He might very well have cut out the reasonable people, but still - daaaaamn. Krugman is far-right libertarian compared to these people.
I swear, it sounds like all of these people came over from the U.S. Communist Party. They’re basically reciting it’s platform.
we should ban money.
we will all be richer.
Yup.
I remember an anecdote (no idea if it is true), but it involved Soviet spy handlers telling their agents not to worry about the liberals in the US as they were already on board. Soviet propaganda was focused on undermining the opposite and letting the liberals keep screaming.
lol. that was amazing. I love how baffled they are by the question of banning profits. its the look of what a brilliant idea, why isnt this on obama’s to do list?!
Yeah. It’s funny because I recently watched an interview with a Polish Ron Paul supporter who was protesting Romney’s visit to Warsaw. When he was asked about what he thought of Obama, he said something like “I can tell you that Obama is definately a socialist. Some Polish people, particularly the elder generation who lived in the communist era, would even say he’s a communist.”
At video: Lol.
You should hear the OWS people.
this is from a series of videos in which a former Soviet citizen confronts these ignoramuses.
Oh there’s advocating of that too.
Alex Jones Interviews Zeitgeist Producer Peter Joseph
A Review of Zeitgeist: Final Edition
A Review of Zeitgeist: Addendum
Holy crap. Neo-Stalinists. Somebody send these morons to the DPRK and see how much they want to stay in it then. IDIOTS.
These people believe - mistakenly, if you ask me - that business activity won’t change if corporate profits are taxed at 100%. But it’s the hope (if not the expectation) of material profit that motivates people to engage in business activity. Remove that, and what sort of business activity would people engage in? Psychic profit is all well and good, but one can’t buy bread with it.
- These people believe - mistakenly, if you ask me - that business activity won’t change if corporate profits are taxed at 100%. But it’s the hope (if not the expectation) of material profit that motivates people to engage in business activity. Remove that, and what sort of business activity would people engage in? Psychic profit is all well and good, but one can’t buy bread with it.
Presumably, corporate profits are what is left over for the corporation (as an entity) and stockholders (as individuals) after all operating costs and new purchases have been made. Think of how a non-profit corporation works. The employees can still be paid very well, and new equipment and facilities can be aquired, but there’s no “extra” on top for non-employees or outside investors. So eliminating all corporate profits doesn’t entirely mean that an end would come to all business activity. But it WOULD have some important implications. Seeking outside capital for investment would diminish greatly, among other things. You also have the possibility of creating mal-investments in in-house capital, rather than having that money be used elsewhere on new and completely unrelated projects as the profits are collected and reallocated to new investments.
What i want to know is how the occupy wall street socialists are SOOOOO incredibly uneducated (for the most part), but believe they understand socialism so much? Everytime someone asks those morons SIMPLE questions they dont have answers and it looks like they never even thought about it.
Seriously, ANY action at all that i do i can defend , from going to see a particular movie to choosing walmart brand butter over the popular expensive brands, and answer anyone better than these people who are standing outside protesting for weeks on end.
Who is telling these people about ‘how great socialism is’ because they are obviously not educated enough to come up with that decision on their own? Or are they seriously so greedy/selfish that they want a system of society that they can prosper without having to do anything? i dont understand them at all.
I usually am quite optimistic, but that video JJ posted sent a shockwave of incredulity and hopelessness through me.
“What’s the difference between North Korea and South Korea, I wonder?”
“The workers in North Korea are paid a decent wage.”
Thats what we’re up against? And she isn’t even a young’n…
Oh well, I’m just glad the truth is onthe side of liberty.
- What i want to know is how the occupy wall street socialists are SOOOOO incredibly uneducated (for the most part), but believe they understand socialism so much?
Eh, go to any Tea Party rally and ask the protesters to define capitalism, Austrian economics, or the role of the State. You’ll probably get equally uneducated answers.
The bottom line is that public education has failed spectacularly when it comes to educating people about various economic concepts and schools. Most people are coming from a position of near total ignorance and trying to learn about it informally themselves. Some of the OWS crowd might have the benefit of having read some rudimentary Marx in a few college classes, but for the most part they don’t know what they’re talkinga about any more than your average “free-market” supporter.
That’s a good thing.
“truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
-Max Planck
Notice they’re a bunch of old fogeys too.
Young people are the future…and this is where they’re looking…
Good points. With the term “corporate profits”, I was implicitly referring to accounting profit, which to me doesn’t include expanding business activity as part of the operational costs. I wasn’t clear about that, though - sorry about that.
Anyway, a “non-profit” corporation could certainly still make accounting profit, but as you wrote, it would have to be entirely re-invested in the corporation. Indeed, were corporate profits to be taxed at 100%, I would expect all corporations to become de facto “non-profit corporations” overnight. This would mean that owning stock in a corporation would no longer convey dividends, only voting and other co-ownership rights. It would also likely mean a massive sell-off and devaluation of corporate stock in practice (i.e. a massive stock-market crash). However, it would not necessarily result in higher wages/salaries for workers or lower costs for consumers.
Another way to look at it is: PETER SCHIFF TROLLING PEOPLE IRL LOLOLOLOLOL!!!
Ditto… I also went off on a 1hr youtube “related video” click-fest and ended up watching some seriously ridiculous stuff…
I guess the part I’m struggling with now, is trying to get my head around some parts of social science that aren’t quite clear yet. I’m struggling to come to grips with the fact that we can become so wealthy as a society (first world industrial) that we can somehow manage to support people such that they can manage to not kill themselves and yet still maintain these views…
When you say the truth is on our side, I interpret that as reality has a set of rules and no matter how much spin, propoganda, etc. you apply to your thinking, if you have ideas that are demonstrably inaccurate then the emergent behaviors will necessarily be self-destructive. This is what I think is embedded in that statement.
So, we got wealthy not off of the good economic ideas, but off of good economic behavior. It’s a naturally occuring thing. The incredible wealth and prosperity we have in the industrial nations can support some bad ideas creeping in without actually imploding the entire social fabric of society. For some reason however, our modern democratic societies don’t seem to be robust, or even better “anti-fragile”, when it comes to bad ideas. I see how it’s happening, but how do we get from here to a social ecosystem that more rapidly and efficiently weeds out these bad memes?
Do we have to actually run through this Democracy experiment until it devastates the globe? Is there a way to shortcut the process without violent revolution, global war, famine, economic depressions?
I appreciate that the socialists in that video are so incredibly off base that it’s a wonder they can even cash the checks they get from the government. However, they aren’t the only one’s who are wrong. It’s like the citizen’s of the democratic states are alcoholics, who keep changing the drink thinking that if I just mix it with Fruit Juice, or make it into a frozen drink, somehow it’ll be ok.
We’re never going to live in a society in which everyone sings kumbayah, and everyone has everything they could possibly desire, and nothing bad happens. But in trying to get to a better one, why do we have to ignore so much basic logic and science.
Systems theory, chaos theory, evolutionary theory all explain how the free market works and that the results will be better. But how do we get to a free market for politics? What’s the path? Because right now all I see is global devastation on the horizon. I’m trying to educate my children so that they understand economics, and politics, and political power, and how to apply basic logic and scientific thinking to life in all of it’s realms. But what world will they have? Do we really have to set the world back 100 years just to be able to move forwards?
If I were to put on my “optimistic” hat, I’d guess that the first world state governments will basically fall apart and regional and local governments will take over and begin putting back together some loose confederations. But, I can just as easily see some larger scale authoritarian governments at the sametime. Similar to the USSR and Germany in WWII. China today. North Korea. That’s the sad truth about massive standing armies.
Sorry, I’m feeling a little flustrated today.
Another good example…look at the difference between young people statements and old people statements. Like Ron said, there’s a revolution goin’ on.
Sure a lot of the OWS-ers are a bit misinformed and/or misguided, but at least they see what’s right in front of them. They may not understand the actual solution, but at least they see the real problem.
They just need a little help. And it doesn’t always take much…
Love the video, John.
Uninformed my ass…
It’s a little reminiscent of that scene in the Wizard of Oz. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”