(08-11-2018, 10:20 AM)jj82284 Wrote:

(08-11-2018, 10:05 AM)MalabarJag Wrote: The Never Trumper Republican pundits supported the tax cut; they didn't argue against it like you. A Republican, even the most left wing version, would never argue in favor of socialism like you do.

You are clearly not a Republican. To claim you are is a lie.

I might actually disagree.  You're right, mikes positions are of or sympathetic to the left.  At the same time when you look at the David Brooks iteration of conservatism/republicanism it's imbued with the same basic premise that the market itself is unjust and that there needs to be government intervention in order to correct for its lack of fairness.  This leads to a derivative of the "better person" fallacy of the left when confronting the empirical failures of said intervention.  If only we had better people running these government bureaucracies then they would actually deliver as promised.  This is especially seductive to professionally educated doctors lawyers engineers etc. As they see themselves as the BETTER PEOPLE.

I think you are at least some of the way there.
I would never say that the market itself is unjust. Usually the market works, and when it works, by definition, people are exchanging things they want at prices they think are fair. 
When I think about government intervention, I'm only looking out for cases where the market does not work and can not work. And those cases and only in those cases government regulations or takeovers are necessary.
In my point of view all of the action is in recognizing when the market has failed and coming up with an appropriate intervention. 
Those who are all the way to the left tend to simply look at the rate of profits and say that any business that rakes in huge profits must be charging too much money and must be a case of market failure. 
Real socialists (and it's unclear if AOC is one) will explicitly tell you that profits themselves are evidence of economic inefficiency. 
I think profits are good. I think high profits alone are not evidence of market failure. Other evidence to look at would be lack of competition, lack of innovation or improvements in quality, lack of attention to life safety issues, and whether consumers are coming to the market as free agents who have a very good idea of what they want or as people who feel scared and coerced and don't have good information about what they need. And then the next question to ask is if government intervention can improve that or not.
For instance I would tell you that the government taking over oil companies is not a very good idea. because whether you're looking at Venezuela 1976 or Norway around the same time, those markets hadn't actually failed. Rather the government just saw these huge profits and wanted them for themselves. I've just point out that the takeover in and of itself does not portend catastrophe, if the government hires good people to manage the company.

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