Time to on government assistanceFollow

This only makes sense if we assume that our economy consists solely of billionaires and their families and poor people living on scraps, with nothing in between. However, for the majority who actually live between those two extremes, the decisions and actions they make have a massive effect on their outcomes. Attempting to convince people otherwise is bizarre. It's like arguing that since only a small number of people with lucky genes can be Olympic swimmers, there's no point in anyone else bothering to learn how to swim. That's just... stupid.

Ada Lovelace turns up in the fourth chapter. She dazzles!

If the working class isn't routinely oppressed and taken advantage of we wouldn't need more benefits. Shall we keep going?

Fair enough.

Let's start with this post by Elinda a while back. In there it states that only about 68% of the "work" by the average father is paid. Above that only 40% of the work an average mother does is paid (hence my ask a mother comment btw). That is a significant portion of the time people spend doing things that they aren't compensated for. One could easily assume those things are important to the functioning of a household, and potentially very necessary, but none of it is paid of course. Only having about 1/2 of the work ((40+68)/2 = 54%) of the work a person does being compensated does throw a lot into the equation. While it might be a nice place to "start" arguably it should only account for about 1/2 the answer for much of the country. I'd also point out that "unpaid work" appears nowhere on that graphic. I suppose we should probably correct for pay discrepancies between the sexes too while we're at it perhaps?

You realize that spending time with your kids and raising them well is a great way to accomplish the "not be a dug addict" thing right? I mean the point is that you're spending that time helping them become better members of society, building a relationship with them, etc.

Edit: I mean look at it this way, you're not going to get me to believe that a guy who made $60k selling heroin for some street gang somehow has a more valuable contribution to society than a stay-at-home mother of 3 who only made $500 selling quilts on Etsy.

You know, if you really want to start with income, feel free to start there. You have to start somewhere I suppose, but I can't imagine it would be a very good metric in the end, unless one largely has no contribution to society outside of paid work, doesn't have a family, etc. That's not most people though.

I'm actually rather surprised I have to argue to a Republican that family values and charity should constitute a significant portion one's contribution to society. Isn't that like your guy's thing or something? Or has the Compassionate Conservative gone the way of the Southern Democrat already?

Edited, Aug 6th 2014 8:50pm by someproteinguy

Except that by that logic, the laborer should give his work freely as well. Being paid is "profiting", right?

Nope, it's not. I would honestly have not thought it possible that you could be so startlingly fucking ignorant after the many many remedial lessons in basic economics you've been provided, but once again, no. Being paid for labor is not "profiting". I'll assume the rest of your post relies on that initial obvious falsehood and not bother reading it.

If we ignore all of human history and pretend a hypothetical is a useful device in reality based arguments, sure. Shame that you're such a lousy liar, isn't it? It's a lot like believing someone that claims that since they work with engineers it makes them engineers. That is stupid. Well, opposed non-white hetero male Christian Republicans from getting equal benefits, anyway.

What was that, married parents raise more successful kids? Time to persecute single mothers some more, that'll solve this social mobility problem.

Phew, that was hard work. Time to go and chill out on my ranch for a couple of weeks.

$60k > $500 and more money is better. It's just obvious.

Y'all need to stop inventing new words for things.

Obviously, mommy should be selling heroin from the house. Dual income families ftw

The linked source isn't remotely relevant to this discussion though. You're a scientist, right? So let's test this theory.

Imagine we increased the percentage of hours spent in unpaid work to 100%. Would you expect that person's overall contribution to society to be higher or lower than if that percentage was at 50% (or 0%)? We can speculate all day long as to the value of the contribution to society made by hours spent doing housework, or teaching your children to read, or sleeping (after all, if you don't sleep you'll be unable to do any sort of contributing, right?). We can be as arbitrary as we want, and create as many levels of association we want, but at the end of the day the point I'm trying to make here is that in general the earnings you make reflect the degree to which others in society value the things you do. They might *also* value other things you do, but we can only quantitatively measure those associated with earnings.

After all, I could just as easily spend time teaching my children how to grift, right? So there's no way to measure that.



Again though, let's test this. Let's take the set of all parents and rank them based on the percentage of their time spent working versus staying at home with their children, and then assess the relative likelihood of their children becoming drug addicts. I'll give you a hint: It's the kids with the non-working parents who have the highest odds of becoming addicts, gang members, criminals, etc. Obviously, this isn't because the parents have more time at home, but... wait for it, the absence of two things:

1. The earnings which might allow them to live in a better area with fewer risk factors for the kids.

2. The positive example those earnings represent.


I'm not saying that there's no value to parents spending time with their children. I am saying that there's a massive value to children being raised by parent(s) who earn a living. Thus, in yet another (somewhat indirect) way, we see how earnings contribute to society.



I'm not saying that at all. We have laws which penalize the person who earns his money selling drugs. You're arguing the exception, while ignoring the rule. When comparing people (legally) earning their money, we can generally say that the contribution each provides to society is relative to their respective earnings. Everything else remaining the same, this is a pretty decent rule of thumb.



Family values starts with providing for one's own family first though. And that kinda starts with earning a salary, right? Hell. Earning enough so that your spouse can remain a stay at home mom/dad is even better, right? But you're able to do that because you earn more. It all starts with making the things you do more valuable to other people.

This is in contrast to the Left's approach of ignoring what one actually does for others and just reward people for showing up. And while that sounds all nice and charitable, over time it results in more and more cost for less and less "contribution". And along the way we actually end out discouraging the very charity and contribution we may have started out thinking we were trying to reward.

That's not even close to a working definition of profit. Profit is the gain above the *cost* to provide the good and/or services, not the value of those things.

If it costs me $100 to buy the materials for a birdhouse, and I can sell the assembled product to you for $150, then my profit is $50. You learned this in school, right? What this means is that all gains from labor are profit. Always. What I added to the cost to buy the materials for the birdhouse was my time/labor. I get that some of you want profit to be some kind of dirty word only applied to evil rich people, but the reality is that every time you collect a paycheck you are receiving profits off your labor.



That's... insane. If there wasn't profit, why would anyone bother running a business? Seriously, stop and think about this. What you're saying is ludicrous.




That's not how it works. It *can't* work that way.



NO, NO, NO, No, No, No! If there is a profit, it means that you produced something which others valued more than your cost to produce it. Profit is a measure of the value you added. When you take some pieces of wood and turn it into something someone else is willing to pay more than the cost of the wood for, you have added value to the pieces of wood. Your "profit" is the measure of that value addition.




This is completely non-sensical. Profits are spent investing in things designed to earn more profits. But this isn't a bad thing, unless you've been brainwashed into not realizing what profit is really measuring. The rich person doesn't take the money he makes away from other people. Money itself has no intrinsic value. The money he makes is a measure of the things that he provided for others that exceeded the cost to produce. I really think this is a concept that far far too many people just don't understand (and actually get completely backwards).

If I give you a shirt, and you give me $10, I didn't take anything from you. I provided you with a shirt. You gave me a piece of paper that records the fact that I gave you something and took nothing in return. Now, later I can exchange that piece of paper for something of equal value, but it's important to note that money itself measures what someone has provided to others, not what he has taken from them. And obviously, profit is the degree to which you did that in an efficient manner. It's not "bad" at all. It's necessary for the market to work.

It's also not something just rich people do. We all profit, all the time.

Well, yes. It doesn't start with a variant of "Let's pretend".

This explains a lot about your typical conservative's grasp of science though...