I'll be a post-feminist in a post-patriarchy.
People talk about how Steve Jobs often was and Linus Torvalds often can be a**holes, but they excuse them on the basis of their genius.
It occurs to me that before we can say we're in a post-patriarchy, we'll have to have it be such that women who are creative, dynamic geniuses can also be a**holes and still command respect rather than being called b***hes or worse.
A reminder for Americans about what many of them were saying during the Kosovo War of the late 1990s:
Why are they so concerned about the Battle of Kosovo? That's ancient history.
Technorati Tags: 9/11
More aphorisms from my .sig file:
Ankh if you love Ra.
Apple doesn't have many motivational speakers because, think about it: There is no I in iPad!???
If the system is such that good enough
isn't good enough, then the system may not be robust enough.
It was predestined and foreordained that I would have presbyopia.
Reality is what happens whether you believe it will or not.
Some look at the dependent variable and ask y?
I look at its initial value and say y0?
There's the lost Taoist episode where Kirk does nothing, but the computer, knowing that Kirk destroys computers with illogic, senses that Kirk's inaction is paradoxical and then explodes.
Technorati Tags: aphorisms, math jokes, puns, Star trek
tl;dr: In an sense, all retirees are parasites
, whether they have large cash reserves or rely on a system like Social Security. Retirement itself is what is a Ponzi scheme
that takes what workers produce and gives it to unproductive
retirees.
The right-wing seems to have declared a War on Social Security to go along with the more general War on the Welfare State and the War on Women. Their propaganda tries to get people to focus on the idea of ownership of a personal account
as the ideal so that they'll demand an end to the pay-as-you-go system that Social Security uses.
Their shell game with personal accounts relies on faith to a greater extent than does the fiat money that they like to condemn as having nothing at its base. Even if an economy uses hard, imperishable commodities like gold for its money, that money is not what the people in that economy ultimately want. What people want is those things, services, experiences, and so on that they spend their money on. Even in an economy with no credit, no paper money, and no base-metal coins but only with gold as the medium of exchange, if there are no things, services, experiences, and so on that people want, the gold will have no real value to them. To claim that gold or personal accounts will provide for people in their retirement is to require them to have faith that the economy will be productive enough when they retire and that their accounts will be flush enough then. A system like Social Security, on the other hand, only requires that the economy be productive enough.
In any economy, whether retired people have personal accounts filled with 1s and 0s on hard drives at banks or have personal stashes of gold under their mattresses or rely on an authority to move currency from people still employed within the productive economy to them, it is the total output of the productive economy that is relevant. Again, remember that it is goods, services, experiences, and so on—not 1s, 0s, or gold—that people want. Retirees are, by definition, unproductive and must take from the productive sector. That they give the productive sector some of their 1s, 0s, fiat paper, or gold does not negate the fact that they take output from production without having themselves produced anything during the relevant time period!
Assuming that the productive economy produces enough to meet everyone's needs, there is no reason that anyone in the society should have unmet needs. Relying on the market + personal accounts, though, virtually guarantees that some portion of the society will. If labor is heavily exploited and poorly paid, then laborers will not be able to buy what they produce, and only those with fat accounts will. If inflation erodes the value of accounts or if too many have been unable to save (see the previous scenario after several decades), then most retirees will not have enough even though the economy produces enough for everyone (see the 1920s).
The solution is for society to actively distribute wealth (that is, goods, services, experiences, and so on) by the proxy of taxing those in the productive economy and transfering the revenues from that tax to retirees. That is what Social Security does. All the talk of Social Security accounts
was necessary to sell the idea to people in the 1930s who were too proud to accept welfare
, but all that Social Security is is a formal system for transferring wealth from the productive to the nonproductive. However, private accounts are also just a system for transferring wealth from the productive to the nonproductive but with the element of high-stakes risk thrown in. Both systems for retirement are, thus, Ponzi schemes
, but Social Security results in justice instead of in a casino.
Technorati Tags: right-wing idiocy, economics, Social Security, retirement, production, productive economy
The Gaffer was down at the pub having a pint or two and expostulating on Russell's Paradox:
Ah, the class of all classes that aren't members of themselves. That's a right, proper class, that is.
Technorati Tags: puns, Russell's Paradox, set theory, math jokes
Consider a philosophy department where several professors study ennui: would it be appropriate to call their group a meh lab?
