Liberalism is a mental disorder

[_MeDotOrg]

Abraham Lincoln instituted progessive income tax.

Shows how much YOU KNOW.....

1. Your "progressive" tax wasn't "progressive" in your meaning of the word.

Let's just start with this: What could my meaning be when describing this tax as 'progressive'?

Doesn't matter.... The FACTS of the issue clearly state that it was meant to be a "temporary" measure to FUND THE WAR...!!!

Don't know about you, but in a time a CRISIS, no matter the kind, everyone tightens their belts and try to help out, and are asked to help out.

Deal with that fact, before we move on to the more intricate details.
In other words, stop misrepresenting the facts AND Lincoln first, and then maybe we can have more productive communication.

You can't call Lincoln "liberal" with that one time action, likewise you can't call Bush liberal because his one time initial bank help. Temporary assistance is far different from Government Welfare of businesses and otherwise. Obama's only slowed down because of two reasons, people don't want to give the government money as much, and because of the election, he doesn't want more fodder against him. But still, the time he did engage, good heavens!!!

ldsfaqs, when speaking of income taxes, the word progressive simply means that the rate of taxation goes up as your income goes up. It has nothing to do with 'liberal' or 'progressive' in the political sense of the word. Conversely, a regressive tax is a tax imposed in such a manner that the tax rate decreases as the amount subject to taxation increases.

From the description of Lincoln's tax at Politico:

In keeping with current levies, Congress based the tax on the principle of a graduated, or progressive, payments schedule. It imposed withholding at the source. Individuals earning between $800 and $10,000 a year paid taxes at the rate of 3 percent. The comparable minimum taxable income in 2009, after adjustments for inflation, would be about $19,000. Those with incomes of more than $10,000 paid taxes at a higher rate. Additional sales and excise taxes also made their debuts, as well as estate taxes.

Calling Lincoln's income tax 'progressive' had nothing to do with politics. It had to do with economics.
It was not 'misrepresenting the facts'. It was not a value judgement in a political sense. It was an objective evaluation in an economic sense.

Consider that when you say:

Me, I studied..... to know the actual truth. You, you regurgitate the propaganda..... and don't think and study for yourself.

I agree we can have a 'more productive communication' - but when you attack something I've said because you don't understand what 'progressive' means in a description of a tax, you make it very difficult.

Going back to the original subject of this post, it was that 'liberalism is a mental disorder':

"Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."

I've worked my whole life. There was a time I was unemployed where I could have collected unemployment but didn't because I received a severance package. To say that everyone who is a liberal does so because they want to mooch off the government is just not reality.

My political opinions are my own. They were not given to me. They are very different from most people in my family. As I said in another post, all of us tend to filter out historical facts that don’t fit our narrative. Cable news and the internet have made it easier and easier to only hear those facts which amplify the points we wish to make in our narrative. Heaven forbid this country should be made up of people with good intentions on both sides of the aisle! That would make being right all the time so much harder!

The idea you put forward that "...most of both parties still had traditional American values" is to put forth a believe in a homogeneous America that may exist in some narratives, but never existed in reality. There was strife. There was conflict. There were anarchists, socialists, communists, progressives, laissez-faire capitalists and union-smashing Pinkertons. Do you think we have the 40 hour work week, vacation days, and employer-offered health insurance because Big Business just decided magnanimously to give them?

Behind democracy, what principle do we have? It is that sovereignty resides with the people. That there is virtue in our collective wisdom. Think about it: we are 300 million people trying to find a way to work together. YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO GET EVERYTHING YOU WANT. Utopias, whether religious, Marxist or Objectivist will never work because people have different ideals.

For our Government to become effective again, people have to come to the table understanding that half the people disagree with them, and that compromise is the only way our Democracy will move forward.

A strong middle class is the glue that holds a democracy together. It holds the center together. When political opinions become so divergent that compromise is impossible, democracy stops functioning. (That, to me, is the parallel between Modern America and pre-Nazi Germany. The destruction of the middle class and the loss of a political 'center'.) If you want that to happen, just keep on believing that the widening gap between the rich on one side and the poor and middle class on the other, is not a concern for our democracy. It is NOT, as Romney says, something to be discussed 'in quiet rooms'. It is central to a functioning democracy.

In the 1960s (despite Romney's rose-tinted reminiscences of his youth) we had the civil rights movement, race riots, lynchings, church bombings, and a huge divide over the war in Vietnam.

And yet despite all of that, at a time when unions were strong, when labor was strong, and helped in no small part by the strongest middle class in our history, our government continued to function, much more effectively than it does today. There may have been riots in the streets, but in Congress people were flexible. Congress passed Medicare, despite the protestations of Goldwater and Reagan that we would descend into a socialist hell. Nixon didn't try to stop it or destroy it. He moved on. Now Medicare, that great harbinger of socialism, is considered, sacrosanct by Paul Ryan (or so he says).

Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising, but out whole system of Government is built on compromise. A binary, zero-sum game worldview is not productive in that context. And the idea of liberalism as a mental disease is just one ideologue making civil dialog more difficult.

[_beastie]

Lee,

Did you ever receive government aid?

I'm pretty sure this was discussed on Z, which is why I feel ok with asking it flat-out.

[_beastie]

The idea you put forward that "...most of both parties still had traditional American values" is to put forth a believe in a homogeneous America that may exist in some narratives, but never existed in reality. There was strife. There was conflict. There were anarchists, socialists, communists, progressives, laissez-faire capitalists and union-smashing Pinkertons. Do you think we have the 40 hour work week, vacation days, and employer-offered health insurance because Big Business just decided magnanimously to give them?

Behind democracy, what principle do we have? It is that sovereignty resides with the people. That there is virtue in our collective wisdom. Think about it: we are 300 million people trying to find a way to work together. YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO GET EVERYTHING YOU WANT. Utopias, whether religious, Marxist or Objectivist will never work because people have different ideals.

For our Government to become effective again, people have to come to the table understanding that half the people disagree with them, and that compromise is the only way our Democracy will move forward.

A strong middle class is the glue that holds a democracy together. It holds the center together. When political opinions become so divergent that compromise is impossible, democracy stops functioning. (That, to me, is the parallel between Modern America and pre-Nazi Germany. The destruction of the middle class and the loss of a political 'center'.) If you want that to happen, just keep on believing that the widening gap between the rich on one side and the poor and middle class on the other, is not a concern for our democracy. It is NOT, as Romney says, something to be discussed 'in quiet rooms'. It is central to a functioning democracy.

In the 1960s (despite Romney's rose-tinted reminiscences of his youth) we had the civil rights movement, race riots, lynchings, church bombings, and a huge divide over the war in Vietnam.

And yet despite all of that, at a time when unions were strong, when labor was strong, and helped in no small part by the strongest middle class in our history, our government continued to function, much more effectively than it does today. There may have been riots in the streets, but in Congress people were flexible. Congress passed Medicare, despite the protestations of Goldwater and Reagan that we would descend into a socialist hell. Nixon didn't try to stop it or destroy it. He moved on. Now Medicare, that great harbinger of socialism, is considered, sacrosanct by Paul Ryan (or so he says).

Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising, but out whole system of Government is built on compromise. A binary, zero-sum game worldview is not productive in that context. And the idea of liberalism as a mental disease is just one ideologue making civil dialog more difficult.

Amen, medot. Amen.

It drives me crazy when republicans act like unions are the enemy. I agree that any organization can become corrupt, but that can be monitored and controlled. Aside from the need for a watchful eye, where do these people think that their work protections came from????

[_Droopy]

It drives me crazy when republicans act like unions are the enemy. I agree that any organization can become corrupt, but that can be monitored and controlled. Aside from the need for a watchful eye, where do these people think that their work protections came from????

From their fellow citizens (the free market), civil society, and the fundamental civility and humanity of the American people as expressed through popular opinion and deliberative, democratic legislatures. Private sector unions, since the 30s, have destroyed trillions of dollars of wealth that would have been created throughout the economy by limiting entry into key trades (the core purpose of all unions as well as the medieval guilds), destroying smaller, non-union shops that could not compete in various trades with the protected, monopolized wage labor rates guaranteed to union members by the force of law, pricing their own industries out of national and global markets, and creating massive inefficiencies in production and (sometimes violently) resisting technological innovation within the industries they dominate.

Unions have also been associated, to some degree since their inception, but to a substantial degree since the 30s, with violence (essentially legal and substantially immune to accountability through the Wagner Act), mobocracy, pervasive corruption, organized crime, rapacious entitlement mentalities among their members that are deaf to the consequences of their lust to add ever more gravy to the monopoly wage labor train; the corruption and debasement of deliberative democratic political institutions, and the imposition of vast, artificial inflationary pressures upon the rest of the economy and private citizenry through gross inefficiencies in work structure, resistance to technological innovation, and wage rates that only partly reflect the actual value of union member's work in a free market, the rest representing the political power and coercive intimidation of the union.

Public sector unions are another story entirely, and should never, under any circumstances, have been allowed to exist. They are incompatible with a free, limited government based, deliberative democratic society, and represent the grossest conflict of interest between one class of citizens and the rest of the society imaginable.

[_EAllusion]

Unions are part of the free market Droopy. Suppressing them is the the anti-free market action. When one makes an argument that they form a labor trust that must be legally limited, as you do in that post, you are arguing for a regulatory intrusion on the free economic behavior of people. You are the one calling for government control of economic decision making. And when you suppress labor negotiation strength, it shouldn't be any surprise that labor gets a worse deal. You also seem to be unaware that the labor law unions operate under is actually designed to legally prevent them from accruing power. It makes concessions to the unions to prevent them coalescing and wielding significant power through general striking.

[_MeDotOrg]

From their fellow citizens (the free market), civil society, and the fundamental civility and humanity of the American people...

Mellifluous words, Droopy, but they have about zero relevance in describing the "fundamental civility" shown by management to labor.

Before 9/11, the greatest work place disaster in the history of New York City was the 1911 Triangle Shirt Waist factory fire. 146 garment workers, primarily women under 25, were killed. They died of smoke inhalation, jumping 10 stories to their deaths, or being burned alive. The youngest victim, Mary Goldstein, was 11 years old. The women were trapped in the building because most of the exits had been chained shut by management to prevent pilferage.

But the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire was merely a focal point to what was happening in New York City. 25 Women had died in a similar fire in New Jersey shortly before the Triangle fire. Every day, it was estimated that 100 people died in industrial accidents.

If you read the first 11 pages of Triangle: The Fire that Changed America you will acquainted with Rosie Lemlich, a young woman in her early 20's, under 5 feet tall, who is beaten and has her ribs broken by William Lustwig and Charlie Rose, thugs hired by management to punish Rosie for the crime of being a union organizer.

Is this the "fundamental civility" of which you speak?

80 years later, in 1991, a fire at a food processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina killed 25 people. Once again, the workers were trapped in the building because the fire doors had been locked by management. Freed from the shackles of unnecessary regulation, the plant had NEVER received a safety inspection in its 11 years of operation. At the time, the state of North Carolina had ONE OSHA (Occupational Safety & Health Administration) inspector.

What do these tragedies have in common? Both shops were non-union. Both buildings had not had safety inspections. And although separated by 80 years, management's regard for the health and safety of their workers had not changed.

You want thugs? Read of Harry Bennett, Henry Ford's right hand man. You want a totalitarian state? Read of Henry Ford's 'Sociological Department' who would go to the homes of workers to question them about their marital life and finances.

Read of Andrew Carnegie's own Harry Bennett, Henry Frick, and the Homestead Strike, or the Battle of Blair Mountain. American labor has a great debt to unions. And in most instances worker's benefits were granted, not because of, but in spite of management.

[_Droopy]

Unions are part of the free market Droopy. Suppressing them is the the anti-free market action.

Private sector unionism is a part of the free market, and you will notice that I made no argument for their suppression. My argument for suppression is only in the case of public sector unionism, which is no part of the free market and a gross conflict of interest between both government employees, the unions themselves, and the union member's fellow citizens.

The problems of the serious market distortions and political corruption introduced by the kind of unionism created and incentivized by the Wager Act and the Norris-LaGuardia Acts is separate from the presence of private sector unions in a free, open society.

When one makes an argument that they form a labor trust that must be legally limited, as you do in that post, you are arguing for a regulatory intrusion on the free economic behavior of people.

No, I am not arguing for the regulation of government employee unions, but their abolition. They are neither free market in nature, nor compatible with the concepts of limited government, the rule of law, and government by the consent of the governed - the core principles of the American experiment.

You are the one calling for government control of economic decision making.

Government unions, pubic sector union members, and the government agencies within which they exist form a self perpetuating iron triangle of parasitism upon the mass of the citizenry using that very citizenry's own self created wealth. Private sector unionism, although using dues generated from private sector economic activity, have, for most of the last century, confiscated dues by force, including from non-unionized members of otherwise union shops and from union members who are Republicans and independents, to fund solely Democratic party political initiatives and interests, and have introduced massive corruption and nepotism into the American political process.

And when you suppress labor negotiation strength, it shouldn't be any surprise that labor gets a worse deal.

There is no such thing as "labor." That's an old, hoary leftist shibboleth that attempts to corral human beings into perpetual, rigid class relations with other ideologically useful classes ("management," "Wall Street," etc.). There are individuals who sell their labor to others as part of a process of productive economic activity and who rise in value to an employer as their productivity increases. Unions may at one time have had a useful role to play in the early developmental history of the industrial revolution, but as time, technology, education, and the sheer complexity and dynamic flux of a free market society (if it is, in a salient sense) proceed, unionism recedes as a positive or necessary aspect of a market economy, and becomes both a net drag on the economy and almost always, an intricate web of corruption and criminality. Most of the benefits of unionism - higher wages, benefits, and pensions - have benefited primarily union members and been enjoyed at the expense of non-union workers in similar trades and at the expense, ultimately, of the entire economy, especially when inflation of higher order factors of production and consumer goods driven by wages and benefits above that which the free market would actually set through both political and direct coercion, the creation of artificial scarcity of wage labor across various trades, and resistance to new technology, comes from within key industries (such as steel, automotive, other metals, and construction trades).

You also seem to be unaware that the labor law unions operate under is actually designed to legally prevent them from accruing power. It makes concessions to the unions to prevent them coalescing and wielding significant power through general striking.

Whatever the law may say, as a technical matter, the history of unionism itself presents a very different picture.

[_Droopy]

Mellifluous words, Droopy, but they have about zero relevance in describing the "fundamental civility" shown by management to labor.

Before 9/11, the greatest work place disaster in the history of New York City was the 1911 Triangle Shirt Waist factory fire. 146 garment workers, primarily women under 25, were killed. They died of smoke inhalation, jumping 10 stories to their deaths, or being burned alive. The youngest victim, Mary Goldstein, was 11 years old. The women were trapped in the building because most of the exits had been chained shut by management to prevent pilferage.

But the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire was merely a focal point to what was happening in New York City. 25 Women had died in a similar fire in New Jersey shortly before the Triangle fire. Every day, it was estimated that 100 people died in industrial accidents.

If you read the first 11 pages of Triangle: The Fire that Changed America you will acquainted with Rosie Lemlich, a young woman in her early 20's, under 5 feet tall, who is beaten and has her ribs broken by William Lustwig and Charlie Rose, thugs hired by management to punish Rosie for the crime of being a union organizer.

Is this the "fundamental civility" of which you speak?

80 years later, in 1991, a fire at a food processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina killed 25 people. Once again, the workers were trapped in the building because the fire doors had been locked by management. Freed from the shackles of unnecessary regulation, the plant had NEVER received a safety inspection in its 11 years of operation. At the time, the state of North Carolina had ONE OSHA (Occupational Safety & Health Administration) inspector.

What do these tragedies have in common? Both shops were non-union. Both buildings had not had safety inspections. And although separated by 80 years, management's regard for the health and safety of their workers had not changed.

You want thugs? Read of Harry Bennett, Henry Ford's right hand man. You want a totalitarian state? Read of Henry Ford's 'Sociological Department' who would go to the homes of workers to question them about their marital life and finances.

Read of Andrew Carnegie's own Harry Bennett, Henry Frick, and the Homestead Strike, or the Battle of Blair Mountain. American labor has a great debt to unions. And in most instances worker's benefits were granted, not because of, but in spite of management.

Anyone can take carefully cherry picked snapshots of history, and especially the history of a vast social and economic shift such as the industrial revolution, and use them to score ideological points in a debate. It was this same Henry Ford who developed the concepts of economy of scale and mass production such that the price of his cars plummeted over the years, bringing them within the reach of countless average Americans. It was Ford himself who said that he wanted his own employees to be able to buy the cars they produced.

Unionism existed well before the 1930s, but it was key legislation passed during the Roosevelt administration, as well as a relentless drumbeat of class envy and entitlement mentality psychology from him and his administration that created the violent, rapacious, intransigent, and capitalist - but essentially anti-rational and anti-business - unionism that has existed since.

What one has to keep in mind about unionism, of any kind (including the guild socialism of the Middle Ages) is that the fundamental purpose of a union is to artificially raise wages by artificially restricting entry into key trades. Worker safety issues only arose with the mass migration of American farmers out of rural areas (and abject poverty) into dense urban areas (and much improved living conditions, albeit with their own drawbacks) as mass production of cheap goods for sale to a burgeoning population rising every higher in disposable income became a necessity. Laws, rules, and norms of conduct regarding working conditions developed and were put in place as the need for them became evident, and popular sentiment demanded it.

Almost all of the abuses and accidents one can point to in the early part of the 20th century are snapshots taken in the rapidly growing youth of the industrial revolution, and represent an entire society struggling with vast shifts and transitions in technology, lifestyles, and patterns of production.

Ideologues, and most especially, those who see themselves as morally anointed messiahs seeking to redeem mankind from its various lower tendencies and make everything right (for certain groups, while usually excommunicating others from humanity) have always used such snapshots as ideological fodder while ignoring the whole picture, and powerful trends in other directions fueled by the very same forces of change and development.

[_EAllusion]

Private sector unionism is a part of the free market, and you will notice that I made no argument for their suppression. My argument for suppression is only in the case of public sector unionism, which is no part of the free market and a gross conflict of interest between both government employees, the unions themselves, and the union member's fellow citizens.

Insofar as the government employs people, the terms of negotiation for their labor is just as much an aspect of the free market as anything else. And legally restricting it is a curtailment of economic freedom. The government when acting as an employer reserves the right, just as all employers do, to reject or accept contractual terms from individuals negotiating or people negotiating together. While it may be in the interest of those the government employs to wield their vote in their economic favor, it is also the case that others have a countervailing interest to wield a vote in favor of the fiscal interest of the government. In practice, this push/pull ends up working comparably to how it does in the private sector with unions. Regarding government jobs, union workers, on average, tend to get paid a little less than non-union counterparts in income but receive much better job stability and retirement security.

There is no such thing as "labor."

More quality posting on economics from Droopy.

Whatever the law may say, as a technical matter, the history of unionism itself presents a very different picture.

You're against unions because Republicans are, not because you have any ideologically consistent beliefs. This is one of those issues that separates out those who say they favor free market policies because they are in the pocket of large business interests and those who favor the free market itself because they think it maximizes liberty and/or produces the greatest good for the greatest number people. While the free market is good for business in general, it can hurt individual business interests. Large, established businesses are notorious for pushing the government to enact regulations that give unfair competitive advantages to the detriment the health of the market and the welfare of the people. Suppression of unions is a case in point. Like the Republican party, you're pro-established business interests more than you are pro-market.

[_EAllusion]

Almost all of the abuses and accidents one can point to in the early part of the 20th century are snapshots taken in the rapidly growing youth of the industrial revolution, and represent an entire society struggling with vast shifts and transitions in technology, lifestyles, and patterns of production.

Yes, people who run businesses are not going to behave according to their economic incentives and drive down the cost of labor to maximize their gain. They're going to pay and treat people fairly out of a sense of benevolence. Adam Smith was wrong. It is by the benevolence of the breadmaker...

All the history of legal repression of unions corresponding to horrible working conditions and compensation and legal allowance of unions corresponding to a rapid increase in standard of living among the working class is totally coincidental.

Unions are like businesses. Individual ones can be for the good or ill of society, but their existence in general is unquestionably beneficial.