Omnibus Politics Thread: Campaign 2016 EditionFollow

Because that power belong to the oligarchs, of course?

Time for CNN to call it.

According to Rasmussen polling, Romney is in the lead.

There is some high quality popcorn generated by the internecine DNC fighting. The threats of spite voting for Trump are probably my favorite threat of all time.

Those are still out there, with frequency. My favourite part about those is that it's predominantly conservatives who say that.

There is this weird bloc of Bernie/Trump supporters who support the other if their preferred populist isn't selected. I assume they are either retarded, spiteful, or deeply disenfranchised, but suspect it's at 2-3 of the above.

Exit polling (for what it's worth not much) is showing large victories for Trump and Sanders. Rubio maybe making 4th place. Going to ruin a lot of Republican thinkers' night if Trump is actually winning by 10-15 points since the dream was that New Hampshire would be another Iowa and force Trump out of the race as having no "real" support.

Edited, Feb 9th 2016 6:33pm by Jophiel

Except that poverty was steadily decreasing in the US prior to the introduction of Johnson's "Great Society" programs. Said rate of decline more or less leveled off during the period between 1965 and 1967 when most of those new programs were passed and first began implementation. It would take more research than I care to expend myself to figure out exactly which programs began when, how long it took them to phase in fully, and how long it took to have a measurable effect, but it's safe to say that none of them could have had an effect prior to being created in the first place. And by far the greatest declines occurred during the period between 1959 and 1965 and not during the period afterwards.

One could make an argument that welfare merely stabilized and institutionalized poverty among those already poor, and may have prevented a wave of prosperity which was at that time sweeping the nation from fully reaching certain populations. Most notably, black populations still just recovering from segregation. We certainly can't point to much statistical data showing that poverty rates were significantly reduced after passage of such programs.



Sure. Again though. Using 1959 as your starting point and comparing to today is a false argument if you fail to take into account that almost all of the gains occurred in the first 5-6 years of the data (which, again, is prior to any of the programs actually being enacted and taking effect). What it tells us is that the US economy was lifting people out of poverty prior to the creation of the welfare state, and then this process stalled once said state came into being. I suppose we could speculate that this rate (11-15%) was some kind of natural "floor" for poverty, but that would just be speculation. And, even if we accept that this is the best we could do, then we still kinda have to conclude that welfare hasn't actually improved things. We're still "stuck" there. We would have been in the same boat without the programs, since we'd reached that same range prior to their creation.

This is an interesting article on the subject. It's a pro-welfare state opinion piece, and even makes some amusing claims in terms of starting point (trying to start things at the time LBJ announced his "war on poverty", but not when such programs were actually passed by Congress, much less when they actually went into effect). But if you look at the chart, and draw a line that represents an average poverty rate going forward from say 1970 or so, it intersects with a point in the 60s that is right around 1966 or 67. Which is right around the time most of the great society laws were being passed and enacted.

Maybe that's just a coincidence, but it sure looks like if these programs had any effect at all, it was to stop the existing downward poverty trend in the US and normalize it in that 11-15% range. Unless you have some alternative explanation for why poverty rates level off in the late 60s, then kinda wobble between 11% and 15% for the entire timeline past that point. The contrast between the slope in the 60s, and the rest of time after that is pretty darn dramatic, don't you think? It certainly looks like something happened in the mid to late 60s that stopped that downward trend. Perhaps it was the passage of those laws? I think so.

My favorite part of the article that gbaji says supports his argument.



Oh, gbaji. Don't you ever change!!

I also enjoy the part where the 1st chart shows poverty goes UP right after we get GOP presidents.


Every single time nice Nixon.

Huh? That makes no sense. I'm specifically making a distinction between classical liberalism and social liberalism. To then respond to that by just proclaiming that they are both liberalism because the word liberalism is in their names is to ignore the entire point. These two ideologies place significantly different weight on the balance between individual liberty and government services. And it's that difference that is significant, since the examples I've mentioned earlier are all examples of governments that heavily infringed individual liberties in the pursuit of making a better society through government action. You may disagree if you want, but it's not like folks handed power over to Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, because they thought those leaders would brutalize their own populations, but because they strongly believed that they would make their countries better and their lives better.

That their believe was wrong isn't the point. The point is that the same ideological concept used by modern socialists (like Sanders) were used to get those populations to give those leaders power. That's the problem with socialism. I sells itself on this idea that if we just give enough power to those in charge, it'll be used to make all our lives better, but once you've handed over that power, it's more or less random luck as to what happens.



Hah. OMG. You're kidding right? First off, as I've said many times in the past, it's not just about how many dollars, but what those dollars are spent on. Some things government does infringe our freedoms more than others. Secondly, if you actually believed this, and actually believed that the GOP spends just as much (or even more as I've heard some try to claim) on the same kinds of things that we oppose the Democrats for spending on, then why aren't you supporting/praising/whatever the GOP? Kinda makes your claim suspect.



Really? How do you suppose the food at your local grocery store gets there? And yes, most of the money for roads are paid for locally by residents and businesses via combinations of taxes, and additionally funded via things like vehicle registration fees and taxes on gas. About half of the total cost for all roadways in the US are paid for directly by the consumers of those roadways (gas taxes and registration fees). The remainder is made up via a variety of taxes, but again, we all actually do benefit from those things.

The flip side would be the dollars spent on things like bike paths, which are not paid for by those who use them, but rather out of the fees paid by drivers on roadways, and out of general tax funds. Yet, there's virtually zero infrastructure benefit to bike paths. They exist purely for the benefit/enjoyment of bicycle riders. No one transports goods or services over them. Emergency vehicles don't use them. Um... That's the example of how liberals want to spend money though.

We could argue for heavy rail as an infrastructure cost, but not really for light rail. Let me also point out that we do need to make a distinction between national level spending and state and local spending. Those are different things. I guess I'm just not sure what your argument is here. So because I don't oppose all government spending, I can't oppose *any* government spending? That's a pretty weak argument. And btw, there's a ton of so-called infrastructure spending that I don't thing is good either. It's not absolute.



Sure. Again, I'm not sure where you're going with this though. And while an individual road can only take you where it goes, a road network that goes to many places is much much easier to build and maintain than say a light rail system. I'm speaking in terms of which method of transportation we should be ok with spending public funds on. And again, how much of that comes from general funds, versus those who actually use and benefit the most from said transportation methodology.

Your fishing law example doesn't make much sense either. Yes, they affect people differently, but if the law doesn't affect you, then that's fine, right? The issue is laws that affect you even though you aren't engaged in said behavior. So, for example, a law which requires you to purchase a fishing license, even though you don't have any plans to go fishing. Let's imagine that the justification for this is that by making everyone pay for a fishing license, even though they aren't going to use it to fish, it decreases the cost for fishing licenses for those who will, thus making fishing more affordable, and perhaps even decreasing the cost of fish (yeah, that makes no sense, but bear with me). You'd not think that's a great argument, since you don't even eat fish, right?

That's the kind of "fishing laws" that the left would create. Does that seem like a good idea to you? I don't think so.



Roads was just an example of acceptable domestic spending. Don't get too caught up on it. Some spending is more necessary than others though, and some spending makes more logical sense to occur via government than private entities. Going back to the roadway example, we have to have some form of roadway system, right? If for no other reason than to provide the most cost effective "last mile" for any sort of transport of goods. Having them built and maintained by some level of government makes sense because then you will have consistent roads, of similar size, with similar requirements for load bearing, standards of materials, etc. Private entities could certainly make roads (and many private roads are, as the name suggests, built and maintained privately). Again though, the point is to do this at a level that is logical. So the federal government involves itself mostly with interstate highways, because it's purview is interstate trade and whatnot. State governments manage roads that travel purely within their own boundaries, because that's the most logical place do this. Local municipalities manage their own road ways. And private citizens manage their own driveways, housing complex roadways, parking lots, etc.

I would never argue that the government should subsidize the purchase of cars though. See how there's a difference? Similarly, while I don't have too much problem with government funding of research, including medical research, and even stuff like the CDC, I'm not a big fan of government getting directly involved in paying for, providing for, or mandating health care for individual people. IMO, the closer you get to the individuals actions and choices, the less the government should be involved. The details of the spending does actually matter. Not just that there is spending.



No. I make a distinction between services that benefit us all, and services that are targeted at individuals for just their individual benefit. I'm not sure how much more clear I can be about this. A fire department provides protection from fires for everyone in the community. Food stamps benefit only the recipient. Get it? I could explain at length all the different reasons why I think the latter form of spending is problematic, but right now I just want you to understand the difference in broad terms.

The latter form of spending represents government micro-managing our lives, which is an additional infringement of liberty above and beyond the initial infringement in the form of taxes.



No, they are not. They are direct applications of the principles of social liberalism. Which, I agree, is just a label since social liberalism is itself a significant departure from classical liberalism (what we normally think of as "liberalism"). But since you said "something we might call liberalism", it's relevant to point out that this is what those systems were using as their base ideology, and it does actually carry the "liberalism" label.

I think you're missing the point that in very very broad 20,000 foot level terms, "liberalism" is any ideology in which the social and governing rules are made up based on a desire to make the resulting society "better" for those who live in it. This is in contrast to earlier systems in which those who ruled did so by diving right or might or whatever, and their subjects were... well subject to their will. Kings were not bound to make their subjects lives better. If they did so, that was great, but their motivation was to improve their own position, power, etc, not out of any systemic process. Even after the Magna Carta, the starting assumption was that the people don't innately have rights at all, but gain those which they were granted via the agreement.

It's only with the rise of modern liberalism that we see the concept of starting with the assumption that people innately have rights as the starting point, and then we allow government to infringe those rights, but only to the degree necessary to maintain a stable society capable of defending and protecting those remaining rights. That's classical liberalism in a nutshell. Later on, more or less as a result of needing to figure out how to apply this new concept to existing nations that had a long feudal tradition of power, social liberalism came along. It's still predicated (or at least sold to the public) on the concept of also making the best society for the people to live in. The difference is that it does everything it can to preserve the idea that the people work for the government in some way and the government provides for them in return. This is the basis for the "social contract" that you'll run into if you research the topic. Social liberalism explains away the existence of powerful government interaction with the citizens on the grounds that the citizens enter into a contract agreeing to have a whole hosts of liberties infringed in ways that would make classical liberalists cringe, in return for a host of government services.

The problem is that this is more or less an excuse to continue to hold significant power over the citizens of a nation. As such, it has on many occasions been used for precisely that. And it's often very hard for the citizens, upon being presented with some new set of agreements, to be able to tell the difference. They hand power first to their government, assuming their government will actually use that power to make their lives better and not abuse it. But they have to first hand the power over. Classical liberalism starts with the government having no power, and then the people just giving it a little bit here, and a little bit there, but (hopefully) never enough to take the kinds of actions that the ***** and the Communists employed. When you first are told you must hand a huge amount of power over to your government so it can use it to make your lives better, you're stuck hoping that it's not abused. That's it.

The same arguments that folks like Sanders use to try to get people to support his social agenda were the arguments used by Hitler and Stalin and Mao. They used the same soaring rhetoric. The same claims that they would feed the hungry, help the helpless, provide jobs for the unemployed, health care for the sick, etc, etc, etc. Again, I'm not saying Sanders would do the kind of things those other leaders did, but that's not the point. Once you've handed over that kind of power, it's only a matter of time until someone will come along and abuse it. And the problem is that every single time this happens, the socialists/liberals/whatever insist that the problem wasn't that their own ideology effective enables this to happen, but that somehow those people were "bad socialists", or "not socialists at all". They invent new terms and come up with all sorts of mental gyrations to explain this away.

But the simplest explanation is that the very system they are employing is inherently dangerous, because it places the power of the government to act on our lives ahead of our own rights to be free of such actions. The same power that allows a government to force you to wear a seat belt, or purchase health insurance, can be used to send those they don't like to the work camps, or sterilize those who are undesirable, or send the elderly to carosel, or whatever other horrific thing we might think of. All for the greater good, of course.



Um. No. See above for my explanation of the ideologies in question. And while not every ideology that places the group over the individual is social liberalism, every single one that sells this to the public and derives its power from the public on the idea that they will make a better society for the whole *is*. If I'm just some dictator ruling with an iron fist and I declare that I'm going to do X because I have the power to and you have no say, then it's not social liberalism. Even if I believe that what I want to do is better for the whole doesn't make it social liberalism. My power must have been derived ultimately by people giving it to me because they wanted me to or at least believed that I would make their lives collectively "better" as a result. This could occur gradually as a result of voting within a democracy, or more quickly as a result of a popular revolution. But what makes it social liberalism is that the people believe (whether it's true or not), that they have entered into a contract with the government in which they agree to give it all it's power in exchange for the government using that power on their behalf.

That's a relatively recent concept in government. Even ancient democracies were more about extending the idea of clan meetings to make decisions to a logical degree. So instead of the heads of clans/families meeting to discuss issues in common, each head of a household (or landowner, or whatever) would vote. Same deal. But at no point is the modern concept of liberty and rights really fully developed. There's no inherent assumption that government is in any way constrained in its power or obligated to do anything on behalf of "the people". The method of decision making is there, but not yet the concept that each person has some right involved.

Well, eventually people who are poor enough long enough starve. Problem solved!

Um... Did you miss where I stated that the article was pro-Great_Society? My point is that if you actually look at and analyze the data rather than just buying the cheer leading, you'll see that the data they use doesn't actually support their conclusion. I used a pro Great Society article specifically so you couldn't just dismiss it as some partisan source.

Funny take on it though. Did you look at the graph? Does it look to you like the downward poverty trend started after Johnson passed his agenda? Or does it look a lot more like that downward trend leveled off after that point? Cause it sure looks to me like the latter, and not the former. Again, while we could speculate that said trend was going to level off anyway and form some kind of floor, the key point is that it would have done that anyway. The Welfare State didn't cause that to happen. At best, it did nothing to reduce poverty, and at worse has kept millions of Americans poor who might otherwise not have been.

That's hardly a ringing endorsement for one of the biggest social spending programs in US history.