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The most popular reviews in /r/askaconservative:
Everyone is claiming that some group rules America:
https://archive.org/details/WhoRulesAmerica
The fact is that we the voters and consumers rule it, and we make poor decisions as a group.
No one wants to face that reality.
>None of those examples can be tied to socialized healthcare.
I refer you to the definition I cited, and the example I cited from Greece's socialized health care system.
How are our tax dollars spent?
Whether the average tax liability is just under $10,000 or a little less than $15,000, it's still a lot of money for most people, and it's important to know where those dollars go. Pew Research broke down how the United States federal government spent $3.95 trillion in 2016, with senior writer Drew DeSilver noting that the country is basically a giant insurance company that has a side business in defense:
About $2.7 trillion -- more than two-thirds of the total -- went for various kinds of social insurance (Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, unemployment compensation, veterans benefits and the like). Another $604 billion, or 15.3% of total spending, went for national defense; net interest payments on government debt was about $240 billion, or 6.1%. Education aid and related social services were about $114 billion, or less than 3% of all federal spending.
Every other program -- public broadcasting, NASA, national parks, foreign aid, and everything else -- adds up to the remaining 6% of the federal budget. Here's how each major spending area breaks down:
24% Social Security 15% Medicare 15% Defense 13% Health 13% Income Security 6% Net Interest 5% Veterans Benefits 6% Other 3% Education
In other words, you pay for benefits for other people, not for yourself or your family.
If you don’t like the Upton Sinclair quote, you can take multiple from Helen Campbell’s Women Wage-Earners. She describes various types of sexual assault and discrimination that occurred to female factory workers, household workers, etc. in her 1883 (publication)[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15204/15204-h/15204-h.htm]. And strange that you should dismiss one of the best law schools in the country so readily.
The happiness data seems entirely separate to sexual assault. If you look at trends across the world, women have been getting less happy, and that tends to inversely follow expectations of equality. So in countries where there’s a higher expectation of gender equality, women are less happy because they have higher expectations for their lives which are not being met. So the exact same harassment of a woman in the US would probably cause more emotional distress than of a woman in, say, India, where sexual harassment is more accepted as part of the culture.
Same with a lot of other behavior. Studies in the US show that an uneven balance of household chores contribute to depression in women where that is not the case in some of the third-world countries. And working women in the US still, on average, do significantly more household work than working men, which further contributes to their distress.
Women were happier because they didn’t have expectations of equality in the 1950s like they do now, but that isn’t to say their lives were of higher quality in any significant regard back then than now. It’s the classic saying, ignorance is bliss. And I don’t think most women would want to go back to the inequality that existed back then either.
I think you might find this Hubpiece or this NPR piece useful. The answer is that shelter is there, but many homeless refuse it. The pieces go into the numerous reasons why. You can lead a horse to water but you can not make it drink.
I think we as a society need to gauge charity by what opportunity is offered, not by what opportunity is seized. Individuals have free will and many will refuse soup lines out of pride. We have to respect decisions made by other adults, even when it pains us to do so.
We see similar memes present in things like the wage gap between men and women. If you average all men and average all women, most of the wage gap is due to free willed decisions by women to be in jobs with fewer hours or lower pay.
We also see this in racial makeup of workforces. In many case an organization has mostly white/asian people because no qualified candidates of other miniorities applied, or the few that did got jobs but there were not enough to equal their percentage in society as a whole.
When you have say women as a group participate less in S&T fields, this means there will simply be less of them in an S&T business, and there is no discrimination at play. It is supply and demand.
The common thread here is basing observances on outcomes rather than opportunities. Geniune failure of charity occurs when people actually want and need and must rely upon something and it is not available. Genuine discrimination occurs when there is an abundance of people applying for a job, and they pass all the color blind metrics needed to be considered for that job, yet they are disproportionately selected for the job.
I hope you can get this point, because this outcomes fallacy is a pretty common one.
Thank you!
What a great article...
There are 3 points in that link I'd like to bring up. At the time of the article's writing the author said:
Under Obama's term the national debt raised roughly 9B or a 77% increase from the day he took office.
Congress is also to blame as are other factors like social security which is running on autopilot. Obamas direct contribution was about 4.5B. Any new president will have the same issues.
Under Bush's term the debt rose over 80%
So if any new president comes into office and has a preloaded deck on their table what can they do? If they add to the overall GDP does it matter?
Here is that GDP to debt ratio:
> Because there is no true socialists according to socialists.
Maybe they are just lying. The foundation of the Left, ideology, is truth-averse when that truth cannot be used to advance the ideology, which is like a type of viral belief system.
> 1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods > > 2 > > a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property > > b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state > > 3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done. -- <em>Merriam-Webster Dictionary</em>, "Socialism"
Since this is not a historically controversially term, we can use that.
While I generally agree, Big Tech is scared of Dissenter.
I sense that people are willing to follow what others do, and the cutting edge is now using DuckDuckGo and Dissenter instead of Google+ (heh) and Google.
There is a strong relationship between economic freedom and economic growth. You can easily find numerous academic articles on the subject with a quick google search. Think about what has happened in China and India over the past few decades. Both have become substantially more free economically and have had explosive economic growth. There's a few main reasons IMO: politicians simply can't manage complex economies with anywhere near the efficiency of a market, too much regulation strangles businesses, and property rights help incentivize people to work hard and take risks.
Conservatives also tend to believe that economic freedom is good in and of itself because freedom is good. Milton Friedman makes a compelling argument in Capitalism and Freedom (essential reading) that political freedom requires economic freedom. If the government controls our economic lives, how much dissent can there really be? Just as most employees don't feel free to criticize their employer, if we all work for the government, dissent and sharing of ideas will be nonexistent.
Ebul nazi here. I as a matter of fact am on good terms with a good dozen Chinese, a bisexual, and a handful of Hispanics at my workplace. I'm very good friends with a Vietnamese guy and a black girl. They are aware of my views and tend to be pretty okay with it.
Not that saying this matters, as I don't have proof, and you being a typical reddit user, I can't possibly be telling the truth.
If for some strange reason you want to learn about my evil ideology:
>"You believe in equality, therefore you argue for equality" is not an ad hominem.
I believe in equality and by extension an egalitarian therefore I'm incorrect in my assessment of your claim is an ad hominem.
Definition ad hominem
(of a criticism, etc.) directedagainst a person, rather than against what that person is saying
what evidence do you have that I believe in equality or egalitarian (criticism of me rather than my claims)? If you provide this op as evidence, I would have to point out that the op is a question for conservatives and not a position on my beliefs about equality. Therefore you do not have evidence of my position on equality. But you've labeled me as egalitarian and provided that as evidence as why I don't believe your claim is true.
>We are moving from general to general here, so none of these apply. Are executives generally working a harder job than fry cooks?
If this was your initial claim then I am wrong in an inductive fallacy claim. But it seems that your evidence for a generalized claim is still extremely limited to a sample of one, you. Is it rationally justified for anyone to believe a claim based on a sample size of one, you?
> The rest of it is that the company really does need to do safety and efficacy studies, because it's a new medication, and these are very expensive.
According to a 2014 Tufts study, the cost of developing and getting a new drug through the FDA approval process is ... [deep breath] ... <strong>$2.56 billion</strong>. Plus another $300 million in post-approval procedures required by the FDA.
And the chances that any given drug will be approved is around 5,000-10,000 to 1.
>We have to deal with an extra 10-15 years before a new medication goes generic and gets cheaper.
Manufacturers typically get around 20 years from the time that a patent is submitted. But keep in mind that it takes about 12 years for a drug to be approved by the FDA. So drug manufacturers typically get around 8 years they can sell the drug before they have to compete with generics, so they try to make up their costs during that time frame.
Yes the industry faces many challenges, but capitalism is about meeting challenges with innovation. The outlook for private health insurance isn't quite so bleak though, unless I am misinformed. Source.
> I said in the very same sentence that there is a 6K average tax payment for free access to all health services.
The key word there is "average." If twenty people have healthcare, and one pays $100k in taxes and nineteen pay zero, then the average is $5k.
> Minimum wage in Ontario, Canada’s largest province by population (14.32M people or close to half of all Canadians) is $14/hr btw.
In other words, $10.54 US.
What about the rising number of people getting paid minimum wage? Does this tell you something about the effects of all this "free" stuff?
>Because unfortunately, conservative values build nations and liberal values tear them down
Give us one example, please.
> The job of the government is recorded in the Constitution.
Yes, but as Scalia wrote in his book, it's a matter of interpretation. It's a very informative book. I recommend you read it.
> Both sides have an agenda and that agenda is to inflate the well being of their supporters so that those supporters will continue to put them in power.
I agree. Who are the supporters and how do we take them down? Trump has made them all members of his cabinet.
Interesting comment about the elite appeasing the poor at the expense of those in the middle. That sounds about right.
If you haven't read Robert Frank's Luxury Fever it would help flesh out my comment about the rich in scandinavia having good lives.
The basic idea is that the rich already have all their basic needs met so their extra income/wealth is used to chase scarce goods such as real estate, country club memberships and large yachts. If they are all taxed the same amount it will not really affect their access to real estate and country clubs (assuming foreign buyers are not a large factor) and it will just tend to downsize all of their yachts by some % which will not have any real effect on their happiness.
It has often been remarked that the only point of having a huge yacht (as opposed to a pretty big one) is to have a bigger one than your rival.
>Yes... they are...
No, they aren't. Like I said, this is basic stuff. You should know it from high school economics. The oversimplified version: currency is a tangible representation of money. But it isn't money itself in the same way that a coupon for a Big Mac isn't food.
Currency is a token representation of money and, yes, a medium of exchange. And, in fact, it's a measure of money, in that we use currency terms to express monetary value in much the same way we use miles to express terms of distance. But while money is intrinsic value, currency is simply the representation of that value in a manner determined by a government or other authority. The value of currency is reliant on public confidence in the currency and the issuing body. However, money includes value held outside of those systems.
Fun fact, only about 10% of the worlds money is represented with hard currency. The rest exists in various forms of assets. The Federal Reserve actually tracks currency supply separately than the rest of the money supply (M0 versus M1, M2, and M3.) If you were correct, this wouldn't be possible.
>I'm not arguing; I pointed out that you are conflating an universal constant in eceonomics with one specific theory.
Okay, but since I didn't exclude S&D's role in other economic systems, what you said didn't really add anything. So I guess you're just talking for the sake of talking now.
In that case, we are all our own teacher. We all have to interpret or translate what we read and hear and see.
There is no simple "overview" of physics, and there is no simple "overview" of economics.
Go grab a copy of "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith. It's a tome, but it is a fun read, and you'll learn far more about economics by reading it than any textbook I have ever found.
If you wanted to learn physics, I'd tell you to grab a physics textbook and start on Chapter 1. Same thing.
I've gone ahead and purchased a few books based on your recommendations: The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle and The Republic by Plato, as well as a few others based on Diversity's authors. I'll post reviews as I finish them and maybe we can have a chat about them. Thanks!
I've gone ahead and purchased a few books based on your recommendations in what I believe are your articles. I went ahead and got The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, and On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche as well as a few others based on Suspender's authors. I'll post reviews as I finish them and maybe we can have a chat about them. Thanks!
I am guilty of snark. Apologies. I'll go cool off.
Thanks for giving me the well-deserved dope slap.
I read Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" in college. Can't say I remember much. I don't know Sowell at all. I'll try to give them a (re) read.
Bullshit. You never read your Adam Smith.
>"To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry, in any particular art or manufacture, is in some measure to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, and must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation." - The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith Book IV, Part 4, Chapter II.
In fact, Smith specifically railed against monopolies which he called the "engine of the mercatile system," the very system he argued against because of the restrictions it placed on industry and workers.
See, the difference between you and me is that you read a Wikipedia article and I teach college-level economics. This also illustrates why I don't allow my students to cite Wikipedia in their papers.
Well, start with Wealth of Nations. If you're going to go around name-dropping Adam Smith, you should at least know what you're talking about.
Follow that up with "Freakonomics. It's pretty dumbed down, but it illustrates how basic economic principles can be applied to real-life situations.
Then take a look at Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. It gets a bit dense but is very good at relating the principles discussed back to historical examples.
If you're still looking for more, try Unintended Consequences for a detailed break down of the subprime lending crisis.
I disagree. We can see motifs reoccurring throughout history. For example, in book 1 of the Republic by Plato, Socrates argues against Thrasymachus' view that can be summed up as "might is right". This view persists to this day under the new name of political realism. Hobbes simply expounded on it hundreds of years later. This one example among countless others shows that human nature has not changed whatsoever. What has changed is our technological capabilities based on the chance discovery that lead to the industrial revolution. This new technology gave us new means by which we could observe the universe and so come to a clearer understanding of physical processes. That is the only thing that makes us different from those that came before us.
I don't deny that in science we do stand on the shoulders of giants, however that's because we have accepted the results of the experiments before us as factual. This new knowledge simply tells us HOW, but does not explain meaning (WHY). the meanings derived from empirical data and logical abstractions are where this conversation began, so ill reiterate: the conclusions that we draw from empirical data (be it from our senses or technology) are similar to those that countless humans have proposed through the history of humanity.
Btw, I'm on my phone so sorry if there are errors in grammar.
I've never read any of the books on your list but looking at it I would highly suggest this:
The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought https://www.amazon.com/dp/1595230165/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_vR69ybRHYDTWR
Also, The Art of the Deal by President Trump is required reading!
A good book on this is Now You Are Less Dumb by David McRaney. Each chapter is on a psychological phenomenon that distorts our perception, e.g. The Common Belief Fallacy, The Benjamin Franklin Effect, The Post Hoc Fallacy, The Halo Effect.
I found it made me look hard at what I believe in.
So short answer: YES.
Conscience of a Conservative is pretty short (88 pages). In fact, it's only 99 cents on the Kindle store. Dereliction of Duty is a lot longer (480 pages), but you can still get a used copy for about $4 after shipping on Amazon.