The problem with communism.

Great Debates
81

And economic stagnation and a low standard of living weren’t the goal of Communism, they were just biproducts as well.

The history of humanity has been largely one of predatory exploitation. It is human nature to want more than you have. More wealth, more land, more power, more hos, whatever. At least capitalism attempts to channel that greed into constructive competition.

That is what you and** Der Trihs **don’t seem to get. Centralized services designed to help people are just as much at risk for corruption and predatory exploitation. Even more so because there they have no competition and there are no alternatives. I don’t understand why you feel safer trusting the altruism of goverment over the greed of corporations.

82

No, it’s called Capitalism because it works via private ownership of the things (capital) which allow one to produce goods.
As the Wikipedia says, “[The Wealth of Nations] is a clearly written account of economics at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, as well as a rhetorical piece written for the generally educated individual of the 18th century - advocating a free market economy as more productive and more beneficial to society.” (Bolding added.)

So the owners of production can free laborers to work on even more advanced products. The rate of unemployment has been fairly consistent for the last 200 years. The invention of the computer didn’t cause mass unemployment. The invention of the car didn’t cause mass unemployment. The invention of the factory line didn’t cause mass unemployment.

People sitting on their ass are a waste of capital, and there’s always been some enterprising fellow who swoops in and hires them all up to work on the next big thing.

83

Let me reiterate my position on this from my first post.

To coordination and coercion I would add corruption, cronyism, fraud, etc.

It is the same problem with both capitalism and communism today, no sides taken. When policy making is in the hands of a few, the many generally suffer. Would I rather live in the US or the old USSR? Of course.

84

I feel the best economic/political system is essentially the one we have: capitalist economics regulated by a democratic government.

The capitalist part works because capitalism does work. The concern with capitalism is how it’s used. Bill Gates is a capitalist. So is Tony Soprano. Capitalism, by itself, does not distinguish between Gates and Soprano. It needs an outside regulator for that.

The government shouldn’t plan the economy. But it should regulate it. Competition between private entities works but the government should function as the referee to keep the competition going. It serves the purpose of making sure capitalists are competing in ways that don’t harm society.

The democracy part works because people are self-interested. A government that is ultimately answerable to the majority of its population will not be able to do anything that will harm its population. Or at least it will be as limited in its harm as is reasonably possible.

85

Well there’s another reason why Capitalism works based on human failings. Say that the people at the top do want to steal everything they possibly can from those below. In a Capitalist system, the only way they can take anything is by selling products to those same people. The person who can sell more, better products to the more people, gets to take the most. Oh except for damn, now everyone has all these cool products like TVs and microwaves, penicillin, air conditioning, earthquake proof houses, cheap transportation around the globe. After a hundred years, the poorest people who have been stolen from the most end up living lives more rich than the people of a hundred years earlier.

You go to Cuba and all their cars, radios, etc. are all remnants from the 50s that have been goaded into lasting. Their clothes and lifestyles haven’t changed a jot. The medical care that they can give, is entirely reliant on the research that was done by Capitalist countries.

Hell, the USSR was only ever able to make bombs and missiles, and they largely accomplished that by using ex-Nazi scientists and stealing information from the US. Any large task that needed to be accomplished had to be rammed through by groups of thugs who rode all around the country to make people work. Moscow lived from shipment-to-shipment because any time the government’s eyes turned to one train carrying supplies, all the other trains more or less stopped. You’d go to Moscow and everyone would be eating bananas and there would be banana peels everywhere because that was all the food there was that week.

But in the US, Pizza Hut wants to send a pizza right to my door so that I barely even need to get off my ass. Businesses want to get products to me. The easier they can make it, pricewise or laziness-wise, for me to take what they’ve got, the richer they become and so they work to make it happen. Each generation comes up with successively better ways to make me able to be fat, lazy, vaccinated, and wacking off to porn all as cheap and easy as possible. Cause that’s what the consumer wants.

86

Sage Rat Actually in a capitalist system those who can move around the most worthless paper value from people’s pensions into their own accounts make the most money.

It’s not exactly producing something to get a whole bunch of people to invest in a hedge fund and inflate the prices so that you and your buddies can sell all the stock off for really high and then buy it back from all the people after you’ve dumped it and the price drops.

87

I’m, personally, rather dubious as to whether the stock market is anything more than a slow-acting bubble machine. At any rate, I wouldn’t view it as a central nor necessary part of a Capitalist system. Certainly there does need to be a way to raise capital for ones enterprise, and loaning money certainly makes sense. But once you start selling ownership of that loan on a value that’s entirely unrelated to the dividends it provides, you’re just creating a greater fool system.

I think that stocks should be revamped to something like, say, you can only sell your stock once you have made back 50% of your original buying price via dividends, or something to that effect.

88

Addendum: Though I’ll note that even for as much as the investment market does pretty much bubble up and pop fairly regularly, and people like to bitch and moan about how the sky is falling, it’s never sent us all back into living in caves and eating bark. The Great Depression was certainly a bad thing and did shorten people’s lives, but I think that we’ve learned how to lessen the effects significantly, as well as learned how to make recessions and depressions less likely and smaller. Not to say that congress nor the president will actually listen to the CBO and other official research on the subject so as to mitigate it properly…

89

To use my Tony Soprano example, he doesn’t stay on top by offering better services. He just shoots anyone who tries to muscle in on his territory. For that matter, leaving out the literal shooting, that’s close to the way Bill Gates stays on top as well.

As I said, capitalism in itself has no morality. It doesn’t distinguish between getting ahead by offering a better product and getting ahead by burning down your competitor’s factory. The government is necessary to make sure capitalists compete in a productive rather than destructive way.

90

Yeah, that’s what it is.:rolleyes:

91

True. I’d definitely say that, for instance, proper labelling of food contents was an entirely good thing. When the customer buys something and it doesn’t work or is just as likely to be a poison, it drives down consumer trust. Products have to do what they say they do, they have to contain what they say they contain, the means by which the product are created need to rely on safe and reliable processes–these are all beneficial to the overall market. Capitalism wants people to innovate, not cheat, and there’s no reason to think otherwise.

92

It’s amusing that even after Bernie Madoff and a whole host of other Ponzi revelations that some people STILL find me saying what I just said controversial.

93

Holding up Madoff as a proof of issues with investment banking is like holding up Paris Hilton as proof that skinny women are sex crazed morons.

There’s no value in moving money from point A to point B unless point B is yourself, or point B can use that money to make more money. And the first of those two possibilities is illegal, which is precisely why Bernie is sitting in jail. But billions of transactions take place every year and have been for the last couple centuries, and the sky hasn’t fallen and we haven’t all discovered ourselves wearing invisible clothing. Certainly one or two have, but that’s not a representative sample.

But, for instance, look at arguments about the peer review process in the science world. Is it a perfect system? No, of course not. Is there a better option? Mmm, not that anyone has been able to suggest, though that doesn’t mean there isn’t. Are they ways to tweak it to be better? Again, not that anyone has particularly been able to suggest, but when they do, I’d be fairly certain that it will find its way into practice.

Yes, there’s issues with our systems of business and investment, but pointing that out isn’t a massive discovery that’s lain unknown until you arrived. Plenty of people work in the middle of it every day and when one of them comes up with an improvement to make it work more within its ideals, that gets added. We’re not dealing with a philosophically pure system that doesn’t need and hasn’t ever picked up rules to plug holes. But the existence of as-yet-unplugged holes doesn’t mean the system is evil and awful; it just means that people are still perfecting it–or that this is just as good as it gets until someone comes up with an entirely different system.

Until there is that other system, throwing what you have away is stupid. And Communism ain’t that other system. Patched up to work, it just becomes Capitalism.

94

Because they aren’t “just as much at risk for corruption and predatory exploitation” as a profit driven corporation in all cases. Such as health care; where the ability to extort money from the desperate and the profitability of letting people dying instead of providing services is exactly the sort of thing that that bring out the worst in corporations. A government bureaucrat as a rule doesn’t care if letting you die is more profitable, which in a situation where it is, is better than dealing with a corporation that will regard profiting at your death as desirable. Governments the world over have shown that they are better at running a health care system than corporations, just as corporations have shown they are better at providing consumer goods than governments.

Sometimes the government is a better solution to problems; sometimes the private sector is. This isn’t hard to understand; it’s the fanatic American ideological conviction that the private sector MUST, in all circumstances, be better than the government in all ways at everything that even makes it controversial.

95

I don’t think what you’re saying is controversial. It’s just that it is unclear what the point is, that you’re trying to make.

So Bernie Madoff and other swindlers convinced others to give them money. They committed fraud. They broke the law.

And so…what? What exactly is your point? There are plenty of laws regarding fraud on the books. People should always weigh risk factors, such as a firm’s reputation, before giving people their money.

Is your point that the government should step in, and somehow protect us by putting the stamp of ‘Approval’ on something? Investments? Drugs? Children’s toys? Well, it turns out in Madoff’s case that they did. The SEC approved Bernie Madoff’s activities.

Of course, the government will claim that the reason they failed was because they didn’t have enough resources, and they need more of our money. That the failure to protect the public was because they didn’t have enough money…and that if they had more money, they would be able to do a better job. That’s usually how it goes in these sorts of situations.

96

Of course; because after so many years of pushing by people who think that Regulations Are Evil, so much stuffing of the government by Bush with people who thought that way, and literally decades of slashing away at regulation and government oversight - we had what the free marketeers wanted. A system where Bernie Madoff and those like him could run rampant, at least until they pulled down the economy. The government isn’t going to restrain people like Madoff when it’s controlled by people who think that anything is justified if it makes a profit.

97

So it’s all a voluntary thing then? Because I never gave any money to Bernie Madoff or AIG or Lehman Brothers or Enron. So it’s a comfort to me knowing that the financial crisis will have no effect on me.

98

You know what’s annoying? For some people, the massive historical failures of government are never taken to be evidence that there might be a problem with putting that much power in the hands of a central authority, but when a Bernie Madoff comes along, suddenly it’s proof positive that Capitalism is rotten to the core, case closed.

For every crooked businessman you can point to, I can point to a crooked politician. For every business that makes stupid decisions, I can point to a government program that utterly failed.

The difference is that eventually the crooks go to jail, and the stupid businessmen lose their businesses. But government just keeps chugging along. And governments are given the right to use force against the people to get their way. Chris Dodd and Barny Frank were as complicit in the real estate meltdown as anyone, but a lot of those CEOs and traders lost their jobs, and Dodd and Frank keep right on rolling. In fact, they have more power now than they did before.

The Department of Education spends 40 BILLION freaking dollars a year, and is has NO discernable impact on education. And what happens? Its funding is doubled.

When it comes to government failure, some of you always claim it’s just the fault of the specific people in charge. It’s never indicative of a fault in the system itself. But if a business does something wrong, it’s an indictment of the entire capitalist system. FEMA totally screws up? Hey, it’s Bush’s fault. I’m sure Obama’s FEMA will be a model of efficiency.

And yet, in the grand scheme of things governments have done jack squat with their big programs. Eight hundred billion dollars of stimulus money gets swallowed into the maw of big government, and the economy gets worse. The government says they ‘miscalculated’, and ‘didn’t have enough information’. Well, duh. But that’s not stopping them from talking about a second stimulus.

Yes, it’s all capitalism’s fault.

99

Bernie stole ~$65,000,000,000
US GDP is ~$14,264,000,000,000

He affected the economy by 0.45%. Or better said, if you’re making $25,000 a year, Bernie stole about $112.50 from you.

The subprime mortgage market was worth about $1,700,000,000,000, but probably only ~30% were delinquent in paying their loan rate as of when things hit last summer, so really we were only all in the hole $510,000,000,000. But, in truth, people who are delinquent in paying aren’t financially helpless. They don’t have zero money, they just don’t have enough money. So really, we’re probably only talking say 10% that we would have needed to cover and let the original payers continue to pay what they can each month (i.e. the other 90%.) So really we’re looking at a value lost closer to $51,000,000,000. This is a economic loss of 0.36%, or about $95 lost to someone making $25,000 a year.

In total, each of us lost about $207.50 during 2008. Now say we decided to stretch paying this off over 10 years, then each of us is only in the hole $21 each year for the next 10 years. Now, since our taxes are about %35, that means we’re already paying about $8,750 every year. So to pay off our debt, we would need to raise taxes to 35.084% (plus 0.084%) for the next ten years.

O, the heaping horror. :dubious:

The economic crisis is there because it was trumped up as a major deal and because dealing with it was shoved off until the next president came in, giving enough time for people to start getting kicked out of their houses and for people to start pulling their money from the market. It’s the shrinkage of the market that caused banks to fail, not the bucks stolen by Barnie nor lost via mortgages. Economically speaking, $20 for the next 10 years is a gnat burp. The problem had little to nothing to do with finances, and everything to do with how it was touted by the media and by the politicos vying to get into the big seat.

This isn’t a problem with the market, it’s a problem of people. People are silly and uninformed little beasts who respond to stimuli instead of logic. Now possibly there is a solution to this that doesn’t exist in Capitalism, but I suspect that there isn’t. But even so, we’re still not looking at life in caves, eating bark.

100

Good point. We should stop pointing the finger at Bernie Madoff and hold all those people who voted for him responsible instead.

Face facts. There’s no central authority. We are the government. The reason that both the Democrats and the Republicans race each other to give us stuff is because that’s what we elected them for. The government’s just doing what we tell it to do.