benny

Moral & Ethical Issues belong to philosophy. (How can you consider yourself deserving if you're not trying to understand?)

It's not a thread about income gaps and equality but about desert. For John Rawls, "the idea of rewarding desert is impracticable". For him, what we can be held responsible for is inextricably entangled with what we cannot be held responsible for (or control).

Market mechanisms are about finding equilibrium. A crisis is more often than not about surplus (surplus of toxic assets, of workers, etc.). Surpluses are eliminated by lowering prices. This is what cost-minimization is all about.

Those eager to say someone deserves something are simply unable or unwilling to understand that market mechanisms are about minimizing costs and that it is better to minimize costs by searching the most gifted economic agents first than by going after the most desperate on Earth.

I see money rather as part of the solution because where there is not enough, and as good left in common for others then the owners (or the owners of the best resources) have money for compensating the non-owners (or the owners of the next-best resources).

For a French-speaking Canadian like me, it's a lot.

I think that to improve Canada and the World at the same time, we have to follow John Locke. In the Second Treatise of Government (1690), Locke puts forward his account of how a man may legitimately appropriate goods from the state of nature for his private use by mixing his labour with them: "Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no Man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for other." "At least where" means "certainly where". To Locke, it's so easy for a worker to make sure he doesn't make the life of anyone worse off because of his work that he writes his "proviso" as if it was a no brainer and almost a (involuntary) matter of fact. For Locke, implementing the condition seems automatic because he conceives private appropriation as a reduction of the pressure that those living out of the common encounter. Locke wrote: "He who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind. For the provisions serving to the support of humane life, produced by one acre of inclosed and cultivated land are... ten times more, than those, which are yeilded by an acre of Land, of an equal richnesse, lyeing wast in common. And therefor he, that incloses Land and has a greater plenty of the conveniencys of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to Nature, may truly be said, to give ninety acres to Mankind."

Capitalism works because it makes a non-existent necessity (hard work), the only virtue for those who owns no property (the workers).

Obama certainly doesn't want to have a stronger next generation by leaving some Americans to die. Only a tiny minority would have voted for a eugenicist anyway.

Here is quickly a reason why dialectic (i.e. reflexivity) is very important: blue eyes are not at all like colourful tails because eyes are like a mirror. Under the heading of the mirror stage, psychoanalysts following Jacques Lacan are the researchers who have the most to say on this.

Indeed, it seems that only public institutions are never too big to fail.

Don't forget that this is a thread about the rich not deserving their money. k is a reflection of productive capacities that those people earning more than the mean wage in the population do not deserve. If all current incomes redistributed by the Welfare states had the structure of the k equation, a k of in between 8 (for the USA) to 16 hours (for Scandinavian countries) per week would be enough, so it seems. http://www.ehess.fr/kolm/document.php?id=67

All people qualify for extended political rights. Political rights are positive rights. This means that the state owes enough expertise and leisure time to the people. Some lobbyists have undeserved corrupting money only because people are still slaves.

With or without religions, sexual drives are directed not towards a "whole person" but towards part-objects. There is therefore no such thing as a sexual relationship between two subjects, only between a subject and a (partial) object. For the man, this object occupies the place of the missing partner, which produces fantasies; in other words, the Woman does not exist for the man as a real subject, but only as a fantasy object, the cause of his desire.

Deliberative democracy creates a powerful incentive for all would-be lobbyists to wear microphones right in front of their mouths.

Deliberative democracy is better.

Get in touch with the reality of lobbying.

A sane economy is an economy that is preventing the people who use their natural talents to monopolize the things they do with these talents.

If you want to understand read this page (p.250) of this e-book (The Parallax View): http://books.google.com/books?id=je702bo2P...t#PRA2-PA250,M1

Contrary to any Conservative president, Obama of course won't be able to excuse himself by saying "I was handed out a big government and I don't believe big government can succeed".

k is an integral part of a theory of distributive justice precisely because skills (talents) is in part given to individuals (undeserved, in other words).

A general should never say publicly his soldiers need a break. He should be wise enough to cipher his message by saying that his army needs fresh recruits. Fox was giving Canada tough love in tough times.

Cops reassure themselves when they obtain what they ask for (that is, in the present case, the Registry).

Zizek says in the clip that nature doesn't exist and also that catastrophes, not evolution, are what matters. In his books (the parallax view, 2006, MIT press, in particular) he develops these points. I can summarize his thesis by taking human sexuality as an example. For humans to appear as a life form, what is needed is a total negation of sexual selection. Humans are born out of a movement away from sexuality and sexual selection. Our consciousness is the consequence of being upset about sex. For humans, sexuality is a dead-end. Sex is for humans what artificial pleasures are for the laboratory rats: a compulsive behavior that is killing them. Christianity is not saying anything else.

Children becoming an excuse, I presume.