public unions versus the public

[caroljane]

And PS you would take that hockey stick out of my cold, dead hand.

[Frediano]

Just saying that it can't be shown that union busting has appreciably improved the[sic] economy overall.

For who? My personal union busting(after a summer or two as a college student learning what the phrase "f***ing the dog" meant, I've had little/nothing to do with them, either as a forced against my will member, or employer)has appreciably improved my economies over what they would have been had I volunteered to ... prepay my own ransom.

No doubt that union busting hasn't appreciably improved "the[sic] economy' overall. Eventually, folks will figure it out. Or not. In the meantime, as far as I'm concerned, they can take all the time they need to figure it out. They are living the consequences of thier beliefs, not me. I am living the consequences of my own beliefs.

Some years, was seven figures worth. Others, mid six. A bad year, low six. All without so much as a secretary.

I am way out of the tribe's way; so feel free to go scoop up all that excess that vampires like me used to suck out of the backs of the virtuous working class...by employing them. That's a big plus now, isn't it? Can you imagine what a prick I would be to work for? (I tried it once briefly, in '92. Never again, it was like being a 'dad' to complete idiots. They need to be working in T shirt shops and tanning salons-, not learning to do what I was once willing to teach them.) I shudder at the idea of employing folks with their crappy attitudes. Let them employ themselves; I guarantee its possible. And increasingly ... well, necessary. I mean, who in their right mind wants to step up and be the guy sucking all the lifeblood out of virtuous labor? No thank you, I'm not that guy. (Which means... the field is pretty much restricted to those with no compunction about being that guy. Uh-oh...one of those unintended consequences of our ratcake politics...)

Folks don't have to hold my beliefs, or practice them. They are free to do as they will, and more power to them, I wish them well, in spite of the crappy advice being fed to them by tribalists, which they apparently swallow by the wagonload. I'm not asking them to change their ways, their beliefs, their outlook on life, their theories, their politics. In fact, I'm not asking anything of them at all. They're free to have at it, the universe, as it is. I'm for sure not in their way.

Hope it works out for them, as it has for me.

And, unionize this.

[caroljane]

It's "for whom" actually, strictly speaking.

I corrected your grammar before, but I now think I was wrong. To "feel badly" means "to grope without being able to get hold of what you are aiming for." I think you used the phrase correctly.

[caroljane]

Oh, and I apologize for mistaking you for a roofing contractor. There is another pseudonymous Doug I had been discussing here and I got mixed up. Though actually you two might have a lot in common.

[Frediano]

Oh, sweetie(sure, I believe you're a woman--why not?)correcting spelling and grammar is the universal sign for 'I got nothing else.'

And, it's 'the economies' stupid. But here is something else: there is no such singular thing as 'the economy.' That is a complete political myth. When we talk about 'the weather' it is clear from context that we mean the local weather; there is no such thing as 'the national weather.' If there was, and we were naive enough to try to control 'it' by heating or cooling 'it' then I'm sure the folks in Alaska and Florida would bear the brunt of our abject stupidity. The current voodoo politics is intent on assessing only the average depth of a stream before designing 'a bridge' to carry all of us across 'it.' No wonder we're all wet.

There are economies. Some are doing quite well. Others are on their ass. As a meaningless aggregate, dutifully averaged in some cubicle at Census, 'the economy' is doing poorly. You don't have to believe me, not my problem, but the reason 'it' is doing so poorly is largely tied to the fact that so many think the real economies are an 'it.'

Totally analogous to "S"ociety. There is no such singular thing. There are societies, plural, that make up a nation, singular. ANd yet, as part of our from birth indoctrination -- our 'socialization' -- it has been drummed into our heads from the day we could first hear and form and understand words that there is something called "S"ociety and 'the economy." We've been conditioned to the point where most of us can't even imagine a reality made up of societies and economies...which is how sheep are created. We have been totally 'socialized.'

I am not 'anti-social.' Folks freely form societies all the time, via free association. Mobil/Exxon is an example. I am pro free association, anti-forced association. I am anti the implied forced -association of the concept "S"ociety. It is an abuse of the language. As in:

Society: from the Latin, socius. Ally, companion. As in, associate.

Do you know everyone? Neither do I. Neither does anybody. What can any thinking person possibly think they are referring to when the refer to "S"ociety? I have no idea. Durkheim gave an honest disclosure in works such as Religious Formes(especially his summary. "S"ociety = God, the modern totem for the invisible authority safely beyond all mere local individual contingencies that yet curiously needs carny hucksters to speak for what is best for 'it.' Same carny hucksterism, new name. Rawls has his own variant of the spirit that lives under the volcano(the perfect state of unbias, to which only he can travel to to conduct political polls.) It's all the same leg lifting political nonsense.

Nothing wrong with being a roofing contractor. Or even, a lawn and garden contractor. Or even a defense contractor. Those are all perfectly accessible ways to escape The Borg. Guaranteed.

Been waiting 20+ years for some tribalist to stand up and defend their forced association philosophy...just never happens. I'm not holding my breath over the latest failure to engage...because you can't do what you can't do. It's just cruel to suggest otherwise.

It's historically unfortunate, but what else can you call socialism on a national scale other than 'national socialism?' There is a difference between socialism and national socialism. In a free America, folks form coops and non-profits all the time. That is socialism under free association. More power to them, existing side by side with other peers living in freedom.

That is not national socialism. National socialism is impressed upon the unwilling 51% to 49% using the ethics of gang rape(unfettered pure democracy, which is exactly what goes on in a gang rape.) The clarifying issue is free association vs. forced association.

None of the advocates of national socialism ever proudly defend their advocacy of forced association. Why is that? If it is such a great idea, you'd think they'd do other than run from that which they advocate, even if does share the ethical characteristics of gang rape.

Fee free to check my spelling and grammar, and run from the ideas. Nobody will notice.

[Frediano]

I meant that in those thirty years you spent in your niches and fringes, the US labour movement has been continuously weakened by ideology-driven anti-union practices and legislation, without any corresponding strengthening of the mainstream economy or trickling down of wealth to it from the tax cuts for the wealthiest.

This is precious. You don't get it. I've run the experiment-- for me, not for you. Did I need labor more than labor needed me? I was told by the prevailing winds in my youth that if I worked real hard and achieved success it would only be by sucking the lifeblood out of virtuous labor. It was a theory I didn't quite believe, so I ran my own singular experiment and I found my own answer. Labor is finding their own answer. They may not like their answer. I absolutely love my answer. So do the many others I've met over the years running their own experiments. This isn't a debate. I'm not in any debate with labor. I'm not in any discourse with labor at all. More power to labor, long ma it wave. Labor might figure this out, or not, can't tell. I hope they do.

You can run your own experiments. "Trickle down' was the bad,bad old days. The not good enough days. 2013 aint about any trickle down. This is about getting out of the way, so that others can -finally- scoop up that which falls from the sky, unabetted.

Welcome to the universe, as it is. Hope you're loving it like I am.

You're out battling the big, bad corporations in 2013. Go get 'em. Meanwhile, I was two of them. One in the US, one in the Caymans(fully disclosed to the IRS)as an aid in doing international business. The ratio of corporations to actual humans who were shareholders, employees, and officers in my instance exceeded 1.

How you going to unionize that? Not my problem. If there is a problem to be seen in any of this story, it is mostly about really clumsy forks.

[moralist]

Hey Fred,

Just wanted to let you know how much I thoroughly enjoy your writing style. You could easily author a best seller.

Greg

[caroljane]

I meant that in those thirty years you spent in your niches and fringes, the US labour movement has been continuously weakened by ideology-driven anti-union practices and legislation, without any corresponding strengthening of the mainstream economy or trickling down of wealth to it from the tax cuts for the wealthiest.

This is precious. You don't get it. I've run the experiment-- for me, not for you. Did I need labor more than labor needed me? I was told by the prevailing winds in my youth that if I worked real hard and achieved success it would only be by sucking the lifeblood out of virtuous labor. It was a theory I didn't quite believe, so I ran my own singular experiment and I found my own answer. Labor is finding their own answer. They may not like their answer. I absolutely love my answer. So do the many others I've met over the years running their own experiments. This isn't a debate. I'm not in any debate with labor. I'm not in any discourse with labor at all. More power to labor, long ma it wave. Labor might figure this out, or not, can't tell. I hope they do.

You can run your own experiments. "Trickle down' was the bad,bad old days. The not good enough days. 2013 aint about any trickle down. This is about getting out of the way, so that others can -finally- scoop up that which falls from the sky, unabetted.

Welcome to the universe, as it is. Hope you're loving it like I am.

You're out battling the big, bad corporations in 2013. Go get 'em. Meanwhile, I was two of them. One in the US, one in the Caymans(fully disclosed to the IRS)as an aid in doing international business. The ratio of corporations to actual humans who were shareholders, employees, and officers in my instance exceeded 1.

How you going to unionize that? Not my problem. If there is a problem to be seen in any of this story, it is mostly about really clumsy forks.

[caroljane]

I know it isn't a debate. It is a speech which you have now made three or four times. Are you practising for your retirement dinner?

I never said or thought of you as "anti-social", that must be some other interchangeable nonexistent you are thinking of.

The Economy and Society are, as peaceful you say rightly, not singular entities. They are semantic conveniences to denote complex plurals. In trying to comprehend the endless world outside myself, I have come to see myself as part of that plurality. You have removed yourself from it, with great profit and happiness. Good for you.

It is truly admirable that you have made a vast fortune all by your ownself, in noncoercive value trades with other right-minded individuals. I do not begrudge you one penny of it.

I will be looking up at the sky to see what falls from it unabettedly, and I fully trust that it will not be you.

[Frediano]

You have removed yourself from it,...

From 'it?' Nonsense. I've removed myself from unions. I've removed myself from forced association with a total myth called "S"ociety.

I have socius. I belong to societies, plural. I participate in economies, plural. I've 'removed' myself from no such 'it' that actually exists.

Whatever 'it' you imagine I've removed myself from is pure delusion. I'd even say, mass delusion.

Your begrudging or not is of no consequence to anyone but yourself.

In the case of 'the economy' and "S"ociety being "semantic conveniences", that may be so, but IMO, those particular conveniences lead away from understanding either, not towards. It is an example of hand waving away complexity, of creating a monopolistic 'it' out of a complex plurality of systems of systems. Throwing our hands up and calling the aggregate of all such an 'it' may make 'it' easier to comprehend as an 'it'...but there is no such 'it.'

Here is another example of an 'it' that doesn't exist: a quintile. As in, the ratio of the wealth of the upper quintile to the lowest quintile. I will begin to take political arguments based on such statistics seriously as soon as someone answers a question I've been asking for over 20 years: Can you or anyone name one thing that any living human being actually does primarily or even secondarily as 'a quintile?' What actions or decisions or effects do 'quintiles' have as actors in our economies?

Canada may be different, but here, I just looked at our IRS 1040, and everyone I've ever files says INDIVIDUAL at the top in can't miss it big letters. Have I and my fellow QUINTILIANS been not filing the proper QUINTILE returns all these years?

After 20 years, I would settle for even a made up thing, like, a lost episode of Star Trek. Surely, there must be some basis for all these QUINTILE statistic based political arguments. Seems we need to be gettin' to some serious redistributin' to even out those QUINILES.

Ok. But before ai take any of that seriously, somebody is going to finally need to come up with at least one action or event or decision made by a QUINTILE that could possible impact the economies, plural, individually or in aggregate.

Is that really too much to ask, before taking any of that redistributive social theory serious???

I tried to help once. No good. What is a QUINTILE(or DECIMILE or PERCENTILE...)? I mean, other than something on a spreadsheet at Census. I really need to know, in order to understand redistributive logic. I'm trying, without any help at all.

Ok, so once a year, we all line up by income or wealth or whatever, and get into one of five freight trains, sorted by wealth or income. And then, a conductor comes along. I know, its a freight train, but it will be all right in the end, I promise. We used to do this on passenger trains but it got too crowded. The conductor adds up everybody's income or wealth on his freight train and then writes it on a piece of paper, and sends it to the Census Department, where politicos wait with tense looks on their faces. What will this years numbers be?

And, then, we all get off the freight trains and go about our lives again.

I understand all that. But damn... there are no freight trains; we don't even do that together as members of a quintile. In fact... we do nothing. Nothing at all, as a quintile.

And that is why it is perfectly OK that there was a conductor on the non-existing freight train, because none of this QUINTILE nonsense has any basis at all in our economies, plural.

[caroljane]

I have no clue what a quintile is, maybe we don't have them in Canada. Enlarge search?

Maybe they are descendants of Quintilius Varus - try the German forest.

[BaalChatzaf]

I have no clue what a quintile is, maybe we don't have them in Canada. Enlarge search?

Maybe they are descendants of Quintilius Varus - try the German forest.

Quintiles. Intervals of 20 percent. Rimes with percentile. Intervals of 1 percent.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[caroljane]

I think I get it. At intervals, dead Roman legionaries will fall out of the sky abetted only by reason.

Thanks Baal!

[BaalChatzaf]

I think I get it. At intervals, dead Roman legionaries will fall out of the sky abetted only by reason.

Thanks Baal!

Quintilus was in the 4 th quartile. Ave Atque!

[caroljane]

Et Vale Usque ad Mare

[Frediano]

So in other words, the entire basis for 'redistribution of wealth' has no basis in fact whatsoever. Exactly the point.

If we can't base those theories on quintiles(huh? what are quintiles? that's as good a response as I've gotten in 20+ years) or decimiles or percentiles, then what in the world is the justification?

The whole ferago of left wing redistributive politics devolves to coveting "dems whats gots more dem me." Apply that recursively, as in lather, rinse, repeat, and the inevitable result is two poor wretches in rags, arguing in a hovel over whose sores are runnier, as claim on the last remaining not so maggoty hunk of rotting Elk.

Thank you for the latest unsurprising data point; I'll add it to the pile. The entire concept of "redistribution of wealth" is totally indefensible even in its most fundamental claim-- that there is a 'maldistrubution of wealth.' It is exposed as having no deeper calculus than the reasoning of any criminal who wants what he wants, and so, can never be taken seriously.

An example: Dr. Laura D'Andrea Tyson, giving a talk at UCal Berkley in Nov 1997, at the peak of the Miracle Clinton Economies. She admits, frankly, "Nothing we did." Not the symbolism of a 3.6% surcharge aimed at income over 250,000. Not anywhere near explaining the surplus. As she said, "Anyone can run those numbers, they aren't even close to explaining the surplus." (But she was too modest; it might be true that Clinton didn't get any of the three key things that he campaigned on 1992 -- A Stimulus Plan, Nationalized Health Scare, or a BTU Tax -- none of that agenda passed. But he did level off the Reagan defense buildup -- he cut the scheduled rate of increase of federal spending. This is what we call the catastrophe of 'sequestration' today. But any president in the wake of the collapse of the USSR would have done the same thing-- the Cold War was over. (And, Reagan made his 'grand compromise' with O'Neill, which was, a little more guns in exchange for alot more butter, needlessly, just to dance in the endzone of the Soviet collapse. US Intelligence, and it is assumed, the POTUS, knew damn well that the Soviets were farming with ox carts in the 80s. That system was gasping its last breath all on its own, on the weakness of its crappy ideas.) When Clinton got spanked in '94 for his failed attempt to lurch the nation left, and Congress entered into a harmless six year perseveration on the stains on chubber's blue dress, the US Economies breathed a sigh of relief and for the last time in recent history, roared.

In the Q&A after the talk, a Berkloid whined that the quintile distribution of income in America was "about 8 or 9 to 1" as defacto evidence of something called the 'maldistribution of income' in America. The highest 20% held "8 or 9 times" what the lowest 20% held.

And, not being a math illiterate, I laughed my ass off at that whine. Because, if incomes fell uniformly from the sky everywhere, totally randomly, so that the same number of folks earned 0$/yr as 1$/yr as $2$/yr....as MAX_INCOME$/yr, the ratio of the highest quintile to the lowest quintile would be exactly 9:1. (The average income of the lowest quintile would be 10% of MAX_INCOME and the average income of the highest quintile would be 90% of MAX_INCOME...) And yet, apparently, not only is the quintile statistic important, but ... the shape of the disribution is somehow an ecomomic factor in something called 'the economy.'....

A hoot. Since modern lefties have punted on knowing anything at all about QUINTILES(claiming ignorance is for sure the best path in this regard), I suspect we're not going to be regaled by any handwaving arguments about the shape of meaningless curves at Census.

And this year's 1040 still said INDIVIDUAL at the top. Go figure...

With that perfectly flat 'distribution' of income, the top 10% get 19 times what the lowest 10% "get" and the top 1% "get" 199 times what the lowest 1% 'get.' The villain in this is called 'magnitude.' Good luck outlawing that. The only way to ever remedy this 'maldistributuion' is to enforce INCOME=SAME for absolutely everybody in the economies, including my teenage son when he was cutting lawns part time in the summer.

Meanwhile, the tribe allows itself to be driven insane trying to do exactly that, egged on by these Berkloid whiner social / political science math illiterates and similar, like the poser in our White House. Sorry, at Martha's Vineyard, working on 'jobs, jobs, jobs...'

[moralist]

It is truly admirable that you have made a vast fortune all by your ownself, in noncoercive value trades with other right-minded individuals. I do not begrudge you one penny of it.

This is the unfettered economic system that defined Galt's Gulch.

[caroljane]

Yes, also of the Galts Gulch West in "Old Nick's Guide to Happiness."

There are pockets of unfettered economic systems around the world. I think of them as anarchies.

[moralist]

Yes, also of the Galts Gulch West in "Old Nick's Guide to Happiness."

There are pockets of unfettered economic systems around the world. I think of them as anarchies.

Yes... and that's all you will ever deserve to see of "Galt's Gulch" as a nonproductive outsider.

But for independent Capitalist producers who honor the trust of their peers by upholding the trust of those who are worthy of their trust, the view is completely different.

[caroljane]

"farrago"

[Frediano]

Heu aliquam feminam canes venari potest

[Frediano]

...because they run like bitches to correct spelling...

[Frediano]

When you got nothing but spelling...you got nothing.

[caroljane]

My Latin is not up for this, and google translate thinks it is in Catalan. You are either saying that all women are dogs or else advising me to have sex with an eagle.

[Frediano]

Nihil animi, nihil certamen animi ...nihil est.