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I love this part: The poor spendthrift vagabond says to a rich man: "I have discovered there is enough money in the world for all of us, if it was equally div

I love this part: The poor spendthrift vagabond says to a rich man: "I have discovered there is enough money in the world for all of us, if it was equally divided; this must be done, and we shall all be happy together." "But," was the response, "if everybody was like you, it would be spent in two months, and what would you do then?" "Oh! divide again; keep dividing, of course!"

marcoperaza 11y ago
Reminds me of one of my favorite Maggie Thatcher quotes: "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."
- cname 11y ago
  I don't know why so many people think Socialism is about welfare. Socialism is about who owns and controls the means of production. Read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    Socialism in the traditional sense of the word refers to what people today would more likely call communism. Socialism these days refers to social-democratic movements that want redistribution within an at least somewhat capitalist system. She was taking a swipe at the British Labour Party and their counterparts on the continent, all of whom used the label 'socialist' but were really social democrats. Words mean whatever people think they mean. There's a similar phenomenon with the word liberal. Liberal once referred to, and in some contexts still does, politics that advocates for human freedom from all kinds of government coercion. At least in the US, it has taken on a different meaning over the last hundred years. Now it refers to social-democracy.
    - coliveira 11y ago
      The reason these ideas changed names is because of the political coercion inflicted on socialists. People advocating socialism had to look for other labels that were not tainted with diret connection to oppressive communist regimes.
  - jfaucett 11y ago
    "I don't know why so many people think Socialism is about welfare." Its one of the meanings that the word socialism has come to denote through quotidian usage in media and within Amercian society. Democratic Socialism would likely be a more precise term for these common usage scenarios. see Usage Discussion of socialism at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism
    - dalke 11y ago
      Here's a recent essay in The Atlantic, by Anu Partanen, concerning the difference between the two - http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/bernie-sanders-nordic-countries/473385/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/bernie-s... : > Americans are not wrong to abhor the specters of socialism and big government. In fact, as a proud Finn, I often like to remind my American friends that my countrymen in Finland fought two brutal wars against the Soviet Union to preserve Finland’s freedom and independence against socialism. No one wants to live in a society that doesn’t support individual liberty, entrepreneurship, and open markets. But the truth is that free-market capitalism and universal social policies go well together—this isn’t about big government, it’s about smart government.
    - jwdunne 11y ago
      And yet incorrect. Democratic socialism is the idea that socialism can be achieved through reform rather than revolution. In some respects, it has been less successful than revolutionary socialism: the UK Labour Party, until recently, reformed itself away from democratic socialism. In the UK, welfare as we know it here originated from the Liberal Party, in fairness. Nationalisation (attempted socialism by reform) was the hallmark of the Labour Party, not heavy welfare spending. Since Thatcher, the Tories have a knack for presenting themselves as the thrifty party - in effect, living within our means. Except household budgets are not so analogous to government budgets. It just so happens that this line resonates with the everyday voter in times of economic woe and it's all too easy to paint the social democrat as a boundless spender. An example: in 2007 the Tory Party's shadow chancellor, George Osborne, said he would match Labour's spending plans. Recession hits, tax revenues drop and they harped a very different tune. It's honestly just politics.
  - dave_sullivan 11y ago
    Aren't the means of production pretty much people's minds at this point? I'd like to own and control mine.
    - CPLX 11y ago
      I wouldn't trade for most minds if I had a producing oil well.
    - theoh 11y ago
      Apart from the fact that material production is still the real source of material goods, that sounds like an individualist fantasy. The idea of controlling one's own mind is a tautology, and as for the body, who can say where it starts or ends? We are interdependent. Combine those two assertions and I don't think you can draw any lines around individual persons any more. There is some particularly crazy thinking in philosophy on self-ownership, which may interest you: Cécile Fabre, Whose body is it anyway? Justice and the integrity of the person http://www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/journal/v9/n3/full/cpt200923a.html http://www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/journal/v9/n3/full/cpt2...
    - jdietrich 11y ago
      A semiconductor fab costs several billion dollars. Rollout of a national communications network still costs even more. The world is still full of big lumps of capital that aren't going away any time soon.
      - dave_sullivan 11y ago
        Agreed, and I'd be in favor of those being financed at least partly by the government and offered "at cost" because it lowers barriers to entry for new participants. I'd also include drug research, roads, housing in areas without a housing shortage (IE, not SF or Manhattan), and more. I even think the idea of a living wage makes sense and in fact will be necessary, I just haven't figured out how to pay for it (and frankly, the naive implementation of "just give everyone $X" would be so hugely expensive that it strikes me as infeasible. A working implementation is going to need to be significantly more... creative.) And yet, the big stories of the last decade or two have noted a trend: more value being generated by fewer people with fewer capital expenditures (prime example being MSFT > Google > Facebook > Instagram/Whatsapp/Minecraft). The majority of "capital" in those cases (VC money, if applicable) is spent on engineering salaries. Meanwhile, oil companies are dying, communication networks are barely profitable (cisco?), and "hard industry" is an industry no one optimizing for profitability wants to get into unless it's to break it up and sell it off. Of course you can point to the recently ended energy bonanza during which Exxon became the most valuable company in the world; explaining the drivers of that is beyond the scope of this comment but it's not about energy being a fundamentally awesome business to be in (but briefly, BRIC growth + monopolistic practices to really juice income). So the interplay between brain capital, industrial equipment, and various other types of capital is more complex than "the public should own the means of production". Some of it yes, most of it no. And I'd argue the brain capital trend is going to continue while heavy industry jobs are going to keep disappearing, forcing us to resolve the "interplay between capital" question in a way that doesn't collapse our entire economy, doesn't cause a civil war (and/or avoids one), and doesn't end up with the public (or a small group calling themselves "the public") being able to shake down any success story simply because they figured out how to make more money than the next guy.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    Usually the first two socialist priorities are healthcare and housing. Together those things probably account for 35% of GDP. Consider a trivial example -- the affect that the post ww2 public housing boom did to the US construction industry. Government procurement rules transformed and forced consolidation of the brick industry. On the east coast it went from hundreds of geographically diverse companies to 4-6, all in the south.
  - merpnderp 11y ago
    Socialism is commonly used today to mean a large welfare state. See Bernie Sanders describing the kind of socialists he is, and you'll realize he isn't actually a socialist in the strict sense of the word.
  - tigershark 11y ago
    The world is full of people that think that they can do better than everyone else and they are temporarily disgraced because all the other people are just simpletons that cannot understand their mighty genius. Mental institutions are full of people that think in a freakingly similar way.
- zouhair 11y ago
  At least the witch is dead, we won't have to suffer her stupidity. She managed alone to prove that women can be as hateful and live destroyers as any men.
- arethuza 11y ago
  A bit ironic then that the overall tax burden was rather higher than the previous Labour government for most of her time as PM: "The tax burden (measured by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in the form of total government receipts as a share of national income) started at just above 40 per cent in 1979, peaked at 45.4 per cent in 1982, then fell below 40 per cent in 1990." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/10-things-you-thought-you-knew-about-margaret-thatchers-downing-street-years-8572023.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/10-things-you-... What she did do was reduce the silly taxes on higher level of income - but those taxes were just imposed on poorer people.
carlosnunez 11y ago
Don't show that to the Universal Basic Income diehards...
- dangero 11y ago
  I'm very interested in the concept of basic income, but I don't see any issue with this commentary from PT Barnum. It seems to be more of a statement of fact that some people spend their money more wisely than others. Basic income could be viewed as inline with this statement because you would get an income stipend at some small interval, like once a month, so even if you spent it all last month, this month arrives and you get that basic income again.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- angersock 11y ago
  Even a cursory reading of the story should suggest to a reader a difference between the proposed action (divide equally riches amongst all), and UBI (fund a fixed-amount per citizen per annum). Least of all, if one believes in the ability of capital to be reinvested to create more capital, it is obvious that the second case need hardly injure an economy while still helping the people who are broke. The former case, of continual wealth division, of course may fail--luckily, that's not how UBI works.
  - jjoonathan 11y ago
    > it is obvious that the second case need hardly injure an economy I think an even stronger statement holds true: if you don't actively redistribute then you're effectively making an open-loop amplifier which will amplify noise (who happened to be in the right place at the right time) in preference to signal (effort input) -- which is just as harmful to the cultivation of a beneficial incentive landscape (i.e. one that promotes effort input, since that's tautologically all anyone ever gets to decide) as a failure to reward success would be. Alternatively: it's often better to reduce the transition-state energy than to improve the final reward, which is exactly the opposite of what happens when decisions are made by people who have 1 metric shitton of money to invest in building a moat with the aim of returning 2 metric shittons of money.
PaulRobinson 11y ago
Which is the correct answer. When you spend money, it doesn't disappear. It's just moved.
- lr4444lr 11y ago
  Yes, but the goods it can buy on the next round of division still don't come from the spendthrift vagabond, and if his way of life is incentivized while the producers' is disincentivized by this redistribution, then that circulation won't continue so innocuously.
  - jjoonathan 11y ago
    > spendthrift vagabond An obtuse mischaracterization of the poor; a more typical "sin" would be failure to hop over the ever-rising bar that denotes the ability to secure money by threatening to withhold labor. Circulation goes both ways and it isn't the ability of producers to secure profits that seems to be most endangered at the moment.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      An obtuse mischaracterization of the poor Why do you think it's a characterization of the poor at all? Circulation goes both ways and it isn't the ability of producers to secure profits that seems to be most endangered at the moment. The working poor are themselves producers.
      - jjoonathan 11y ago
        > Why do you think it's a characterization of the poor at all? Because they're the ones who the type of policy we are discussing would actually be intended to benefit. Voicing that side of the argument through a "spendthrift vagabond" is disingenuous at best. > The working poor are themselves producers. I was using the term with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, I thought it would be clear enough from context that I was referring to capital-holders.
johnloeber 11y ago
This is nonsense. Spending money isn't bad at the macro/societal level. Spending is a cornerstone of economic growth.
alwaysdownvoted 11y ago
In 1880 there was no Federal Reserve system. "Money" was backed by commodities of finite quantity.
kamaal 11y ago
The fact that socialists feel entitled to free cash is hardly a surprise. In India which went though decades of socialist rule, its quite common among people to expect others to provide for them all their life. I know a lot of people from my circles, especially older people in the late 50's and 60's who have spent their lives in the socialist era endlessly expect elder brothers/relatives to provide for them. Any refusal to do so is taken to amount to some extremely bad kind of selfishness and greed. Keep alone the fact that they've barely done any work all their lives, or are any way serious even now with their spending habits. The basic idea is that they are entitled to be provided no questions asked and someone is supposed to make up for them. Refusing to comply is evil.
- zouhair 11y ago
  Socialists feel entitled to free money? Do you have some sources on this?
  - SturgeonsLaw 11y ago
    foxnews.com
    - hjhgjtyhgdf 11y ago
      I couldn't find it. Give me a direct foxnews.com link that claims that.
- rorykoehler 11y ago
  From where I am standing it seems capitalists feel entitled to free cash. They take their capital, dump it in the stock market and hey presto free cash! This free cash mostly arises due to some accounting trick and is not productivity backed at all.
  - tomp 11y ago
    Which accounting trick?

marcoperaza 11y ago

Reminds me of one of my favorite Maggie Thatcher quotes: "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

cname 11y ago
I don't know why so many people think Socialism is about welfare. Socialism is about who owns and controls the means of production. Read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  Socialism in the traditional sense of the word refers to what people today would more likely call communism. Socialism these days refers to social-democratic movements that want redistribution within an at least somewhat capitalist system. She was taking a swipe at the British Labour Party and their counterparts on the continent, all of whom used the label 'socialist' but were really social democrats. Words mean whatever people think they mean. There's a similar phenomenon with the word liberal. Liberal once referred to, and in some contexts still does, politics that advocates for human freedom from all kinds of government coercion. At least in the US, it has taken on a different meaning over the last hundred years. Now it refers to social-democracy.
  - coliveira 11y ago
    The reason these ideas changed names is because of the political coercion inflicted on socialists. People advocating socialism had to look for other labels that were not tainted with diret connection to oppressive communist regimes.
- jfaucett 11y ago
  "I don't know why so many people think Socialism is about welfare." Its one of the meanings that the word socialism has come to denote through quotidian usage in media and within Amercian society. Democratic Socialism would likely be a more precise term for these common usage scenarios. see Usage Discussion of socialism at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism
  - dalke 11y ago
    Here's a recent essay in The Atlantic, by Anu Partanen, concerning the difference between the two - http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/bernie-sanders-nordic-countries/473385/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/bernie-s... : > Americans are not wrong to abhor the specters of socialism and big government. In fact, as a proud Finn, I often like to remind my American friends that my countrymen in Finland fought two brutal wars against the Soviet Union to preserve Finland’s freedom and independence against socialism. No one wants to live in a society that doesn’t support individual liberty, entrepreneurship, and open markets. But the truth is that free-market capitalism and universal social policies go well together—this isn’t about big government, it’s about smart government.
  - jwdunne 11y ago
    And yet incorrect. Democratic socialism is the idea that socialism can be achieved through reform rather than revolution. In some respects, it has been less successful than revolutionary socialism: the UK Labour Party, until recently, reformed itself away from democratic socialism. In the UK, welfare as we know it here originated from the Liberal Party, in fairness. Nationalisation (attempted socialism by reform) was the hallmark of the Labour Party, not heavy welfare spending. Since Thatcher, the Tories have a knack for presenting themselves as the thrifty party - in effect, living within our means. Except household budgets are not so analogous to government budgets. It just so happens that this line resonates with the everyday voter in times of economic woe and it's all too easy to paint the social democrat as a boundless spender. An example: in 2007 the Tory Party's shadow chancellor, George Osborne, said he would match Labour's spending plans. Recession hits, tax revenues drop and they harped a very different tune. It's honestly just politics.
- dave_sullivan 11y ago
  Aren't the means of production pretty much people's minds at this point? I'd like to own and control mine.
  - CPLX 11y ago
    I wouldn't trade for most minds if I had a producing oil well.
  - theoh 11y ago
    Apart from the fact that material production is still the real source of material goods, that sounds like an individualist fantasy. The idea of controlling one's own mind is a tautology, and as for the body, who can say where it starts or ends? We are interdependent. Combine those two assertions and I don't think you can draw any lines around individual persons any more. There is some particularly crazy thinking in philosophy on self-ownership, which may interest you: Cécile Fabre, Whose body is it anyway? Justice and the integrity of the person http://www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/journal/v9/n3/full/cpt200923a.html http://www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/journal/v9/n3/full/cpt2...
  - jdietrich 11y ago
    A semiconductor fab costs several billion dollars. Rollout of a national communications network still costs even more. The world is still full of big lumps of capital that aren't going away any time soon.
    - dave_sullivan 11y ago
      Agreed, and I'd be in favor of those being financed at least partly by the government and offered "at cost" because it lowers barriers to entry for new participants. I'd also include drug research, roads, housing in areas without a housing shortage (IE, not SF or Manhattan), and more. I even think the idea of a living wage makes sense and in fact will be necessary, I just haven't figured out how to pay for it (and frankly, the naive implementation of "just give everyone $X" would be so hugely expensive that it strikes me as infeasible. A working implementation is going to need to be significantly more... creative.) And yet, the big stories of the last decade or two have noted a trend: more value being generated by fewer people with fewer capital expenditures (prime example being MSFT > Google > Facebook > Instagram/Whatsapp/Minecraft). The majority of "capital" in those cases (VC money, if applicable) is spent on engineering salaries. Meanwhile, oil companies are dying, communication networks are barely profitable (cisco?), and "hard industry" is an industry no one optimizing for profitability wants to get into unless it's to break it up and sell it off. Of course you can point to the recently ended energy bonanza during which Exxon became the most valuable company in the world; explaining the drivers of that is beyond the scope of this comment but it's not about energy being a fundamentally awesome business to be in (but briefly, BRIC growth + monopolistic practices to really juice income). So the interplay between brain capital, industrial equipment, and various other types of capital is more complex than "the public should own the means of production". Some of it yes, most of it no. And I'd argue the brain capital trend is going to continue while heavy industry jobs are going to keep disappearing, forcing us to resolve the "interplay between capital" question in a way that doesn't collapse our entire economy, doesn't cause a civil war (and/or avoids one), and doesn't end up with the public (or a small group calling themselves "the public") being able to shake down any success story simply because they figured out how to make more money than the next guy.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Usually the first two socialist priorities are healthcare and housing. Together those things probably account for 35% of GDP. Consider a trivial example -- the affect that the post ww2 public housing boom did to the US construction industry. Government procurement rules transformed and forced consolidation of the brick industry. On the east coast it went from hundreds of geographically diverse companies to 4-6, all in the south.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  Socialism is commonly used today to mean a large welfare state. See Bernie Sanders describing the kind of socialists he is, and you'll realize he isn't actually a socialist in the strict sense of the word.
- tigershark 11y ago
  The world is full of people that think that they can do better than everyone else and they are temporarily disgraced because all the other people are just simpletons that cannot understand their mighty genius. Mental institutions are full of people that think in a freakingly similar way.
zouhair 11y ago
At least the witch is dead, we won't have to suffer her stupidity. She managed alone to prove that women can be as hateful and live destroyers as any men.
arethuza 11y ago
A bit ironic then that the overall tax burden was rather higher than the previous Labour government for most of her time as PM: "The tax burden (measured by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in the form of total government receipts as a share of national income) started at just above 40 per cent in 1979, peaked at 45.4 per cent in 1982, then fell below 40 per cent in 1990." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/10-things-you-thought-you-knew-about-margaret-thatchers-downing-street-years-8572023.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/10-things-you-... What she did do was reduce the silly taxes on higher level of income - but those taxes were just imposed on poorer people.

carlosnunez 11y ago

Don't show that to the Universal Basic Income diehards...

dangero 11y ago
I'm very interested in the concept of basic income, but I don't see any issue with this commentary from PT Barnum. It seems to be more of a statement of fact that some people spend their money more wisely than others. Basic income could be viewed as inline with this statement because you would get an income stipend at some small interval, like once a month, so even if you spent it all last month, this month arrives and you get that basic income again.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
angersock 11y ago
Even a cursory reading of the story should suggest to a reader a difference between the proposed action (divide equally riches amongst all), and UBI (fund a fixed-amount per citizen per annum). Least of all, if one believes in the ability of capital to be reinvested to create more capital, it is obvious that the second case need hardly injure an economy while still helping the people who are broke. The former case, of continual wealth division, of course may fail--luckily, that's not how UBI works.
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  > it is obvious that the second case need hardly injure an economy I think an even stronger statement holds true: if you don't actively redistribute then you're effectively making an open-loop amplifier which will amplify noise (who happened to be in the right place at the right time) in preference to signal (effort input) -- which is just as harmful to the cultivation of a beneficial incentive landscape (i.e. one that promotes effort input, since that's tautologically all anyone ever gets to decide) as a failure to reward success would be. Alternatively: it's often better to reduce the transition-state energy than to improve the final reward, which is exactly the opposite of what happens when decisions are made by people who have 1 metric shitton of money to invest in building a moat with the aim of returning 2 metric shittons of money.

PaulRobinson 11y ago

Which is the correct answer. When you spend money, it doesn't disappear. It's just moved.

lr4444lr 11y ago
Yes, but the goods it can buy on the next round of division still don't come from the spendthrift vagabond, and if his way of life is incentivized while the producers' is disincentivized by this redistribution, then that circulation won't continue so innocuously.
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  > spendthrift vagabond An obtuse mischaracterization of the poor; a more typical "sin" would be failure to hop over the ever-rising bar that denotes the ability to secure money by threatening to withhold labor. Circulation goes both ways and it isn't the ability of producers to secure profits that seems to be most endangered at the moment.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    An obtuse mischaracterization of the poor Why do you think it's a characterization of the poor at all? Circulation goes both ways and it isn't the ability of producers to secure profits that seems to be most endangered at the moment. The working poor are themselves producers.
    - jjoonathan 11y ago
      > Why do you think it's a characterization of the poor at all? Because they're the ones who the type of policy we are discussing would actually be intended to benefit. Voicing that side of the argument through a "spendthrift vagabond" is disingenuous at best. > The working poor are themselves producers. I was using the term with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, I thought it would be clear enough from context that I was referring to capital-holders.

johnloeber 11y ago

This is nonsense. Spending money isn't bad at the macro/societal level. Spending is a cornerstone of economic growth.

alwaysdownvoted 11y ago

In 1880 there was no Federal Reserve system. "Money" was backed by commodities of finite quantity.

kamaal 11y ago

The fact that socialists feel entitled to free cash is hardly a surprise. In India which went though decades of socialist rule, its quite common among people to expect others to provide for them all their life. I know a lot of people from my circles, especially older people in the late 50's and 60's who have spent their lives in the socialist era endlessly expect elder brothers/relatives to provide for them. Any refusal to do so is taken to amount to some extremely bad kind of selfishness and greed. Keep alone the fact that they've barely done any work all their lives, or are any way serious even now with their spending habits. The basic idea is that they are entitled to be provided no questions asked and someone is supposed to make up for them. Refusing to comply is evil.

zouhair 11y ago
Socialists feel entitled to free money? Do you have some sources on this?
- SturgeonsLaw 11y ago
  foxnews.com
  - hjhgjtyhgdf 11y ago
    I couldn't find it. Give me a direct foxnews.com link that claims that.
rorykoehler 11y ago
From where I am standing it seems capitalists feel entitled to free cash. They take their capital, dump it in the stock market and hey presto free cash! This free cash mostly arises due to some accounting trick and is not productivity backed at all.
- tomp 11y ago
  Which accounting trick?