Indeed.
But no doubt, this time it will work like a charm.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m not going to manage it at all. In a distributist society there would be no one to do any managing.
Both capitalism and socialism are based on the assumption that there must be a ruling elite at the top that manages economic activity. They disagree only in the nature of that elite and the form of that economic management. Capitalism gives us a CEO at Wal-Mart deciding how much millions of employees will earn and what a global supply chain will produce. Socialism gives us a government department deciding when everyone in the country will retire. Both systems can only be imposed from the top down, so those raised within the system tend to assume that economics is necessarily the study of powerful institutions; moreover the system itself can only be imposed at the national level, so capitalists and socialists are necessarily always talking about what decisions national governments should make.
Distributism, on the other hand, occurs from the bottom up. It begins with individuals making personal decisions, not with a national government deciding what system everyone will live under. Hence distributism need not provide a recipe for managing all economic activity.
Right now some people are distributists to certain degrees. A few live entirely ‘off the grid’ and refuse to take part in any corporate or big government economic activity. A larger number participate in family and local economics when they can, and deal with government and corporations when they have to. While I’d hope that the number will grow, I do not delude myself into believing that 99% of the population agrees with me. (Unlike some groups.) If we ever reached a critical mass where distributism is widespread enough to leave its stamp on our entire society, then we could consider ways to manufacture things without centralized power, degrading rote labor, and environmental destruction.
No, it doesn’t. That’s is one of the most absurd claims about capitalism I’ve seen in awhile. Walmart is not “the market”.
[QUOTE=ITR champion]
Both capitalism and socialism are based on the assumption that there must be a ruling elite at the top that manages economic activity.
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Good grief. :smack: Capitalism isn’t a managed system, and doesn’t rely on some ruling elite to manage and guide it. Do you know what The Market is???
-XT
Before I respond to this, just to clarify, who are you referring to with “we”?
Not sure why you decided to drop into scofflaw mode, here.
Personal insults are prohibited outside The BBQ Pit.
Do not do this again.
= = =
foolsguinea, your comment did nothing to promote the discussion, as well. Knock it off.
[ /Moderating ]
Sorry, didn’t see this until just now. I hate to sound snarky, but that’s what I thought you’d do. Fish for something that is remotely related to what you claimed, but doesn’t even come close to supporting the claim. Unless it’s your claim that single, Japanese mothers with two children are a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan, but maybe I missed all this entrepreneurship.
But we should really get back to the original point, which was that a generous welfare state will feed entrepreneurship. That’s a bit hard to prove, since “entrepreneurship” isn’t that easy to measure, but you could certainly try and measure something along those lines and see how it is correlated with the amount of wealfare a country provides.
Maybe someone has done such a study, but I doubt it.
The New York Times noted something similar
"The most recent Index of Entrepreneurial Activity by the Kauffman Foundation showed a slight uptick of new businesses in 2008 — a full recessionary year — over 2007. "
“Accidental or by design, entrepreneurship is on the rise again this year[2009]. LegalZoom.com, the online legal document service, says the number of new businesses it helped to form was up 10 percent in the first half of the year, compared with the period a year earlier.”
Lots of studies have found correlations between unemployment and entrepreneurship in the US. You’d think Greece and Spain would be a hotbed of innovation.
It was supporting my claim about Japan having a particularly good welfare system. As for the rest…
As far as I can tell it has not been done.
I expect that would remain true regardless of our social safety net. Culturally, we as a nation are inclined to want to feel like we’re pulling our weight.
I said “mean,” not “median.”
You have demonstrated that you are not innumerate, yet you seem to imagine words that aren’t there when people try to explain things to you.
Basing it on the median redistributes relatively little of the economy. Basing it on the mean is actually basing it on the GDP, or rather one’s fraction of it as an equal partner in citizenship. Call it participatory capitalism.
Deleted.
Sorry, I’ve been kind of mean to Algher, but I say “mean” because I mean mean, not median and not mode. There is a sort of underlying principle and logic to it (albeit not explained in detail in the post Algher responded to) and it irked me to see him just change it to “median.”
From “Cuba’s future: An Assessment,” by Sam Barber, in International Socialist Review:
Nitpick: The U.S. has an embargo on Cuba, Mr. Barber; we have not imposed a blockade since the Missile Crisis.
Do (post-)Leninist-Stalinist economies really have more shortages, or just louder feedback when they have shortages? In a laissez-faire economy, the common man has no expectation of access to basic consumer goods; the lack of such is “nobody’s fault.” In a Marxist economy, the lack of such is a failure of the state.
There are two very important things people here need to realize, and I laugh that they need to be said. The first is that the US is a VERY socialist country, you’re kidding yourself is you think it’s not, or that it’s even the least socialist, or the most capitalist. It takes a special sort of willful ignorance to pretend that Europe is that much more socialist, and that much less capitalist, than the US.
The second is that socialism will destroy your economy and impoverish your citizens just as easily as the worst capitalist system you can imagine in your silly little liberal fantasies. Again it’s a willful ignorance that looks at history and only sees the crash of 2008, and then chooses to blame it all on the evils of capitalism. There is no reason Argentina couldn’t be at the top of every metric we have about developed countries, but instead they’ve fell trap to military coups and horrible socialist policies. And in spite of having already been through it before, they are about to do it again. Capitalism isn’t sending the peso down the drain.
But all of that is secondary to the main point Zeriel touched on, that of culture. My experience having grown up in socialism, and now living in the US is that there is indeed a slightly different cultural attitude towards capitalism. And for want of a better expression capitalism is very good at taking advantage. It’s really what it’s best at, like BrainGlutton said it’s all fingers.
Capitalists live in a world where they seek out every advantage they can, and it’s this characteristic that I believe causes the US to suck so bad at all things socialist, when presented with a social safety net they use it. Take even the most simple policy, such as one that says you can’t turn off someone’s power/gas in the winter. It’s the kind of thing that just makes sense to normal, caring, compassionate individuals (ie socialists). But what happens in a capitalist society is that very quickly people realize they can get free utilities for 8 months of the year. And if you’ve got free utilities, you can charge your friends $1 to do their laundry, etc. Capitalists look to take advantage of a system.
Even right now, in the wake of the housing crisis people are happily taking every advantage they can. Short selling instead of renting out a place. Strategic foreclosures. Refinancing a mortgage that they originally took to take advantage of the last socialist intervention.
Socialism came out in most of Europe as a result of WWII, when society needed to work together to rebuild, ie when thumbs were needed more than fingers. Germany had heavy government involvement to get VW going and rebuild their economy. Ditto for Japan, heavy government involvement in the markets to kick start capitalism. But when done wrong, it causes just as much pain as capitalism, as witnessed by Japan’s lost decade.
The people that praise socialism the most are all too often the ones that understand it the least.
You’re kidding yourself if you think a welfare state makes a country socialist. Social democracy is a different animal from socialism.
Which? Guatemala in 1954? Ecuador in 1960? Dominican Republic in 1963? Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Grenada, Venezuela and most recently Honduras?
I think he thinks a government makes a country socialist.
What ever terms you like to use, the US has plenty of it. Unless at this point in the thread you’d like to nitpick the fact that the OP doesn’t know the difference.
I was talking about Argentina, do try to follow along. Point being, it didn’t take capitalism to destroy their country.
Do you know of a socialist (or social democracy) country without a government?
National Health Service Act of 1946
The French system started in 1945
As just two examples. Again to help you along, the US didn’t have or need a post war rebuild. The country was full of intact factories and workers for them. Resulting in two very different cultural perspectives on social democracy.
Why the income tax bracket then?
By feedback do you mean more deaths? In the traditional central planning system the government becomes the monopoly supplier and has to predict future needs. Get that wrong and an entire nation starves.
It’s certainly someone’s fault, but it’s also someone’s opportunity for profit. The common man has no expectation for FREE consumer goods. In theory, there can never really be shortages because scarcity means the price goes up. There will always be speculators hoping for a failure of one crop so the price of his crop goes up.
Again, consider the consequences when the state represents the means of production (such as Cuba). The state controls all the land and decides what vegetables to grow, in what method, and how many. Ultimately the problem is more about having a monopoly which would result in the same eventual failures. If there is just one company producing all the country’s potatoes they will eventually screw up meaning people starve. If you have 5 companies each will overproduce meaning waste (which is ultimately inefficient) but when 1 fails the rest pick up the slack at a profit.