Comments by "Kim O\x27Brien" (@kimobrien.) on "Thomas Sowell's greatest insight | Konstantin Kisin" video.

  1. This fist defeat of Sowellian economics begins with the defeat of generalized notions. That resources are scarce. This a notion based upon nothing but the logical outcome of the profit systems inability to solve its own problems within the framework of capitalist market private profit and private ownership. The reality is there is and never has been a reason to believe we are running out of resources or not finding new ones and new ways to use or reuse old ones. The second is to talk about alternatives instead of use values. Alternative are A or B Use values are much more concrete and to the heart of the why of choice. The notion that trade and risk produce value in and of themselves. In fact these activities have a cost. .As John Locke said labor transforms nature. The cost of any product good or bad, worthless or valuable materialistic or abstraction is bound up in the labor time needed to produce it. That includes any time spent searching or thinking about how best to accomplish something. To follow Sowells thinking is to deny the material nature of the world and engage in simplistic anti historical views and notionism. Humankind are social animals who have used our hands to labor and were shaped by labor along with a voice box ears and a eyes to used for communication. Cooking to increase and speed digestion and fire After fulfilling our needs for food clothing and shelter we produce culture from which all science art and even religion develops. . .
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  2.  @scatton61  Nothing more ignorant than a fool like Sowell who believes in limited resources and not the limits imposed by the capitalist system of production. Ask yourself when is it we haven't found more uses for what is already have here on earth in the natural world. Actually it's genius like Sowell who are running out of excuses for a crisis ridden system that is in state that the brilliant bourgeois scholars said was no longer possible with the controls being exercised by the central bank.
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  3.  @OJB42  If economics was just trade off than were did the modern world come from?
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  4.  @roughhabit9085  The first rule of ignorance is their is plenty to go around and Sowell is one of the best examples for that. If there was not enough to go around then our population would be self limiting like other animals and the theory of Malthus where the size of farms can only grow arithmetically while population geometrically would have resulted in a huge die off. Since the beginning of agriculture our species began creating a surplus of food production such that no one on earth needs to go hungry. The reason for hunger is quite simple misallocation of resources caused by the capitalist drive for increased accumulation of profits above all else. Half the human population lives in cities not the countryside where most food production takes place The population directly engaged in agriculture no longer as important as the population doing everything else. Yet the small farmer like the workers is being ground into the dust by the capitalist bosses market manipulations whose only goal is to enrich themselves at a cost to everyone else. .
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  5.  @jeffforsythe9514  Have a good trip and don't forget to write.
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  6.  @retroactivehistory  Sowell and Friedman say limited reserves are best disturbed by so called free markets. Are you sure resources are limited? When have we not found new uses for what we have here on earth? Now if resources are not limited then why do we need to use markets to limit them. See how easy that argument was to dismatled.
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  7.  @scatton61  "Economics is the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses." Can you tell which resources are scarce? In fact economics is about use value, labor value along with the creation of surplus value. If something is scarce we just spend more time looking for it or using something else if we needed more than we had now. We wouldn't necessarily be raising the price through the roof as the only solution we could also ration it like during world war two. In fact it was John Locke who said labor transforms nature. Explain how gambling and trade is an act of production? Being beneficial doesn't actual cost or create anything. The cost is in making the determination to begin with so it a loss to both parties who have to determine cost. Same with gambling even if you get the odds right it still a cost and hasn't created anything.
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  8.  @RandoTark  The reason for rationing occurs when there is not enough to go around. Okay let's put you on a boat in the ocean with a broken down motor. The boat owner who also owns the water bottles on the boat decided it's time to jack up the price of water because help may not arrive for days. Still want to talk about the rights of property, freedom to buy and no need io ration? .We had rationing in the United States during world war two. The theory of the magic market allocation is false because first of all if things become scarce that doesn't mean more can be produced or a prices just rises slowly up a supply and demand curve. Speculators can buy up supply and then sell it for an even high price. Could be a plant shut down unexpectedly and others can't pick up the slack.
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  9.  @scatton61  Sowell wrote a bedtime story called "basic economics" where he sings the praises of neoliberal capitalism.
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  10.  @scatton61  The slavery of Africans practiced by Europeans for the growth of plantation crops was not the same as that practiced elsewhere in the world. Africans were chosen because of their inability to run away was limited since the were neither Native American who could go off into the surrounding countryside nor European with the ability to escape and blend into the towns.
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  11.  @jeffforsythe9514  The fist step toward socialism is for the workers to win the battle of Democracy.
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  12.  @jeffforsythe9514  When you come back from heaven or the dead let us know what it was like. Have you decided on a name for God yet or are you all still arguing on what to call someone who speaks only to one person at a time?
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  13.  @roughhabit9085  Sure let's all have a parade and pass out lolly pops for fools who believe in Sowells and the bosses theory of scarce resources and not the scarcity of ideas among a ruling class that sees its system in a state of chaos and is losing its self confidence. Ask yourself when in the history of mankind have we not found new ways to use what we already have right here in nature on earth.
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  14.  @conelord1984  What about the problems the market creates? Friedman is like a protestant preacher who practices his sermons on the faithfull. Unfortunately the boss don't follow the yellow brick road laid out by Friedman and Sowell. Insead they go to the government to solve their problems created by their own greed and drive for profits. The government is not the oppressor of capitalism but the defender. For without government and the central bank the chaos of capitalism would threaten the very foundation of the system itself. The hocus pocus of the so called free market whatever that is suppose to mean has crashed upon the rocks of 2008. No one ever again will be able to say capitalism can function without government controls on monetary policies at the enterprise level. Too many junk bonds had to be retired to the vaults of the federal reserve for the examination of future posterity.just like the cache of gold in the cellars of the federal reserve bank and fort knox.
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  15.  @coolioso808  Yes the declining and shrinking middle class desires to save itself from big capital which grinding it into the working class with by lower costs and replacing higher paid skilled with unskilled labor and more machinery.
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  16.  @coolioso808  The industrial workers are that class that will organize, lead and build a new government economic system and state power. Only those in the middle class who willing to though their lot in with the new class will be helpful in the that task.
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  17.  @coolioso808  No i'm not interested in some nut cases ideas of ancient astronauts, energy channels, and pseudolaw for banks. I prefer the real world not one made up by a fantasy.
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  18.  @micheleparadis2808 Why not have a brass band play some marshall music so we can have a parade for Sowell and Freedman as some of the most shallow thinkers of the twentieth century. Ask yourself how true is the theory of limited resources. Now ask yourself when in the history of humankind we have not found new uses for what we already have on earth. So now if the limited resources theory is untrue hiw ture is the need to put everything in a market because of limited resources. See how easy it was to destroy those arguments.
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  19.  @TheByron130  Socialism is the only one really possible because the class struggle produces it along with the theory's to advance the struggle, The others are concoctions of ideas by universal remormers with no real way to create it.without the actions of the privileged intelligentsia which becomes in its majority reactionary without the advance of the class struggle of the proletarians.which advances first on a national and then an international baisus. .Formation into a class, party and then state.
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  20.  @TheByron130  We have the experience of the Cuban revolution with Che Guevara Economics and Politics in the transition to Socialism by Carlos Tablada. We want the workers to take control of the job and the unions to tell the bosses to open the books so the workers can see where and how the income is being taken in and then how it is being spent. In Cuba no one was told they couldn't be an administrator what they were told is they couldn't use their position to exploit others. Salaries of officials were reduced and those who wanted to leave were allowed to. The big homes of the property owners became the New Embassies.
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  21.  @TheByron130  That's the know nothing theory where prices reflect true production costs. If that was true the bosses wouldn't oppose opening their books. Bosses ran away because the Americans told them they'd be murdered. Just like Ayn Rand's dad who locked the door to leave for the white side of the civil war we aren't going let things go to waste when the bosses lock the doors and run away.
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  22.  @TheByron130  Your not really serious you just want yell theif. The poof that your ideas are garbage is what happened after the Soviet leaders took Milton Friedman's advice creating an even worse economic crisis.
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  23.  @TheByron130  That was before he invention of the Turing machine besides we don't need to keep track of every last detail. You problem is you can't keep prices from getting out of control when the reinvestment of profits shift from expanding production to driving up the value of fictitious capital until the value collapses. All you talk of price signalling is just so much hocus pocus disguised as science. .
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  24.  @pneron2032  Right he supports thing like child labor because of the early opportunity it provides to become another Bill Gates and the unfairness of life.
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  25.  @OJB42  If economics were just trade offs we still be living like people 2000's years ago or when our species became the dominant human species. It precisely because we create culture after satisfying our animalistic needs though the use of social labor and began a process of creating a surplus for times when food was scarce for hunter gatherers that we began agriculture after which trade developed. Today you live in a world economy not a national or local one. Five hundred years ago the people of Europe had no knowledge of those who lived in North and South America and they had no Knowledge of the People of Europe Asia or Africa. The people of Australia were sitting on some of the richest deposits of iron in the world yet knew nothing about making iron tools.
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  26.  @OJB42  Sowell gets interview by one of the faithful and he just so into his attacks on enemies that the guy says of course we don't have needs and he doesn't even catch that. Yet all they talk about is how bright Sowell is. I guess Sowell the great economist never realised that people have needs. To busy defending his wealthy friends from any kind of criticism. .
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  27.  @OJB42  Yes you should since the picture represents the workers and farmers government of Lenin and Trotsky.
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  28.  @Limpass610  The point is this Sowell is a neoliberal and all his thinking is based upon Capitalism and Markets reflecting accumulated "intelligence" and they deny Marx's conclusions and theories laid out in Das Kapital that capitalism goes into crisis because of the natural way in which it develops. That capital must become more and more concentrated into fewer and fewer hands with the disciple more and more petty and tyrannical. Capitalism in fact creates great surplus value yet the surplus ends up being used to advance the interests of profits which is NOT synonymous with this neoliberal happy meal theory of capitalism that people like Sowell promote.
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  29.  @Limpass610  Because their are solutions that are being created by the ability to create surplus value. If there were no solutions only trade offs we would be still living like our nearest relatives the Chimpanzees, Bonobos and Orangutans. His book Basic Economics is little more than a bedtime story designed to assure the readers capitalism is working for their benefit except when evil governments or bosses not realising the long term folly get involved making decisions better left up to a mythical free market capitalism.
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  30.  @OJB42  You assuming capitalism arose though compromise and not bloody revolution. English history is one of civil war and execution of a monarch before the English merchants could impose the will of parliament over the King. Even then the still living of the 59 Commissionaires of the House of Commons who voted for the execution of King Charles had to go into exile or face either execution or life imprisonment. Some went to the New Haven colony. When England was a Republic it was called the English Commonwealth. The American revolutionary merchants would not make the same mistake as the English which was to have a King who could not be removed except by a civil war.
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  31.  @OJB42  More people were probably injured making the movie"Ten days that shook the World" than actually October Revolution. Maybe you should actually know something about history before you start shooting your mouth off. The problem with some one like Sowell being a critic of Stalin is Churchill and FDR sitting right next to him in pictures. Not to mention the war time propaganda movie "Why we Fight." That was shown in Movie theaters before TV.
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  32.  @OJB42  Lenin wanted Stalin out of his post as General Secretary just before his death in 1924. Trotsky then also began a faction fight would result in 1928 split of the Russian Party and the Communist International. Stalin was the murderer of Lenin Party not the continuator. All the old Bolsheviks except Lenin who died in 1924 and Stalin were framed up and Murdered in the 1936 to 38 Moscow tralis. Trotsky would be assassinated in Mexico City in his last exile by a Spanish Stalinist NKVD agent. Thousands of loyal Communists in the Soviet Union. hundreds in Spain and others world wide would be murdered by agents of the NKVD.
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  33.  @OJB42  Once again from the manifesto: The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism. When the Cuban Revolution occurred. An almost completely new leadership developed with the ideas of Communism that rejected those of Stalin, Mao and the second international. The leaders of the revolution for national independence came in conflict with Imperialism and their own capitalist class of collaborators and end up taking it on the path described in the manifesto, by Trotsky in the permanent revolution and Lenin in the April Theses. The Cuban's did not make the mistakes of Stalin and Mao. No forced collectivization or need to engage in purges of scapegoats for bureaucratic policies. Fidel spoke about how the Soviets never properly dealt with the injustices of the Stalin Era and how lucky they were not to have to rely on an ally 10,000 km away to defend themselves from an invasion. That they had to rely on their own strength and were able to prevent their party and cadre from becoming disconnected from the masses by privileges. Fidel and Che always saw and made internationalism part of the revolution and not something one talks about on the May day holiday as future goal. Is Cuba some kind of utopia? No but to say they have failed considering what they have accomplished in 60 years 20 without Soviet help and despite the blockade would be a sign of ignorance of what has been going on in not just the United States but the world as a whole. . .
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  34.  @Beauloqs  He made one of the most important discoveries for Republican and Democrats alike. The 1960 US Labor Dept. was not under Communist Control. I'm surprised he doesn't get a nobel prize for it.
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  35. You also love being told what you want to hear.
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  36.  @coolioso808  Why stop their should a campaign to canonize a Christ like savior of capitalism who comes down from heaven like Sowell get underway before he becomes completely forgotten or despised like all the others?
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  37.  @coolioso808 Plenty of statues were erected to Confederate civil war heros also. The rising tide floats all boats theory ended in 2008 when the tide went out and left the small boats inexplicable stranded. But ya I can see Sowell's wealthy upper class California community of bi racial liberals in Concord building a monument to a new Savior they will probably put up a statue of Obama and Hillary Clinton in Wellesley MA also. Afterall you going to need all the saviors you can find.
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  38.  @quintrankid8045  It still cost you in labor time to make it just as Ben Shapiro's mud pies do. Whither you can get any exchange value for it depends on the market. What is the cost of labor time but the cost of the laborer who must reproduce his labor power for the next pay period. If i come to work and the mill is broke down it still cost me to show up and wait around while management decides what to do. Just because your mill broke down doesn't change the fact that I have to eat, drink and sleep. Those are the laborers costs. How skilled the painter is determines how fast he can produce paintings along with his ability to work in general.
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  39.  @quintrankid8045  Where did the money come from? Did it fall from trees? Or is it just numbers spit out of a computer? Gold and Silver in the ground? Money was invented as a medium of exchange. It has to be recognised by both parties to a transaction as having value. The defeat of the South in the civil war made their paper money worthless but not the silver coins they minted. The original paper money was issued as receipts for gold or silver on deposit in a bank. Anyone who runs a business knows that labor cost and application is the most controllable of all expenses. Your investing in three things capital equipment, materials and wages in anticipation of sales in a market. Unless you intend to cheat your workers you need to pay a total wage in a pay period that will get them to return for the next pay period. Assuming its a full time production job the bosses want us for the longest hours at the lowest wages at the quickest pace to make the biggest profits from the surplus value our labor produces after that which is needed to reproduce our labor.
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  40.  @quintrankid8045  American money is issued by a combined actions of the US Treasury which sells bonds to pay for debts incurred and money loaned out by the Federal Reserve Bank at the prime rate to the national banks. The federal reserve also bought up junk bonds in a process called quantitative easing to bailout banks who had taken on bad debt. Now all the original Robber Barons are dead as are most of the people who mined the gold sitting in Fort Knox and the cellars of the New York Federal Reserve. When a company issues stock or the transit authority tokens that is also a form of money since it can be used in trade. For the capitalist system to "work" trading or buying and selling must always be going on. This is why banks became the center of business activity including the need for a central bank. It becomes necessary to manage every last detail to exert ever greater control and enforce ever more petty rules to extract and keep up the rates of profit for industries without more markets to expand into. The government must more and more take on the role of settling all the disputes created over what can and can not be subsidised or taxed or untaxed and what must and must not be regulated in where the interests of private profit, big capital and incumbents always come first with corruption and monopoly just being a way to conduct business not yet found to be illegal. .
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  41.  @quintrankid8045  Water and food have value and people existed before money was invented by people. A chimpanzee knows what to do with a banana and water he need lessons from a man who labors to know what to do with money. "Labor transforms nature." John Locke. Now the modern bourgeois has been trying to escape that very basic idea to justify and to mystify value and profit. This is why Sowell says trade is not a zero sum but can be beneficial to both parties and big risks can produce big rewards. He is like you trying to get around that the basis of human life is social labor to make life possible for a social group. It is unnatural for us to stray very far or for very long away from other people. Our hands are shaped by the complex tasks that hunting, gathering, fishing and fire making required. Our voice box for communication. Our eyes for observation. Cooking to help with digestion of food. We are part of the natural world and governed by its laws. It might be nice to build John Gaults perpetual motion machine but so far the laws of the universe for reasons we don't understand preclude it. It was the reports of English sea captains who wrote about how people who lived in other parts of the world in a more primitive way without the use of money, marriage and hereditary property like the cultural practices of the Europeans. Culture is only created after out animalistic needs are meet.
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  42.  @quintrankid8045  I'm fairly certain that when one or more workers tries to keep the results of his collective labor the police will be called. Or in the case of Bill Gates when he had charges pressed for theft of intellectual property for coping software that was promoted as being free the only charge that stuck was the coping of a Microsoft logo. No sympathy from Microsoft the big promoter of everything innovative and good though the guy still went to prison.. I'd like to be able to legally work on my car without the threat of eviction. I don't know where you live just being allowed to work is a problem. Companies want to monopolize everything and control your access to parts and the ability to repair everything you own. They have all kinds of laws and license requirements to keep everything under monopoly control.
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  43.  @quintrankid8045  Like I said people engaged in socal labor for centuries without money and if the distaste for labor has become a problem it is the capitalist with their constant demands for more work at the same or lower cost. They disconnected money from the value of gold because they had overspent on the Vietnam War and wanted to make the rest of the world pay. France wanted gold for dollars and Nixon said no provoking the inflationary economic crisis that followed. All that flowed out of the months of Sowell and Friedman was how government social spending and not the endless war spending and preparations for war for which not a peep was heard from either Sowell or Friedman, was the problem.
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  44.  @82fdny97  No you don't understand surplus value. We began creating it since we began to understand the need for it when we realised the need for a store of food in times of need. The creation of a surplus has been the goal of every great civilization not the realization of scarcity for when have we not found more uses of what is already exists in nature. The pessimistic capitalist ruling class is the ones who see scarcity in the midst of plenty The reasoning being is their profit system is not a true measure of human potential. Instead it is crisis ridden because of the greed of the ruling classes who halt production when ever the profits stop flowing. The whole reason the profits stop flowing is the constant shift back and forth between using them to expand production and using the to spectuale on a riise in capital value. Since they can't stop overproducing for markets that become saturated at the prices need o turn a profit the halt production only deeping the crisis which is cased becaue the workers can not buy back all that is produced and the rising capital value begins to ciolapse as production stops. This leds to only a few solutions like either destroying capital so primitve accumulation a can begin again or write offs on paper and restarting production by foating more debt. That just prepares the system for an even greater crisis.
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  45.  @LibertyOverDeath-27  Of course because people like you have everything handed to them on a silver platter.
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  46.  @jeffforsythe9514  No the more import thing to learn is their is more where that came from.
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  47. Sowell ever give credit to a liberal socialist or communist for anything positive? Or is t just his tribe of conservatives politicians that are responsible doing everything good?
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  48.  @wstavis3135  He loves to do cherry picking and battling the evil Karl Marx and "Socialism" he sees behind every bad Capitalist Democratic Party Liberal policy.
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  49. What the constraint?
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  50.  @albertclarke2826  On might also collect the sayings of Chairmen Mao and put them next to Sowells and Jesus for moral fortitude.
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  51. If only trade offs were possible and we were not creating a surplus starting with agriculture than we would still be living like hunter gatherers. That is just one of the professors attempts at mystifying economics by waving his hands and inserting popular but untrue notions. Like the accuracy and assurance of price signals.when bosses see sales declining with profits falling the begin halting investment in expanding production realizing they have overproduced for markets that can sell more goods at a profit they go to driving up the price of speculation in contracts and fictitious capital until the market gets so out of wack with the law of value it collapses causing an ever widening economic crisis as workers get fired and can no long buy back the goods and pay the housing costs for the products they produced to buy back from the market.
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  52.  @scatton61  Some things yes but usually he paints us with the broad brush of Republicans who are the opponents of the Democrats. We aren't part of the Democratic Party. Nor are we interested in reforming the capitalist state apparatus or expanding the administrative state. Nor are we conspiratorial as he seems to think..We seek to change the government with completely Constitutionally legal means. We've only really scratched the surface if your talking about minerals. Do we know whats beneath the ocean? The deepest hole is only about eight miles down in Siberia. We have lots of Gold doing nothing but sitting in vaults. We can probably replace U 238 with thorium which is much more plentiful. Platinum is somewhat rare and has industrial use as a catalyst but I'm not sure what the rest of the heavy metals are useful for. Anything with an atomic number less than iron we are going to have lots of because only stars like our sun were necessary to create iron. I have an agenda? Yes I do to set the record straight. We put the FBI on trial for all the things they accused us of doing in Socialist Workers Party vs Attorney General. They couldn't prove a thing they claimed about the Russian revolution. They did break ins, Black bag jobs, wiretaps and used informants as agent provocateurs encourage marijuana use for possible arrest and disruption along with whatever minor reason they could use for harrassment like liquor laws at social gatherings and missed payments of spousal or child support. Gambling is no different than risk taking. Both are governed by the laws of probability now just because you might not be able to calculate it correctly or down to the penny doesn't change what you are doing. It has nothing to do with the morality of it but no you don't create anything by doing it anymore than trade does. It may only appear that it does because of the way the capitalist system works but that is a false appearance. Big risk can produce big rewards says Sowell. What a discovery!!! Is it any different than with gambling? Both parties might be happy or unhappy with a trade also but that doesn't mean the trade produced or lost something. It he case of Professor Sowell he seems to think it does and that may explain his believe that the subjective view answers the supposed paradox of the diamond and water.along with his and others anti materialist view of value in economics. Nor does he say anything about the accumulation of a surplus. He also talks about alternatives rather than uses. A use value for gold in microelectronics certainly trumps it use value in bank vaults or as jewelry. But saying alternatives masks the difference as if it makes no difference how something is going to be used in economics.
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  53.  @RandoTark  The origins of slavery arose with agriculture and class society. People were captured during wars were used as slaves. Before that war captives were used for dinner when food was scarce.
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  54.  @jeffforsythe9514  Nice of your thinking of my dad but he passed away a while ago. Did you meet him during one of your trips back from the dead? Can you take a message in case you get back to heaven before me?
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