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As more reports come out of Iraq, it does seem to appear that "The surge" is working.  The new tactics are working.  Of course, much of the mess the US finds itself in in Iraq is due to the lack of planning and poor handling of the victory on the battlefield in 2003.

Al Qaeda moved in and for awhile, it appeared that they were gaining the upper hand. But then they managed to lose the support of even the insurgents who are increasingly seeing that the US doesn't want to be in Iraq any more than the nationalists in Iraq want them there. By contrast, Al Qaeda began over playing their hand and demanding ever increasing extremism from their allies -- cutting off hands and killing all those who didn't toe the line.  As a result, Al Qaeda is losing support and being crushed on the field according to military commanders.

This article below talks about it in extensive detail. Worth reading for sure!

In a discussion I had today, an argument was posed:

Why do conservatives hate insuring kids?

Of course, it's a strawman argument.  Conservatives object to paying for other people's personal decisions. 

Having a child, is a choice.  Liberals are overwhelmingly in favor of "Abortion rights" and therefore see having children as a "choice".

On the other hand, they apparently against choice when it comes to whether other people should have to pay for the choice a woman makes.

As one pregnant left-wing poster put it:

Speaking as an uninsured, unemployed, pregnant Vermonter, it sickens me to think that my child will likely have very little health care in the future. While I'm not given a break for my OB appointments, the clinic my husband attends does have a sliding scale fee structure as well as long term payment plans. And of course, there's the free clinic in town, which has people from New Hampshire and Massachusetts going to it, because it's the only health care they receive at all.

I think the poster has it right on - children get in the way of the money.

You see, she's not being greedy. Her demand that other people have their property confiscated by the government to be given to her isn't greed.  No, the greed lies with those who object to having their earnings syphoned off to be given to someone who has chosen to have a child they can't afford.

In our ongoing series of discussions between me and a group of radical left-wing quasi-marxists, we learn a great deal on the differing viewpoints on how wealth is created and the role of government in our society as well as the contributions of different groups in our civilization.

My position is that wealth is created through labor. But the value of that labor varies widely. One person can produce a lot more wealth with their labor than another person can. This is the foundation of why some people are very rich and other people are very poor in the United States.

Needless to say, the far left disagrees:

This is more or less horseshit.

Wealth is the result of the application of labor and capital to land. Capital is defined as "the stored or saved proceeds of labor."

The type of wealth you are talking about does not result from either labor or the application of capital in the form of stored proceeds of labor to land (resources). The type of wealth you are talking about results from the private monopoly ownership of resources.

It could not possibly result from the application of one person's labor and capital to resources. Through private monopoly ownership of resources, everyone else is deprived of the opportunity to apply their labor and capital to resources--so they have to go to work for you. This allows you to expropriate the labor products of others on a continous basis, claiming the proceeds of others' labor as justly your own.

The kind of wealth you are talking about has nothing to do with "working harder" or "working smarter", and everything to do with a whole complex system of private monopoly that allows the few to own all the resources and, as a corollary to this equation, to own all the non-ownership class of people--as slave labor.

To which I responded that the super rich make enormous sacrifices and take significant risks and typically work much harder and longer than most people which produces exponentially more wealth.  In the same way that interest is compounding resulting in someone who starts saving at age 20 having 5X more saved up at age 60 than someone who started only 10 years later, financial rewards work very similarly. Someone who takes risk and works hard and succeeds at a venture is going to get exponentially more than someone who does not.

The above is how the world actually works. Some may not like that it works that way but that is, precisely, how things are.  This is where things really start to go down hill. Because the left won't accept that reality is what it is. On fringe sites like the one linked, they have been in their echo chamber so long that many of them believe their desire is already reality.  One person literally said "Labor produces wealth. People provide the wealth. Wealth is therefore controlled by the people." No. It most certainly is not.  They may wish that wealth is controlled by the people (people in this case meaning the masses).  But in reality, wealth is controlled very disproportionately by what I refer to as the motivated class. 

This becomes a real problem because so badly do some of these people want to believe their utopia is how things really are that my failure to grant them their premises results in a lot of "you're profoundly ignorant".  Because ignorance in their mind is based on not having reached their conclusions on how things ought to be.  If I weren't ignorant, I'd be agreeing with them.

In response to the assertion that the super rich commonly take great risks, work very hard and make enormous sacrifices the response was:

This is the goofiest justification I've ever heard for paying someone a lot of money.

Try taking care of three kids who are sick with the flu for a few days, cleaning up throw-up all night, and making midnight trips to the laundry room to wash the soiled sheets--and dialing up ask-a-nurse at 3:00 a.m., while you are throwing up on your own shoes. See how fun that is.

The poorly paid among us are doing stuff like this after working all day, but there will be no ocean vacation house, and no accumulation of money for relaxing vacation time.

I will go a bit further and say that, if you wouldn't do what you are doing without being paid astronomically well for it, maybe you should ask yourself why. Could it be that what you are doing is a shameful piece of pure bullshit?

Incidentally, I have 3 kids. Have taken care of my kids when they're sick.  I tried to point out the law of supply and demand again: The number of people who can clean up puke is high. The number of people who can run a large organization is low.

The response I got for that was:

I can roll my tongue in to a neat circle. One of my daughters can touch the tip of her tongue to her nose. Yet another can curl her tongue into an interesting fleur-de-lis configuration. I can't see how the the remarkable abilities of the pro basketball player or CEO have any more economic value than these rare and beautiful tongue-curling abilities.

She also added:

I see a lot of big, ugly buildings inhabited by a bunch of troglodites, all working away a shit they see no use in and derive no pleasure, self-determination, or benefit from. I see the mass of people in the US suffering from starvation from eating lard-soaked cardboard. I see schools that don't educate, and families with no time or energy for their kids. I see people with no health care. I see people who are one month away from homelessness--like, MOST people.

These fabulously creative and talented wealthy people have not produced wealth, but poverty.

Another person chimed in:

PSST, everybody - Draginol is a Randite.

That's where he(?) gets all his(?) "Pro-Capitalist" drivel. He(?) is probably also not yet 30 years old, and still believes that someday he(?) too will be one of the super-rich.

And then another:

I've read all your posts here and just can't go on. You are SO full of shit!
I, too, have been saying for years that it would solve a lot of problems if they would simply put a cap on the amount any one person or entity can accumulate.

What is the point in owning more than you can hope to spend in a lifetime? He who dies on the biggest pile is still dead. I think the caps mentioned in the article were a bit overly generous.

You say people need incentives, and you are right - most do. Some are just naturally motivated, and those who are motivated are certainly going to be worth more than the ones who must be enticed with incentives. Ambition deserves to be rewarded, and lack of....well, then it all rolls downhill. But, even those who must be enticed deserve a fair enough compensation to live amenably.

Those who are highly motivated certainly deserve more, but there should be limits. There is something obscene about that kind of greed. It becomes greed after you have reached that point at which you know you are going to be comfortable for the rest of your life (whatever your degree of comfort may be - for some it's a summer house and a yacht, for others it's less) and that more is not going to improve your quality of living. THEN it is obscene to continue to accumulate, and....he who has the most has the POWER! Unfortunately, then this is the person who governs us, and is most unfit to do so, being set apart from us, as he is by his wealth . This is the man who say "I'm THE king, we'll be doing things MY way".

Another person adds in response to my comment about the rich earning their money:

Such as being born with silver spoons in their mouths?

No one here seems to have addressed that yet The vast majority of the richest people, those we are talking about here, have done SQUAT to earn their wealth.

Which as most people around here know is false. The origin of wealth for the richest people in the world is well known. The majority of the wealthiest people o the Forbes 400 earned it on their own. But that didn't stop another person from agreeing and adding:

Very few of the very rich are making a lot of money because they are some kind of unique snowflake.

They are making a lot of money because their families are wealthy and well connected, they belong to the right country club, know the right people, went to the right schools, and their narrow and blinkered backgrounds have assured their loyalty to the values of "their set."

If people really got high-level jobs in business because they were smart--why, some of them would be smart. Apparently you are unaware that these characters are so incredibly stupid and venal that they are, as we speak, in a fair way of reducing the global financial system to a smoking ruin.

Another agreed, adding:

Draginol makes an assumption that there is a meritocracy in the US, and high social mobility. There isn't either of those, the rich have pulled up the drawbridges. In the US now, it is "to those that have, shall be given....".

Another person objects to the rich because of the affect on society:

The rich pay no taxes. You cannot improve the lot of 300 million Americans by handing the nations wealth to a handful of ultra wealthy. It just doesn't work that way. You must have taxes and by their very nature they will take more from the rich than the poor. There is no good reason for excusing multinationals and the very rich from paying tax by resorting to paper shuffling and tax dodges.

At this point, I have been called ignorant by several different people. One person tells me:

You have zero knowledge of facts of any kind, not the smallest familiarity with economics, or the slightest understanding of history, government, or sociology--or even ordinary common knowledge about the physical objects in your environment.

When I say that having the government confiscate the wealth of the richest people would not make society better, the response I get is:

That $$ would be going towards infrastructure, roads, bridges, water treatment plants, deficits, healthcare, schools and educations, fire depts., etc. that would enrich us as a society. It seems you are misreading this as $$ above the cap goes to specific greedy individuals in elected gov't, vs. gov't actually being all of us and all of our collective commons. You really don't see how surplusses used for the public's greater good will make our society a better place?

I respond with this:

No, I don't think society would be better off if the government confiscated the wealth of the rich. Because government squanders resources. It is a far less efficient mechanism for social good than the private sector is.

The things the government has cobbled together (like an interste highway system, failing schools that get immense amounts of money per student, etc.) does not give me confidence in the government's ability to make good use of capital.

By contrast, most of the things we rely on and enjoy on a day to day basis comes from the private sector. Cars, airplanes, computers, the Internet (and no, Darpa was not the Internet before someone tries to bring that up), affordable housing, massive medical advancements, mass communications, televisions, etc.

The government is just another corporation. One with a monopoly on force. It's not some magic public good organization. It's just a big inefficient corporation whose products and services we're forced to purchase.

But at this point, the conversation has largely descended into people name calling me and telling me how stupid, ignorant, greedy, fascist, naive and selfish I am. 

That is, when I respond to their arguments (such as explaining to the woman who argued that her daughter's ability to curl her tongue seems to her as valuable as being good at basketball that if she can get people to pay her daughter for that talent, then good for her but in reality, society decides how valuable things are through their voluntary purchasing decisions are).  But I think you can get an idea of what their values are and what their economic philosophies and view of an ideal world is.

Over at a fringe left-wing site, a discussion on economics recently came up. It was very interesting to see some of the viewpoints on how wealth is created and used and so forth.

Here are some of the highlights:

Income has nothing to do with it really. Income is only a derivative, the real culprit is WEALTH. Income comes in two ways, (1) from work i.e., being paid for your labor or (2) from WEALTH applied over time, whether you call it rent, interest, capital gains, property appreciation, or whatever. Those whose only income comes from work will never become wealthy.

On the other hand, the wealthy have gotten away for far too long, saying "who, me??" when it is time to cough up money for the common good. They all nod in agreement that wealth will trickle down, then they install an impermeable barrier to reduce that trickle to mere molecules.

I would propose something along the lines of Jonathan Swift's comments on children as to how the wealthy should be treated -- we should eat them! Every time I see a picture of Carlos Slim, I think that he's not slim at all, nice amount of marbling on that meat, he would be great barbecued. Maybe a little adobada marinade and then just plop him on the asadero --yum! The only drawback I can see is at first there would be a lot like Sumner Redstone and Kirk Kirkorian; way past their prime and tough and stringy. You would have to stew them a long time to make them palatable. But once all the old goats have been consumed, there would be better pickings among the ones left.

There is a certain logic in having them give back to humanity while they are alive, er make that shortly after they are alive, as it would just be a waste to let them be cremated way past the point of well done. If they wanted, they could even be memorialized with a plaque on the barbecue.

Next time you go to WalMart and see all those barbecues out front, think how nice it would be if one of Sam's kids was there, slow cooking with a spicy rub. Nothing like jerked rich jerk to whet the appetite.

Here you see someone who doesn't understand how the wealthy got wealthy and thinks that the wealthy don't give back to the "common good". This person is apparently unaware the the wealthy are the ones who pay most of the taxes. The top 1% pay over a third of the taxes. Moreover, the wealthy are the ones who overwhelmingly contribute the most to charity (ironically, statistically the very rich and the working poor are the two groups that give the most, even accounting as a % of income).

Another person has made an argument for having a cap on how much someone can make and then "force them out of the system":

I've always been partial to a "career cap" instead of an annual cap, upon which point one is kicked out of the system so that that accumulated mega-wealth then can't be used to further undermine the common good or manipulate the system further via lobbying, deregulation campaigns, anti-environmental propoganda, stockholder/board influence, RW thinktanks, accumulated interest, kickbacks to regulators/investigators, etc.

When I argued that a cap on income would create disincentives for people to work the response was:

Most inventors invent for the same reason musicians make music -- because it's what they do. Saying they couldn't become more than multi-millionaires probably wouldn't stop them.

The obscenely wealthy Walton family has done nothing of value for the country or the world -- once Sam died. The Walton children are now just parasites who make money by treating other people as shit.

Most people who have made valuable contributions to society made those contributions long before they would have hit any income cap.

Most of the people in the financial industry make money by gambling with other people's money -- not by producing anything of value to the country.

Most of the CEOs who run the giant corporations aren't necessarily any better than other people. They just belong to a very exclusive club that rewards failure. Fuck up one company and you'll be hired by another within a month. Look at George Bush -- screwed up every business he every touched, and was bailed out repeatedly, until he got his hands on the big enchilada and he's flushing that down the toilet, using both hands.

The idea that an income cap would stifle creativity and inventiveness is just corporatist crap. It's actually the other way around. A lot of inventiveness is stifled because the corporatists have made the cost of entry so high.

So the idea here is that the rich are hogging the wealth.  Wealth is produced by the people and the rich are people who are stealing this wealth. If we could kick these people out of the system, then other people would have their turn.

Or as one person wrote:

Make the income tax progressive again with no limit on the top marginal rate. Let it rise above 100%. It would be a polite way of asking the biggest pigs to step away from the trough and let the others have a chance.

In their reality, the Bill Gates or the Henry Fords of the world are easily replaced. Everyone can do what they did if they just got a chance instead of being held down by these "pigs".

Another person, arguing against my position that caps on income would remove the incentive for the most productive to keep working wrote:

You're assuming money is the reason extraordinary people do extraordinary things. I doubt that. Take away the money and extraordinary people would still do extraordinary things. Maybe more so.

Sociologists have known for a long time that in a "gift society" the motivation for greatness is still there - just different. The incentives are tribal status, self-fulfillment and altruism.

Obsessive money lust is pervasive nowadays, but societies without it have functioned fine.

The issue I take here is that what exactly is a "gift society".  Our society certainly doesn't match that.  Motivated people tend to be competitive whether that be in sports, business, or elsewhere.  Competitive people want recognition for their achievements. In athletics, we give trophies, medals, ribbons and other marks of success.  Our soldiers win medals and ribbons for bravey, tours of duty, etc.  And yes, successful businessmen buy things that demonstrate their success.  Perhaps if successful businessmen weren't so profoundly villainized in the media and in society in general but instead rewarded them with accolades, medals, etc. then the incentive for successful businessmen to purchase their own rewards would be lessened.

I argued that no one is 100% altruistic. There are limits.  I may enjoy writing software but there comes a time where it's not fun or I have to sacrifice something in order to achieve my objective. To do things that aren't fun, people have to be compensated. That's why I wrote the article "Robots of Capitalism" to illustrate this point.

But the response was that by my logic, garbage men should make a lot more money than CEOs because a garbage man's job is a lot less fun than that of a CEO.

To which I wrote:

A garbage man doesn't make as much as a professor (usually anyway) because the number of people who can be a garbage man are far more than the number of people who can be a professor.

As I mentioned elsewhere, the reason why CEOs and pro basketball players make so much is because only a tiny percentage of the population can do what they do at their level.

So what makes people mega rich? Again, it boils down to supply and demand: In a capitalistic system, how much we make is tied to how much wealth we produce combined with the competition for people who can produce that wealth.

The value of what we produce is determined by other people (which is what makes capitalism work in the first place). Bill Gates doesn't get to decide he's rich. Society does by valuing what he does enough to pay him for the products and services he provides.

The responses I got to this included:

If only the selfish personal motive is what you recognize that drives people because your mindset is authoritarian or 'free market' disciple, rather than elevating the common good out of common concern, you're not really equipped to be living in, or contributing to, a democratic society with the collective wellbeing in mind. A rising tide should lift all boats, not just the fanciest 5 ships in the marina; -especially if the rising tide or productivity is generated by those being cut out of their corresponding contribution.

To which I say: Yea, I don't like to do things I don't want to do. So sue me. If I'm doing things I find unpleasant, then I expect to get something out of it. But the nice thing in a capitalistic system is that by being rewarded for doing things that I don't enjoy, I might choose to produce things that I'm better at doing than other people rather than spending my time playing frisbee or something. And if the things I'm good at producing are valued by society, society does in fact benefit.

Human nature is pretty straight forward on this point: We want to do the things we want to do and we don't want to do the things we don't want to do.  Capitalism works reasonably well as a way to motivate people to do what they're good at rather than doing just what they want to do.

One of the common things you see coming from fringe groups, particularly those on the far left, is that our government is horrible and its leadership criminals and all kinds of assertions that the world has gone to hell in a handbasket.

But do they really believe this?  If they do, and yet do nothing, would that not make them cowards?  If you really believe that our government has become a fascist, evil, force for evil in the world or is indeed the biggest threat to world peace but you do nothing but sit in front of your monitor in your comfortable home then what does that make you?

The song about Delilah that's been on the radio was written about a girl who isn't interested in the guy.

As a result, someone came up with a hilarious parody of the song that is in response.

For a fascinating series of examples of how really REALLY far-left debaters think and behave, especially when confronted with alternative points of view, check out the comments in this article:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/10079#comment

It is extremely interesting to read how they think but also how intolerant many of them are to opposing points of view. 

I merged the two hives -- just in time as the queen in one of the hives had died.  I am pretty confident one of the hives will survive the Winter but I have reservations the other honey bee hive will make it but I'll do my best.

Next year I plan to try to get up to 5 hives.  My friends think I'm nuts (they're probably right). I don't really like honey, I'm in it for the bees. We need them (they are the primary pollinator of flowering plants including much of our food supply) and they're just a fascinating thing.

Of course, some people thought I was nuts for not destroying the bald faced hornet nest.  But our patio has been free of yellow jackets (the favorite food of bald faced hornets) and the hornets don't bother us, they never come around. People just find their big nests in trees very intimidating even though you'd be hard pressed to find someone who has been stung by one (other than someone who messed with their nest).

It's not so much that I love "bugs". I just don't like the idea of destroying things simply because we can.  If the bald faced hornets were a problem, I would have gotten rid of them. But people tend to just reflexively do things that can be destructive.  We are, after all, part of nature.  If people can't be bothered to try to conserve, can we at least try not to actively destroy without cause?

Anyway, sorry for the soap box.  I'll keep you up to date on how the bees are coming along.

Why don't garbage men or teachers or factory workers make as much as CEOs? We need teachers right? Our society would get pretty dirty in a hurry without garbage men and the things we rely on every day wouldn't exist without factory workers.  How can we justify living in a world in which some CEO makes 1000X as much as these people?

A garbage man doesn't make as much as a CEO because the number of people who can be a garbage man are far more than the number of people who can be a CEO.

As I mentioned elsewhere, the reason why CEOs and pro basketball players make so much is because only a tiny percentage of the population can do what they do at their level.

So what makes people mega rich? Again, it boils down to supply and demand: In a capitalistic system, how much we make is tied to how much wealth we produce combined with the competition for people who can produce that wealth.

The value of what we produce is determined by other people (which is what makes capitalism work in the first place).  Bill Gates doesn't get to decide he's rich.  Society does by valuing what he does enough to pay him for the products and services he provides.

Let's use the inventor analogy to illustrate how becoming "mega rich" works. The supply/demand pipeline we'll call it:

Our creative inventor invents a robot in his basement.  He made it because he enjoyed making it.  But its value to society is nil because it's a robot in his basement at this point.

Making a robot was enjoyable to our inventor and our inventor is one of the few people who can produce such a robot.

But to make the robot really change the world, it needs to be available to people everywhere.  To do that, our inventor needs that robot to be able to be mass produced, mass distributed, mass marketed.

But many of those things are NOT enjoyable to do.  The number of people who want to hop on a 6am flight to Tokyo to meet with component vendors and then fly to New York 3 days later to meet with Ingram Micro for a distribution meeting with buyers from major retailers is very small. Definitely not fun.  Our inventor would also need to raise investment capital in order to pay for the mass production of this robot, pay for marketing, and other up front costs so he would have to build a business plan, travel around to meet with investors, etc.

The items I list above involve skills that very few people have.  And out of those few people who have those skills, very few people are willing to do them because they are not fun, especially given the risk -- our inventor could do all these things and have the product fail and all this work and pain would be for nothing.

But every once in a long while, someone steps forward who not only has all or most of the skills necessary to take an idea and get it out there (Henry Ford being an example) but also the willingness to actually go and do it.

And as a result, they become mega rich.

But they don't do it simply because they want to be rich. They start out because they like doing what they're doing.  Material wealth, however, becomes a key ingredient because they won't love every part of what they have to do. 

The super rich make enormous sacrifices that most people simply wouldn't be willing to do to maek their visions a reality.  They miss family time. They have to often do mind numbing work (try putting together a distribution schedule while on a plane at 3am to Hong Kong to meet with a parts supplier and see how fun that is). 

But those sacrifices are much easier to tackle when they thought of compensation comes into play. Our inventor thinks to himself "Well, going to a robotics trade show in Tokyo during Thanksgiving is a pain but I'll be able to afford a nice Ocean vacation house for my family to go and relax at and have enough money to put into my next invention."

The ones who REALLY benefit from this, however, are the rest of us.  Our friendly inventor ultimately succeeds with his robot idea and the rest of us can buy a cool household robot for $299 at Best Buy that cleans houses, does wash, whatever.

Of course, that won't stop some academic at a left-wing site from writing an article arguing that our inventor is greedy and shouldn't be allowed to have his vacation house and the fact that he's worth $5 billion is a disgrace even as one of the inventor's robots is quietly cleaning his house in the background...