What if There Were No Poor Among Us?

[_subgenius]

You cannot shift more resources to fewer people without leaving the majority with less, Droopy. That's basic math.

not an accurate characterization.
If the majority were the middle class, and only a minority was poor and another minority was wealthy one could, via basic math, shift resources from the minority wealthy to the minority poor which may effectively bring the poor "up" to middle class and the wealthy "down" to middle class.
For example
P has 0 and M has 2 and W has 4
Take 2 from W and give to P
now P has 2, M has 2, and W has 2
Only a minority (1 of the 3) was left with "less".
now that is....basic......math

[_Buffalo]

You cannot shift more resources to fewer people without leaving the majority with less, Droopy. That's basic math.

not an accurate characterization.
If the majority were the middle class, and only a minority was poor and another minority was wealthy one could, via basic math, shift resources from the minority wealthy to the minority poor which may effectively bring the poor "up" to middle class and the wealthy "down" to middle class.
For example
P has 0 and M has 2 and W has 4
Take 2 from W and give to P
now P has 2, M has 2, and W has 2
Only a minority (1 of the 3) was left with "less".
now that is....basic......math

What exactly do you suppose you're arguing against here?

[_Analytics]

If it were possible to abolish poverty from the human condition utilizing either a free market capitalist economic order, or a socialist economic order, which would be preferred, assuming, for all intents and purposes, the same outcome?

If poverty qua poverty could be abolished in either system, which would be preferrible? The question was not how well you or anybody else could do under either system, but that system's relation to the abolition of poverty.

...I won't go into Marx' theoretical nonsense about the workers right to all the wealth they have created (the labor theory of value) as it isn't endemic to the point at hand, which is if either system could abolish poverty from the human condition, which means, the socialist or the free market democratic capitalist, would be preferable. If poverty could be eliminated in either system, which would be preferable, to eliminate it through redistribution of wealth and total equality of income (David Bokovoy's formulation, just for the sake of the argument), or economic growth and the productive labor and economic self sufficiency of the poor through their own productive contribution to society?

I still honestly don't understand the question.

Just to clarify what we are talking about, Let's say that "elimination of poverty" is defined in America as every houselhold taking in at least, say, $12,000 a year.

So what are we talking about? The Droopy system where everybody works and everybody earns at least $12,000 a year, vs. the Bokovy system where everybody gets a check for $12,000 regardless of how much they do or don't work?

If that's the case, it's clear the Droopy system is a huge Pareto improvement over the Bokovy system.

I state it this way because a part of the assumption here is that either system has a number of other effects upon society and the form that society will take, overall, and this mus be relevant to the question. In other words my question becomes, if we can eliminate poverty in either way, what price are we willing to pay for that elimination? What are the secondary effects of eliminating it in one way or the other way, and would it be worth that price?

I agree that either system has a number of effects upon society. But does either system actually eliminate poverty in the first place?

[_3sheets2thewind]

ahhhh Droopy you like many others who blinding and dogmatic deny the communistic/socialist aspects of the Gospel, must and allows deny that the freemarket is motivated by greed pure and simple, "get me and mine more than everyone else" is the capitalistic mantra.

Capitialism has failed, and has failed many many times. Capitalism fails because of greed i.e. some wanted more than others and thus there was a bust somewhere.

Your proposition can not work, has not worked and will not work, because capitalism being the lesser of the 3 evils (capitalism, socialism, communism) is still evil at its core.

[_ludwigm]

Damn... I am associating again!

People spend stupid amounts of money at nightclubs all the time — see a $135,060 receipt, a $156,679 receipt, and a $189,375 receipt — but some hedge funders managed to spend £71,000 ($111,000 USD) at London's The Rose Club between just nine of them. That's over $12,000 per person. Hey, it was their company Christmas party, okay?

How does one even go about doing that? Well, you buy £7,200 worth of Dom Perignon (that's six magnums), and seven bottles of something called Mahiki Coconut that cost £160 each. There was a £7,956 service charge, and they tipped an extra £10,000 on top of that. Also, they ordered 24 bottles of what the Daily Mail calls "Prince Harry's favourite drink," Ciroc Ultra Premium vodka. What is Ciroc Ultra Premium vodka? Glad you asked.

Ciroc Ultra Premium vodka comes in six liter bottles that, at the Rose Club, cost £1,850. It is also served from a device called Le Halo, which is described as "a futuristic pouring unit." Here's hoping they shared; 24 six liter bottles of vodka goes a long way between nine people.

Anyway, the £71,000 bill is in addition to the money the hedge-funder just threw on the ground: "At one point he threw £50 notes in the air like confetti and watched as 'pretty girls' scrambled on the floor to pick up as many as they could." Real charmers, these guys.

Free market capitalism, eh...



[Photo: Rose Club]
information
The Rose Club, 23 Orchard Street, W1H 6HL
Tues-Sun, 10pm-3am
The Lucky Pig, 5 Clipstone Street, W1W 6BB
Mon-Sat, 3pm-late

[_Bond James Bond]

juxtaposes himself with "the kind of mind that reposes in utopian dreaming and romantic, idealistic academic theorizing."

Indeed and isn't anyone who believes in some rift on the Christian "Heaven" a utopian dreamer at heart?

[_Bond James Bond]

Let me see if I'm getting this straight, before 1964-1970 and beyond, there was no middle class in America, and the American population was characterized by a gigantic mass of poor and dispossessed toiling serfs, living in Third World conditions, ruled by a tiny oligarchy of rich industrialists in stove pipe hats and black suits with tails, chomping on expensive cigars and throwing pennies from their limousines to the ragged children of the empoverished, toiling masses as they drive to work each morning, and it was then the Great Society welfare programs that were the engine and source of economic growth and prosperity only beginning in the mid-1960s.

Someone probably misspoke, obviously they meant the creation of the modern middle class post WWII.

Government, and government welfare spending then, is the source and engine of economic growth?

You can't help but wonder how much those billions of (1960s) dollars would have helped if they'd actually gone to the Great Society rather than to Vietnam. Much the same way we wonder today how different America's economic situation would look if we'd not fought conventional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and just sent surgical strike teams in ten years ago after OBL.

[Guest]

-

[_Bond James Bond]

Droopy doesn't look like one of the 99% ....

Droopy is that typical 99%er who thinks he'll one day be named in the Last Will and Testament of a Walton, complete with the "25% Off Sam's Club Lifetime Membership" card as long as he consistently votes against his own economic self interest.

[_Droopy]

"Buffalo"

You cannot shift more resources to fewer people without leaving the majority with less, Droopy. That's basic math.[/quote]

I have no idea what you're talking about here.

Perhaps this will help:

Trying to educate you as to why the cake and slices analogy of a free market economy is a strawman and a red herring is probably futile, but suffice it to say that in an economy such as that in the U.S., at least considering all of its attributes that represent the unhampered market working basically without distortions and destructive mutations introduced through various forms of state interventionism, wealth is not "shifted" from the poor to the rich. The rich invest in productive economic activities and create jobs. Employees participate in the production of wealth and are remunerated according to their contribution to the productive process. The poor, the middle classes, and everybody participates in the creation of wealth. In that process, a fraction of that wealth moves to "the rich" as their fellow citizens trade a portion of their property for the goods/services "the rich" are key in producing through their own risk, savings, and investment.

For those who just will not "get it," here, this translates roughly into "Let's go shopping."

In point of fact, "the rich" generate wealth and wealth creation opportunities for "the poor" by creating jobs, opportunity, encouraging general economic growth across the entire society, and improve everybody's lot over time through a general rise in living standards and technological improvement that are the inherent concomitants of a free, dynamic, growth oriented economic order. If anything, the wealthy "shift" a vast amount of wealth, through entrepreneurial investment, to all the socioeconomic strata below them while those below them reap the benefits of jobs, careers, economic independence, and upward mobility into the realms of "the rich," if they have the talent, aptitude, and desire to do so.

In a nutshell, in a free maket society, there is no set, static pile of money out there (cake) that has a limited number of "shares" that must be devided up between the entire population. Nor is there a class of "rich" People who somehow got a hold of more than there share and shifted it to themselves at the expense of the rest. This evil, destructive nonsense has done, in my estimation, far more than its share of human damage already, and why it still lingers like a twitching intellectual corpse in the morgue of failed human ideologies strains credulity to its limits.

All socialism really is is a flight from an economically free, contract based society back to a feudal, status based society in which whether one gets ahead economically is not grounded in what one has to contribute to the productive processes of society, but in what politically designated "class" one permanently resides and who one knows (how well one can ingratiate himself to and massage the powers that be within the omnipresent, omniscient state).