Assorted numbskull liberal responses to Michael Shermer’s by-no-means-scintillating ideas on evolutionary economics/morality:
I prefer questionable progressivism over questionable libertarianism anyday [sic]. I [sic] rather live in a society where everyone [sic] needs are met even if it’s not perfect, then [sic] that of a world that [sic] only just 5% whose needs are really met and screw everyone else.
Mangling of the English language aside, questionable progressivism has also brought us political correctness, hate-speech laws, and a welfare state in which the prosecution of even blatant abusers of the system is “racist.”
There’s an idiot who still posts regularly on Steve Sailer’s blog, going by the online handle of Captain Jack Aubrey. IIRC, he was all in favor of raising the minimum wage to $20/hour in his state … with no comprehension whatsoever of what that would do to the cost of goods and services, or of how such an economy would effectively be a socialist’s dream, in which there was negligible income differential between the upper and lower classes, and the wealth of the formerly rich had truly all been spread around, near-equally. (Yes, that would have been done via higher wages rather than via an explicit tax-grab, but the redistributive effect is the same, except that employers can combat a rise in minimum wage by replacing proles with machines built by high-IQ geeks.)
The same fool also obviously had zero comprehension of how, if you can make basically the same money doing a dumbfuck-prole job (e.g., delivering mail in a hospital for $25/hour, in a unionized position) as at a high-skilled one (e.g., computer programming) that requires a significant educational investment up front, there’s very little incentive indeed for anyone to go into the latter. And that is completely analogous to how, if you can make comparable money on welfare to what you’d make at a minimum-wage job, there’s likewise no reason to work. (And, of course, even attempts to implement “workfare” in place of welfare are “racist” and “sexist,” in the eyes of nitwit progressives.)
Very efficient way of stifling innovation and entrepreneurship, that.
Plus, it’s only income differential that lets smart people buy their way out of having to live alongside violent, low-IQ dumbfucks and welfare mothers. Or do you want to have Aunt Jemima and her eight illegitimate kids running up and down your hallway? Without income inequality, her pimp would be bustin’ caps outside your door all night long.
It’s easy to think that income equality is a good thing if you’ve led a typical sheltered-liberal life (as I had until a few years ago), and never had to deal up-close with our world’s two-digit-IQ pig-fuckers, i.e., where you could write off the few you had encountered as being just isolated “bad apples” … as if bullying in high school was just a white-trailer-trash phenomenon, when it’s rather the regular state of mind among savages of all colors (including white proles). (How many sub-90 IQ niggers do you figure the atheistic Four Horsemen have met collectively, in their lives? All they’ve ever seen in their adult lives is the best and most well-mannered that all other races and cultures have to offer. And hell, even those are frequently total shit.) Even being upper middle-class whites didn’t stop the jocks at Columbine from being merciless bullies, you know. And don’t think that a “blank slate” is going to make any big difference there, either—as if 2×4-hammering morons would have turned out to be geniuses if only they had been given the educational opportunities that middle- and upper-class whites and Jews and Asians have been given.
You know what else kills me? When liberals talk about their politics having been “reality tested.” You know what’s been reality-tested, and failed, utterly? Multiculturalism. Since the Robbers Cave study in the 1950s, fer Chrissake! But that’s typical for the (practically non-existent) liberal understanding of human nature.
Newsweek just published a first ever (and controversial) ranking of countries, which included, among other qualities, social mobility and income equality. Guess what? Those [social-democratic] Scandinavian countries were tops.
Well yeah, if one of your primary criteria for positive ranking is a low income differential, certainly the countries which achieve that will have a big advantage in such a (wonky) ranking!
In other news, in a ranking of sprinters, those with the fastest times were tops. Film at eleven.
Yes indeed, sweden (one of the more social democratic countries in the world) is so horrible. The poverty! hm.. I wounder ["the wound! the wound!"] how we compare to the USA on wealth [?], heatlth [sic], education, equality?
… and also, how Sweden would compare to the USA in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship, where a primary drive to succeed is not infrequently the desire to escape the shit you were born into. Ask any rapper or basketball player. (Ach, I just realized I’m listening to ABBA right now!)
It’s also much easier to grow a population with high levels of education when your country isn’t being sabotaged from within by religious conservatives and blacks—as America is, with Intelligent Design, fundamentalists wary of “too much learning,” and the watering-down of the curriculum since the “new math” ’60s to allow women and low-IQ minorities to “compete.” That is, since smart, motivated people will find a way to learn, even if they’re placed into poor schools, culture/demographics is probably a far bigger influence in that ranking than is mere economics or politics.
Consider Finland, in the #1 position:
The share of foreign citizens in Finland is 2.5%, among the lowest in the European Union. Most of them are from Russia, Estonia and Sweden. The children of foreigners are not automatically given Finnish citizenship.
Hmm, what could America learn from Finland? Anyone? Bueller?
The Muslim community in Finland … numbered only about 900, most of whom were found in Helsinki. Lately immigration has increased the number of Muslims.
Oh-oh. Well, it was good while lasted. (Switzerland was #2, and Sweden #3. What demographic characteristics do they share with Finland? Anyone? Whitey? Again, social-democratic politics have worked [for a few generations, at least] in those countries because of their culture and work ethic and “monotonous” whiteness; the same policies in a country of incentivized, uneducated welfare mothers would be a disaster.)
Further, health correlates with education, in part because smarter and more-informed people make better dietary choices than do illiterate proles. As I’ve noted previously, people eat at McDonald’s not because they “can’t afford” to pack a nutritious lunch, but rather just because they’re too stupid/uninformed/lazy to make the effort to eat properly. When a salad, fries, and a Coke at McD’s costs $11, how could packing a lunch possibly be more expensive? Even if you just planned ahead and bought a salad at a supermarket, you’d save half the cost of that. But if you can’t even plan that far ahead….
In Mind of the Market, Microsoft is Shermer’s poster boy for how monopolies benefit consumers.
If it wasn’t for Microsoft, we’d all (except for a few Mac users) still be having to deal with a different ugly-as-open-source interface for every program, and everyone would still know (the hard way) what a command line looks like. We all owe Bill Gates a debt of gratitude, for having saved us from that future.
MS bundled a free browser with your O/S, and you couldn’t uninstall it because some of the dll’s were being re-used elsewhere by Windows. Oh, boo-boo-hoo. Nothing ever stopped you from downloading Netscape (which by v6 was a bloated p.o.s.) … except, of course, that if you hadn’t had a browser shipping with the O/S in the first place, how exactly were you planning on connecting to the Internet to do that download? In which case, whose browser, exactly, were you thinking Microsoft should have been shipping with Windows … and why?
Plus, it’s partly the very hugeness and guaranteed stability of Microsoft, and their impressive commitment (so totally unlike Apple) to making their software backward-compatible, that allows businesses to be confident that they’ll still be able to open the files they’re creating in those applications, even after a few upgrades, or a decade from now … and that they’ll be able to share files with other companies, and everyone will be able to open them. Try doing that without a monopoly to enforce the standardization.
By contrast, I recently had to figure out how to get the data out of an ancient (c. 1998) Sharkware database—produced by a tiny company that still has a website, but doesn’t respond to emails, even when you’re requesting the password for their zipped trial edition of the software! You have no idea what I went through, to finally be able to connect to that DB via an obsolete third-party tool. By contrast, you can still open Word 97 and Works 6.0 files in Word 2007. Plus, Microsoft’s economies of scale allow them to amortize their R&D out over many more units than any other software shop could, driving down the price of competing horizontal-market software for everyone.
I also recently had to go through the grief of trying to get open-source SugarCRM installed into the same SQL Server instance as Reporting Services. ‘Cause, guess what? The out-of-the-box installation stack (for SQL Server 2005 Express, PHP, and Sugar) doesn’t install RS properly, i.e., doesn’t let you use the Configuration Tool for the setup which you have to do after installation.
I’ve done dozens of installations of RS, and never encountered that problem before. But as with everything, you get what you pay for (RS, too, is free, with SQL Server, and is awful for bugginess), and getting open-source stuff to even just install properly, even on Windows, can take hours.
I’ve also seen (on the same Shermer-related thread) the breakup of the AT&T monopoly being used as an example of how a monopoly had stifled innovation, customer service, and upgrading. But there’s a flip side to that, too: When my brother was down in California during one of his trips to Hidden Valley, and had to call back up to Winnipeg, the number of connections which had to be made between different private companies in order to place that call were prohibitive; and one of the operators he spoke to actually told him, “Don’t ever let them break up Bell Canada” (i.e., our national phone monopoly).
