The Social Contract?

[Sandman]

I suggest that having privately owned and operated roads would nothing short of an economic catastrophe.

Now, the details on how such a scheme are sketchy, partly because it's such a deranged idea, like how to build a car out of cheese or something, so I'll have to use guesswork.

Toll-roads. If we put aside suburban roads for a minute, just consider the impact of having every main road in a state paid for by tolls. The sheer number of toll-booths will slow down traffic, as well as making every journey need the same level of financial planning as a shopping trip. Imagine a small company that does business all over the country. They're going to have to pay through the nose for all the paperwork, working out toll expenditure and/or paying the road companies for a season ticket.

And for anyone looking for a job, the cost of job-hunting will be further increased.

The opportunities for profiteering are enormous. What's to stop the owner of the only road to a small mountain community charging extortionate fees for the inhabitants? Sure, some entrepreneur might come along and build a rival road, but that will take years, and there's no guarantee that it'll happen. By the time it's finished, the owner of the original road will have a suitcase full of money and won't care either way.

As for suburban roads, the mind boggles even more. Will people have to pay to use the pavement? That'll make job-hunting (and all sorts of other economic activity) more expensive and frustrating. Now, if suburban roads were simply given to the community as a present, that might work. At least better than handing over the economic lifeblood of the community to some rich person.

A toll-booth is just another word for a checkpoint, really. Having privately-owned roads amounts to little more than a series of checkpoints across the country - like a totalitarian state. Even if toll-booths are replaced by more advanced technology, it's still intrusive. Freedom of movement is an often neglected aspect of modern democratic states. It should be protected.

[Ben Kenobi]

It doesn't matter how much money there is. Even a fully funded pension system that magically required no input from current workers will still fail if there aren't enough young workers to support the economy as a whole. If one person is supporting two retirees, that is still the case whether the pension system is private or public. Either you have a demographics problem or you don't. Either there are enough people who are so productive that the economy can support a large non-working population or there aren't.

Spot on.

I hate to agree with Che but he is right. The root of the problem is not social security, but the demographics crunch. We would not be speaking about the demise of Social Security if we had a better ratio of workers to retired people.

And he is right about the older people, that their efficiency drops off as they get older. Raising the retirement age is a band-aid solution to the much greater demographic problem.

Same with immigration. Immigration relies upon an available workforce, and with the worldwide trends, such a workforce will not always be available.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Japher
ok, Kid...

You say that ppl need help sometimes.

I agree.

However, the help they are being given is not the help they need. If we continue with the way the help is given many will become dependent on it. Granted many will get to their feet, but that is the hard way out, and not everyone (and I would argue that not even a majority) cares to take the hardway out.

Yes, people can become dependent on welfare. That's because of problems with the system, not because there are plenty of jobs.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi

And he is right about the older people, that their efficiency drops off as they get older. Raising the retirement age is a band-aid solution to the much greater demographic problem.

Is it? From my own experience I'd argue vehemently that, even if the average 70 year-old is less efficient than the average 50 year-old, they're still markedly more efficient than the average teenager.

[chequita guevara]

Well, teenagers are useless.

[Ned]

Just to say here that something doesn't add up about unemployment in America. We have millions of illegal aliens in United States almost almost whom seem to find jobs and we have one or 2 million a year more pouring across our borders in seek of employment. They would not be coming here in such high numbers if there was no work.

And still we have Americans who complain that there are no jobs and they cannot find work. This does not make sense.

I was listening to an expert talking talking about actual employment in America. Apparently the "jobs" surveys is conducted among 30,000 corporations of some size. The surveys are not conducted among new businesses or small business in general where much of the new employment seems to be occurring. Even though we have somewhat anemic job growth among the 30,000 corporations, we simultaneously have an historically very low unemployment rate. In other words, according to the unemployment rate, we are at full employment even while the job growth numbers among the 30,000 corporations is slow. This seems to demonstrate that there is a significant growth in jobs outside of the 30,000 corporations which are part of the jobs survey.

[Agathon]

What's hilarious is that Libertarians, to a man, do not understand how the economy works. At least socialism has a track record of being sustainable (if not optimal in many respects).

If you want to live in a low-crime society where crushing poverty does not cause a sizeable chunk of the population to lose any stake in the system, you need a welfare state. Libertarians seem to believe that stern moral lectures or throwing people out on their own will magically lead to them becoming socially responsible citizens.

If you want to see what it will be like, look at some of the East African countries with their rampant criminality.

Free markets work extremely well at providing certain goods that people need, but they also fail miserably at providing other equally important goods. That's why we have a welfare state, not because people are nice or because it's morally good, but because it is the only way of providing things that people need and the market won't provide at all (like an army) or won't provide at the needed levels (like health care).

[Imran Siddiqui]

Commie

With these wackos around, I'd rather be a Commie .

Hell, these extreme Libertarians are pushing Communism as well. If their dream state gets actualized, there would be a Communist revolution within a generation . Like I said earlier, I believe when Marx saw capitalism, he saw the Libertarian version of it and that is why he was so wrong (at least in IMO, che... no need to go off on Marxian theory ).

We have millions of illegal aliens in United States almost almost whom seem to find jobs and we have one or 2 million a year more pouring across our borders in seek of employment. They would not be coming here in such high numbers if there was no work.

Yeah, they also get paid $2/hr which is impossible for a citizen to make (employers can do it with illegals because they know that they won't complain about min wage).

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ned
I was listening to an expert talking talking about actual employment in America.

It's 400,000, actually. The Household suvey is of 16,000, and is considered much less reliable, even if it is more likely to catch people who are (actually, as opposed to merely saying they are out of embarressment) self-employed.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Yeah, they also get paid $2/hr which is impossible for a citizen to make (employers can do it with illegals because they know that they won't complain about min wage).

They also live ten or twenty people to an apartment, which is illegal and if you do it you can get your children taken away.

[Imran Siddiqui]

That's also true... it's how they can live on their $2/hr.

[chequita guevara]

It is also true that illegals sometimes work "well" paying jobs, $10 an hour of more for construction work. This is also a case, however, of bosses refusing to hire Americans, who they feel are inferior workers.

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

Commie

With these wackos around, I'd rather be a Commie .

Hell, these extreme Libertarians are pushing Communism as well. If their dream state gets actualized, there would be a Communist revolution within a generation . Like I said earlier, I believe when Marx saw capitalism, he saw the Libertarian version of it and that is why he was so wrong (at least in IMO, che... no need to go off on Marxian theory ).

So far social-democracy has generally been able to slow down the process that Marx had foreseen, but in truth the climax of social programs has already been reached and has begun to erode. I think it's reasonable to assert that SDs are a mere bump in history and that in essence Marx was probably right - look at how effective the right is in selling the virtues of the "market". I think that Marx hadn't predicted that the working class would turn into a petit-bourgeois class (which arose from the mediatic revolution along with the agony of old-school industrial economies).

But libertarians are so idiotic that I don't listen to them anymore, and most intelligent people don't.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I think it's reasonable to assert that SDs are a mere bump in history and that in essence Marx was probably right

Um.. no it isn't. Like you said, Marx never saw the rise of the middle class, which destroys the entire theory.

You speak of the right selling the virtues of the market, but Bush has expanded spending more than Clinton did. The welfare state is here to say.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
They also live ten or twenty people to an apartment, which is illegal and if you do it you can get your children taken away.

The Vietnamese used to do this in southern California all the time. They'd have a four bedroom house with 20-30 people in it.