Author: WyattPitts

Marx’s criticisms of capitalism and how I would respond to them. According to the dictionary, capitalism is “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.” This is what the USA does and it works wonderfully! I’m sure you know who Karl Marx is, so I’ll save you time in getting to the point. According to Econlib, “Marx condemned capitalism as a system that alienates the masses. His reasoning was as follows: although workers produce things for the market, market forces, not workers, control things. People are required to work for capitalists who have full control over the means of production and maintain power in the workplace.” How do I respond to this? I would change my job, wouldn’t you?

What Is To Be Done? This is a novel written by Vladimir Lenin. According to Wikipedia, “In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously become political simply by fighting economic battles with employers over wages, working hours, and the like.”

New Economic Policy. According to Britannica, “The New Economic Policy reintroduced a measure of stability to the economy and allowed the Soviet people to recover from years of war, civil war, and governmental mismanagement. The small businessmen and managers who flourished in this period became known as NEP men.” 

Ukrainian terror-famine. this famine was actually a man made famine. According to Wikipedia, “The Holodomor, also known as the Great Ukrainian Famine, was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.”

The primary values of fascism. According to World101, “Many experts agree that fascism is a mass political movement that emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of both the nation and the single, powerful leader over the individual citizen.” Fascism doesn’t sound like something that I want to happen today, but what are the primary values. According to Wikipedia, “Common themes among fascist movements include: authoritarianism, nationalism (including racial nationalism), hierarchy and elitism, and militarism. Other aspects of fascism such as perception of decadence, anti-egalitarianism and totalitarianism can be seen to originate from these ideas.” 

What was life like for the businessman in Nazi Germany? Not very good. For one they had price control. This means that the government decides how much you can or can’t sell something for. They also lived in a socialist society under HitlerAccording to the dictionary, socialism is “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” . 

What is the idea of a “living Constitution”? A living constitution is a constitution that can be changed. This isn’t a good ides, because one day your right could include having guns, but the next day you’re not allowed to have guns. People could also change the law to fit their standards and be against others. A living constitution isn’t a strong constitution. A living constitution doesn’t protect your rights. 

What is nullification? According to Wikipedia, “Nullification, in United States constitutional history, is a legal theory that a state has the right to nullify, or invalidate, any federal laws which they deem unconstitutional with respect to the United States Constitution. There are similar theories that any officer, jury, or individual may do the same.”

What are the compact and nationalist theories of the Union? According to Wikipedia, “In United States constitutional theory, compact theory is an interpretation of the Constitution which holds that the United States was formed through a compact agreed upon by all the states, and that the federal government is thus a creation of the states.” According to Wikipedia, the nationalist theory is “It holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity, and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power.”

Can smaller political units contribute to the cause of liberty? Yes. Most of the time smaller political states have more freedom economically. Just because they do not have a large military, doesn’t mean that they always lose battles. some can be won with economic power. 

What problems do price controls cause? According to the Dictionary, price control is “a government regulation establishing a maximum price to be charged for specified goods and services, especially during periods of war or inflation.” Price controls can do things like cause shortages, make hour long lines, and make things become too expensive. price control doesn’t work, but the governments around the world keep doing it. I don’t know why, but it isn’t anything good to do. 

What is the origin of money? Well what is money? Money is a medium of exchange. A medium of exchange is something everyone wants and is worth something. But the government can’t just say “This is money. It is worth something. Starting today, it is the new medium of exchange.” That wouldn’t work. People used to get things using barter, which is trading one thing for another. This was difficult because you had to find someone that had what you wanted, but also wanted what you had. So people started using gold as a medium of exchange. They traded their item for gold and then bought what they wanted. This was happening for years, but gold was hard to carry around because it was too heavy. So the government introduced paper money that represented gold. One dollar of paper money represented one dollar of gold. They couldn’t print more money without finding gold. This worked greatly and society thrived, but then the government got greedy and started printing as much money as they wanted without finding gold. This caused inflation and it ruined everyone who made their savings in paper money. The government robbed everyone of their money and they still do it today. 

The “benefit principle” and its problems. According to Wikipedia, the benefit principle is “a concept in the theory of taxation from public finance. It bases taxes to pay for public-goods expenditures on a politically-revealed willingness to pay for benefits received. The principle is sometimes likened to the function of prices in allocating private goods.” What are its problems though? According to Hello Vaia, “Two main drawbacks of the benefit principle of taxation are: it’s often difficult to accurately determine the level of benefits each individual receives from public services, and it may exacerbate wealth inequality as lower income earners may pay a disproportionately higher amount for services compared to higher income earners.”

The Washington Monument Syndrome. According to Wikipedia, “The Washington Monument syndrome, also known as the Mount Rushmore syndrome or the firemen first principle, is a term used to describe the phenomenon of government agencies in the United States cutting the most visible or appreciated service provided by the government when faced with budget cuts.” The Department of Interior needed to make budget cuts, so they shut down the Washington Monument knowing that the public would demand them to reopen it. 

Outcomes of anti-poverty programs. Anti-poverty programs were supposed to keep people out of poverty by giving them things. The outcome was that more people wanted to be in poverty to get free things. 

The primary problem facing a policymaker trying to design a program to benefit people in unfortunate circumstances. According to standardfusion.com, some problems facing policymakers are, “Inconsistent Document Creation and Editing, Poor Policy Maintenance, Lack of Accountability, Outdated Documents, Improper Policy Mapping.”

How can private-property rights help solve environmental problems? The environmental problem that I will talk about is pollution. Now there are many types of pollution. There’s just throwing trash on the ground (which is what most people think about when they hear the word pollution), there’s air pollution, noise pollution, hunting pollution, and many more. How can private-property rights help with pollution though? I’ll explain hunting pollution, because it’s the most understandable.  Imagine that there’s a forest that nobody owns with lots of animals. A lot of people are going to take their guns and go shoot all those animals, because nobody owns the property so no one owns the animals. But there’s this one person that thinks “If I only shoot a little bit of animals this year and leave enough animals to reproduce, then there will be enough animals for hunting next year.” That guys an idiot. Any animals that he doesn’t shoot, someone else will. But what if that guy owns the forest. He can make a number of animals that everyone can shoot, then there will be enough for next year. 

What have been some of the problems with the federal prohibition on certain drugs? Prohibition is a law that makes it illegal to sell certain drugs. What’s the problem? According to DocsTeach, “Prohibition was enacted to protect individuals and families from the “scourge of drunkenness.” However, it had unintended consequences including: a rise in organized crime associated with the illegal production and sale of alcohol, an increase in smuggling, and a decline in tax revenue.” So it was a complete failure. 

Some of the factors that have contributed to rising health-care costs in the United States. According to People Keep there are nine reasons. “1. Medical providers are paid for quantity, not quality, 2. The U.S. population is becoming more unhealthy, 3. Newer healthcare technology is more expensive, 4. Many Americans don’t choose their own healthcare plan, 5. There’s a lack of information about medical care and its costs, 6. Hospitals and providers are well-positioned to demand higher prices, 7. Fear of malpractice lawsuits, 8. Inflation’s impact on the economy, 9. The U.S. population is growing older.”

“World War II was a time of great prosperity in the United States.” This statement is a lie. Just because we won, doesn’t mean that we had great prosperity. The biggest reason I say this is because the government was too busy with the war to focus on America. They sent all our young, strong, and hard workers to fight in the war. Because they were gone, they had to be replaced by teenagers, older men, and women. Because of this, we couldn’t prosper anywhere near the rate we did before the war. 

What is the problem that Ludwig von Mises identified that a socialist economic planning board faces? According to Wikipedia, “Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was an Austrian–American Austrian School economist, historian, logician, and sociologist. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on the societal contributions of classical liberalism and the power of consumers.” Mises believed that rational economic calculation wasn’t able to occur in a socialist economy. He thought that this could only lead to chaos and disaster. 
What has been the most significant contributing factor to the abolition of child labor? According to History Channel, “Through the first half of the 1800s, child labor was an essential part of the agricultural and handicraft economy of the United States. Children worked on family farms and as indentured servants for others. To learn a trade, boys often began their apprenticeships between the ages of ten and fourteen.” This child labor wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. A lot of families couldn’t make enough money so their children got jobs to help their parents. So what led to it getting abolished? According to History Channel, “Nineteenth century reformers and labor organizers sought to restrict child labor and improve working conditions to uplift the masses, but it took the Great Depression—a time when Americans were desperate for employment—to shake long-held practices of child labor in the United States.“

Is Kant’s nature/freedom dualism clearer in ‘Farewell to the Master’ or ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’? What was Kant’s nature/freedom dualism? Kant believed that  human thought are inexorably riven by fundamental dualities. There are many of these fundamental dualities that he talks about, but the one he talks most about is the distinction between practical and theoretical reason. According to Great Thinkers, “It can often look as if Kant thinks that rhetorical reasoning and practical reason constitute 2 separate domains of human thought that cannot possibly be joined in a single system: in theoretical reasoning we use the pure forms of sensibility and understanding, that is our pure intuitions of the structure of space and time on the one hand and the fundamental logical structures of the discursive thoughts on the other, to define the basic laws of a realm that cannot be influenced by our moral conceptions of how things ought to be, while we appeal to pure practical reason to determine how truly free beings ought to relate to themselves and one another regardless of what they actually do. Thus it can seem as if in Kant’s view the realms of nature and freedom, while each possesses its own kind of systematic laws and organization, cannot be joined in a single system.”

What is Farwell to the Master? ccording to Wikipedia, “‘Farewell to the Master’ is a science fiction short story by American writer Harry Bates. It was first published in the October 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction on page 58. It provided the basis of the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still and its 2008 remake.” 

What is The Day the Earth Stood Still? Thus is just a remake of Farwell to the Master. 

Is Kant’s nature/freedom dualism clearer in ‘Farewell to the Master’ or ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’? I think it is Farwell to the Master. This is becausee robot thinks he is sovereign instead of the police bot that he was supposed to be.