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>That is patronizing. There is a wide spectrum of reasons why one might say vote for lower/higher taxes between "they worked hard, so they deserve it" and "fuck

>That is patronizing. There is a wide spectrum of reasons why one might say vote for lower/higher taxes between "they worked hard, so they deserve it" and "fuck you, I want mine". Since I never clarified what I meant and you came up with such a specific notion, it would appear you're projecting some defensiveness here. But I will go ahead and clarify my position: The fact of the matter is, the US is a combative system. For it to work properly, each side has to take the extremes of their own position so the result ends up in the middle. The rich don't need the poor or middle class to vote as a rich person, they can literally pay people to do that for them if they wish. A poor person should vote for issues that help them specifically and directly. Forget trickle-down even if you're ignorant enough to believe in it. A perfect example is right-to-work states. Within the last year or so I read a story about a husband in (I believe it was) Kentucky who was sent out on a neglected platform to do some work, it collapsed and he died. The family was simply out a husband, father and provider. They couldn't even sue because the way the laws worked in that state meant the company would have literally had to try and murder the man for the family to be able to sue over the indecent. I bet if you talked to most people in that state, they would be for this law because they don't want people suing McDonald's over hot coffee, for example. But why would they care? They're closer to the burned woman than they are McDonald's, voting their interests would mean they vote for the ability to sue McDonald's if they accidentally burn themselves. Of course ditto-heads will scream "yea but if we did that it would ruin the whole country!" and indeed if the poor and middle class always got their way it would. But that wouldn't happen. Voting their own interests would simply pull the final result closer to the middle. That is, it would present ridiculous situations like a family not even being able to sue a company for a true case of near-criminal negligence and wrongful death.

eshvk 13y ago
> Since I never clarified what I meant and you came up with such a specific notion, it would appear you're projecting some defensiveness here. Correct, I was taking up an example, which is why I used the phrase "one might say". I didn't advocate a specific position (higher or lower taxes). I am completely detached; I don't participate in the political system in America (neither do I plan to ever) so I simply don't care. I am not in disagreement with your thesis. The problem that bugs me is this presumption that the people are not cognizant of what is good for them. Maybe, the people do something for a reason which is of interest to them (but not the reason that someone else thinks is right for them). E.g. maybe, the people who sue McDonalds don't want their neighbor becoming rich while they are poor. This of course is not limited to the poor; this is a human thing. I would argue that it is not in Warren Buffett's self interest to vote for higher taxes; then again that is my opinion and is not necessarily the same as his. If you examined your decisions over a certain period of time, you will find that the reasons you do something are not necessarily in accordance with what society (or $person whom you think is smarter than you) does them for.
- flyinRyan 13y ago
  >The problem that bugs me is this presumption that the people are not cognizant of what is good for them. Go to America. Live there for a while. Move to a red state and actually talk to people. This presumption won't seem so arrogant when you meet so many people for which there is no other logical conclusion to make. >I would argue that it is not in Warren Buffett's self interest to vote for higher taxes It's not, but the voting environment has gotten so skewed that people like Buffet feel they have to abandon voting in their best interests to try and get some kind of balance. At least they claim to publicly.
  - hga 13y ago
    I grew up in and retired to a reddest of Red State America, spent a dozen year in the very Blue State Boston area and a dozen in the D.C. area, which was sort of mixed but plenty Blue State, and I have to say that this "What's the Matter with Kansas" false consciousness thesis is presumptuous bunk. It basically labels our different concerns, or different weighting of various concerns, as illegitimate. In your case, a lot of this seems to reduce to the economic man world view ... and even then, since you don't consider things like "trickle down economics" (sure seemed to work better for us in the '80s than what's been tried after Clinton) or our "libertarianism" AKA classical liberalism at least debatable points vs akin to the KKK.... I mean, is there any room in your world view for religion, e.g. "Man does not live by bread alone", or, say, non-economic principles that are worth dying for??? Any non-economic reason why anyone would volunteer for the military?
    - flyinRyan 13y ago
      Sadly, you sound very much like what I'd expect from a red state. I bet you also think Obama is very left wing, don't you? >since you don't consider things like "trickle down economics" (sure seemed to work better for us in the '80s than what's been tried after Clinton) If you're not going to educate yourself, there's not much point in bothering with this. The stats are in, trickle down never worked [1]. And trickle down was continued through Clinton (somehow you don't realize he was more conservative than a lot of so-called republicans) on to the present time. >or our "libertarianism" AKA classical liberalism at least debatable points vs akin to the KKK.... Of course libertarianism has some debatable points. But luckily, those points also belong to legitimate political movements as well (minus the naivety inherent in an-cap/libertarianism). >I mean, is there any room in your world view for religion, e.g. "Man does not live by bread alone" Sure. > non-economic principles that are worth dying for??? As a matter of fact there are, though I would phrase it as "worth risking your life for" since simply dying is extremely unlikely to help anything. >Any non-economic reason why anyone would volunteer for the military? Sure. For example, if an imperialist, evil world power claimed my country was "terrorists friendly", "has weapons of mass destruction" or some such nonsense I would volunteer for the military to try and help push back these scum from our lands. But blind patriotism? No. I don't believe someone "died for my freedoms" simply because they joined the military and died. For me to believe they died for my freedoms, my freedoms would have to be in danger from something they actually fought. [1] Starting point, not that you'll care: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Criticisms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Criticis...
drrotmos 13y ago
I strongly disagree. In my mind, the only way to vote is to vote your conscience, not what happens to give me the greatest personal gain. "The God Delusion" by Dawkins includes a great (and somewhat Rawlsian) rule, 'Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.' E.g., as a libertarian, I consider taxes to be unethical regardless of whether I gain a net profit from them or not.
- flyinRyan 13y ago
  >In my mind, the only way to vote is to vote your conscience, not what happens to give me the greatest personal gain. Then you should abstain from voting in the present US system because that's not how it works nor how it was designed to work. It's a combative system where compromise is achieved by basically averaging the desires of the interested parties. > 'Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.' This is a Utopian way to govern, which would be great. But it doesn't apply to the US system. If your position is reasonable and the other side is pushing extremely toward their interests you're going to end up with the middle point between you both. > as a libertarian, I consider taxes to be unethical regardless of whether I gain a net profit from them or not. Fine, consider what ever you like. But when you vote you should vote for what directly helps you personally. Giving billionaires tax breaks can't possibly help you in any manner. I look forward to the day when the US reaches the level of political enlightenment that having an uncle who is a libertarian is as embarrassing a revelation as having an uncle in the KKK is today. There is a reason that this party exists only inside the US and probably couldn't even be sensibly articulated to anyone from another country.
  - drrotmos 13y ago
    > Then you should abstain from voting in the present US system because that's not how it works nor how it was designed to work. It's a combative system where compromise is achieved by basically averaging the desires of the interested parties. Well, I'm not an american, so I don't vote in the US, but if I could I would vote for Libertarian Party candidates. > Fine, consider what ever you like. But when you vote you should vote for what directly helps you personally. Giving billionaires tax breaks can't possibly help you in any manner. No, but it's not about helping myself, it's about having a system which I consider ethical. > I look forward to the day when the US reaches the level of political enlightenment that having an uncle who is a libertarian is as embarrassing a revelation as having an uncle in the KKK is today. There is a reason that this party exists only inside the US and probably couldn't even be sensibly articulated to anyone from another country. I'm from Sweden. I understand very well why the Libertarian Party exists. We do have (very small) parties in Sweden which correspond quite well to the libertarian party.
yummyfajitas 13y ago
A poor person should vote for issues that help them specifically and directly. Why? Your vote doesn't matter. The probability of your vote affecting the outcome is so small it can't be represented with a double precision floating point [1]. So why shouldn't the poor do the same thing everyone else does, namely vote for the guy who makes them feel good? (Incidentally, the idea that the poor vote R is statistical artifact caused by state level aggregation. http://www.tino.us/2012/11/republicans-may-be-many-things-but-we-are-not-moochers/ http://www.tino.us/2012/11/republicans-may-be-many-things-bu... ) [1] I'm looking at state/federal elections here. Your vote might matter in, e.g., your local school board election.
- michaelmior 13y ago
  Perhaps individually your vote is unlikely to affect any particular outcome. But think about the consequences if every voter adopts this belief.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    Why do you believe every voter has not already adopted this belief? Political campaigns certainly behave as if they believe voters already do vote this way. That's why Bush is the regular guy who clears brush from his estate, for example, and why everyone who disagrees with Obama is racist.
  - michaelmior 13y ago
    I am admittedly an idealist. But theoretically speaking, this sort of behaviour seems highly suboptimal.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
michaelmior 13y ago
While frivolous lawsuits are certainly a problem, I think everyone citing the McDonald's coffee example should watch the documentary Hot Coffee. It puts that incident in a new perspective.
- flyinRyan 13y ago
  My point wasn't about what actually happened in the McDonald's coffee incident but rather how many people perceived it.
- michaelmior 13y ago
  Sure thing. I just thought I would dump this hear for anyone who happened to be reading this thread because I found that documentary pretty informative.
- a-priori 13y ago
  For those not interesting in watching a documentary about the incident, the summary is that McDonalds served a woman, Stella Liebeck, coffee which was approximately 85C. Most coffee shops, at least at the time, served coffee about 60C. After getting the drink from the drive-through, she spilled the entire coffee on herself while adding sugar and cream to it. She was the passenger in the car, and the incident happened with the car parked. She received third-degree burns and needed a skin graft. She eventually won a substantial sum from McDonalds in a civil lawsuit. The coffee's temperature met McDonald's policy. They set it higher than their competitors because they assumed people would keep it in a cup holder and want it to be a more drinkable temperature when they arrived at their destination. Today, McDonald's has not changed their policy and still serves coffee at 80-90C, and places like Starbucks serve it at similar or higher temperatures. They are able to do this because of better packaging that's less likely to spill the entire drink even if it's dropped on your lap like Liebeck did. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran... Personally, I don't think that it was a frivolous lawsuit. She did receive serious burns, more serious than I would expect someone to receive from spilled coffee.

eshvk 13y ago

> Since I never clarified what I meant and you came up with such a specific notion, it would appear you're projecting some defensiveness here. Correct, I was taking up an example, which is why I used the phrase "one might say". I didn't advocate a specific position (higher or lower taxes). I am completely detached; I don't participate in the political system in America (neither do I plan to ever) so I simply don't care. I am not in disagreement with your thesis. The problem that bugs me is this presumption that the people are not cognizant of what is good for them. Maybe, the people do something for a reason which is of interest to them (but not the reason that someone else thinks is right for them). E.g. maybe, the people who sue McDonalds don't want their neighbor becoming rich while they are poor. This of course is not limited to the poor; this is a human thing. I would argue that it is not in Warren Buffett's self interest to vote for higher taxes; then again that is my opinion and is not necessarily the same as his. If you examined your decisions over a certain period of time, you will find that the reasons you do something are not necessarily in accordance with what society (or $person whom you think is smarter than you) does them for.

flyinRyan 13y ago
>The problem that bugs me is this presumption that the people are not cognizant of what is good for them. Go to America. Live there for a while. Move to a red state and actually talk to people. This presumption won't seem so arrogant when you meet so many people for which there is no other logical conclusion to make. >I would argue that it is not in Warren Buffett's self interest to vote for higher taxes It's not, but the voting environment has gotten so skewed that people like Buffet feel they have to abandon voting in their best interests to try and get some kind of balance. At least they claim to publicly.
- hga 13y ago
  I grew up in and retired to a reddest of Red State America, spent a dozen year in the very Blue State Boston area and a dozen in the D.C. area, which was sort of mixed but plenty Blue State, and I have to say that this "What's the Matter with Kansas" false consciousness thesis is presumptuous bunk. It basically labels our different concerns, or different weighting of various concerns, as illegitimate. In your case, a lot of this seems to reduce to the economic man world view ... and even then, since you don't consider things like "trickle down economics" (sure seemed to work better for us in the '80s than what's been tried after Clinton) or our "libertarianism" AKA classical liberalism at least debatable points vs akin to the KKK.... I mean, is there any room in your world view for religion, e.g. "Man does not live by bread alone", or, say, non-economic principles that are worth dying for??? Any non-economic reason why anyone would volunteer for the military?
  - flyinRyan 13y ago
    Sadly, you sound very much like what I'd expect from a red state. I bet you also think Obama is very left wing, don't you? >since you don't consider things like "trickle down economics" (sure seemed to work better for us in the '80s than what's been tried after Clinton) If you're not going to educate yourself, there's not much point in bothering with this. The stats are in, trickle down never worked [1]. And trickle down was continued through Clinton (somehow you don't realize he was more conservative than a lot of so-called republicans) on to the present time. >or our "libertarianism" AKA classical liberalism at least debatable points vs akin to the KKK.... Of course libertarianism has some debatable points. But luckily, those points also belong to legitimate political movements as well (minus the naivety inherent in an-cap/libertarianism). >I mean, is there any room in your world view for religion, e.g. "Man does not live by bread alone" Sure. > non-economic principles that are worth dying for??? As a matter of fact there are, though I would phrase it as "worth risking your life for" since simply dying is extremely unlikely to help anything. >Any non-economic reason why anyone would volunteer for the military? Sure. For example, if an imperialist, evil world power claimed my country was "terrorists friendly", "has weapons of mass destruction" or some such nonsense I would volunteer for the military to try and help push back these scum from our lands. But blind patriotism? No. I don't believe someone "died for my freedoms" simply because they joined the military and died. For me to believe they died for my freedoms, my freedoms would have to be in danger from something they actually fought. [1] Starting point, not that you'll care: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Criticisms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Criticis...

drrotmos 13y ago

I strongly disagree. In my mind, the only way to vote is to vote your conscience, not what happens to give me the greatest personal gain. "The God Delusion" by Dawkins includes a great (and somewhat Rawlsian) rule, 'Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.' E.g., as a libertarian, I consider taxes to be unethical regardless of whether I gain a net profit from them or not.

flyinRyan 13y ago
>In my mind, the only way to vote is to vote your conscience, not what happens to give me the greatest personal gain. Then you should abstain from voting in the present US system because that's not how it works nor how it was designed to work. It's a combative system where compromise is achieved by basically averaging the desires of the interested parties. > 'Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.' This is a Utopian way to govern, which would be great. But it doesn't apply to the US system. If your position is reasonable and the other side is pushing extremely toward their interests you're going to end up with the middle point between you both. > as a libertarian, I consider taxes to be unethical regardless of whether I gain a net profit from them or not. Fine, consider what ever you like. But when you vote you should vote for what directly helps you personally. Giving billionaires tax breaks can't possibly help you in any manner. I look forward to the day when the US reaches the level of political enlightenment that having an uncle who is a libertarian is as embarrassing a revelation as having an uncle in the KKK is today. There is a reason that this party exists only inside the US and probably couldn't even be sensibly articulated to anyone from another country.
- drrotmos 13y ago
  > Then you should abstain from voting in the present US system because that's not how it works nor how it was designed to work. It's a combative system where compromise is achieved by basically averaging the desires of the interested parties. Well, I'm not an american, so I don't vote in the US, but if I could I would vote for Libertarian Party candidates. > Fine, consider what ever you like. But when you vote you should vote for what directly helps you personally. Giving billionaires tax breaks can't possibly help you in any manner. No, but it's not about helping myself, it's about having a system which I consider ethical. > I look forward to the day when the US reaches the level of political enlightenment that having an uncle who is a libertarian is as embarrassing a revelation as having an uncle in the KKK is today. There is a reason that this party exists only inside the US and probably couldn't even be sensibly articulated to anyone from another country. I'm from Sweden. I understand very well why the Libertarian Party exists. We do have (very small) parties in Sweden which correspond quite well to the libertarian party.

yummyfajitas 13y ago

A poor person should vote for issues that help them specifically and directly. Why? Your vote doesn't matter. The probability of your vote affecting the outcome is so small it can't be represented with a double precision floating point [1]. So why shouldn't the poor do the same thing everyone else does, namely vote for the guy who makes them feel good? (Incidentally, the idea that the poor vote R is statistical artifact caused by state level aggregation. http://www.tino.us/2012/11/republicans-may-be-many-things-but-we-are-not-moochers/ http://www.tino.us/2012/11/republicans-may-be-many-things-bu... ) [1] I'm looking at state/federal elections here. Your vote might matter in, e.g., your local school board election.

michaelmior 13y ago
Perhaps individually your vote is unlikely to affect any particular outcome. But think about the consequences if every voter adopts this belief.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  Why do you believe every voter has not already adopted this belief? Political campaigns certainly behave as if they believe voters already do vote this way. That's why Bush is the regular guy who clears brush from his estate, for example, and why everyone who disagrees with Obama is racist.
- michaelmior 13y ago
  I am admittedly an idealist. But theoretically speaking, this sort of behaviour seems highly suboptimal.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

michaelmior 13y ago

While frivolous lawsuits are certainly a problem, I think everyone citing the McDonald's coffee example should watch the documentary Hot Coffee. It puts that incident in a new perspective.

flyinRyan 13y ago
My point wasn't about what actually happened in the McDonald's coffee incident but rather how many people perceived it.
michaelmior 13y ago
Sure thing. I just thought I would dump this hear for anyone who happened to be reading this thread because I found that documentary pretty informative.
a-priori 13y ago
For those not interesting in watching a documentary about the incident, the summary is that McDonalds served a woman, Stella Liebeck, coffee which was approximately 85C. Most coffee shops, at least at the time, served coffee about 60C. After getting the drink from the drive-through, she spilled the entire coffee on herself while adding sugar and cream to it. She was the passenger in the car, and the incident happened with the car parked. She received third-degree burns and needed a skin graft. She eventually won a substantial sum from McDonalds in a civil lawsuit. The coffee's temperature met McDonald's policy. They set it higher than their competitors because they assumed people would keep it in a cup holder and want it to be a more drinkable temperature when they arrived at their destination. Today, McDonald's has not changed their policy and still serves coffee at 80-90C, and places like Starbucks serve it at similar or higher temperatures. They are able to do this because of better packaging that's less likely to spill the entire drink even if it's dropped on your lap like Liebeck did. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran... Personally, I don't think that it was a frivolous lawsuit. She did receive serious burns, more serious than I would expect someone to receive from spilled coffee.