unixknight

Yeah I can't believe he got a 1 day sentence in county jail and then probation. What a travesty. That dude had been watching too many Law & Order episodes where the D.A. finds ways to heroically get that pesky Constitution out of the way so he can get the conviction for the bad guy.

I call Superman! On topic, there's a problem I've encountered when trying to find that middle ground when discussing abortion. A lot of people go for the middle ground that says they'd oppose legal abortion except in cases of rape an incest. That seems reasonable on the face, but the problem is in the implementation. How would one set up a system in which a rape victim can obtain an abortion? What would the requirement be? A conviction for the rapist? That can take months, sometimes even years. By the time the case was decided, the baby could be learning to walk. Is the mere accusation of rape enough, then, so it can be done in time? I see a lot of false accusations of rape in order to obtain an abortion by frightened young women who don't feel like they have any other option. A false allegation of that type can be absolutely devastating to a guy. Just ask a Duke lacrosse player.

@MormonGator

But if a werewolf can only be hurt by a silver weapon (or any weapon with at least a +1 enchantment) then would suffocation be a fatal event?

I see it from the opposite perspective. I think it's precisely because we don't carry the babies that men have an advantage in objectivity. Not saying at all that guys; opinions should matter more, only that we do have something valuable to contribute to the discussion. Usually when one is debating this topic with someone they deploy the "guys' opinions don't matter anyway" as a mechanism for shutting down the discussion. (Of course I know you aren't doing that, Gator.) Of course, the results of men being involved can be mixed. The Supreme Court which legalized abortion was all men...

I think it's likely, yes.

Thanks! Yes I did, and I have literally hundreds more, but this is just a sampling.

I was wondering that myself. There seems to be a horde of strawmen in this thread today...

This makes me think of the "I am the 99" movement, where every other image showed someone who was complaining because they'd graduated from college with a degree and couldn't find a job, or what job they could find wasn't paying enough for them to pay on the student loans and meet their other expenses all at once. Of course, that degree was invariably in something that just isn't a marketable skill... and somehow that's the fault of... everybody else. I think the problem is that for a long time we've been told that College Degree = Lucrative Employment. That was probably true once, back when college degrees were generally marketable. Now, what do you do with a degree in Womens' Studies? Teach Womens' Studies? Write books about Womens' Studies? Gonna pay your bills with that?

I don't think anyone here would put profit above people as far as personal priorities. That said, difficult decisions need to be made when you're running a business, and I don't think a Government official is going to be any better than a professional businessperson, so no way would I leave it to any Government entity to hand out punishments for CEOs who have had to lay people off. If laws were broken that's one thing, but letting Government into your business makes things worse, not better.

Speaking of painting...

A company must make a profit to stay in business. Period. All those employees who work for the company need that company to stay in the green. So yes, profit is why they're in business. You think when Jesus was working with Joseph as a carpenter, that He was giving away free tables, or do you think He sold His wares for a profit so that the family could eat and the family business remain afloat?

The difference is that it's tyranny for the Government to make business decisions. Protecting a natural resource that we all share is one thing. Interfering with a company's internal business practices is quite another. Sometimes layoffs are a necessity to keep a company solvent, and it isn't necessarily due to bad management. Things change. Supply and demand are not static. The company's management isn't going to be improved by having Government pulling puppet strings and punishing people. By this logic, the Government should monitor how you raise your kids, because they're people who shouldn't be exploited or abused and by your arguments it appears that you trust Government to oversee it. Which evenings would you like to schedule your regular visits from Child Services? I don't see this as an issue of valuing humanity. If I were the CEO of a company and I had to choose between protecting what employees I could save or letting the entire company tank and putting them ALL out of work, I'd save as many as I could. This satisfies both compassion AND self interest, as the more people you can retain in your company, the easier it will be to get things running smoothly again. If a CEO is being paid according to his contract, then the Government has no right to interfere as long as those contract terms are legal. Period. Of course we agree that if something shady is going on and laws are being broken then somebody needs to go to jail. The issue I have with your arguments is that they're highly subjective. You really need to express, in a concrete way, what you mean by exploitation and abuse. Some say any worker who is paid less than $15.00/hr is being exploited, regardless of what their job entails. Others think $7.00/hr is a perfectly reasonable wage for someone whose skillset includes little more than running a deep fryer and pouring salt on french fries. Unions often accuse companies of abusing their employees as a way to stir up emotion to strengthen their bargaining posture. There are existing laws already that afford protection to employees without playing Big Brother to corporate business decisions. OSHA comes to mind as an obvious example. Who's doing that? Sometimes companies try to do exactly that, but often employees simply can't afford a deep pay cut and opt to try and find another job with a similar rate of pay to what they were making before. I'm a Software Engineer. If I had to take a pay cut down to the level of, say, a Software Consultant, I would have no choice but to start job hunting because I couldn't possibly cover my expenses at that level. Mind you, this assumes that the company even has job openings to filter the workers into, which is never the case. Your solution also doesn't work if an entire department has to be let go since there would be no lower positions at all.

The courts.... So you're okay with allowing the Government to make decisions about how to run a private company. As was presented in an earlier example, it's disingenuous to characterize layoffs as as being merely a tool for profit and gain. If they're necessary for keeping a company from goingout of business do you really think it's more moral for ALL of the employees to be out of work, instead of a few? If the CEO breaks the law, he gets prosecuted for it just like everyone else. Why should this be a special case, and why would you make an assumption like that about what I think? I see. So you want the Government to be able to take, at will, earnings legally paid to an employee by a company. Where does that power end? I think you've made another statement that's too broad to mean anything: that people shouldn't profit for putting someone out of a job. Isn't that exactly what managers are supposed to do if an employee isn't good for the company, for whatever reason? People lose their jobs every day and not necessarily from layoffs. Where do you draw the line? Have you ever been a manager? I have, and I've fired people. Should the Government come and take my paycheck? And layoffs are only necessary because someone isn't doing their job right? That seems like an awfully broad and unsupported assertion.

The courts.... So you're okay with allowing the Government to make decisions about how to run a private company. As was presented in an earlier example, it's disingenuous to characterize layoffs as as being merely a tool for profit and gain. If they're necessary for keeping a company from goingout of business do you really think it's more moral for ALL of the employees to be out of work, instead of a few? If the CEO breaks the law, he gets prosecuted for it just like everyone else. Why should this be a special case, and why would you make an assumption like that about what I think? I see. So you want the Government to be able to take, at will, earnings legally paid to an employee by a company. Where does that power end? I think you've made another statement that's too broad to mean anything: that people shouldn't profit for putting someone out of a job. Isn't that exactly what managers are supposed to do if an employee isn't good for the company, for whatever reason? People lose their jobs every day and not necessarily from layoffs. Where do you draw the line? Have you ever been a manager? I have, and I've fired people. Should the Government come and take my paycheck? And layoffs are only necessary because someone isn't doing their job right? That seems like an awfully broad and unsupported assertion.

Yep, all Conservatives believe the exact same things. Who fires him? The Government? The owners? What if the owners don't want to fire the CEO? What if it isn't the CEO's fault? And how do you tax something beyond 100%?

Good point, and I think that cuts right to the core of it. Socialism isn't a form of government but it is a way of using government force to control wealth.

I think if we want the national revenue to stay in the green the first step is to start making a serious effort to reduce waste and unnecessary spending. As long as the Government can keep going back to the well and raising taxes, they'll never make any real effort to reduce waste and eventually, when it's impossible to raise taxes further, there'll be a collapse. Agreed.

I find a statement like this to be fallacious, and to be honest there's nothing objective about it. My income puts my family in the 3% of earnings in this country. When I was complaining about how my healthcare costs rose after Obamacare became law, I was told "you can afford it so stop complaining." Just what, exactly, gives anyone the right to decide what I can afford, much less make a blanket statement like "they can afford it?" It's another one of those meaningless marketing statements. No, I actually CAN'T afford the increases. I live in an apartment that's too small for my family, but the area I live in is expensive. My car is a 1995 Chevy Lumina. It's literally old enough to drink, if it were a person. I commute an hour each way to work, and I pay for health care not only for myself and my wife, but our 2 kids as well as the 3 I have from a previous marriage. Oh, and I'm helping my 2 oldest with their college expenses as well. My last 3 raises were below the cost of living increases which means my buying power is less than it was 4 years ago despite my making more money. I can't afford to buy new parts for my CPAP machine because they're ridiculously expensive, and to get my healthcare to cover part of them I have to go do another sleep study and get another prescription for another machine. I have a broken tooth that my dental coverage will pay $350 toward a $5,000 bill on so I've been chewing my food on just the left side of my mouth for about 3 years now. I don't just hope Bernie Sanders doesn't get elected, I PRAY for it. The tax increases he would trigger will break me. Do millionaires have these same problems? I doubt it, but I'm still not comfortable presuming that people can just afford arbitrary tax hikes just to make my sense of "social justice" feel better and take the sting out of what is, essentially, institutionalized class envy. Why? At a 15% tax rate, a person who makes $20,000 annually pays $3,000. A person who brings in $2M would be paying $300,000 in tax. I fail to see the problem. The rich person is already paying 100 times more tax dollars, and they're not paying enough? This is bizarre to me. Out in the real world, nobody faces an actual opportunity to jump from the middle class to Warren Buffet. There is a disincentive. I've known people who have turned down promotions at work because the pay raise would put them in a higher bracket and bring minimal additional benefit to their income with a huge increase in stress and workload. When people do get an opportunity to do better, it's in baby steps. And it's absolutely punishing people for being rich. It isn't just the additional money they pay, it's the fact that nobody acknowledges that guys like Warren Buffet generate jobs and keep money moving, which also allows for banks to do things like give mortgages and car loans. Where do you think that money comes from? Aunt Jeannie's retirement account? No. It comes from accounts held by rich people and corporations. That money is used to start businesses, buy houses, keep the economy growing. I'd say the rich are doing plenty as it is. It isn't just about taxes paid. Does a middle class earner contribute anything to economic growth on the scale the rich do? Do the poor? Of course not. And we don't expect them to. The rich do a lot more than people realize just by being rich, whatever their intentions are, and still politicians win elections by promising to hurt the rich to make the middle class and the poor feel better.

@Godless That's kind of the intent behind why I asked you that. I think the desire to tax rich people more, in most cases, is based on class envy and not an actual, articulable sense of what the problem is. I'm personally an advocate for a flat tax, because then everybody pays the same (proportionally.) The trouble with terms like "their fair share" is that it's a really great propaganda/marketing term... It means something different to everyone, and who would argue against such a noble sounding phrase like "their fair share?" It's just like "social justice" or "assault weapon." Everybody understands the term differently so you can rally a lot of support for it without having to define anything specific at all, and it's really easy to vilify anyone who argues against it because all one has to do is use a language trick.... "Oh, so you DON'T think the rich should pay their fair share?"

This, I agree with. Care to define what "their fare share" is? I have yet to see anyone do that.

Well I see an elephant...

I like that you qualified the problem of Billy using government subsidies to buy the jet. Just realize though, that most people who use phrases like "make the rich pay their fair share" or complain about how unfair it is that Billy can buy a jet are not making that distinction. Class envy doesn't care how Billy got his millions. Billy might have subsidies, he might have inherited it, or he might have earned it through his own hard work and investments, but that doesn't mean squat to those people. They treat wealth as a zero sum game, and believe that no matter how Billy became a Billionaire, it MUST have come at the expense of the poor. This is why we hear about "the 1%" as the rallying cry for socialist policies.

Because by putting that on the Government's plate, 2 things happen: 1) It becomes politicized, and politicians can use it as a red herring to get elected. ("Vote for me and I'll reduce entitlements like Welfare!" or "Vote for me to expand welfare for those who need it!") Soon it loses all semblance of what it was meant to be. 2) The Government can now use it as a control. "Want welfare? Then you have certain criteria to meet..." This is already happening in many jurisdictions. While Private charities may have their own problems and disadvantages, that's somewhat compensated for by the sheer number of them that exist. With the Government, it's a monopoly.