Is Harry Reid Now Moving Toward Official Church Discipline?

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_moksha
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Re: Is Harry Reid Now Moving Toward Official Church Discipli

Post by _moksha »

That is because you only want ecclesiastical discipline for Reid's alleged lies (which you still have not proven), but not for Romney misrepresenting what his political opponents have said.


If spreading rumors was a truly actionable offense in Church, many Priesthood and Relief Society members would need to be disciplined - on a regular basis.
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_Darth J
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Re: Is Harry Reid Now Moving Toward Official Church Discipli

Post by _Darth J »

Equality wrote:
Kevin Graham wrote:Obviously labor existed before wealth. Joey doesn't seem to understand this.

This. One would think that someone as enamored with free-market capitalism as joey claims to be would be at least rudimentally familiar with the writings of John Locke.


You have to have capital before you can invest capital. Was there not someone along the line who had to do some work to create the capital that is being invested?
_Darth J
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Re: Is Harry Reid Now Moving Toward Official Church Discipli

Post by _Darth J »

Equality wrote:Here I thought you were going to say "I will concede that you know whereof you speak regarding falling down drunk." Kudos on taking the high road, Darth.


As Droopy has frequently asserted that I am on drugs, apparently that high road is a one-way street.
_Darth J
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Re: Is Harry Reid Now Moving Toward Official Church Discipli

Post by _Darth J »

By the way:

Droopy wrote: Again, this logical shell game may work in the courtroom to line tort attorney's pockets and legislate through litigation


The OP suggesting that Harry Reid should sue Mitt Romney for defamation was written by:

(a) Droopy
(b) Someone other than Droopy

By a show of hands, who thinks that Droopy understands what a tort is?
_Droopy
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Re: Is Harry Reid Now Moving Toward Official Church Discipli

Post by _Droopy »

Sure. Let's say I'm trapped on a deserted island with nothing but the clothes I'm wearing. I have no capital. Through my own physical labor I build several shelters using the raw resources found on the island. I then craft tools to use for fishing and trapping. All of these things consitute wealth in every sense of the word and through time I begin to accumulate said wealth.

Now it is your turn.

Explain how capital can exist without labor.


On a desert island, there is no need whatsoever for a medium of exchange, and no economic need or possibilities above hunter/gatherer levels of development.

A modern economy, or economy of any complexity approaching a modern Western economy, is grounded upon production, or, in other words work. It is labor, production, creativity, and "human action" that takes raw materials and changes them into a wide variety of products for human use, consumption, and felicity. Only the existence of money - and money prices - which are the only information transmitting medium or means that can intelligently determine the value, and hence the allocation of resources used in creating, of various goods and services, is capable of supporting a large, complex, and prosperous economic order.

"Capital" isn't just money. Iron ore is capital. Trees are capital. Raw copper is capital. Fish swimming in the ocean are capital. To Crusoe, or at a very primitive barter level of economic develoopment, raw items can be traded directly. They are captial and the are, in essense, also money. To make a raw material useful in a much more complex economic context, and to actually raise common living standards into actual "affluence," someone (an entrepreneur) has to imagine and think, and devise a use for such a raw material. Then people have to go dig it up, process it, and turn it into a good that others want to trade some of their own property for (the medium of exchange known as money).

This requires savings, or amassed, accumulated capital. An entrepreneur then has to create a business, hire workers, administrative staff, managers etc. and deploy this productive capacity in an intelligent and rational manner. This is production, and there is no wealth creation without it. Neither is there consumer consumption without their first having been productive economic activity taking place in which goods and service were created and presented to consume.

Consumer demand does not drive the economy. This is the core fallacy of Keynesian, statist economics. Very true, production cannot exist without consumption, but without production, there is no consuming whatsoever. There is, after all, nothing to consume that has not first been produced, and no money to purchase what has been produced that has not been first generated by other productive activity that allows consumption of the products of other productive activities. Consumption does not drive the economy; it supports, or is an integral aspect of all economic activity, but it is not the foundation that makes an economy possible. That is action, activity, work, labor, production, and effort to improve material conditions for the purpose of consumption. Consumption and, at a deeper level, to materially improve material conditions and increase human enjoyment, felicity, and economic security, is the reason for production; is the reason why human beings work, strive, save, invest, and invent. Consumption is what they do once work has been done and goods/services have become available - through productive economic activity - to consume.

Further, consumption, in and of itself, does not create wealth. Consumption is an aspect of a much larger web of interconnected, interrelated, and spontaneously generated and coordinated production, in which consumers are producers and producers are consumers in a vast matrix of productive activities in which consumption is only the end result of a fantastically complex, systemic effort to improve human's lives and temporal condition. Man's fundamental problem is not the production of consumption, but the production of wealth (which is the source of all consumption, including its most important side-effect, the accumulation of private capital as savings and the investing of that capital in further economic activities, or expansions of already existing activities).

Consumption is limited by the ability and incentives to produce, not the other way around. Consumption only exists because production exists. Anyone who consumes, say x, must first earn the money necessary to purchase the goods and services he desires by himself engaging in other productive activities, thereby generating for himself the means to consume at all. Others (y, z,) produce in other sectors of the economy so that they may consume that which x produces. They also consume what a, b, and c, produce (some of which are materials used to produce what x helps produce at various stages of production). D produces so that he may consume that which is produced by x, z and b, and so on, throughout a vastly complex and mostly unforeseen and unintended economic web of cooperation and competition.

Capital can be either the medium of exchange, or capital goods, including raw materials. There's plenty of capital (fish, crabs etc.) in the sea, but for Crusoe, they are useless until he works and strives to attain them. The fish on the stick over the fire is now capital; it is capital being, or about to be, consumed. Other fish will be put in a small alcove of sea water that Crusoe has separated from the main ocean by a wooden fence he has constructed out of tree branches and vines; raw materials, and useless, until he applied his thinking mind, imagination, and labor to fashion into more capital.

Crusoe can sit on the beach and demand, demand, demand, demand, and demand some more, until he starves to death, but until we produces - works- and creates capital out of the raw materials he has at his disposal, he has no economy, and nothing to consume.
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_huckelberry
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Re: Is Harry Reid Now Moving Toward Official Church Discipli

Post by _huckelberry »

Droopy, i am glad you agree with Kevin on this labor and capitol thing. What ever other differences in understanding pop up, it can be remembered that at least this basic area of agreement does exist.
_Droopy
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Re: Is Harry Reid Now Moving Toward Official Church Discipli

Post by _Droopy »

Yes they are all necessary at this point, but it should be obvious which came first. Obviously labor existed before wealth.


Exactly. You are now an official Austrian/Chicago School free market thinker. Production is the golden egg from which all the consuming chickens come and who are then able to create more eggs through ever greater, wider, more diverse, and more efficient production.

What makes business owners so special? They need labor just as much as laborers need employment.


Business management and entrepreneurial skills are rare. Most people would be unemployed without them and the capital accumulation that allows the creation of job opportunity. There would be very little of what we call "affluence" in the broad, overwhelming sense they are enjoyed by Americans and other western societies without them.

Playing "capitalists" off against "workers" as if their was a great moral drama in play in the free interactions between them is just the same old Marxist class war clap-trap that dug so many graves and smashed so many economies in the last century

The difference being is that Joey and his brand of Capitalists love to take on this elitist role, pretending the whole world owes them a tremendous gratitude for "giving" people jobs. He approaches this with a really screwed up perspective and it is the kind of thing that turns so many people off from wealthy folks.


Just more gangrenes class war boilerplate. Yes, entrepreneurs provide other people jobs, and opportunities to live, rise economically, live well, send their kinds to college, and develop themselves personally. Employees become participants in the economic processes of society, and improve their own lives, the lives of others, and their employer by participating in that process.

To say that the employer needs the employee just as much as the employee needs the employer is to miss the point. The employee receives in wages/salary fundamentally what he contributes to the productive process (which is why wages rise as productivity rises). An engineer does not work for the benefit of his employer but for himself, his wife, and his children. In the process, he makes himself as valuable to his employer as he possibly can, and seeks to ad as much value to the produce sold by the company as possible. He needs the employer (some employer) to achieve his aims. The employer needs him to achieve his aims (make a profit for the stockholders and/or for himself, whether he be the main owner or only a CEO). Each has a different but integral part to play in any productive process. Playing each off against the other in a great starry-eyed moral drama is the game of ideologues and Platonic intellectuals seeking power and domination of those processes and the human beings that engage in them.

In a free, market driven, uncoerced economic environment, employer and employee reach mutually agreeable terms in an atmosphere of numerous competitive options and choices. Wages, salaries, and the income of the business and its owners, are utterly determined (when not influenced by rent seeking behavior and monopoly status granted and encourage by the state) by the market - those they serve by producing the goods and services that are hoped will be desired by the public.

by the way, I'm a former business owner and come to think of it, a near future business owner. Most people who know me consider me quite wealthy, in case you get any ideas of accusing me of "wealth envy."


The lion's share of the most egregious sycophants, useful idiots, fellow travelers, and dupes of totalitarian collectivism in the 20th century have come from the ranks of "the rich," and they are not envious so much as gripped by a sanctimonious, pathological guilt as well as sense of messianic moral rectitude (most deeply developed among the academic intelligentsia) to which no human sacrifice has yet proved too great.

Class envy, however, is the psychological and ideological meat of their appeals to the hoi polloi.
Last edited by Guest on Thu Aug 09, 2012 2:08 am, edited 3 times in total.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
_Droopy
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Re: Is Harry Reid Now Moving Toward Official Church Discipli

Post by _Droopy »

huckelberry wrote:Droopy, i am glad you agree with Kevin on this labor and capitol thing. What ever other differences in understanding pop up, it can be remembered that at least this basic area of agreement does exist.



I think you've misread Kevin, or else Kevin is all over the map tonight. Kevin believes that consumer demand drives the economy, and that low demand is why the economy is failing to recover. He also believes that fiat money creation (or confiscated taxes) pumped into the economy as "stimulus" can create general economic growth.

I'm a free-market thinker and claim that production drives the economy, not consumption. The reason the economy isn't recovering is because private investment is very poor, not consumption, and private investment is very poor for one and one reason only.

Government policy.

Kevin has misunderstood the concept of "capital," apparently believing that this term implies simply "money."
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
_EAllusion
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Re: Is Harry Reid Now Moving Toward Official Church Discipli

Post by _EAllusion »

You are now an official Austrian/Chicago School free market thinker


Wtf? Those are completely different macroeconomic schools of thought. They're diametrically opposed on one of their most key arenas in a way that is relevant to what you are talking about. It's like all you care about is that they are both associated with conservatism.
_Droopy
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Re: Is Harry Reid Now Moving Toward Official Church Discipli

Post by _Droopy »

Any and all conversation between us is now over.

Here's the stable, here's the shovel. You know what to do, as you've dedicated your very life to it thus far.




[quote="Darth J" blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.......blahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...][/quote]
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
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