Far-left, Anti-Austerity Party Triumphs in Greek Election.

[Seth]

It disappears from the pocket of the taxpayer and it goes into the pockets of the dependent class. While you are correct that wealth is not a zero-sum game, redistributive taxation is a negative-sum game for the productive class. Always.

So you're saying the dependent class buries their free money instead of spending it on free enterprise dope, malt liquor, and fried chicken?

Nope. I'm saying that those who labor to produce the dope, liquor and fried chicken will quickly tire of being forced to labor without being able to profit from that labor and soon there will be no dope, liquor or fried chicken at all.

Are you trying to pretend there's no profit in dope, malt liquor, or fried chicken? Or are you trying to raise the minimum wage for the people who fry the chicken, brew the malt liquor, and snort that dope?

Every dollar of redistributive tax imposed on a producer is a dollar of lost profit. The greater the clamor from the lumpen proletariat dependent class for largess from the treasury to fund their indolent dependency the more pressure there is on the ruling elite to give them bread and circuses, and the only place from which to get the funds to do so is from the dependent class. Thus, as the tax burden on the productive class grows larger and larger, and the capital of the wealthy is seized outright in order to meet the proletarian demand for equality of income, the less capital there is to invest in production.

Why do you think Venezuelans are standing in lines guarded by armed soldiers to try to buy food...they've given up trying to find toilet paper.

It's because of capital flight and destruction of the markets by Marxist seizure of the assets of companies that had invested billions in Venezuela's oil production infrastructure. When facilities like ports and oil rigs were "nationalized" by the Marxists in charge, the companies that were investing in Venezuela because profits were available all but instantly turned their backs on Venezuela and took their capital elsewhere.

That's capital flowing away from taxation (and expropriation) like water off a duck's back. And that's what always happens when the profit potential is impaired by socialist redistribution of wealth programs to benefit the idle dependent class.

Oh, I see. You think a bucket of fried chicken costs less in the ghetto and The Colonel is being ordered to sell it for less there, and his orders come straight from Washington?

Depends on what product we're talking about and the nature of the socialist infection in the particular society. Ever hear of "rent control?"

The problem is not generally that the government is ordering that the producer sell for a lower price (although this does happen), it's that the government increases the costs of production by soaking the productive class for the funds with which to pacify the dependent class.

At some point the tax and regulatory structure eliminates the ability of the producer to make a profit. The closer to Marxism the society gets, the faster this happens, as in Venezuela and quite soon in Greece.

This is because socialists are not motivated by equality of opportunity, they are motivated by equality of outcomes. Socialism considers a successful producer to be a criminal who is stealing from the mouths of the dependent class, so the impulse is to seize the assets of the wealth to reduce, as rEv puts it so well, "income inequality." The words "income inequality" are the ultimate proof of the perfidious and cancerous nature of socialism. It's a class-warfare phrase intended to incite the proletarian working class against the bourgeois merchant class, pure and simple.

You see, in reality income inequality is what drives people to improve their economic status. They see that it is possible to be wealthy, so they work hard to achieve that goal. Remove that carrot and there's no reason to work hard. When the indolent dependent class is given the fruits of YOUR labor in order to make their economic condition the equal of yours, you're going to stop working hard because there's no reason to do so. And soon, as we see in every Marxist state, nobody does more than the absolute minimum amount of labor required to receive "equality of outcome" benefits from the government, which quickly become "equality of misery" instead.

Mexicans don't flood over our southern border because they hope to be equal to everyone else, they come to try to realize the American dream and be financially successful.

[pErvinalia]

Of course it's a moral and ethical issue. A lot of wealthy people did nothing for their wealth other than being lucky enough to be born into it. And the others who allegedly "worked" for it, owe an ethical debt to those that they fleeced via an unfair exploitative economic system.

And yet again, OPM can't run out, unless you believe that wealth is destroyed when money is moved around in the economy.

I didn't say wealth is destroyed, I said OPM runs out, which it does,

Absolute bollocks! It becomes 'Some Other People's Money'. And it grows in value as well. It can't fucking run out unless you think that wealth is a zero sum game.

when the people to whom it belongs tire of working to produce wealth that is then taken away from them and given to others.

Who said anything about taking so much from them that they "tire of 'working' to produce wealth" (my irony emphasis)? What's with you and the fucking strawmen?? What you are really trying to say (how pathetic is it that I know your argument better than you on virtually every occasion we debate?!) is that we are on the right side of the Laffer Curve. Like all economic conservatives, this is an assumption with zero evidence to back it up. In fact the evidence supports the likelihood we are on the left side of the curve. Growth was greater during the post-war Keynesian period (when taxes were much higher) than at any other point in time. And other countries that have higher tax rates than the US still run strong economies. Australia has a higher tax rate than the US, and we haven't had a recession since 1989 (if my memory serves me correctly). That's coming up on 26 years! And before the GFC we had zero government debt (we obviously had to pump-prime our economy with borrowings to come out of the GFC as the strongest economy in the world). So taxing higher doesn't lead to your idiotic strawman.

An economy requires a constant stream of produced wealth in order to operate. Once the capital has been sunk and is no longer producing new capital it becomes unavailable to the government for redistribution. Just look at China's abandoned and derelict but brand-spanking-new cities it built when capital was flowing in, but which have never been occupied because demand for them ceased to exist.

You really don't understand how economies and money work. That money all went back into the economy. Capital can't be "sunk". It just becomes capital for other people. And as I keep telling you, it becomes many multiples of the initial input capital.

The rest of your post seems to be the standard socialism strawman recorded message. No need to address that shit.

And that's such an idiotic belief, I'm not surprised you follow it. Every dollar given to poor person re-enters the economy. And more of it enters the national economy than with a rich person.

There's your problem right there. You're simply mistaken in this assumption. In point of fact, rich people's money produces far more wealth than does the consumer spending of poor people.

It simply can't when there is no demand. Reduce demand and you reduce the wealth that capital can produce.

Every such dollar generates many multiples of dollars of wealth, and provides demand for an economy, which is the primary thing that supports an economy.

Your mistake is in thinking that a dollar spent by a poor person on consumption generates greater wealth than does the investment of that dollar by the wealthy person in creating products for the public to consume. You're quite simply wrong.

Prove it.

If we adopt your economic system of neoliberalism, we get increased inequality and the destruction of the middle-class,

Marxist claptrap. You see, you're conflating "inequality" with "economics." Big mistake. It is the inequality of absolute wealth between the consuming class and the producing class that makes wealth generation possible. This "inequality" is actually available capital which is risked to create new products and companies to make those products which the consumers will buy. Without that available capital, no car factories or burger shops get built and there is no supply available to meet demand, much less create new demand for new products that is the hallmark of a growing economy.

Capital is capital no matter who's hands it is in. Take everything from the rich and give it to the poor, you've still got the exact same amount of capital in the system.

If everybody has exactly the same amount of money as everybody else, there is no reserve pool of capital available for capital investment (risk) to create infrastructure and products for everybody else to buy. That capital is only made available because the owners invest it in pursuit of profits. If they don't stand to profit from their investment of capital, they won't invest it, they will merely spend it until they don't have any more to spend...or until the tax man takes it away from them to give to someone else.

Rubbish. What frees up capital is SPENDING. It doesn't matter who has the money and in what proportions, as long as it is spent in the system then it is freed up capital. You really have zero understanding of economics.

[pErvinalia]

As usual, this thread now has nothing at all to do with the original topic. Wonder how that happened?

Perhaps you didn't get in here early enough to look down your nose at us?

Anyway, it is related to the topic of austerity.

[Seth]

Of course it's a moral and ethical issue. A lot of wealthy people did nothing for their wealth other than being lucky enough to be born into it. And the others who allegedly "worked" for it, owe an ethical debt to those that they fleeced via an unfair exploitative economic system.

And yet again, OPM can't run out, unless you believe that wealth is destroyed when money is moved around in the economy.

I didn't say wealth is destroyed, I said OPM runs out, which it does,

Absolute bollocks! It becomes 'Some Other People's Money'. And it grows in value as well. It can't fucking run out unless you think that wealth is a zero sum game.

Right, but at each step the new owner of the money (in this case the manufacturer of the product purchased by the dependent class beneficiary) the government taxes the OPM again, which reduces the profit margin of the manufacturer, which happens again on the next iteration, and the next and the next. Eventually that one dollar has been divided up so many times and put into the pockets of bureaucrats in the government, who are nothing but giant black holes in any economy, that there's not enough left to give to anybody.

The point is not that the money disappears, it's that it becomes unavailable to the productive class by being taxed and diverted.

You seem to think that an economy operates when everybody is taking in everybody else's washing. That doesn't work. If the entire economy has a total of $10 in capital available, that $10 may circulate endlessly, but because there is no profit involved that would turn $10 into $20, there's no incentive for anyone to produce anything. You get a stagnant economy like that of Cuba, where there are no consumer goods to be purchased because there is no capital with which to create or buy them and there is no demand because nobody has any disposable income, all they have is just enough to stay alive, if they are lucky. Cuba is the perfect example in fact. It creates almost nothing, exports almost nothing, and has to be constantly resupplied with new capital by outside forces (that's OPM by the way) because the value of the currency continues to diminish bit by bit until you have a situation where you have a grocery store with 14 "employees" who have a "right to work" who stand idly around in a store with almost nothing on the shelves.

The OPM isn't destroyed, it just goes elsewhere, which makes it unavailable to the socialist society.

The problem is that a stable economy relies on continuous generation of new wealth by virtue of labor input. This requires excess capital (profits) to build the facilities used to produce goods for the marketplace. All the demand on earth won't supply a product if there is no money available to build the infrastructure needed to produce it.

when the people to whom it belongs tire of working to produce wealth that is then taken away from them and given to others.

Who said anything about taking so much from them that they "tire of 'working' to produce wealth" (my irony emphasis)?

I did. It's the inevitable and inescapable end-game of socialism. As the dependent non-working, non-producing class continues to expand, and continues to demand and consume an ever-greater portion of government revenues the government must raise taxes to continue providing services to the dependent class, which negatively affects the profitability of the markets. It's a vicious cycle that is seen in every socialist country on earth.

What's with you and the fucking strawmen?? What you are really trying to say (how pathetic is it that I know your argument better than you on virtually every occasion we debate?!) is that we are on the right side of the Laffer Curve. Like all economic conservatives, this is an assumption with zero evidence to back it up. In fact the evidence supports the likelihood we are on the left side of the curve. Growth was greater during the post-war Keynesian period (when taxes were much higher) than at any other point in time. And other countries that have higher tax rates than the US still run strong economies. Australia has a higher tax rate than the US, and we haven't had a recession since 1989 (if my memory serves me correctly). That's coming up on 26 years! And before the GFC we had zero government debt (we obviously had to pump-prime our economy with borrowings to come out of the GFC as the strongest economy in the world). So taxing higher doesn't lead to your idiotic strawman.

Of course it does. It's mathematics. You can't get something for nothing. Every dollar taxed away and given to someone gratis is a dollar lost to the owner of that capital, and that loss adds up until it is no longer profitable to operate the business, which then goes away, thereby reducing productive capacity. As this spiral of economic destruction continues more and more companies go out of business because they cannot pay the expenses of running the business because their profits are being taxed away and given to somebody else. The market gets smaller and smaller, with fewer and fewer producers making fewer and fewer products and the dependent class continues to grow as the bankrupted business owners and their employees go on welfare because they don't have jobs.

So, while the market pool of capital and products available to meet demand continues to shrink, the need for revenues to pay for social welfare programs continues to grow and grow, eating up an ever-larger part of the GNP until there are more people demanding largess from the government than there are producing wealth that can be taxed to pay for those demands.

It's economic entropy and it's inevitable in socialist systems.

An economy requires a constant stream of produced wealth in order to operate. Once the capital has been sunk and is no longer producing new capital it becomes unavailable to the government for redistribution. Just look at China's abandoned and derelict but brand-spanking-new cities it built when capital was flowing in, but which have never been occupied because demand for them ceased to exist.

You really don't understand how economies and money work. That money all went back into the economy. Capital can't be "sunk". It just becomes capital for other people. And as I keep telling you, it becomes many multiples of the initial input capital.

Except it doesn't, due to a little thing called "inflation." Just ask the Zimbawean people who have to roll wheelbarrows full of worthless cash to the store to buy a crust of bread.

The rest of your post seems to be the standard socialism strawman recorded message. No need to address that shit.

Because you can't.

Capital is capital no matter who's hands it is in. Take everything from the rich and give it to the poor, you've still got the exact same amount of capital in the system.

But is it available capital? No, it's not. Available capital means excess capital available for investment in economically-productive wealth-creating businesses that provide jobs. Do you think that the capital that's dispersed among the dependent class in your scenario is going to be available to build a factory? No, it's not. Sure, the currency is still there, but it's worth less due to inflation and it cannot be used to create new products because you can't build cars without investing millions of dollars building the infrastructure with which to build them. This is why the industrial capacity of the USSR was in continuous decline the whole time and why their technology was inferior to everybody else's...they couldn't afford to divert the necessary capital to building new infrastructure because it was all being spent feeding the proletarian masses and feathering the nests of the Marxist elite.

If everybody has exactly the same amount of money as everybody else, there is no reserve pool of capital available for capital investment (risk) to create infrastructure and products for everybody else to buy. That capital is only made available because the owners invest it in pursuit of profits. If they don't stand to profit from their investment of capital, they won't invest it, they will merely spend it until they don't have any more to spend...or until the tax man takes it away from them to give to someone else.

Rubbish. What frees up capital is SPENDING. It doesn't matter who has the money and in what proportions, as long as it is spent in the system then it is freed up capital. You really have zero understanding of economics.

You're positing a Keynesian perpetual motion machine. Economics doesn't work that way. You forget small things like inflation and increasing population. Increasing population alone accounts for most of the "disappearance" of the OPM as each dollar taxed away has to be divided up between more and more dependent class individuals. Eventually that circulating capital is so dispersed that it's not "free" to be shunted away for major infrastructure projects because it's being used to pay for keeping the dependent class fed.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Strong is the tl;dr in this thread...

[piscator]

Of course it's a moral and ethical issue. A lot of wealthy people did nothing for their wealth other than being lucky enough to be born into it. And the others who allegedly "worked" for it, owe an ethical debt to those that they fleeced via an unfair exploitative economic system.

And yet again, OPM can't run out, unless you believe that wealth is destroyed when money is moved around in the economy.

I didn't say wealth is destroyed, I said OPM runs out, which it does,

Absolute bollocks! It becomes 'Some Other People's Money'. And it grows in value as well. It can't fucking run out unless you think that wealth is a zero sum game.

Right, but at each step the new owner of the money (in this case the manufacturer of the product purchased by the dependent class beneficiary) the government taxes the OPM again, which reduces the profit margin of the manufacturer, which happens again on the next iteration, and the next and the next. Eventually that one dollar has been divided up so many times and put into the pockets of bureaucrats in the government, who are nothing but giant black holes in any economy, that there's not enough left to give to anybody. ... ... ...

Oh, so it's The Government that buries money? They don't spend my tax dollars at Lockheed and GM buying AC130 Spectres and Ghostriders, JDAMS, and Humvees? And undocumented alien Lockheed and GM employees don't spend their paychecks at local Walmarts and McDonald's in Marietta, Georgia and Dearborn, Michigan, but instead secretly travel home to Peru and Malaysia to bury their ill-gotten gains?

[Seth]

Of course it's a moral and ethical issue. A lot of wealthy people did nothing for their wealth other than being lucky enough to be born into it. And the others who allegedly "worked" for it, owe an ethical debt to those that they fleeced via an unfair exploitative economic system.

And yet again, OPM can't run out, unless you believe that wealth is destroyed when money is moved around in the economy.

I didn't say wealth is destroyed, I said OPM runs out, which it does,

Absolute bollocks! It becomes 'Some Other People's Money'. And it grows in value as well. It can't fucking run out unless you think that wealth is a zero sum game.

Right, but at each step the new owner of the money (in this case the manufacturer of the product purchased by the dependent class beneficiary) the government taxes the OPM again, which reduces the profit margin of the manufacturer, which happens again on the next iteration, and the next and the next. Eventually that one dollar has been divided up so many times and put into the pockets of bureaucrats in the government, who are nothing but giant black holes in any economy, that there's not enough left to give to anybody. ... ... ...

Oh, so it's The Government that buries money? They don't spend my tax dollars at Lockheed and GM buying AC130 Spectres and Ghostriders, JDAMS, and Humvees? And undocumented alien Lockheed and GM employees don't spend their paychecks at local Walmarts and McDonald's in Marietta, Georgia and Dearborn, Michigan, but instead secretly travel home to Peru and Malaysia to bury their ill-gotten gains?

I'm sure, but what good does that do YOU financially. You're out the money and at best you get some abstract benefit from it. If you're running a business that operates on razor-thin profit margins a percent or two in taxes is enough to sink you. And when you sink, whatever it was that you were selling is gone, and you are demoralized and potentially bankrupt, which puts you into the dependent class where YOUR government-subsidized needs take the money out of someone else's pocket who then faces the same fate as you. Repeat enough times and you have the end-state USSR, a bankrupt nation that wasted its capital on government programs while killing off any sort of entrepreneurial spirit.

Does somebody end up with the capital? Of course, but I find it rather amusing to hear you lauding the military industrial complex as the ultimate beneficiary of government largess.

In the case of Russia today it's Putin and his kleptocrats. Likewise in Greece...the new kleptocrats are the same as the old kleptocrats, they just use a different name. You won't see them (the kleptocrats) living in wattle-and-daub huts on the beach as an example of their personal sacrifice for the proletarian masses. Nope, they will raid the treasury and get rich even faster than the last set of kleptocrats.

[MrJonno]

If you're running a business that operates on razor-thin profit margins a percent or two in taxes is enough to sink you.

If your profits are razor thin then its time to do something else more productive, in fact you are almost certainly only solvent because the state is either giving you money directly or subsiding your staff wages so they can stay alive

[piscator]

I didn't say wealth is destroyed, I said OPM runs out, which it does,

Absolute bollocks! It becomes 'Some Other People's Money'. And it grows in value as well. It can't fucking run out unless you think that wealth is a zero sum game.

Right, but at each step the new owner of the money (in this case the manufacturer of the product purchased by the dependent class beneficiary) the government taxes the OPM again, which reduces the profit margin of the manufacturer, which happens again on the next iteration, and the next and the next. Eventually that one dollar has been divided up so many times and put into the pockets of bureaucrats in the government, who are nothing but giant black holes in any economy, that there's not enough left to give to anybody. ... ... ...

Oh, so it's The Government that buries money? They don't spend my tax dollars at Lockheed and GM buying AC130 Spectres and Ghostriders, JDAMS, and Humvees? And undocumented alien Lockheed and GM employees don't spend their paychecks at local Walmarts and McDonald's in Marietta, Georgia and Dearborn, Michigan, but instead secretly travel home to Peru and Malaysia to bury their ill-gotten gains?

I'm sure, but what good does that do YOU financially.

I'm going to treat that like it was a real question asked in the context of this discussion: Because my tax dollars go right back into the private sector to pay private sector payrolls and taxes, and a woman with a good job at Lockheed Marietta bought $120,000 worth of land from me in Alaska, after she spent $1000 with Delta Airlines to fly up here and about that much to stay in a Hilton in Anchorage. Moreover, I pay my private sector employees to engineer roads with your federal fuel taxes and set section corners for the BLM, who pays me with your income taxes, such as they may be.

See what happens? You pay me to mark a township in Bumfuque, Alaska under ANILCA, ANCSA, or the Public Domain Act of 1803, so that people you've never met know exactly where their property is. I spend that $$ as profit on KFC, Colt 45, and political contributions to Hillary Clinton and Greenpeace after I pay my employees, creditors, and taxes with it.

Are you with me so far?

[piscator]

If you're running a business that operates on razor-thin profit margins a percent or two in taxes is enough to sink you.

If your profits are razor thin then its time to do something else more productive, in fact you are almost certainly only solvent because the state is either giving you money directly or subsiding your staff wages so they can stay alive

If his margins are razor thin, it's because of competition by other private businesses.

[pErvinalia]

Of course it's a moral and ethical issue. A lot of wealthy people did nothing for their wealth other than being lucky enough to be born into it. And the others who allegedly "worked" for it, owe an ethical debt to those that they fleeced via an unfair exploitative economic system.

And yet again, OPM can't run out, unless you believe that wealth is destroyed when money is moved around in the economy.

I didn't say wealth is destroyed, I said OPM runs out, which it does,

Absolute bollocks! It becomes 'Some Other People's Money'. And it grows in value as well. It can't fucking run out unless you think that wealth is a zero sum game.

Right, but at each step the new owner of the money (in this case the manufacturer of the product purchased by the dependent class beneficiary) the government taxes the OPM again, which reduces the profit margin of the manufacturer, which happens again on the next iteration, and the next and the next. Eventually that one dollar has been divided up so many times and put into the pockets of bureaucrats in the government, who are nothing but giant black holes in any economy, that there's not enough left to give to anybody.

How's that any different from the rich spending it?!?

The point is not that the money disappears, it's that it becomes unavailable to the productive class by being taxed and diverted.

Bullshit. Taxes don't disappear or become unavailable. It all enters the system again. You really are clueless about how economies work.

{snipped socialist 'no profit' strawman broken record bollocks}

when the people to whom it belongs tire of working to produce wealth that is then taken away from them and given to others.

Who said anything about taking so much from them that they "tire of 'working' to produce wealth" (my irony emphasis)?

I did.

Troll someone else, fuckwit. You don't get respect in an argument by making up bollocks.

What's with you and the fucking strawmen?? What you are really trying to say (how pathetic is it that I know your argument better than you on virtually every occasion we debate?!) is that we are on the right side of the Laffer Curve. Like all economic conservatives, this is an assumption with zero evidence to back it up. In fact the evidence supports the likelihood we are on the left side of the curve. Growth was greater during the post-war Keynesian period (when taxes were much higher) than at any other point in time. And other countries that have higher tax rates than the US still run strong economies. Australia has a higher tax rate than the US, and we haven't had a recession since 1989 (if my memory serves me correctly). That's coming up on 26 years! And before the GFC we had zero government debt (we obviously had to pump-prime our economy with borrowings to come out of the GFC as the strongest economy in the world). So taxing higher doesn't lead to your idiotic strawman.

Of course it does. It's mathematics. You can't get something for nothing.

Christ, you don't even fucking know what a Laffer Curve is. I was wrong. You're not even smart enough to make the argument that stupid people make.

An economy requires a constant stream of produced wealth in order to operate. Once the capital has been sunk and is no longer producing new capital it becomes unavailable to the government for redistribution. Just look at China's abandoned and derelict but brand-spanking-new cities it built when capital was flowing in, but which have never been occupied because demand for them ceased to exist.

You really don't understand how economies and money work. That money all went back into the economy. Capital can't be "sunk". It just becomes capital for other people. And as I keep telling you, it becomes many multiples of the initial input capital.

Except it doesn't, due to a little thing called "inflation." Just ask the Zimbawean people who have to roll wheelbarrows full of worthless cash to the store to buy a crust of bread.

Possibly a fair point (I'm not wasting any time thinking about it), but it doesn't change the fact that capital can't be "sunk". It becomes capital for other people.

The rest of your post seems to be the standard socialism strawman recorded message. No need to address that shit.

Because you can't.

Fuck off, troll. As Hermit said, you're a broken record, and as I said, you haven't had an original thought in a decade.

{snipped Marxists paranoia}

[Seth]

How's that any different from the rich spending it?!?

It's how and upon what the rich spend it that's important. The dependent class don't have the aggregated capital to invest in large-scale projects that create jobs and products, they spend it on day-to-day items, which while the OPM exists continues the circulation of the money in the economy, but only to the extent of supporting the industries and business that provide the kinds of essentials that the dependent class can afford to buy with their "found money."

If I have ten million dollars I can build a factory or a hospital and use it to generate wealth. If I have ten dollars I can buy a pack of cigarettes and a Coke. That may advance the fortunes of Marlborough or Coke, but it doesn't provide available capital to anyone to create anything new that the market might be interested in. And as Marlborough and Coke are repeated taxed on the profits realized from my $10, which go towards giving me another $10, the forces of inflation and population growth make that second $!0 worth only $9, so now I can only afford to buy the cigarettes but not the Coke. And so Coke's profits dip and the whole cycle repeats itself until all the OPM has been used up and the entire economy is dedicated to producing minimal necessities of life, a la Cuba and Venezuela. Eventually the economy collapses entirely, going the way of Zimbabwe on the way down.

Except it doesn't, due to a little thing called "inflation." Just ask the Zimbawean people who have to roll wheelbarrows full of worthless cash to the store to buy a crust of bread.

Possibly a fair point (I'm not wasting any time thinking about it), but it doesn't change the fact that capital can't be "sunk". It becomes capital for other people.

As I demonstrate above, it doesn't. You falsely presume that a dollar will always buy a dollar's worth of goods, which is quite literally never the truth. In a functioning economy a dollar buys, typically, less than 50 cents worth of goods, the other 50 cents representing profit to the producer. If your dollar buys a dollar's worth of goods (defined as goods whose total cost of goods sold equals one dollar), the producer makes no profit. If the producer makes no profit there is no incentive for him to keep risking his capital or seek to increase production, much less free capital with which to do so. Thus the economy stagnates and begins its downward slide into hyperinflation and collapse.

It's really very simple: TANSTAAFL.

Fuck off, troll. As Hermit said, you're a broken record, and as I said, you haven't had an original thought in a decade.

Sure I have, I just don't produce them here for you to peruse because you're too fucking stupid to understand the intellectually advanced concepts involved. What's the point in discussing differential calculus with a monkey? You're in the same category of intellectual challenge.

[MrJonno]

If you're running a business that operates on razor-thin profit margins a percent or two in taxes is enough to sink you.

If your profits are razor thin then its time to do something else more productive, in fact you are almost certainly only solvent because the state is either giving you money directly or subsiding your staff wages so they can stay alive

If his margins are razor thin, it's because of competition by other private businesses.

The point is if you are earning so little from a business then you aren't brave you are stupid not to be working for someone else or the state and getting a steady wage instead of taking silly risks

Edit
Just had another thought since when do non-profitable companies pay taxes (in fact profitable ones tend to be very good at avoiding it as well)

[piscator]

If you're running a business that operates on razor-thin profit margins a percent or two in taxes is enough to sink you.

If your profits are razor thin then its time to do something else more productive, in fact you are almost certainly only solvent because the state is either giving you money directly or subsiding your staff wages so they can stay alive

If his margins are razor thin, it's because of competition by other private businesses.

The point is if you are earning so little from a business then you aren't brave you are stupid not to be working for someone else or the state and getting a steady wage instead of taking silly risks

Edit
Just had another thought since when do non-profitable companies pay taxes (in fact profitable ones tend to be very good at avoiding it as well)

Yep. It's not very entrepreneurial to get into a cutthroat business where your future is in the hands of everyone but you. That's a lot closer to slavery than socialized roads and crop insurance.
In fact, Seth's business should have figured out long ago they were working for everyone but themselves - suppliers, competitors, customers, the government - and only keeping a percent or two of the taxable gross. In fact, it sounds like the market as a whole would benefit from the loss of such a marginal operation, particularly one so brittle it can't pass on costs or pry a percent or two of evidently unforeseen tax on their 1% profit from the bonus and perks packages of the stiff-necked managers who took the company there instead of to greater profitability. It was just a matter of time as it was. Maybe they can sell their losses to a real company and manage some black ink?

Here soon I expect a retort from Seth where he'll quote some stat he misremembers from Junior Achievement 1958 about some astonishingly low margins of X, Y, or Z sector of the business world. What he swallowed along with that knob was those figures bandied about in the "You Can SELL Anything!" books about how tightly wired the business world is at the top are typically post-tax margins, after everyone else gets paid, including the government and the shareholders and the consultants and the capital reserves and the skyscrapers full of Wharton & Rutgers-educated accountants.

[Seth]

Yep. It's not very entrepreneurial to get into a cutthroat business where your future is in the hands of everyone but you. That's a lot closer to slavery than socialized roads and crop insurance.
In fact, Seth's business should have figured out long ago they were working for everyone but themselves - suppliers, competitors, customers, the government - and only keeping a percent or two of the taxable gross. In fact, it sounds like the market as a whole would benefit from the loss of such a marginal operation, particularly one so brittle it can't pass on costs or pry a percent or two of evidently unforeseen tax on their 1% profit from the bonus and perks packages of the stiff-necked managers who took the company there instead of to greater profitability. It was just a matter of time as it was. Maybe they can sell their losses to a real company and manage some black ink?

Here soon I expect a retort from Seth where he'll quote some stat he misremembers from Junior Achievement 1958 about some astonishingly low margins of X, Y, or Z sector of the business world. What he swallowed along with that knob was those figures bandied about in the "You Can SELL Anything!" books about how tightly wired the business world is at the top are typically post-tax margins, after everyone else gets paid, including the government and the shareholders and the consultants and the capital reserves and the skyscrapers full of Wharton & Rutgers-educated accountants.

Your and Jonno's arguments are merely diversionary rhetoric. The issue is not the wisdom of running a business on a margin, the issue is the fundamental economic fault of Socialism that destroys entire economies. All you are saying is that the entrepreneur should just make more money so he will have more money so that government can tax it away from him without bankrupting him.

You are positing non-responsive non sequitur as an evasion of the hard truth that socialism does not and cannot serve as a permanent form of government.

The problem is that mathematically it doesn't matter what profit margin a business has because in a socialist system the end result is exactly the same, it's just the amount of time it takes for things to collapse that changes as the amount of OPM available for taxation increases, which is exactly what I've been saying all along. Me and Margaret Thatcher, who said "Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them", which is usually condensed to the aphorism attributed to her, "The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."