Thanks for another great video, Eric.
So are we done with our exchange?
Probably…
If we really want to reform Western “societies” and economies, we must take into account the correlation between wealth, intelligence/knowledge and demography.
As I said: We know that fertility and prosperity (wealth) correlate with each other (b.t.w.: also with intelligence).
What is said in that video is merely partly right because it suggests that the knowledge would depend of the so called “free market”, and again: that is merely partly right, thus partly wrong. For example: (1.) The current Western/global market is not really a “free market”. (2.) Knowledgte depends also on education, thus on a relatively long time; so it is not primarily a question of a market, or of capitalism versus communism, but a fortiori of culture. (3.) Knowledge can be used in several ways; so it is also important to keep knowledge by selecting the right people with their achievements and trustworthiness, and that (of course!) is also not primarily a question of a market, or of capitalism versus communism, but a fortiori of culture.
When it comes to speak about knowledge, the meaning of knowledge, and the importance of knowledge for a “society” and its economy, then it is primarily important to do it (1.) in connection with culture, (2.) in connection with (the history of) culture, (3.) in connection with economy, … That does not mean that economy is somehow unimportant. No. That only means that knowledge is firstly a genetic/biological and cultural issue (remember and see above: “long time”) - and guess why this issue is a taboo in the Western “societies” -, and secondly an economical issue, but then (and only then), if such knowledge is well arrived in economy, then there is such a great feedback that the West had in the past, still has in the present (although the negative trend shows clearly in the other way!), but will not have anymore in the future.
So first of all a “society” has to have people with knowledge and a trustful will to work, thus intelligent people with a trustful will to work, and only then it can also enjoy the advantages of this people because they have enriched the economy and via economy also the “society”.
And b.t.w.: In order to get the final direction, this thread should not be called “Reforming Democracy”, but “Reforming Demography” (see above). 
I enjoyed it as well, Eric, although it really didn’t add much to my knowledge base. Sorry. I’m not sure where I learned some of the things I know; perhaps from my study of General Semantics, or maybe it’s because I’m an English/Theatre type and have a terrific imagination. (BYW, I thought my idea of color-coded food stamps was pretty innovative even if it was human engineering.)
And I’ll be sorry when the thread peters out ultimately, as it appears to be doing. I don’t think any of us has arrived at a solution–whether it’s reforming democracy or demography. History has shown, imm, that theories may be fine–like Sowell’s free-market theory–but they don’t always work as they’re supposed to. A large part of that is the nature of the human animal.
A free market economy would be great if it weren’t for people; the same is true for limiting government’s regulatory function–most people just don’t let morality get in the way of expediency. Added to that is the drive for ‘wealth’, not as knowledge, but as evidenced by buying ‘power.’ Ask people what one thing would make them happiest–9 out of 10 will probably say, “I wish I had the money to . . .”
Corporations are no different. New drugs are developed all the time, for example, but prices for drugs don’t go down–not even for drugs that have been on the market for decades. Generic drugs were supposed to be the answer, but the generic drug manufacturers went through a sort of ecological food chain eating frenzy. Little companies were eaten by bigger companies, which were then eaten by even larger companies–all the way up the chain until corporations absorbed them. Then the big guys fixed prices so as to be ‘competitive’–with each other.
I could go on, but I won’t bother. I’d only be repeating myself.
It’s been. . .
Enjoy,
Liz
I agree with you Arminius that culture is a very important factor to think about. I’m going to abstain from this thread for a few days, but when I get back I’d like to go into this.
“Affirmative action” is racism and sexism, the increased form of racism.
“Affirmative action” has such results (for example):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqCLr6MSBWk[/youtube][youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGv8PQr8Uo4[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzvlQ0hy7kg[/youtube][youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr_SgD5cORs[/youtube]
(“SCUM” means Valerie Solanas’ manifesto, “SCUM Manifesto”. And it’s evident what “#killallmen” means.)
And if you want to get of the top of racism and sexism, you only have to observe the white autoracism and male autosexism (the increased form of autracism), thus the autoracisms and autosexism of the male whites. Funny? No! Dangerous!
That “liberal” “professor” is white and male.
Do you have any question?
Wrong thread…
I disagree with your conclusion. While I’ll acknowledge that there is a correlation between Wealth and children produced by an individual, I do not think it amounts to anything significant. There is a larger correlation between not having children until marriage, instead of government limiting the amount of children a person can have, should we instead demand that they cannot have them until they are in a stable marriage? Or, should only the rich be allowed to reproduce, as they have more money to hand out to the children they have. Few would argue that Bill Gates should be so limited to two, he can hand out so much more to the two he has.
Or, could we instead stay the hell out of people’s lives, stop assuming we know what is best based on our biases… That is the entirety of my argument through this thread… Really my argument to everything that gives more power to government. At the very, very least, because one day someone in the government is going to decide the thing you like to do is damaging to you, and that shouldn’t be allowed. I bet I could find someone to argue that Philosophy boards are damaging to the participants.
I can accept all of that, even that the color-coded thing was clever, my problem is that it is human engineering. Which would be done by people, who suck.
Not really Sowell’s, it’s been around for a long freaking time.
Adam Smith wrote a book about it a long time ago, “The Wealth of Nations.” (1776)
But, in one, the people that suck only have the power to screw up their own lives. In the government run one, the people who suck are often in charge of everyone else.
Prove it.
FIxed pricing has never been proved to happen in a significant way in a free market. It only happens when the government steps in and allows them to do so.
I know the feeling.
Has it?
NEVER!
Me.
No. As I already said (here, here, here, here), each human should have the right and the duty to reproduce himself / herself; that should and would lead to an ideal case with the reproduction rate 1. If someone wants to have more or less than one child, he or her would have to pay for it.
If the reproduction rate is higher than 1, it would be reduced soon because there are enough humans who don’t want to reproduce themselves. If the reproduction rate is lower than 1, the state or a professionell corporation would have to add the reproduction rate by “reproduction managers” (“state mothers” or “professionell mothers”) who are paid by those who don’t want to reproduce themselves.
If we do not solve the demographic problem, we will get very much bigger problems!
I disagree.
You’re a victim, if you want to call it that, of human engineering in every aspect of your life, Eric, you know that! It’s called advertising. Even if it weren’t for advertising, you’re still manipulated. You can’t buy anything if it isn’t for sale and sales are manipulated, not just through ads, but through manufacturers, as well. Even the food on your table or in your fridge is what you’re forced to buy, because that’s all there is. You may have a lot of choices within those areas, but your choices have been made for you.
And, yes, a ‘free market’ has been around for ages–from before Adam Smith and the Industrial Age, even. (And I’ve read The Wealth of Nations.) It’s been tried in various forms many times, and it’s failed. We’ve all learned about the Great Depression in the US, but what about the Long Depression from 1873-1878? The problem, if there is one, isn’t that there are regulations, but there may be too many regulations. It’s like laws. We’re quick to make laws which often solve an immediate problem. The laws, however, remain for decades after ward. (I was serious when I said it was against the law in FLA to keep a crocodile in your bathtub.) The multiplicity of regulations and laws can certainly stifle real invention, but that’s not the only reason.
I wish I could find what I read about the generic pharmas; that they are consolidating, however, is no secret. As Ucci would day, it takes less than 30 seconds to google everything you’d want to know about it. And they do set prices, although the FDA is cracking down on the practice, now. Price setting is being stopped because the government is stepping in.
As for proving that the price of drugs hasn’t gone down even years after it was put on the market, I have my empirical knowledge only. Birth control pills have been on the market for almost 40 yrs. and the price is now much more than many women, even with insurance and generics, can afford. Newer drugs demand extremely high prices; it can cost $87,000 to be treated for HepC, that’s the wholesale price and only if a single drug, Sovaldi, is used. It’s most often used in conjunction with other drugs. Cancer? It’s been around for millennia. The cost of chemotherapy has risen sharply. So has radiation therapy.
–kaiserhealthnews.org That item is about breast cancer. My sister died of lung cancer, and the costs have gone up there, as well.
–http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3150743/
Perhaps those two examples are really examples of human engineering at its finest. Of course, the second comes from a government publication. You’ll deny it for that reason.
Yes, Eric, it’s been. . .Illuminating, informative, ultimately futile? But it’s been, or I’ve only dreamt it all.
Enjoy something, please.
Liz 
You can disagree as much as you want: You have no argument. Demography and economy have much to do with each other, but it is the demography that has the 51%. Or to modify your sig to a metaphor: “In a pure denography, 51 percent of the people get to pee in the economy of 49 percent of the people.”
You all want to prefer to live in luxury and therefore not to make the smallest sacrifice.
You all are partly to blame for the disaster that awaits us.
You all say: “After me, the flood.”
You all do not want to see anything because you are too luxury horny.
That’s a shame.
See, this is why conservatism exists. Because there are people out there who can, apparently with a straight face, propose a global authority with the power to monitor and regulate the reproductive activities of everybody on the planet; and they see this the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of people having as many or as few children as they want to have.
I think there are a lot of moderate liberals out there that see stuff like the above as looney, but don’t realize that “Hey I know, how about we let the State own all the means of production!” or “Hey, I know, how about we only allow State law enforcement to have access to firearms!” or other such things are exactly as looney for basically the same reasons.
Who pays for it, that many people have too many and some people too few children? Who makes sure that it is paid for?
My solution means (amongst others) that less would be paid.
Who has an interest in defending the current circumstances, thus problems?
We could really avoid these problems, if there were no interest in defending them!
I am often confused by the lines of logic. At least with gib, the argument was, you allow for basic levels of socialism, why don’t you want more. But I always have trouble with people that claim, “The cops are horrible people!” when it is followed with, lets put them in charge of enforcing, “No Smoking” or “You can only make so much money, then the rest is taken.” Who do they think is going to be called when someone decides not to play along. Always passing more laws, assuming that people have to follow them, because they are the law.
Actually, it was more like: You seem to be allowing for some basic level of socialism; is this because you think it’s necessary, acceptable, tolerable, or do you want to get rid of even that (this is why I said I was trying to get a better understanding of your position with my questions)?
My solution means that less would be paid
// And less state would be made.
That rhymes and makes very much sense.
Well, that was a good break–now I want to recap on where we are:
The focus of this thread, despite its title, is the problem of political corruption and how to solve it. I called this thread “reforming democracy” because I implicitly, and without realizing it, made an assumption–that the problem was that the democratic process (by which I mean the manner in which we vote for our presidents or prime ministers, not in that the country is run by 51% of the people) was being undermined. I assumed that the democratic process was adopted as a means of curbing political corruption by way of limiting power, but that as history rolled on, politicians, big companies, lobbyists, and other powerful individuals/groups found clever ways of circumventing the democratic process and thereby gaining levels of power well beyond the limits that democracy was supposed to impose. Therefore, the time is ripe, I thought, to reform the democratic process.
But Liz and Eric, and eventually Ucci, have drawn my attention to the fact that there are other spheres of public life in which to look for the source of the problem–in particular, the economy (and if Arminius is serious about contributing to this thread, we may look at culture too). The main goal remains the same however–how to deal with the problem of political corruption–but we’ve since moved away from looking at the democratic process.
Later, the thread took another turn: I very quickly discovered the age-old conflict between conservatives and liberals. This was all new to me but tediously familiar to most Americans. This turn was a decisive one, and I’m inclined to say it represents the point at which I discovered the problem of political corruption at least in America (and eventually the solution). What the debate between conservatives and liberals taught me was that we must not merely think of the problem of political corruption as that between a government and its people, but also between factions in the people themselves, each political party being only the tip of an iceberg–90% of the corruption, in other words, is beneath the surface, between the factions of the people themselves, factions which form, out of themselves, and use political parties to represent them and fight against the opposing faction on their behalf.
I posed a question to Ucci earlier in this thread: given this consideration–that a huge bulk of the corruption that occurs in politics stems from warring factions within the people themselves–would it be fair to say that most of the corruption that occurs at the level of politics is carried out by one party against the other, or can one party carry out acts of corruption against the very people they are supposed to serve and represent (I don’t think I would get very far asking whether one party carries out acts of corruption against the opposing faction as I’m sure that faction would unhesitatingly say yes, they carry out acts of corruption against us all the time, while the other faction would say no, the acts they carry out are acts of justice). So for example, Obama, in order to win the most votes he can during the weeks before he was elected, might decide to betray the very people whom his party is suppose to represent and server–he decides to make a promise to conservatives and Republican supporters: if you vote for me, I promise to make a concerted effort to ignore or even fight against anti-gun lobbyists (he’d somehow have to peddle this in such a way as to not lose votes on the liberal/democrat side, but you can see what I mean by political corruption against one’s own constituents).
Corruption against one’s own constituents is something we ought to address if we’re still concerned with the government, as a unified block, oppressing or exploiting or abusing the people, as a unified block, (which we should be) but from where I stand now, I see the conflict between the factions that each party represents and serves as far closer to the root of the problem. As I said in an earlier post, if the people can resolve their issues, the problem of political corruption (in terms of the government abusing their power over the people) would be a cinch to solve.
Now, as much as I think we’ve hit the root of the problem, I think we’ve also come up with the best solution so far: the conservative ideal of minimizing government; after all, the less government, the less political corruption–and this is especially true if we limit government to those spheres in which they function well (if it functions well at all). Eric and Ucci assure us that the studies to prove this exist–studies showing that the economy thrives best the more free the market–that is, the less the government intervenes. And to those liberals whose main concern is not so much that an economy thrive at her best, but that the worst off in society have at least their basic needs taken care of, conservatives like Eric and Ucci assure us that the best way to approach the worst off and their basic needs is to just allow the free market to thrive–in that way, everyone–even the poor–get richer–and if there are still those who are too poor to afford the basics (food, shelter, health care), then they can rely on charity, for in a truly free market that thrives, there will be enough money to go around that even charities will have enough to feed the poor, to shelter them and to provide adequate health care. It’s a glorious utopian vision. Ucci and Eric assure us that studies exist out there to prove that this is not only possible but will happen.
Of course, before we blindly take their word for it, we must get passed the problem of the contaminated information pool–it’s not enough to click on their links; we must put in the extra effort of doing our own personal peer reviews of the articles and reports they link us to. And there is a bit of a science behind this–not a perfect one, but it does seem reasonable–for example, Ucci suggests we look out for a pattern: one study comes out suggesting one set of results followed by apologists from the other side trying to explain the data away rather than deny the results, chances are it means those apologists couldn’t quite find any flaws in the results or the methods by which they were attained. Eric also suggested some approaches: make sure you can get a clear description of the methods they used to acquire the results (I’m finding that Thomas Sowell is an excellent source of examples of how such investigations into the methodologies of many studies often reveal just how sloppy and flawed those methodologies turn out to be). He also suggested looking at the sample of participants used: internet surveys for example will attract a much different crowd than studies recruiting (and paying) live volunteers.
Now I haven’t done this yet–I’m lazy and I can’t find the time (but this is a project which I’m considering to have no deadline so I have the rest of my life and I do hope to get some more solid answers before I die)–and so at this point everything that I’ve gathered from everyone here has only achieved what I call “heterophenomenological” status. Heterophenomenology is a term coined by Daniel Dennette which denotes a scientific approach to studying the mental states of others. The idea is that while it hinges on the reports of others, it takes a completely neutral stance towards the truth or falsehood of those reports; the point is not to get accurate, objective facts about the state of reality based on the reports of the subject but to get a picture, a phenomenology, of the subject’s state of consciousness–that is, the world as the subject sees it (in fact, I’m inclined to say the heterophenomenological approach doesn’t even depend on the subject telling the truth about his/her own mental states, but on whether a coherent picture of a phenomenological world based on the subject’s reports can be painted at all). This is the status that everyone and their contributions to this thread have achieved in my mind. I’m not sure if this comes across as disappointing or offensive (I get the impression many here are overly eager to have me swallow every word they post and believe it wholeheartedly). I apologize if this is so, but I’m not going to change my attitude towards this. But I do want to emphasize that this is not a resting place for me–I do intend, slowly, gradually, to look deeper into the studies to support the claims Ucci and Eric have been making, and if they know they’re right, they should have nothing to worry about (though they might have to exercise a bit of patience with me). The up shot is that, as far as the heterophenomenological approach goes, Eric’s vision is really very impressive and inspiring–it takes the cake as far as coherency and plausibility go, which goes a long way to instilling hope that we can have a better, happier, more prosperous society with minimal political corruption.
Liberals don't like cops based on their personal interactions with them. I think when most people are trying to push for some new regulation, they are simultaneously imagining why it shouldn't/won't apply to them. A cop telling them they aren't allowed to do something they want to do is an insult to our dignity- that sort of control is only needed for the unwashed mashes , of which we never consider themselves a part.