Unthinking Majority wrote:If I have a workshop where I make wooden tables, and we agree that I will make you a table in exchange for $200 or a few pieces of gold or whatever, and I defend my workshop with a gun and a cranky dog, the government isn't needed in any of this and yet we just engaged in capitalism.
Perhaps me and my buddies can come up in the middle of the night when you are sleeping, kill your dog and yourself, kidnap your family and keep your workshop for myself and sell your family after a few of my buddies rape them... What you are suggesting has occurred in the past... didn't work so well.
There is nothing that says your workshop is yours, nor that the land where your workshop exists is yours other than the society that you live in.
Julian658 wrote:It would be nearly impossible for anyone with an IQ over 70 to lose 100,000 in the current market. I think you are a POC who is very poor and bitter.
You have this proclivity to put into written words those thoughts that should have been flagged as non-sense by well functioning prefrontal cortex.
This is simply not true.
Where were you when news kept going non-stop about how Billionare Carl Icahn lost 1.5bil on his stake on Hertz? Or when Warren Buffet Lost equally humongous amounts as well? The "markets" is not the S&P 500 and the DOW... those are indexes which are very heavily skewed towards a handful of very large american coorporations, many of which didn't suffer from the pandemic or perhaps even thrived. Amazon is doing great since everything is online... so is microsoft for similar reasons (online services, people having to buy computers for home offices, etc) similar with apple (same reasons), etc.
Successful investment has less to do with IQ and more to do with 1. Patience, 2. Luck and 3. Information. Information is very hard to have, either it cost a fortune of people doing research... or it is borderline illegal (e.i. insider trading, unless you happen to be a senator in which case it is OK
).
Unthinking Majority wrote:Socialism is the state taking people's possessions by threat of violence, and then giving it to other people. That's literally theft.
I consider taxes theft also. I'm not anti-taxes, but it is what it is.
If you worked your butt off to build a successful company over the course of your working life and then the government stole it from you I doubt you'd be very happy about it.
And I consider your point ridiculous.
The terms of "property" or "taxes" only exists under the paradigm of a society that accepts that you "own something". There is nothing in the universe that dictates that the computer that I am using to write this reply is "mine". It is society that decided that if I worked X amount of hours at X amount of money and I spent a portion of that money on this computer, then this computer is "mine". The same society has ruled that if you "steal" my computer, and you get caught and it is proven... you can suffer penalties (fine, imprisoment, death, etc). Theft only exists within the confines of what this paradigm set up by society... the same society which has agreed upon parameters for tax collection. You might not enjoy taxes but it is not theft.
When you say:
Socialism is the state taking people's possessions by threat of violence, and then giving it to other people.
You demonstrate that you are not familiar with what you are speaking off.
For one... socialism is an economic paradigm, not a governing one. What you are instead proposing in your comment is nothing more than a caricature/propaganda. Despite the fear mongerings of "you gonna become like venezuela" or "this is going to be the same as cuba" the fact of the matter is, that the core tenents of socialism (means of production owned by the community), is not compatible with a dictatorship form of goverment (such as cuba). They might call themselves socialists, communists, or pandas for all I care... but that does not make it so.