/liberty/ - Liberty

>>13272

Of course the private sector won't voluntarily shorten the work weeks while keeping the overall salary the same (effectively raising the hourly rate). The state will have to intervene.

You can't physically force the private sector to hire people on at $15+/hr but you can force them to either pay taxes or engage in capital flight (capital flight is not a problem because the government has it's own sovereign currency. Japan's public debt is higher than Greece and the sky isn't falling there because they can print their own money. And inflation is not a problem in Japan. In fact their inflation has been lower than the optimal level in the past 20+ years). So you have to go the basic income route. You could create some useful public sector jobs but you can't create a government job for every unemployed person who wants a job. So a basic income is necessary. Scrap corporate subsidies, scrap corporate tax credits, get rid of all sorts of tax credits, simplify the tax code, introduce a poverty line tax credit and a child poverty line tax credit. Then raise taxes, raise capital gains tax to the same as labour, introduce a Robin Hood Tax (ala Sanders) for securities transactions. I am very keen on introducing a non-primary residence tax because the Chinese rentier assholes use their dollars from the trade deficit to buy homes there and then charge rents at high mark-up. Oh and we need to raise inheritance/estate taxes.

And then when the material conditions are there, we can transition to real socialism, not this social democracy stuff.

The capitalists all seem to think that the bourgeoisie will run away in terror with all these taxes. But this would make it easier for the government to consolidate ownership of the means of production so I really don't care if the bourgeoisie want to leave.

The thing that people don't "get" is that taxes do not fund spending. No spending comes first, taxes comes second. If you have control of the money supply, you can create money out of thin air. Taxation is merely to control for inflation. Read Modern Monetary Theory. So capital flight is not a problem.

>>13274

>Of course the private sector won't voluntarily shorten the work weeks while keeping the overall salary the same (effectively raising the hourly rate). The state will have to intervene.

It shows that you never worked. My mother is often working sixty hours or so in a week. She has to do this because she's in a fuckload of debt, my father has left the family not a nigger though and she'd rather work ten hours per week more than not go to the restaurant once a month. She has chosen to work that much, and both her and her employers benefit from it.

She has no fixed employer, but I bet my ass that most people who work more than fifty hours a week do so because the money is worth more to them than these ten weekly hours of free time. If people were less dependant on the money, they wouldn't volunteer to work these extra hours. So as soon as real wages go up, work hours will go down or the standard of living will go up. The evil factory owner could demand they work eighty hours per week, of course. Nothing would stop him from making a contract like that with his employees, if ancaps got their way, EXCEPT the possibility of a long, costly strike and all his employers leaving, which hurts a fucking lot. The latter would be illegal in my country, by the way, if the workers organized it without asking their union for permission. Talk about regulation helping the working class.

>bla bla taxes taxes taxes

Can you give me a solution that does NOT involve robbery and kidnapping?

>The capitalists all seem to think that the bourgeoisie will run away in terror with all these taxes.

Even if they don't run away, I'll disapprove. Even if they think these reforms are a great idea and publicly endorse them, I will still disapprove, and if you haven't gotten it by this point, then you're a fucking idiot.

>But this would make it easier for the government to consolidate ownership of the means of production so I really don't care if the bourgeoisie want to leave.

Right, let's just steal all their fancy assets from under them without even pretending it's anything but a seizure!

>>13265

That's all Fine and dandy, but tell me this : how do you think you are not a thief when you loudly proclaim that people don't won what they earn?

>>13286

*own

>>13274

>The thing that people don't "get" is that taxes do not fund spending. No spending comes first, taxes comes second. If you have control of the money supply, you can create money out of thin air. Taxation is merely to control for inflation. Read Modern Monetary Theory. So capital flight is not a problem.

This is absolutely true. The problem under American Capitalism is that all the created money goes to billionaires first (investment bankers) who use it to privatize public assets, commit hostile takeovers to dismantle productive industries for a quick buck, and create market crisis which is used as a pretext to create out of thin air even MORE money for themselves.

It is like investment bankers are playing a video game on cheat mode, where they push a button that dumps money into their accounts, which they then exchange for physical assets of actual value. This is all the debt crisis is.

The notion of our public debt is a scam to justify cheaply selling off the country at the auction block to the very people who caused the debt in the first place.

I say all these things as a committed Libertarian, and any solution to the economic problem (regardless of the philosophy it comes from) needs to first address the issues I mentioned.

>>13265

…could someone please explain to me wtf OP is even saying?

>>13272

The point of divergence in all your graphs was 1971.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock

>>13290

It's good that libertarians and socialists at least agree that the neo-liberal capitalist status quo we have in place is a scam. This is something that we can't get Republicans and Tea Party types to see. Libertarians and socialists just don't agree on what the solution is.

Quantitative Easing, the bailouts and all this other crap has only ever insured that the bourgeoisie "recovered" from this economic crisis. It has not ensured that the working-class has recovered. The working-class is still in a recession. And by working-class, I'm not talking about just lumpens. If you are not at least a small business owner and you have to work to support yourself and/or your family, you're working-class. Small business owners are middle-class. Historically I think doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. might have also been considered middle-class too. I hate how "middle-class" has come to mean anything from part-time or temp gas station attendant (basically a freeter. If that's not a lumpen, they are at the very least part of the precariat. Which is still an under-class) to the gas station manager to the well-compensated salariat making six figures who drives a BMW. When politicians talk middle-class, all three people think the politician is talking about them.

I'm pro-fiat currency. Because having the ability to print money is very useful during times of crisis. But printing money for rich people only to see them blow the money on Wall Street and then have their hand out asking for more is fucking bullshit.

If I was Prime Minister of my country (Canada) with a parliamentary majority and we had another global financial crisis and the banks and Bay Street (Canada's Wall Street) had their hands out asking for a handout because they dun fucked up, this is what I would do: I would front capital to the bankrupt institutions IF they sell the equivalent value of that capital in shares to the government. Think of it as sneaking in socialism through a backdoor exit by seizing the means of production from one bankrupt corporation at a time.

That's like the only way that I can really consider giving bailouts to these corporations (if they sell shares to the government). I don't like the idea of rich people getting money from the government, spending it recklessly and then coming back with their hand out for more when they get burned. I talked with a "fiscal conservative" Democrat about this. And he said that if I refused to bail out the banks and the financial sector as Prime Minister during another big recession, there would be mass unemployment and I would get assassinated. But wouldn't killing a Prime Minister because he wouldn't give you a bailout reflect badly on you? Wouldn't that make the people realize that democracy is an illusion and that parliament/congress is bought and paid for by the rich? Someone has to stand up to crony capitalism.

>>13298

> I don't like the idea of rich people getting money from the government

I think the problem is they're not getting it from the government. They're not getting it from anywhere. They pull a monetary lever called "create monies" which extracts wealth from everybody who already has money due to inflation. This wealth extraction causes bankruptcies and foreclosures as the salaries and savings of every working class person goes down while the prices of all goods from food to gas to rent go up. The investment banking class then uses this invented money to buy stocks or land or assets from the very people they have just ruined and whose lives are now at auction.

Here is the parable version: Billionaire Bob robs Working Wally life savings literally through currency manipulation. Billionaire Bob then says "well, I can help out 'ol chap. You can sell me your land and your wife and daughter for the $10,000 I just robbed from you, otherwise you go to jail." The media (which is owned by Billionaire Bob) then declares him a hero for creating jobs. So he goes back and pulls that lever again and invents for himself some more "capital" to spend. Oh, looks like his friend Politician Pete is losing the election! Nothing invented money can't fix. Such a civilization cannot last more than a generation, and the clock has been ticking since the 1980s.

It's disgusting. I don't care what economic ideology someone adheres to, but if they cannot realize that our current system is a literal kleptocracy that will replace our Republic with a continent of slaves I have no use for them.

>implying ultrarich people throwing their money away to people working an honest day job isn't a boon for islamic gommunism

you're just jealous nobody pays you a year's salary to give them a bottle of nigger-rich overrated champagne