I think you’re confusing the word “guarantees” with “promises”.
Correct.
I think the model where employees are paid partially with a stake in the equity of the of company is a good one. It’s very common here in Silicon Valley. But that’s something negotiated up front, and many people don’t want to take the downside risk of there being no profits to split at the end of the day. The idea that employees “own” the product without putting up any of the capital or taking any of the risk is ludicrous.
Because just like capitalism, once installed it begets corruption.
Communes and cooperatives are examples that work better.
Capitalism suffers from horrible distortion and corruption. It corrupts governments and regulators. It quickly becomes monopolistic. Laws are modified through big money to change the whole concept into something different .
I have an answer for this but am going to address this at a later time.
I will explain what I mean when I say that France or Sweden are capitalist economies.
Sometimes when discussing economics it is beneficial to boil things down to very simplistic representations of the real world (Guns and Butter analogies, for example.)
Let us postulate about a hypothetical country that since time immemorial has been capitalist. Individuals will use capital to create factories in the hope that their product can generate them a profit. Other individuals will work at the factory in exchange for currency, which they use to buy their necessities and any luxuries they can afford.
For whatever reason this country initially had no government at all. Let’s say that all of society was governed in a collective manner for whatever reason, with everyone having an equal say in how things were run. Long ago this worked fine, but as society became more complicated that system fell apart. So eventually this country developed a republican form of representative democracy.
This government initially just set rules of behavior, it defined crimes and provided a very small legal system that adjudicated matters. No one in government was paid at all. Judges were selected for specific matters by popular vote and juries were selected by lot. Not even a police force existed, individuals would volunteer to keep the peace. When crimes were discovered posses would be formed to seek out the perpetrators.
Eventually though, society kept getting more complex. Laws were passed that were more and more difficult for lay judges to understand. Crime got to a point where it was difficult for volunteers to keep it under control. People got together and realized they needed some professional law keepers, and some professional judges. These people would need to be able to devote their whole time to these professions, meaning they could not earn a living. So it was resolved that the government would pay these people and to get money, the government would do something it had never before done. The government would take a small amount of income from every person who earned income, and use that to cover these expenses. So laborers or business owners one and all, had to give up a small bit of the wages they were paid or the profits they earned. Some people didn’t like this, but by and large people were happier on the whole. The full time professional police force made things safer, and having permanent professional judges gave people a more consistent and fair legal system.
As with all societies, mores changed over time. Since time immemorial this society strongly believed it was the responsibility of family to care for the old and sick. When a family member became too old to care for themselves, the younger members of the family would care for them in their old age.
However, due to the vagaries of chance, some people might grow old and not have any family to take care of them. This society was very centered around the concept of small family units, and initially these unfortunates were mostly left to fend for themselves. Over time their views changed, though. People started to feel like the elderly deserved help even if they didn’t have families to care for them. So the people went back to the government and worked out a system by which the government would run nursing homes for the elderly who required them, and would give pension payments to the elderly who could still live on their own but couldn’t work any longer. To fund this, the government again raised taxes.
To skip forward, eventually this society had taxpayer funded disability care, fully taxpayer funded medical care, fully taxpayer funded transportation systems, fully taxpayer funded prisons, schools, and et cetera. Pretty much any social service you could imagine was the exclusive domain of taxpayer funded institutions.
When did this society quit being capitalist?
The answer, to my mind, is: never. The source of all that money was taxation on the wealth being produced by capitalists, so it was still a capitalist economy.
I don’t believe there is some magical level where if you take X percentage of private profit and use it for public purposes you stop being capitalist and become something else.
To me, you are capitalist as long as the lifeblood is all still coming from privately owned industry.
In my fictional society, there are no user fees for any of the government services. For this reason, it is truly clear cut that the lifeblood is capitalism. Things do get more complicated when the government starts operating utility companies and charging fees for usage. At that point, the government is actually operating a publicly owned business, and that is an example of something that isn’t capitalist. Where do co-ops fit in, some places have utilities that are owned by the customers themselves, and some large businesses in America are owned entirely by the workers. Well, that’s more complicated and obviously “busts the model” of my simple hypothetical.
I will say though, that I don’t believe any country in Europe exists whose wealth is primarily generated by co-ops and government run business. Europe has a lot of government run service, but they are funded by taxes taken from private profits. Europe has some co-ops and such just like we do, but just like here, the majority of revenue generation in Europe is from privately owned entities.
To say Europe isn’t capitalist you have to do more than just say they have a lot more services or a lot more regulation than us (if you notice I’ve hardly talked about regulation at all), you would have to actually say that most wealth generation was done by government owned business or by co-operatives. From what I can tell that just isn’t the case. Worker owned cooperatives do not appear to be super common anywhere yet, though they are growing everywhere. France, based on a quick look at wiki, has about 36,000 people employed in worker owned cooperatives. That’s pretty small.
“State Owned Enterprises” are big in countries like Norway, but even there my quick Googling suggests only about 30% of Norwegians are employed by government. So Norway might be one of the closest to not being capitalist, but it isn’t there yet.
Another analogy is the rhinoceros. Creatures like rhinos can get ticks on them. These ticks are parasites. There is a species of bird that especially likes to hang out on the backs of rhinos and eat these ticks (Oxpeckers). Let’s postulate a rhino that has an enormous number of ticks, and a massive flock of Oxpeckers that feed on them constantly. So many that you can’t even see the rhino under them, let’s also postulate the Oxpeckers have small parasites that feed on them. While that is a strange looking thing, it is still a system with one engine, and that is the rhino itself. So it is with a country with tons of taxation and lots of social services, as long as most of the wealth is generated through private enterprise, that is still the engine of that country’s economy.
Probably a better example of countries that aren’t capitalist might be found in South America. I would not be surprised if perhaps Venezuala has a larger portion of its wealth generation in the hands of State Owned Enterprises (but I’m not sure about it, really.)
So yeah, that’s how I define a capitalist country, one in which the wealth generation is primarily a result of capitalism.
Note I haven’t talked much about regulation, that is because capitalism just refers to who owns the means of production. Heavy regulation can be a part of it, or it can be absent, the presence or absence of regulation doesn’t affect whether the economy is capitalist or not.
I thought I explained it with my engine example. Like I said, let’s presume I’m the supervisor of a machine and you’re an engineer with an alternative engine. It doesn’t matter how much you can point out that is messed up with our current engine, the machine has to keep rolling forward. If you don’t have a different engine’s specs up and ready for me to look at, I’d be derelict in my duty to take the current engine out or even consider taking it out.
Capitalism’s current status as status quo doesn’t make it “grand” but it does mean it is the system that pretty much a majority of the world is using. It thus seems to be the result of lots and lots of choices made all over the world. To replace that system you need to have something pretty good in mind, because I don’t think it’s just random chance that most of the world is using a capitalist system.
The people who stand to benefit from any system will always seek to perpetuate it. This is why feudalism went on for about a thousand years. But again, without something else even being suggested, how can people even begin to move in another direction?
With any other system you could come up with, I will guarantee one thing. There will be a class of people who benefit from that system more than others. For example lets say we have a system in which all the means of production are owned by the workers who actually work at the facility or entity. Well, who runs things there? In large organizations pure democratic decision making just won’t work, you need day to day administration. In such a system administrators become the upper class, and they can and will start to (because of good old fashioned human greed) use their position of power to enhance themselves.
Pretty much everything here isn’t an alternative system, though. It’s just a list of laws and regulations you want to see in the current capitalist system.
The one thing that is an alternative, your example of municipal utilities is just an example of a planned economy. Are you saying you think the government should own all enterprise, not just a few special utilities, but all the stores, all the factories, all the mines, all the entertainment venues, all the newspapers, all the transportation companies et cetera? If not, I don’t see how you’re talking about something vastly different than what we have.
Total aside, but your example of municipal utilities is actually flawed. Pretty much everywhere I have ever lived if a private company operates a utility they are regulated by Public Service Commissions. These exist because that company has a monopoly on providing say, water or electricity in that area. This actually restricts what the company can do significantly. For example electric companies actually cannot just raise their rates, they have to go to the PSC and ask that they be allowed to raise their rates. Are these requests usually granted? Yes, but in my locality I have seen several instances in which the utility was asking for a rate increase of X % and the PSC came back and approved a much smaller increase.
If customers have complaints that they do not feel the company has resolved, they can then take the company to a hearing at the PSC. If the PSC finds in favor of the customer there are large penalties to the company. Additionally, it costs the customer nothing to go before the PSC (other than some time), whereas utility companies will spend a lot of money on lawyers and such at these hearings. For this reason many such utilities will often become very polite if a customer even mentions going to the PSC. Not to get into a long personal story but my water company actually did something really shitty to me about three months ago. I called to complain and I was basically told to piss off. I sent a certified letter to the office of their CEO in which I quoted sections of PSC statute and told them I felt their phone staff was rude and I felt I was not treated properly under the regulations published by the PSC. I didn’t once mention taking the utility company before the PSC, I just said I wasn’t happy and I felt they hadn’t done right by me. I got a letter 3 days later with a signed apology from the CEO and on my next water bill I received a credit equivalent to about three month’s service.
And actually that is a better situation than a government owned utility. A government owned utility doesn’t much care if you go through their formal complaint process, since it doesn’t affect their bottom line (government owned utilities are far less concerned about bottom lines.) Additionally, since the operator is the government and the hearing board is the government, it’s questionable how often you will come out ahead. At least at the PSC you have a lot of life long government bureaucrats, many of whom may actually enjoy punishing large utility companies. That divided role of oversight and provider, in which the provider is a private entity, can actually create a more beneficial situation for the customer.
There is also less chance of stopping a rate increase when it is a government owned utility, unless you can successfully lobby the city council. And if you do successfully stop a rate increase, what happens if the utility goes into the red? It just gets its operations subsidized by taxpayer money that comes in through other routes. So with a government owned utility you can have trouble on both fronts.
To me a government owned utility is only preferable in situations where private companies just aren’t willing to provide a necessary service. For example I believe it was a small town in Tennessee that laid a full fiber optic network, with base plans for 100 Mbps and max plans for 1 Gbps connections being offered to customers. This was done because people in that town wanted high quality internet connections and no private telecom was going to provide them to a mid-sized city in Tennessee (and actually those speeds give that city amongst the fastest connections in the world, and is one of the few places in America that can compare to connection speeds in Korea, Japan, and parts of Europe.)
How has it ‘worked’? It has driven people to care only for themselves, not for those around them.
The reason communism in other countries has not ‘worked’ (though it has done better than Western, capitalist-biased thinking has given it credit for) is because the influence from capitalistic countries is much too strong.
A government with a capitalistic, “everything for me” mindset would do such a thing. The root of communism is benevolence. Capitalistic influence sullies the waters of any communistic brook that begins to flow.
No, there was no confusion. Eventually, there would not be a need for a ‘guarantee’ (or, as you believe, a promise). Eventually, it would just become human nature - an ingrained part of the human psyche - to act with beneficence to others as a capitalist acts with beneficence to himself.
Capitalism as an economic system has evolved hand-in-hand with relevant economic philosophy (which philosophy or grouping of philosophies was very politically influential, and sometimes revolutionary, in the 19th Century, and descendant philosophies remain influential to this day); so it’s really hard to separate the two, or to imagine what capitalism would have been if, somehow, no one had ever mounted any intellectual defense of it.
Human nature is, among other things, a complex mix of self-interest and altruism. The former isn’t going to go away, and pretending that it will is extremely naive. It’s even more naive than blaming the failure of communism on the existence of capitalist countries. And neither stands up to the most cursory empirical evidence.
Human nature is that way because it has been molded by the imperialist hegemonic forces of capitalism for centuries.
That “cursory empirical evidence” that you suggest is in existence exists because pro-capitalist research was done with a purpose of supporting capitalism. Any and all evidence is laced with bias - and evidence supporting the success of capitalism is no different.
That’s the problem with a capitalist system. We have false and inequitable notions of what constitutes “ownership.” The wrong people prosper.
Nobody has worked on my house since I bought it, but even if they did, I would be paying for their labor so I still don’t understand your analogy.
You mean by existing, giving people who realize how much communism sucks a place to flee to?
If you retire and take some of your retirement income and open a small business, should your employees have ownership in that business?
They don’t flee because communism is bad or because capitalism is good. The feel forced to flee because of the rigid caste system enforced by capitalism - they MUST flee to capitalism, because unless they fall lock-step in line with the capitalist mentality, they will be forced into a lower caste by the imperial ‘capitalists.’
If there was another plant with only communists and no capitalism, what would prevent the administrators in the communist society from consolidating power and perks in their own hands? Essentially depriving others of their fair share by “allocating resources” to themselves above and beyond what they should receive?
That would not happen. Communism, at its core, is purely benevolent. A communist would not do what you proposed, because it is anti-communist. It is capitalist.
So why did administrators in say, the Soviet Union, commit the types of abuses I have just postulated?
Because the USSR, at its core, was not a communist system, I expect him to say.
I don’t believe he’s completely serious.
I do not fully support the capitalist-biased evidence that such a thing ever occurred.
However, if it did, I would not be surprised if it was a capitalist act of sabotage with a goal of disrupting the peace of the Soviet Union and making the nation look poor in the eyes of the capitalist world.
This is partly true, actually. The USSR was not fully communist - as I stated before, the reason why these nations ‘failed’ is because the influence of capitalism existed that helped facilitate (read: force) their failure.
The root of capitalism is “me.” The root of communism is “we.”
Make it anti-hierarchical: no administrator class. Form job descriptions where people all have some administrator-duties, and give everyone a say in how perks are distributed.
OK, you definitely jumped the shark with that post. I won’t be debating this subject with you any further.