It works for cars, since there are acceptable alternatives (biking, walking, carpooling, Uber, etc). It works less well for housing, as leftist NIMBYs often advocate, since one alternative (homelessness) is very unappealing, and the other (living somewhere else) just exports the problem.
Yes. To decrease demand, you limit supply so that the price goes up. This can work dramatically if you increase price high enough that alternatives are cheaper.
In the case of transportation, price is measured in time and convenience as well as dollars.
So we want to shrink our road infrastructure to drive the cost up in terms of pollution, fuel costs, time and convenience? This way less people will drive. I would propose that you are forgetting that you are going to price transport into the hands of the wealthy and business who will effectively rent-seek to loan cars or taxi people who cant afford a car around.
The idea of shrinking our roadways to discourage use of vehicles is challenging in a practical sense and it just cleaves off another aspect of life for business and the wealthy to enjoy without plebs interfering with the roadways they paid & still pay for.
I was thinking this as I read through this thread;
This living forever idea is great but so set apart from modern science it's amazing how serious some can be about it.
Live forever with your deafness or blindness from birth! Got herpes in college? It's only another infinity years of those outbreaks! If you were able to live infinite years you would ultimately wind up in some vegetative state. Between accidents dismembering people, un-curable ailments, etc.
It is quite amazing to me that someone can seriously suggest that a scientific community with the biotechnology to control aging as a chronic medical condition would somehow lack the biotechnology to defeat inherited and infectious disease.
If you actually spend any time looking at what is going on in the labs, treatments for any and all viral infections, universal cancer therapies, ways to repair some of the cell and tissue damage that causes aging, ways to repair any and all genetic defects, and more, are all on the verge and will emerge over the next decade or two.
That is easy to say... but there are still chronic pain cases where people do not even have a diagnosis of what is wrong. There are blood disorders for which the recommended treatment is still bleeding the patient. Chemotherapy is basically poisoning people and hoping they survive but the cancer does not. All of these things will hopefully one day seem barbaric and we will have better answers. But we are absolutely not on the verge of having all the answers.
>As a business owner, having access to cheaper labor is absolutely in his best interests
As a business owner, having a thriving, growing economy is absolutely more important than cheaper labor.
So many intelligent people on this website but I see so many fall into strange logical contradictions like this. How do you come to the conclusion that all wealthy elite cannot care to help repair income inequality? Do you stereotype 100% of wealthy people this way or only those you dislike, based on feelings?
It's no contradiction - it comes from understanding the dynamics of the situation. It's a prisoner dilemma-like case. Repairing income equality requires cooperation of a lot of people - who are otherwise competing with each other. At any point during that cooperation, it is in each participant's short-term interest to screw the whole thing and go exploit workers right now.
Every business owner may truly care about thriving, growing economy. Hell, they could all be nice people who are unhappy about exploiting their workforce. But any ability for cooperation drops rapidly as competitive tensions increase. So yes, without external guiding force, them choosing what's best for all longer-term would literally be a miracle.
>without external guiding force, them choosing what's best for all longer-term would literally be a miracle
Do you agree that have had quite a few miraculous people in our history as a nation? Many founding fathers, presidents, judges, military service members, and the like have chose what is best for the long-term at the expense of themselves.
I am trapped by your logic on this one anyway - the rich can't or only in a "miraculous" case chose a non-self enriching endeavor; so the discussion is futile, in your world, no human can solve this issue. Hopefully Google can get that Skynet system up and running soon, to resolve all these issues! :D
> Do you agree that have had quite a few miraculous people in our history as a nation? Many founding fathers, presidents, judges, military service members, and the like have chose what is best for the long-term at the expense of themselves.
No actually, we've had virtually none, and this easy to see if you attempt to count them and state their numbers in terms of percentage of the total population inclusive of their lifetimes. 1000, even 10,000 such are merely statistical noise basically equivalent to 0.
What you're doing is reasoning by anecdote, thinking a few examples mean something by ignoring the hundreds of millions of times the anecdote is wrong. You have to look at all of the people if you're going to make relative claims like "quite a few" because it's not quite a few, it's practically none.
> Many founding fathers, presidents, judges, military service members, and the like have chose what is best for the long-term at the expense of themselves.
Not saying it doesn't happen; it does rarely, and under special circumstances. Also it's not that people really need to be pushed hard to do good things - it's more that everyone is entangled in various incentive structures preventing them from doing good, and you could argue that rich and powerful are generally subject to much stronger incentives to do bad than ordinary people. It takes strong character and luck to be an exception. Elon Musk can and does think long-term and for the betterment of everyone - for which he is constantly ridiculed by the media (or even here), not to mention loads of people being constantly perplexed by Tesla's and SpaceX's business decisions, because they can't understand that a company can really exists just as a means to realize some non-short-term, non-monetary goal like getting us to Mars or getting transportation off fossil fuels.
Hell, we've generally created a system that attempts to forbid companies from long-term, cooperative thinking. Just almost any kind of strategic cooperation on the market is being called "anti-competitive practice" and discouraged with severe punishments. And for good reason, probably - companies tend to cooperate against society, not for it, and governments tend to not like rich people being powerful enough to work around them completely. As companies get successful they're being asked to go public - and that's usually enough to destroy any possibility of working for long-term good in them - public shareholders tend to not give a damn about the company mission or deeds beyond their means of making immediate profit. It takes special trickery, like Google did, to keep the company in control of individuals capable of thinking longer-term.
For better or worse, we tend to force rich people both culturally and legally into being greedy and short-sighted - so let's not act surprised if that's all most of them do.
No, I don't "stereotype 100% of wealthy people". I am talking about a single wealthy person, and I'm basing my opinion on his actions.
He can and will say whatever he needs to say to get support. Looking at the history of his actions is a much better indicator towards what he will actually do.
With your injection of the wall comment, your post is as text book as straw man arguments get.
Econ 101 tells us that reductions in supply drive up demand.
Reductions in workforce size drive demand for workers. Employers will pay more for an employee when the pool is smaller. We are in the opposite now, employers can be extremely selective because there are 100s of people applying for the job. So why not demand the college graduate with 5+ years experience for the part-time barista job?
Sorry, was there another actual anti-immigration policy framework that Trump was putting forth other than "build a wall"? (edit sorry, I forgot, and besides "ban Muslims"?)
Again I'll ask, can you point me to a respected economist who advocates for Trump-style isolation policies as a way to increase wages for the working class? Thanks in advance.
edit: Seriously just gonna downvote and slink away? Put your money where you mouth is and tell me what Trump's immigration policy is or admit that he's nothing but a blowhard shouting "ban Muslims" and "build a wall". I'm sorry that you don't like having his own stances pointed out to you or that it exposes your obvious cognitive dissonance.
Even without border wall, if all those measures are implemented immigrating illegally to US will make less economic sense. Also a lot of immigrants will self-deport after they fail to get any job due to e-verify enforcement.
* Triple the number of ICE officers.
* Enhanced penalties for overstaying a visa.
* Detention—not catch-and-release.
* Defund sanctuary cities. Cut-off federal grants to any city which refuses to cooperate with federal law enforcement.
* Nationwide e-verify. This simple measure will protect jobs for unemployed Americans.
Good luck getting a Trump supporter to respond with consistency when you can't even get those kind of answers from the candidate. Whatever he said a week ago has no bearing on what he will say next week.
It's noteworthy that 2 of us responded but the attack artists like yourself didn't provide anything other than anger, sarcasm and feelings-based logic..
Sorry, I forgot your weren't seriously asking - just trying to be caustic.
Not that you genuinely care, otherwise you could have evolved your position by going to Trumps website where there is an entire section devoted to immigration issues. Beyond your MSNBC-Tier talking points about Wall & Ban Muslims; e-verify, defund sanctuary city curtailing the current laws, detention of illegals, criminal penalties to visa overstays and many more.
Your appeal to authority style argument won't be a very strong one, so I won't be finding "respected" economists who agree with me.
Have you not seen the problems with censorship in r/the_donald ?
Reddit is the largest liberal echo chamber on the net, every character of it's content is actively moderated.
It's exactly the point being made here - liberal strategy as been to define and label opposition as racist/sexist/*ist for a very long time now. So those of us who disagree are just bigoted against incessantly. Many of those in disagreement with liberal ideas just vote instead of debate because it's tiresome having people generalize and stereotype you ad nauseum.
You are free to create your own subreddit, with your own moderation rules, with the exception of not brigading which seems very reasonable. There is no longer any central community on reddit (since /r/reddit.com was made inactive), speaking as if reddit is one voice is very strange to me.
>liberal strategy as been to define and label opposition as racist/sexist/*ist for a very long time now.
Are you going to sit there with a straight face and claim that Donald Trump is not racist or sexist? Or that the GOP hasn't consistently been fighting against LGBT rights for decades?
In general, I like to read viewpoints that are different than mine, it's challenging. Listening to people who agree with me is boring. Dog whistle politics is certainly pervasive in politics on all sides, and it is an important thing for people to recognize.
Yeah, me too. I just like it when the writers are at least a little insightful. I never get that sense from Scott Adams.
It reminds me a little of being back in high school when I read his stuff, a few decades ago, when my pals and I were starting to, tentatively and sloppily, feel out bigger philosophical ideas about the world.
"Trump has never mentioned race beyond pointing how how many African-Americans and Latinos support him. Ask your anti-Trumper to offer evidence otherwise. Then point out…"
Do people actually buy this absolute bullshit? Just unbelievable. Good one. I guess he hasn't called migrants from Mexico rapists? I guess his discussion of the judge's race and nationality wasn't racist either? yeah?
And yes, separating out his xenophobia and religious discrimination against Muslims is much better than lumping that in with his other racist speech. Now I'm dying to support him.
His fellow GOPers are calling him a racist and yet somehow I'm expected to just ignore reality? Scott Adams is really a piece of work in this blog post of mental gymnastics. The little pity party he throws for himself at the bottom is a nice touch. God forbid someone hold those voting for fascists accountable. It's almost like minorities and LGBT folk have more at stake or something.
The person you are responding to means to say that they are unhappy with being called on sexist/racist behavior and can't we just go back to the good old days where white male dominance was the cultural norm?
You couldn't have intentionally done a better job of proving my point.
I make a political statement. The first response is; Pivot target away from me and to a straw man (Trump & GOP). Label the straw men with your narrative of *ist and begin the appeal to common sense fallacy.
You also triggered me by changing the conversation away from liberal attack methods and bringing up LGBT issues.
So if you're not defending Trump or your support of Trump then what is your point? You just want to support a sexist, racist and bigot without having to be held accountable for it?
And the shitty, completely out-of-the-blue joke about triggering at the end. Nice that you want to allude to blanket dismissal of social causes just because I brought up LGBT issues. The only way you could be a bigger cliche is if you called me an "SJW" and spit on the ground afterward. Grow up. I'm done with this pointless conversation. Happy Pride, asshole.
Yup. Not done off-shore. Just using illegal immigrants. That shouldn't surprise anyone. As a businessman he would make money and cut corners any way he could and he has been proud of that throughout his campaign. I'm sure he will change and be more presidential after elected.
The article linked in submission isn't purely about off-shoring; it compares different level of an AmeriPhone: assembled here, parts from here, and source materials from here, detailing cost and practicality along the way.
I seriously doubt that "assembled in America by illegal immigrants" would be in the spirit of Trump's request of Apple, even though that's how he attained the wealth to put himself in the position to make that request.
It's a lifestyle choice. Personally, I like restoring old cars, remodeling my home, building robots. I couldn't do any of these things without being already wealthy if I lived in a big city, within walking distance to the grocery store and work.
I gladly commute so I can come home to something more than an apartment or condo, because that is all that is available or affordable.
Huh? If you limit supply, demand goes down?
Your logic would say that the solution to Los Angles traffic problems is to close half the lanes and wait for people to sell off their cars?