Comment by bpt3
4 days ago
> And you don't acknowledge the actual definition, or you would have been asking about price elasticity, not what is or is not essential for human life. Plenty of people will give up Chinese takeout before they give up GPUs.
You just listed two examples of discretionary items (prepared food is generally not considered a consumer staple).
> The luxury car, because it's grandma's old classic that Tom has kept in good enough shape to drive to his job, and he doesn't know how he'll get there when it finally breaks down, but he doesn't really have a penchant for fancy food and gets by with some cheap staples he prepares at home.
You're 0 for 2. That's not a luxury car, unless Grandma had a love of rare exotics that he should probably sell to buy food and a reliable car.
> The trip to the casino, because Judy is getting evicted, and doesn't have any friends or family she can stay with, and won't survive the winter on the street, and hitting it big at Blackjack is unlikely, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And although she does sometimes take Tylenol for headaches, she's otherwise in good health and doesn't have any ongoing medicinal needs.
And now you're 0 for 3. Your earlier comments are making more sense.
> What are we doing? You're deciding what other people need for their lives?
Most humans understand what is essential to sustain human life and what is not. In fact, every functioning adult I've ever met does.
The implications of the fact that you don't can be left for you or other readers to decuce.
> Of course they do, because however they behave, they have an army of op-ed writers, sycophants, and apologists who spew out post-hoc justification for their behavior, and viola, their behavior turns out to have been rational all along.
> Meanwhile, if the poor (and we are always talking about the poor when we are talking about "essential") stubbornly show an unwillingness to stop purchasing some good that some economist has decided is "non-essential", they're villainized and called irrational. Many of them even have refrigerators!
Not remotely true.
> You choose now, in 2025, to deny that there's a class war? That's certainly a take.
Whether there is or isn't a class war is debatable, but the one you've concocted that is led by economists is certainly not happening.
> That's not a luxury car
So an "old classic" (I was thinking a Mercedes) stops being a luxury car as soon as a poor person inherits it? Do you see how nebulous these categories are? How easy it is to just move the line whenever it suits your argument?
> Whether there is or isn't a class war is debatable, but the one you've concocted that is led by economists is certainly not happening.
I'll give you an economist who led the charge: Donald Regan, Ronald Reagan's secretary of the treasury and chief of staff. This was back in a time when people felt they needed to come up with a plausible-sounding excuse to strip poor people of their rights and keep them stuck in a cycle poverty. The banner was "Reaganomics", or "Trickle-Down Economics". You're so incredulous that the discipline of economics has anything to do with a class war that was largely started and still fought under the name "Trickle-Down Economics"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Regan
> So an "old classic" (I was thinking a Mercedes) stops being a luxury car as soon as a poor person inherits it? Do you see how nebulous these categories are? How easy it is to just move the line whenever it suits your argument?
No, it stops being a luxury car when it's old and no longer luxurious. Luxury cars are very expensive to maintain, and the poor person in question should absolutely sell a historic luxury car and buy a Honda Civic (or similar) and use the remaining funds for other essentials.
> I'll give you an economist who led the charge: Donald Regan, Ronald Reagan's secretary of the treasury and chief of staff. This was back in a time when people felt they needed to come up with a plausible-sounding excuse to strip poor people of their rights and keep them stuck in a cycle poverty. The banner was "Reaganomics", or "Trickle-Down Economics". You're so incredulous that the discipline of economics has anything to do with a class war that was largely started and still fought under the name "Trickle-Down Economics"?
So one guy (who wasn't an economist BTW) who died over 20 years ago and whose ideas have been long abandoned is your big example? Come on.
Your entire premise is ridiculous and your hyperfocus on blaming the rich for every ill in the world completely negates any shred of a valid argument you might have.
> the poor person in question should
So you are telling poor people how they should live their lives after all. The core point I made that set this whole thing off. It turns out this whole thing actually is an excuse to decide how poor people should live. Thank you for proving my point for me.
> So one guy (who wasn't an economist BTW) who died over 20 years ago and whose ideas have been long abandoned is your big example?
Are you kidding about being abandoned? Reaganomics has not been abandoned, it has been enshrined as the idol of American capitalism. Almost every element of the ongoing and ever-accelerating enrichening of the rich and the disenfranchisement of the disenfranchised can be traced to ideas put in place during the Reagan administration. And the guy who invents "supply side economics" and the economic policy of the United States for the next 50 decades is an economist, regardless of what his piece of paper says. There are plenty of Chairmen of the Fed that you could look at under a similar light, and they are mostly "official" economists.