"My use of those two examples was in mockery of the fallacy he used in supporting his desires."
Oh, that's just funny. See, I'm a straight, white male, married to a woman. So, in defending gay rights, I am hardly "supporting my desires". Careful, or a conservative head might explode as you read the following: not only am I a straight guy who supports gay rights, I support women's rights, and I'm not a woman, and I support racial equality and I'm not a racial minority, and I support religious rights, and I'm an atheist. Blows your mind, huh. But see that's just us, selfish liberals whom you cannot fathom that we can fight for the rights of others not just ourselves, just as we can fight for the rights of conservatives to free speech the content of which we wholly disagree with. So regarding my "desires" - RRRING, wrong answer.
Anyhow, I shall pass over the sorry sources of these arguments against gay people from Family Councils and the like. It's just sad that the standards are so low and so little thought goes into the arguments of someone who sees himself as Logical.
I'm not going to try to rebut each and every poor "argument", as I take no pleasure and see no reward in shooting fish in a barrel.
But I'll put forth for you a few facts, which you may - if fair minded - cogitate upon.
You make a big deal about gay people being somehow damaged and an error and a genetic mistake and the like. Perhaps best summed up in this quote from you:
"If there is nothing inherently wrong with being a homosexual, why would an entirely homosexual society cease to exist beyond a single generation?"
This is a theme many anti-gay folks harp upon. So sad - because so ignorant. To see what is happening, what if I answered you as follows:
"If there is nothing inherently wrong with being a MAN, why would an entire society composed of only MEN, cease to exist beyond a single generation?"
Getting a clue yet? Think a bit about it. I promise you, further thinking will be rewarded.
In plain English. You set up an absurd situation in order to get an absurd result - and then got an absurd result. Surprise - not. Of course there is nothing wrong with being a MAN, and saying that "well a whole society composed of only men would die out within a generation" - and that therefore proves that there is something wrong with being a man - is absurd. Do you get it yet? There is nothing wrong, or an error, or genetically damaged, or immoral, or stupid, or selfish or whatever with being a man - based or justified by that idiotic argument of "society composed of only men, gay people, only women". Same for nothing being wrong with being gay based on your faulty argument. Somehow, you specialize in idiotic arguments.
Now, society would not be composed of only men, because naturally men and women are born in roughly (not exactly, but roughly) equal proportions. So it would be a stupid argument to say "only men". And - science fact alert! - pay attention! - human sexuality also occurs along a spectrum in small proportions toward the homosexual end of the spectrum. That number is pretty stable. It is also the case in the animal kingdom - there is a steady small proportion of homosexual behavior - it never takes over the whole species, but it is always present. A certain percent of males and females is gay - always. Never a whole society. But always present in about the same small percentage.
And now, if you have a fair mind - or merely if you are logical as you claim - pay attention, and you may learn something.
Homophobes and bigots seem to think that since gay people don't naturally reproduce, it must mean they are damaged and society is better off without them. Basically it's a kind of argument "from biology" as they imagine. Only there is a cruel joke played on the bigot. Because biology tells us the exact opposite - something that anti-science conservatives missed. Because biologists asked the opposite question: if nature and evolution has taken such pains to preserve homosexuality in the species, if it has not been eliminated, but instead has been preserved in the same proportion for all these generations - why was that?
Well, we know that genetic errors and mistakes get winnowed out from the genetic pool. Yet, homosexuality is preserved at some biological cost. Nature is not sentimental nor ideological. There is always a practical reason. There must be an evolutionary advantage to having a small amount of homosexuality in a species, otherwise it would not be so persistently preserved.
And when scientists examined how species function, they soon realized what was going on. First, bigots make a mistake in thinking that genetic fitness is a per individual count only. That is wrong. Genetic fitness is important in the whole species. And that is not the same thing - individual fitness or fitness of a species. Think about for example an ant society. Depending on the species you have all kinds of organization, but for example, you can have a fertile female (queen) and fertile male, and infertile ants (vast numbers of them). Now think - THINK! Why would a species have males, females, and intentionally infertile members? Well, Virginia, because it confers upon them an evolutionary advantage. Not on the individual level - bigot thinking - but on the species level. An infertile ant has no genetic fitness because it does not reproduce. But the SPECIES overall is better off for having this division into male, female and infertile. There are all sorts of reasons. For one, there is specialization. You can have fighters, you can have carers, you can have workers. And it diminishes sexual competition, so energy is not dissipated fighting for a male or female - an infertile ant is focused 100% on its role (fighting or working or whatever). As a result, in a competition with an ant society that is only male + female, the society that is male + female + infertile - the latter wins. Which is why evolutionarily ant societies preserve the infertile ant population in every generation.
Same here. We are learning more and more about the animal kingdom and evolution, and biology. And human beings. We now know that there isn't only "male and female" but a SPECTRUM of sexual behavior and attraction. Homosexuality is preserved, because it is GOOD for the human species (and all the other species where it occurs). Gay people don't have to add to the sexual competition, they can lower tensions and can have other functions in society which strengthen the WHOLE society. Gay people are good for society. That is what we can see from evolution.
Google the "grandmother hypothesis" - scientists were puzzled why women outlive their sexual procreation period by so many decades - seems wasteful. What do you need a grandmother for, why not only a mother, once the woman is no longer fertile, why doesn't she die? Well, because evolutionary pressure preserved the species that kept the grandmother around since she was useful - she cared for grandkids freeing the parents to hunt and many other things. There was a reason. It made the society more fit. It was GOOD for society. So they were preserved. Just as gay people were - GOOD for society.
You see, when you free yourself from bigotry and hatred, and open your eyes and your mind to learning and thought, you soon realize that the world is a whole lot more complicated and wonderful than the narrow-minded conservative views of what "biology" supposedly is, or "evolution" supposedly is. Nothing is more apt than this quote from the Bard - something every conservative who has made the same idiotic biology based bigoted arguments against gay people should keep in mind:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio
Rather than cling to narrow and incorrect interpretations of sub-highschool level biology, bad arguments and simple prejudice, open your mind and THINK.
This is just a small example - there are hundreds of ways to demolish the other "arguments" you cite, but why not leave that as a (pretty easy!) exercise for you to get your logical thinking on?
Are you a performance artist, Tallest Skil? I just gave you the arguments - which you entirely ignored. Businessmen, political and religious leaders are on a spectrum of conservative to liberal. It is wrong and counter reality to claim that they can only be conservative. I gave examples. You ignored them. We're done.
Oh, I’m talking about work on company time. And a lack of productivity is harm, even if the work that IS done is relevant.
The company has every right to direct what work you do on company time. They are paying for your labor.
What if the prices are artificially inflated beyond what the market dictates?
What's "artificial" are deflated prices brought on by taxpayers subsidizing the company through social programs that benefit its underpaid workers. Beyond that, there are many goods that cost so much to manufacture that they are not commercially viable.
I'll provide a hypothetical example calculated to push your buttons: Suppose that I open a business that manufactures butt plugs for a primarily gay clientele. I pay my workers $8 per hour and, due to their low wages, they qualify for various government assistance programs including subsidized housing, food stamps, medical insurance subsidies, child care subsidies, and an Earned Income Tax Credit. You may argue that it's unfair to you, as a taxpayer, but I argue that the butt plug market in the gay community is very price-sensitive and that my sales would drop if I had to pay my employees a living wage.
I keep seeing (not just here) the discussion devolve to either raising wages (which raises prices, which forces wages to be raised) or firing people and keeping the same costs.
Two things:
1. A business that could afford to fire many workers, and still meet the demand for the good/service at the same price, would probably have long ago been driven out of business by more efficient competitors.
2. It's really much simpler than that: Cut the pay of the executives such that it's rise is equivalent to that of low-paid workers.
Cut the pay of the people on that red line to finance a living wage for those people on the dark blue line. Remember, that those are not the absolute pay rates -- they are the percent increases from groups that already started at drastically different salaries at the 1979 origin.
Quote:
I was thinking the end of fiat currency, but there’s already so much crap this thread covers that I didn’t want to add yet another point.
But then you have an infinite cycle of ever-increasing prices. Yes, if you “keep step” the ratio of CoL isn’t changed, but is the Zimbabwe (Hungary 1946, Germany 1927, etc.) model really the best solution? Just add more zeroes to the bills?
My overarching conclusion is that the supply of currency has to be limited, preferably by physical or uncompromising legal means.
Don't mistake high inflation and hyperinflation for low inflation. Economists consider the latter to be normal and healthy while the two former are indicative of severe economic problems.
Most economists agree that biggest reason why the U.S. got out of the Great Depression was the break with the gold standard. Going off the gold standard gave the government new tools to steer the economy. If you're not tied to gold, you can adjust the amount of money in the economy if you need to. You can adjust interest rates.
For anyone interested, there have been numerous refutations of the anti-homosexuality propaganda that Tallest Skil re-published (without attribution to the discredited author, Paul Cameron): http://www.qrd.org/QRD/www/RRR/cameron.html
These are some quotes from Paul Cameron:
"Marital sex tends toward the boring end. Generally, it doesn't deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does. If you isolate sexuality as something solely for one's own personal amusement, if all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get, then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist."
— Interview with Rolling Stone, 1999
(Oh, yeah, Paul Cameron is totally not gay. LOL!)
"Most people who engage in homosexuality are of the lower strata; these are people who are waiters and busboys and bums and hobos and jailbirds and so forth."
— 1994 religious right conference panel discussion on homosexuality
"I think that actually AIDS is a guardian. That is I think it was sent, if you would, about forty years ago, to destroy Western civilization unless we change our sexual ways. So it's really a Godsend."
— quoted by Mark E. Pietrzyk, News-Telegraph, March 10, 1995.
Dr. Gregory Herek noted on his blog that:
In 1984, the American Psychological Association informed its members that “Paul Cameron (Nebraska) was dropped from membership for a violation of the Preamble to the Ethical Principles of Psychologists” by the APA Board of Directors.
Later that same year, the Nebraska Psychological Association adopted a resolution stating that it “formally disassociates itself from the representations and interpretations of scientific literature offered by Dr. Paul Cameron in his writings and public statements on sexuality. Further, the Nebraska Psychological Association would like it known that Dr. Cameron is not a member of the Association.”
In 1986, the American Sociological Association (ASA) adopted a resolution that stated: “The American Sociological Association officially and publicly states that Paul Cameron is not a sociologist, and condemns his consistent misrepresentation of sociological research.”
In August, 1996, the Canadian Psychological Association adopted a policy statement that said, “The Canadian Psychological Association takes the position that Dr. Paul Cameron has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism and thus, it formally disassociates itself from the representation and interpretations of scientific literature in his writings and public statements on sexuality.”
Oh, I’m talking about work on company time. And a lack of productivity is harm, even if the work that IS done is relevant.
What if the prices are artificially inflated beyond what the market dictates?
I keep seeing (not just here) the discussion devolve to either raising wages (which raises prices, which forces wages to be raised) or firing people and keeping the same costs. It’s late and I probably just don’t have enough about the topic collected to know a conclusion, so I’ll just agree again that any solution must not involve state welfare.
What the market dictates isn't a rational way of looking at it. You determine if it's a viable business model according to what the market will bear while accounting for natural fluctuations. There's an inherent optimization problem there in determining how you can make as much money as possible. If it's below a certain threshold, it's just not a great business model.
I think you should also consider that being able to hire people for very little causes some weird side effects in areas with high real estate demand.
Atheism is a belief system in the same sense that bald is a hairstyle.
LOL. I was trying to tally up all my belief systems based upon the premise that atheism is one. It's quite staggering how many belief systems I have it seems I don't believe in so many things I don't know where to start!
If the person saying that only stopped for one second to think, he or she might realize a belief system requires time and effort to be put into it. Where as I really don't expend much energy not believing in the tooth fairy or mythology.
That person might also realize that there has never been a collection of people that don't believe in mythology (aka religion) appointing a leader and setting him or her up in a luxurious palace and building millions of places where people brain washed not to believe in mythology come and give their hard earned money because they don't fear hell and damnation ... I could go on, it's hilarious.
"If there is nothing inherently wrong with being a MAN, why would an entire society composed of only MEN, cease to exist beyond a single generation?"
Getting a clue yet?
Yes, the clue is that you have absolutely no comprehension whatsoever of sexual or asexual relationships and the organisms that comprise them. That would explain why you went off on a huge tirade about something that is wholly and completely irrelevant.
It is also the case in the animal kingdom - there is a steady small proportion of homosexual behavior
There is no homosexual behavior within the animal kingdom that is not used for the purpose of rape or to show social dominance. None. There are no homosexual ‘relationships’. There are no homosexual ‘pair bonds’. Because even animals understand that they will DIE OUT if there is not an element of normalcy.
if nature and evolution has taken such pains to preserve homosexuality in the species
No such pains have been taken.
...preserved in the same proportion for all these generations...
Sources for that, by the way?
We now know that there isn't only "male and female" but a SPECTRUM of sexual behavior and attraction.
Nope. In terms of sexes, there is male, female, the scant few genetic aberrations that result in XXX, XXY, etc., and then where you believe that being XX makes you male or XY makes you female. In terms of attraction, there is heterosexuality and then where people pretend that the best thing to do is spread the ‘virtue’ of not reproducing.
Homosexuality is preserved, because it is GOOD for the human species (and all the other species where it occurs).
Gonna need an actual rebuttal to what I’ve already presented that says otherwise, then.
I just gave you the arguments - which you entirely ignored.
What arguments?
Businessmen, political and religious leaders are on a spectrum of conservative to liberal. It is wrong and counter reality to claim that they can only be conservative.
Good thing I didn’t claim that, then, huh? Phew!
I gave examples. You ignored them. We're done.
Thank you, again, for confirming that you have absolutely no rebuttal, refutation, or disproof of anything that I have posted.
Originally Posted by Fred Maxwell
The company has every right to direct what work you do on company time. They are paying for your labor.
Right, and so if they deem the labor not worth the currency granted it, they’ll just fire you or retask you.
What's "artificial" are deflated prices brought on by taxpayers subsidizing the company through social programs that benefit its underpaid workers.
Removal of welfare can only come with an increase in purchasing power (and a change to social attitudes), not just forever increasing prices/pay.
...market... ...is very price-sensitive and that my sales would drop if I had to pay my employees a living wage.
You’re not even facing toward the console; how can you press my buttons?
If the market is so price sensitive that it cannot handle these things, then the market doesn’t really have much right to keep existing beyond the whims of those who would pay, does it? There’s not really a market for oil lamps anymore, for example.
1. A business that could afford to fire many workers, and still meet the demand for the good/service at the same price, would probably have long ago been driven out of business by more efficient competitors.
But we’re seeing plenty of that occurring now. Fast food joints are replacing cashiers with terminals, because we’re to the point where people have begun asking why on Earth would there need to be a trained human to run a cash register and press the order buttons.
2. It's really much simpler than that: Cut the pay of the executives such that it's rise is equivalent to that of low-paid workers.
I still prefer fixing the root problem first. Nothing else can be a positive change until then.
Most economists agree that biggest reason why the U.S. got out of the Great Depression was the break with the gold standard.
I’ve never heard that. The break happened before the Great Depression and I’ve only heard that it caused it.
If you're not tied to gold, you can adjust the amount of money in the economy if you need to. You can adjust interest rates.
And look how well that has worked out¡ Now we’re at ~0% interest with nowhere to go but down. You can’t adjust the amount of money, only currency. And when you can–and do–print to oblivion, what good is that currency? What value does it have?
What the market dictates isn't a rational way of looking at it.
Apologies; I’ve thus far been using the overarching term to describe the collective of globalized behaviors and scenarios simply because we hadn’t needed to discuss anything more than the conceptual supply/demand cross. There’s no one mathematically perfect “market”, certainly not. “The market” is determined by everything down to local environmental factors and there’s very little long- or large-scale planning that can be used as more than a guideline (people tend not to view the world on a yearly scale, for example, so even if they know how wet their region gets across the year, you’ll still see an uptick in umbrella sales directly on rainy days, whenever they fall).
I think you should also consider that being able to hire people for very little causes some weird side effects in areas with high real estate demand.
$350,000! Better pay up! Oh, the “kitchen needs some work” and “the bathroom is not functioning”. “I would not recommend anyone moving right in.”
Theoretically, though, shouldn’t the lack of buyers in the market pull the real estate prices down? I mean, how can a seller afford to sell a house that no one can buy? And how could buyers put up with prices they cannot possibly afford as though there’s no way... out... Wait a minute! Speaking of no way out, just take a 50 year mortgage with a variable interest rate on that little hovel! NOW you can “afford” it and the seller can keep his original price! Hooray! Prices don’t have to go down now! What could go wrong!
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.” ??Romans? ?1:22, 24-27? ?ESV?? http://bible.com/59/rom.1.22,24-27.esv
Not many ways you can reinterpret that. The Bible is clear.
And to those who state there are many interpretations: yes there are many passages that have differing interpretations. But the one that matters is the original intent of the author: Gods intent. This is why scripture needs to be interpreted by scripture, to help us understand what the author is saying. I've said this before, and I'm saying it again. It all boils down to what is the context. The only way to know if you have a correct interpretation of a passage is to compare it in its entirety to other passages to see if it aligns with the rest of scripture. To do otherwise could/will lead to an erroneous interpretation. Not all interpretations are equal. This is also why there are word studies of the original texts to help us understand the meaning of a word in the given context. This is called hermeneutics.
Science can no more disprove the Bible as it can prove the Big Bang. Can you repeat the Big Bang for me? Thanks, that would be great.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
??Romans? ?1:22, 24-27? ?ESV?? http://bible.com/59/rom.1.22,24-27.esv
My lord and savior Zeus did not quite see it the same way.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
??Romans? ?1:22, 24-27? ?ESV?? http://bible.com/59/rom.1.22,24-27.esv
Not many ways you can reinterpret that. The Bible is clear.
And to those who state there are many interpretations: yes there are many passages that have differing interpretations. But the one that matters is the original intent of the author: Gods intent. This is why scripture needs to be interpreted by scripture, to help us understand what the author is saying. I've said this before, and I'm saying it again. It all boils down to what is the context. The only way to know if you have a correct interpretation of a passage is to compare it in its entirety to other passages to see if it aligns with the rest of scripture. To do otherwise could/will lead to an erroneous interpretation. Not all interpretations are equal. This is also why there are word studies of the original texts to help us understand the meaning of a word in the given context. This is called hermeneutics.
Science can no more disprove the Bible as it can prove the Big Bang. Can you repeat the Big Bang for me? Thanks, that would be great.
You quote a book written by people who had an agenda how long ago? Yet you hang on every word. Do you realize how many religions there are and have been on earth since man learned to con his fellow man. Had you been born under the influence of anyone of them you'd believe every word they spouted. You'd be quoting what the oracle at Delphi told you with total conviction or swearing that Mount Olympus was where all the Gods hung out. Religions thrive because of the gullible.
“So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,
for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.””
??Acts? ?17:22-26, 28-31? ?ESV?? http://bible.com/59/act.17.22-26,28-31.esv
“So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,
for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.””
??Acts? ?17:22-26, 28-31? ?ESV?? http://bible.com/59/act.17.22-26,28-31.esv
Zeus will destroy your God with the power of his lightning bolt thrown with the accuracy of a javelin off of Mt. Olympus. Do not mock him.
Right, and so if they deem the labor not worth the currency granted it, they’ll just fire you or retask you.
If your workforce is fully employed, firing employees means shrinking the business. I bet that most businesses would learn to live on lower profit margins. Or they would would reduce executive compensation in order to keep the business from shrinking.
Quote:
Removal of welfare can only come with an increase in purchasing power (and a change to social attitudes), not just forever increasing prices/pay.
People don't need more purchasing power from each dollar. They need more income. They need more of the GDP to go to the middle class and less to go to the extremely wealthy -- to return to the same balance we had decades ago when the middle class was thriving. Why do you keep arguing against this? There has been a massive, huge shift of the GDP from the working class to the wealthy over the last few decades and you just refuse to acknowledge that it is a problem.
Quote:
If the market is so price sensitive that it cannot handle these things, then the market doesn’t really have much right to keep existing beyond the whims of those who would pay, does it? There’s not really a market for oil lamps anymore, for example.
Markets don't have "rights." They expand or contract based on price and demand. No, there's not really a market for oil lamps, and if you want to run a company producing them, don't expect the taxpayers to subsidize your underpaid labor force so that you can price your lamps so low as to keep producing them.
Quote:
But we’re seeing plenty of that occurring now. Fast food joints are replacing cashiers with terminals, because we’re to the point where people have begun asking why on Earth would there need to be a trained human to run a cash register and press the order buttons.
So the fast food industry lays off another bunch of American workers. They go on unemployment at taxpayer expense. That increases the labor pool. That drives down wages (supply of labor exceeding demand). And McDonald's CEO, CFO, COO, Board of Director, and stockholders all get bigger checks. Thanks for explaining the mechanism by which income inequality has become disastrous.
By the way, I almost never use a self-serve line at a store because I want to keep cashiers employed. I'd rather pay a bit for my loaf of bread than have a cashier in a bread line.
Quote:
I still prefer fixing the root problem first. Nothing else can be a positive change until then.
The root problem is income inequality. The portion of the GDP going to 80% of Americans has dropped dramatically while the portion going to the wealthiest 20% has skyrocketed. CEOs now, even after adjusting for inflation, make orders of magnitude more than they did 40 years ago while middle class wages during that same time have remained stagnant, again adjusted for inflation (meaning that inflation has no bearing on this).
The only way that you increase the purchasing power of the dollar is to lower prices for goods and services. That's the definition of increasing purchasing power -- more goods and services for the same amount of money. So how do you propose that we force companies to lower their prices without reducing how much they pay their employees? Do you want the government to step in and impose price controls? And how will we force the overseas firms supplying components, manufactured goods, and services to American companies to also reduce their prices by the same amount?
Quote:
I’ve never heard that. The break happened before the Great Depression and I’ve only heard that it caused it.
FDR effectively took us off of the gold standard in 1933 (after the Great Depression was in full swing). See:
And look how well that has worked out¡ Now we’re at ~0% interest with nowhere to go but down. You can’t adjust the amount of money, only currency. And when you can–and do–print to oblivion, what good is that currency? What value does it have?
It's worked out very well. We've seen our stock markets more than double in fewer than 7 years while our inflation has remained very low (under 5% annually).
You have some mistaken beliefs about how the value of our currency is set and I recommend that you read this article on the Motley Fool investing web site:
“So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,
for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.””
“So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,
for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.””
??Acts? ?17:22-26, 28-31? ?ESV?? http://bible.com/59/act.17.22-26,28-31.esv
Science can no more disprove the Bible as it can prove the Big Bang.
There's no such thing as a 'burden of disproof.' As the person positively asserting the existence of a God, the burden of proof is on you. Man has invented over 2,800 deities throughout recorded history -- and not provided proof, or even compelling evidence, for the existence of any of them. In contrast to your evidence-free belief in God, there is strong scientific data, evidence if you will, to support the Big Bang theory.
Yes, the clue is that you have absolutely no comprehension whatsoever of sexual or asexual relationships and the organisms that comprise them. That would explain why you went off on a huge tirade about something that is wholly and completely irrelevant.
There is no homosexual behavior within the animal kingdom that is not used for the purpose of rape or to show social dominance. None. There are no homosexual ‘relationships’. There are no homosexual ‘pair bonds’. Because even animals understand that they will DIE OUT if there is not an element of normalcy.
No such pains have been taken.
Sources for that, by the way?
Nope. In terms of sexes, there is male, female, the scant few genetic aberrations that result in XXX, XXY, etc., and then where you believe that being XX makes you male or XY makes you female. In terms of attraction, there is heterosexuality and then where people pretend that the best thing to do is spread the ‘virtue’ of not reproducing.
Gonna need an actual rebuttal to what I’ve already presented that says otherwise, then.
"Yes, the clue is that you have absolutely no comprehension whatsoever of sexual or asexual relationships and the organisms that comprise them. That would explain why you went off on a huge tirade about something that is wholly and completely irrelevant."
It is you who has no clue. I gave an exact analogy that exposed the fallacy of your argument. Your response is to claim that I don't understand, while not actually providing an argument. That is not effective.
"There is no homosexual behavior within the animal kingdom that is not used for the purpose of rape or to show social dominance. None. There are no homosexual ‘relationships’. There are no homosexual ‘pair bonds’. Because even animals understand that they will DIE OUT if there is not an element of normalcy."
They have, which is why it keeps occurring in every generation in the species which exhibit it.
"Nope. In terms of sexes, there is male, female, the scant few genetic aberrations that result in XXX, XXY, etc., and then where you believe that being XX makes you male or XY makes you female. In terms of attraction, there is heterosexuality and then where people pretend that the best thing to do is spread the ‘virtue’ of not reproducing."
Please refer to court transcripts wherein the case for and against harm were made. The court found the vast preponderance of evidence conclusively argued against any purported harms. And the courts ruled accordingly.
I bet that most businesses would learn to live on lower profit margins.
What about the ones that can’t? Isn’t the business that was the start of this whole argument an example of that?
People don't need more purchasing power from each dollar. They need more income.
Well, that’s nonsense. Getting more purchasing power would negate the need for more income. One or the other works, but only one stops the cycle.
Why do you keep arguing against this?
I’ve not made any statement about it, either way. I’ve just ignored it because it’s secondary to fixing the base problem.
Markets don't have "rights."
Exactly, hence my distaste with the phrase “too big to fail” as well as subsidies in general.
They expand or contract based on price and demand.
Sometimes a business’ plan contracts out of existence.
So the fast food industry lays off another bunch of American workers. That drives down wages (supply of labor exceeding demand).
Which forces prices down, which would mean there aren’t bigger checks to give the executives. Or would mean that, without the welfare, which should be ended.
If people aren’t working, they don’t have currency. If they don’t have currency, they can’t buy things at their previous prices. Thus the prices have to come down for them to be sold.
The root problem is income inequality.
Nope, that’s a consequence of the system itself, not the cause.
The portion of the GDP going to 80% of Americans has dropped dramatically while the portion going to the wealthiest 20% has skyrocketed.
Honestly, I’d much prefer a currency that has its value set against a tangible physical object than one backed by faith. Because when there is no faith in that currency, it doesn’t matter how large or successful its economy is. Look at Zimbabwe. Printing in perpetuity (in response to implementing the IMF’s racist economic policies) to try to solve the problem of a collapse of valuation... And some think that QE 4 is around the corner.
Comments
"My use of those two examples was in mockery of the fallacy he used in supporting his desires."
Oh, that's just funny. See, I'm a straight, white male, married to a woman. So, in defending gay rights, I am hardly "supporting my desires". Careful, or a conservative head might explode as you read the following: not only am I a straight guy who supports gay rights, I support women's rights, and I'm not a woman, and I support racial equality and I'm not a racial minority, and I support religious rights, and I'm an atheist. Blows your mind, huh. But see that's just us, selfish liberals whom you cannot fathom that we can fight for the rights of others not just ourselves, just as we can fight for the rights of conservatives to free speech the content of which we wholly disagree with. So regarding my "desires" - RRRING, wrong answer.
Anyhow, I shall pass over the sorry sources of these arguments against gay people from Family Councils and the like. It's just sad that the standards are so low and so little thought goes into the arguments of someone who sees himself as Logical.
I'm not going to try to rebut each and every poor "argument", as I take no pleasure and see no reward in shooting fish in a barrel.
But I'll put forth for you a few facts, which you may - if fair minded - cogitate upon.
You make a big deal about gay people being somehow damaged and an error and a genetic mistake and the like. Perhaps best summed up in this quote from you:
"If there is nothing inherently wrong with being a homosexual, why would an entirely homosexual society cease to exist beyond a single generation?"
This is a theme many anti-gay folks harp upon. So sad - because so ignorant. To see what is happening, what if I answered you as follows:
"If there is nothing inherently wrong with being a MAN, why would an entire society composed of only MEN, cease to exist beyond a single generation?"
Getting a clue yet? Think a bit about it. I promise you, further thinking will be rewarded.
In plain English. You set up an absurd situation in order to get an absurd result - and then got an absurd result. Surprise - not. Of course there is nothing wrong with being a MAN, and saying that "well a whole society composed of only men would die out within a generation" - and that therefore proves that there is something wrong with being a man - is absurd. Do you get it yet? There is nothing wrong, or an error, or genetically damaged, or immoral, or stupid, or selfish or whatever with being a man - based or justified by that idiotic argument of "society composed of only men, gay people, only women". Same for nothing being wrong with being gay based on your faulty argument. Somehow, you specialize in idiotic arguments.
Now, society would not be composed of only men, because naturally men and women are born in roughly (not exactly, but roughly) equal proportions. So it would be a stupid argument to say "only men". And - science fact alert! - pay attention! - human sexuality also occurs along a spectrum in small proportions toward the homosexual end of the spectrum. That number is pretty stable. It is also the case in the animal kingdom - there is a steady small proportion of homosexual behavior - it never takes over the whole species, but it is always present. A certain percent of males and females is gay - always. Never a whole society. But always present in about the same small percentage.
And now, if you have a fair mind - or merely if you are logical as you claim - pay attention, and you may learn something.
Homophobes and bigots seem to think that since gay people don't naturally reproduce, it must mean they are damaged and society is better off without them. Basically it's a kind of argument "from biology" as they imagine. Only there is a cruel joke played on the bigot. Because biology tells us the exact opposite - something that anti-science conservatives missed. Because biologists asked the opposite question: if nature and evolution has taken such pains to preserve homosexuality in the species, if it has not been eliminated, but instead has been preserved in the same proportion for all these generations - why was that?
Well, we know that genetic errors and mistakes get winnowed out from the genetic pool. Yet, homosexuality is preserved at some biological cost. Nature is not sentimental nor ideological. There is always a practical reason. There must be an evolutionary advantage to having a small amount of homosexuality in a species, otherwise it would not be so persistently preserved.
And when scientists examined how species function, they soon realized what was going on. First, bigots make a mistake in thinking that genetic fitness is a per individual count only. That is wrong. Genetic fitness is important in the whole species. And that is not the same thing - individual fitness or fitness of a species. Think about for example an ant society. Depending on the species you have all kinds of organization, but for example, you can have a fertile female (queen) and fertile male, and infertile ants (vast numbers of them). Now think - THINK! Why would a species have males, females, and intentionally infertile members? Well, Virginia, because it confers upon them an evolutionary advantage. Not on the individual level - bigot thinking - but on the species level. An infertile ant has no genetic fitness because it does not reproduce. But the SPECIES overall is better off for having this division into male, female and infertile. There are all sorts of reasons. For one, there is specialization. You can have fighters, you can have carers, you can have workers. And it diminishes sexual competition, so energy is not dissipated fighting for a male or female - an infertile ant is focused 100% on its role (fighting or working or whatever). As a result, in a competition with an ant society that is only male + female, the society that is male + female + infertile - the latter wins. Which is why evolutionarily ant societies preserve the infertile ant population in every generation.
Same here. We are learning more and more about the animal kingdom and evolution, and biology. And human beings. We now know that there isn't only "male and female" but a SPECTRUM of sexual behavior and attraction. Homosexuality is preserved, because it is GOOD for the human species (and all the other species where it occurs). Gay people don't have to add to the sexual competition, they can lower tensions and can have other functions in society which strengthen the WHOLE society. Gay people are good for society. That is what we can see from evolution.
Google the "grandmother hypothesis" - scientists were puzzled why women outlive their sexual procreation period by so many decades - seems wasteful. What do you need a grandmother for, why not only a mother, once the woman is no longer fertile, why doesn't she die? Well, because evolutionary pressure preserved the species that kept the grandmother around since she was useful - she cared for grandkids freeing the parents to hunt and many other things. There was a reason. It made the society more fit. It was GOOD for society. So they were preserved. Just as gay people were - GOOD for society.
You see, when you free yourself from bigotry and hatred, and open your eyes and your mind to learning and thought, you soon realize that the world is a whole lot more complicated and wonderful than the narrow-minded conservative views of what "biology" supposedly is, or "evolution" supposedly is. Nothing is more apt than this quote from the Bard - something every conservative who has made the same idiotic biology based bigoted arguments against gay people should keep in mind:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio
Rather than cling to narrow and incorrect interpretations of sub-highschool level biology, bad arguments and simple prejudice, open your mind and THINK.
This is just a small example - there are hundreds of ways to demolish the other "arguments" you cite, but why not leave that as a (pretty easy!) exercise for you to get your logical thinking on?
Are you a performance artist, Tallest Skil? I just gave you the arguments - which you entirely ignored. Businessmen, political and religious leaders are on a spectrum of conservative to liberal. It is wrong and counter reality to claim that they can only be conservative. I gave examples. You ignored them. We're done.
Quote:
Oh, I’m talking about work on company time. And a lack of productivity is harm, even if the work that IS done is relevant.
The company has every right to direct what work you do on company time. They are paying for your labor.
What's "artificial" are deflated prices brought on by taxpayers subsidizing the company through social programs that benefit its underpaid workers. Beyond that, there are many goods that cost so much to manufacture that they are not commercially viable.
I'll provide a hypothetical example calculated to push your buttons: Suppose that I open a business that manufactures butt plugs for a primarily gay clientele. I pay my workers $8 per hour and, due to their low wages, they qualify for various government assistance programs including subsidized housing, food stamps, medical insurance subsidies, child care subsidies, and an Earned Income Tax Credit. You may argue that it's unfair to you, as a taxpayer, but I argue that the butt plug market in the gay community is very price-sensitive and that my sales would drop if I had to pay my employees a living wage.
I keep seeing (not just here) the discussion devolve to either raising wages (which raises prices, which forces wages to be raised) or firing people and keeping the same costs.
Two things:
1. A business that could afford to fire many workers, and still meet the demand for the good/service at the same price, would probably have long ago been driven out of business by more efficient competitors.
2. It's really much simpler than that: Cut the pay of the executives such that it's rise is equivalent to that of low-paid workers.
Cut the pay of the people on that red line to finance a living wage for those people on the dark blue line. Remember, that those are not the absolute pay rates -- they are the percent increases from groups that already started at drastically different salaries at the 1979 origin.
Quote:
But then you have an infinite cycle of ever-increasing prices. Yes, if you “keep step” the ratio of CoL isn’t changed, but is the Zimbabwe (Hungary 1946, Germany 1927, etc.) model really the best solution? Just add more zeroes to the bills?
My overarching conclusion is that the supply of currency has to be limited, preferably by physical or uncompromising legal means.
Don't mistake high inflation and hyperinflation for low inflation. Economists consider the latter to be normal and healthy while the two former are indicative of severe economic problems.
Most economists agree that biggest reason why the U.S. got out of the Great Depression was the break with the gold standard. Going off the gold standard gave the government new tools to steer the economy. If you're not tied to gold, you can adjust the amount of money in the economy if you need to. You can adjust interest rates.
For anyone interested, there have been numerous refutations of the anti-homosexuality propaganda that Tallest Skil re-published (without attribution to the discredited author, Paul Cameron): http://www.qrd.org/QRD/www/RRR/cameron.html
These are some quotes from Paul Cameron:
"Marital sex tends toward the boring end. Generally, it doesn't deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does. If you isolate sexuality as something solely for one's own personal amusement, if all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get, then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist."
— Interview with Rolling Stone, 1999
(Oh, yeah, Paul Cameron is totally not gay. LOL!)
"Most people who engage in homosexuality are of the lower strata; these are people who are waiters and busboys and bums and hobos and jailbirds and so forth."
— 1994 religious right conference panel discussion on homosexuality
"I think that actually AIDS is a guardian. That is I think it was sent, if you would, about forty years ago, to destroy Western civilization unless we change our sexual ways. So it's really a Godsend."
— quoted by Mark E. Pietrzyk, News-Telegraph, March 10, 1995.
Dr. Gregory Herek noted on his blog that:
Oh, I’m talking about work on company time. And a lack of productivity is harm, even if the work that IS done is relevant.
What if the prices are artificially inflated beyond what the market dictates?
I keep seeing (not just here) the discussion devolve to either raising wages (which raises prices, which forces wages to be raised) or firing people and keeping the same costs. It’s late and I probably just don’t have enough about the topic collected to know a conclusion, so I’ll just agree again that any solution must not involve state welfare.
What the market dictates isn't a rational way of looking at it. You determine if it's a viable business model according to what the market will bear while accounting for natural fluctuations. There's an inherent optimization problem there in determining how you can make as much money as possible. If it's below a certain threshold, it's just not a great business model.
I think you should also consider that being able to hire people for very little causes some weird side effects in areas with high real estate demand.
LOL. I was trying to tally up all my belief systems based upon the premise that atheism is one. It's quite staggering how many belief systems I have it seems
If the person saying that only stopped for one second to think, he or she might realize a belief system requires time and effort to be put into it. Where as I really don't expend much energy not believing in the tooth fairy or mythology.
That person might also realize that there has never been a collection of people that don't believe in mythology (aka religion) appointing a leader and setting him or her up in a luxurious palace and building millions of places where people brain washed not to believe in mythology come and give their hard earned money because they don't fear hell and damnation ... I could go on, it's hilarious.
Getting a clue yet?
Yes, the clue is that you have absolutely no comprehension whatsoever of sexual or asexual relationships and the organisms that comprise them. That would explain why you went off on a huge tirade about something that is wholly and completely irrelevant.
It is also the case in the animal kingdom - there is a steady small proportion of homosexual behavior
There is no homosexual behavior within the animal kingdom that is not used for the purpose of rape or to show social dominance. None. There are no homosexual ‘relationships’. There are no homosexual ‘pair bonds’. Because even animals understand that they will DIE OUT if there is not an element of normalcy.
if nature and evolution has taken such pains to preserve homosexuality in the species
No such pains have been taken.
Sources for that, by the way?
Nope. In terms of sexes, there is male, female, the scant few genetic aberrations that result in XXX, XXY, etc., and then where you believe that being XX makes you male or XY makes you female. In terms of attraction, there is heterosexuality and then where people pretend that the best thing to do is spread the ‘virtue’ of not reproducing.
Gonna need an actual rebuttal to what I’ve already presented that says otherwise, then.
What arguments?Good thing I didn’t claim that, then, huh? Phew!
Thank you, again, for confirming that you have absolutely no rebuttal, refutation, or disproof of anything that I have posted.
The company has every right to direct what work you do on company time. They are paying for your labor.
Right, and so if they deem the labor not worth the currency granted it, they’ll just fire you or retask you.
Removal of welfare can only come with an increase in purchasing power (and a change to social attitudes), not just forever increasing prices/pay.
You’re not even facing toward the console; how can you press my buttons?
If the market is so price sensitive that it cannot handle these things, then the market doesn’t really have much right to keep existing beyond the whims of those who would pay, does it? There’s not really a market for oil lamps anymore, for example.
But we’re seeing plenty of that occurring now. Fast food joints are replacing cashiers with terminals, because we’re to the point where people have begun asking why on Earth would there need to be a trained human to run a cash register and press the order buttons.
I still prefer fixing the root problem first. Nothing else can be a positive change until then.
I’ve never heard that. The break happened before the Great Depression and I’ve only heard that it caused it.
And look how well that has worked out¡ Now we’re at ~0% interest with nowhere to go but down. You can’t adjust the amount of money, only currency. And when you can–and do–print to oblivion, what good is that currency? What value does it have?
What the market dictates isn't a rational way of looking at it.
Apologies; I’ve thus far been using the overarching term to describe the collective of globalized behaviors and scenarios simply because we hadn’t needed to discuss anything more than the conceptual supply/demand cross. There’s no one mathematically perfect “market”, certainly not. “The market” is determined by everything down to local environmental factors and there’s very little long- or large-scale planning that can be used as more than a guideline (people tend not to view the world on a yearly scale, for example, so even if they know how wet their region gets across the year, you’ll still see an uptick in umbrella sales directly on rainy days, whenever they fall).
I think you should also consider that being able to hire people for very little causes some weird side effects in areas with high real estate demand.
Sure! Here’s a great example of that.
$350,000! Better pay up! Oh, the “kitchen needs some work” and “the bathroom is not functioning”. “I would not recommend anyone moving right in.”
Theoretically, though, shouldn’t the lack of buyers in the market pull the real estate prices down? I mean, how can a seller afford to sell a house that no one can buy? And how could buyers put up with prices they cannot possibly afford as though there’s no way... out... Wait a minute! Speaking of no way out, just take a 50 year mortgage with a variable interest rate on that little hovel! NOW you can “afford” it and the seller can keep his original price! Hooray! Prices don’t have to go down now! What could go wrong!
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
??Romans? ?1:22, 24-27? ?ESV??
http://bible.com/59/rom.1.22,24-27.esv
Not many ways you can reinterpret that. The Bible is clear.
And to those who state there are many interpretations: yes there are many passages that have differing interpretations. But the one that matters is the original intent of the author: Gods intent. This is why scripture needs to be interpreted by scripture, to help us understand what the author is saying. I've said this before, and I'm saying it again. It all boils down to what is the context. The only way to know if you have a correct interpretation of a passage is to compare it in its entirety to other passages to see if it aligns with the rest of scripture. To do otherwise could/will lead to an erroneous interpretation. Not all interpretations are equal. This is also why there are word studies of the original texts to help us understand the meaning of a word in the given context. This is called hermeneutics.
Science can no more disprove the Bible as it can prove the Big Bang. Can you repeat the Big Bang for me? Thanks, that would be great.
You quote a book written by people who had an agenda how long ago? Yet you hang on every word. Do you realize how many religions there are and have been on earth since man learned to con his fellow man. Had you been born under the influence of anyone of them you'd believe every word they spouted. You'd be quoting what the oracle at Delphi told you with total conviction or swearing that Mount Olympus was where all the Gods hung out. Religions thrive because of the gullible.
“Claiming to be wise, they became fools,”
??Romans? ?1:22? ?ESV??
http://bible.com/59/rom.1.22.esv
“So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,
for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.””
??Acts? ?17:22-26, 28-31? ?ESV??
http://bible.com/59/act.17.22-26,28-31.esv
If your workforce is fully employed, firing employees means shrinking the business. I bet that most businesses would learn to live on lower profit margins. Or they would would reduce executive compensation in order to keep the business from shrinking.
People don't need more purchasing power from each dollar. They need more income. They need more of the GDP to go to the middle class and less to go to the extremely wealthy -- to return to the same balance we had decades ago when the middle class was thriving. Why do you keep arguing against this? There has been a massive, huge shift of the GDP from the working class to the wealthy over the last few decades and you just refuse to acknowledge that it is a problem.
Markets don't have "rights." They expand or contract based on price and demand. No, there's not really a market for oil lamps, and if you want to run a company producing them, don't expect the taxpayers to subsidize your underpaid labor force so that you can price your lamps so low as to keep producing them.
So the fast food industry lays off another bunch of American workers. They go on unemployment at taxpayer expense. That increases the labor pool. That drives down wages (supply of labor exceeding demand). And McDonald's CEO, CFO, COO, Board of Director, and stockholders all get bigger checks. Thanks for explaining the mechanism by which income inequality has become disastrous.
By the way, I almost never use a self-serve line at a store because I want to keep cashiers employed. I'd rather pay a bit for my loaf of bread than have a cashier in a bread line.
The root problem is income inequality. The portion of the GDP going to 80% of Americans has dropped dramatically while the portion going to the wealthiest 20% has skyrocketed. CEOs now, even after adjusting for inflation, make orders of magnitude more than they did 40 years ago while middle class wages during that same time have remained stagnant, again adjusted for inflation (meaning that inflation has no bearing on this).
The only way that you increase the purchasing power of the dollar is to lower prices for goods and services. That's the definition of increasing purchasing power -- more goods and services for the same amount of money. So how do you propose that we force companies to lower their prices without reducing how much they pay their employees? Do you want the government to step in and impose price controls? And how will we force the overseas firms supplying components, manufactured goods, and services to American companies to also reduce their prices by the same amount?
FDR effectively took us off of the gold standard in 1933 (after the Great Depression was in full swing). See:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-03-21/how-franklin-roosevelt-secretly-ended-the-gold-standard
As to the effects, see: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/04/27/135604828/why-we-left-the-gold-standard
Quote:
It's worked out very well. We've seen our stock markets more than double in fewer than 7 years while our inflation has remained very low (under 5% annually).
You have some mistaken beliefs about how the value of our currency is set and I recommend that you read this article on the Motley Fool investing web site:
http://wiki.fool.com/Who_Determines_the_Value_of_US_Currency?
“Claiming to be wise, they became fools,”
??Romans? ?1:22? ?ESV??
http://bible.com/59/rom.1.22.esv
“So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,
for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.””
??Acts? ?17:22-26, 28-31? ?ESV??
http://bible.com/59/act.17.22-26,28-31.esv
"It is not possible either to trick or escape the mind of Zeus."
Science can no more disprove the Bible as it can prove the Big Bang.
There's no such thing as a 'burden of disproof.' As the person positively asserting the existence of a God, the burden of proof is on you. Man has invented over 2,800 deities throughout recorded history -- and not provided proof, or even compelling evidence, for the existence of any of them. In contrast to your evidence-free belief in God, there is strong scientific data, evidence if you will, to support the Big Bang theory.
Yes, the clue is that you have absolutely no comprehension whatsoever of sexual or asexual relationships and the organisms that comprise them. That would explain why you went off on a huge tirade about something that is wholly and completely irrelevant.
There is no homosexual behavior within the animal kingdom that is not used for the purpose of rape or to show social dominance. None. There are no homosexual ‘relationships’. There are no homosexual ‘pair bonds’. Because even animals understand that they will DIE OUT if there is not an element of normalcy.
No such pains have been taken.
Sources for that, by the way?
Nope. In terms of sexes, there is male, female, the scant few genetic aberrations that result in XXX, XXY, etc., and then where you believe that being XX makes you male or XY makes you female. In terms of attraction, there is heterosexuality and then where people pretend that the best thing to do is spread the ‘virtue’ of not reproducing.
Gonna need an actual rebuttal to what I’ve already presented that says otherwise, then.
"Yes, the clue is that you have absolutely no comprehension whatsoever of sexual or asexual relationships and the organisms that comprise them. That would explain why you went off on a huge tirade about something that is wholly and completely irrelevant."
It is you who has no clue. I gave an exact analogy that exposed the fallacy of your argument. Your response is to claim that I don't understand, while not actually providing an argument. That is not effective.
"There is no homosexual behavior within the animal kingdom that is not used for the purpose of rape or to show social dominance. None. There are no homosexual ‘relationships’. There are no homosexual ‘pair bonds’. Because even animals understand that they will DIE OUT if there is not an element of normalcy."
Factually incorrect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals?
"Homosexual behavior in animals is sexual behavior among non-human species that is interpreted as homosexual or bisexual. This may include sexual activity, courtship, affection, pair bonding, and parenting among same-sex animal pairs. Research indicates that various forms of this are found throughout the animal kingdom.[1][2] As of 1999, about 500 species, ranging from primates to gut worms, have been documented engaging in same-sex behaviors.[3][4] According to the organizers of the 2006 Against Nature? exhibit, it has been observed in 1,500 species.[5]"
"No such pains have been taken."
They have, which is why it keeps occurring in every generation in the species which exhibit it.
"Nope. In terms of sexes, there is male, female, the scant few genetic aberrations that result in XXX, XXY, etc., and then where you believe that being XX makes you male or XY makes you female. In terms of attraction, there is heterosexuality and then where people pretend that the best thing to do is spread the ‘virtue’ of not reproducing."
Yep. There is a spectrum:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sexuality_spectrum
"Gonna need an actual rebuttal to what I’ve already presented that says otherwise, then."
I'll refer you to the the extensive argumentation that demolished all such claims in the following cases:
Lawrence vs Texas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas?
Hollingsworth vs Perry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollingsworth_v._Perry
Obergefell vs Hodges
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obergefell_v._Hodges
Please refer to court transcripts wherein the case for and against harm were made. The court found the vast preponderance of evidence conclusively argued against any purported harms. And the courts ruled accordingly.
I bet that most businesses would learn to live on lower profit margins.
What about the ones that can’t? Isn’t the business that was the start of this whole argument an example of that?
People don't need more purchasing power from each dollar. They need more income.
Well, that’s nonsense. Getting more purchasing power would negate the need for more income. One or the other works, but only one stops the cycle.
I’ve not made any statement about it, either way. I’ve just ignored it because it’s secondary to fixing the base problem.
Markets don't have "rights."
Exactly, hence my distaste with the phrase “too big to fail” as well as subsidies in general.
Sometimes a business’ plan contracts out of existence.
Which forces prices down, which would mean there aren’t bigger checks to give the executives. Or would mean that, without the welfare, which should be ended.
If people aren’t working, they don’t have currency. If they don’t have currency, they can’t buy things at their previous prices. Thus the prices have to come down for them to be sold.
The root problem is income inequality.
Nope, that’s a consequence of the system itself, not the cause.
The portion of the GDP going to 80% of Americans has dropped dramatically while the portion going to the wealthiest 20% has skyrocketed.
Interestingly enough, and without statement to its validity in this situation, you find that ratio in a lot of places. Just an aside.
The only way that you increase the purchasing power of the dollar is to lower prices for goods and services.
Or reduce the size of the currency pool.
We’ve seen our stock markets more than double in fewer than 7 years...
Which gets me antsy, since there are cycles to worry about.
You have some mistaken beliefs about how the value of our currency is set and I recommend that you read this article on the Motley Fool investing web site: http://wiki.fool.com/Who_Determines_the_Value_of_US_Currency?
Honestly, I’d much prefer a currency that has its value set against a tangible physical object than one backed by faith. Because when there is no faith in that currency, it doesn’t matter how large or successful its economy is. Look at Zimbabwe. Printing in perpetuity (in response to implementing the IMF’s racist economic policies) to try to solve the problem of a collapse of valuation... And some think that QE 4 is around the corner.