Liberal Forum

Str8tEdge » 29 Jul 2014 6:01 pm » wrote: Economic freedom is the right of every human to control his or her own labor and property.....

Cannonpointer » 30 Jul 2014 1:50 am » wrote:
I am acting on YOUR word, HERITAGE's word, that Singapore is a true and worthy model of capitalism, pig.

Are you denying that Singapore is the second most economically free nation on earth?

If you deny your claim of economic freedom in Singapore, after all your bluster and triumphalism and definition changing just to accommodate that slave pit, what does that tell us of your trust worthiness?

And if you stand by your claim of economic freedom in Singapore, how will you explain 55 years pf economic freedom for all, and still 88% of the country lives in government housing? Lazy Asians, Clem? Bootstrap shortage, Clem?

Why do 88% have no access to this glorious economic freedom, Clem?

Why would owning a house be a measure of economic freedom when their median income is higher than ours?

Str8tEdge » 29 Jul 2014 7:27 pm » wrote:
Most of the civilized world has jettisoned socialist economic principles with the fall of the Soviet Union. South Americans don't know anything but dictators, socialism and abject poverty. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink. Your economic socialism is DEAD for all intensive purposes.

RichClem » 29 Jul 2014 10:40 am » wrote:Market systems AKA capitalism=freedom

Socialism=slavery to the state

Cannonpointer » 30 Jul 2014 1:58 am » wrote: It's "all intents and purposes," retard - not "all intensive purposes." Jesus, you moron.

And if capitalism is so great, why is it introduced through tinpot dictators imposed on voters by foreign coup plots, every **** time?
If capitalism is so great, why does it require force to be accepted?

Str8tEdge » 30 Jul 2014 1:56 am » wrote:
Why would owning a house be a measure of economic freedom

Cannonpointer » 30 Jul 2014 2:05 am » wrote: Gosh, kid. I guess maybe living in government housing IS one of the new benchmarks of capitalist success.

You know me - when the definition of words changes within singles sentences, I get confused.

Str8tEdge » 30 Jul 2014 2:04 am » wrote:
That's just stupid **** there.

Free market=ZERO FORCE

Socialism=COMPLETE FORCE

I'm not sure you understand the concept of government force....

Str8tEdge » 30 Jul 2014 2:07 am » wrote:
Their median annual income is HIGHER than ours....

Perhaps their housing scenario is left over from when they abandoned socialism.

Cannonpointer » 29 Jul 2014 5:25 am » wrote:A gaggle of impressionable progressives recently went on a Grateful Dead style fan-girl tour of the web, singling praise and glory to Singapore's "economic freedom" - "It's the second freest on EARTH," they jubilated.

Cursory investigation -their undone due diligence - revealed Singapore to practice "economic freedom" exclusively for corporations and the elite, not for regular people. The regular people have no rights, are kept in check by police state brutality, cannot purchase homes, and are influenced in their views by media that is almost exclusively state owned and that is entirely state-regulated with no pretense of respect for freedom of the press.

One of the cheer leaders, button-holed to explain Singapore's complete LACK of economic freedom for the bottom 88% of its citizens, spontaneously launched into a completely off-top defense of Chile's Pinochet, casting the man as a capitalist hero. Ironically, he was precisely right: Pinochet WAS a capitalist hero: a murdering psychopath who forced Singapore style "economic freedom" on his people. The only motive one can imagine for this Freudian non sequitur is that the apologist believes brutality on behalf of capital is justified.

Capitalism did not invent the free market. Indeed, it is the sworn enemy of it. Free markets existed long before Adam Smith was born. Capitalism is an economic model run by employees, on the capital of absentee owners - capital that could not be agglomerated except by exchanges licensed and regulated by government. FREE ENTERPRISE is an economic model run by owner-investors who risk their OWN capital with no assistance from government. Free Enterprise serves the market and requires a free market to exist. Capitalism attacks the free market to eliminate risks and competition. Our government's favoritism toward capitalism is why Wall Street's least hiccup makes Main Street catch a cold, but Main Street's greatest misery has no effect on Wall Street.

Authoritarian capitalism (the less regulation upon it, the more authoritarian it becomes) relies on the government gun to foist itself on populations. Left to their own devices, South and Central Americans vote for a free market, rather than capitalism. But the capitalists pretend that free markets are "socialism," and they get their servants in our government to topple elected governments and force authoritarian capitalism on their populations. A recent example of capitalist over-reach occurred in Bolivia, where Bechtel cornered the market on WATER by way of the government gun. Bechtel's wholly owned puppet government simply made a law declaring Bechtel owner of every drop of the stuff, making it a crime for a peasant to put out a rain barrel or drink from a creek. The result was a popular tide in favor of a Coca farmer named Evo Morales, whom election riggers failed to keep from office, and who has implemented free markets - or, "instituted a brutal socialist regime with no respect for private property," in neocon parlance.Our country would not have let this go unpunished, but for two land wars in Asia occupying its attention.

The folks singing Singapore's praises present themselves as "conservatives." But they did not even LOOK at capitalism's effect on their latest, greatest Shangri La's human population before festooning a brutal slave pit with the mantle of freedom. Conservatives look before they leap; reactionaries and progressives leap before they look.

The reactionary neocons on this board wil hee haw and gee gaw and slap their knees and shout hosanna for the stupidest, least-vetted **** ideas imaginable, and still pretend to be conservatives. REAL conservatives - a rare bird these days - are against rashly signing off on ANY new idea, no matter how pleasantly-wrapped and spun by professional ad-men hired to serve the interests of capital and subvert the interests of ordinary workers. Thoughtful and methodical examination of ANY policy change is in the conservative wheel house - pretty much IS the conservative wheel house. Hoo-rahing for any proposition Heritage packages for the Sunday chats is the province of neocon stooges, not conservatives. Genuine Conservatism is ANY nation's necessary steadying hand, without which the ship of state is likely to run aground.

Few believe the nation is going in a good direction - and none but retards deny the course is being set by those who control the media and the congress and the president and the economy. Ergo, the bad road we are on is unarguably the fault of Wall Street capitalism, and it leads to a lovely tropical island in the South China Sea by the name of Singapore.

Singapore - that great reveal which uncloaked the true nature of several pretend conservative perverts in our midst - also lays bare the goal and intention and natural, inevitable end of capitalism: to elevate capital above human beings in the realm of rights and power. That's why the founders picked the British East India Company's vessel as their target in the Boston Tea Party: Because they understood that their fight was against that corrosive capitalist engine as much as it was against the British Crown, and that their historical imperative was to free their nation's market from that anti-human machine.

Capitalism was allowed to sneak back in with the railroads. Its history since has been uniformly scandalous and has kept this nation down - always requiring access to the public treasury and the public credit for its continued existence, fattening itself on the nation's catastrophes right up to this very moment. We are under the boot of capital more than ever - but less than Singapore (for now). Capital moved our jobs to China for cheap labor and to pollute without consequence to its bottom line. It crashed our economy and demanded (and got) reparations from the society it had injured.

The debunked pretense that capitalism desires or even tolerates free markets is given the lie by the Singapores and the Chiles of this world. The "freer" capital, the more the PEOPLE are enslaved.

Cannonpointer » 30 Jul 2014 2:16 am » wrote:
Show us on the chart where the lie touched you, clown.

http://www.middleclasspoliticaleconomis ... es-in.html

Cannonpointer » 30 Jul 2014 2:16 am » wrote: Show us on the chart where the lie touched you, clown.

http://www.middleclasspoliticaleconomis ... es-in.html

Str8tEdge » 30 Jul 2014 2:39 am » wrote: I was thinking GNP per capita not median annual income.

Str8tEdge » 30 Jul 2014 2:39 am » wrote:Sorry. By the way, your graph is only OECD countries.

Cannonpointer » 30 Jul 2014 2:46 am » wrote: Oh, you mean if we hide all that "economic freedom" the super rich have by "averaging" it with the income earned by the bent and lashed, unclothed backs of the beaten down peasant class?

What a dishonest little fellow you are, sonny.
Good catch - another Singaporean shortcoming noted: Does not play well with others.

I'm gonna need a larger big chief tablet.

Str8tEdge » 30 Jul 2014 1:56 am » wrote:
Why would owning a house be a measure of economic freedom when their median income is higher than ours?

I'm sensing another goal post move!

Cannonpointer » 30 Jul 2014 1:58 am » wrote: If capitalism is so great, why does it require force to be accepted?

Cannonpointer » 30 Jul 2014 2:16 am » wrote:Show us on the chart where the lie touched you, clown.

Source: Dylan Matthews, based on data from Credit Suisse

Cannonpointer » 30 Jul 2014 1:58 am » wrote: if capitalism is so great, why is it introduced through tinpot dictators imposed on voters by foreign coup plots, every **** time?

RichClem » 30 Jul 2014 7:17 am » wrote: Tell us again how Eastern Europe was forced to apply it "at the point of a gun." That was so hilarious.

Whose "gun," psycho?

Reagan's, who they adulated?

Do tell.

RichClem » 30 Jul 2014 7:17 am » wrote: Tell us again how Eastern Europe was forced to apply it "at the point of a gun." That was so hilarious.

RichClem » 30 Jul 2014 8:03 am » wrote: I didn't realize the US ever had a "tinpot dictator." What was his name, btw?