Do people on the political right care about societal issues?

Replace the positive incentive of payment with a scalable disincentive.

So if you they do a good job they are left alone to get what everyone else gets but if they do less than a good job than they get whipped a little and if they do the bare minimum they get their fingernails pulled out?

What about those who don't have many skills or who are lazy? Do they get scalable disincentives too?

This all sounds like a totalitarian nightmare to me but different strokes for different folks I guess.

Lol that's hilarious because that's exactly the same argument you right-wingers use for unemployed people.

I guess totalitarianism is OK for some sectors of society - as long as they're poor.

Maybe you should re-think spending 100x as much money on tackling a minuscule amount of benefit fraud than on chasing corporations for tax.

They mostly seem to fob it off by saying "we need a strong economy to pay for social programmes". So apparently we have to give all our money to rich people via economic growth (from which the bottom 10% haven't benefited at all since 1980) and trust them to know what's best for us.

Since when? I've argued on this site before that if unemployment benefits exist that they we shouldn't use voucher cards to prevent them from buying whatever they want with it. Some rightists do advocate that and I think it is unnecessary and wrong. That's about as close as you'll get to a comparision but even then it isn't anywhere close to what the totalitarian socialists want.

You do need a supporting economy to support your social programmes. It's just a fact.

Socialists need capitalists but capitalists don't need socialists.

How is the idea of food stamps relevant? The unemployed, sick and disabled are hounded quite enough as it is under the present benefits system in exactly the ways you so abhor when it comes to high-earning executives.

Yes, the thing is that right-wing policies, such as austerity and neo-liberalism, don't provide us with the sort of economy that can fund that, not least because all the wealth is handed to rich people who hoard it offshore, outside our tax jurisdiction.

Capitalists need socialists: where would capitalism be without socialist infrastructure to support the health and education of their workers and expedite their business activities. They're supposed to pay tax in return for this stuff but they seem to manage to weasel their way out of it and make the rest of us pay instead.

As I said, what it comes down to with you people is, "Give the rich all the money, they're so clever, they know what's best for you, just trust us and don't make a fuss."

Since when am I defending the current system? Since when are these people prevented from leaving the country or since when have I advocated that?


Your understanding of economics is ridiculous. It is not a zero sum game. What wealth is handed to rich people? I simply advocate that people should keep more of what they earn and not have the parasitic public sector steal it off them to waste.

The empirical evidence is clearly on the capitalist side:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_CQyU4ayBifw/SyV9qbBVPvI/AAAAAAAACjU/FpykvhF-ZaA/s1600-h/were+screwed.jpg


Those services would be better provided by the market. It's a fallacy to say that because the government does it then if the government didn't do it it wouldn't get done.

Our primary and secondary education is dreadful anyway. If you happen to have parents who can afford to live in a good area then you can go to school that is decent. Otherwise you are screwed. That's what educational socialism, i.e. the comprehensive system, gets you.


It's about taking less of theirs (and everyones) money not giving it to them. The people that best fit your description are the bureaucrats, politicians and QUANGO employees.

Well, I would firstly say that coercion really precludes compassion. Nobody is being compassionate if they are being forced to act in a certain way by the state.

Secondly, I doubt that to be true - in simple terms. If practically the whole electorate votes for an NHS system which they believe to be compassionate, where do you imagine all that compassion would go when such a service disappeared? It would go nowhere. If people vote to continue the existence of such institutions, there are likely to agree to voluntarily produce them anyway if they realised that that arrangement would be more successful.

Thirdly, self-interest and altruism (as ordinarily understood) are not mutually exclusive. People commonly understand self-interest as being about punishing others' for one's own benefit, but that is not really accurate. It is in nobody's interest that the poor are poor, or that they suffer. Why, then, would we suppose when people are free to act in their own interest, they won't support them? At the end of the day, the State as it is now is preserved by self-interest, and not altruism. If people thought the existence of the state was bad for them, they would repudiate it. Clearly, then, we already live in a society ruled by self-interest. The difference is not that a Socialist society has altruism, and a liberal one self-interest. It is just that self-interest in both cases is realized differently, since in both cases people disagree about what is in their interest.

This is a completely different point. Of course an individual is not approximately equal to a group of individuals.

Because in a hypothetical world where x people are born at once, and no other humans exist (the closest possible approximation to a purely natural state), I feel it is absurd to suggest that any of those people are born slaves, since it would also follow that others would have a birthright to dominion over them.

I was watching this video and found it interesting that he says he is not into "that society stuff", which I honestly found weird. Surely if you are part of human society you should have a slight concern about how the world stands on a human level after all we don't each live on our own separate islands but shared spaces.

I've always like the analogy of the ants being a smaller representation of us, working together & co-operating and to a certain extent we do that. It seems though that some people think that profit can be gotten at the expense of the planet & society and I am not naive I know there are psychopaths out there who are currently wringing the world dry just for some profit that they will probably never spend. The trouble it seems is that these people (or rather their advocates) are increasingly in the public domain forcing this ideology into the mainstream media and political sphere and more and more I see these views are being expressed in places like TSR by right- wing students.

Furthermore, I sometimes find that many people on the right are unwilling to discuss social issues or dismiss them as irrelevant in the face of profit and growth. My question is do people on the political right care about societal issues such as inequality, poverty etc. ?[video="youtube;JNeGadtnUJo"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNeGadtnUJo[/video]

Graph: wow, what a shocker, economic growth declines, government steps in to fix the mess the kids have made. Also the reason for higher spending is attempts at government cuts, which always cost more in the end due to crises created in the social system, and secondly all the entitled nutcases insisting on unsustainably low taxes so we have to borrow instead or go off balance sheet.

Also that data is the US and why is it a 20 year rolling measure for growth but an annualised one for spending?

And why are you so surprised that as GDP growth slows government spending *as a percentage of GDP* rises?!

And of course economics is a zero sum game. You can't just magic money up out of nothing, even if you're a Friedmanite economic illiterate. All value exists as potential before it is realised. What right-wingers refer to in mystery cult terms as wealth creation is merely the release of otherwise un- or under- or passively used capital when an investor sees the opportunity. Where debt is created from nothing by financial institutions, it is still a zero-sum game as it causes inflation. Where resources are extracted, it's still a zero sum game as there is resource depletion.

So if you they do a good job they are left alone to get what everyone else gets but if they do less than a good job than they get whipped a little and if they do the bare minimum they get their fingernails pulled out?

What about those who don't have many skills or who are lazy? Do they get scalable disincentives too?

This all sounds like a totalitarian nightmare to me but different strokes for different folks I guess.

So a group of individuals who individually have no right to hold dominion other overs somehow gain it when they are a group?

Do you think a group of men have the right to rape a woman because they outnumber her?

In what conceivable way is x people appearing out of thin air anything approaching natural? I question your understanding of the word natural, it sounds like Genesis. In reality you cannot separate any generation of mankind from its forebears.

Obviously, all hierarchies are constructs and I don't justify anyone being born to power or social position, especially including one of enslavement. 'When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?' But it's a bold leap to say equality is our natural state. Hell, even chimps establish strongly hierarchical communities.

The important word in "chimps establish strongly hierarchical communities" is "establish", since it necessarily implies that there is a pre-hierarchy situation.

In any event, at this stage of history we are sufficiently evolved to overcome the brutality of such extreme social Darwinism.

Sorry, why is establish important? Inequality in this country is about far more than the social rank one is born to. One can have social mobility and inequality. My point is that there has been inequality as long as there have been humans and earlier. If you want to go back to your pre-hierarchical state you're going to have to go back a long way.

And whether we actually are that evolved to get rid of all inequality is far from proven. Even if so, it remains to be shown that it's actually something we would want to do.

This has nothing to do with rights. The only reason anyone has any rights is because the law exists - in a pre-legal society, there would accordingly be no rights. With that said, things which currently constitute rights would very rarely be possible to be morally breached anyway since the harm any breach would cause to the victim(s) would be greater than any gain to anyone else resulting.

Well you have spotted that there are no such things are 'rights'.
They are often a useful way to a moral justification for the use of force. There are better ways of doing so such as through ethics.

Instead of saying we have a right to life or equivalently saying no one has the right to murder, we can that murder is a universal wrong. This is how can rationally conclude that murder should be punished.

Calling something a 'universal wrong' is the same thing as calling it a 'right'. The reason is that there is no such thing as a 'right' is that any harm to an individual can be morally justified in certain circumstances, and it's senseless to call something a 'right' if it's just something that we're going to take into account.

Ethics is a better way though. We can rationally conclude things like murder, theft and rape are wrong.