Monday, February 22, 2010

Liberty vs. Equality


Today, there's a struggle for control between factions that embrace these ideals. In terms of social constructs, 100% Liberty would be unbridled capitalism; 100% Equality would be fully redistributive socialism. For some time, I've wanted to do a piece on the consequences of the debate, in opposition to what is taught in our Equality-oriented schools and universities. So here it is:
  • Liberty is unfair to most people, the gap between rich and poor is enormous
  • Equality is unfair to everyone
FDR's Law: The closer you get to full Equality, the lower the average standard of living (less incentive to produce), the only way to achieve complete Equality is to have nothing.

I will illustrate my case graphically, then shut up.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

4 comments:

  1. A third column for "oligarchy" might be good.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm confused; on the one hand you talk about the evils of central banking, a system created by the very wealthy to steal all the world's wealth for themselves, and on the other you post this, which seems to be arguing that the best way to organize an economy is to allow them to do just that. What am I missing?

    Jesse provided a great counterpoint to this post today as luck would have it:
    http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2010/02/failure-of-bubble-nomics.html

    "One has to wonder what would have happened if some more coherent, approachable science, had put forward a system of management that relied upon the nearly perfect rationality and unnatural goodness of men as a critical assumption in order to work? They would have been laughed out of the academy. Yes, there is a certain power to befuddle and intimidate common sense through the use of professionally specific jargon, supported by pseudo-scientific equations.

    Why doesn't 'greed is good' work? Because rather than work harder, a certain portion of the population, not necessarily the most productive and intelligent, will immediately seek rents and extraordinary income obtained by unnatural advantages, by gaming the system, by cheating and coercion, by the subversion of the rule of law, which will sap the vitality of the greater portion of the population which does in fact work harder, until they can no longer sustain themselves. And then the greedy seek to expand their venality, and colonies and then empires are born."

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dear FDRAllOverAgain,
    As far as I can tell from the Federal Reserve's Income Statement they are not recording the purchase of Treasury Securities as an Expense. Only about 10% of the total interest income is lost to operating expenses like salaries. Therefore, roughly 90% of the interest income they are earning is available as net income prior to distribution. Approximately 90% of these profits gets paid to the US Treasury. The real beneficiary to me seems to be the US Government. Please tell me what I am missing?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wil Durant wrote that if history and philosophy taught him anything, it was the inverse relationship between freedom and equality.

    That you even need to point that out show how badly the public school system has failed us.

    ReplyDelete

The USA's political-economc system is best described as:

On Nov 2, 2010, I plan to vote (FOR or AGAINST) my incumbent congressman

 
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