I Totally Support the Occupy Movement...Follow

So what exactly makes him the representative of all liberals? That's as crazy as anyone here believing you're the representative of all conservative thought or that varus was American.

No. No. No. Most private corporations don't provide pension funds because they're ridiculously costly. The potential for shenanigans is, almost certainly, never brought up in pros/cons discussions.

Him specifically? Nothing. The statement he made about pushing for more government even while complaining about being screwed by the government is pretty typical liberal behavior though. Hell. Just look at the Occupy folks themselves. Government bails out banks, so do they blame the government? Nope. They blame the banks. Think about that.

All the while the same group is largely demanding the government provide them free education, housing, food, and bob knows what else. Who will they blame when the costs for all that free stuff put us even more in debt? The rich? Because they opposed spending the money in the first place and now refuse to pay for it? Those bastards!


Am I somehow wrong about what liberals want? Cause that sure seems pretty typical to me.

It wasn't so much the "mental faculties of liberals" so much as "the mental faculties of rdmcandie" then? Kind of a sloppy method to take a potshot at liberals.

They're mad at the banks for putting themselves in a situation where they needed to be bailed out.

I disagree. There were some abuses very early on (19th century), but those as much had to do with government corruption in business as the problems we're seeing today. In the 20th century, the defining feature was the amazing leap and bound improvements in quality of life resulting directly from the massive growth of private capitalistic industries and the wealth those industries created. Those things happened as a natural evolution of free market capitalism and modern industrialism and not because of communist/socialist movements.



Sure. And he assumed that condition would not change and would in fact get worse over time. He was wrong. Karl Marx did not understand that modern industrialism breaks the thousands of years old zero-sum nature of economics. And it's not unreasonable for him to have missed it. That rule had been the case for the entire history of human economic endeavors. For one person to get rich, someone else had to be poor.

He failed to see that the industrial revolution changed all of that. When he wrote his books, it was too early in that revolution to see clearly where it would lead. He saw the rich getting richer, assumed this would result in the poor getting poorer (because he applied a zero-sum assumption), projected the results going forward, and predicted disaster. He completely missed that even as the rich got relatively richer, they did so by massively increasing the availability and decreasing the cost of products and services. The net result is that the average working class person today enjoys a standard of living that is greater than the richest people in Marx's day.


He can be forgiven for not seeing what was happening. What's shocking is that so many people today still continue to make the same mistake. Despite over a century of incredibly strong evidence showing just how wrong Marx was, they still cling to his theories. They attempt to apply zero-sum assumptions to modern economies long long after it's become abundantly obvious that they can't possibly be correct. They drive modern liberal social theory as well. And those theories, and the movements they inspire, require that the same flawed economic assumptions must be true. So, in a massive case of cart-before-horse logic, they act as though they are, and teach people that they are, and wave signs which assumes that they are, all the while ignoring the fact that those things simply are not true.


Is there anyone who can honestly and objectively argue that when big businesses make lots of money that this results in a decrease in economic fortunes among the poor and working classes? If this were true, then why did a bunch of people lose their jobs when big businesses lost money a few years ago? Shouldn't the poor and working class folks have gained by this? And even if you don't accept that the corollary must be true, aren't the Occupy folks operating on exactly that assumption? They believe that the way to improve their own lives is to tear down the rich. Clearly, that can't possibly work. No one actually believes this, do they?


Yet, this is the message of the Occupiers. Hurt the rich and help the poor. But it doesn't work. You hurt the rich and you make more people poor. That's it.

You're having problems with pronouns. rdm is a person. "It" as a pronoun does not apply to "him". It applies to what he said. A person can say something which is representative of a group's philosophy without himself being representative of that group.

Why are you having so much trouble with this. If I say "A fetus is a living person from the moment of conception", that would be representative of a pro-life position. But *I* am hardly a representative of the pro-life position. In the same way, I have no clue how many of rdm's positions are lockstep liberal positions. Thus, I'm not talking about *him*. I'm talking only about what he said.

You honestly can't separate the person from what that person says? Thats... strange.

No. They believe that we'd be better off without major banks at all, and are flocking to local credit unions en masse as part of the protests. They don't believe that the success and stability of the banking industry is important. They want the whole system shut down.

(The OWS credit union flocking is also due to the new debit card fees announced by BOA and Wells Fargo. I'm about to do that myself, because I sure as heck am not paying $3 a month to use the money I so graciously let the bank hold in what I thought was a mutual benefit of convenience - they make interest off my cash, I get to pay my bills from that cash. Well, we do still thankfully live in a country without monopolies, and the local credit union is more than happy to let me have a Visa debit card with no fees.)

Edited, Oct 19th 2011 8:39pm by catwho

Ok. But that leads us around in circles. I originally questioned the logic of shutting the whole system down, while also complaining about jobs, given the pretty direct tie between job creation and liquidity in that very same system. Xsarus then said that they didn't want to shut the banks down, but were angry at them for needing to be bailed out. Which lead me to conclude that this made even less sense.

Either way, I don't think their position makes any sense (ok, not much sense anyway).



You do realize that $3/month savings will evaporate the first time you need to use an ATM, right? There are good reasons to switch to a credit union. Saving $3/month is not one of them. Unless you're ok with always walking into the bank to get cash, you will get charged for using ATMs (which you don't for Wells Fargo as long as you use their ATMs which are pretty darn ubiquitous). Most credit unions don't have their own credit/debit cards, and use other bank (or banking group) systems, so you're really not saving yourself much there.

On the plus side, I hear some credit unions are trying to take advantage of this by offering introductory deals where they'll waive some fees and even pay you to put your cash in their bank. That wont last long though, and I just don't see it being worth it in the long run.

I'm not saying this part to be argumentative, but to warn you ahead of time that the move you're contemplating isn't as great as it appears on paper. Credit unions are not nearly as convenient for day to day banking. Most of the people I know who use them *also* have accounts with larger banks. They use the credit union because there are some special deals you can get through them for some sorts of financial transactions (loans, investments, etc). They do that in addition to their normal banking though, not as a replacement for it.

Woah, buddy, stop right there.

Economics have never been a zero sum game, capitalism is no different from any other system in this regard. Increased utility has always been created by economic activity, or there would, by it's nature, be no economic activity.

BoA pays me more money than a credit union, so I use them. I am happy with their performance, as long as they are not subsidizing their losses publicly, and therefore charging me (and the general public) more via a back-end route.

As someone who has never had to pay a dime for basic healthcare - the single payer system works.

(Oh and yeah I pay thousands of dollars in taxes a year, but I never have to budget for breaking my leg or getting the flu - if I get sick, the system is there for me, and when my grandma gets pnemonia, it doesn't matter how much money she has - she gets healthcare)

Edited, Oct 20th 2011 1:32am by Olorinus