Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I don't believe any one here would disagree on that one! There is no other group that can feed people lies in so many ways!

The money has to come from somewhere.
You either raise taxes or print it. Both reduce the amount of money that all the productive people of society have. It is the productive people of society that create jobs and create real wealth. By stealing from them to give to others is just making everyone poorer. If the govt stopped paying people to dig holes and fill them in again then they would be employed by the productive people instead, to actually create things of value.
Waste is waste and never good for any reason at any time.

If the govt wasnt printing truckloads of money in the first place and subsidising their friends in agribusiness etc then the depression would never have happened in the first place to justify (wrongly) paying people to dig holes and fill them in again.

It is not that corrupt government came first. Corrupt business put the corrupt people into the government. Look at the aspartame debacle in 1980. Donald Rumsfeld was the CEO of the company with it's patent. Obviously corruption goes back further than that. But if people don't participate, than corporations can continue to slip corrupt people in. They are also trying to erode away the government regulations that were started when people really did participate. They will pay big money for publicity campaigns that sway public opinion away from those regulations. I saw it happen here in Cali with the deregulation of energy. Experts sayed it would be good for business, and businesses pay the people. Then rolling blackouts hppened, and everyone went WTF! The sugar coated ideas of the libertine movement sound good. They are carefully crafted by some smart people payed lots of money by businesses that want to go back to the bad old days where it is ok to lock 200 teenage girls on the ninth floor of a factory and forget to unlock the doors during a fire. After all it is their factory, they should be able to do what ever they want with it.

This point here is where we get stuck. This is the fundamental difference in our views so lets delve a little deeper.

First of all could you please explain specifically how a corporation can go corrupt first, without the government being involved?

What usually happens is a corporation becomes wealthy due to serving it's customers well (there is no other way) You can't just make a corporation and start making lots of money without providing a valuable good or service to many people.
Then due to political relationships the corporation can lobby for subsidies/tax breaks/heavy regulation (which stops smaller businesses competing).
The company doesn't even have to be big or wealthy first, it just needs the political connections.

Notice how corruption can ONLY occur with involvment with the government. Without the government the company is at the mercy of its customers.

This is what happens when govt gets heavily involved in agriculture and "protects" farmers.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/01/us-india-wheat-idUSBRE8600KD20120701

Sound familiar ?



This is just a silly claim. If you like I can explain the origins of the school of Austrian Economics and the liberty movement. You will find it is definitely NOT in the interests of big business.
It is definitely in the interests of workers and small business. The only people libertarianism threatens are those that wish to control others for their own ends, no matter how "good" they think the ends are.

Accidents and neglect and outright bad practices happen all the time. Nothing is going to change that. Nothing is stopping businesses today from locking the fire exits due to some stupid reason. There are plenty of cases when people get killed in company fires when they DO follow the regulations. Who says the regulations are adequate ? Only a month ago an employee at my previous work had to smash a window to get out of the burning office. If it was on the 3rd floor he probably would have died. Regulations would not have saved him (the building is new and built to regulations)
Do you actually think businesses want to burn their employees or harm their customers ?
It is really bad for business to have a fire burn your employees, you have to then get all new workers, and train them up to replace the others. It is also bad for reputation.
Those responisible should have been charged with murder/manslaughter. With regulations, if the people still died then those responisible would not be charged because they were following the "regulations"

If big corrupt business thought they would benefit from a free market they would be pushing that agenda. They don't. Big business pushes more regulations and bigger government because govt is inherently corrupt. Big business profits from govt and regulations

The business is not corrupt by serving its customers, but by exploiting it's workers, the environment, or other resources. Chief among those is the exploitation of workers. Sure you are serving your customers well, but at the expense of what. The owners of the triangle shirtwaist factory were brought up on manslaughter charges. They were found not guilty because there was to prove that they knew that the doors were locked at the time. Al Smith, an Irish catholic from the lower east side of Manhattan, championed reform that lead to regulations that would prevent the horrendous conditions that lead to the triangle shirtwaist atrocity. To the owners of the company, there were hundreds of girls that also wanted that job. They did not want highly skilled crafts people. They wanted girls with no where else to go. If a girl did not show up for work because she was sick, she was replaced. That is the way it was. Businesses love the way it was because they could keep the labor cheap and expendable. A good read that covers this is Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." While it's answer to the problems is just silly, it does describe a reality that exists when there inadequate or poorly implemented regulations. There are some regulations that make it difficult for small business to compete. That is absolutely correct. But one can not say that all regulations are bad. The company that I work for is headquartered in California, and to many the regulations imposed on it would seem like a lot. However our company is still profitable. We are certainly no fortune 500 company, and sometimes compliance is difficult, but they are there for good reason and in the end they have forced us to implement policies that do serve our customers better.
Now, you are correct that our viewpoints do differ in where the corruption stems from. A democratically run government in itself is not corrupt. People within the government can be. The people in a democratically run government are put in there by the people that participate. Now once those people are put into office, they can and will create systems that are corrupt. They can get away with it because there are a lot of people that don't participate. I keep referring back to pre new deal new york as an example because it is telling of what it is like to have no regulations. New York has always had, and always will, a large immigrant population. It is part of what makes New York New York. The value of the immigrant population politically was not tapped for quite some time. These are the people who came over because there was no profitability on their farms. They worked for next to nothing. They were marginalized. Once they realized their political power, they were able to affect real change. Regulations like allowing for sick days, 40 hr work weeks, and outlawing child labor. The people elected in people like Al Smith who cared about these things. Oddly it was the notoriously corrupt Taminy Hall that started his political carrier. However, he knew that it was the people that put him there, and kept him there, so in the end he himself was rather uncorrupt. Franklin Deleno Roosevelt has said that everything he did in the new deal was started by Al Smith in New York.
An interesting watch is "Food Inc." This is where the regulations become more of a balancing act. Where you are saying there should be less regulations, I feel that here needs to be different regulations. But the point that I am bring up is that a stratified society is bad for people, but good for business. Companies like Tyson operate by exploiting it's people. It purposely keeps it's farmers in debt, so they can not ween themselves off of Tyson. Meat packing plants truck in illegal immigrants, because they work for cheap, under the table, and have NO rights. The immigrants only get on the bus because, like my great grandfather, their farms could not compete with American grains. Now when I hear people complain about the immigration "problem" I tell them to think about the goods they buy. The immigrants I'm sure would like to enter properly, but the bus does not make that stop. Now you could say that it is because of regulations that those business resort to illegal immigrant labor. Cursed minimum wage. But I say that the regulations should be stricter. I think that if a business is using illegal labor, it's assets should be seized. The immigrants given an opportunity to be naturalized. And a clear message that that kind of business practice will not be tolerated.

I guess SV can sort of get you on a technicality though Ron, If there are no regulations then there can be no corruption..

But thats a little like solving a high incarceration rate by abolishing the laws putting people in jail.. Brilliant, if something isn't a criminal act, then no one will go to jail and crime will stop... There is no more crime, problem solved... Simple really....

Man when you think about it, there's a swathe of changes that can be made for the betterment of society. Stop under age drinking, completely? Abolish the legal minimum drinking age. Stop illegal fishing, remove all fishing regulations. Stop the high levels of people speeding, remove speed limits. Stop the illicit drug problem, without government controls and regulations, all drugs are legal, after all, no one has a right to tell "me" what I can and can't do, that's infringing on my rights of freedom and liberty. There's the drug problem solved over night...

Gees when you think about it, this solves almost every problem there is....


Except that's a world I wouldn't want to live in...

If that were really the case, than there would be no corrupt dictators. They make the laws, therefore they don't break them.

If a business doesn't force someone to work for them, how does it exploit their workers ?
Do you define exploitation as a mutually beneficial trade between 2 people?
If the worker is willing to work for $2/hr, with no sick pay or job security or any benefits whatsoever, and the employer is willing to pay them for their work, where is the exploitation ?
If $2/hr is too low, then the worker will not show up, they can get a job for $5/hr around the corner. The company paying $2/hr will have to raise their rates to make it more attractive so they can get workers. Rembember it is the workers choice to work.
What is the situation before the company was started ? It is very clear that if a new company opens and pays $2/hr and has no trouble getting workers, the people were worse off before it opened.
So if the people have a certain quality of life before the company opened, and a better quality of life when they are working for the company for $2/hr, how is that exploitation ?

I guess SV is a true and true 1st worlder.

For many people in poor countries, it is a choice between $2 a day or the family starves.

I guess debating via google search/research won't give you persepcective.

The question was, what were the people doing before the company started ?
Were they all starved, and then after the company arrived they were un-starved ?
And the more companies that start, the more choice the people have, and the companies then have to start competing for workers by raising wages/conditions etc.

Its only exploitation compated to our rich lives of leisure. For the 3rd world its an oppurtunity to increase their living standards.

if the company is making 50000% profit in the first world by paying third world workers $2 an hour, its exploitation. These companies arent doing it to increase the living standards of the third world, they are doing it to line their own pockets through cheap, exploitative labour practices

I agree that case would definitely be unethical, but if the company was making that sort of profit it wouldn't be very long at all before many other companies joined the party and through competition wages would be bid up to the point where profits would probably be similar or less than anywhere else.
Where there are great profits to be made, others will follow. The greater the profits, the faster they would come and in greater number.

Are there any actual examples of these fantastic profits anyway? Generally the company would be producing cheap goods with the cheap labour and so profit margins would be razor thin.

Also while the company is making great profits, it is likely they would continue to expand and employ more and more workers, increasing their quality of life as well.
In time the economy grows and worker salaries and conditions rise along with it.
I don't think any modern economy in the world has not experienced this vital part in its beginning.

Remember people choose to work there.

Nice dream.

does that mean you disagree but you don't know why?
Even if you disagree with my arguments, does it make sense ?

It makes about as much sense as my methods of doing away with crime and corruption as I mentioned above...

Still stuck in that perfect world, utopian place..

You say people have a choice but in reality most don't.. The people working in the asbestosis factories in India don't want to work there but they have no choice, they have no other means of making money or getting another job. They know they are dying from asbestos related diseases and that they probably only have 3-4 years left to live, but thats 3-4 years of food on plates for their family.

But as you say, ok, they have a choice, they don't have to work, their families can starve...

And why are those dirty asbestos factories still running in India? Because there's little to no government intervention or control to stop the poor working condition... Now follow the trail of money, it leads to a huge mining company in Canada, where they still mine blue asbestos. it's too difficult to process asbestos in Canada. Send it off to India where they process it and turn it into slum housing products.. The poor people can't kick up a fuss, they're too poor, and hell, they will die young as well..