Capitalism does not mean the absence of government. It means a government playing a well-defined role. Every defender of capitalism I know would agree that the government has a role to play in tackling pollution. Milton Friedman, the economist most often vilified for his defense of free markets, was clear on the point. Friedman argued the best way to deal with a pollution problem was through taxes, cap-and-trade, or other means which allowed polluters to determine the most cost effective way to reduce pollution, rather than the overbearing regulations that were popular in the 70’s. Much environmental policy has shifted in that direction over the past two generations.
Note that Milton Friedman thinks the EPA should be abolished.
I’m sure I can find other citations of the Right wanting to abolish the EPA, get rid of environmental protections, and so on.
Perhaps I am mistaken due to the limited length of the quote, but he seems to be suggesting a problem with worker-owned corporations without proposing a solution, i.e. that co-ops will not take steps that would increase total profit but decrease or keep neutral profit per employee. If all companies were employee-owned, they would be inefficiently small, and prices would be inefficiently high. The method that is used to reach this point–whether its government funding or slowly taking corporations from their owners–doesn’t change this fact.
Then what is your point of disagreement, if any, with Naomi Klein?
There’s no reason that an employee owned firm has to be inefficiently small.
Yes there is, and David Schweickart mentioned it in as many words. The value of an additional employee for a company is presumed to be less than the value of the employee before him; after all, there’s less work for him to do. A normal, capitalistic company will keep hiring employees until the benefit of hiring another employee is exactly equal to the salary and costs (e.g HR, liability) of the employee. The amount of employees hired in this system is efficient, and the company is optimally sized, being able to deliver goods or services at the lowest price.
An employee owned company, however, would not hire this last employee–he would add only a negligible amount of profit to the company, while he would mean the profits were split between another person, reducing them for everyone else. So an employee-run company would be inefficiently small, because the employees are seeking to maximize their own and not total profit.
This shouldn’t be very controversial–this is basically what David Schweickart said in the quote you provided.
We are waiting for you to cite the claim made in your OP that people, namely Naomi Klein, are claiming that Socialism is greener than Capitalism. That is your thesis. We’re not interested in what Milton Friedman said. We’re interested in you backing up what you claimed Naomi Klein said.
Lack of environmental regulations and lack of enforcement of those regulations are two different things. I know that China has regulations intended to tackle air pollution, and that industry in China routinely ignores the rules without consequence. I haven’t studied the case of India, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the same is true there. The USA and other free market nations can craft environmental rules and make a reasonable effort at enforcing them. China and other centrally planned economies can’t. It’s one of those funny facts that as government grows bigger, more intrusive, and more powerful, it becomes less and less able to accomplish the basic tasks that it should do successfully.
As you say, socialism means different things to different folks. I may not be able to provide a cite showing that she advocates your definition of the word.
Quoting the article I linked to in my first post:
That sounds pretty similar to my definition of the term, at least. Especially the goal of “equitable redistribution of lands”. She is clearly smart enough to know when she’s using language that echoes communist/socialist language of yore. Also this:
Again, it may not match your definition of socialism. In my OP, I specifically addressed two communist countries, China and the USSR, and also non-communist countries such as Mexico, which only have overbearing governments, heavy regulation, and major limits on free enterprise. So if it would help us address the substance of the debate rather than quibbling about the definition of “socialism”, I’d be willing to drop the word and instead say that Klein advocates managed regrowth, elimination of some or all corporate profits, and increased central planning. Then we could discuss whether this is likely to actually produce environmental progress.
Of course that is a good reason for all of us telling one of our parties to knock it off regarding the attempts at defunding, obstructing or eliminating the EPA.
Unfettered capitalism pushes for maximum extraction of coal?
Let’s look at a test case. In the 40’s, Great Britain nationalized its coal industry. The decision making was done by government officials, and the workforce was entirely unionized. No unfettered capitalism here.
In the 80’s, the very conservative Margaret Thatcher was in charge. Her government determined that many coal mines were unprofitable and should be shut down. The unions and the entire British left fought back with everything they had, insisting that the mines remain open. It was the biggest domestic clash of Thatcher’ s career. She won, of course. The mines were closed. But the British left insists to this day that Thatcher closed the mines just because she was evil and hated miners.
We keep hearing, even in this thread, that to beat global warming we have to leave fossil fuel in the ground. Thanks to Thatcher and her conservative economic views, the coal in those mines stayed in the mines. If the left had gotten their way, that coal would have become atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Wow, so Maggie Thatcher was an environmentalist way back even before environmentalism was a thing! 
Tell me, what would you call the economic forces that are behind the likes of the powerful and secretive lobby American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity that is pushing for expanded coal use, the economic forces that are behind the American Petroleum Institute and the oil companies that are pushing for boundless drilling and fracking while opposing emissions regulations, that are pushing for rapid expansion of the Canadian tar sands while contaminating air, land, and water with pollutants, CO2, and toxic tailings ponds, that are pushing for the Keystone XL pipeline and pipelines across the whole of Canada both east and west? What would you call the economic forces that are behind the sordid bill mill called the American Legislative Exchange Council through which industry lobbyists own and control politicians and which recently stepped up to a new level its efforts to thwart any and all environmental regulations both at federal and state levels? What would you call the motivations of the Koch brothers to fund campaigns against climate science and against environmental regulation, and the propensity of Koch Industries to engage in flagrant and illegal environmental abuses and frequently get charged and fined for them? I’d call it the intrinsic motivations of capitalism. What would you call it?
Well, this is really the difficulty in communication here. You insist on defining socialism in terms of central planning, which I guess naturally progresses to the evils of autocracy. I can see your concern, that regulation might represent the slippery slope to dictatorship, but ultimately, you are building a nice straw dummy to flail at.
It is obviously not a binary – capitalism vs. the soviet state – we can observe a wide range of socio-economic systems that employ varying mixes of capitalism, socialism and regulation all around the world. In fact, there are no examples of pure ideology to draw lessons from. Even the USSR cannot be viewed as a satisfactory control, as its system was severely distorted by having to deal with external hostilities (many of which were of its own making).
No one on the left, worth speaking of, is advocating Stalinism or autocracy, because that is not the socialist ideal. From the left, it looks a bit like the right is lobbying for some sort of Austrian School/Objectivist/Theocratic mix, but that is probably not fair either. The reality appears to be that neither side (at least on the extreme) owns the definitive practical model to build from, some kind of balance needs to be achieved.
What is fairly obvious, though, is that the captains of industry cannot be relied upon to make things better, because they are slaves to the color of the ledger’s ink. Long-term effects and broad-scope considerations get lost in the balance sheet and the near-term trend lines. This situation also affects any kind of reform efforts, because the people in general tend to respond to short-term effects and are loath to give up the devil they know.
So as we quibble over minutiae, we lose sight of the fact that everyone prettymuch seeks the same ends. For the most part those on the right are not keen to turn the world into a smoggy toxic waste dump, and those on the left are not looking to bring about the collapse of the economy. If we all stand on one side of the line or the other and continue to throw rocks at each other, both of those things will happen, and we will be covered in bruises to boot. This “you’re stupid<->you’re stupid” style of debate is only making things worse by making it harder for us to find the real common ground that we can actually approach each other on.
Then what is your point of disagreement, if any, with Naomi Klein?
You don’t know these dudes, then?
The debate does not yet have any substance, which is why it’s hard to address it… You need to provide some specific quotes from Klein that support your thesis. With all due respect, I am not willing to accept your paraphrase. I don’t know that she advocates “central planning”. I know she advocates increased regulation, but that’s not the same thing at all. And “eliminate some corporate profits”… that sounds like increase taxation, which is simply a policy issue. As for eliminating “all” corporate profits, again some direct quotes will be needed to give this debate some actual substance.
Moreover, most of us rationalists aren’t calling for state ownership of producers (socialism), but simply for government regulations – best would be taxes and subsidies. This actually is a market-based solution, with the government imposing external costs which would otherwise not be accounted or used for best price discovery.
It boggles the mind to know that many otherwise-intelligent laymen seem to think free-market *could *find optimal solutions to problems like AGW. Among other drawbacks, unfettered Dog-Eat-Dog systems exhibit, in the real human world, very little attention to long-term risks. (Nevermind that political systems are also usually imperfect. :eek: )
My biggest quarrel with today’s hyperlibertarians is their insistence that failures of the unregulated market to derive a public-policy best price are rare exceptions. Instead, many valid examples can be offered. It appears we agree by now that Braess’ Paradox gives examples of such which, by their simplicity, have a certain elegance! As recently as the 1990’s many “libertarians” agreed with me that intelligent government taxes and subsidies were appropriate. In the past two decades, there has been a huge swoosh to the Right, Dopers self-identifying as “libertarian” take a diametrically opposed view to libertarians of the 1990’s; “government regulation” is conflated (by some) with “socialism” in today’s U.S.A. :smack:
Then what is your point of disagreement, if any, with Naomi Klein?
PBS’s FRONTINE made an anger inducing report (Climate of Doubt) on the current extreme Republicans elected to congress and groups that advertised to help elect them. Both groups do refuse to do anything about AGW.
In essence, and more so regarding the new congress, they are promoting the demonization of those market based solutions like cap-n-trade that were supported before by Republicans to deal with issues like acid rain.
As Bill Moyers said: “God help us”
Then what is your point of disagreement, if any, with Naomi Klein?