You’re also taking a snapshot of the most regulated industry in the US. Building high rises is illegal in huge swaths of urban areas. Before we say the free market isn’t providing an answer cab we actually try it? I’m talking removing exclusionary zoning, speeding up the permit process and reducing the power of local action committees, and reforming the broken heritage process that’s used by rich people to keep their areas from densifying.

Oh I’m sorry i didn’t realize there was empirical evidence for socialism. Please send me a link to some of these successful socialist societies.

You wouldn’t be any better off on a socialist system. The people at the top of the party would control everything and the working class would be even poorer than they are now. You’re just licking the left boot instead of the right one.

Right? There are pros and cons with every system. People disagree based on value judgements not based on misinterpretation of facts. People in their echo chambers will have you believe that everyone on the other side of the political spectrum all thinks the same way “the same people who say X also say Y!” Rarely is that the case. Most people are actually centrists who have their own independent beliefs on a wide range of topics.

deleted by creator

I’m not even trying to go down the capitalism vs socialism debate route. All I’m saying is democracy isn’t like this perfect system that is only compatible with the most perfect and utopic principles.

Hitler was elected by a democracy in case you forgot.

How would you describe this conflict? A bunch of lemmings shit-posting and getting fired up behind their keyboard?

We’ve had riots, insurrection and mass civil disobedience on countless issues in the last few years. When is the last time there was even a local protest against wealth inequality? It’s not really a hot button issue outside of online communities like Reddit and Lemmy.

deleted by creator

Well consider the fact that there is currently no conflict and no evidence that one is going to start. The Roman republic went on for 700 years with both a republican democracy and what most historians describe as a highly unequal and oligarchical distribution of power and wealth. Perhaps it fell eventually due to class struggles between the working class and the aristocracy but if it was truly incompatible, then fine it existed in a state of “incompatibility” for literal centuries and there’s no reason to believe the USA and other capitalist countries will be any different. And no reason to believe something better will come along after.

So if democracy and financial oligarchy are incompatible, why does it matter? And btw there’s probably a ton of “incompatible” things that depend on the eye of the beholder. We had racist laws enacted by statute, foreign wars, internment camps, espionage, immoral scientific experiments done by the government all could be described as incompatible with democracy. The reality is that democracy is rule by majority (nothing more, nothing less). Whatever the ethos or the common morality is will be compatible with democracy. Anything done by the elected leaders of the 51% is compatible with democracy.

Don’t get me wrong democracy is better than any other option but we need Democracy+ to really guarantee a just and equal society.

I am a libertarian. One thing I think people of all political stripes need to do is to start judging policy proposals by their outcomes and stop judging policy proposals based on their intentions. So you want minimum wage because a higher minimum wage will lower poverty? But is raising minimum wage the right way to achieve that goal?

Here are ten studies that provide some evidence that raising minimum wage does a poor job of lowering poverty:

1, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10

See the thing with every policy is that it creates unintended consequences. If you tax gas, gas becomes more expensive and the price of food goes up, if you add zoning regulations it makes it harder to build and house prices go up, if you raise wages through legislation (even though we all want to make high wages) that raises the costs to businesses and they have to raise prices or reduce labour at the margin. This has the effect of helping specifically minimum wage workers but for people without a job making it harder to find one. In the long term prices will go up to make minimum wage feel like less than it used to, necessitating the need for constant minimum wage increases. Do you really want to be fighting the same fight all the time over minimum wage only to have it raised when it’s far too late and most people are already making more than the minimum wage? What a waste of political will.

IMO UBI is a great option, Milton Friedman was famously very pro-UBI, but also need to be sensible about what regulations and laws we are passing and use a science and evidence-based approach, not one that sounds good when you first hear it.

It’s not that hard just put a baking tray with soapy water on the top rack and blast the oven as high as it will go. There’s still a lot of scraping and scrubbing but it makes it easier.

Why?

Tbh I think a lot more things are compatible with democracy than people think.

In my experience it’s only apps that support some kind of goal like Duolingo that do this to motivate you with guilt, and this might’ve been a glitch but i think it’s actually a fake-out. They will still continue to show notifications after this one.

I wonder how people who don’t have kids affect the average. Assuming they just get dropped?

It’s an interesting trend i have seen online since the onset of the post-pandemic inflation.

At its core it’s an ethics problem of Kant vs Utilitarianism. On the one hand Kantians are big into the golden rule. They would point out that we shouldn’t accept stealing in society, because we as individuals don’t want to be stolen from. If you can steal from a store why not steal from your friend’s parents or the local community centre? In fact why don’t we just all go steal the things we want whenever we want? Utilitarians on the other hand would argue that someone stealing food (if they really need it) creates more good than some investors losing a small amount of profit does harm. Utilitarians think we should live in a world that minimizes harm and maximizes good. If you’re familiar with the trolley car problem they would pull the switch to kill the 1 guy instead of the 5 on the track. They argue there is no objective system of ethics but rather every moral problem depends on the situation and the circumstances of the perpetrator and victim.

In my experience people on both sides of the political spectrum fall into utilitarian and Kantian camps. But I think people who fall on the left of the political spectrum and who also have utilitarian beliefs have a much more amplified opinion on this because they not only see stealing as a lesser of two evils but they view the whole capitalist system as an exploitation of the working class, and that the gains were ill gotten in the first place and theft is almost a natural revolutionary action to take back what is rightfully there’s.

The additional complication though is that this is also an economic problem in an economic system. Sure maybe if it was a one-off thing where somebody desperate stole something from a store one time then no systemic problem would occur, but because this is happening in larger volumes it becomes a multi-period prisoners dilemma. As opposed to the single period prisoners dilemma where defecting is the optimal choice, in the multi-period version participants develop rational expectations. Recently grocery stores such as target have been closing in inner cities because shoplifting has become endemic and they no longer believe they can make a profit there. This is terrible for inner city residents that do not commit theft because it raises the cost for them to transit and find groceries. So the system of “stealing when you need” isn’t tenable in this economic system.

Whether you believe that means we need to change the economic system or alternatively you believe we need to impose harsher penalties for crime, what’s clear is that in the end we will need a legislative solution, and so we probably should’ve just gone and done that in the first place.

Do you think that’s of all the issues in politics, it’s only valid to have the same 2 political views as everyone else? Or can people have wide ranging views on many topics?

Also why would you want to be in an echo chamber? I’m more of a libertarian but I like surrounding myself with people that challenge my views.

This isn’t an axiom. It’s just Karl Popper’s opinion. One of the few times the paradox of intolerance was actually invoked in a legal setting was in Communist Party of Germany v. the Federal Republic of Germany

The German federal government had petitioned for the Communist Party to be banned in 1952 on the basis that the party’s revolutionary practice means “the impairment or the abolition of the fundamental liberal democratic order in the Federal Republic”. Following hearings, the Federal Constitutional Court ordered in 1956 that the party be dissolved and its assets confiscated, and banned the creation of substitute organizations.

Eat the rich -> you be one the next richest -> get eaten