And what happens to capitalism when you remove those controls? Can capitalism maintain itself without them? Or will it revert into monopolies and wealth differences so large that revolutions fester?
I think what you really mean by “self organizing” is that you don’t really know how it happens and somebody else figures it out for you. You are probably just happy with your social status and not inclined to ask any further.
Interesting how you’ve skipped over some of the more difficult details provided by your own OP when it’s convenient to you. How did you get the rights and the land to begin with?
Who is “they” though?The landowners that’s who. What about the people who worked in that community? The owner sells shop, makes a quick buck, and retires. Now those people don’t have a job. In certain versions of a communist society they might have a chance to at least vote on the matter.
So you set up a straw model of communism and knocked it down, how convincing.
I don’t think that communism has to structured around a single centralized bureaucracy. Just because you can’t seem to imagine it in other ways, doesn’t mean that’s the only possibility. The problems you keep theorizing about seem to stem from this assumption and it is unproven.
Now since you accept what happened in Russia as communism I understand the assumption to a degree. And since it has come under the popular usage, and that’s how Russia wished to portray itself, I guess we have to call it a form of communism. But to me (and I’m not the first to think this) Russia was practicing a very primitive version of capitalism where the state was the owner of everything. That’s why everything came under a central bureacracy: the state had to enforce and assure its ownership.
The difference that I think is overlooked is the difference between state ownership and community ownership. People form communities not only through place but through interaction. People you work with, go to school with, have fun with, etc… This type of community is more flexible and allows for multiple simultaneous associations. Thus the people that work in the factory can own the factory not a national government. Different factories can make the same products and hence provide competition. And even if government does control certain resources, it wouldn’t have to be the equivalent of a federal government. It could also be a town, a rural community, city, county, etc… These governments are smaller, less bureacratic, and more responsive.
The idea of ownership may not be as ingrained as we think. Those who lived a nomadic lifestyle found the idea of owning land hard to understand. I think it’s possible that feelings about “own” could eventually change so that it takes on a meaning closer to “to take care of, be responsible for, or use” rather than some divine right that seems to flow from the heavens.
Wow, Sam, he (she?) just called you a bourgeois pig, or something along those lines. You gonna take that lying down?
Why is it necessary for a capitalist to know how every aspect of capitalism works? If I produce a widget and sell it, it’s true that my action is influencing widget sales and related industries worldwide. I don’t see why I should have to track every one of those actions and analyze the possible outcome. If the market becomes flooded with widgets and I can no sell at my regular price, I’ll cut my prices and/or cut production. Let the widget-producers in the next time zone take care of their own problems. For a person who keeps backpedaling on the nationwide beaurocracy issue, you sure like describing situations in which such a structure would be necessary. Either that or magical accountant elves.
What if they lose the vote? Aren’t they just as screwed? As for the suddenly unemployed factory worker… well, life sucks, doesn’t it? But the factorry worker at least can look around the country and find a place where his skills are wanted and move to that area. Or he can learn new skills. And at least he won’t have to ask permission from some Labour Assignment Committee for Worker Integration and Tasking (LACWIT).
I love this plutocratic view you have of capitalists, like the “store owner” that sells out and retires, presumably to a life of decadent luxury, wiping his mink-lined boots on the faces of the poor downtrodden exploited noble wage-slaves starving in the streets and begging for a scrap of the crumbs falling from his gold-inlaid table… ahem. Store owners don’t always sell out and retire. Often they move to new locations and restart their businesses. In the time of tenant farmers and such, it’s true that the vast majority of labourers had no claim of ownership on the land, but since WW2 in the U.S. and Canada, private home ownership is on the rise. Believe it or not, it is possible for a reasonably industrious person to eventually afford his or her own piece of land, even if it’s just a Levittown-ish suburban tract. But once paid for, that land is theirs and the owner can get full protection of the law in defending it.
And the mechanism by which one gets land in the first place is a well-established one involving stakes and claims and whatnot, going back several hundred years in North America. Once your claim is recognized, you can sell the holdings at any time or pass them on to your children.
Rather than a primitve form of capitalism, why not call it an advanced form of totalitarianism? The Soviet Union was a collossal failure and it semes pretty weaselly to claim it was more of a capitalist state than a communist one.
On a related note, Chernobyl wasn’t a meltdown. It was an unrequested fission surplus!
I sort-of agree with you on this, as I have stated numerous times: communism can work if the scale is kept very small, limited to communities of a few hundred people with a well-defined purpose. Anything beyond that and some sort of administrative infrastructure is required, and communism is a terrible model for this. I love the way you think people in a communism will vote on every issue and everything will be just hunky-dory. What if eighty percent votes to kill the other twenty percent? It doesn’t even have to involve firing squads. The eighty percent can decide they’d like to turn a million hectares of farmland into the world’s biggest parking lot, because a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records will bring pride and glory to the State. Sure, the twenty percent of the population living there will starve, but majority rule, right?
Who said anything about divine rights? I expect to inherit property (eventually) from my mother. What will make the land “mine” isn’t some divine proclamation, but that fact that I live in a society where everybody agrees that if a person owns property, it is his and no-one else can just grab it. The other individuals in society agree to this, because they know that if they own property, I will recognize it as theirs and I will not attempt to just grab it. As a (future) landowner, I don’t have to know the names and holdings of every other landowner (though apparantly that attitude may make me a bourgeois pig, or something), but I know what belongs to me and what doesn’t belong to me, and I respect the rules and hope everyone else does because that’s the framework of a capitalist system that, so far, offers just about the safest, longest and most comfortable way to live in a nation of milllions.
First of all, I have never met anyone who actually believes in communism, other than a few nuts in Union Square and a few stoners in college who were mad at their wealthy parents.
That said…
All these glorious things that communism promise - personal freedom, financial security, unlimited productivity, etc are not possible. How can you have any of these things when you are at the mercy of the whim of the masses? Bryan Ekers gives a perfect example with his crop annecdote.
What you really want is a better form of capitalism. The biggest problem “communists” seem to have is the class structure. There are ways of distributing wealth more equitably while retaining private ownership.
IMHO individual rights and freedoms are better protected when there is are clearly defined boundaries of ownership. “THIS is my car THAT is your house. My skills and experience earns me x money.” Communism dilutes the individuals decision making ability and thus their freedom because the group always comes first. I’ve worked/lived in that kind of environment and I don’t care for it. “The Team feels WE should work this Saturday. The Fraternity wants to use YOUR room to serve tequila shots for the party.” Well I don’t like to work on weekends and I don’t feel having a party tonight in MY room.
I didn’t say that, I was talking about the beuracracy that currently keeps our economy afloat. Do you think Alan Greenspan spends all day reading comic books?
I was trying to say that bureacracy has proven a fact of life for large societies. Capitalism is not immune to it. I haven’t tried to say that communism is immune to it. Just that it’s not ipso facto a top heavy monstrosity of one.
You guys really have marvelous imaginations. You do a really a fine job of contructing communists societies that you would hate.
Ah yes, back to the violent military conquest and genocide of many peoples. If you buy your land from a thief is it really your land?
Well at least we agree that it was a failure. If you want to call it communism have fun. It wan’t at all like Marx envisioned though. Contemporaries of Marx predicted that those in power would not give it up one the revolution was over. So it’s not entirely hindsight.
Yes I agree, we should get rid of this pesky democracy thing. Rather a bit like mob rule, wouldn’t you say old boy?
Did anybody really agree to it, or were they just born into it? Nobody told me I was agreeing to anything if I was given a choice I might have raised some questions first.We’ve just been raised on it so it’s hard for us to imagine otherwise.
Didn’t say that, just said he was happy with his place. Didn’t say that place was bourgeois.
C’mon at least give me some creds for not using that word so far.
What’s this? An ad hominem, or just an explanation for your bias against communism?
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”
Yet another knock against democracy and really the human race.
You guys keep saying that it’s not possible, but possible is a rather hefty word to be throwing around. Communism doesn’t violate any physical laws that I know of.
Great. When it happens, I’ll stop yabbering about communism.
There IS no bureaucracy that ‘runs’ a capitalist country. There are tens of thousands of businesses that manage their own affairs and organize on their own. Government merely picks around at the margins. The vast majority of commerce and industry in the United States is wholly self-regulated. Even ‘regulated’ industries, which only suffer under regulations in some fairly narrow ways.
That falls under the “life sucks” category. Any piece of land, except for cooled volcano lava, has been fought over at some point. Even some idealized future communist state will have been the site of violence (probably a lot of violence), so your comment is pointless.
I don’t understand the need for this rather peevish comment at all. You’ve been maintaining that the members of a commune would have the right to vote on that commune’s actions. That just begs the question; if no personal property rights exist, why can’t the majority just vote you off the valuable farmland and onto a barren rock, if that’s what the majority wants? Under capitalism, you own your property and no simple vote can deprive you of it. Democracy at its worst is mob rule, but in a capitalist democracy, the individual retains certain inalienable personal and property rights (otherwise capitalism doesn’t work) which are not subject to revocation even if the majority wishes it, short of a constitutional amendment or other major legal step.
It’s not hard for me to imagine otherwise, and decide that what I imagine (communism) would be hugely worse than what I currently have (capitalism with a social safety net). Be so kind as to stop projecting onto us (or at least me). Don’t confuse my counterarguments with ignorance.
It’s not pointless. If you share, who can accuse you of stealing?
Umm actually if the (democratically elected) goverment decides to build a freeway through your house: you’ve got to move. If you don’t pay your (democratically proposed) taxes the government will take your land away.
I don’t understand why you anticipate so much antagonism. The rights of the minority is a standard question of any democracy.
Yes, I’ve already complemented you on your excellent imagination. If you want to imagine all kinds of awful Orwellian things, I can’t stop you. I didn’t like what happened in Russia either, but I can and do imagine other things.
Aside from the thousands of bureacrats in employ of the federal government to help assure the smooth running of the economy, every business in this country complies with dozens if not hundreds of government regulations. Labor laws, OSHA regulations, environmental laws,building codes, tax codes, the list goes on and on. No the government doesn’t make all of the decisions for them, but I haven’t proposed that for a communism either.
Didn’t I just propose that a business could be run by somone other than the federal government in a communist society? You ask for details and then ignore them.
perspective, you are quite confused about the entire matter and your arguments are just a mish mash of things which lead nowhere. I am not going to debate this issue with you because I have done my arguments too many times in other threads but I will just point out two major things:
You can point out flaws in capitalism until the cows come home and it still does not add one cent in favor of communism or any other system. You have to provide argument and proof that whatever other system is overall better than capitalism. This you have not done at all and you agree you have no answers. So far capitalism has shown to be the less bad system (or the best if you look at it from my side).
Your saying that a capitalist country also has an Administration just shows how little you understand of what Sam Stone is patiently trying to explain to you. In the USA the laws provide a framework in which people are free to alllocate resources as they see fit. In communist countries the state allocates resources as they see fit.
The question is “what is the most efficient way to allocate resources?” and you are doing a lot of hand waving and talking generalities but you have not addressed it and I think it is just because you do not even begin to understand it.
If you are truly interested in this question I would suggest you read Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and The Use of Knowledge in Society where he deals with this topic in depth.
“Democracy is the worst for of government…except for all the other” - Winston Churchill
“A person is smart - people are dumb, fearfull and irrational…” - Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones), Men in Black
Ok. When communism works, I’ll stop yammering about capitalism. More equitable distribution of wealth and property is not the same thing as communal ownership of property.
Oh, I dunno. Maybe the people who claimed to own the land before the communists showed up and declared it common ground?
True, the principal of Eminent Domain, allowing the society to appropriate private land to build necessities like roads and infrastructure does exist in capitalist societies, but the people displaced are owed compensation and they can seek legal rememdies. I don’t see what compensation is granted to the proles in a communist society. Maybe they get a notice that says “Comrade: in the great glorious name of our wondrous collective society, you have 30 days to report to the General Emplacements and Targeted Locations Organization for Socialized Transport (GETLOST) for resettlement. Members of the Secret Police will be happy to assist you in your move, should you demonstrate any hesitation.”
As for taxation, it (ideally) pays for the things the society collectively needs, like a military, health care, education, road maintenance, etc. I don’t have a problem with the idea, though I naturally want my taxes used as efficiently as possible.
What ARE you proposing, exactly? A capitalist democracy has about as much regulation as it needs. When the regulations become too complex and pose too great a barrier, there are calls for “deregulation”. Once a number of rules are struck down, new businesses enter an industry and the system toddles along for a while, with new regulations being created as problems are discovered and eventually there is another call for deregulation and the cycle begins again.
No, it means he understands the theory of spontaneous order. Look it up. It’s a great explanatory tool, used by everyone from economicsts to linguists to political scientists to evolutionary theorists.
So is language. Or most of the computing industry. Or 95% of the entire economy.
Here’s another real-world example. How do you allocate bandwidth in a network? You’ve got hundreds of thousands of resources competing to get their information down a pipeline that has limited bandwidth. One way is to have a central controller, that accepts requests for bandwidth and then tries to determine who should have it next. As the network gets more complex, and does more different kinds of things, the controller has to start making all kinds of complex decisions about which process needs the bandwidth more. And the controller itself becomes a bottleneck, both because it has to physically keep up, and also because as the network gets more complex each individual node has to send more and more information about what it’s doing so that the controller can make intelligent decisions.
Eventually, you reach a point of diminishing returns, where the information required to let the controller know what to do is consuming more bandwidth than the data itself.
So a while ago, some researchers had the idea to try to set up a free market in bandwidth. They set up rules similar to a free market (i.e. a node can barter with another node for bandwidth, and has to pay a price. As bandwidth goes down, the price goes up). Nodes that have a critical need for bandwidth are willing to pay more. Give the nodes enough intelligence, and they start to realize that it’s smarter to try and organize themselves to use bandwidth when it’s cheaper.
So what you’re doing here, instead of having a super-smart central controller, is to have a whole bunch of nodes that are more autonomous and are given their own intelligence and ability to learn from the past. When they set this system loose, they found that nodes were organizing themselves together, using bandwidth more efficiently, scheduling more data transmission during ‘cheap’ bandwidth times, etc. If a node has a critical need for communication, it pays the higher price for bandwidth.
Another example is AI. There have been two basic schools in AI - one is to try to make smart programs through brute force (the central control model). Every possible behaviour and response is coded, and more and more complex ‘rule systems’ are built to try to cover all the exceptions and possibilities.
The other way to do AI is to set up a simple set of rules for ‘living’, and then to let the devices learn on their own and develop their own brains and responses. Neural networks are an example, and they can grow to be surprisingly complex and efficient, even though they are not being guided by anyone. The human brain works this way, and it has developed surprisingly complex structures spontaneously.
Capitalism is like a neural network. Human beings are the autonomous nodes, and the market system is the communication conduit between them for matters of resource allocation. Other types of media help provide information to guide decisions, and act as the closest thing to a ‘hive mind’ to help create concensus and group collaboration.
The end result is an amazingly complex system that grew out of nothing with almost no guidance. Government only affects the tiniest percentage of all interactions between people. The vast amount of order in our society arose spontaneously through the interactions of free people.
Here’s a group who have taken the market model to a fairly high level, including spot prices, ‘futures’, brokers, etc. Check out the plots of network efficiency improvements: http://arqos.csc.ncsu.edu/talks/1999_07_efslides.pdf
Here is an excellent web site on the Michigan Adaptive Resource Exchange, which has a very amusing acronym: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/MARX/
From the technical propsal:
In other words, markets aren’t just efficient, they are OPTIMAL. Assuming rational actors (an assumption that is accurate when applied to the economy as a whole), scarce resources are allocated as efficiently as possible.
Note again that I’m not talking about social justice. Free markets are the most efficient way to allocate scarce resources, but sometimes pure efficiency is not the goal. But remember, any time you muck with the markets for a social purpose, you do so at the cost of efficiency, which means you are lowering your wealth for some other good.
The optimality of markets is predicated on a number of assumptions, including the following.
All agents have perfect information.
Markets are complete. There is a market (and a price) for everything, including contingent markets and futures markets.
There are many buyers and sellers, so there is no monopoly power.
Property rights are completely defined for everything. (Includes air, water, etc.)
Transactions costs are zilch. (There might be quibbles on this last one.)
In the real world, none of this applies, so we are stuck with “2nd best” frameworks.
There is no theory that says that, given the existance of 1 market failure, any movements towards a freer market necessarily are more efficient. Again, see “The Theory of the 2nd Best”.
All true. Which is why I I’m not an anarchist. Some government is useful in keeping markets operating efficiently. Most importantly, a military, police force, and courts to maintain property rights. You can convince me that there *might be a need for anti-trust laws to prevent monopolies, although I believe they are wildly over-used, and the number of real cases of monopolies arising out of free market conditions is grossly over-stated.
I’m also in favor of government intrusion in areas where the market doesn’t work because prices aren’t efficiently distributed, or when external costs of transactions are not borne by the parties involved. Pollution, technical monopoly (one company owning all of the available resources of something, or owning the only road out of a community, etc), and other true market failures. But again, the number of these is much smaller than most activists want you to believe.
Basically, since markets are efficient and the best allocator of resources, the burden of proof should always be on those who want to interfere with market mechanisms. If you think there’s an honest-to-god market failure somewhere, prove your case. If you do, the next step would be to figure out the least amount of interference we need in order to bring the market back into line.
Note that minimum wage laws, government ‘job creation’ programs, farm subsidies, public television and radio, funding for the arts, and about 90% of the other functions of the modern welfare state do not pass this test, and are rather attempts to ‘improve’ upon a market system that is functioning perfectly well but just doesn’t reflect the values of the people who seek intervention.
*Basically, since markets are efficient and the best allocator of resources, the burden of proof should always be on those who want to interfere with market mechanisms. If you think there’s an honest-to-god market failure somewhere, prove your case. If you do, the next step would be to figure out the least amount of interference we need in order to bring the market back into line. *
Market failures are ubiquitous. Pointing them out is like shooting fish in barrels. So, no, markets are generally not “efficient” empirically, if by that you mean (Pareto?) optimal.
For example, one at a time: min wage laws. Krueger and Card have demonstrated the local monopolistic effects of employers. They have a dataset which shows no appreciable impact of changes in min wages. (I should also say that 2 other Federal Reserve economists have shown an effect with a superior dataset. Personally, I’m uneasy with minimum wage laws. But pointing out market failures in the labor market -or in any other market- is in practice a piece of cake.)
Govt job creation programs: Countercyclic government spending makes sense, provided very small frictions exist in the price setting mechanism.
farm subsidies Um. Um. Barriers to exit. If one farmer goes out of business, it is typical for his neighbor to buy up his plot of land. Thus, “exit” doesn’t lead automatically to lower output. Oh, and “imperfections in the land market”. (Of course existing farm programs do little or nothing to address this market failure, AFAIK. Luckily Sam set the bar pretty low above by claiming that markets give optimal efficiency. Whew. [sub]He also retracted that claim. We ignore that for now.[/sub])
public television and radio The market failure is externalities within the information market.
Sam has conceded the potential distributional benefits of governmental intervention, so I don’t have to go there.
90% of the other functions of the modern welfare state.: Well, you don’t mean 90% of the spending of the modern welfare state. A lot of that is military. And a lot of it is redistribution. Together, those 2 elements make up a majority of US Federal spending. (Most of the redistribution going to the elderly and disabled, admittedly).
Of course “government failure” is widespread as well. A point that Libertarians would be smart to emphasize, IMHO.