Born Losers

[JCF]

Gee I don't know. Maybe it's because that "self correcting" system seems to make sure those incompetent bstrds are rewarded so richly while the people doing their work well lose their jobs because of rhose exec f ups and might end up needing the governments help and then those same execs don't feel responsible enough to feel like they should pay their fair share of taxes ( sorry, they don't ) to help those lazy bastartds who because of them are out of work?

[red-beard]

There is no discussing this with you.

[competentone]

Originally posted by red-beard
There is no discussing this with you.

"You can't reason with them, they're not open to reason."

One cannot defend, by any rational economic or moral argument, the position of wealth redistribution.

When one tries to argue that taking wealth away from the person who produced it and giving it to the person that did not produce it is somehow "good," one is trying to argue that theft is good.

Those who benefit (or hope to benefit) from "wealth redistribution" will create all sorts of convoluted arguments about how the theft is "good," but when you decipher their banter you just find emotions like jealousy, anger and the desire for more than what they have earned.

[techweenie]

Sorry, but 'wealth distriburion' doesn't just go one way.

A CEO that lays off 30,000 workers and sends jobs overseas to a third world country and gets a $30 or $40 million bonus/salary package is a valid example of wealth distribution, as well.

[Tim Hancock]

Originally posted by techweenie
Sorry, but 'wealth distriburion' doesn't just go one way.

A CEO that lays off 30,000 workers and sends jobs overseas to a third world country and gets a $30 or $40 million bonus/salary package is a valid example of wealth distribution, as well.

Maybe if those 30,000 workers had been making a bit less money than their union demanded, the CEO would have been able to remain profitable and not have had to go overseas to survive. A company cannot operate at a loss for too long and expect to survive.

[red-beard]

Originally posted by techweenie
Sorry, but 'wealth distriburion' doesn't just go one way.

A CEO that lays off 30,000 workers and sends jobs overseas to a third world country and gets a $30 or $40 million bonus/salary package is a valid example of wealth distribution, as well.

That is not wealth redistribution. That is real world decision making. He paid paid by the stockholders to increase value of the corporation. He is not paid to be Mr. Nice guy to the workers.

He is doing what the stockholders require. They are investing into a corporation to MAKE MONEY! If it isn't profitable to make it here, you mkae it there. If you don't do this, the company goes out of business.

[JCF]

Originally posted by red-beard
There is no discussing this with you.

My feelings exactly.

[legion]

Originally posted by competentone
"You can't reason with them, they're not open to reason."

One cannot defend, by any rational economic or moral argument, the position of wealth redistribution.

When one tries to argue that taking wealth away from the person who produced it and giving it to the person that did not produce it is somehow "good," one is trying to argue that theft is good.

Those who benefit (or hope to benefit) from "wealth redistribution" will create all sorts of convoluted arguments about how the theft is "good," but when you decipher their banter you just find emotions like jealousy, anger and the desire for more than what they have earned.

Yep.

[daepp]

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich--will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt--and of his life, as he deserves.

[daepp]

"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood--money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers--as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being--the self-made man--the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."

Francisoc D'Anconia in Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.

[red-beard]

Prophetic

[legion]

Thanks Dave. That's what I've been getting at. I didn't want to have to type it all from my copy of the book.

[M.D. Holloway]

Originally posted by JCF
Gee I don't know. Maybe it's because that "self correcting" system seems to make sure those incompetent bstrds are rewarded so richly...

And I hope to be that "incompetent" someday. How many CEOs do you know personally? How do you think they got there?

Take a ride on the clue train - it ain't because they rose to their personal level of imcompetence. Unless you are running a multi-million dollar company or have a direct relationship and understanding of someone that does, don't think you know what is going on.

So many of us sit on the couch and scream at our team when they mess up thinking that we could do better. We couldn't. They get paid millions for something hardly anyone else can do. CEOs are no different.

[Superman]

Originally posted by legion
Supe, you would drive the country into the ground in short order. Everyone would have everything they want or needed provided by the government, and no on would feel the need to work. And then, who would be left to tax to provide these handouts?

Newly emboldened unions would extort outrageous concessions from companies driving them out of business (killing the golden goose, if you will).

The Law of the Jungle applies, and any attempt to shape things in a more advanced, human way will cause the Earth to leave its orbit and spin wildly into the Sun. It's best not to get in the way of greed, since that is the engine that fuels our society? In a thousand years, assuming our ball is habitable for that long, I think people will look at this thinking and shake their heads in embarrassment. Is there anything, other than "effectiveness" or "cleverness" or "resourcefulness" that you think separates us from the other animals? Are we just very effective hunter/gatherers........or is there a more fundamental difference?

Nevermind. I'm guessing that the folks I am trying to reach will not understand that question. One of my favorite movie lines: "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are placed here to rise above."

[legion]

Supe, I don't think you could appreciate the irony of your comments.

[Moneyguy1]

Lube:

It has been my pleasure to know a few CEOs. Interestingly enough, many of these rose to their lofty positions by a combination of luck and pull. A few were genuinely talented and deserved their position but there were enough of the others to make me realize that schmoozing ability can and does trump talent. Interlocking boards help too.

[daepp]

I've known quite a few CEO's in the finance field, and to a person they share drive, work ethic, quick thinking and a personality that makes employees want to work for them.

[M.D. Holloway]

Originally posted by Superman
:....Is there anything, other than "effectiveness" or "cleverness" or "resourcefulness" that you think separates us from the other animals? Are we just very effective hunter/gatherers........or is there a more fundamental difference?

nope, that pretty much sums it up. Well, then again we do like to ***** more than most other animals and we are pretty good at ruining our environment. The upside is we cook and bake better than other animals but thats because we like to eat till we are massively over weight. Oh ya, lets not forget killing and torture for fun and profit.

I guess we do have alot over other animals. They are just trying to get by everyday. We got that mastered!

[Superman]

Indeed, the RANGE of human behavior is breathtaking. Men sometimes take action to protect other humans and accept the fact that they will certainly, or almost certainly, die. For someone they don't know.

At the other end of the scale, there are people like Uday.

Talk about RANGE..........

[Moneyguy1]

Interesting to see responses advocating actions overseas to provide "freedom and liberty" to these folks, and the same posters staunchly against helping Americans with problems.

Why is this? How can this be a logical P.O.V.?

I must be totally out of the loop when it comes to modern philosophy.