Gyroscopic Investing

There is a lot of really good there.

A strange mixture of both far left and right positions.

I'm not too keen on the idea of "raising consciousness of the Christian worldview.", so I doubt they would ever get my vote. I'm a big fan of the "increasingly secularized" world that they are bemoaning, preferring to keep politics and religion separate.

curlew wrote:A strange mixture of both far left and right positions.

I'm not too keen on the idea of "raising consciousness of the Christian worldview.", so I doubt they would ever get my vote. I'm a big fan of the "increasingly secularized" world that they are bemoaning, preferring to keep politics and religion separate.

Not to mention they also rapaciously violate the First Amendment, in deed if not by fact.

It's strange they would use a leftist socialist meme in the title too. But then again they're all talk talk talk about extreme statist solutions without giving any specifics just like the Communist Party does. So we have to conclude they are being ideological first and foremost rather than pragmatic.

Our high tolerance for religion in the USA is a large part of the reason we assimilate foreigners so successfully compared to Europe. We really don't want to overturn that precedent by promoting Judeo-Christian values instead of Constitutional.

Strange mix indeed. I had high hopes when I read Tenn's post, but I found this to be a quite unrealistic set of often vague positions that few people will subscribe to. To take just one example: they are for (effectively) open borders which I presume means they are in favor of hanging on to birthright citizenship, although that was not mentioned. The Citizen's Dividend is completely unrealistic unless you get rid of birthright citizenship and control immigration. Or unless, I suppose, you decide a priori just to hand it to everyone on the planet and be done with it.

On the positive side, this is the first internally consistent "right to life" platform I've seen.

But since this is political, you have to question the motives behind what they claim to be saying, i.e. second order derivative. You can't just take what they say at face value as the functionally objective truth, especially when they will wield the coercive force in hand and weakness corrupts absolutely. Didn't we all learn the very hard way what happens when different Christian cults pwned the throne?

So keep your religion out of my politics. Don't even use it as a justification or a basis for the imposition of statist coercion. If you want to outlaw abortion, find another way based on reason and compassion than that some faux "God" says thus should be so.

MachineGhost wrote:But since this is political, you have to question the motives behind what they claim to be saying, i.e. second order derivative. You can't just take what they say at face value as the functionally objective truth, especially when they will wield the coercive force in hand and weakness corrupts absolutely. Didn't we all learn the very hard way what happens when different Christian cults pwned the throne?

So keep your religion out of my politics. Don't even use it as a justification or a basis for the imposition of statist coercion. If you want to outlaw abortion, find another way based on reason and compassion than that some faux "God" says thus should be so.

What is your justification for outlawing murder?

Xan wrote:

MachineGhost wrote:But since this is political, you have to question the motives behind what they claim to be saying, i.e. second order derivative. You can't just take what they say at face value as the functionally objective truth, especially when they will wield the coercive force in hand and weakness corrupts absolutely. Didn't we all learn the very hard way what happens when different Christian cults pwned the throne?

So keep your religion out of my politics. Don't even use it as a justification or a basis for the imposition of statist coercion. If you want to outlaw abortion, find another way based on reason and compassion than that some faux "God" says thus should be so.

What is your justification for outlawing murder?

Two homo-sapiens got together and said let's come up with some laws that will help us to survive as a species. One said how about "Thou shalt not kill" to start with and the other said, that's a great idea - we can't stop God from killing us with floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes and other natural disasters but at least we can avoid doing it to ourselves.

Hopefully this thread isn't going to turn into another pointless "Figuring out Religion" thread but the American Solidarity Party does call itself a "Christian Democratic" party so it might be unavoidable.

Only economists and engineers and the like could dream up or support something as obviously bad as the Citizens Dividend. I am sorry to offend, but that is what it has come to. It is one of the dumbest, baddest ideas out there. Just because something looks clean, logical, and efficient does not make it good. Just today I came across an article about a study of people in some state who had received a basic cash assistance benefit. They and their offspring were more likely to remain on welfare, file for disability, etc., than the control group who got more typical assistance.


No, I don't have the link.

P.S.: A Citizens' Dividend for "surplus revenue"? That could be different. And it's a fairy tale. But that's not what has been talked about here.

Simonjester wrote:
i don't quite understand the bolded part. whats the point of a citizens dividend or a basic income if it doesn't eliminate all the other crap welfare systems and use the money saved to help fund it ? I thought that was the whole point of a basic income..., get rid of dysfunctional welfare that is a social negative, a government boondoggle, a vote capture method for the party of handouts, and generally riddled with negative unintended consequence.. a dividend /basic income may still have some problems, but the idea is to at least attempt to fix them by repeal and replace, not add another layer of junk government on top of the ones we have...

I Shrugged wrote:P.S.: A Citizens' Dividend for "surplus revenue"? That could be different. And it's a fairy tale. But that's not what has been talked about here.

I believe that's the difference between a citizens' dividend and "basic income". Most people who talk about a citizens' dividend actually mean basic income.
http://www.socred.org/index.php/blogs/v ... l-dividend

Xan wrote:What is your justification for outlawing murder?

Well, that's the crutch isn't it? Gotta find that delineation line we all can agree upon where a bunch of inhuman cells no one really cares about (except True Believers) becomes a defendable human being. It would be far easier to just be an extremist to either side, but that wouldn't be getting closer to the functionally objective truth.

I Shrugged wrote:P.S.: A Citizens' Dividend for "surplus revenue"? That could be different. And it's a fairy tale. But that's not what has been talked about here.

I posted that article and it only affected the adults minorly, not their children. The adults may have saved more for retirement, worked less to raise their children better, enjoyed life more than working a boring routine job, etc. to explain having less income decades in the future when they were 50-60 years old. But you know, life is not just all about earning the almighty buck. There are many other variables that need to be studied and the point is the concept needs to be studied and now it's finally being done again after a 40 year absence.

But I do think you're missing the whole point of the Citizen's Dividend. It's to replace the welfare state and deal with technological unemployment. It's a post-libertarian approach, i.e. statist libertarianism where you do the minimum to achieve a public good objective (which in most cases is the government getting out of the way!). Realistically, this is just not going to happen until serious immigration reform, some kind of stringent border or citizenship enforcement and term limits, otherwise you'd have the grandmother of all magnets.

Basing it on surplus revenues is bloody stupid, though. What are you gonna do in a recession/depression? Pull the plug to those that desparately need it the most? That's not a stabilizer at all.

I did like some of the tax policies, like doing away with the corporate income tax which would provide a huge shot in the arm for the GDP and perhaps address some of the reasons for international outsourcing and moving manufacturing out of the country. But the more you think about it the more you realize that the proposals, taken together, are not well thought out.

For starters, I can't begin to imagine how you could eliminate corporate income and payroll taxes while reducing or eliminating taxes on earned income, and simultaneously creating a single payer health system and shoring up Social Security. Increasing taxes on unearned income will mainly hit two groups: wealthy people and retirees. Hitting up the latter is completely counter to the overall stated goals of the platform. That leaves taxing the h**l out of unearned income for the first group. Good luck getting that to fly.

What is missing to make it all work is a consumption tax, i.e. national sales tax.

What worries me about earned vs unearned income is it may not be a common defintion, but what the IRS decides. I don't have a high level of confidence that the IRS understand the many nuances of tax policy as far as it affects job creators and employment. Capitalists take risks to provide their capital to job creators who then provide employment to non-job creators. Why should they be penalized for that when it makes the world go round?

I was curious about it, and it seems that the Constitution Party is another of what they call a paleoconservative party:

https://www.constitutionparty.com/our-p ... rinciples/

It seems like a libertarian version of the American Solidarity Party. Given the continual failure of the "secular" Libertarian Party to attract any significant political success after 40 years, maybe they're onto something.