Vinzer Deling
Banned
and fuck you too for trying thinking you have the "right" to my hard earned money.
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Raoul Duke...
- Thread starter King Jippo
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whytemyke said:
Well I never said socialism was incompatible with capitalism. I quite explicitly noted in an early post socialism is a successful feature of capitalism, but for it work, it has to be working under a capitalism system and not replacing one.
My argument isn't anti-socialist, it's merely pointing out the problems of another poster's post.
Ralph Nader is a crotchety old man who would be wrong on women's issues, cultural issues, foreign policy and immigration. Still, he's a good choice for people who realize Bush's incompetence but think Kerry was too liberal.
Raoul's social-political philosophy is just shallow anti-authority posturing; it was a coin toss whether he'd turn out like this or as a Randroid. Since it's so silly, the board's right-wingers flock to it. It lets them go to bat for the home team without having to defend Bush's self-parodying series of fuckups.
Raoul's social-political philosophy is just shallow anti-authority posturing; it was a coin toss whether he'd turn out like this or as a Randroid. Since it's so silly, the board's right-wingers flock to it. It lets them go to bat for the home team without having to defend Bush's self-parodying series of fuckups.
Oh, dude, you're totally right with that. You have to have money before you can start converting over to socialism, and unfortunately (or fortunately, depending where you're sitting on the food chain) capitalism is the best economic model for that. But I wasn't even really commenting on what you said. It was what Guileless said with his "Socialist Leader sending us to prison farms" type bullshit that he can't back up.Deku said:
whytemyke said:
You're thinking linearlly like Marx. Capitalism isn't the stepping stone to a better model, it is the only model to create wealth. Societies can then introduce socialist systems under the market economy to divert some of that wealth generated to benefit the people.
I said this several posts ago, the danger is to think socialism is the end all and a nationalized socialist economy becomes quasi communist since although you have firms austensibly still for profit, the ultimate owner is the government and it will be the sole investor and owner and will allocate funds ineffectively. This problem manifests itself all the time in heavily regulated or government owned industries where all the firms are under national control. wealth is destroyed as the government has no real incentive to create any wealth.
economic models aren't black and white, but the only point I wanted to get accross was that capitalism is the way to go in terms of 'dominant' economic systems. You can have subserviant economic models working in symbiosis with the capitalist model as well since capitalism is also very flexible.
believe me. I know what you're talking about, haha, and I don't think anything like Marx.Deku said:
First we need to address this idea of a capitalist system. Everyone here knows that we haven't had an ideally capitalist system for quite some time, and that's for good reason. Americans are starting to understand why capitalism will HURT us on a global or even regional level. We need a certain amount of government control in the economy. On this same hand, there's really no such thing as a 'socialist' economy, as socialist describes a type of government and not an economic ideology. That's like me saying I have a Cat dog. No such thing and they relate to two totally different, albeit interrelated, ideas. You know this, deku, i'm sure, but anyone else reading this may not which is the only reason I really go so far as to enumerate here.
Your idea about a capitalist supersystem feeding off into command subsystems is a very tangible idea. The problem with it, as I see it, is that you'd almost necessarily have to have a governmental system built as a confederacy, with even more liberality given to the states/provinces in regards to power to run their microsystems, if that is indeed what you're saying when you mention having command economies exist in a free-market milieu. The problem with this is deciding who is given authority to dictate the rules of the command economy. The amount of government intervention into relations between these two systems is staggering to the point that you'd be skirting on a command economy anyways.
Without strong legal rammifications, what's to stop the superstructure from abusing the substructures?
I personally do believe that you can push the command model to a certain level before having to worry about the loss of free enterprise and creative thinking in the market. I believe smaller countries have demonstrated this to a lesser extent, as I've listed before, and while technically, yes, they are 'capitalist', the social programs we're advocating in this thread are primarily legislative in manner, not economic.
I think that's where the dropoff comes in here. I believe it's entirely possible to have strong social programs while still existing in our little mockup of a free market system, if the proper incentives are used the right way. To have entirely subservient microsystems working in symbiosis, as you're presupposing, seems like an awful big waste of capital.
I'm off to bed. I'll hack it out with ya more tomorrow...er, later.
McMoron said:
Boo hoo, please save us the melodrama. You probably sit on your arse in some cosy office job reading gaming age forums half the day while the people who damn well do earn their money bust their cunts off 24/7 to make ends meet.
Deku said:
How can you call Karl Marx linear when you've basically showed your obvious short-sightedness and claimed capitalism as the ultimate economic system…huh, on what basis and whose authority? And apparently it is the only system that can create wealth…huh, since when? That's a terribly short-sighted position to take and I don’t think you are in any position to say that capitalism cannot be a stepping stone to more advanced economic systems because you won't be around 500 years from now to see how well a capitalist system would work in a highly automated and technologically developed society.
I want to ask you though, what do you think wealth actually is and why do you think it can only be created through capitalism? I also made a post earlier making the point that capitalism is not the ultimate form of socio-economic organisation, but rather, as Marx stated very rightly, that socio-economic systems are in a constant state of evolution and their development is driven primarily on the basis of technological development. If modern day early 21st century technology is the most advanced we ever develop then perhaps you have a point somewhere in there, but it obviously isn’t going to be, and thus your argument is one of short-sightedness.
whytemyke said:
Well the term capitalist is inherently a loaded term in this day and age as those on the extreme left have used it to attack all economies with a market system. But moving away from that extreme view, no government on the planet is really capitalist in the classical sense.
Economists refer to modern western economies as 'mixed' economies, that is, capitalist economies with socialist features. And these economies exist within a continium from heavily socialist in parts of Europe to relatively free market US, Hong Kong and Singapore. But all economies have some form of government involvement and income redistribution scheme. The older name of mixed economies is the so-called Welfare State.
It is often a difficult comparison to compare small economies and large ones. Note that while you pointed out several scandinavian economies have done exceedingly well with a heavily socialistic system, I can also point out that heavily free market economies like Singapore and Hong Kong, practically city states, have also done exceedingly well and enjoy a high standard of living, minimal poverty and very good public systems without having to rely on a socialistic system. I think the size of the population may have something to do with it on both extremes.
Well command economies are something else entirely. Welfare-States imply a socialistic system of gathering the wealth generated by the marketed and redistributing it to the population. This can be direct transfer payments or indirect subsidies on housing, fuel, education, defense (public safety) and infrastructure.
And to do this, governments may take control of certain industries or keep them heavily regulated. (ie: regulated utilities which require regulatory approval for rate hikes. So if market prices swing out of control, the government essentially foots the bill so that the population pays the same rate as they did before.)
Command economies is the act of governments actually taking charge of industries and showing the same communist style '5 year plan' mode of directing capital to certain industries. Japan and Frace did this to great effect by naming certain industries as 'winners' and funding them with tax breaks, incentives, and government subsidies. Basically, corporate welfare on a large scale. The thing however is that once both countries became industrialized and rich, the command structure has broken down. Neither Japan or France have particularly healthy or dynamic economies. Growthi s stagnant and in Frace's case unemployment is high. This may be the remnants of a command system that worked well to quickly develop a country but became unglued when it comes to competing with other countries after the economy has been developed. Certainly, there's always the danger of cronyism and the government simply being wrong when it picks a 'winner' pour billions into an industry and at the end of the day, have very little to show for it.
xabre said:
I can also ask you on whose authority do you think that capitalism ISN't the ultimate economic system. But that would just be counterproductive.
Whytemike made a comment which I took to meant that socialism will worked AFTER capitalism has generated the wealth. I replied that it is a linear system and that you need continual wealth generation to keep up the standard of living. But it seems like whytemike didn't mean it in that way.
Marx had suggested that capitalism is just a phase in economic development with the next level being communism and that's highly unworkable. The wealth that is generated under capitalism would not be replenished once the economic system is shifted and standards of living will fall and the economy.
The market is the only system that can generate the MOST wealth. I've said it at least once before in this thread. You're right, it's not the only system that can generate wealth since theretically, despotism can also generate wealth but it would be very little wealth.
When humans become different creatures altogether in 500 years then it might be possible. When we all have computer implants and there's a giant super computer that can read our mind and set prices based on this data it has collected, then perhaps the market will take a back seat to more direct forms of planning. Until then, the most effective means of directing capital to the profitable industries and setting prices as well as production is the market system where individuals act collectively to set prices and production.
Well, it's not so much short sighted as practical. Markets have existed in all of history and it won't disappear anytime soon. And Marx was right to point out that socio-economic systems are related to technological development, but his conclusions are wrong. The communist system was actually quite blatant in its rejection of markets, private property and profit, all of which have been part of 10,000 years of human development and technological evolution.
The more narrow question of whether corporations or the market system as we know it will exist in 200 years is certainly open to debate. 200 years ago, the world operated under the mechantile system and before that most economies have been agrarian and industries were small scale with production based in the home. It's not only techonological development but also political development.
The global economy, integrated as it maybe, is lacking political leadership. There is a global economy, but not global politics. And hence, the next level of development is infact to move the politics globally. And I don't mean a UN style consultative body, but either under a federal system of government or under the imperial rule of a great power that has somehow managed to unite the world economy under one political body which would allow labour and capital to move freely like labour and capital moves freely inside any modern capitalist economy. That's going to be the next level of development.
It might seen like a pipe dream, but not so long ago, people in Italy or in Japan thought of their city or their prefecture as their country and there were intense rivalries on all sides.
Vinzer Deling
Banned
xabre said:
btw: I also walk around my office wearing the million dollar belt.
Deku said:
Capitalism is not the ultimate form of the economy.
Ultimately, an economy's job is to fairly distribute resources. not wealth, but resources across the population, such that the overall access to resources for everyone is maximised, accounting for diminishing returns of resources for any single individual.
In that sense, in a pure free market, along with human behaviour, means that a huge chunk of wealth, and control of resources (social, technological, material) ends up with a very small group of people, and alot of their wealth has a large diminishing returns, even in terms of been able to spur the economy and general advancement on.
The perfect economy would be a meritocracy that through some devine mechanism determines the most suitable jobs, supply, demand and people to meet those needs and the amount that they should be compensated.
Of course, a meritocracy in practice is still a little more difficult, but it's what a freemarket should also be, ideally.
But in practice it (the freemarket/capitalism) works out to be more like a very inefficient meritocracy, similar to evolution; in very general terms, the more talented you are the better your chance at success. In real terms though, they're many other factors that combine to skew such outcomes.
It is given our technological development being none of the alternatives we have can do better.Zaptruder said:
That's really arguable. How resources are distributed depends on the society. Economies are not abstract things, the very basic level is the caveman making craft so he can trade for meat from the hunters in the community and it has evolved from there. There was never a decree that said an economy is to distribute wealth evenly. That is purely a reflection of your political orientation.
That said, throughout history, people have used economic systems or rather support of an economic system, either implictly or explictly as a means of improving their own welfare and that of the general public.
And this has always been the case under all economic systems. But it was only recently under the free market system that a middle class existed in sufficient size . That is new historically.
Well, its arguable. Again, it's probably the perfect economy for you. I can sympathize with the point about total efficiency in the allocation of suppy and pricing. This may be possible in the distant future when the technology is available to collect accurate information from the individual about what they demand, what they would pay etc.
But until then, the market will have to act as a proxy with individual actions used to reflect desire.
The value of someone's work is a thorny issue because people can work equally and their value will not be the same. It is simply more difficult to become a doctor than a janitor, or put another way, there will always be more janitors than doctors. That's just reality. A meritorcracy assumes all work produced is of equal value it also assumes there's a way to measure the amount of work and the value of the work precisely. That may work in a company where pretty much everyone do the same kind of work, but in a complex economy, your argument breaks down.
Deku said:
I make that claim myself on the basis that capitalism is a vastly flawed system of economic resource management, both in theory and in practice. There are the classical flaws that should be obvious to most people, such as by the very nature of the system, it tends toward the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority as well as leading to exploitation of the lower working classes. But there are also other interesting factors not often readily considered, for example, capitalism it is an incredibly wasteful and inefficient system, it is a good generator of wealth, but it also represents the production of vast amounts of goods and services that go unsold in the marketplace or products the marketplace doesn't otherwise need. Furthermore, it also represents an incredible misallocation of resources, for example, wealth spent on developing industrial infrastructure to produce consumer commodities could have otherwise been allocated to the development of infrastructure for more pressing social needs.
There is a good reason for the social democracies of Europe, which as you pointed out are strong mixed market economies, and while not as socially oriented, even in the US there is often need for the government to regulate the market. The reason for this is the flawed nature of the system itself, it is too anarchic and too polarised. The reason for the prosperous living standards of the western world today are largely as a result of social reform, the institution of programs by the state to protect its workers and citizenry against the brutality of late 19th industrial capitalism. Policies such as minimum wages, minimum working hours, minimum working wages, workplace safety policies, union representation and social support policies funding health and education services have all played a key roll in raising living standards and supporting the lower and middle classes. I don't dispute that capitalism generated the wealth and innovation necessary to procure technological development throughout the last 150 years, yet capitalism also generates and continues to generate an animosity toward the system in many places of the world that has lead to the implementation of many of the social policies listed above that protect the worker and the common man from the raw brutality of the system.
The point I am making is that your viewpoint in this regard is stagnant, and that it will be technological development which undermines the present capitalist model. In the current global socio-economic climate there is need for mass human input to drive manufacturing and development, the technology does not yet exist to automate housing construction, or logging or farming, yet that is not to say some future society within the next few hundred years wont develop advanced robotics and nanotechnologies to augment such processes and largely undermine the human element necessary today in economic development. In such a scenario where there is a significant portion of the population unemployed how are they to be supported by society? How are they to support society through tax revenue? In this situation the nature of society has evolved, driven by technological development and as a consequence systems of economics must also evolve as they have in the past and as they will in the future.
That is not to say specifically that this is the path human society will take over the course of the next few hundreds years, but the point is that technological development will drive socio-economic change. Even the capitalist system has changed vastly since its inception; it is now a global system that could barely be contemplated by commentators in the mid 19th century.
The problem in making this statement is that you have no real historical parrels with which you can draw a basis as to how a true communist society may perform. Of course, to pre-empt the classily predictable response, the Soviet Union was never a country one could legitimately consider communist, it was about as communist as North Korea is democratic. Rather instead of true universal democratic control over the means of production as should be the case in a communist society, the true control of the means of production lay in the hands of the bureaucratic elite. The Soviet Union was essentially a centrally driven autocratic state that acted as a giant corporation, or 'state capitalist' as it is more commonly referred to; where the individual is replaced by the state. Similar can be said of all countries that ever claimed to be communist or were considered communist, they were either autocratic in nature and therefore centrally driven by elite bureaucrats who had a power monopoly or such countries suffered under harsh trade embargoes severely constricting development and limiting their true potential.
One can make a case for planned economies however, in that despite how some states may have run them in the past there should be little doubt of their raw productivity and efficiency. The Soviet Union itself at the turn of the 20th century was largely agrarian, poorly developed and lacked nearly all of the modern industrial infrastructure of Western Europe. However, in spite of a costly civil war, a devesting world war which destroyed significant Russian industrial infrastructure and a costly arms race with the west, Russia had managed in about seventy years to do what had taken the western powers well over two centuries to achieve, that is turn an agrarian society into a mighty industrial powerhouse. China managed the same task even faster, managing it in about fifty years becoming the fastest country to industrialise in history. Such states were autocratic and often brutal, yet they are examples of the productive efficiency of centrally planned organisation and development as opposed to the largely anarchic development provided by capitalist based economic systems.
This is not really an issue of markets as it is one of incentive. In a market based system the profit motive acts as the incentive and the market is the platform in which to accrue that profit. I would disagree that markets have existed in all of history, in actual fact human society has generally been largely communally oriented for the large part with many indigenous societies existing on the principles of communal ownership. The concept of private ownership of production, profit and markets are a relatively new phenomenon and have only emerged in the last few thousand years and have only really gained steam in the last few hundred which does constitute a small part of the history of human civilisation overall.
In regards to incentive and specifically private property as a means to accrue profit, there are ultimately two positions on the matter, this is the core basis of all collectivist and individualist economic systems. It essentially comes down to either a philosophy based upon sharing and mutual ownership or a philosophy based on a 'finders keepers' mindset. This is essentially why I consider private property to ultimately be theft, it is the confiscation of a natural resource (say a gold mine) for the benefit of the individual at the expense of society in general. In a true communist society, the means of production, property which could be used to create wealth, is collectively owned. There would certainly exist personnel property, such as various commodities of individual nature but the means to use private property to create individual wealth would not be allowed. The reason for this is simple and comes back to the mutual ownership or 'finders keepers' philosophy where an individual with the means to procure profit is doing so at the expense of society.
The real issue in any system being an effective generator of wealth is through incentive, there must be a reason for an individual to pursue a particular career path, invent a particular invention, take a particular risk etc. In the case of capitalism this is the profit incentive, the drive to multiply individual wealth, whereas in communism the profit incentive does not exist so in its absence there must be an alternate incentive. The problem with many unfamiliar with the concepts of communist societies is that they become too preoccupied with the concept of equality; any society that forcibly tries to keep its population equal despite the importance of various individuals like doctors or scientists in said society is a society ultimately doomed to failure. Rather, a communist society should maintain a platform of equal opportunity, an equal footing from which every individual can develop which is the very thing capitalism fails to provide. Yet to spur this individual development there must be incentive, and there is absolutely no reason a individual such as a doctor in a communist society cannot or would not earn more than a janitor, he should and must based on his importance; rather what is said is that he cannot multiply that wealth through means of private production with ultimately leads to class division and other degenerative aspects of society. The incentive to become a doctor is to earn additional wealth, social status and respect. Ultimately there certainly can be an incentive, rather the difference is that in this case individuals earn their wealth, they don't simply inherit their wealth, manipulate their way to being wealthy or become wealthy producing nothing of true value.
Discussing alternative economic systems to modern day capitalism is always an incredibly broad thing to do. The reason this is done to attempt to correct the many problems prevalent in the nature of the capitalist system, particularly class division, a posit an alternative. The model I described is on the collectivist spectrum and is similar to what I would describe as the classical dictionary definition of what a true communist society supposed to be, a stateless and classless society with social ownership of the means of production. I'm not discussing the means on how to create such a society, be it through Marxist principles or more along the lines of anarcho-communism, only that I believe such a society can be a viable alternative to the current prevailing capitalist system. Incentive is a key aspect as I mentioned, but that is just one aspect and as I said it is a vastly broad topic and how the scope of political organisation (must be thoroughly democratic of course) and large scale social infrastructure would work among other things are worth thinking about also.
xabre said:
Well, you might want to reconsider your assumptions.
Capitalism or a market system is not wasteful. In fact, it is the least wasteful of any economic systems. The market responds to demand and your claim about goods being produced going unsold is dubious at best since that is actually a feature of the 'planned economy/communist system where there is either massive shortages or massive surpluses on a variety of goods.
Furthermore, capitalism is the most effective allocator of capital since investors will allocate capital to where they think returns are most likely to be highest and thus fund the industries and firms with the best growth potential.
Lastly, you're confusing the socialist/communist fusion of the state and the economy with economic systems. Capitalistic economies doesn't exclude a strong state that keeps law and order and builds infrastructure. In fact, many classicial economists argue, it is the duty of the state to only provide public goods (security and infrastructure.) So theoretically, they are not mutually exclusive and historically capitalism has done exceeding well inside stable states with advanced infrastructures.
If you had bee reading I had touched on this point already. No western economy is truly capitalistic. They are all Welfare-States or Mixed economies and they exist within a continuim from heavily socialistic to more free market. My pont has been that there is a symbiotic relationship between a market economy and a socialist wealth redistribution system but that the more dominant of the two will always be the market.
That is a social development and resulted in what I just described as an augmentation of purely free markets into mixed economies. It however doesn't really exclude the fact that capitalism itself remains viable despite predicitons it would implode and or that it is not ideal.
The simple fact of the matter is, the primary tension in politics today is how much socialism needs to be mixed in with capitalism and not the overthrow of capitalism. Talk to anyone from the soviet bloc who is now doing much better with a free market and watch them sneer at the idea of ovethorw.
That however is a tug of war between libertarianism, a concept which argues we should be free from state intervention in every sphere of our life to centralization, an argument that the state has a major role to play. Society has decided that neither extreme is good. It doesn't speak to capitalism itself. And infact, the fact the capitalism has thrived when there are these checks in place may speak even more highly of the system.
Stagnation and capitalism don't mix, unless you're talking about European economies who have become stagnant because certain features of a free market economy has been overly supressed.
Free markets also involves the forces of creative destruction. Technological change leads to increased productivity and the surplus labour it displaces needs to be retrained and reallocated to other sectors. More conservative economists have argued labor unions and government subsidy of protected sectors prevent the forces from kicking in and resulting in massive misallocation of labour and the stagnation of the economy. Modern Europe is a good example of this, with high unemployment mainly due to overly restricted labor laws and several sectors under subsidy.
Creative destruction doesn't speak about simply throwing the surplus labor out to dry, but suggests that governments can play a role in retraining and providing a social security network to help these workers re-adjust, and many western democracies have tied their unemployment insurance schemes to retraining and subsidies for education once a person has been displaced from work. Canada for one does this.
That's stating the obvious, but it's along way from saying that to coming to a conclusion that capitalism isn't viable. The market, from the very local to the now global has always been with us for thousands of years, and it won't disappear.
Whereas economies were largely rural and local for most of human history, the last few hundred years have seen a truly global market and an understanding that market forces can be beneficial. That is already learned in most societies and it will continue. The next step is the globalization of politics, with global standards from everything to labour movement to capital movement. This is a new development.
But historically speaking, it isn't so new. As I noted previously, it was not so long ago that city states were the primary identification people had and the concept of nation states did not exist. I see us moving down the similar path where the nation states, through much conflict and creative destruction will eventually settle on a compromise that would see the emergance of a government. I noted two possible outcomes. A federal system, which may or maynot be democratic, or an imperial system whereby one nation state or an alliance of nation states conquers and subdues other nation states under imperial rule. Those who are familiar with China's history should be quite comfortable with this evolution as China was on several occasions divided between warring states before being unified time and agian under an emperor and later a communist republic.
Ideally, the planet would be unified under one government and a signular economy. In this case, the government can tax the rich countries and funnel them to the poorer ones. It would operate just like a welfare state in a mixed economy. A global political order also elimates one of the more glaring problems with economic globalization. That is, the exploitaiton of jurisdictional differences in labour laws by corporations.
The assertion has been corporations are evil. I'd argue that corporations are like water, they seek the path of least resistance to doing business but aren't inherently any more evil than any organization. A global set of enforcable standards would remove this feature. Put simply, the argument against multinational corporations isn't a return to the past as many of the left and the protectionist right suggests, but to look to the future and create multi-national governments.
That's a red herring. I could argue that you can't say what you're saying either since you haven't been able to observe how a true capitalism economy performs. It's a debating trick I see often used by supporters of communism by arguing that the communism we've seen is not real communism. Libertarians and classical economists would likewise argue the laissez faire capitalism we've seen wasn't the true form and they have the formula for the right economic system. Everyone has a formula. But let's just stick to our experiences.
You're right, and the market system is the best motivator. Planned economies create incentives by letting a single entity (as opposed to the matket) , the state, shift capital between industries, but the biggest problem is planning and getting the correct data to make the right plan. this is old stuff, I said this on page 2.
Well my point has always been that capitalism is the best generator of wealth and the market will remain dominant. It will then be augmented by socialist income redistribution schemes to funnel the wealth to benefit the people.
I then noted that there are two kinds of socialism under free markets. One where the government is one of many players in deciding how reosurces is allocated, or one where so much of the economy has been nationalized that the economy beocmes quasi communist and becomes stale and inefficient. Im arguing against the latter.
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