I did not claim otherwise.
Purex, your views on property ownership is pretty idealistic and not grounded in the real world either. My take on this one is, if either Joe or Yourself proved your point beyond a shadow of a doubt, neither of you would change your position.
I agree. But the difference is that Joe's position is based on the half-truths of organized propaganda produced by extremists, which he is interested in touting here on RF for it's own sake. I am not interested in seeing this sort of propaganda touted here. And it's extremely frustrating to try and argue with extremists who cherry pick "facts" and then try to present them as significant truths. Like, if it is a fact that my phone book has some errors in it, and it is a fact that I don't know which numbers in it are wrong, then in truth I must treat the entire phone book as hopelessly flawed and unusable. This is the logic of the extremist. Joe posed this same irrational argument (regarding the "zero-sum" economy) against me in his first several posts, and refused to acknowledge either the dishonesty or irrationality of it. He refuses to acknowledge it because he is unable or unwilling to see it, I suspect. From this, I surmise that it is a waste of time to engage in this sort of "discussion", because it's not really going to be a discussion at all. It's just an opportunity for Joe to spew his anti-liberal propaganda, and an opportunity for me to be frustrated chasing after an endless chain of half truths and irrational suppositions.
From an idealist standpoint, both sides present a good arguement. In the real world, just as soon as Barney and friends started lending money to people who had no incentive or means to pay back the money, the socialist ideals failed miserably.
No they didn't because a lot of people who didn't have their own homes, got one. As a socialist, I don't really give a crap that SMae or FMae got payed back all the time. I cared that families have their own homes to live in.
Most of the loans made were being paid back. Some of them were not. We could have installed programs to help those who were having trouble for a very minimal cost.
But NONE OF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE. The economic collapse happened because some criminals on Wall Street realized that they could bundle these debts together, and then make up a story about how because they are bundled together, the serviced debts somehow magically secure the unserviced debts, and so these bundles of debts are actually ASSETS. And as assets, they can be sold for money. A lot of money.
SMae and FMae did not invent this scheme. Wall Street brokerage houses, owned by big investment banks, invented this scheme. And it was this scheme that crashed the economy. It has nothing to do with liberals or the "Great Society". Absolutely nothing. And it has everything to do with the Reagan-era economic philosophy of deregulation, and of the outright worship of "free markets" as the answer to all possible social ills.
After the crash of 1929, many regulations were put into place to see that it never happens again. But the republican administrations have been methodically dismantling many of these regulations since the days of Reagan, and as a result, there has been more and more market abuse and manipulation, more and more wealth being accumulated by very few people, and the markets have become unstable and volatile and open to catastrophic collapse due to such abuse. And that's exactly what happened to it.
So here we have Joe, desperately trying to blame the crash on "liberals", when in truth, it was greed and the lack of oversight caused by recent republican administrations that are the real cause. But Joe will NOT recognize any of this, because he is fully invested in the lies and half-truths he has been told by the extremists on the right, through their various tireless propaganda outlets.
So what would you have me do?
Any time hard work is rewarded equally to doing nothing, productivity slides into the toilet. When people do very little, they will have very little. This fact is a constant under socialist or capitalist systems.
I have no idea where this is coming from or what it has to do with anything. It looks to me like some of your personal prejudice has accidentally ooozed out onto the screen. I will ignore it because I'm a nice guy. *smile*