Some certainly try. A good number of them succeed. That's capitalism for you. Wouldn't be possible in a well structured and sustainable socialist nation.

I dunno. Don't see that it makes any difference to the topic. It's a capitalist system, what did you expect?

No you are the one showing naivete. You're so naive you didn't even refute me like you apparently think you did, and so I have no reason to respond.

Nope lots of people can't travel and they come to you in those circumstances, even in the US. Also, cherry picking services requiring a modicum of effort doesn't alter your instant access to other services for which no effort on your part must be made; thus the original analogy still fails.

I bet they also all worked for him, thus they were in fact supervised. You obviously haven't any idea how criminal organisations function.

Bullshit they can't. There are kids outside right now playing in the snow without any adults in sight. Maybe you should get out more.

TELL me and everyone reading HOW FUNCTIONALLY (the mechanics of) are not a form of extortion and theft.  Here try a dictionary definition.

The government send you a bill telling you that you owe a certain amount of money.  If you don't pay it, and you resist long enough, they come WITH GUNS and will take you against your will.  

1. the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats.

    

    

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 IF you or I do what was described in my response above, we would go to jail.  In other words, if you or I, come to someone's house after demanding pay and then take them out at gun point, and ultimately take it, that is theft.  YET the government does it, well now, that is OK.  Taking something that does not belong to you is wrong, and is thus theft.

Yes. I know we need to take out the capitalist gangsters so we can be ruled by the socialist gangsters.

Under Socialism the labor unions will be the ones to pay off the politician. Big improvement there.

Now you're showing what damn liar you are.

You stated that goverment is not a scam because they pay out benefits. I could go on all day showing you definitions and examples of scams where the scammer will payout something to try to make it not look like a scam. It's called a pyramid scam because the early investors get something back. That is how a shell game works. You build confidence in the people being scammed by paying out something. That is the only way it could grow.

Now are you going to admit this statement  was wrong?

In socialism everyone would be roughly equal in terms of power. Merit would take some further, which is much better than accident of birth or luck. So no gangsters, sorry.

Under socialism politicians won't have enough power to be worth buying, so again you fail.

You're the liar. You've been lying since I first met you, suggesting you've always been a liar, and will always be a liar.

And you've failed to refute that fact.

Which would merely be more evidence of your stupidity. Every scam out there eventually collapses under its own weight. The longest running scams, (christianity, etc.), are starting to fray rapidly. Governments have been delivering an increasing number of services since before those religions existed, and show no sign of failing. Some specific nations have collapsed, but in general things have been consistently improving overall for more than 3000 years. You have NOTHING. Your entire position from the foundation up is literally pure bullshit. You are a lying, moronic, scum sucking, shit-for-brains loser.

Prove that food is unaffordable today compared to what it was when our population was much smaller. 

We don't have population problems because our population is very small compared to what we are capable of supporting. Our poorest cities actually have the opposite problem, their populations are leaving and causing large gaps in their economy where basic services simply no longer exist- Detroit exhibit A, Chicago working on being B. 

So? That is what happens when you have a complex problem caused by hundreds and thousands of factors. No single solution is going to be magically make it disappear. Reducing the size of the population in most modern countries would actually aggravate the problem- humans create value, if they disappear (or never existed) you lose real wealth. In dense countries, worrying about population pressure might be worthwhile, but certainly not a blanket answer everywhere. 

We have, and the rate of population increase didn't go up, it went down. We produce approximately 10 times per acre that we produced in the early 1900's, our population is only about 2.1 times what it was, despite large amounts of immigration, and our birth rate is falling. Hence the mountains of evidence that Malthus' base assumptions were wrong. He assumed the population would double every 25 years without population controls. He assumed that a population would quickly expand if it had the boom in agricultural production that the US experienced, it didn't happen. Solely increasing the food supply doesn't have anywhere near the effect on population levels he predicted.

You mean exponentially, but the fact is that they don't. Look at current population growth rates, they don't grow anywhere near the rates Malthus predicted despite our poorest of the poor living more comfortable lives. HIS idea of someone above poverty was someone who could "afford a piece of meat once a week". Virtually all Americans eat meat every meal, or at least daily. Even the poor unemployed dishwashers. There is no doubt that the poverty in his time was far more severe than we see in any developed nation today, possible exception for the rural areas of China, which remain very impoverished (while the cities with all the population pressures are experiencing the lowest levels of poverty they have ever seen, albeit still impoverished compared to our lavish lifestyles)

Populations haven't grown as fast as he predicted, and yeah, a lot of that is due to factors he couldn't forsee. No doubt the much easier access to birth control is a factor and we know for certain that education dramatically lowers birthrates. Also, there is pretty significant correlation evidence that a social system guaranteeing retirement care lowers birth rates- thge theory as to why is that one of the reasons that people continued having many kids late was to ensure that some of them survived to take care of them when they were old and infirm. 

Meanwhile, food production has grown exponentially and there is good reason to believe that it will continue to throughout our lifetimes and possibly beyond. We farm far less acreage, with far less human labor and we produce far more than we need. Groceries have become a commodity that acts more like what Malthus termed "wrought commodities", in that we can increase or decrease production to meet demand. Applying Malthus' analysis of wrought commodities to food and his predictions are much more noteworthy. 

In case you haven't noticed over the years, I am a libertarian. 

I've lived in my car and have gone to food banks. Money was an issue, food never was in terms of actually facing starvation. I do prefer to be able to afford lobster. Stay on topic. You are claiming a Malthusian catastrophe, not just people living below societal standards. 

Without a population you have no wealth. Humans create wealth. America is America because we had a ridiculously fast growing population that was quickly put to work creating wealth efficiently and effectively. It made us the richest country in the world by far. An argument could be made that one of the reasons that our growth in wealth slowed is because we started restricting legal immigration. There is certainly a correlation, proving the cause would probably be difficult, but easier than you trying to prove your baseless claims. 

How does starving people pay for infrastructure? Do you even understand why money has value?

Yet our road system didn't exist anywhere close to what it is now 100 years ago. Until the 60's only a couple generations ago, the interstate system was zero roads. Airports were non-existent. The Internet, which while not capable of transporting physical goods, improved our infrastructure exponentially by allowing it to be radically more efficient at getting goods to where the demand is quickly. We HAVE built infrastructure fast enough. Perhaps the only place we aren't building it fast enough is electricity, though that is due to political barriers more than practical construction problems. Indeed, in the area of housing, we built infrastructure too fast! that is what the housing bubble was and why we have a ton of empty houses sitting around a lot of the US. 

In the future, it is forseeable that we will have drones, self driving cars, 3d printers and other innovations which will allow continued improvements to the efficiency of our infrastructure. And that is just what is coming in the next few decades. 

Famine is a huge risk when you are mostly dependent on one crop. There would have been a famine if it was one family with one field of potatos that was wiped out. You know how you solve that problem? A larger population with more farmers growing multiple different types of crops so that if potatos fail, you have corn or soy and vice versa. It didn't occur because there were too many people in Ireland. It would have occurred regardless of how large or small the population was. If it was small, it might have been wiped out completely. One of the reasons Ireland remained very poor for so long after the famine (although your logic they should have been rich because they had a much lower population and the agricultural production the size they had with a larger population) was because such a large portion of their population died or emigrated and that really fucks with an economy. 

The government only has money if there are people paying taxes. The more people, the more of them pay taxes, the more money government has for things like building bridges. That is why large cities have huge budgets that allow them to build all sorts of things that you don't get in rural areas. If I wanted a bridge to be built, I would probably have to build it myself because my local government doesn't have anywhere near the funds for any such large project.

Traffic jams only happen in the rich areas of my state. 

Nice vacant slogan. The poor don't sit in traffic jams, they don't have cars. 

And again, Malthus was wrong. We have been able to build our infrastructure fast enough in general. The housing crises was an example of too much infrastructure- more houses built than people to live in them. That is why they are sitting empty and not being rented. One of the solutions has been to actually tear down the houses to remove the excess. Gasoline was expensive, now it isn't. Why? Because production increased and is now at a point where it is much higher than we need. Although applying Malthusian catastrophe to things like roads is very anti-Malthus. Malthus believed that the market could and would provide anything manmade to keep pace with population growth. He made an exception for food because he thought that food was inherently limited. Understandable given his time, but now we know better. 
 
 

I did? I'm sure you remember it much better than I do. Isn't it easier when everyone in the world just acts like a character in your little fantasy play?

More pure unsupported conjecture, and conjecture that runs directly contrary to your previous unsupported conjecture where you claimed that poverty limited population. 

At most, the amount of resources sets a ceiling. A ceiling may or may not be binding. For us in the US, the ceiling is currently nowhere near a binding one, so worrying about it is foolish. The same thing can be observed in nature. Animal populations have some limit where they will be overpopulated, but they don't necessarily expand to meet that limit. If they did, every ecosystem in the world would constantly be at or near 100% capacity. The reality is that there are many other factors that come into play and some ecosystems are so plentiful that there is no real danger of ever approaching the ceiling. 

To put it in economic terms, suppose the government decided to cap wealth to lower the population of the evil rich. If they declared that no one needed more than $1 billion in assets and seized anything above that, the ceiling would be binding and the government would force the population of the rich all below $1 billion in value. Suppose instead that someone opposed to the plan edited the law and made it $1 trigintillion, in that case, the ceiling wouldn't be binding and in no danger of being binding now or anytime in the forseeable future. It would be meaningless to worry about it. Just because the ceiling is in place, doesn't mean that suddenly rich people are going to be making decillions of dollars. Other existing factors will hold their wealth well shy. 

Show that immigration has been an economic negative for the US. 

Virtually everyone in the US lives much better today than they did decades ago. Again, you have absolutely no basis for your claims. You are just making shit up. 

More ignorance. Organic has absolutely nothing to due with the nutrients in the food. That we are so wealthy that some people are willing to pay twice the price for produce that was inefficiently grown is evidence that we have no real supply problem with our food. You don't find people worrying about organic or non-organic when there is an actual shortage. American diets are unhealthy because americans like convenience and unhealthy food tastes better. 

Of course they wouldn't, Marx and Engles supported the complete overthrow of the capitalist system so they wouldn't support any policy in a capitalist system at all. 

This is a democracy. We'll vote in a different party in the next election who will bring taxes back down. Idiot.
I already covered your other question, and you STILL have failed to legitimise your claim that taxes are theft.

You can either click on the button with the chain symbol almost in the exact middle of the top row, or you can click source and manually code it with <a href="http://www.mylinkaddress.com">any text you want blue and clickable here</a> 

 When humans talk of political parties are religions or business models all of it is the same stupid refusal to understand all of it is an act of communcation to replicate what we think works for us as a species. Evolution is diverse and any idea that tries to slap that on diversity is fucking bullshit. Long before humans settled in cities and set up boarders we saught resources. I value western ideas more because they take into account that diversity. Some in the west however have taken our open system as license to make class an automatic morality.

Anytime you see an imbalance in a society you will see instablilty, shifting from a more open socity or a more closed society is not the fucking issue. Starve enough people to death evolution kicks in. Nick Hanauer a BILLIONAIRE understands this.

Beyond and Ibweik are right in that economic views are complex. They are only important to humans to undertand, not to make excuses for them, but to detangle them so that humans can understand the core is the same no matter what humans set up.

FUCK CHE FUCK AYN, it still amounts to making excuses to take advantages of reasources, and humans have always needed resources. BALANCE not parties, diversity, not monopolies. Ultimately whatever humans set up it is still the same rock we all live on.

I really could give a shit less how much people despise me, but my hope for this imperfect world would be that more people understand Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. The world is natural, and part of that nature is our ability to cooperate. None of us are bound by law to like each other or only say nice things about each other, but in the end we still need resources.

You NEVER answerd the question....SO WHAT if you elect a new party in place, what if they don't repeal the tax increase on you or at least lower it, does that make it OK?  Are you ever going to answer?  OR...are you just going to keep insulting me as usual?  

 Give it up Brian, you don't even know what capitalism is, you can't tell the difference between capitalism, marxism, mercantilism, feudalism or any other major economic system ever in place or theorized. Let alone get into any serious discussion about any of the main schools of economic study. There are chimps who have a better grasp of basic economics than you do and parrots that have more to say.  

You don't have a fucking clue what Che, Ayn, Marx or any other historical figure believed. Hell, I'm willing to bet that you can't even talk intelligently about what your butt buddy Nick Hanauer believes, you probably didn't even bother to actually watch his TED talk that got him in the news. All you know is that he had a couple of one liners that you liked and read in HuffPo and the Daily Kos and now he is your ctrl-v. 

Folks...see...He has NEVER answered my questions, but rather, he just dodges and uses an homs.  He cannot bring himself to admit that there is no difference in the force used by government to collect taxes vs the force used by criminals to extort money from their victims.  

This comment has been moved here.

Ok, so you admit your earlier claim about food being expensive is false. And no, it doesn't prove Malthus correct, because he argued quite convincingly that wrought commodities weren't an issue because humans would always create what was needed. He made a very clear distinction between food and wrought commodities. He saw food as a problem, because he saw it as inherently limited, and no matter what humans did, they couldn't force extra production from mother Earth. While wrought commodities- things like roads, houses, tools etc. weren't an issue because the materials are plentiful and we can always make more to meet population needs. He actually argued against Says Law. So if you are right (which you aren't) then Malthus was not only wrong about food (which I would argue has reached the point of being a wrought commodity in a Malthusian context) he was wrong about everything.

Except that "inevitable" catastrophe hasn't hit other cities with population booms. 

Except teachers did live there and their population was doing very well relative to the rest of the country. Many a blue collar worker had a retirement that was remarkably luxurious compared to other blue collar workers. 

If by "small" you mean a few million people. However they "managed" their immigration, Detroit still would have been headed downhill when the people who maintained their infrastructure left for greener pastures. Infrastructure requires people to run, when people leave- in Detroits case because of jobs in Chicago's case because of gang violence- everything falls apart. It isn't because the infrastructure was insufficient in raw materials to provide for the population, it was because the people who provided it no longer had an economic incentive to put in the human labor necessary. Malthus wasn't talking about the economics of distribution systems, he was talking about actual physical shortages of food. IOW, no matter how perfect your distribution system was, there wouldn't be enough food. That was his disagreement with Marx, because Marx believed that there was enough food for everyone with an improved distribution system, while Malthus argued that food shortages was an inherent and unchangeable reality of society, which poverty and vice were tools that humans used to limit their populations, preventing massive famines. 

There are many arguments for immigration from every school of economic thought. 

Yet the only constraints we have are voluntary. He argued that the constraints on population growth occurred BECAUSE of food shortages. We clearly don't have a food shortage-if anything we have massive food surpluses- yet we have many constraints on our population growth still being practiced and not being enforced by laws. He had two main premises in his original essay:

P1. Population grows exponentially while food production grows arithmically.

P2. Populations will grow to match the maximum food production of a society.  

Question: In most societies population growth doesn't exceed their maximum food production, why?

Conclusion: Misery, vice and morals act as limiting factor on population growth and therefore, population growth approaching the physical limits of food production is the main cause of misery and vice. Therefore, it is impossible to eliminate misery and vice.

P1 is proven false, food production has grown exponentially.

P2 is proven false, the US population as well as many other modern countries has not grown to exceed physical food production capabilities or even to approach the limit. We can have a major drought as we did just a few years ago and we still produce more than our country eats- and our country eats way more than strictly needed to survive.

So that leads to a false conclusion, our population growth has slowed and obviously we still have misery and vice and there are still plenty of right wingers banging their moral fists on the pulpit. The only possible conclusion is that there are factors at work beyond mere food shortages. (Although his main assertion that society is not "perfectible" or that it is impossible to get rid of misery and vice, is probably still true for other reasons- it was a question of whether it was possible to eliminate poverty that was the inspiration for the essay)

It is being built you fucking ignorant idiot. Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta have spent billions of dollars on research and development. The newest release is a drought resistent corn that was planted on some half million acres last year and increased yields in dry areas almost 10%. How do they pay for it? By getting corn at about half the price they paid for it two years ago. Better technology= better yields = lower prices. Agriculture biotech is currently one of the best funded and immensely profitable fields out there. One of the few industries that grew consistently through our most recent recession as crashing land prices met with global turbulence in the grain markets.

I'd be terrified if you agreed with me. 

All I can do is facepalm. I haven't the energy to go down that rabbit hole with you, let's stick to Malthus.  

It isn't an either or choice. 

You do know that all adults have to be children first right? Kids grow up, get jobs and pay taxes. 

If you are "forced" to live in your car in US today it isn't the fault of the Mexican mowing lawns. Indeed, from a Malthusian standpoint, Mexican immigration is a savior to us since they account for a very disproportionate amount of our agricultural labor, and thus directly and immediately increase our food supply- which according to Malthus is a very positive thing. Before you go touting someone, you should probably make sure you actually agree with them. 

What isn't cheaper and better than 20-30 years ago? Yeah, short term we had a recession that sucked- it also caused a huge drop in our immigration. During the 90's when immigration was extremely high and we saw the largest increase in immigrants as a percentage of our population of any decade since such numbers were tracked, our economy boomed and damn near everyone was better off. It doesn't matter how you twist the numbers, immigration is greatly beneficial. There are dozens of better theories, but you have already decided that population is the only lens you will look through. You didn't arrive at your conclusion carefully analyzing data, you created your conclusion and you attempt to figure out how to justify it. 

Perhaps that is the problem, you get your information from movies. 

Asshole, low wage workers are not paying for it. How the fuck does a dishwasher pay the high salary of a Monsanto scientist?

These 3 companies you mentioned are some the biggest corporate welfare queens out there. It is taxpayers and money borrowed from wealthy places China. The USA is on debt death spiral.

So do you think 60+ million people on food stamps is sustainable? Is ever increasing taxation on the middle class to pay for Monsanto's corporate welfare sustainable? Is government debt sustainable?

So is your vision of the future a small group of lazy wealth capitalists get richer, while all the workers are kept alive on cheap high fructose corn syrup and live in their cars cause all the land to build affordable houses is owned by the Monopoly game winners? And we keep bringing in all the cheap labor immigrants the capitalists want cause there's now way they compete for jobs, housing, space on the road or food?

You're only rebuttal seems to be denial that workers are not being squeezed or make this ridiculous claim that low wage workers are funding advanced research, not massive government borrowing.

You also seem to think illegals don't cost anything even though they compete for jobs, housing, space on the roads. The use our hospitals and schools for free and don't pay any taxes. Seems obvious to me we're paying for the cheaper food in other ways, but I'm just an idiot.

Thanks to all the visas for people with Masters and PhDs., you can't get a decent jobs without massive spending on education. This immigration is also a big reason the working middle class is on a downward spiral.

I've explained my position ad nausem. So why don't you explain your theory on why despite all the technological advances and additional infrastructure, live for the poor still sucks and the middle class gets squeezed harder and harder. All the benefits go the bourgeoisie.

Is that a serious question? They employ maybe 100,000 people between the three of them across the entire world and their products are sold to billions. Every time a low wage worker buys a hot pocket they are paying the salary of a scientist. 

Prove it.

A completely different issue. We aren't talking about the US budget. 

What does any of this have to do with the issue at hand? As a portion of our budget, food stamps are a rounding error, although I would contend that people wouldn't starve to death if they were eliminated. A lot of people on food stamps have smart phones. But that has nothing to do with Malthus except to prove his theory even more wrong. We have 60 million people on food stamps, and it is nearly impossible to starve to death in the US, yet our population growth rate has slowed significantly. We can argue about how food should be distributed, but the bottom line is that we produce more than we need and can continue to do so certainly for the next few hundred years.  

I have only asserted that population pressures are not the sole cause of all our problems. Malthus was wrong that population growth would exceed our ability to produce enough food. We produce enough food, period. And we will for the forseeable future. Whether our system of distributing those resources is just, fair or effective is a completely different question. Marx argued that the capitalist system was unjust. His big disagreement with Malthus was because he saw Malthus as an apologist making the argument that poverty wasn't the result of an unjust system, it was a natural and unavoidable result because the population would always grow to bump against the maximum capacity of food production and misery and vice would then be the restraints that would prevent catastrophe. On this point, Marx was right and Malthus was wrong. With our 20/20 hindsight, we can see that food production has grown exponentially and population growth is nowhere close to meeting our food capacity.

Being poor today is a fuckton better than being poor 100 years ago (or even 50 years ago). Immigration and the cheap labor that comes with it has almost always been a net benefit for our society and improved the lives of all the poor. We can thank much of our infrastructure that makes being poor in America so much better than being poor in Mexico to the African, Russians, Irish, Chinese, and Mexican immigrants in the past that came over and worked for low wages or sometimes actually slaves, that allowed us to expand rapidly and take advantage of our natural resources.