Bonam
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Posts posted by Bonam
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27 minutes ago, -1=e^ipi said:
Rather, basing an ideology around conserving things for the sake of conserving things is rather silly. Conservatism is a relative political ideology rather than an absolute political ideology. Conservatism only has policies once you take into account the society you are in, where has something like Classical Liberalism has policies that apply everywhere regardless of society (freedom of speech, equality between men and women, etc.). That's why conservatism means beheading women who go shopping without a male escort and killing gay people in Saudi Arabia. Why people would want to associate themselves with the gay-killing Saudis is crazy to me, but it makes a bit more sense once you take into account Andrew Scheer's dislike of gay marriage.
Conservatism has nothing to do with free trade. That's revisionist history. Traditionally, conservatism in most societies has been about conserving traditions and not wanting to trade with foreigners. The conservative parties in Canada were opposed to free trade until the 1980s. It was conservatives that opposed free trade with the Americans during the time of Wilfred Laurier.
Trade liberalization is a Classical Liberal idea, not a conservative one (see Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill). If you look at the origins or the terms right and left with respect to politics (i.e. late 18th century France), the right consisted of monarchists, catholic theocrats, and protectionists wanting to restrict economic freedom & trade.
Bernier is not a conservative, he is a libertarian. It is too bad that he has bought into this revisionist history rather than correctly identify himself as not conservative.
You may be right about the historical origins of the terms left and right and conservatism, but what is important is the reality of today not the origins of words back in the 18th century. Today, in most Western countries, "conservative" parties are coalitions of fiscal conservatives (who favor low taxes and free trade), social conservatives (who favor legislated morality), libertarians (who favor small government and individual liberty), and lately populists (who favor nationalism). Many of these positions are internally inconsistent, for example libertarian values are in direct opposition to social conservatism.
Today's conservative parties are not about just "conserving things" regardless of context. In fact, conservative parties want change just as much (or just as little, depending on your perspective) as liberal parties do, just towards different ends. When it comes to human rights in Islamic dictatorships/theocracies/monarchies, you are much more likely to see (Western) conservatives criticize the situation these days rather than (Western) liberals, who nowadays fear to be seen as anti-Muslim in any way.
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Hopefully most of these people can escape before South Africa's plans for genocide come to fruition. There's a certain point where the hatred in a country cannot be stopped or reasoned with and the only options are to flee or to die. For White South Africans, that point is now. We can only hope that some countries leave their doors open to fleeing South Africans, unlike what happened during the horrors of the early 20th century when people fleeing extermination were sent back to die.
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9 minutes ago, Argus said:
Bernier is not that leader. I don't know about in French, but he's not particularly charismatic in English.
If he's not, then his party will probably disappear after an election or two just like other upstart parties have come and gone in the last few decades.
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I think Canada's politics are dynamic enough that it's hard to predict, and not useful to simply resign to the idea that the right vote will be split and that otherwise things will remain the same. The Liberals went from the dominant party to a distant 3rd and then back to power in the span of a decade. The decades-long BQ dominance in Quebec disappeared in a single election. Reform went from 1 seat to 52 in 1993, and was gone 7 years later. Unlike Canada's neighbor to the South where politics is static and all depends on tiny 1-2% variances between the two established parties, Canadian parties come and go rapidly, and their fortunes can change greatly from one election to the next. In France, a new party formed in 2016 won the 2017 election. The same can happen in Canada. It just depends on if the party and its leader resonates with voters or not.
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48 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:
The second part sounds really Marxist.
Not really, I didn't mention anything about the means of production, the proletariat, the clash between classes, etc. Just being dissatisfied with status quo, poor governance, corruption, etc, has nothing to do with Marxism.
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2 hours ago, Michael Hardner said:
There is a labour shortage. I work in corporate IT and there are basically zero white people on the team. You are not going to be able to get the welfare recipient into one of these jobs.
Also good luck getting any centrist party to turn it's back on business to stop bringing in low wage workers.
Not sure how the presence or lack of white people on your team says anything about a labour shortage. First, that's anecdotal, as you well know. Second, most of the people on your team are Canadians, I'm sure. Third, Corporate IT is ripe for more automation in the coming years, anyway.
As for centrist parties, by which I assume you mean Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP. You're right. Conventional political parties have largely failed Western countries over the last decade or so. Individual liberties have been eroded, populations have become more bitterly divided over social issues, corruption has proliferated, etc. The sooner the political status quo that permits all this to continue is shattered, the better.
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50 minutes ago, eyeball said:
Instead people want to double down on the moral imperative to carry one's own weight.
Damn straight. A world in which half the population does nothing and lives off handouts from the few who still work is a dystopian nightmare that has been played out enough times in science fiction, we don't need to try it out in reality.
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1 hour ago, Slick said:
We tax earnings to provide necessary services so if we are replacing jobs with AI and bots, maybe it's time to tax the machines to provide income and services.
And yet at the same time we are increasing immigration rates to unprecedented numbers because there is a "labour shortage". Ahh, the wonderful world of alternative facts.
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4 hours ago, bcsapper said:
This was a big surprise to me, as I had no idea the Catholic Church ever sanctioned the DP.
Shouldn't be a big surprise given the countless thousands that the Catholic Church murdered throughout its history. They were big fans of killing people while they had the power to do it. Now that secular authorities hold that power instead, of course they are against it.
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21 minutes ago, eyeball said:
Your concern for the poor reminds me of the sudden concern you people started displaying for LGBT communities in Islamic dictatorships.
It's as phony as three dollar bills.
I dunno, a concern for people who face death or life imprisonment for who they are sounds to me a lot more legitimate than outrage over slightly controversial speakers at universities.
As for spending, fiscal conservatism is entirely consistent with both points: that money spent on welfare for the poor should be spent wisely and in a way that encourages them to return to work if at all possible; and that if money is being spent on housing refugees and illegal immigrants in hotels it seems odd that they get more support than Canadians who find themselves also in need of help. No inconsistency there whatsoever.
But then again, being able to see what's consistent and what's not is not something I would expect from people who are more concerned about microaggressions than about life and death situations.
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17 minutes ago, paxrom said:
Not sure I can agree, I've contacted my university professor about this issue as well and he doesn't have a clear answer. The problem is that America's economy is heavily service based and are non-trade-able so doesn't benefit much from globalization, we also don't export much. As you also mentioned with the advent of automation what is the point of a globalized manufacturing supply chain? Manufactured products could be easily be automated back in the US. we have the technology and expertise to do it. Something the Chinese have been trying to steal. Our AI tech. So for us to adopt economic nationalism it wouldn't do much harm to us. There's a reason we are selling weapons to the world and asking people to arm up. Economic nationalism can lead to war if there is a huge power disparity. The US will then become to sole guarantor of peace, underwriting security arrangement thus keeping its position as the permanent hegemonic power.
Actually services are among the most tradeable things. When people think of the "service" sector they think retail cashiers, healthcare, restaurants, etc. But the far larger part of the service sector (by economic output, not necessarily number of employees) are financial, legal, professional (engineering, architecture, consulting, etc) and software services. Western companies excel at providing these services and provide them all around the world.
As for advanced automated manufacturing in America... yes, it could in theory be done (and is done on a small scale in many cases). But while labor costs may become (and already are in many cases) a non-issue, the real problem is regulations, particularly environmental ones, legal liability, nimbyism, etc. Building a factory in America is not easy, especially if it handles any kinds of unusual materials, which are all necessary for manufacturing in rapidly growing fields including batteries, solar energy, semiconductors, etc. Moreover, the needed scale of manufacturing requires the construction of entire industrial cities with interlinked infrastructure providing for an entire supply chain to exist in place, everything from the refining and production of raw materials to the production of tooling and equipment to the construction and testing of final products. China and some other countries can do this, America simply can't, it is too mired in gridlock, regulation, and partisanship. Think of how much hype surrounded the Tesla gigafactory, and then realize that a thousand such factories are built in other countries every year.
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3 minutes ago, paxrom said:
As I said that principle only work if they play by the rules and actually adopt free trade. The international trading system is not free trade. Joint Venture is not free trade. What trump has done is threaten globalism with economic nationalism if they don't conform to the free trading system. He's playing devil's advocate.
Actually the benefits of globalization are so great that even when trade is not free but instead faces various levels of market distortion, it still generates vast wealth for all parties involved. But you are right, the benefits would be even greater if it was closer to a free trade situation. Trump can try to up the ante to attempt to harness these additional benefits by forcing other parties to move towards freer trade, but if instead economic nationalism becomes a prevailing movement and causes Western economies to turn inwards on a long term basis, it will cause massive economic harm.
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2 hours ago, turningrite said:
I think we're entering a new paradigm in which technology will eliminate the much of the advantage enjoyed by low-wage economies.
That paradigm is already here and has been for a while. The primary advantage of manufacturing in China nowadays isn't that they have lowest cost workers but that they have entire cities which are optimized for the manufacturing supply chain that a certain product or process needs. There is nothing comparable in America. Many consumers still have the impression that stuff that is "made in China" is of lower quality or shoddy worksmanship, but the reality is that China now has some of the most advanced manufacturing capabilities in the world and is the primary choice not only for reasonable costs but for the best quality, lead time, and reliability.
There are still other countries where their primary competitive "advantage" is low wages (i.e. Bangladesh) but now that the world's largest developing countries (by population) are out of that role, it won't take long for the smaller ones to be saturated and either catch up in wages or simply be out-grown by automation capabilities.
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2 hours ago, turningrite said:
We were sold on the notion that it would create a virtuous loop whereby enriched consumers in the developing world would be able to buy products and services from the Western economies but this never really happened.
On the contrary, I think it did. Billions of people across the developing world have entered the global middle class over the last couple decades. These people have fueled the explosive growth of Western (mostly American) tech and finance companies. Facebook has over 2 billion users, and most of them are in developing countries, for example. More traditional industries have also enjoyed massive overseas sales, everything from military contractors (Lockheed, Northrop) to civilian aircraft (Boeing, Airbus) to computer hardware and software (Apple, Microsoft, Intel) to Western engineering and architecture firms designing new infrastructure and buildings in developing countries, among many others.
That said, I think this thread is correct, there is an increasing rise of "economic nationalism", primarily in Western countries, where the benefits of globalization are not obvious to a large portion of the lower/working class. What will likely happen is that as Western economies erect new barriers to trade, they will cut themselves off from increasingly prosperous global trade relations among the rest of the world's countries, where the benefits of globalization have been more widespread throughout the entire population. Just as the greatest benefits of globalization will be ready to be harvested, Western countries will cut themselves off from it and not share in the rewards.
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7 minutes ago, ZavHoz said:
Another "expert".
A little bit about YOUR pension system. As an immigrant I feel obliged to explain it to you.
Employees and employers contribute allmost 10% to CPP from your earnings up to the threshold.
Then CPP pays retirement pension to the current recipients from these money, that YOU contributed.
So, far CPP does not require inflow of money from outside. Though in such countries like, for example, UK, government has to add money to the pension fund, because inflow of contributions is less than outflow of pensions. The same fate awaits the CPP. Sorry, it's science called demographics.
There is nothing to discuss about OAS, because it is paid directly from the taxes.
For not very smart people, I repeat. If you earn more than $3500 ANNUALY you have to pay contributions to CPP, therefore you send money to retired "Canadians" who think you are parasite. lol
I'm an immigrant too. Three times immigrant, in fact.
Making artificial buckets around "CPP" and "OAS" serves no practical purpose, it's all government money, appropriated as taxes from people that are working. Whether you call it a "tax" or a "payroll deduction", it's still the same thing. People that earn $3,500 annually consume far more in government resources than they pay back as taxes, and will receive far more in support in their old age than their meager CPP/OAS contributions will contribute to today's retirees. What matters is net cash flows, not walling off individual buckets of money and forgetting about the rest.
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20 minutes ago, ZavHoz said:
Nice quotes. I'll read the articles later on and will send you some statistics on the Canada's demographics, but I guess you know the facts yourself. Because the facts are the same everywhere. Population is aging. Pension systems are under enormous pressure, because there are not enough working adults to keep it afloat. So, there are two options:
1) import workers who will pay pensions to elderly people
2) cut down on CPP and OAS
1) Only works if the people being "imported" are in the top ~20% of earners, otherwise they barely pay for the services they themselves consume or even just increase overall government costs. But only a tiny fraction of immigrants end up in the top 20%. If the goal is to generate more tax revenue to pay for services for Canadians, then the current immigration system is phenomenally badly designed to achieve that aim and instead achieves the exact opposite.
2) Yes and yes, this should be done. You can't keep the retirement age the same even as life expectancy continues to increase. People are living on average for decades after retirement, whereas when retirement were first brought in, life expectancy was less than the retirement age! Medical advances will continue to raise life expectancy, likely to 100+ years in the next few decades. Will people soon be spending half their lives retired? It's not sustainable. Retirement age must be indexed to a fixed fraction of life expectancy.
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On 7/13/2018 at 8:56 AM, BuzzKillington said:
You only need so many garbagemen.
Probably zero, soon. Garbage collection seems like a task well suited for automation in the very near future.
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3 hours ago, paxrom said:
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" -Churchill
Except for all the others that have been tried so far, sure. Just as democracy superseded old forms of government that were no longer suitable in the 20th century, I wonder if democracy is becoming unsuitable for properly governing a country in the 21st century. While western democracies still offer more personal freedom than any existing alternatives (though this gap is quickly diminishing due to social media thought police), their governments are trapped in paralysis and gridlock that prevents meaningful progress and common sense improvements from being carried out.
For example, in the US, almost everyone agrees on infrastructure... ask Democrats or Republicans or independents, almost all will tell you that investing in repairing existing infrastructure and building more newer better infrastructure is something they support. And yet essentially nothing has happened on this front for decades. Roads and bridges are crumbling and aging and becoming more congested, but essentially nothing is being done. Meanwhile, developing countries with far less money, expertise, experience, or technology are building out vast new systems of infrastructure, which are in many cases more advanced.
Hopefully some form of government can be devised that is able to preserve personal liberty as envisioned by classical liberal ideals while eliminating the tendency towards paralysis and partisanship that comes with large representative democracies.
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3 hours ago, -1=e^ipi said:
Having a violation of equality under the law (monarchy) normalizes the violation of equality under the law and helps to justify other violations of equality under the law (such as circumcision double standards, race/sex based hiring practices, etc.). In addition, it is a violation of secularism (the queen is the head of the Anglican church), thus the continuation of the monarchy normalizes violations of secularism and helps to justify other violations such as funding the catholic church via catholic schools, blasphemy or religious hate speech laws, funding the Aga Khan with tax payer money, having the crucifix in the national assembly of quebec, and having god in our anthem and charter. Furthermore, having a monarchy helps make the narrative of the far left, that we live in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, more believable and therefore allows them to more easily take power.
Meh I don't buy it. Being born the son or daughter of royalty confers no greater advantage than being born the son of daughter of other very wealthy parents. In fact, it's probably crappier, you get the spotlight for life whether you want it or not whereas many sons or daughters of billionaires can enjoy their wealth with relatively little fanfare if they so choose. Violations of equality under the law, secularism, etc are all just as prevalent (if not more) in non-monarchist presidential republics, like the US. The US president gets to arbitrarily pardon whoever the heck he wants, for any reason.
I understand that in your mind, violating a certain principle once (by having a monarchy) means that principle is open to violation all over the place. But lets get out of theory and back to practice for a moment. Do you see any correlation in the real world between reduced secularism and reduced equality under the law in western monarchies as compared to western republics?
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28 minutes ago, -1=e^ipi said:
So, according to you, something a person is born with (their sex) somehow justifies having a society where the head of state is determined by birthright instead of by merit..
If the Queen/King had real power, this would be a problem, but given that they are mostly a figurehead and perform mostly ceremonial duties, while the real governing decisions are performed by elected officials, I don't see it as a problem. The advantages of the monarchy are simple: a tie to past history and tradition, revenue and publicity associated with interest in the royal family, and the simplicity of not messing with what isn't broken. Western nations that include a symbolic monarchy including Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium are among the most well governed nations out of them all (regardless of if this is because of, despite of, or unaffected by the presence of monarchy). So why not?
On a side note, what system allows a head of state to be determined by "merit"? Certainly not presidential democracy, which gets to pick the best liars out of the worst dregs of society who have the urge to be that vilest of all things, politicians.
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11 minutes ago, Hudson Jones said:
Do some research before typing.
Why? No one else in America does.
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51 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:
OMG that's funny.
If you look carefully, the idea of favourable policies for wealthy people 'trickling down' is slowly being taken off the table and replaced with favourable policies for wealthy people as a moral imperative. When I asked people if the $15 minimum wage would ruin Ontario, for example, no would would commit to that prediction. The wealthy just deserve more (and more).
Why do they deserve it ? Because they have convinced everyone else that they do.
Meh, "poverty" in the US is not being able to afford to afford a 3rd car and a 2nd house, or blowing all your money on unnecessary consumer goods on your credit card and ending up in debt. The amount of people in actual poverty (i.e. can't get access to food/shelter) is far smaller, and they are mostly druggies.
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Meh, I wouldn't put much stock into polls at this point telling you anything about "generation z". There's probably a hundred billion pages of ink spilled about what millenials do and don't like, and it's all self-contradictory and mostly wrong, and the same will be the case with generation z. Views on issues vary much more based on geography, family history, formative events, what school one went to, and ultimately just any given individual's own thoughts, than they do based on generation. Moreover even for any given individual, views change over time.
People love to make sweeping broad generalizations but for the most part its just useless punditry, in reality, people couldn't even predict which blue states would turn red during the last election.
All that said, I wouldn't be surprised if the current stew of social justice ideology brewing among the left half of society generates a substantial backlash and eventually alienates a great many people.
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2 minutes ago, Argus said:
If American was finding low-skilled labor in short supply it would increase the wages for low-skilled labor. Since it has not significantly done so, there is no shortage.
Well, there's no shortage, since a lot of those positions are filled with illegal/undocumented (depending on your preferred terminology) immigrants. By converting this unofficial sector of the economy to a legitimate one, it could be better measured and the number of people being let in could be modulated to allow for gradual wage growth without the shocks that would be caused by a harsh enforcement regime without simultaneously creating a legitimate pathway.
Are two conservative parties better than one?
in Federal Politics in Canada
Posted
That is the idealist view of democracy, sure. But the reality is that, to varying extents in different countries, the parties/government drive the discourse or the opinion. Government has enormous power to shape public opinion. These powers include explicit control of permissible discourse (i.e. laws about what is permissible speech and what is not), the power to propose or pass bills that shape the context and content of political discussion for years to come, and of course endless free media coverage of their views and positions. Governments also have immense power of aiding or hindering various organizations through tax policy, trade policy, and regulation. Governments can also criminalize or decriminalize things, which can powerfully shift public perception and discourse around certain issues. Governments also control the content and nature of the education system, which shapes the minds of future generations, and is perhaps the most powerful tool of changing/controlling what future voters will want.
I would say that "what voters want" is influenced just as much by their government, as the government is influenced by what voters want, if not more.