ruggedjackal46 said:Sure, if we're talking about iPhones. But if you actually left everything to the "pure" market, you probably wouldn't have indoor plumbing, either.
And honestly, I’m not even sure if we actually *have* a working sewage system at this point, because from where I’m sitting, it looks like crap is just floating everywhere around us anyway.
wiredfalcon2 said:Capitalism is basically dead in the water because it’s got zero way to deal with negative externalities. It's easy for guys like Adam Smith to sit around and talk big when they weren't staring down a total environmental collapse. He didn't have to worry about the planet burning while he was busy scribbling his theories. Things are different now. Reality hits differently when everything is breaking.
Look, kid, you gotta step outside the bubble. Get out of this little corner of the world and see what’s actually happening. People out there are living off street food every single day, just thriving on it. Meanwhile, the US is sitting comfortably right there in the top 30 globally. It's just a fact.
Man, it’s absolutely beautiful out in San Diego right now.
Yeah, there’s that logic right there. Like, nobody here is actually out here campaigning for socialism, but even under capitalism, you still see people struggling just to eat, and over in the States, you've got all that violence tearing through the inner cities.
It’s like saying because there’s famine in parts of Africa, everything we have going on here is totally fine—or okay, maybe not "fine," but at least we're doing slightly better than the rest of the world.
wiredfalcon2 said:The real reason America is lagging behind other major players is this constant legal instability. It’s a mess—corrupt laws, overlapping regulations where you’re basically breaking the law just by existing, and rules that change every five minutes. If you could actually settle a lawsuit in a reasonable timeframe or plan a business strategy for the next five or ten years without the floor dropping out from under you, the economy would actually take off. Honestly, tax rates aren't even the main issue here, nor is how the government spends the money. On a global scale, we’ll finally see some real growth once we become more like the Americans in places like Seattle, where only about 21% of people are religious.
By the way, man, we all got played by those old-school radicals who suddenly rebranded themselves as "liberals" back in the early nineties. It’s that exact same mindset, honestly—they weren't ever true believers in the old system, and they aren't actual democrats now either; when you look at their core ideology, they’re really just nothing but crooks.
Matthew Young35 said:We would have ended up exactly where we are. It wasn't the presence of market regulations that ruined us—it was the systemic looting. One way or another, we were always going to get robbed.
Look, I’m just saying they’d be in a way better spot right now, and I’m definitely not claiming that the war or the looting wouldn't have happened regardless.
Honestly, I think it’s more than obvious that we would’ve been way ahead of the curve if we’d just let the free market do its thing from the start and built our society on that foundation instead of this absolute mess we’ve managed to create. And look, even if we decided to go full laissez-faire right this second, the first thing that would happen is all that leftover privatization garbage would just get cleared out naturally, because honestly, not even one percent of those bloated entities would survive a real competitive market, which would finally give us a clean slate to actually build something worthwhile. We’re basically twenty-eight years behind where we should be, but hey, I guess it's better late than never, right?
Matthew Young35 said:You're being naive. I don't have anything against entrepreneurs myself. I’m certainly not advocating for more government overreach.
My issue is with thieves. In America, ninety-nine percent of these corporate titans are nothing but crooks; they belong in federal prison alongside the politicians who cleared the way for them to plunder the system.
Of course, we all know that isn't going to happen. At most, you'll see some individual get handed a few months of community service.
I agree that the state needs to back off. This whole mess with companies like General Motors—where the government steps in to bail out mismanagement—is strictly a byproduct of excessive state involvement.
Honestly, you really need to work on how you actually express your points because there's a lot of room for improvement there:
Matthew Young35 said:The real issue here is that he didn't earn a single cent legally. Not one! In fact, the more wealth he accumulated, the more he was actually stealing. Everyone knows this, yet most people just pretend they don't see it.
I feel like we really need to get real about our own little backwater here instead of getting all caught up in these imaginary scenarios about foreign powers. Honestly, the idea of giving the government even more power is just straight-up insane. We should be shrinking the state down as much as possible, because if nothing else, it would force people to wake up to the reality that landing a job in the public sector isn't a guarantee anymore. If you can't rely on some buddy or family connection to hand you a cushy desk job at City Hall right after graduation, maybe a few more freeloaders would actually start looking into real career options instead of just coasting on the dream of a government paycheck. I’ve been following this whole thread, and I had to chime in specifically to ruggedjackal46, since from what I can tell, he seems to think this bloated version of the state is somehow better than dealing with actual entrepreneurs.
But the biggest joke of it all—the absolute peak of absurdity—is seeing someone with those kinds of views rooting for the underdog, which is just totally nonsensical 😂
Matthew Young35 said:The real issue here is that he didn't earn a single cent legally. Not one! In fact, the more wealth he accumulated, the more he was actually stealing. Everyone knows this, yet most people just pretend they don't see it.
Period.
I mean, you're kind of right, but it's more complicated than that. A huge chunk of these people built their fortunes by exploiting the cracks in our system, taking advantage of that weird brand of crony capitalism we have here where government insiders basically hand out favors to their "entrepreneur" buddies, letting them get filthy rich on the backs of every regular taxpayer in America.
And if I'm reading you right, your solution seems to be just handing the government even more power to fix it.
So, what, we're just gonna pour gasoline on the fire?
Honestly, if the old regime was still in charge, we wouldn't even realize things were going south, because that’s the only real difference. Back then, you could only vent about how much life sucked during a quiet family dinner at home, assuming you were lucky enough that your best friend wasn't some undercover FBI informant, because if you were, you'd be absolutely screwed.
Forget these online forums, Facebook, or any of those local dive bars where people whine—everyone would just shut their mouths and pretend everything was perfect. And those few guys who might actually find a backbone after a couple of beers? They’d probably end up getting a PhD in masonry and heading straight to Alcatraz.
James Anderson5 said:Marić is certainly great at public speaking, but what makes you think he’s competent and sincere?...
Look, I’m judging his honesty based on how he carries himself, which is pretty subjective, but honestly, yesterday's performance really drove it home for me. The biggest "crime" they tried to pin on him—after months of people digging through everything they could find—was that preferential interest rate, which, if you look at the actual law, he was totally entitled to, but according to Morris's moral compass, apparently, it's just wrong.
As for whether he knows what he's doing, again, that's just my own take, and since I'm obviously no Wall Street expert, my opinion doesn't carry much weight anyway; I'm just someone watching his moves from the sidelines. 🙂
I'm more than happy to hear your side of things and change my mind if your arguments make sense. 🙂
The Democratic Party basically forced Most out into the open by making that move to trust Marić, and honestly, I’ve got this feeling that even they didn't see a full-on government collapse coming, like they totally miscalculated the whole situation.
I gotta admit, I spent way too much time yesterday watching what was going down in Congress (and honestly, no one’s giving me that time back), and even though it pains me to say it, that guy from the fringe party absolutely shredded them. Biden's performance was on a whole different level compared to everyone else, and he actually showed some backbone, proving he's got what it takes. The runner-up for me was definitely Yellen.
Look, sorry, but all those conspiracy theories floating around claiming Yellen is somehow related to Trump or that she was specifically put there just to bail out Walmart... man, that’s some straight-up lizard people nonsense right there.
Walmart has been expanding and dominating through pretty much every administration we've had in the US, and it just so happens that Yellen is exactly who the Treasury Department needs right now, serving as Secretary (because let's face it, that's the only way to actually pull the strings) to step in and save them. Yeah, sure, keep dreaming.
To me, Yellen seems like one of those rare, genuinely decent, level-headed, and capable people, and honestly, we could really use more folks like her.
As things stand, this administration is headed for a collapse, but I’m just not seeing what the Democratic Party stands to gain from all this since they were the ones who kicked the whole thing off—I don't see how they benefit from calling for snap elections.
Adam Williams2 said:Man, seriously, with all this trolling about the examples and the Champions League, I honestly can't tell when you even showed up here. 🤣
I guess any idiot could have pulled it off, but nobody else actually did, damn... that's just how it goes, I suppose.
Maybe half of them don't even have the right paperwork, though they act like they know everything and can see through everything. Even the heavy hitters, guys way more powerful than Petrov and those types, don't always know it all, I think. 😉
The whole point of using the phrase 'any idiot' isn't really about debating who's got the guts and who doesn't, you know? It’s actually about something else entirely, which is the simple fact that the Speaker of the U.S. Parliament and the top guy in the country's second most important party actually has way more authority and much bigger opportunities than what 'any idiot' can manage, yet his actual impact ends up being limited to the exact same level as what any random idiot could pull off.
Looking at everything from Petrov onwards, it's pretty obvious we're just seeing a standard, run-of-the-mill pre-election stunt here. It's cheap.
Honestly, going with Milanovic was miles ahead of anything involving Karamarko, there’s really no contest there because Karamarko shouldn't have been allowed near the reins of power under any circumstances. I mean, look, the Democratic Party is pretty much useless, and yeah, I totally agree with you on that, but they actually started—albeit in a super timid, lukewarm, and honestly unconvincing way—trying to clean up the mess and bring some actual order to things. And if the Bridge Party had stepped in back then with those six ministries they were offering, they would've accomplished way more than what we're seeing right now. Plus, the Republican Party would have put Plenkovic in charge even back then, and he would have spent his first four years just trying to fix the party's internal chaos instead of being stuck doing what he's doing now, trying to manage both the government and the whole Republican Party at once, which is basically an uphill battle where it's hard to see him doing anything good at all. That is, assuming he even has good intentions, but I won't get into that since I don't really know. And you have to admit, Sanders was actually modern and popular back in the day.