"Makers vs. Takers" and why it's dangerous

[Gerald McGrew]

Here's a hint people, if you think Seth should be ignored, then ignore him.

Did that a while ago...forum became instantly better.

[macdoc]

Like ignoring the bubonic plague - not a great idea - better to whack the stupid memes the way they deserve. Protect the innocent.

[Seth]

Here's a hint people, if you think Seth should be ignored, then ignore him.

Did that a while ago...forum became instantly better.

I've always said that killfiles are the last refuge of small minds. Guess I'm right again.

[Kristie]

Here's a hint people, if you think Seth should be ignored, then ignore him.

Did that a while ago...forum became instantly better.

I've always said that killfiles are the last refuge of small minds. Guess I'm right again.

It's more like they've realized that no matter what they say, you will argue it and it's not worth their time.
Hmmm, I think I've just realized that also....

[Seth]

Here's a hint people, if you think Seth should be ignored, then ignore him.

Did that a while ago...forum became instantly better.

I've always said that killfiles are the last refuge of small minds. Guess I'm right again.

It's more like they've realized that no matter what they say, you will argue it and it's not worth their time.
Hmmm, I think I've just realized that also....

Of course I'll argue it, that's what the flinking forum is FOR, or had that fact escaped you too?

[Drewish]

Oh and look, the thread has become people attacking Seth and talking about how they should be ignoring him, but aren't actually ignoring him. I'm not attacking or defending Seth here, but his posts don't shut down discussion here, this forum's collective responses to his posts do. Now either discuss things with him, ignore him, OR discuss things with other people.

[Tero]

Question to makers: when you somehow become takers (you forgot to use the last bullet on yourself), how do you deal with that situation? You could be burden on society for 20 years!

[Calilasseia]

It's interesting to me how when you debate religious conservatives, they quickly resort to passive-aggressive behavior, e.g. "One day you'll have to stand before God and answer for all this" as if it's some sort of valid rebuttal. But when you debate non-religious conservatives, you get "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" as if that's a valid rebuttal.

Both are indicative of the "conservative rage" mentioned in the OP. Further, psychological profiles have shown that conservatism is correlated with a tendency to the "dark triad" of personality traits, machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.

http://scienceprogressaction.org/inters ... ty-traits/

The fact that this rage is now being directed at the poor is what concerns the author in the OP.

Actually, over at another place, I posted a post in which I described the GOP as the "fuck you" party, I'll reprise the post for you:

What the Rethuglicons offered to the electorate this time round was, in effect, a platform that said "vote for us - the fuck you party". They effectively said:

[1] Fuck you if you're not whiter than white;

[2] Fuck you if you don't have a dick;

[3] Fuck you if you're in any kind of difficulty as a result of our corporate friends fucking the economy;

[4] Fuck you if your sexuality doesn't conform to the strictures of 3,000 year old mythology;

[5] Fuck you if you care about decent healthcare;

[6] Fuck you if you think women should have a say in what happens to their bodies;

[7] Fuck you if you're a rape victim, because we think you're a slut and got what you fucking deserved;

[8] Fuck you if you're on minimum wage;

[9] Fuck you if you're chronically sick or in need of other similar provisions - curl up and fucking die, parasite;

[10] Fuck you if you're not a corporate billionaire.

That was the message they were sending out. And millions of people heard them put out this message, and thought "these guys are warped."

Moving on ...

Very aware. There's at least 12 million jobs for Americans to take that are now held by illegal aliens. Problem is the laid-off unemployed aren't going to get off their fat asses and go take those jobs because they are "beneath" their dignity. They would much rather cut back and enjoy regular unemployment checks than go work at the jobs that are available.

Hunger is a great motivator to the indolent and idle, we should make use of it.


... Those who will not work and instead prefer to suck at the public teat can starve in a ditch for all I care. I have no moral obligation to support them in their idleness.

I take it you support Mrs. Romney's statement that the unemployment problem could be solved by removing the minimum wage and other labour laws? Because these 'jobs that are available', but are being taken by illegal immigrants, are not subject to minimum wage or any labour laws. It's pure exploitation. You will not see an illegal alien working at McDonald's for minimum wage and an 8 hour shift with lunchbreaks. You'll see them driving a taxi for 80 hours a week under someone else's license (who sits at home, drinks and smokes crack with his mates) for $2.00 an hour. You'll see them putting up fences and doing grounds maintenance work for 12 hours a day with a 15 minute break for $1.50 an hour. Sure it's better than where they came from, but do you really want to turn your country into where they came from? Because that's what will happen with this sort of dimwitted fucktardery line of reason. These 'jobs that are available' (provided you kick all the illegal immigrants out - how you'd do that without going all military state would be interesting to know) would be filled, provided you cut all income support across the board (except for the disabled and veterans I assume), and the unemployment rate would barely have a dent put into it. Very soon you'd find the payscale of all formerly minimum wage jobs dropping dramatically causing a domino effect that would see income across the board from the poor to the middle class falling decreasing terribly. The legs of your economy now cut out from beneath you you'd find that corporate profits would go into a freefall, offices, factories, retailers, and service industries would cut back operations dramatically or close outright. The people formerly employed at those places would soon find themselves and their families starving on the streets or fighting over jobs which would put some food in their tents in the public parks. The housing market would crash. Loans would be defaulted and mortgages foreclosed en masse. You'd have mass starvation, mass civil unrest, and open rebellion. The military would need be deployed in force (fuck the Posse Comitatus act) to stop a full scale rebellion, curfews enacted, travel and communications restricted, and your country would become everything you've always feared - run by a government of tyrants and oppressors of the people until its inevitable collapse into total anarchy and ruin as the funds to pay for your infrastructure expire.

All because some nitwits thought the unemployment problem could be solved by cutting the bottom out of the tin can that contains your workforce.

In short, the whole 'hate the poor' approach simply results in the country ceasing to be a civilised nation. It becomes Somalia with stealth bombers. Not that the sort of people who jack off to Randroid fantasies about billionaires being "wealth creators", when they wouldn't be able to "create" anything without those millions of poor people doing the shitty jobs for them, the sort of people who think anything attached to the public sector is a symbol of the Antichrist, who think that compassion for one's fellow human beings is "socialism" or "communism", would recognise this. The whole libertarian masturbation fantasy would be a fucking nightmare if it came true. Of course, here in Europe we've had personal experience of what happens when right-wing fantasies are allowed to run unchecked, and the result was a world war and fucking genocide. Which is where these sort of fantasies lead when they're pushed to their logical conclusion. The moment you start reverting to the sort of barbarism that leads to people being left to sink and drown the moment they hit bad luck, you're on the road to fascism.

Of course, the sort of people who make up the power brokers in the GOP, an unholy combination of corporate robber barons and Dominionist inquisitor wannabees, push this shit to the rubes because at bottom, what they want is a return to serfdom for anyone who isn't a member of their entirely self-appointed and self-declared 'elect'. Once that serfdom is in place, they can dispose of millions of purportedly "surplus" plebs with little or no opposition, and keep the rest as a slave labour force.

As for the idea that America is a "free market" economy, this is another of those fictions that the dupes who lick the authoritarian jackboot keep chanting to themselves. Apart from the fact that economies of scale make it impossible for a small business starter to break into certain business sectors as a newcomer (try going to your local bank for a loan to start up a competitor to the likes of Nissan in the volume small car market, and watch the bank manager piss himself laughing), the entrenched corporate powers now present soon find ways of squeezing out any upstarts. At best, they buy them out, then after a little lull in the proceedings, snuff out the new purchases and slap patents on whatever innovations the bought out newcomer came up with, suffocating those innovations until such time as it becomes something the corporate sharks decide is time to unleash upon the world for their own enrichment. At worst, they resort to cartels, price fixing, and a host of other dirty measures to snuff out the opposition. And now, of course, we have a whole new way of making money, called the leveraged buy out, which is how RMoney made his fortune - saddling unsuspecting companies with huge debts and fees, whilst collecting fat profits for throwing people out of work and subjecting their workplaces to the scorched Earth treatment, a method of scrambling into the corporate pig trough that is only available to people with serious money to start with. The idea that I could get in on this sort of self-serving avarice from an asset base of precisely zero, is a fantasy that only ideology-addled rubes licking the corporate propaganda ringpiece could entertain.

The "free market" fantasy is precisely that, a fantasy. Most markets are about as "free" as a loan shark's attentions. If I tried going to my bank manager, then asking him to provide a business loan to set me up as a utilities provider in competition with British Gas or NPower, he'd piss himself laughing so hard he'd piss his bladder out onto the floor. The results would be even more hilarious if I tried asking my local branch of Barclays to set me up as an international merchant bank. The only way you can move into some business sectors, is if you're already in possession of serious corporate firepower. Of course, this is one part of the reality that is kept carefully hidden from the starry-eyed rednecks being fed the 17th century mercantile fantasy, along with certain other stark realities about operating in a world where giant corporations can trample upon opposition the way an elephant can snuff out an ant without drawing breath. Indeed, in some parts of the USA, they don't even need to bother with the elementary economics classes: they just feed them the Atlas Shrugged fantasy instead, and lull the rubes to their doom.

[Tero]

Was that the emoticon? Im on mobile.

[mistermack]

If it's makers that are the heroes of the right, then they should have no objection to a 100% death tax.

After all, people who inherit vast fortunes didn't make it. So no maker loses, when the state takes it.

Put all the money into educating the children of the poorest. So that they will end up as makers, not takers.








(no makers were harmed in making this message).

[Gerald McGrew]

Actually, over at another place, I posted a post in which I described the GOP as the "fuck you" party

Pretty accurate I'd say.

Of course, the sort of people who make up the power brokers in the GOP, an unholy combination of corporate robber barons and Dominionist inquisitor wannabees, push this shit to the rubes because at bottom, what they want is a return to serfdom for anyone who isn't a member of their entirely self-appointed and self-declared 'elect'. Once that serfdom is in place, they can dispose of millions of purportedly "surplus" plebs with little or no opposition, and keep the rest as a slave labour force.

Reminds me of an observation a journalist made in an article about the tea party movement, "How do you get a bunch of lower-middle class whites, many on Medicare and paying little in federal taxes, to go to rallies and demand de-regulation of Wall St.?"

Given that a big part of conservatism is about identity, it's pretty easy for the wealthy to manipulate the "Joe Six Packs" into demanding things that actually cut against their own self-interest. All you have to do is create the impression that you're one of them...you wrap yourself in the flag, talk about "freedom" and "liberty", yell about how evil "socialism" is, play into their fears that the "others" outside the "real America" are trying to "take the country" from them, tell them you're going to keep gays from marrying and will stop abortions...and they'll support the billionaires' agenda, even though it directly impacts their own lives in negative ways.

The end result is you get white rednecks taking away their own access to health care; allowing Wall St. firms to gamble whatever retirement they have and if they fuck up, they get bailed out by the taxpayer while the JSP's now have to work into their 80's; voting to de-fund the schools their kids attend and cutting support for public universities and student loans, further reducing the likelihood that their own kids will succeed.

The end result is exactly what we've been seeing the past 30 years...a rapidly growing gap between the wealthy and everyone else. And not only does JSP not see that as a problem, he's convinced that any efforts to reverse the trend is "class warfare"! Meanwhile JSP has no health insurance, his retirement is weak at best, his kids go to shitty schools and a college education is increasingly out of reach, and the infrastructure around him is falling apart. But at least he has his "freedom" and "liberty"!!!

Now, I'm not saying the people who fall for this are stupid. Far from it. People on the left buy into false narratives as well, but IMO it's more about their politicians just not following through, rather than their supporters demanding actions that go directly against their self-interest.

[Kristie]

Was that the emoticon? Im on mobile.

Yep, yep!

[Seth]

Question to makers: when you somehow become takers (you forgot to use the last bullet on yourself), how do you deal with that situation? You could be burden on society for 20 years!

That depends. Up until lately I engaged in this activity we Makers like to call "saving for the future." In this activity, we take a small percentage of what we make and on a regular schedule we set it aside and don't spend it on crack, meth and flat-screen TVs (I was gonna say Twinkies, but the unions just killed Twinkies, and every other Hostess product dead with their greed, and now 18,000 of those idiot fuckwits are out of jobs completely...good for Hostess for not giving in to thuggish union blackmail! I'd do the same thing if I owned a business that was unionized...shut it down and throw all the assholes who think they are entitled to what's mine out on the street and let them understand economics a bit better.), so that over time we build up a reserve of wealth upon which we can draw in our dotage without having to steal from other people.

It's an interesting concept, perhaps you should try it sometime.

[Seth]

What the Democraps offered to the electorate this time round was, in effect, a platform that said "vote for us - the fuck you party". They effectively said:

[1] Fuck you if you're not black or brown;

[2] Fuck you if you if you have a dick;

[3] Fuck you if you if you want to keep and spend what you work hard for;

[4] Fuck you if you don't want to be forced to facilitate behavior that you think is immoral;

[5] Fuck you if you if you want to pay for your own health care and not everybody elses;

[6] Fuck you if you think women ought to keep their knees together rather than fucking everything in sight and killing living human beings;

[7] Fuck you if you're a woman and you want to carry a gun so you can shoot a rapist dead;

[8] Fuck you if you make more than minimum wage;

[9] Fuck you if you can't afford to pay for some stranger who is chronically sick or in need of other similar provisions - curl up and fucking die, parasite;

[10] Fuck you if you're not part of the proletarian working class, we're going to kill you and take everything you have.

That was the message they were sending out. And millions of people heard them put out this message, and thought "these guys are warped."

Sure as fuck is.

In short, the whole 'hate the poor' approach simply results in the country ceasing to be a civilised nation.

If that's what was going on, you might be right, but it's not, and you know it. It's "hate the indolent, lazy entitlement-mentality dependent class who WILL NOT work and demand that other people support them."

Not that the sort of people who jack off to Randroid fantasies about billionaires being "wealth creators", when they wouldn't be able to "create" anything without those millions of poor people doing the shitty jobs for them,

Somebody's got to do the shitty jobs, and without the billionaires creating wealth the poor people would have no jobs, no income, no food, no shelter, no clothes and they would starve to death. By providing those jobs, those billionaires give each and every one of those poor people the opportunity to improve their economic and social lot in life and the only thing standing between those workers and being a billionaire is their own limitations and fears.

the sort of people who think anything attached to the public sector is a symbol of the Antichrist,

Government is a necessary evil, nothing more. Like fire, it's a useful tool that must be carefully controlled lest it consume everything.

who think that compassion for one's fellow human beings is "socialism" or "communism", would recognise this.

You want compassion from me, don't approach me wielding the Mace of State in an attempt to take what belongs to me without my consent. Humble yourself and ask me politely and if I deem you worthy of my compassion and charity, then I'll decide whether I can afford to help you...or not.

The whole libertarian masturbation fantasy would be a fucking nightmare if it came true.

For the dependent class Marxist dupes it sure would be. For the productive class it would be heaven on earth.

Of course, here in Europe we've had personal experience of what happens when right-wing fantasies are allowed to run unchecked, and the result was a world war and fucking genocide.

Sorry, but all those wars and genocide were actually caused by LEFT-wing fanatics like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Hitler. Yes, Hitler, who was the leader of the German National Socialist Party a Liberal Fascist organization.

Which is where these sort of fantasies lead when they're pushed to their logical conclusion.

Using the sort of ignorant proletarian "logic" that Marxists have deluded one another represent actual rational arguments, which they don't.

The moment you start reverting to the sort of barbarism that leads to people being left to sink and drown the moment they hit bad luck, you're on the road to fascism.

And that would be a feature of Marxism.

Of course, the sort of people who make up the power brokers in the GOP, an unholy combination of corporate robber barons and Dominionist inquisitor wannabees, push this shit to the rubes because at bottom, what they want is a return to serfdom for anyone who isn't a member of their entirely self-appointed and self-declared 'elect'. Once that serfdom is in place, they can dispose of millions of purportedly "surplus" plebs with little or no opposition, and keep the rest as a slave labour force.

*Yawn*

As for the idea that America is a "free market" economy, this is another of those fictions that the dupes who lick the authoritarian jackboot keep chanting to themselves.

Sadly, you're correct. America is not, and has not been since about 1912, a true free market economy, and therein lies the problem. Get rid of all the Marxist Progressive interference with the markets and America will work much better and people, and that means everyone, will prosper.

Apart from the fact that economies of scale make it impossible for a small business starter to break into certain business sectors as a newcomer (try going to your local bank for a loan to start up a competitor to the likes of Nissan in the volume small car market, and watch the bank manager piss himself laughing),

So fucking what? You snooze, you lose. Nissan spent hundreds of billions of dollars over decades to carve out it's market share. Why should some underfunded start up hope to compete with them? You seem to think that it's unfair that Nissan has dominant market share in a particular industry, but they got there by making a better mousetrap. If you want to compete with them, then build a better, cheaper, more comfortable, more reliable automobile. Otherwise shut the fuck up and quit whining that you came late to the table and find some other niche for your talents. Or just take a job working for Nissan so you can take home a regular paycheck and not suffer the slings and arrows associated with the risks of entrepreneurship like most people do.

the entrenched corporate powers now present soon find ways of squeezing out any upstarts.

Yeah, they make better, cheaper, more reliable products than their competitors and market them more effectively.

At best, they buy them out, then after a little lull in the proceedings, snuff out the new purchases and slap patents on whatever innovations the bought out newcomer came up with,

And the innovators get paid for their innovation. What the fuck is wrong with that? If I could come up with a 200mpg high-performance auto engine that runs on water, I'd be happy to take a couple of hundred million from Ford for the rights and they can do what they want with it. It's my idea, why shouldn't I profit from it, and why shouldn't Ford suppress it to protect their market share until they are ready to produce it themselves? You seem to think that my idea is somehow property of the world and that I'm not allowed to profit from it. Wrong. If it were, I'd suppress it myself until the world came up with a couple of BILLION dollars to buy the fruits of MY LABOR.

suffocating those innovations until such time as it becomes something the corporate sharks decide is time to unleash upon the world for their own enrichment.

So what? They paid for it, they can do what they want with it. If you want to do something else with it, then YOU pay the inventor more than someone else for the rights. Then you can put it in the public domain if you want and never make a dime from it. But you have to pay to play, so put up or shut up.

At worst, they resort to cartels, price fixing, and a host of other dirty measures to snuff out the opposition.

All of which are illegal (though they shouldn't be). You want to compete, then fucking COMPETE. You don't deserve a leg up just because you have Marxist ideals and a good idea.

And now, of course, we have a whole new way of making money, called the leveraged buy out, which is how RMoney made his fortune - saddling unsuspecting companies with huge debts and fees, whilst collecting fat profits for throwing people out of work and subjecting their workplaces to the scorched Earth treatment, a method of scrambling into the corporate pig trough that is only available to people with serious money to start with.

"Unsuspecting companies" my ass. In most cases leveraged buyouts occur when the business is ALREADY in financial danger due to mismangement by the current owners, and because they've blown all their capital they can't afford to pay their own debts. That's where venture capitalists come in. They acquire the company and then break it up and sell the components to make a profit (as in Pretty Woman) or, as happens more often, they take over the company, reorganize it, get rid of the deadweight and overpaid union leeches, streamline the business and fund it into profitability again, under new ownership.

The idea that I could get in on this sort of self-serving avarice from an asset base of precisely zero, is a fantasy that only ideology-addled rubes licking the corporate propaganda ringpiece could entertain.

So what? Who cares? What leads you to the idiotic belief that you deserve to get in on the gravy in the first place? You deserve only what YOU can produce. Just because you haven't got the balls or the intelligence to make a profit from a failing company doesn't mean everybody else has to be as unqualified as you. Go get an education, suck it up and go make some money.

The "free market" fantasy is precisely that, a fantasy. Most markets are about as "free" as a loan shark's attentions.

Sadly true, but we have the Marxist Progressives and Liberals to thank for that.

If I tried going to my bank manager, then asking him to provide a business loan to set me up as a utilities provider in competition with British Gas or NPower, he'd piss himself laughing so hard he'd piss his bladder out onto the floor.

Of course he would because he's recognize immediately that you don't know the first thing about the industry, haven't the skill or capital to overcome the barriers to entry and he'd be throwing good money after bad. But what on earth makes you think that this is in any way unfair? You're not qualified to run such a business, so you have no business trying to do so. Go make quilts or carve bears out of tree stumps with a chainsaw or do something you're actually qualified to do. If you're really good at it, and you make a really good product, then consumers will beat a path to your door and you can corner the market in chain-saw bears or quilts. If you're not, well, so sad, too bad for you, you're a victim of YOUR OWN LIMITATIONS, not some grand corporate conspiracy to keep you poor.

The results would be even more hilarious if I tried asking my local branch of Barclays to set me up as an international merchant bank. The only way you can move into some business sectors, is if you're already in possession of serious corporate firepower.

And there's a good reason for that. Your implicit argument is that you think that the world owes you something and that it's not "fair" that you don't get to open an international merchant bank. Only an idiot socialist would think that its not "fair" that some people are better able to make money than they are and whine about it. Intelligent people find something THEY are good at and spend a lifetime building a business model around their strengths, thereby creating wealth.

Of course, this is one part of the reality that is kept carefully hidden from the starry-eyed rednecks being fed the 17th century mercantile fantasy, along with certain other stark realities about operating in a world where giant corporations can trample upon opposition the way an elephant can snuff out an ant without drawing breath. Indeed, in some parts of the USA, they don't even need to bother with the elementary economics classes: they just feed them the Atlas Shrugged fantasy instead, and lull the rubes to their doom.

Pure Marxist propaganda egalitarian class-warfare hate the productive class envy and jealousy, that's what your argument consists of.

Quit whining and go make something of yourself and stop complaining that its unfair to you that other people are better at it than you are. Life doesn't owe you a damned thing, nor does society. You're on your own. In America, however, you have unlimited opportunity to find your niche and get rich, if you have the ability within you to do so. If you don't, you're a victim of your own limitations, not the victim of some grand conspiracy to keep you down. Only a dependent-class entitlement-mentality moron thinks that.

[Calilasseia]

What, you mean the same way the Rethuglicons tried to "fix" the election with fake "voter fraud" laws? Pull the other one Seth, it's got fucking bells on. Let's take a look at this strawman cariacture you're erecting shall we?

What the Democraps offered to the electorate this time round was, in effect, a platform that said "vote for us - the fuck you party".

Wrong. They didn't dismiss 47% of the American electorate as being feckless parasites, just because they weren't members of RMoney's corporate billionaire elite.

They effectively said:

[1] Fuck you if you're not black or brown;

Bollocks. There's plenty of poor white people out there. quite a few of whom were roundly fisked by RMoney's predatory leverage buy-out corporation, and who found themselves tossed on the scrapheap after he ram-raided the companies they worked for, saddling them with gigantic debts whilst walking off with telephone number "profits" on the deals. But please, don't let facts get in the way of another of your Randroid fantasy rants, will you?

[2] Fuck you if you if you have a dick;

Once again, bollocks. Last time I checked, the D's weren't planning on slapping restrictions on what men could or could not do with their bodies. Another Seth rantasy. (Now that's a neologism I think I'll trademark!)

[3] Fuck you if you if you want to keep and spend what you work hard for;

You mean, like those people who worked for decades at the companies RMoney ram-raided while he was at Bain Capital? The only people the Rethuglicons are interested in enriching are people who already have telephone number bank accounts, and don't need any more jollies thrown at them. One of the endlessly chanted Rethuglicon mantras during the election was "tax cuts for the rich". You didn't hear a peep out of them with respect to helping those who don't belong to the corporate billionaire elite.

On the other hand, the Ds want to see people other than the Koch brothers enjoy a share of what they've worked for. Another Seth rantasy.

[4] Fuck you if you don't want to be forced to facilitate behavior that you think is immoral;

Yawn, yaw, yawn, masturbate mouth ... you're good at that, Seth, it's the defining hallmark of your posts. Please tell me what is "immoral" about people wanting to forge committed relationships, and formalise this through marriage? Just because those people happen not to conform to the diseased strictures of 3,000 year old mythology, doesn't change one iota, the fact that these people are interested in commitment and lasting relationships. All those defamatory caricatures about gay people the Rethuglicons erected are just that - defamatory caricatures. Oh, and of course, we all enjoyed the spectacle of one of the prize bigots, namely George Alan Rekers, the so-called "scientific adviser" to NARTH, a hate group peddling the "pray the gay away" bullshit, being caught red handed hiring a "travelling companion" for his European jaunt ... from a website called "rentboy.com". Once again, facts stick the middle finger to another Seth rantasy.

[5] Fuck you if you if you want to pay for your own health care and not everybody elses;

Oh please, the diseased and psychotic view you're peddling here really is sad to behold. Please tell us all, what exactly is "wrong" with supporting others in medical need, as opposed to letting them die if they don't have platinum Amex cards? Which is what you're espousing with your above caricature? Oh, here's a hint for you, Seth - the number of medical bankruptcies reported each year in numerous European nations, where human empathy counts for more than corporate avarice, is, wait for it, zero. Or do you think that it's somehow "right" that people should be ruined if they happen to be medically unlucky?

[6] Fuck you if you think women ought to keep their knees together rather than fucking everything in sight and killing living human beings;

Oh, you're really scraping the barrel with this one, aren't you Seth? Just like "Mr Legitimate Rape" Todd Akin and the other wanktards, who think that women who want to exercise choice over their reproductive destinies, instead of being nothing but incubators for Rethuglicon Jeebus, are purportedly "sluts" and "whores". Congratulations on erecting the same diseased caricature above, Seth, and for letting us know what you really think of half the human race.

[7] Fuck you if you're a woman and you want to carry a gun so you can shoot a rapist dead;

Plenty of other countries manage to have lower crime statistics without being an armed camp. And as a corollary, have far fewer gun related deaths as well. But once again, don;t let facts get in the way of another rantasy.

[8] Fuck you if you make more than minimum wage;

Yawm, yaw, yawn, masturbate mouth ... you're good at these Randroid apologetic wankfests, Seth. What a pity for you, that reality says something different.

[9] Fuck you if you can't afford to pay for some stranger who is chronically sick or in need of other similar provisions - curl up and fucking die, parasite;

Oh look, once again, in SethWorldTM, the only people who deserve medical care when they need it are platinum Amex card holders. What a completely diseased world view you have.

[10] Fuck you if you're not part of the proletarian working class, we're going to kill you and take everything you have.

Wow, you just took hyperbolic and subjected it to cosmic inflation. This is why no one with functioning brain cells takes your rantasies seriously.

That was the message they were sending out. And millions of people heard them put out this message, and thought "these guys are warped."

Sure as fuck is.

Your caricature is warped to the power N, where N is a large integer, possibly transfinite.

In short, the whole 'hate the poor' approach simply results in the country ceasing to be a civilised nation.

If that's what was going on, you might be right, but it's not, and you know it. It's "hate the indolent, lazy entitlement-mentality dependent class who WILL NOT work and demand that other people support them."[/quote]

Bollocks. Tell that to the people who worked at Ampad for decades before RMoney came and performed a bust-out on their company, leaving them with no jobs, no money and no future, while RMoney pocketed $100 million in fat fees and "dividends". Tell that to the people who were subject to another RMoney bust-out at KB Toys, left with no jobs, no money and no future, whilst RMoney and his rich pals took a 900 percent "dividend recapitulation" out of the bled-dry husk and pocketed $83 million. When the creditors examined the books, they described RMoney's activities as "breaking open the piggy bank". The people being described as "indolent, lazy, entitlement-mentality, dependent class" by the Rethuglicons are people like those now-redundant workers from Ampad and KB toys, shafted by the Gordon Gekkos of Wall Street. Then there's other companies whose workers ended up getting the shitty end of the stick from RMoney and his fellow pink champagne parasites - Hertz, Dollar General, Del Monte, all of which were loaded up with huge debts, courtesy of the interest payments on the loans Bain Capital took out to finance their "leveraged buy outs", followed by fat "consultancy fees" for the privilege of being told which workers to fire in order to meet the escalating debts, and yet more "dividend recapitulations" lining RMoney's pockets.

As for entitlement, well RMoney knows a lot about that, given that he's bilked the taxpayer to finance his wrecking-ball outings, engineering a $10 million government bailout to save his own company, and used the tax code to siphon off more funds to finance his wrecking of Middle America, before squirrelling the swag in offshore accounts in tax havens, including the use of a blocker corporation to hide $100 million from the taxman. Entitlement? Hah, the real entitlement junkies are RMoney and his "financial products" cronies.

Not that the sort of people who jack off to Randroid fantasies about billionaires being "wealth creators", when they wouldn't be able to "create" anything without those millions of poor people doing the shitty jobs for them,

Somebody's got to do the shitty jobs, and without the billionaires creating wealth the poor people would have no jobs, no income, no food, no shelter, no clothes and they would starve to death.

Oh, so small businesses have no input into this, do they? Keep spinning that fantasy, Seth.

By providing those jobs, those billionaires give each and every one of those poor people the opportunity to improve their economic and social lot in life and the only thing standing between those workers and being a billionaire is their own limitations and fears.

This is total bollocks. If it were that easy, Seth, we'd all be fucking billionaires. Those people at Ampad, Hertz, KB Toys, and the rest, would like a word with you.

the sort of people who think anything attached to the public sector is a symbol of the Antichrist,

Government is a necessary evil, nothing more. Like fire, it's a useful tool that must be carefully controlled lest it consume everything.

Oh, and corporate avarice isn't? See above.

who think that compassion for one's fellow human beings is "socialism" or "communism", would recognise this.

You want compassion from me, don't approach me wielding the Mace of State in an attempt to take what belongs to me without my consent. Humble yourself and ask me politely and if I deem you worthy of my compassion and charity, then I'll decide whether I can afford to help you...or not.

Wow, the arrogance and utter narcissism of that statement is truly breathtaking to behold.

Guess what? Nobody appointed you as an arbiter of who is deserving and who isn't, and given your rampantly psychotic view of your fellow humans, it's just as well.

The whole libertarian masturbation fantasy would be a fucking nightmare if it came true.

For the dependent class Marxist dupes it sure would be. For the productive class it would be heaven on earth.

Please tell us all what was "productive" about ram-raiding Ampad, KB Toys, Hertz, etc?

Of course, here in Europe we've had personal experience of what happens when right-wing fantasies are allowed to run unchecked, and the result was a world war and fucking genocide.

Sorry, but all those wars and genocide were actually caused by LEFT-wing fanatics like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Hitler. Yes, Hitler, who was the leader of the German National Socialist Party a Liberal Fascist organization.

Poppycock. Hitler was about as left wing as Pinochet. Did he nationalise the big German businesses, such as Krupp, IG Farben, BASF etc? Er, no. He let them continue making vast profits, and in the case of Krupp, let them make vast profits from concentration camp slave labour. As the voluminous documentation sifted through at Nuremberg testifies. The Krupp documents alone comprised 12 tons of paper. If you think Hitler was a "liberal", then you really are living in a fucking fantasy world.

Which is where these sort of fantasies lead when they're pushed to their logical conclusion.

Using the sort of ignorant proletarian "logic" that Marxists have deluded one another represent actual rational arguments, which they don't.

Oh look, it's the tiresome attempt to caricature my post as "Marxist". I handed you your arse cheeks over this issue at RatSkep when you were trolling the forums there.

The moment you start reverting to the sort of barbarism that leads to people being left to sink and drown the moment they hit bad luck, you're on the road to fascism.

And that would be a feature of Marxism.

You're becoming a Randroid Elizabot, Seth, and it's sad to watch.

Of course, the sort of people who make up the power brokers in the GOP, an unholy combination of corporate robber barons and Dominionist inquisitor wannabees, push this shit to the rubes because at bottom, what they want is a return to serfdom for anyone who isn't a member of their entirely self-appointed and self-declared 'elect'. Once that serfdom is in place, they can dispose of millions of purportedly "surplus" plebs with little or no opposition, and keep the rest as a slave labour force.

*Yawn*

No answer for that? Quelle surprise. Oh, that's because in the case of the creepy Dominionists, they've already stated who they'll round up for a spot of "disappearance". Quite a hit list, I gather.

As for the idea that America is a "free market" economy, this is another of those fictions that the dupes who lick the authoritarian jackboot keep chanting to themselves.

Sadly, you're correct. America is not, and has not been since about 1912, a true free market economy, and therein lies the problem. Get rid of all the Marxist Progressive interference with the markets and America will work much better and people, and that means everyone, will prosper.

Actually, that "interference", as you call it, was put in place because in the 19th century, the robber barons demonstrated that they couldn't be trusted to behave in a civilised manner if left to their own devices. Read any Charles Dickens lately? Or do you think returning to that era of squalor is a good idea?

Apart from the fact that economies of scale make it impossible for a small business starter to break into certain business sectors as a newcomer (try going to your local bank for a loan to start up a competitor to the likes of Nissan in the volume small car market, and watch the bank manager piss himself laughing),

So fucking what? You snooze, you lose. Nissan spent hundreds of billions of dollars over decades to carve out it's market share. Why should some underfunded start up hope to compete with them? You seem to think that it's unfair that Nissan has dominant market share in a particular industry, but they got there by making a better mousetrap. If you want to compete with them, then build a better, cheaper, more comfortable, more reliable automobile. Otherwise shut the fuck up and quit whining that you came late to the table and find some other niche for your talents. Or just take a job working for Nissan so you can take home a regular paycheck and not suffer the slings and arrows associated with the risks of entrepreneurship like most people do.

In other words, it wouldn't be a "free market" even if your fantasy assertion above about removing the guarantees of decency you deride as "Marxist" became a nightmare reality. Thanks for making my point for me.

the entrenched corporate powers now present soon find ways of squeezing out any upstarts.

Yeah, they make better, cheaper, more reliable products than their competitors and market them more effectively.

You mean like Freddie Laker? Oh, wait, he was one of those "upstarts". He was squeezed out by the big boys, despite offering everyone cheaper air fares.

At best, they buy them out, then after a little lull in the proceedings, snuff out the new purchases and slap patents on whatever innovations the bought out newcomer came up with,

And the innovators get paid for their innovation. What the fuck is wrong with that? If I could come up with a 200mpg high-performance auto engine that runs on water, I'd be happy to take a couple of hundred million from Ford for the rights and they can do what they want with it.

You think they'd pay you that much? I love your optimism.

It's my idea, why shouldn't I profit from it, and why shouldn't Ford suppress it to protect their market share until they are ready to produce it themselves? You seem to think that my idea is somehow property of the world and that I'm not allowed to profit from it. Wrong. If it were, I'd suppress it myself until the world came up with a couple of BILLION dollars to buy the fruits of MY LABOR.

Good job Linus Torvalds didn't think that way.

suffocating those innovations until such time as it becomes something the corporate sharks decide is time to unleash upon the world for their own enrichment.

So what? They paid for it, they can do what they want with it. If you want to do something else with it, then YOU pay the inventor more than someone else for the rights. Then you can put it in the public domain if you want and never make a dime from it. But you have to pay to play, so put up or shut up.

Once again, good job Linus Torvalds didn't adopt such a mercenary posture.

At worst, they resort to cartels, price fixing, and a host of other dirty measures to snuff out the opposition.

All of which are illegal (though they shouldn't be).

Oh, so might is right in SethWorldTM, is it?

You want to compete, then fucking COMPETE. You don't deserve a leg up just because you have Marxist ideals and a good idea.

The mere fact that you have to caricature anything that doesn't involve rampant, uncontrolled avarice as "Marxist" speaks volumes here.

And now, of course, we have a whole new way of making money, called the leveraged buy out, which is how RMoney made his fortune - saddling unsuspecting companies with huge debts and fees, whilst collecting fat profits for throwing people out of work and subjecting their workplaces to the scorched Earth treatment, a method of scrambling into the corporate pig trough that is only available to people with serious money to start with.

"Unsuspecting companies" my ass. In most cases leveraged buyouts occur when the business is ALREADY in financial danger due to mismangement by the current owners

Complete hooey, as the relevant records demonstrate. When KB toys was targeted by RMoney, they'd not long made a packet from Tamagochis.

and because they've blown all their capital they can't afford to pay their own debts.

From what I can gather, KB Toys didn't have any debts until RMoney showed up.

That's where venture capitalists come in. They acquire the company and then break it up and sell the components to make a profit (as in Pretty Woman) or, as happens more often, they take over the company, reorganize it, get rid of the deadweight and overpaid union leeches, streamline the business and fund it into profitability again, under new ownership.

Another fantasy. Dade Behring is a case in point. RMoney and the real leeches at Bain Capital raided the employees' pension fund, used that to add another loan to the ever-growing debts Dade Behring was acquiring as a result of the leveraged buy-out, extracted $365 million in dividends, leaving Dade Behring with $870 million in debts. Then, having sucked as much blood out of the company as they could, Bain and RMoney ran off with the loot, and left Dade Behring to crash.

The idea that I could get in on this sort of self-serving avarice from an asset base of precisely zero, is a fantasy that only ideology-addled rubes licking the corporate propaganda ringpiece could entertain.

So what? Who cares? What leads you to the idiotic belief that you deserve to get in on the gravy in the first place? You deserve only what YOU can produce. Just because you haven't got the balls or the intelligence to make a profit from a failing company doesn't mean everybody else has to be as unqualified as you. Go get an education, suck it up and go make some money.

Ah, hubris. Where have I seen this before?

It's precisely because I acquired an education, that I can see through your fantasies and lies, Seth.

The "free market" fantasy is precisely that, a fantasy. Most markets are about as "free" as a loan shark's attentions.

Sadly true, but we have the Marxist Progressives and Liberals to thank for that.

Poppycock. The people we have to thank for any legislation, are the people who demonstrated that they couldn't be trusted to behave themselves without it. This is why laws are enacted in enlightened jurisdictions, Seth, in case you're unaware of this elementary principle, namely to prevent malicious exploitation of the helpless by powerful and amoral bullies. I know that you still entertain this Wild West fantasy with respect to jurisprudence, hence your fetishistic attachment to weapons, but some nations have grown out of this. Nations that haven't include Somalia. Want to go there, do you?

If I tried going to my bank manager, then asking him to provide a business loan to set me up as a utilities provider in competition with British Gas or NPower, he'd piss himself laughing so hard he'd piss his bladder out onto the floor.

Of course he would because he's recognize immediately that you don't know the first thing about the industry, haven't the skill or capital to overcome the barriers to entry and he'd be throwing good money after bad. But what on earth makes you think that this is in any way unfair?

I didn't say it was unfair, Seth, I merely used this example to demonstrate that the "free market" mantra is a myth, because there exist restrictions upon what one can and cannot do therein, and those restrictions would still exist even if your nightmare Randroid future dystopia of total deregulation became something other than your wet dream. But please, don't let basic facts stop you from trying to rewrite my posts to suit your apologetic convenience.

You're not qualified to run such a business, so you have no business trying to do so.

And you know this how, precisely? I love seeing you pile assertion upon assertion.

Go make quilts or carve bears out of tree stumps with a chainsaw or do something you're actually qualified to do.

Tell that to some of your favourite politicians.

If you're really good at it, and you make a really good product, then consumers will beat a path to your door and you can corner the market in chain-saw bears or quilts. If you're not, well, so sad, too bad for you, you're a victim of YOUR OWN LIMITATIONS, not some grand corporate conspiracy to keep you poor.

Those people at KB toys and the other places want a word with you again ...

The results would be even more hilarious if I tried asking my local branch of Barclays to set me up as an international merchant bank. The only way you can move into some business sectors, is if you're already in possession of serious corporate firepower.

And there's a good reason for that. Your implicit argument is that you think that the world owes you something

No it isn't, Seth, and you know it. Stop trying to put words in my mouth I never uttered. I simply used these examples to demonstrate the mythological nature of the "free market" mantra so many chant. There's no such thing as a "free market", even if your nightmare deregulation fantasies become something other than a wet dream. Indeed, if those fantasies of yours ever become true, it'll be even less of a free market, because the big boys will be able to erect artificial obstacles to startups on a grand scale, in order to keep the loot for themselves. And don't try and delude either yourself or others that this won't happen, Seth, because if there's one lesson humans have learned the hard way, it's that the rich and powerful will abuse that wealth and power for their own self-aggrandisement on whatever scale they can get away with, and to hell with everyone else. Want to live in that kind of world, do you? In which case, when someone invents a time machine, ask them to send you back to 12th century Europe.

and that it's not "fair" that you don't get to open an international merchant bank. Only an idiot socialist would think that its not "fair" that some people are better able to make money than they are and whine about it.

Once again, I'm not complaining about this, what I'm pointing out is that the "free market" mantra is a myth, and would actually be an even bigger myth if your fantasies ever became real. Plus, I don't mind people making money honestly, Seth, this is another of your fantasy caricatures. What I object to is people who have already made a supertanker load of loot, using that loot to screw everyone else. Oh, but you admitted above that in SethWorldTM, might is right. Civilised societies have moved on from this.

Intelligent people find something THEY are good at and spend a lifetime building a business model around their strengths, thereby creating wealth.

Heh, if we'd listened to Barnes Wallis, we could have had Mach 4 airliners in the 1960s. But he wasn't interested in avarice, he was interested in building something that worked properly. The world is full of examples of brilliant people, whose great ideas never matured because of the very myopia you're peddling here.

Of course, this is one part of the reality that is kept carefully hidden from the starry-eyed rednecks being fed the 17th century mercantile fantasy, along with certain other stark realities about operating in a world where giant corporations can trample upon opposition the way an elephant can snuff out an ant without drawing breath. Indeed, in some parts of the USA, they don't even need to bother with the elementary economics classes: they just feed them the Atlas Shrugged fantasy instead, and lull the rubes to their doom.

Pure Marxist propaganda egalitarian class-warfare hate the productive class envy and jealousy, that's what your argument consists of.

Bollocks, Seth. I handed you your arse cheeks over your facile and ludicrous attempt to characterise my attachment to decent, civilised conduct as "Marxist" over at RatSkep. Remember that, do you? I can resurrect that post here at a moment's notice if need be. It's not classes of people I harbour revulsion for, Seth, it's categories of behaviour. Do learn this elementary concept sometime.

Quit whining

Look who's talking. Every time someone dares to criticise manifestly maleficent behaviour on the part of your beloved corporate gods, you whine and bleat with the best of the asses.

and go make something of yourself and stop complaining that its unfair to you that other people are better at it than you are.

Actually, what I'm complaining about Seth, isn't that other people are better than me at building cars, or designing airliners, or selling food at low cost. What I'm complaining about, though once again you chose to avoid addressing this, because you prefer knocking down your usual strawman caricatures rather than face the real arguments, is that some people are abusing their assorted positions of power and privilege, ultimately to the detriment of our entire species. Frankly, this is one activity I'm glad to be incompetent at, because I would rather see my life out knowing I've striven to be decent and civilised. You might think this is "Marxist", Seth, but you'll sing a different tune if your sad little wet dreams become reality, only to find there's no one around to save you when it's your turn to be gobbled up by the sharks. That's what civilisation is all about, Seth, or did you not learn this elementary lesson in any civics classes you took?

Life doesn't owe you a damned thing, nor does society.

Actually, last time I checked, one of the foundational principles of civilisation, was that we owe each other decent and humane treatment. If you wish to disagree with this, there are a number of uncivilised places you can move to, and learn the hard way the value of decency and humanity when faced with the absence thereof.

You're on your own.

What an utterly Hobbesian nightmare you conjure up, Seth.

In America, however, you have unlimited opportunity to find your niche and get rich, if you have the ability within you to do so.

Another myth. Which I destroyed above.

If you don't, you're a victim of your own limitations, not the victim of some grand conspiracy to keep you down.

Keep drinking RMoney's Kool-Aid, Seth. Just don't blame me if it poisons you.

Only a dependent-class entitlement-mentality moron thinks that.

No, the people who think the likes of RMoney and the Rethuglicons are seeking to return us all to serfdom, are the people who read the evidence, Seth. Which the R-thugs have provided themselves in quantity.