Is that that ludicrous concept where any law where you’d be unwilling to use violent force to enforce it isn’t worth having, á la Stefan Molylneux?
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I’ll not reply to any contribution that has the word “bullshit” in it, for one thing.
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I’ll reply to any substantive query with as substantive an answer as I can manage, if you’ll do me the kindness of speaking to with the civility I (think I) deserve. Sam’s post gets precendence, though!
You get what you give, and you are getting all the civility you deserve. Stop looking for excuses to avoid debate.
Your notion that capitalism requres poverty is stupid and wrong. Your Marxian ideas of value are equally stupid, and equally wrong. Prove them or withdraw them.
Regards,
Shodan
Not to you, no; or at least, not like this. I’m reasonably sure I didn’t say a harsh word about your opinions here, and I’ll not lower myself to your standards. You have a standing invitation to ask substantial questions, and my standing promise to answer them. Do with that what you wish. Please also note that I’ll not be goaded into replying to any of your replies from here on out unless they include a substantial and civil query or comment.
I’m vaguely familiar with Molyneux, but I never said anything remotely like what you suggest. I haven’t made any statements about what laws are “worth having”.
The non aggression principle has been a theme of libertarianism for quite some time. Quite frankly, if you are unfamiliar with it and attribute it to a video blogger, you may be out of your depth.
IOW you want to snark without being snarked back at, and you are using that as an excuse to avoid points you cannot otherwise answer. As mentioned, no surprise there.
Regards,
Shodan
In a capitalist system, you cannot acquire wealth without either homesteading or engaging in voluntary trade with another individual or corporation. Which of these methods do you have a problem with? Could you provide examples of one of the above methods that you specifically do not like?
No, it is the concept that the first person to cause “harm” to someone else without their consent is the one in the wrong. Allowing someone the choice whether or not to use infrastructure you own to produce value in exchange for dividing the proceeds between the person providing the labour and the person providing the infrastructure is not an act of aggression. Making this offer to someone and having them reject it puts them in no worse a situation than if you had not made the offer at all, therefore a rational person could only be enriched by this opportunity or break even.
Der Trihs, on the other hand, explicitly supports acts of aggression. Just ask him if he thinks killing a stranger to take their property is a legitimate strategy to sustain your own life.
Sam, I’ve snipped some stuff again, and you’ll let me know if you think I unduly avoid some of your questions and points.
I believe you’re begging the question here, by suggesting that economic growth is a general concern independent of the economic system we’re in. In fact, however, economic growth is a concern (as you rightly note, the primary concern) only for capitalism, because growth is the only thing that keeps the illusion of a perpetual improvement for everybody up (well, to be fair, it’s not an illusion to some: some peoples’ lives are being bettered by growth). But the problem with growth is that it cannot possibly be perpetual: at some point, whenever that point may be, we will run out of resources (this must be a logical truism, no?). Or possibly, we will have produced so much money (through financial speculation or, perhaps, merely from compound interest) that there’ll not be enough things to buy with the money. In either case, collapse must follow. Can anything grow for ever, I guess, is the question I’m asking.
Who is “you” in this example? And how has she grown the economy, even conceding that that’s desirable?
This is true (in parts, anyway), and I offer two considerations in return. The first is this: it is a myth that capitalism is particularly effective at any of things you describe in your list. First up, overproduction and underconsumption are real facts of economic life, and of utterly astounding failures of management (I doubt you would deny this?). It is also logically coherent, unless you insist that there is a telos to the capitalist system other than the accumulation of capital (I’m not sure you do). If the accumulation of capital is the chief goal, however, then production does not depend on “what’s needed” (meaning social uses), but “what can be profitably exchanged.” Your example of the grocer is well taken—but you will remember, probably, images of harbors full of loaded containers, parking lots full of unsold cars, and houses empty of inhabitants, in 2008, all a consequence of misjudged demand. (A short, Marxist, analysis of this phenomenon here).
Similarly, I don’t think it’s possible to claim that capitalism can also have its shortages (of iPhones, if nothing else, whenever a new one comes out). Similarly, capitalism quite obviously is not doing a good job in providing everybody with food, although food is such an inelastic market: millions of people starve not because we do not have the food, but because it does not get sold to those who need it. There is a demand for food, but nobody is selling; why?
Your argument is not quite a strawman: capitalism does successfully distribute goods and services in some places in a highly efficient manner (as long as efficiency is only measured internally, without regard for tangential costs that are not immediately monetarily calculated, such as long term costs to the environment, of course). But only when there is a profit to be expected, and hardly always; but always to the detriment of some, as at all stages of this organization, profit must be made. As soon as there is no profit to be made, all the demand in the world will not efficiently organize the market’s non-response.
Here’s the second point (it allows me, I think, to snip your hammer example): it’s not as though the market magically manages resource allocations even where it manages to do so “properly”. Rather, a lot of computational effort goes into the determination of what prospective demands will be, effort that every grocer undertakes when he plans future inventory, every wholeseller when she buys the stuff to sell to the grocer, every maker of oats when he orders the cartons to put them in, every carton maker when she buys woodpulp, and so on. Planning, in other words, decentralized in individual parts of the chain, is already a fact of economic life. The difference between the capitalist economy and a socialist economy in that sense is not planning, it’s the question of profit.
Quite right, and let’s make one thing clear: central planning has been tried, and it has failed. Central planning is not the crucial aspect of socialism, though: the socialization of the means of production is. There is no major reason why each of the nodes you describe needs to turn a profit, and why each of those nodes cannot do the work it does under capitalism as well under a system in which all information gets passed on exactly as before, except nobody is expected to make a profit.
I hope it’s okay if I skip the rest of this now, too, because it’s largely concerned with government intervention and central planning, none of which is a necessary feature to a possible socialist alternative to capitalism. I can outline alternatives, if you like, but as I said I’m not chiefly interested in giving my view of socialism, but rather the problems of capitalism. I can also respond to specific issues that you feel I’ve missed.
I would much rather not do so here, where I’m concerned with showing the problems that capitalism has. We can do a separate thread on that, perhaps?
I really don’t know how “vast majorities” of anything behave, not knowing vast majorities of anything. I’m not doing too good a job of it, but note this: capitalists aren’t evil per se, nor businessmen bastards. It’s not the people in the system that are the problem, it’s the system itself and the demands it makes. But you’re wrong, categorically, historically, empirically wrong, when you say the market forces people to deal fairly with one another. The market is amoral. The market permits real slavery and wage slavery (as it has historically—I doubt you deny that?). The market permits child labor and starvation wages (as it has historically). The market permits (indeed, demands) laying off workers in order not so that a company may survive, but that its profits may increase. The market permits pharmaceutical companies to charge almost any price on monopoly medicines without regard for the lives of people. And so on, and so forth. So I’m fully with you on debating the merits of the market as a tool for the effective organization of an economic system (I disagree that it is such a tool, but I see how you think that); but I’d very much like to see actual, hard evidence on the market’s “forcing people to deal fairly with one another”.
Your idea has no error-checking. There has to be a mechanism by which society can tell inefficient or obsolete producers they don’t want to keep shovelling resources into a wasteful enterprise.
I assume, therefore, that your version of socialism makes no pretense that they will improve things overall, or that economic growth will be enough to support a growing population.
“You” refers to the people making pins. The economy grows because more pins are produced from the same inputs.
No, it’s not a myth, as the example contrasting the West vs. the USSR (and East Germany vs. West Germany and North vs. South Korea, etc.).
The reason capitalism is more effective than a planned economy is thru pricing, as Sam Stone explained.
There is no distinction between “what’s needed” and “what can profitably be exchanged” in a capitalist system. Consumers are communicating what they want to buy by bidding up the price for it.
That’s exactly the problem with command economies - bureaucrats decide what consumers want most. When they are wrong, there is no efficient mechanism to communicate that they are wrong. In capitalist economies, consumers decide what they want most. Those who do not respond to the information conveyed by rising or falling prices and demand, either lose money or go out of business.
Often because someone is interfering with the free market and causing the famine. See Stalin deliberately starving millions, Mengistu engineering famines in Ethiopia, etc.
The trouble being that this winds up a state-owned and -enforced monopoly, where the free market is not allowed to operate. And whoever owns the means of production decides how it is run. If the state owns them, then those decisions are central planning almost by definition.
If nobody makes a profit, then their self-interest is not appealed to, and there is no particular motivation to manage the node efficiently. As seen in the USSR.
Regards,
Shodan
Not to mention profit is the only way we can be sure we are improving the value of inputs. If I take lumber valued at $200 and labor valued at $200 and produce a chair exchanged for $450. I have benefitted everyone involved. If I take lumber valued at $200 and labor valued at $200 and produce a chair exchanged for $350, I have not only lost money for myself, but have lowered the valued means more so than I have increased the valued ends in the economy and impoverished society.
Say you are the successful entrepreneur in the first example and I am the poor entrepreneur in the second. Your profit allows you to acquire more lumber and labor so that you can continue to take lower valued inputs and create higher value outputs, enriching society. After my loss, it will be more difficult to command the resources needed. This is a good thing because I was decreasing the wealth of society.
If we both continue along these lines, you can see it is the person who best increases wealth in a society who also earns the most profit.
Correct (obviously). Because profit is the signal that somebody has correctly divined what the consumer really wants. Not what the state thinks he should want, what he really wants. What he really wants, because he forgoes all the other possibilities and is willing to exchange something he values for something he values more. Because economics is the study of what people do under conditions of scarcity - when you can’t have whatever you want by wishing for it. You have to exchange for it.
In theory I want a car that costs $65,000. In practice, I want something else that costs $65,000 more. So I buy the something else, and whoever produced and supplied the something else makes the profit and the BMW salesman and manufacturer do not.
Regards,
Shodan
Everybody is, the differences are over particulars.
I don’t know what this is supposed to mean. The particulars are what we are talking about.
Regards,
Shodan
The first and most obvious problem is that you seem to be assuming goods flow from China, India and Bangladesh to the USA, Canada, and Germany, and therefore goods flow from the poor to the rich. Which would be a rather interesting point if it were true, but of course it’s not.
Many, many goods flow in the opposite direction, from industrialized countries to poorer ones. China imports something in the order of $50 billion a year of manufactured goods from the USA alone. Many goods flow internally - contrary to what some people are (ridiculously) saying in this thread, many things are manufactured in First World countries. There is no evidence at all that there is a disproportionate flow of goods from the labors of the truly poor to the at-least-reasonably-well-off. (ETA: Actually, just today I visited a firm in Welland, Ontario that makes fairly high end steel fabrications for chemical and pharmaceutical uses. Their biggest customer is in China.)
The industrialized world would be much better off ir poor countries weren’t poor. We are much better off for South Korea not being poor anymore; now South Koreans buy our things, and they make better things for us than they did before.
I don’t recall offhand, but I would be stunned if Marx felt labor was a “irreducible function” but natural resources, space, time, and the like were not. That would be a really amazing oversight.
I didn’t say that. I mean, it seems obvious to me that it must logically be true that some people are just stupid, but to be perfectly frank I suspect people who run a business are vastly more aware of the centrality of human labor than people who do not run businesses. A business run by someone who fails to recognize that human effort is central to an enterprise is a business that will be dead and buried by the middle of next week, if not sooner.
Here is where your policy of “we can’t discuss anything except capitalism” is a deliberate cop out.
The problem with this criticism is not that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s not a criticism of capitalism. It’s a criticism of EVERY system, at least every system beyond hunting and gathering. People are valued according to the contribution they make; every single human being on earth is viewed but all the other human beings as being a role, or a set of roles. I am viewed by every person who knows me as having value based on my fulfilment of a role, be it as an employee, a father, a husband, a son, the second baseman on my softball team, a friend, a brother, and so on. The reduction of a person to their value in a role is not at all a feature exclusive, or even particularly indicative of, capitalism; it is a feature of the human condition. It is every bit as true in a communist, fascist, or feudal monarchist system. It was true of Japan during the civil war era of the 1500s, of East Germany, of Canada today, of republican Rome. It’s an inherent part of human perception. You aren’t criticizing capitalism, you’re making an observation about how human beings work.
The secret to a free market system is that it’s one of the best ways to make use of that facet of the human condition, providing you’ve got some other safety nets in place.
Of course we do make an effort to go beyond “what does this person do for me,” or most people do, to treat others with a modicum of respect and decency accounting for their being fellow human beings. And there are people we love, who get an extra does of altruism. But, again, we always do that, no matter the “system.”
Trust me, old spor’, this debate was over when that wall in Germany fell some decades ago.
You will hear no more from me in this thread.
You are aware, are you not, that Stalinism is not the only alternative to capitalism?
Broadly speaking, the debate boils down to free market or central planning.
The latter has run its course, although it has a new iteration in the form of state capitalism, which is having some success in China and elsewhere. I don’t expect that to last very long; the Communist Party will eventually have to loosen the reigns and there is only so much oil in Russia and South America to prop up their otherwise bleak economies.
As I have already mentioned up-thread, I believe social democracy with a capitalist underpinning is the best system we have. The OP wants to drown us in Marxist technicalities to justify his professed belief that capitalism exploits the poor to make the rich even richer. A simple comparison of the standard of living for poor people in capitalist economies versus those of communist economies should put that dog to rest.
And yet, he’s only going to double-down. Snooze.
That is a continuum, not a dichotomy.