New Zealand To Greatly Tighten Gun Laws After Christchurch Massacre

[thomas00]

I'm not understanding the point you're making. That sounds like a bunch of transhumanist propaganda to me. There is no hierarchy in the absence of a state. Employers and entrepreneurs aren't controlling society, they take all the risks. The employer is simply responding to the demand of the consumers. The consumers control society, not the wealthy CEOs. But according to this why bother right, we can all just go home and sit on our lazy butts all day and let artificial intelligence take over the world.

Employees make up all of the workplace deaths. That is who taking most of the risk. If consumers create the demand and workers create the product then why should CEOs and employers who do the least get most of the reward?

That's exactly right. If we could ever remove the socialistic elements to our market system, then the free market could generate enough wealth that private charitable donations could cover most if not all of the welfare. In our current environment however, there is no financial incentive to contribute to private charities. The welfare state is designed to enslave people, financially, and to create a permanent underclass dedicated to their political party.

Citizens have zero say in how private charities are run. Many are not audited and huge amounts of the money are hoovered up in admin fees. It's become an incredibly corrupt sector with the CEOs earning ludicrous pay cheques. At least government welfare can accept *some* degree of democratic input.

The welfare state was designed to stop people falling through the cracks as full employment seemed to be something capitalism could never provide. The underclass existed before welfare. It was bought in to stop it from getting worse.

 

[thomas00]

If they're like conversative Christians I know, much of the donation is probably not even money, it's driving time, gas, and labors of love. And it's still more efficient for both parties than government aid is.

If private charity was more efficient then governments wouldn't have to step in.

A second issue Salamon identified is philanthropic particularism. Private charity has a tendency to focus only on specific groups, particularly groups that are considered either “deserving” or similar in-groups. Indeed, in one telling, this is the entire point of private charity. The largest single category of charitable giving in the United States goes not to caring for the poor but for the sustenance of religious institutions (at 32 percent of donations). Using very generous assumptions, Indiana University’s Center for Philanthropy finds that only one-third of charitable giving actually goes to the poor.
The Conservative Myth of a Social Safety Net Built on Charity

Charity via religious groups has simply been way to for them to maintain societal power, not provision to the needy.

 

[TeaRex14]

Employers make up all of the workplace deaths. That is who taking most of the risk. If consumers create the demand and workers create the product then why should CEOs and employers who do the least get most of the reward?



Citizens have zero say in how private charities are run. Many are not audited and huge amounts of the money are hoovered up in admin fees. It's become an incredibly corrupt sector with the CEOs earning ludicrous pay cheques. At least government welfare can accept *some* degree of democratic input.

The welfare state was designed to stop people falling through the cracks as full employment seemed to be something capitalism could never provide. The underclass existed before welfare. It was bought in to stop it from getting worse.

Workplace deaths is a straw man, plenty of people working in the public sector die on the job too. I don't think you understand. I don't support giving free handouts to every poor person in the country, that's what destroys economic systems. You've got straw man arguments based on the fairytails of equality. If people are lazy they should starve to death in the streets. All you're suggesting is we should incentivize poor people to stay poor and continue being burdens on the system. We should be incentivizing them to become self sufficient. Those that have no desire to become self sufficient, good luck, but you're on your own. Workers in the free market system can easily choose to leave and go work for another employer. The employers essentially have no power. All they can do is compete on the open market for providing wages and benefits, in hopes it entices people to go work for them. And if consumer demands falls out, then they lose their profits, workers, and quite possibly even their business if they can't conform to changes fast enough. We're not capitalist either, we're living in a quasi socialist economy. So anything you say about our current state of affairs might as well be blamed on socialism, not capitalism. You're entire ideology is turned on it's head.

 

[thomas00]

I'm yet to meet somebody who suggests we should determine a person's worth by their level of busy-ness, who wasn't full of resentment about their own employment situation. That's the effect of work for work's sake. Laziness should be treated as a death sentence and work -any work- no matter its consequences to humans and their environment should be lauded....and you say it's me with the upside down ideology?

Cry me a river for the powerless employers who have an endlessly supply of labor they can choose from and decide how much to pay, including unpaid interns and immigrants who work for far less, along with the political clout to crush organized unions with litigation or police force and lower their own tax rates. Small business lobbies rank as most powerful groups in virtually every society.

Workers have few choices. There are more workers than their are jobs, giving the employers the obvious advantage.

A word on the definition of socialism:state socialism involves government ownership of all industry and business. Libertarian socialism involves worker ownership of industry and business. Neither of these definitions could be used to describe any country on earth. What you have is state capitalism. And the absense of another ism to blame it on.

 

[Waremu]

I point it out as you are merely parroting somebody else's arguments.

1. If someone has an argument that is basis in facts, sharing the same argument doesn’t mean you’re parroting their argument; it just means they are right and you both agree.
2. For someone who goes on about reading books, you clearly show yourself to be largely uneducated in the matter that you speak of, because these views have existed long before Peterson. Peterson is more of a old school liberal, but he is not against central planning necessarily like the many other free market academic thinkers are which he borrows from are. Peterson merely is someone who has studied and understands the similarities between the totalitarian aspects of communism and national socialism and the downfall of those frameworks, and in that regard he agrees with many of the more libertarian academic thinkers. But they are different on a number of issues. In fact, Peterson is more of the old school progressive left, before the overton window shifted so far left that anything to the right of Mao is considered fascist to them (despite being totalitarians themselves in what they advocate for).
3. The Overton wonder has shifted so far to the totalitarian left that anyone who is not for the slave master collectivist morality and equality of outcome doctrines are all lumped together as being the same. This is essentially the simple-minded framework in which you operate from.

This Peterson/conservative view that holds people responsible for absolutely everything that happens to them is simply a way for unhealthy folk to justify their cruel disposition towards others and not have to suffer the challenge of entertaining more complex perspectives on things.

No, is isn't just one or the other. People make bad choices AND bad things happen to them. Some people are in a bad situation because they suffered at the hands of someone else to such a degree that they are not able to recover or heal, while some people suffer due to their own bad choices. And Peterson himself doesn't say people are responsible for everything that happens to them, but that it is best to basically do what you can with the cards you’ve been delt. Quite a perversion of what he says.

And I can just as easily say that in your utopian view of how you think the world does or should work, you think everything that happens to people is simply part of some greater conspiracy to keep them down because you don't think people should take much if any responsability/or can be responsible for bad things that they do. It is because you have a flawed moral framework in how you understand the world to begin with. Most people like you think most people are good and just make the wrong choices out of ignorance because they didn't have the 'right kind' of education or indoctrination or information. But the reality is, there are crappy people out there in the world who do bad things regardless of which environment they come from. If there were not other humans to blame your bad mistakes on, then there would be nature itself as you'd be alone in the wilderness fighting off wild animals just to live another day. The fact is, to a degree bad things will always come our way, and we will always be exposed top stressors. You can never control everything that happens to you, but more so how you react to those stressors or bad situations. You simply want to reject that this is the case in the reality in which you live, and so it is easier to blame all your problems on everything all around you. But the fact is, while bad things that are not within a persons control happens to them, they also make bad choices. There are currently millions of people who are in credit card debt because they went into debt not buying things they needed/which were essential, but rather, they went into debt by buying expensive things they could not afford just to appear to be of a certain status. In your mind, these people are victims of the credit card companies when in reality, they bear just as if not more responsability for getting themselves into debt just to consume. There is nothing 'complex' about your perspective.

It's a rationale for not having to change or have to listen to people you've been taught to be scared of, bought to you by the those who don't want you to ask questions about them (does it not bother you that all of the arguments you advance have their origins in PR firms and corporate funded think tanks who are explicit in their mission to manipulate public opinion?)

Yep, it's all the corporations and PR firms. If we just got rid of the undesirables and showered people with money and goods they will then become good, moral individuals worthy of a perfect society. Oh wait..

Special interests will always be there to manipulate public opinion because that is human nature. And just who are the ones you will use to put to rest all these forces of evil, of bad people, who manipulate public opinion? What individuals who are immune from the same flaws of human nature that created those special interests which manipulate in the tier place? And therein lies the problem in your way of thinking.

The only real solution is to allow people to be as aware and educated to these things as possible because ultimately, it is those who are uneducated and unaware who allow themselves to be manipulated by those who wish to shape public opinion.

Free market champions who insist they are the solution but admit they don't exist by virtue of the government interference they decry, advocates of merit who defend inherited wealth, critics of state authority who casually defend the same authority if it's in private hands, detractors of government violence carried out in the name of socialism but not when it's done for capitalism, sycophantic fawning over private enterprises' innovations built off the technology created by government scientists with public money.... exemplary ethics and self awareness.

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You don't understand free market champions then because none of them (the respected ones) say they do not exist by virtue of government interference in that way. In one sense free markets do not exist because of government decree because they are simply organic forces at work and therefore come about organically in just about any civilized society if government were not present, but in another sense, a free market can only work in the sense of being a leveled plain field in allowing for greater economic mobility and equal opportunity by allowing forces to compete on merit, which you do by protecting social and economic freedoms, which requires there be law and order, hence a government. Free market academics for the most part (unless they're for anarchy) see government as being necessary to ensure that free markets exist by them 'getting out of the way' in the sense of not just unnecessary and heavy regulation, but monopoly/being in bed with large coroporations which cuts out smaller businesses, destroying economic mobility, etc. And in that sense, therefore, their duty should be, to create an envrionment in which the free market can thrive by protecting social and economic freedoms, thus creating enough economic mobility so that competition works organically but in a way that obeys human rights and basic freedoms (private property, etc.). In the absence of lawlessness and systemic corruption, competition does more good than it does harm, and is generally not bad, but requires a government that does not cave in to special interests, like with ANY political system. So, no, they don’t advocate massive government interference in the free market itself, but rather, that they are there to protect life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness by not granting such rights, but ensuring that they are enforced and maintained. That means basic human rights/freedoms which are social and economic (feeedom of speech, due process, property rights). These social and economic basic rights are vital to make a free market system work smoothly, relatively speaking. So they are there to do there job, but not micro-manage the economy and our lives. I don’t know what free market academics you are reading but none of the respected ones I’ve studied say such nonsense. Free market exists with as limited a government as possible. That is basically their position. And it did exist well up until the last few decades, with the massive government bloat and micromanagement and regulations which mainly are there to protect monopolies. It’s extremely difficult for the entrapaneur to start up his own business or do any basic thing, with all the regulations in place to favor big business because big corporations actually lobbied to have such regulations to cut out competition. (This is one reason why monopolies and big government hate competition). But such academics do not decry government itself. They see it as a necessary but limited evil.

Since the the eary 1900's, the US economy has been a centrally planned mixed economy. There is very little about the US economy that makes it a free market, in very objective terms. The problem is, with socialism or the type of system you advocate for requires more of what made the U.S. economy less free and more corrupt: government. No, not even big business, government, because at the end of the day, government is what should be regulating or overseeing that so that it/monopoly or corporatism does not occur. Now, you want more government, thinking you can have less of these things but reality is, you cannot have less of these things with more government because of human nature when in reality a limited government is the only true way to limit systemic corruption as much as possible. And if private industry tries to usurp or influence power with money, then that ultimately has to be on the people because they in essence are the government. They must be educated and aware enough to be aware of such things. But to allow government to be as bloated as it is today ensures that government becomes it's own industry, looking to maintain its own self-interest in place of the people, and to grow further at the expense of their freedoms.

And you can say what you will, but government has killed far more people than any level of capitalism has. Capitalism has only existed until recently, whereas government has been around long before capitalism, and accounts for far more blood shed and violence. So if you truly were concerned about bloodshed and violence, you'd be more objective about that. But you are not.

'Equal' is a value judgement. Difference is a more appropriate term for a scientific observation here.

Nonsense. We are talking about socio-economic issues here, not observable closed studies. Therefore, it is perfectly fine to use the term, if it is based on scientifically objective metrics. You are equal to what? To what you are measuring for, objectively. If someone is less strong than another person, tested per muscle group or exercise, then we can say that not only is there a difference in strength, but, according to objective metrics, one person is stronger than the other person, and by X or Y. Therefore, in terms of strength alone, they are not equal because one person is inferior in terms of raw strength per muscle group or exercise, etc. Both people cannot be expected to lift the maximum amount of weight for said exercise or muscle group. And that difference WILL largely impact who wins and loses if they have a weight lifting competition, assuming all other variables are considered and isolated. So, we can say, if they are having a deadlift competition, both lifters are not equal and that mainly will affect how the contest plays out and who wins. So, if the stronger lifter continually wins, is it because they are different, but equal lifters? No. That would be utter nonsense. It would make no sense. The only conclusion would be that they different in that they are not equal in their strength lifting/deadlift abilities.

Some things are more subjective, like with social skills, etc., buy many things that impact a persons performance more directly, they are not so much subjective, like strength, intelligence, etc.

Your parents told you this because they never experienced anything better. Now you tell it to others because neither have you.

No. My parents told me this because they grew up and reached adulthood, and then I grew up and figured the same thing out as I reached adulthood. And, as I said, most people work jobs they do not enjoy and figure this out as they too reach adulthood (it's part of growing up), so if you experience something better than working a job you do not enjoy, you are an exception to the rule, but not the rule. And by the way, that isn’t to say people shouldn’t try to focus on getting into jobs that make them happier, but that is generally a statement of fact regarding life itself. I wish it were not so, but I also wish bad peoole didn’t exist and money grew on trees but I realize that would never happen in reality..​