Before you read, note the references to Satanism and "you Satanists" refers to the fact I posted this on the LaVeyan Satanist forum, at http://www.satannet.com/forum/ubbthr...&Number=291530



I was once a brief member here before I left for greener pastures; I now come back to engage fellow people in a discussion about something oft-discussed: redistribution economics, a la Marxist "theories".

Too much information I know, but I just was in the shower thinking about what to say exactly (I tend to rehearse my speeches in my mind, to contemplate the message and anticipate possible questions and or criticisms). The basis of this essay is the disproving, not through equal rhetoric or philosophical meandering, but through economic discourse, of the idea of redistribution of income.

Most of you here are obviously Satanists, and support hierarchism, but I've never really seen a valid reason why you do. I am no longer a Satanist, but I still remember the key concepts behind Satanism and thus emphasize with many of you who have read this far shaking your heads saying, "hierarchy is just necessary." Well, you'll probably be pleased to hear I have some economic proofs showing it is necessary.

I've never seen a single essay or document proving through economic calculation and theories that redistribution is not only unfeasible but be the most disasterous man-made catastrophe in history. If someone does know of such an essay or document, please let me know. I wrote this essay completely independently because I frankly got pissed off with Marxist bull(*)(*)(*)(*) on www.soviet-empire.com/ussr 's forums, filled with, I kid you not, Stalinists, Jucheists, and Marxists of every kind.

I was banned from that pro-Communist forum because of the essay you're about to read. I was given no explanation and no respect. I will warn that I do use some swearing, but it is in context and will make sense to you once you reach it.

One last note: it would be merely philosophical, not economical, to try and "disprove" every other concept Marx and his comrades came up with, like State ownership of property, State ownership of your children, elimination of the family unit, and abolition of private property larger than your toothbrush. I mean, you can, through debate, try and convince people that Communism is just plain insane, but you can't disprove Communism's social values because they aren't based in any economic theory. Only redistribution is, and that's why it was so easy for me to completely debunk it. For the record, I don't claim to be unsympathetic to the plight of the poor who work more than one job, or social injustice. I think some of Marx's ideas are quite wonderful dreams, like a society without need for class or division, but humanity has evolved over the last 10,000 years to incorporate trade and economy, and over the past few thousand years it has incorporated medium-of-value systems, like currency, to replace crude bartering. If society takes this long to find an equilibrium, what kind of moron thinks they can solve the problems of society by giving all power to the Central Government? History has shown that within a political or economic system, the more competing agendas exist, the better for the average citizen. The more companies competing, the less prices will be, benefiting the average consumer. The more parties and politicians competing against each other, the greater rights and priviledges will be granted to us through social contracts, and the less government abuse will occur. However, the less competing agendas, the less opposition to abuse and corruption there is. With one voice, there is no dissent, but with many voices, there is much dissent, to the benefit of society. Marxists wish to replace the many voices with one voice: the State.

Oh one last thing: this essay comes from, originally, http://forums.newspeakdictionary.com...pic.php?t=3349 and thus has references to certain members (Kirov, sorianofan, etc). Just for reference, Kirov is a Socialist, and sorianofan is a Libertarian.

Now onto the essay.

----------

Please read the whole thing or you won't understand.

Thesis Statement

I did not begin this as a complete trashing of redistribution economics, or even as an essay. Having found the first article on Al Jazeera, an Arab world news perspective, it occured to me I should comment on the policies of Bolivian President Evo Morales. Reading further, it became clear one of his policies was to establish a widening of executive power, if not ultimately communist-style dictatorship, using constitutional reforms designed to give more power to the Indian majority, something I can sympathise with, but simultaneously to establish socialist policies of redistribution of wealth. Morales' goal in the context of socialism was to submit Bolivian districts which were composed largely of ethnic Spanish, districts whose natural resources and developed economy, to the authority of the central government. Wealth was, before the districts declared autonomy, to be expropriated from the districts to less developed districts in the western Andes whose Indian majority did not produce goods or services on the level as the eastern districts the central government envied. Political trend in the former and current communist sphere has shown that any government seeking to take wealth from one group and distribute it to other groups will hardly stop at moderate redistribution. First, the states, provinces, districts would be compelled to surrender their income to the less-off. Then individuals are compelled to give up their income to the less-of. Then their property, and then their lives when those individuals are no longer useful. It would be foolish and naive to assume Morales would stop at simple income redistribution amongst districts. His party, Move Towards Socialism, has a clear socialist goal in their policies and statements, and will not, as a socialist group in charge of government, stop at a moderate redistributory measure.

It became clear to me the only way to discourage redistribution thinking is to show, conclusively, scientifically, economically, and with clear calculations anyone with a calculator and algebra-level mathematical understanding can reproduce on their own, that redistribution would lead the society implementing it even partially into a greater economic collapse than that of 1929.

Therefore, my hypothesis is: as the purchasing power of the majority of society which otherwise had little purchasing power increases astronomically or more than mere percentage points as a result of economic parity measures, supply will dramatically decrease as demand skyrockets, leading to mass shortages of basic consumer goods, including food.

The Paper

Breaking news:

And some old news but relevant on Santa Cruzian autonomy initiatives:

[CONTINUED BELOW]

I've been paying attention to Bolivia just as I paid attention to Venezuela. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez wanted to introduce constitutional reforms through amendments. The amendments would have allowed the government to expropriate private property without having to first seek court authorization, taken total control over the Central Bank, created new types of property managed by cooperatives and have extended presidential terms from six to seven years while allowing Chavez to run again in 2012. While his packed legislative body voted absolutely overwhelmingly for it, the citizens turned it down. In various news articles, it was reported the military leadership of Venezuela warned Chavez against doing something rash.

Morales doesn't seem like such a bad guy, and neither does Chavez. Sure Chavez fires his mouth off, but the same can be said for just about every other leader in the world. Bolivia has interested me ever since Morales, the first indigenous citizen, was elected as leader, and since I read Che Guevara's biography, Che having been killed in Bolivia. Problem is, Morales is power-hungry; his constitutional amendments not only do some good and some bad, they increase his presidential powers, and his term limit.

I read through the article, noting several points:

Improving the rights of the majority isn't a bad thing; I support that. But you can't support the overhaul if it includes clearly undemocratic things like "increase presidential powers" which is obviously a way to keep himself in power, or nebulous things like "redistribute wealth". The solution to poverty is to work harder, increase production, and encourage foreign investment among other things. When you start siphoning off other's people's wealth, that makes you a parasite. And besides, who's going to redistibute wealth? The government? Do I really need to give examples of governments which have and now claim to redistribute wealth?

I recently had a discussion with someone about anarchy which evolved into a discussion on scarcity, which prompted me to consider economics and look back on my economics education. All economics is based on scarcity: without scarcity there would be no need for currency, and thus, no need for an economy or economics classes.

Let's look at this picture here.



Pardon the spelling error; it comes from a government website, which doesn't excuse the typo.

The bottom 20% make $9,300, the next 20% make $20,600, the next 20% make $34,400, the next 20% make $56,400, the next 15% make $97,400, the next 4% make $210,000, and the top 1% makes $1,117,000. The US population in 2000, our last census, was 281,421,906.

So 20% of the 2000 population is 56,284,381, 15% is 42,213,286, 4% is 11,256,876, and 1% is 2,814,219.

This means the bottom quintile makes $523,444,745,160, the next quintile makes $1,159,458,252,720, the next quintile makes $1,936,182,713,280, the next quintile makes $3,174,439,099,680, the next 15% makes $4,111,574,046,660, the next 4% makes $2,363,944,010,400, and the top 1% makes $3,143,482,690,020 at a total of $16,412,525,557,920. That's a lot of money, people. Let's start redistributing money equally, assuming party bosses get the same as everyone else equally, which will never happen, but let's just pretend like it will. The total of all income divided by the total population in America is $58,320. For 80% of Americans, they'll see, based on their quintile bracket, from 527% to 183% to 70% to 3% of their original income, and the upper 20% see no gains, but (*)(*)(*)(*) them, right? (*)(*)(*)(*)ing bourgeois pigs who should be shot, they're lucky to get ANYTHING!

As demand for goods and services by the bottom 20% increases 527%, as demand for the next 20% increases 183%, the next 20% increases 70%, and the next 20% increases by 3% this collective skyrocketing of demand throughout the bottom 80% of American society which is 225,137,525 people leads to increase in demand of goods and services provided by the American economy. What do you think will happen? While some will invest and save a lot of money, most will spend, spend, spend. And guess what that will do to supply?

A counter-argument Kirov mentioned to me is that as purchasing power increases astronomically, supply will match the demand. My answer to that is: no. It takes gradual increases in demand to lead to the addition of new factories, new businesses, more labor employment to produce the goods and services to meet the rising demand. It takes decades, years. No economy can handle increases in demand by over 500% and solve it any time soon. And if more factories are built, where does the material come from? Imports and mining and logging and production of material, be it through refinement or laboratory creation, must increase by 500%. Even in the Soviet Union, no New Economic Plan or Five Year Plan ever came close to increasing production this far; and it never really increased consumer goods production. You can say goodbye to natural resources if demand for goods from people who had very little previously skyrockets.

Back to scarcity, at such a high level of demand, imagine what will happen to supply. Food reserves, stores, etc. When people are given more money than they've ever had in their life, they will buy more. It's a simple fact of economics.

Redistribution would only serve as the greatest economic, social, and human catastrophe ever to exist. The numbers are all there, if you disagree, disagree with cold hard math. When an economy lacks INCOME scarcity, it will lack safeguards against maintaining supply and keeping demand at a reasonable level of balance. I don't like the fact some people on this forum are now touting the "productive elite" as the arbiters of society, and they obviously should not be, but income on a national and international level cannot be redistributed or else we face mass shortages of goods and energy. There would be nothing keeping people from leaving their lights off and conserving energy in power-stricken regions of America because there would be no problem paying the bills; I'm not saying they'd keep lights on constantly, but there would be no consideration for conservation at all. There would also be no regard for conservation of goods. People would buy whatever they feel like with incredible increase in income; there would be no sense of limit for most people.

Let's say we enact protectionary measures on supply through rationing. Well, what the (*)(*)(*)(*) would be the purpose of the increased income if we can't SPEND it? It would be a total Catch-22 and no one would support redistribution if they found out they couldn't do (*)(*)(*)(*) with it. Yeah you could invest the money, but what would be the point if rationing is enacted? It makes no sense at all from any perspective unless your goal is to be confusing and pay lip-service to Marx and don't do (*)(*)(*)(*) about society.

Let's say we start increasing prices to match demand. Well, it would still be no different from enacting rationing at all because people would still see no point to an increased income if their purchasing power remains virtually the same.

To keep society from starving and running out of goods through this stupid redistribution policy, you have to ration the goods, increase prices on the goods, or scrap this stupid policy altogether.

Let's say you said "let's actually redistribute to select people". You think the rest of society will go along with that selectivist bull(*)(*)(*)(*)? I doubt it. If you asked the bottom 80% if they want the top 20%'s income, why not ask the bottom 80% if they want to own the businesses by themselves and kick out the entrepreneurs who, without, there wouldn't be businesses. Why not ask the bottom 80% if they want the top 20%'s homes and property? Hell, let's just let the majority take away the rights and property of the minority. Well, I think that's called totalitarian democracy, an actual term.

And even if you destroyed democracy and rights and property rights, and decided to give the income of the top to the people on the very bottom, you'd still be greatly increasing their purchasing power, which would lead to the ration/pricing paradox I already mentioned, in a less severe way, but still severe.

What if Bolivia goes Redistributory



Here above we can see the data for income of Bolivian citizens in 1999 located on page 7 of http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/sdissu...n_Andersen.pdf

The Boliviano is the name of Bolivia’s “money” or “currency”. Bs is the symbol for the Boliviano in Bolivia, BOB elsewhere. - http://www.citizenshipbolivia.com/ht...in_bolivi.html

So I can see while I post my post instead of having to look at the image preview, I'll type out the table.

-----------

Employment and income in Bolivia 1999, by labor category

Laborer = Employment (#) // Employment (%) // Income (Bs.)

1. Rural small-holder = 1,409,313 // 39.5 // 244
2. Agricultural worker (unskilled) = 66,672 // 1.8 // 725
3. Non-agricultural worker (unskilled) = 296,451 // 8.3 // 651
4. Urban informal = 878,203 // 24.6 // 415
5. Employee (skilled) = 626,368 // 17.5 // 1,240
6. Employer = 292,734 // 8.2 // 2,683
Total labor force = 3,569,741 // 100.0 // 704

-----------

Bolivian 1999 population estimate: 7,982,850 - http://www.photius.com/wfb1999/boliv...ia_people.html

-----------

This table below is the result of my simple calculations of labor population multiplied by average income for each 6 groups and a total calculation.

1. Bs. 343,872,372
2. Bs. 48,337,200
3. Bs. 192,989,601
4. Bs. 364,454,245
5. Bs. 776,696,320
6. Bs. 785,405,322
Total Bs. 2,513,097,664

Bs. 2,513,097,664 divided by the labor force (who will provide for their families) which is 3,569,741 people is Bs. 704. So if everyone who works is paid Bs. 704 that means the following percent changes in income will occur:

Percent changes in income

1. Rural small-holder = 188%
2. Agricultural worker (unskilled) = -3%
3. Non-agricultural worker (unskilled) = 8%
4. Urban informal = 70%
5. Employee (skilled) = -43%
6. Employer = -74%

This means for 39.5% of laborers, their incomes increase by an average of 188%; for 24.6% of laborers their incomes increase by an average of 70%, and for 8.3% of laborers their incomes increase by an average of 8%. This all means that 72.4% of laborers and their respective families will see increases in income from a range of 188% to 8%, greatly increasing the purchasing power of 2,584,492 people and their families, which adds millions more to the number of people whose purchasing power will greatly increase.

Since the Bolivian economy is much worse than the American economy we don't see increases as high as American income increases if this redistribution scheme were enacted. Do any of you besides Eurasian indulge in a fantasy that its economy can possibly handle such high increases in purchasing power?

In 1999 5.8124 bolivianos were worth 1 US dollar. - http://www.worldpress.org/profiles/bolivia.cfm

So if you wanted to translate the above results into dollars, the following would show up:

----------

Employment and income in Bolivia 1999, by labor category

Laborer = Employment (#) // Employment (%) // Income ($)

1. Rural small-holder = 1,409,313 // 39.5 // 41.98
2. Agricultural worker (unskilled) = 66,672 // 1.8 // 124.73
3. Non-agricultural worker (unskilled) = 296,451 // 8.3 // 112
4. Urban informal = 878,203 // 24.6 // 71.40
5. Employee (skilled) = 626,368 // 17.5 // 213.34
6. Employer = 292,734 // 8.2 // 461.60
Total labor force = 3,569,741 // 100.0 // 121.06

----------

1. $ 59,161,856.03
2. $ 8,316,220.49
3. $ 33,203,083.24
4. $ 62,702,884.35
5. $ 133,627,472.30
6. $ 135,125,821.00
Total $ 432,137,337.41

----------

$ 432,137,337.41 divided by the labor force (who will provide for their families) which is 3,569,741 people is $ 121.06. So if everyone who works is paid $ 121.06 the previous calculations will occur, with the same percentages and same purchasing power increases. In fact, translating Bolivian economics and hypothetical redistribution policies into US dollars for mental comparisons actually shows better to American readers just how disasterous redistribution in Bolivia would be. With over 70% of society receiving above 188% to below 8% increases in income, the Bolivian economy would shut down completely as supply would run out as demand skyrockets. The Bolivian economy is not completely industrialized in the sense of the American economy. It is obviously not advanced like the American economy, and with 70% of all Bolivians in a state of poverty, does not possess the supplies to meet a skyrocketing of demand. Food would run out even quicker than in America because Bolivia doesn't possess the vast lands and farms and lacks adequate consumer markets in comparison to America. As humanitarian aid would eventually reach Bolivia, thousands of people would already be dead. Military personnel would be stationed in food markets and in farms, martial law would be declared, and until the military would calm the populace and until redistribution ended, there would be riots, killings, mass discontent, and looting.

----------

I am now 2-0 with no one even trying to rebut me. Any society: Bolivian, American, Luxembourgian; cannot handle redistribution. Any national economy based on medium-of-value currency economics would collapse as soon as the majority of society experienced vast increases in purchasing power. A Luxembourgian society with a relatively high per capita for such a small nation would still experience higher purchasing power for most of society, which would result in shortage for its nation. It would have to bring in imports, adding to its national debt.

If you still wanted economic equality but realize it's thus impossible in a currency-based society, you could enact it in communes, but that would entail planned economics, no currency, and a system of trade bartering for surplus and deficit. People would have to give up money, give up their livelihood, their jobs, and all the luxuries they can afford. You think you can force people to leave the cities and go into the countryside to form communes without a civil war? Even the poorest laborers would probably resist to this dramatic upheaval of socio-economic proportions.

In conclusion, mixed-market economics preserves the fragile balance between supply and demand. With redistribution unfortunately comes economic chaos. Obviously, a mixed market economy needs some government oversight and regulation into how businesses conduct their affairs. Businesses, like governments, cannot be trusted to run their own affairs by themselves, and thus need rules to abide by, and investigations when suspected of breaking those rules, or else we have no safeguards on the workings of the economy. And obviously, people who need economic assistance should be given assistance by their government they voted to protect themselves with. The homeless should be assisted, the hungry should be assisted, the disabled should be assisted. Some businesses provide services and goods to all three groups (there's more groups beyond these three major ones), but we can't completely rely on businesses because business can go broke or change their policies without any approval, and can only do so much. The government can do all three things if mere percentages are switched from military funding to social services, and the government needs approval from voters or from other lawmakers to change its policies and cancel any social service program.

Some of you like sorianofan have voiced in the past an unwillingness to depend on the government, and rather on charity of others. But if you sit on the street and hope people give you money, is that any way to live your life? Not only will you not get much, you won't get a job, you won't get a home, and you won't really live, will you? If you instead go to a charity organization or government social service organization for help, you'll probably get some help if not all the help you need. You might even get a job through their employment or employment-seeking programs. Only two choices of three choices I just listed will help you live your life in dignity if you lack the means to survive on your own. A government social service organization if they exist (I have no idea) will probably get you a job faster than an independent charity organization.

In conclusion (again) it's not a bad idea to help others. But radically or partially redistributing wealth would only lead to disaster as I've already evidenced.

Debunking redistribution in any form took less than one hour, a calculator, American income data, and a high school economics course.

Please read the whole thing or you won't understand.





----------


Some more thoughts to add:

Basically the conclusions one can gather from this socio-economic essay is, first, that a free market (be it laissez-faire or mixed) is the most efficient form of economics of all the examples and experiments in all of human development. We've gone from primitive tribal subsistence to bartering to primitive currency-based economics to feudalism and finally to the centuries-long experiment called capitalism. No one can change this overnight or within a century at the very least. While many societies were relatively wealthy relative to our standards, with their own forms of luxuries, throughout history, it's only recently with the advent of advanced capitalism and global economics that meritocracy is becoming more and more prevalent throughout human society. We'll never have a perfect system; there will always be dysmeritocracy (for lack of a better term) in which the wealthiest succeed regardless of their skills. But we can strive to make our system better and better just as our ancestors made human society better and better.

Second, the price of civilization is the concentration of wealth into the hands of the few. I share no similar sentiments of hierarchy with the Satanists on this forum, but I can recognize basic social stability requirements when I see them, and this is no exception.