Yes. We know conservatives talking about their politics have nothing to do with democracy. That’s the point.

Democracy has nothing to do with federalism. That's the point.

The more I think about it, I'm driven to an idea. The government should have a 50% nonvoting stake in every company. When the company takes profits, half of those profits go to the government and is used to spur new investment.

This way, when monopoly power increases and profits increase, the profits are largely redirected into subverting monopoly power directly. Either that or corporations would be incentivized to invest more.

You just described corporate taxes.

But:

A. No one in Congress is going to vote for that.
B. Corps will lobby endlessly to ensure A. stays that way.

It’s a social dividend only worse because executives can trivially defeat it by discharging all excess profit to themselves in a big bonus.

Here’s the idea I’m driven to the more I think about it: the workers should have a 100% voting stake in every company.

Voting stake in what (seriously asking) and expound a bit please?

I don't want to work at a company where my co-workers have that much say. We have a 100% voteing stake in our government and it's a self-serving **** show. Making thing more democratic just empowers selfish manipulative people to take advantage of stupid people's anger for personal gain.

I mean, hell, look at Valve. That's exactly how it's run and, well, if you've heard the stories, it isn't good.

You have gerrymandering, unconstitutional congressional apportionment, and active legal barriers against the participation of independent and third party candidates. You have almost no say in how your government is run.

If you don’t believe in democracy, though, I guess we really don’t have much to talk about. I just wonder what the subjects of Louis XVI would say about your posts.

lol, Valve isn’t run that way. It’s privately owned by the founders and the org chart is secret.

A cooperative may vote for its leadership and priorities, but once the vote is made the direction is set. Inside valve, you vote with your feet.

God forbid someone might vote for a power mad lunatic. They should just be born into that power. smh.

Ok how about we don't have king but Obama can run a third term as long as he uses the first 18 months when he can actually get stuff done beause he has a Democratic congress and senate to address income inequality

I know, right?

So I'm guessing the joke is that that was what he had in his first term and he didn't do that except what does addressing income inequality really mean?

Valve sounds like an alright place to work and their platform works super well. There's literally no significant competiton in video game digital downloads.

Yah idk, Valve looks like evidence to me that manager free corporations produce drastically higher profits and are much better at being psychopathic capitalists than highly managed teams. Seems they make ****loads of money.

Maybe not the best place to work but not the worst I've heard of.

Esp surprising is that Valve only has about 400ish employees, but brings in revenues of about 4.5bn these days.

That's an insane amount of money. The entire Xbox division at Microsoft is finally breaking 10bn, but I'm almost certain there's well past 1k employees working on that project.

Their "vote on projects with your feet [and get fired if you don't guess what gaben wants]" policy doesn't apply to Steam.

Nvm then

if they were so great they'd make my mf'ing HL3 already

Upping long-term capital gains from 15% to 20% to 50%.

Or even 50% on all individuals whose gains exceed, I don't know, 10k per year?

Admittedly I don't really get the argument for taxing the rich. Presumably the problem with income inequality isn't that the haves have too much, but that the not-haves don't have enough. Taxing the rich does nothing to solve that latter problem. And while the money could be used to fund, say, a more generous healthcare system, many, I believe, are overly sanguine about the social and psychological benefits of such a system. Having healthcare makes life easier for individuals, but I'm not sure that it's the key pain point for most people who are suffering now. The lives of those who feel held back will only be improved so much by having more reliable, robust healthcare services.

Like it seems that a lot of these government interventionist solutions, while humane and well intentioned, don't really address the problems that are polarizing society in the wake of the Great Recession. To my mind, the key problem is scarcity of opportunity, and the widespread view that there are fewer economic opportunities available and that the future is bleak.

Just to be clear, I'm saying that these are great ideas and they'd improve peoples' lives. But I'm not convinced anymore that they would address put a dent in political polarization (e.g., that they would reduce the appeal of far-right radical politics) if they were implemented.

didn't think i'd get blasted in the face by margaret thatcher

first, increased inequality does experimentally correlate with other societal ills, even in places where lower quintiles have experienced wealth increases too. there's lots of evidence on this.

second, yes wtf healthcare is more than just something which makes life easier

There's fewer opportunities because nobody is starting companies and nobody is investing in their companies. Both are due to regulatory capture, monopoly power, monopsony power in labor markets, and have quite a bit to do with government policy as decided by the wealthy.

There's good evidence that increased inequality makes it easier for the wealthy to corrupt politics.



Eating the rich would help.

That's Mr Margaret Thatcher to you, pal.



Sure, it's provides a sense of financial security and, subsequently, emotional security, and it's a hedge against catastrophic incidents (and the financial ruin that results from them). These are all significant factors after the recession, when a sense of financial insecurity is so prevalent. I'm not denying that. I just don't think it's the magic bullet that many think it is.

Ok fine.



Yes, I'm aware that that's the assertion.

Eversor, I did see your response but then I saw your response to your response and so I didn't really feel the need to make a response until I saw that you segued into healthcare in your response.
This made me wonder, similar I suppose to your discussion with yourself about taxes, it seems that when you expand healthcare access through affordability to the poor that the access for other groups to healthcare are negatively impacted. This seems related to supply and demand and I'm sure if I put some more thought into this I could figure it out on my own but some of you have probably actually already done this. The supply hasn't changed but the demand is high because it's accessible to all/more. If prices are fixed then it seems we get the long waiting lists we hear about in countries that mandate these sorts of practices. So demand can't be reduced through prices so supply has to increase and that means enticing doctor's to grind through med school so they can grind through work. So, will they want to and will doctors in the field want to stay? So then maybe the answer is the government pays all these doctor's $200,000/yr (or something) with no student debt and somehow still keep standards high? Just sort of thinking "out loud".

yeh its all a government conspiracy by democrats

A secret plan? I think not.

A. Medical care is not "accessible to all". Obamacare at its lowest tiers does not make it affordable enough for the truly poor to get most preventative procedures. All it does (which IS better than nothing) is cover emergency services better. The demand overall really hasn't gone up that much.
B. Long wait times is something of a huge exaggeration. Nevermind the fact that we've had long wait times for certain practices already, long before even Obamacare, but most other universal care countries don't actually have that problem for situations that call for rapid response. No, you're not going to just get a check-up appointment next week with your PCP. But it's a check-up appointment, you don't NEED to see your PCP next week. Meanwhile, if you're dying of cancer or something, you're not going to be waiting.
C. If anything, I would expect pay for doctors to rise under a universal plan, not lower. Currently, pricing for medical care is all over the place. Prices skyrocket not from demand, but because of complete lack of regulation (see also: pharma). Insurance companies negotiate hilariously lower pricing with hospitals, under the understanding of "you either agree to our terms or you don't get our patients".

IMO, the only people who defend the existing medical system are the ones who've never experienced free healthcare. It's such a radically different experience. Hell, I often wonder how many people recover slower or even die because of the stress of worrying about their medical bills.

Yeah, I wasn't referring to Obamacare at all and I regret that my comments might have been construed in that manner. I intentionally comment very little on Obamacare because other than destroying the forty hour work week for some it has not directly affected my family.

“Income inequality” is visceral shorthand for a complicated interplay of factors, ranging from executive compensation, capital securitization, disincentivized reinvestment, campaign finance, the principal agent problem, etc.

There’s nothing objectively wrong about some people having more than others. The problem is how “having more” ends up working in practice today.

The short version is that properly identifying and taxing/capping the gains of “supermanagers” (as Piketty terms them) would solve these problems. Or, like, socialism. That would honestly be easier.

What do you mean here by preventative procedures? Does anybody have preventative procedures done outside of teeth cleaning and braces? Maybe I'm too young to need a hip replacement or other things like that (you can see I'm struggling to understand what preventative care is, since that's not even an example; maybe things like smoking cessation?), so perhaps I've never needed to go to the doctor for "purely preventative care".

And my understanding of Medicaid is that all the other stuff people usually go to the doctor for (i.e., not "emergency only") are covered as well (e.g., drugs, imaging, surgery).

At some point I said the problem with income inequality was only that the have-nots don't have enough, and that the fact that the haves have more is not a problem. My "ok fine" was intended to acknowledge that the fact that the haves have more is in fact a problem unto itself.

What I was saying about healthcare still stands. I don't think a single-payer healthcare system will have the social and political effects that many claim it will.

I guess that depends on what the universal plan would look like. If it's like Medicaid, then doctors will actually be paid less (last I checked, Medicaid only paid 80% of the market rate to specialists, which is why many specialists don't accept it).

On the other hand, I imagine a system like Medicaid would probably do a much better job of managing costs, simply because the government establishes criteria for what is medically necessary (think about what a health insurance company would be like if it were run like the FDA).

See? If only wookie were better informed, he'd realize that it's all a government conspiracy by republicans!!

I am amused at how much you are exaggerating the effecting of gerrymandering in order to keep believing in democracy. Yeah, maybe sometimes gerrymandering might push some close races one way or anther, but it's not the dominating force in politics. People are. It's the millions of people posting shearing asinine memes on facebook and uncritically accepting whatever ideological circle jerk their peer groups has accepted.

The alternative to more democracy isn't a king. It's a system that abstracts the will of the people. The people should have some input, but it shouldn't be too direct. You can argue back and forth about what system should be used for electing the president, but at the end of the day, Donald J. Trump received 46.09% of that nations votes. That's nontrivial.

From what I gather, there's widespread consensus amongst healthcare wonks on both the left and the right that one of the most crippling problems is that prices (not of insurance to consumers, but of healthcare services and supplies to insurance companies) is way too high, and that has to do with a mix of overregulation (that prevent competition) in some cases and under regulation in others (e.g., companies can charge exorbitant fees for cheap services when they shouldn't be able to). I don't think supply and demand is necessarily the most pertinent factor here.

It's one of those things where our public debate is about an ideological conflict (to what extent should the healthcare insurance industry be private?) which produces endless irresolvable conflict about something that's relatively* unimportant, but despite the fact that there's widespread agreement about the real problem (prices are too high) nothing gets done about it (presumably because of lobbying).

*relatively being an important word in that sentence