The Goddess granted us the internet so that we could continue our outreach to the cramped, the constipated, and the libertarians. Peace on you!
And if you had ever taken a bath stoned, you’d realise what a dumb question that really is.
I’ve probably taken more baths, um, under the influence, then I’ve taken straight up, so…
as-Slām ʻLykm…stay thirsty my friend.
-XT
It should come as no surprise that I am for this sort of thing in general. But to get people to sign on, I suppose you have to get past that distinction that so many make. You know the one: “I & those like me are deserving; those subhumans over there are leeches.”
I didn’t realize they were holding Burning Man in November this year.
Stranger
Yeah, because everyone who disagrees with you on this issue, and that’s most people, think those not like them are “subhuman”. :rolleyes:
If you can’t make a reasoned argument for your case, but instead must demonize the opposition, I don’t see why anyone would choose to debate with you.
OH, I wouldn’t worry too much about that, John, someone else will make a very similar case, politely sipping tea with pinkies akimbo, and you probably won’t like that any better. Those of us who favor equality and cooperation over competition and greed have an uphill climb, always have. It would be nice if we could have our way with calm recitation of the bleeding obvious, but sometimes we need to raise our voices a bit for the hard of thinking.
No case was made. If someone makes a “similar case”, it won’t matter how polite it is. If it’s “similar” it will be empty. OTOH, I’m happy to debate with someone, even if they are less than polite, if they actually lay out a case instead of just demonizing the other side.
If you’d like offer a serious debate, you can start by defining your terms. If you’re talking equality of opportunity, that’s wonderful. Equality of outcome, not so much. Cooperation sounds nice, until it becomes collusion or market manipulation, and then we put people in jail. Competition can be healthy as long as we agree to the rules and obey them.
Greed…, well that’s a loaded term, and I don’t know that many people besides Gordon Gekko are going to go out on a limb to defend it. Let’s just say that favoring free markets over state controlled markets doesn’t require one to favor “greed”. We can relegate that to the land of the strawmen.
“Free markets”? Wherever has this extraordinary creature been spotted? When has there ever been such a thing, unattached to government regulation and government exploitation? The very first king who ever heard coins clinking in the market place, there ended the “free market”. It doesn’t exist, never has existed, probably won’t tomorrow.
That being said, how can you laud the efficiency of the “free market” with such certainty and aplomb? The efficiency and superiority of the "free market’ is offered as a given, an “everybody knows”. As I’m sure you have noticed, sometimes what “everybody knows” flat isn’t so.
So you can start by actually proving that these “free market” principles you so admire actually exist, and have some measurable effect.
Or, alternatively, you could admit that the “free market” you admire doesn’t exist any more than a cooperative worker owned General Motors exists. Which is fine, abstract ideals can inform the conversation, just so long as no one tries to claim that one is real, and the other is just so much fantasy.
What a stinking pile of horseshit. foolsguinea very clearly utilized the rhetorical trick of characterizing anyone who disagrees with his position as believing “‘I & those like me are deserving; those subhumans over there are leeches.’”
As for “favor[ing] equality and cooperation over competition and greed,” I’ll just point out that every major example of government-provided holistic welfare and economic price fixing has been subject to significant corruption, political machination, and ultimately failure. The o.p. is attempting to institute market socialism in the guise of supposed capitalism, albeit said capitalism offers no actual control by the investors and a fiat safety net by having the government somehow insure against losses. Never mind the influence this will have on the market, dwarfing any existing mutual funds including index funds; it redistributes wealth by taxing the “wealthy” (redefined, apparently, by anyone who holds a job), taking monies they might invest or save on their own, and placing it into a government-controlled fund. I can’t think of any exercise more open to corruption and political influence than this proposal.
Stranger
Your disdain for the free market is well known. Where you got the above screed from my simple statement about greed is beyond me. Interestingly, you went off on this wild tangent without commenting on any of the other points in my post.
When you’re ready to debate, let me know, If you just want to spit on the concept of market economies, then knock yourself out.
Well, have I misunderstood, then? Do you mean a “free market” as some unrealized ideal, to be sought after? Because it seems as though you ascribe some very practical effects to this “free market”, it has qualities you find desirable. Indeed, its seems as though you wish to *preserve * the “free market”.
Well, OK, then, point to an example of the “free market”, so that we may examine it more closely, all the better to be astonished by its wonders.
Right now, I’m looking at buying a digital piano for my daughter.
I can purchase pianos from over a dozen different manufacturers, in prices from under $100 to over $20,000.
I can buy pianos made in more than four countries.
There is so much choice in this market that I can find her pretty much exactly what she needs. I can choose from pianos with better sounds, or better keyboards. Some with computers, some without. Some in grand piano cases, some little plastic ones on stands.
The quality of digital pianos has been skyrocketing. One company innovates, the rest work like mad to catch up.
These pianos contain parts made all over the world. They are of uniformly high quality in terms of price/performance at pretty much every price level. Some of them have intricate grand piano hammer action keyboards. Others have light plastic keys and synth actions.
Right now, Costco is advertising an amazing deal on an upright digital for $999. A piano of its quality would have cost $3000 two years ago.
Each of these companies has supply chains of hundreds of other companies supplying the parts for these pianos. Each of those companies in turn have their own supply chains. Goods ship around the world efficiently on private ships, airplanes, trains, and trucks. All these parts arrive just in time to each place they need to be, so that this immensely complicated dance of production and competition can provide to me the choice, quality, and value I’m looking for.
By and large, these manufacturers operate on very slim profit margins - competition has driven the prices down to cost plus a few percent. That few percent of profit is the engine that drives all of this coordination and innovation.
At every point along the way, people were free to choose to deal with each other. They were free to choose which materials to use, which shipping companies to use, which distributors to use.
The result of all this is that my daughter will be able to sit down and play an instrument light years more advanced than anything I could have had at her age. She will be able to play music and enjoy the arts. A human being will get to enjoy a soul-satisfying, artistic lifestyle that was unavailable to the mass of humanity in generations past.
That’s a free market. I’m surprised you don’t know about them - they provided the computer you’re using to read this, the desk it’s sitting on, and just about every other good surrounding you.
Of course, you’ll nitpick that markets aren’t ‘free’ because people can’t afford everything, or because some people cheat or steal, or because the rich can buy more things than the poor or have more choices. But that’s just because you choose to define away the greatest achievement in mankind’s history because it doesn’t suit your personal political worldview.
That’s your problem, and that’s a shame. Because if you’d open your eyes and stop hating the productive people of the world, you might learn to appreciate, or even stand in awe of, the fantastic complexity of billions of people working together, motivated and organized by the invisible hand of prices in a system of free exchange. Muslims making goods for Jewish people, and vice versa. White people making products for black families. They don’t even have to know they’re doing it, because prices and profit abstract away racism and tribalism and national boundaries.
Of course some markets are broken. Of course there are poor people who need help. Of course capitalism isn’t perfect. But it’s pretty wonderful anyway, and nothing else we’ve ever conceived of has come close to its ability to provide the greatest good to the greatest number of people.
So forgive me if I’m getting tired of people spitting on it because in their mean little hearts they just can’t stand the thought of capitalists becoming rich while providing them with all the comforts of modern life, and who therefore want to empower the government to use guns to take it away from them.
</rant>
Great way to avoid answering the question.
Wherever has this “free market” thing actually been spotted?
Great way to mis-read what s/he said. Market economies is one thing, a fairly nebulous concept that covers all degrees of capitalism. A “free market” economy is precise: it is a more pure concept, meaning laissez-faire, “leave it alone”.
So… when/wherever has this “free market” thing actually been spotted? Hmmmm?
Translation:
“… and if your neighbor is made homeless because he lost his job making these pianos to some cheap labor country, oh well. Markets are broken, Americans go homeless and hungry, they can go suck it because I got my $999 piano, ain’t capitalism wonderful?”
Clue: You spit on him, he has a right to spit back on you. Now you know why opposition to your version of capitalism is growing.
You can’t argue rationally with people who prefer to wallow in victimization.
For them to accept the rational point of view (as you nicely describe above), they need to first get past the denial stage…similar to Step 1 of a classic self-help program.
That stage is to acknowledge and admit that they have the power to change their own position if they so desire. That it’s nobody else’s fault but their own. They have the opportunity and they are choosing to throw it away.
Victimization and denial are very powerful defense mechanisms. For many people, they are impossible to overcome. They spring forth from basic human insecurities that we all possess, to some degree.
It’s also why so many people throughout history have followed leaders like Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao or even Hitler. They have bought into the notion that you can trade liberty and freedom for security. They willingly sign over their rights of choice (as well as their property) to a powerful leader, with electric and captivating oratory, that promises them security and that Everything Will Be Alright. And those leaders will gladly take that power, if offered to them.
All models, even those in physics, are unrealized ideals*. No physicist has ever encountered a perfectly spherical body, and yet it is an extremely useful model to apply to the real world. We know there are no ideal simply harmonic oscillators, and yet that model allows us to solve all sorts of problems in the physical world.
*Not really the term I would choose to use, but it’s close enough for government work.
Good post Sam. You are tossing pearls into the mud, however.
Translation: ‘I gots nuffin, so I’ll make up a hyperbolic screed that appeals to emotion. That’s really all I have to do to get other fringe lefties to hop on board’.
Couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that we are in a deep recession, and that loony lefty types are coming out of the woodwork lately with even more anti-Capitalism/anti-FM screeds, right? Folks such as, oh, I don’t know, a certain horned rabbit we all know and ‘love’?
You wouldn’t know it if it bit you on the ass, developed lockjaw and was dragged to death. Sadly.
-XT
Now, hoss, that simply won’t do. You’re not comparing apples and oranges, you’re comparing apples and orangutans. In the one instance, in the service of a relentlessly deterministic science, a mathematical abstraction is used to render calculations, calculations which can then be tested against the real world, and shown to be accurate to a determinable degree.
It doesn’t wash for economics and/or political science. You are not offering a mathematical abstraction for the sake of verifiable calculations, you are offering an entity, an entity that has qualities and definite real-world effects, it has “thingness”.
We are given the “free market” as though it has qualities, positive qualities, qualities that we are bound to respect and defer to. If I point out the obvious injustice of a stockbroker making one thousand times more than a teacher or a fireman, I am told that it is the sacred workings of the “free market”, and that I am bound to respect those workings, and not to interfere. Because, by some miracle, I should respect the injustice of its workings because it offers some overarching boon.
In the one instance, you can measure the variation between the fact and the ideal, and measure it to a very fine point. Can you offer any such metric regarding the “free market”? That this market varies from the “free market” ideal by 0.01 of arc? Put that way, your perfect sphere has much more reality that your “free market”, because variance can be measured against the ideal.
The capitalist’s “free market” has no more reality than the “dialectical materialism” of a Marxist, or the transubstantiation of a devout Catholic. You would laugh to scorn if I brought either of the latter two into our conversation as a deterministic factor, but cling to your own as though it were solid and verifiable fact, even as you admit that it isn’t. And I say its spinach, and I say to hell with it.
It is good that you are here, to offer an example of how argument might be conducted, free of *ad hominem *and insult.
The short answer is, you’re wrong. The longer answer includes fields of study such as Econometrics.
Now, it’s true that economists don’t measure "the free market’ per se, but the they measure aspects of that model, such as the effect of the minimum wage on employment or the effect of tariffs. But then physicists don’t measure “quantum theory”, they measure the emission spectra of a given atomic system.