Judson Phillips, president of Tea Party Nation, thinks that it makes sense that voting rights in the United States should be restricted to those who own property. He believes that property owners have more of a “vested stake” in a community than do people who do not own property. That’s what he claimed on a weekly program hosted by Tea Party Nation recently.
BTW, Phillips is the individual who sent an email to members of his organization in October telling them that they should vote for the Independent candidate over Rep. Keith Ellison in the November election for 5th Congressional District in Minnesota. Phillips wrote the following about Ellison in his email: “There are a lot of liberals who need to be retired this year, but there are few I can think of more deserving than Keith Ellison. Ellison is one of the most radical members of congress. He has a ZERO rating from the American Conservative Union. He is the only Muslim member of congress.”
Meanwhile—Rushbo ranted on about poor folks recently on his radio program. In a “media tweak of the day,” Limbaugh asked listeners if they thought that people who can’t feed and clothe themselves and who receive government assistance should be allowed to vote. It was just a “think piece” Rushbo said as he asked his listeners to imagine how different the political make-up of this country would be if such people couldn’t vote.
In a Psycho Talk segment on his MSNBC program, Ed Schultz “tweaked” Limbaugh back.
Maybe Phillips and Limbaugh ought to get together to establish an organization for the purpose of taking voting rights away from certain Americans whom they deem unworthy. Why not return to the good old political days when only property-owning white men had the right to vote. Right???
Sources:
– Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
That would explain the cats attached to my lap and my foot.
‘Cause I’ve got friends in low places
Where the whiskey drowns
And the beer chases my blues away
And I’ll be okay
I’m not big on social graces
Think I’ll slip on down to the oasis
Oh, I’ve got friends in low places
I blame the cold medicine.
which you drink alot
or is your name Dick
That would explain the cats attached to my lap and my foot.
Opposites attract 🙂
Mornin Bobby
Sorry meps, noone “invented” economics. He may have had some insights hitherto undiscovered, but economics as a phenomenon has been around since the first caveman gave another caveman a saber tooth for a wooly mammoth fur. In fact it was most likely the need to articulate the finer points of mutually beneficial cooperation that lead to the development of verbal languages in the first place. Also other people have had some thoughts about the subject well after the 17th century.
B the problem with modern banking is multi-faceted, but you are only scratching the surface and diagnosing symptoms rather than the disease. The root problem is the existance of a central bank, which tinkers with interest rates which massively distorts price signals crucial to economic decisions across the entire spectrum of production. Couple that with fractional reserve banking that allows banks to surreptitiously inflate the supply of credit by loaning out many times the actual amount of deposits they have, and the moral hazard of fdic and “too big to fail” mentality insuring private bank investments with taxpayer money and you have a system teetering on the brink of implosion.
Also if your going to insist i was home schooled id prefer autodidact.
http://mises.org/daily/4103
What Smith, Ricardo, and Marx have done, and what the followers of the latter two continue to do, is to confuse the meanings of two important words: cost and value. While it may be true in the above instance that it might cost five dollars to produce the lumber from a given tree, the value of the lumber from that tree has no immediate relationship to cost.
Value, as Eugen Ritter von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and others demonstrate is inevitably the result of a subjective judgment. Lumber may cost $5, but the intensity with which you, as a purchaser, desire the lumber determine whether it is worth $1 or $20 to you. If it is worth only $1 to you, you will not purchase it if it is priced above that sum, regardless of the cost expended in producing it. Similarly, if you would be glad to pay as much as $20 for it, you will consider it a bargain if it is priced at $10, even though the cost of producing the lumber was $5 and the other $5 represents a profit to the producer.
In short, as a purchaser, you do not consider either cost or profit to others. You concern yourself with value, which relates to your own desire and your own ability to pay. It is in this area that Smith, et al., come to grief. They conclude that cost and value are the same thing.
raff,
That would explain the cats attached to my lap and my foot.
Also why every time I walk through the woods I get bombarded by falling squirrels. Which, when you think about it, is a lot like being attacked by trolls.
Sorry, Gyges. I took that class too and many years ago … from Adam Smith, I think.
Buddha,
You are making so many friends on this thread!! It must be your animal magnetism!
Mespo,
Beat me too it. Oddly enough, because I was taking a final exam for Econ 201 (one of the 2 classes I need to finish up my degree).
Oops, make that “excerpt.”
ekeyra:
Sorry there, Ekeyra, but the inventor of our economic system came down squarely on Buddha’s side as to the value of labor over capital,as this except explains:
Adam Smith was the first to produce an analysis of the place of capital in production. His ideas were vague and indefinite, as later controversy proved; but none the less, he grasped the essentials of the use of capital. Although he believed that labor was the source of all value, he also said that the productivity of the laborer increased with the subdivision of labor, this in turn being dependent upon the quantity of capital available. Furthermore, the number of laborers could not be increased except by the augmentation of capital. In his opinion capital was accumulated by the savings of individuals, not as a social contribution but in the pursuit of self-interest. However, one who saved was a public asset; and a spender was a liability. It is impossible to discover what Smith believed to be the source of capital’s productivity or its relative contribution to the value of the total product.
(Scarlett, History of Economic Theory & thought)
Maybe you’d like it from the master himself:
EVERY man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life. But after the division of labour has once thoroughly taken place, it is but a very small part of these with which a man’s own labour can supply him. The far greater part of them he must derive from the labour of other people, and he must be rich or poor according to the quantity of that labour which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase. The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.[emphasis mine]
Adam Smith, (AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, Bk. 1, Ch. 5)
Ooo. More nonsense from the home schooled.
I don’t hate rich people. I hate venal people. To be clear.
I said capital and that’s what I meant. Not capital goods or real capital (which includes workers). Capital only exists within the mechanism of a medium of exchange in classical economics and it’s only a part of the whole. Had I meant capital goods or real capital (which can be paid for by other means that the ‘good will’ of the wealthy – such as commercial bank loans and stock offerings), I would have said capital goods or real capital. It’s the bankers and the monied elite that have broken the production capacity of this country in their desire to maximize their personal profits. One of the biggest tragedies of banking is the commingling of commercial and financial banking which allowed made up casino shell games like CDS’ possible. It’s the excess profit taking (at the expense of labor and tax payers) that is killing the system. Learn to differentiate between finance money and real capital. But that’s what you get from a home schooling. GIGO. I don’t hate rich people. I hate what the love of money makes people turn do to their fellow humans all so some asshat can have a gold plated toilet.
As to the rest? Make your own blog and ban me. Otherwise? You’re just bitching to hear your lips flap.
_______
Elaine,
I read that when Rich originally posted it. I find I agree with him more often than not, but that was a particularly good column. Thanks for posting it.
Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?
By Frank Rich (11/13/2010)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opinion/14rich.html?ref=frankrich
Excerpt:
The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.
The Americans I’m talking about are not just those shadowy anonymous corporate campaign contributors who flooded this campaign. No less triumphant were those individuals at the apex of the economic pyramid — the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.
It’s the very top earners, not your garden variety, entrepreneurial multimillionaires, who will be by far the biggest beneficiaries if there’s an extension of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for income over $200,000 a year (for individuals) and $250,000 (for couples). The resurgent G.O.P. has vowed to fight to the end to award this bonanza, but that may hardly be necessary given the timid opposition of President Obama and the lame-duck Democratic Congress.
On last Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” Obama was already wobbling toward another “compromise” in which he does most of the compromising. It’s a measure of how far he’s off his game now that a leader who once had the audacity to speak at length on the red-hot subject of race doesn’t even make the most forceful case for his own long-held position on an issue where most Americans still agree with him. (Only 40 percent of those in the Nov. 2 exit poll approved of an extension of all Bush tax cuts.) The president’s argument against extending the cuts for the wealthiest has now been reduced to the dry accounting of what the cost would add to the federal deficit. As he put it to CBS’s Steve Kroft, “the question is — can we afford to borrow $700 billion?”
B your economic ignorance is staggering. Capital is much more than paper stamped with a fed reserve seal. See capital is factories, machines, fuel, wages, and many more critcal components that must be in place before any of your labor can even start. Where does all that come from? Well i know in buddatopia all those things just magically appear, but in the real world here’s how an economy functions. Those” rich” people you hate decide not to spend money now to save for the future. They then invest those saved resources into property, buildings, factories, and machines. This is quite a risk to take because not only are your resources at risk but so is all the time you spent accumulating those resources. Only after all this can workers come into the picture and mix their labor with the previously acquired capital goods to manufacture products. Next time, do everyone a favor and don’t pretend you know a goddamn thing about economics. Now go take your marxist labor theory of value and peddle that crap somewhere else.
were that is
I blame the cold medicine.
You we’re married to two-dimensional fictional characters?
That explains a lot.
All in the ex family.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxpauUgVFvQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]
Oh, that’s right. You can’t.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp0QbZWY67s&w=480&h=390]
Come back when you can win an argument, a propaganda war or anything else.
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.
That is exactly what Buddha is doing.
Go ahead, buddha-troll; try to wiggle your way out of that one. Your daily attacks on bdaman are disruptive to this blawg.
We’re still waiting for you to tell us how you’re involved in production.
Is mommy still supporting you?
If JT doesn’t give a rat’s ass about civility, neither do I.
__________ E.W.