I'd rather have Mary Jane Watson and Lois Lane than the enterprise. Yes, I know I sound like a broken record on this point.

Will it bring girlfriends and wives? Will he get Louis Lane and Mary Jane?

Rorschach's judgments are questionable at best and I'd rather trust Dr. Manhattan. Honestly, Superman is still the best bet. He is more powerful than Dr. Manhattan and has a much better moral sense, possibly the best among superheroes besides Spider-Man.

I think that its better to describe Dr. Manhattan as apathetic rather than sociopath. A sociopath would actively do bad things for the hell of it, Dr. Manhattan doesn't. Plus, Dr. Manhattan is capable of following orders. He should do fine.

Iron Man and Batman are real superheroes and the benefit of their wealth is that its a frankly unrealistic levels and already directed towards fighting bad people. In this case, resources are superpowers. We also want superheroes that are capable of thinking rather than the dumb muscles ones.

Question: Are hot nerd-wish fulfillment girlfriends and wives considered an innate talent and power of superheroes? If yes than we need to create Spider-Man so we get Mary Jane Watson-Parker to.

Yes, I'd imagine that it would encompass some of the worst villains of all time like Doctor Doom, Lex Luthor, and possibly some Disney villains.

We need a good balance of intelligence, strength, power, and emotional balance to deal with this threat becasue we don't want anybodies personal dramas affecting the balance. This leaves us with three options as I see it.

Option A is the Fantastic Four plus somebody from the DC Canon, either Superman or Wonder Woman. The Fantastic Four know how to work well has a team, are used to dealing with mad scientists, super villains, and alien invasions. They also have a good balance of powers and Mr. Fantastic's super-intelligence and science. Superman and Wonder Woman are both the functional equivalent of deities and won't bring too much personal drama to the struggle. Wonder Woman would add a nice gender balance but Superman's sheer power is going to be really useful in this scenario.

Option B will be a to assemble a combination of superheroes from Marvel and DC that have the right combination of smarts, intelligence, power, and riches (so they can contribute their own resources). I'd say in Option B, Superman is a must because of the the immense power and wide range of skills he has. Plus his moral purity and friendly demeanor would be necessary to keep the team in check. Than I'd pick Iron Man. His flaw his his tendency to be a playboy and egotist but he is very intelligent, powerful, and has material resources to contribute because I believe that Stark Industries is a power of Iron Man. Batman is also a must. He doesn't have superpower in the classic sense and he has a lot of personal drama issues. However, he is very skilled, has the resources of Wayne Industries, and his capable of strategic thinking. Thats a must in this scenario. We need some women so we get a proper balance. I'd argue that we create Invisible Woman for her defensive capabilities and She-Hulk.

Option C is to recreate the functional equivalent of deities if we can't recreate deities. That means Superman, the Green Lantern, Marvel's Thor (who is aliens), Dr. Strange, and the Doctor.

I've only been posting for a short time but I've learned that you can have a website filled with divergent views and have discussions that don't end in a shooting match.

Why is self-sufficiency so important? Only a small percentage of humans have been self-sufficient through out human history. Nearly everybody else has been dependent on other humans even at the very top levels of the socio-economic ladder. Feudal lords were dependent on their serfs and servants, merchants on other merchants and customers, and industrialists on their employees and customers. Only substantive farmers and backwoods hermits have been truly self-sufficient. Why not just admit that humans are dependent on each other and try to create an ethical and workable system from that.

Do you not think it possible that we might reach a more humane solution out of pragmatism, the type that led Otto von Bismarck to pass welfare legislation, if not actual compassion. It won't be the first time in the United States history where politicians enacted reforms to save capitalism from the worst excesses of the capitalists. See the New Deal and the Progressive Era.

Pretty much its image bias. The mill worker could be a perfectly good administrative assistant but image bias might prevent him or her from getting the job. That and lack of relative related jobs on resume. If you are hiring for an admistrative assistant, you probably aren't going to hire somebody's whose entire previous experience invovled operating heavy machinery. You probably won't even call them in for an interview. It just wouldn't occur to the people hiring that a former factory worker could do fine in an office.

Thats because there isn't an easy answer. Our current society, and this applies to nearly the entire developed and most of the developing world, deems that one has to work in order to live for the most part. It hasn't been unusual in human history for the man of the house and maybe some of the older boys and young men and women to seek work elsewhere and send money back to the mother, younger children, and other dependent relatives.

Now we kind of see that as a barbaric separation of families and think that parents and children should be able to remain together rather than sending one or more family members hundreds or thousands of miles away for a long time for work. At the same time we still have the expectation that you need to work in order to live.

The solution has to involve divorcing the idea of work and life. Work is important. I like work and find meaning in it. However, there needs to be a base minimal life-style that people are entitled to simply because they are human. If you want more than this life style than you should work for it but the base minimal life-style needs to be created. It needs to be done through government in my opinion because a democratic government is the best forum for reaching a concensus on what is the base minimal lifestyle, adjusting it as necessary, and implementing it.

I think the answer will depend on how much humans are willing to let go of old assumptions relating to work, material possessions, society, and ownership. If we can get ascend the old notion that you need to work in order to be entitled to even a bare minimal living and if we can accept the idea of a mass leisure class than we can arrive at the idea of a scarcity-free utopia. In Marxist terms, create a society of "each according to their needs". If we as species insist on the current model of work for wages even when it really doesn't work anymore than its not going to be pleseant.

I hope your just being pessimistic rather than actually advocating for this. A capitalist system like this is going to give Marxism a very wide-spread popular revival.

A former mill worker is also highly unlikely to get hired for a lot of pink-collar jobs even if he or she is capable of doing them.

How is this going to work? There are over three hundred million people in the United States and there really isn't a need for three hundred million entreprenuers. Most people, even very intelligent people, aren't fit out to be entrepreneurs because a lot of people are rather risk averse. They don't necessarily want to be rich as much as they want to be comfortable and really wouldn't know how to come up with business ideas.

New Dealer's last point is the really important one. SSI is being used as a way to deal with the unemployable in a relatively humane manner with the tools available to the government. Determining who is disabled isn't being done to the strictest level of the law. One of the doctors interviewed on TAL states that he asks people how much education they have when he checks them out for disabiltiy. If the patient only has a high school level education, the doctor assumes that the person is not suited for a sit-down job and is disabled.

I think this is because the Far Left in America is more than a little disdainful of democratic politics and does not associate itself with the Democratic Party. The Far Left views the Democratic Party with contempt and does not attempt to take it over the same way that the Far Right did with the Republicans during the 1950s and 1960s. This makes it a bit easier for the Democratic Party to police their margins.

Based on American history, the idea that Constitutional limitations on government power limits the political power of the wealthy is highly debatable. During the Gilded Age, the wealthy were able to use government power to enrich themselves further, the land grants to railroad companies etc., and curb any attempts of workers to unionize and strike. The Federal government acted as strike breaker on numerous occasions during the 19th century, most famously during the Pullman Strike in Chicago. The constitutional limits of government power mainly frustrated the attempts of Middle Class reformers and workers to pass the laws they wanted, laws that would protect their rights and limit the power of the wealthy.

True. You could argue that a CEO salary cap could cover the same functions as the income tax and estates taxes were created for, preventing the creation of aristocracy of wealth and political influence. The problem with creating a salary cap, as opposed to the income and estates taxes, is that how do you determine what should be the maximum pay and who should cap laws apply to. Is a person who makes a fortune for a lucrative cosmetic surgery practice less problematic than CEO and therefore entitled to a larger salary or should the salary gap apply universally?

Wouldn't this require that stock-ownership be much more individualized rather than through mutual funds or corporate ownership of stocks through holding companies. Wouldn't this also require that the CEO and other members of the Board can't own stock in their own corporation to avoid a conflict of interest?

I don't think that many liberals and progressives are against high CEO pay per se. Most liberals and progressives in this country want to temper and regulate capitalism rather than eliminate it and replace it with an alternative economic system. What gets to liberals and progressives about high CEO pay is that we feel that a lot of it is at the expense of the salaries and wages of more ordinary employees and that much of is it underserved in that CEOs seem to find ways of rewarding themselves with high pay and benefits even in the company they work for is doing very badly. The objection isn't so much the level of pay but whats being done for the pay and the perceived costs of the pay.

I don't think that most liberals and progressives would call for a cap on CEO pay. Thats much farther to the left than they want and also what could realistically be passed by Congress. If you listen to the complaints, its also not what bothers liberals. What bothers us is the ratio of pay between the CEO and the wages of an ordinary employee rather than how much the CEO is making.

I actually don't think that the Jewish right to self-determination derives from genetics. During the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, we were either persecuted out right or at best treated as citizens-strangers in most countries where we lived. We might have been a citizen of X country on paper but the reality was often different because we weren't Christian or Muslim or whatever. Jewish self-determination derives from this rather than genetics.

I actually have a soft-spot for Edward Said. Impeccable anti-Zionist as he was, he was enough a realist to admit that the Jews of Eastern Europe and the Middle East would have had a tough time of it but for Israel.