Globalism

[NorrinRadd]

What's a RINO and I thought the Senate approved the budget?

RINO = "Republican In Name Only."

[demi-conservative]

Globalism means different things to different people.

With your new understanding of foreign aid, how do you reevaluate globalism regarding the USA?

[Starlight]

You may be confusing financial assistance with NATO defense contributions. I've never heard conservatives compare (and then complain) about the former.

The most recent conservative whining on the subject I've read in this forum was about how it was terrible that Obama redirected 2% of the US's foreign assistance budget to focus on climate change mitigation. Conservatives here appeared to think this amounted to throwing open the doors of the US treasury and let other countries loot it, and that this money was fueling the climate-change industrial-complex (ie the solar panel manufacturers) whom many conservatives here seem to think are responsible for inventing the concept of global warming in order to get rich or somesuch (their conspiracy theories on the subject don't make much sense to me to be honest. Sometimes they seem to think climate change is a conspiracy theory invented by some scientists to steal grant money out from under other scientists who apparently don't object to this happening).

Yes, and some people like to be nurtured as adults.

I do like to have healthcare, roads, a police force, clean drinking water, a functional sewerage system, education, yes. I call that "living in a first world country", but I guess you could call it "being nurtured"??

I would not want to live in the Wild West if that were my choice by comparison - I would describe that time period / area where men were beyond the bounds of any meaningfully functional government as "a 3rd world hellscape where life was very unpleasant, full of fear about bandits and disease, and likely short".

People who have never known freedom from government don't recognize when they are enslaved.

Well the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, ranks my country of New Zealand as the freest country in the world. As someone who's lived all my life in what libertarians rank as the freest country in the world, I don't find it very plausible that I somehow wouldn't understand freedom or wouldn't know what it was. I would tend to suggest that I should know what it is much better than the Americans here. The same Cato ranking puts all the Scandinavian countries ahead of the US.

Besides, I think those books are cooked as the surveys tend to be conducted by globalists or others who promote big government.

If your view is that no data can be trusted, how would you ever assess if any theory you held were correct if there is no valid data to assess it against?

The best products in the world are the ones that were subjected to competition.

In some cases, in others (monopolies) they are best because there is no meaningful competition because they have bought it up or forced it out.

Government doesn't compete

I don't think that's a meaningful statement. Government can tender out contracts to private industry and bidding for those can be competitive. Government can own shares in a company that is itself competing in private industry against privately owned companies.

A cultural view that characterizes my country and that of the Scandinavian countries is that idea that government should be made to be as efficient as possible, and every party makes serious efforts to make government more efficient. A product of this is that the government here is very efficient. It is absolutely not a truism here that government is less efficient than private industry.

It is different in the US obviously, where Republicans deliberately sabotage the efficient functioning of government as much as possible so they can point to it as a PR stunt and claim how inefficient government "inherently" is, and where the Dems don't particularly place any significant value on government efficiency and so don't care enough to try to make the government efficient.

But even in the US, where direct comparisons can be made between government and private industry, the government actually seems to measure up pretty well. Consider healthcare. Many private companies sell health insurance to people, and the government also runs a health insurance system Medicare. We can measure the "efficiency" of the systems by measuring what proportion of the money put into the system either by the private individuals or the government makes it through the system and ends up being paid to hospitals/doctors to provide healthcare, versus what percentage gets eaten up by overheads (wages to the people running the health insurance system, profits, advertising etc). Medicare's overheads are 2%, i.e. 98c of every dollar put into medicare is paid out to hospitals/doctors in bills for healthcare services rendered and only 2c is lost along the way in government inefficiency. Whereas the private insurance companies have an overhead around 17%, i.e, 83c of every dollar paid to them is paid out to hospitals/doctors in bills for healthcare services rendered, and 17c is lost along the way due to the inefficiencies in the structure of the private company (wages, profit etc). So the private companies are 8 times less efficient than the government in this instance (you could have one government's insurance scheme paying another government's insurance scheme paying another paying another government's insurance scheme etc 8 times total and still be slightly more efficient than the private companies).

And since government doesn't work to earn the money it collects, it doesn't value it like productive elements of society do.

This is dubious. Income from work is only one type of way a person can get money. Inheritance is another, and that's not earned by work. Capital gains is another, and that's not earned by work.

The government employs tax officials who do indeed work to earn the money the government collects. And if the government is the major shareholder in a company, and that company paid dividends, then the government did work to earn that money in the same sense a private shareholder of the company would have.

Q: How many government officials does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Unknown. One to spot the burned-out bulb, his supervisor to authorize a requisition, a requisition typist, twelve clerks to file the requisition copies, a mail clerk to deliver the requisition to the purchasing department, a purchasing agent to order the bulb, a clerk to forward the purchasing order, a clerk to mail-order a receiving clerk to receive the bulb ...

I take it you haven't worked for many / any private companies? That largely describes the process that the private company I work for follows with regard to such matters.

My point was that the treaty unfairly burdened Germany financially.

Yes and it had bad outcomes. After the war the US gave Germany foreign aid and that had good outcomes.

The US is in massive debt.

Yes and no. Your debt is kinda large, though not as large as many countries, and not as large as your country ran up in WWII and had few if any problems dealing with afterward. Your country dealt with its post-WWII debt by running a budget that was close-ish to balanced for 15 years or so and inflation and GDP growth took care of most of the debt. That method works for basically any level of debt.

Personally I'd advise undoing the Trump & Bush tax cuts so that the budget is back balanced-ish and putting a bit of effort into running a close to balanced budget over the next decade to get your debt down a bit. It's not urgent though.

Foreign aid might not be a major expenditure relatively, but when a household is in such debt it needs to start cutting out needless spending. This is the best place to start.

In any situation like this the best place to start is always with the largest amounts. That applies to freeing up computer hard disk space (which I was doing last week) and it applies to government spending, because even a small percentage of a big item is likely to be bigger than multiple small items. In the US's case the obvious place to start is defense spending. That's by far and away the largest discretionary spend item in the US federal budget. No point cutting multiple smaller items to pinch pennies when you're burning money in giant fire pits on defense spending.

[Sparko]

I do think the United States is too deeply involved in foreign affairs though at the same time I think an abrupt withdrawal from world affairs would be irresponsible given that our government's actions have had an effect on various areas of destabilization. It would be like creating a mess and suddenly leaving without trying to pick it up.

I would like to push back on one part: From a Christian perspective, I do think that the overall welfare of the world is more important than the welfare of the US. We have brothers in Christ all around the world and I don't see any justification for claiming that the good of a persecuted brother in China (China is cracking down on religious freedom, recently banning the Bible) does not outweigh the good of a random non-Christian living in the US.

That would be be the job of personal charity and missionaries, not forced charity by the UN taking tax dollars to give to 3rd world countries. Not to mention the UN has no plans to stop religious persecution in China or elsewhere.

[Roy]

Spot the difference:

When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, otherwise they may also invite you in return and that will be your repayment. But when you give a reception, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, since they do not have the means to repay you

Out of curiosity, do you put the needs of your well-fed family with roofs over their head over those who, out of no fault of their own, were forced into the refugee lifestyle?

Yes. I don't put the needs of anybody over the needs of my family.

[Ronson]

With your new understanding of foreign aid, how do you reevaluate globalism regarding the USA?

That statement assumes my understanding has changed.

[Sparko]

Spot the difference:

Where does that say to ignore taking care of your family first?

[Charles]

Where does that say to ignore taking care of your family first?

Or where does it say to ignore taking care of your dog first?

[Charles]

Yes. I don't put the needs of anybody over the needs of my family.

Luke 14:25-26
I am glad I don't have to explain why there is no contradiction and how some "context" solves the problem.

[Ronson]

The most recent conservative whining on the subject I've read in this forum was about how it was terrible that Obama redirected 2% of the US's foreign assistance budget to focus on climate change mitigation. Conservatives here appeared to think this amounted to throwing open the doors of the US treasury and let other countries loot it, and that this money was fueling the climate-change industrial-complex (ie the solar panel manufacturers) whom many conservatives here seem to think are responsible for inventing the concept of global warming in order to get rich or somesuch (their conspiracy theories on the subject don't make much sense to me to be honest. Sometimes they seem to think climate change is a conspiracy theory invented by some scientists to steal grant money out from under other scientists who apparently don't object to this happening).

I am going to break this up a bit and perform some edits because I don't have enough time in the day when posts grow to this size. Just a warning ...

I'm new here so I don't know what conservatives have been arguing about prior to my arrival (and this is not identifying myself as "conservative"). As far a Climate Change being a conspiracy, no, I don't believe that. But with most subjects that have been hijacked by the Left, I think it has been exagerrated and used as a vehicle to promote militant environmentalism. But this is a subject for another thread.

I do like to have healthcare, roads, a police force, clean drinking water, a functional sewerage system, education, yes. I call that "living in a first world country", but I guess you could call it "being nurtured"??

I would not want to live in the Wild West if that were my choice by comparison - I would describe that time period / area where men were beyond the bounds of any meaningfully functional government as "a 3rd world hellscape where life was very unpleasant, full of fear about bandits and disease, and likely short".

Well the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, ranks my country of New Zealand as the freest country in the world. As someone who's lived all my life in what libertarians rank as the freest country in the world, I don't find it very plausible that I somehow wouldn't understand freedom or wouldn't know what it was. I would tend to suggest that I should know what it is much better than the Americans here. The same Cato ranking puts all the Scandinavian countries ahead of the US.

My statement was partly hyperbole. As a Libertarian, just the thought of a government subjugating citizenry makes my brain boil. The world you are advancing has its downside, as it is one where government makes decisions for the unwashed masses. It presumes to "know best" and forces compliance whether you want it or not. I would rather trade some of your comforts to remain free.

If your view is that no data can be trusted, how would you ever assess if any theory you held were correct if there is no valid data to assess it against?

But that's not my view.

In some cases, in others (monopolies) they are best because there is no meaningful competition because they have bought it up or forced it out.

I don't think that's a meaningful statement. Government can tender out contracts to private industry and bidding for those can be competitive. Government can own shares in a company that is itself competing in private industry against privately owned companies.

Government owning shares of a private company? That sounds a bit fascist, and likely unconstitutional for this country. Do you have any examples of this in the US?

A cultural view that characterizes my country and that of the Scandinavian countries is that idea that government should be made to be as efficient as possible, and every party makes serious efforts to make government more efficient. A product of this is that the government here is very efficient. It is absolutely not a truism here that government is less efficient than private industry.

It is different in the US obviously, where Republicans deliberately sabotage the efficient functioning of government as much as possible so they can point to it as a PR stunt and claim how inefficient government "inherently" is, and where the Dems don't particularly place any significant value on government efficiency and so don't care enough to try to make the government efficient.

But even in the US, where direct comparisons can be made between government and private industry, the government actually seems to measure up pretty well. Consider healthcare. Many private companies sell health insurance to people, and the government also runs a health insurance system Medicare. We can measure the "efficiency" of the systems by measuring what proportion of the money put into the system either by the private individuals or the government makes it through the system and ends up being paid to hospitals/doctors to provide healthcare, versus what percentage gets eaten up by overheads (wages to the people running the health insurance system, profits, advertising etc). Medicare's overheads are 2%, i.e. 98c of every dollar put into medicare is paid out to hospitals/doctors in bills for healthcare services rendered and only 2c is lost along the way in government inefficiency. Whereas the private insurance companies have an overhead around 17%, i.e, 83c of every dollar paid to them is paid out to hospitals/doctors in bills for healthcare services rendered, and 17c is lost along the way due to the inefficiencies in the structure of the private company (wages, profit etc). So the private companies are 8 times less efficient than the government in this instance (you could have one government's insurance scheme paying another government's insurance scheme paying another paying another government's insurance scheme etc 8 times total and still be slightly more efficient than the private companies).

Again, this is a subject for another thread. All I will say here is that it is easy to show "efficiency" on the dollar when those dollars are not earned, but are absconded through taxes. A company doesn't run on taxes but on profits, so its finances are measured more harshly.

This is dubious. Income from work is only one type of way a person can get money. Inheritance is another, and that's not earned by work. Capital gains is another, and that's not earned by work.

The government employs tax officials who do indeed work to earn the money the government collects. And if the government is the major shareholder in a company, and that company paid dividends, then the government did work to earn that money in the same sense a private shareholder of the company would have.

I take it you haven't worked for many / any private companies? That largely describes the process that the private company I work for follows with regard to such matters.

Aside from a stint as a newspaper reporter, I have worked for small and mid-sized technology companies for most of my life, usually as a contractor. Twice I have worked directly for large companies, Kodak and Konica Minolta, and both experiences were terrible. Yes, large companies are very much like government, I won't argue with that.

Yes and it had bad outcomes. After the war the US gave Germany foreign aid and that had good outcomes.

Yes and no. Your debt is kinda large, though not as large as many countries, and not as large as your country ran up in WWII and had few if any problems dealing with afterward. Your country dealt with its post-WWII debt by running a budget that was close-ish to balanced for 15 years or so and inflation and GDP growth took care of most of the debt. That method works for basically any level of debt.

Personally I'd advise undoing the Trump & Bush tax cuts so that the budget is back balanced-ish and putting a bit of effort into running a close to balanced budget over the next decade to get your debt down a bit. It's not urgent though.

In any situation like this the best place to start is always with the largest amounts. That applies to freeing up computer hard disk space (which I was doing last week) and it applies to government spending, because even a small percentage of a big item is likely to be bigger than multiple small items. In the US's case the obvious place to start is defense spending. That's by far and away the largest discretionary spend item in the US federal budget. No point cutting multiple smaller items to pinch pennies when you're burning money in giant fire pits on defense spending.

I agree. The US spends too much GDP on defense. I would like to see that cut back as well.

[Sparko]

Or where does it say to ignore taking care of your dog first?

Who claimed anything about dogs?

Take care of family:

1 Tim 5:8
Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

1 Timothy 3:5
He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church?

[Charles]

Who claimed anything about dogs?

Take care of family:

1 Tim 5:8
Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

1 Timothy 3:5
He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church?

[Sparko]

Jesus is talking about following him even if your family tries to stop you. Try reading in context sometime.

God is number one.
Family is number two.
Others are number three.

[Charles]

Jesus is talking about following him even if your family tries to stop you. Try reading in context sometime.

God is number one.
Family is number two.
Others are number three.

Try reading the content sometime. It clearly, very clearly says "hate". Hate is the word. And in the context it is not mentioned as a criterion that they should try to stop you. It is a convenient claim to make and you do so without supporting it. And there is no mention of family being "number two". It says "hate" and not "number two".

Simply claiming "context" is too cheap. If you have anything specific you can point to, anything that would explain why I should HATE my children feel free to share it and show how it follows along the lines of claiming "Family is number two" and the other quotes you provided.

And need I remind you, the word was "hate"?

[Sparko]

Try reading the content sometime. It clearly, very clearly says "hate". Hate is the word. And in the context it is not mentioned as a criterion that they should try to stop you. It is a convenient claim to make and you do so without supporting it. And there is no mention of family being "number two". It says "hate" and not "number two".

Simply claiming "context" is too cheap. If you have anything specific you can point to, anything that would explain why I should HATE my children feel free to share it and show how it follows along the lines of claiming "Family is number two" and the other quotes you provided.

And need I remind you, the word was "hate"?