State of the Union 2014

[derspiess]

Your faith in the free market is far more distorted.  My solutions may not work; you refuse to recognize that there is a problem at all.  Who's using faith-based reasoning?  His name is Berkut.

Where is this free market?

Evidently it's in the PRC, the country we should all emulate.  That was the moral of your story, right?

What are your thoughts on Labor-Managed Market Socialism? 

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Evidently it's in the PRC, the country we should all emulate.  That was the moral of your story, right?

I thought we wanted to reduce economic inequality, not exacerbate it.

[MadImmortalMan]

China: We've got a million millionaires and a GDP per capita the same as Angola. Go us!

[Berkut]

Your faith in the free market is far more distorted.  My solutions may not work; you refuse to recognize that there is a problem at all.  Who's using faith-based reasoning?  His name is Berkut.

My faith is a figment of your imagination. I have no particular faith in any market, free or otherwise. I am pretty sure I've expressed that numerous times.

[Ideologue]

China: We've got a million millionaires and a GDP per capita the same as Angola. Go us!

Hey, if that's what it takes to get those IBM factories.

[citizen k]

China: We've got a million millionaires and a GDP per capita the same as Angola. Go us!

Hey, if that's what it takes to get those IBM factories.

What IBM factories? They're selling everything to Lenovo.

[Admiral Yi]

Your faith in the free market is far more distorted.  My solutions may not work; you refuse to recognize that there is a problem at all.  Who's using faith-based reasoning?  His name is Berkut.

Seriously?

[Iormlund]

My earliest and thus most impressive memory regarding minimum wage increases is the one which happened around 2001 or so in Hungary. There was an IBM hard disk factory in the city I worked at, which employed, like, most of the city. The government wanted to be re-elected so they raised the minimum wage.
Fast forward a month or two and the factory announced it would relocate to China, which it did.

Or IBM might have simply asked for too much subsidies and government officials said no. Market doesn't work when an employer has such leverage over government. Happens here all the time with Opel factory.

[DontSayBanana]

I'm probably more the same now than ever before.

So you're more the same.  Are you more equal yet?

[Ideologue]

Your faith in the free market is far more distorted.  My solutions may not work; you refuse to recognize that there is a problem at all.  Who's using faith-based reasoning?  His name is Berkut.

Seriously?

I'd actually forgotten that Berk did recognize some problems inherent in inequality, etc.  So I would feel obligated to apologize, except Berk insulted my integrity and intellectual honesty first.

[Admiral Yi]

That's a strawman Ide.  Who says the free market produces income equality?

On topic, I can't believe Barry repeated that old canard about women making 77 cents on the dollar.

[Ed Anger]

Women working. 

[Ideologue]

That's a strawman Ide.  Who says the free market produces income equality?

Empiricism.

[Admiral Yi]

wut?

[Ideologue]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question.  Income inequality demonstrably exists in free market systems; and forgetting observed evidence, even the least sophisticated economic theory would predict it would too.