs Universal Basic Assets

Post by Mountaineer » Thu Dec 06, 2018 5:22 pm

moda0306 wrote:
Thu Dec 06, 2018 5:11 pm
Maddy wrote:
Thu Dec 06, 2018 4:56 pm
moda0306 wrote:
Wed Dec 05, 2018 11:17 am


People give into terrorists all the time. Neoliberal state capitalism is essentially that on an economic level. They do it cuz Profits. If you're going to do that for Profits with foreign elites & governments but have a hard-nosed approach towards your own populations, it's clear what your agenda is...

By "your" I don't mean you, but governments and elites in-general.

But there is no marginal benefit to ones-self by joining a protest. People do it as an irrational response towards a supposed problem. Responding with a police state to change already emotionally charged incentives isn't the correct one, IMO.
The modern phenomenon of "protesting" shouldn't be viewed as a negotiation strategy, the latter of which assumes some degree of power or influence and the intelligence to put it to good use. To the contrary, your typical protest represents the primal scream of a self-disenfranchised segment of the population that's been so coddled and catered to that they're incapable of functioning in a truly diverse world where their wants and needs are in conflict with those of the next guy. (Again I'm reminded of Harry Browne's "How I Found Freedom," and his rebuke of the self-defeating habit of wasting energy thrashing about in angst over how others are limiting you rather than finding ways of getting what you want out of life despite the things you can't change.) Anybody who's spent any time with a badly socialized two-year-old can immediately relate; the strategy is one of maximum annoyance, not some kind of bargained-for exchange. At least the two-year-old wields some power by virtue of the fact that the weary parents have no choice but to deal with him. The protester, whom the rest of the world would just as soon see run over, is laughably devoid of even that bargaining chip.
That's a pretty broad generalization. Does that include Tea Party Protesters? Does that include folks in Iceland who peacefully protested when their government was going to engage in a massive banking bail out?

What about other forms of gathering in the streets? Is a parade or fair more desirable because a local government wants to do it and a certain segment of the population doesn't mind streets being shut down for that purpose rather than some form of holding the powerful accountable?

Of course it's not a negotiation strategy. It's far-too decentralized for that. But it sends messages about the degree to which masses of people are willing to behave irrationally to their best interests for a given principle (same with voting). It either lends or removes legitimacy to power structures.

For someone who constantly berates a segment of political power as being so disgusting as to not even be legitimate in holding that power, you seem to have a very passive attitude towards more active forms of civic participation.

While on an individualist basis I agree with HB on protesting, the same could be said for voting. If we want to talk about entitled folks, let's look no further than the baby boomers that vote in droves to keep the massive amounts of public benefits flowing towards them, issuing nary a peep when a massive theft of the American people occurs (bank bailout), and then lecture protesters about how entitled and short sighted they are.

When a crowd drags Tim Geithner, Dick Cheney or Scott Pruitt to the bottom of a guillotine, maybe then they'd have a point. Until then, keep em coming. Fewer parades. More protests.
Hey, don't mess with our hog troughs! The masses are too lazy to find another. ;)
DNA has its own language (code), and language requires intelligence. There is no known mechanism by which matter can give birth to information, let alone language. It is unreasonable to believe the world could have happened by chance.
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Re: Universal Basic Income vs Universal Basic Assets

Post by Xan » Fri Dec 07, 2018 9:41 am

MangoMan wrote:
Fri Dec 07, 2018 8:58 am
The WSJ has an interesting perspective on Macron and the protesters.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/macrons-wa ... 1544139254
Refreshing to see a piece calling out the practice of 50.1% dictating everything to 49.9%.
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Re: Universal Basic Income vs Universal Basic Assets

Post by dualstow » Fri Dec 07, 2018 12:46 pm

MangoMan wrote:
Fri Dec 07, 2018 8:58 am
The WSJ has an interesting perspective on Macron and the protesters.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/macrons-wa ... 1544139254
Hey, when did you get a subscription?
RIP Marcello Gandini
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Re: Universal Basic Income vs Universal Basic Assets

Post by boglerdude » Sat Dec 08, 2018 10:06 pm

"The most common explanation for France’s gilets jaunes protests against fuel-tax hikes is that they arise from too little democracy. Lower-income and rural citizens feel left behind by President Emmanuel Macron’s aggressive economic reform agenda, which ignores their interests and benefits an urban elite. The opposite is true. The protests are happening because France has too much democracy. What it’s lacking is politics.

Mr. Macron’s political movement was born of the notion that France needed to become more democratic. As a young technocrat-in-training and junior government minister, he became convinced that special interests within the traditional parties obstructed national progress.

As Economist correspondent WiseOne Pedder notes in her illuminating biography of the president, the premise is that as a numerical matter there are enough actual or potential winners from economic reform and globalization that a leader could cull those voters from the old parties and unite them under a new banner. It would then be possible to steamroll minority opposition.

Which is precisely what Mr. Macron did. It helped that his rise came in an era when French politics was becoming steadily more democratic overall.

A 2000 constitutional amendment shortened the presidential term to five years from seven—explicitly to align the presidential and legislative election calendars. This amplifies a president’s mandate (already bolstered by a runoff voting system meant to exaggerate electoral support for the eventual winner) by reducing the risk that he might have to “cohabit” with a National Assembly controlled by the opposing party. Mainstream parties have adopted the U.S. style of intraparty primary campaigning, allowing party members to pick who leads them into general elections.

The inexorable logic of all this democratization: If the rural, low-income yellow-vest protesters feel left behind, well, leave them behind. Christophe Guilluy, the geographer who coined the phrase “peripheral France” to describe this segment of the population, estimates it at about 60%. But there’s reason to suspect that’s an overcount. Most conspicuously, the far-right National Front that everyone thinks is the natural home for peripheral voters keeps losing. Marine Le Pen, the party’s presidential candidate last year, scored only 21% in the first round and 34% in the runoff against Mr. Macron.

Similar “peripheral” movements elsewhere, from the Sweden Democrats to the Alternative for Germany, also have discovered there’s a limit to their support somewhere short of one-third of the electorate. Not even Donald Trump represents a full victory of the periphery, having run two percentage points behind Hillary Clinton in the nationwide popular vote.

Yet peripheral voters still are a substantial minority. And the widespread rioting in France shows the dangers of allowing a healthy dose of democracy to transmogrify into a brutal majoritarianism. Majority rule has its place, but it’s no way to knit together a diverse society.

Those special interests Mr. Macron derided turn out to have provided ballast. A center-right Republican Party under its failed 2017 candidate, François Fillon, would have effected some labor-law and civil-service reforms for which there is now broad support, but that party’s rural base would have precluded the green-energy follies that are sinking Mr. Macron.

The other word for this is “politics,” whose practitioners delicately trade interests and strike compromises to make majority rule more palatable to the minority. Having eschewed this form of politics, and lacking any formal way to account for peripheral concerns in a constitutional system that mercilessly rewards majority rule, Mr. Macron can only flail. The fuel tax that started this mess is on hold. So may be other parts of his agenda, some of which could have enjoyed more durable support.


Do America’s coastal Democrats get the message? They believe they represent an ascendant majority, and election results in recent years suggest they may be right for now. One can sympathize with their frustration that America’s complex federal system doesn’t automatically translate an electoral majority into power where it counts in Congress or the White House. This frustration increasingly leads to rhetorical attacks on the Constitution, whose mechanisms—especially the Senate and the Electoral College—block majoritarianism and make it impossible for progressives to govern from their demographic strongholds on the coasts.

The lesson from France is that restraints on majority rule are a good thing. Democrats would do better to focus on the practice of politics rather than on constitutional re-engineering. Mr. Macron is discovering that those politicians who live by strict majoritarianism can die by the social unrest it triggers. So can their agendas."
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Re: Universal Basic Income vs Universal Basic Assets

Post by dualstow » Fri Dec 21, 2018 4:55 pm

MangoMan wrote:
Tue Dec 04, 2018 2:38 pm
You LOL now, but when the <snip>
protesters here start destroying our cities, it won't be nearly as amusing.
The yellow vest protests have spread to Taiwan.
RIP Marcello Gandini
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Re: Universal Basic Income vs Universal Basic Assets

Post by moda0306 » Sun Dec 30, 2018 10:38 am

boglerdude wrote:
Sat Dec 08, 2018 10:06 pm
"The most common explanation for France’s gilets jaunes protests against fuel-tax hikes is that they arise from too little democracy. Lower-income and rural citizens feel left behind by President Emmanuel Macron’s aggressive economic reform agenda, which ignores their interests and benefits an urban elite. The opposite is true. The protests are happening because France has too much democracy. What it’s lacking is politics.

Mr. Macron’s political movement was born of the notion that France needed to become more democratic. As a young technocrat-in-training and junior government minister, he became convinced that special interests within the traditional parties obstructed national progress.

As Economist correspondent WiseOne Pedder notes in her illuminating biography of the president, the premise is that as a numerical matter there are enough actual or potential winners from economic reform and globalization that a leader could cull those voters from the old parties and unite them under a new banner. It would then be possible to steamroll minority opposition.

Which is precisely what Mr. Macron did. It helped that his rise came in an era when French politics was becoming steadily more democratic overall.

A 2000 constitutional amendment shortened the presidential term to five years from seven—explicitly to align the presidential and legislative election calendars. This amplifies a president’s mandate (already bolstered by a runoff voting system meant to exaggerate electoral support for the eventual winner) by reducing the risk that he might have to “cohabit” with a National Assembly controlled by the opposing party. Mainstream parties have adopted the U.S. style of intraparty primary campaigning, allowing party members to pick who leads them into general elections.

The inexorable logic of all this democratization: If the rural, low-income yellow-vest protesters feel left behind, well, leave them behind. Christophe Guilluy, the geographer who coined the phrase “peripheral France” to describe this segment of the population, estimates it at about 60%. But there’s reason to suspect that’s an overcount. Most conspicuously, the far-right National Front that everyone thinks is the natural home for peripheral voters keeps losing. Marine Le Pen, the party’s presidential candidate last year, scored only 21% in the first round and 34% in the runoff against Mr. Macron.

Similar “peripheral” movements elsewhere, from the Sweden Democrats to the Alternative for Germany, also have discovered there’s a limit to their support somewhere short of one-third of the electorate. Not even Donald Trump represents a full victory of the periphery, having run two percentage points behind Hillary Clinton in the nationwide popular vote.

Yet peripheral voters still are a substantial minority. And the widespread rioting in France shows the dangers of allowing a healthy dose of democracy to transmogrify into a brutal majoritarianism. Majority rule has its place, but it’s no way to knit together a diverse society.

Those special interests Mr. Macron derided turn out to have provided ballast. A center-right Republican Party under its failed 2017 candidate, François Fillon, would have effected some labor-law and civil-service reforms for which there is now broad support, but that party’s rural base would have precluded the green-energy follies that are sinking Mr. Macron.

The other word for this is “politics,” whose practitioners delicately trade interests and strike compromises to make majority rule more palatable to the minority. Having eschewed this form of politics, and lacking any formal way to account for peripheral concerns in a constitutional system that mercilessly rewards majority rule, Mr. Macron can only flail. The fuel tax that started this mess is on hold. So may be other parts of his agenda, some of which could have enjoyed more durable support.


Do America’s coastal Democrats get the message? They believe they represent an ascendant majority, and election results in recent years suggest they may be right for now. One can sympathize with their frustration that America’s complex federal system doesn’t automatically translate an electoral majority into power where it counts in Congress or the White House. This frustration increasingly leads to rhetorical attacks on the Constitution, whose mechanisms—especially the Senate and the Electoral College—block majoritarianism and make it impossible for progressives to govern from their demographic strongholds on the coasts.

The lesson from France is that restraints on majority rule are a good thing. Democrats would do better to focus on the practice of politics rather than on constitutional re-engineering. Mr. Macron is discovering that those politicians who live by strict majoritarianism can die by the social unrest it triggers. So can their agendas."
These protests have massive support. This isn't about too much democracy. This is about too much neoliberal establishment politics heaping ever-lower wages on the working class, slashing wealth taxes, and using consumption taxes to pad their fiscal deficit.

This is what the protestors are mostly upset about. It's capital's intrusion into otherwise possibly democratic systems.
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