Why is systemic poverty intractable?

Right…let’s get rid of the thing that has single handed-ly managed to reduce poverty the most in human history because, you know, it’s really, really bad. And stuff. As for laissez-fair capitalism, that’s so 19th century, but certainly we should continue to fret about something that hasn’t existed in living memory (and is debatable that it EVER really did in it’s pure form, if we want to talk about true Scotsmen). :stuck_out_tongue:

The same would have been true, at its peak, of feudalism.

Capitalism has done what it can; now it’s time to move on to something that will be even better: a free society, a libertarian society, which is to say a communist society.

I don’t really want to get side-tracked into a debate of which wealthy Western countries have the superior political/economic model. What is more telling to me that regardless of their wealth and power, the USA, Japan, Germany, France, UK and every other major economic power still suffers from issues with poverty for some segment of their population.

Countered by empirical evidence. We have a salary floor in this country (minimum wage), and yet there is effectively no ceiling as we have some people (not many) who make billions.

I don’t think any of those words mean what you think they mean. Since they are all mutually exclusive concepts. :confused:

Um, no…it wouldn’t have been. Since more humans were better off under earlier non-feudal systems.

No, it hasn’t…it’s still the engine that is doing the most to reduce global poverty that it’s mind boggling that you’d even think it’s done…or that there is anything that could replace it and do more.

As for communism, it’s to laugh, considering their track record at reducing human poverty or suffering. And ironic, considering the most successful ‘communist’ countries today incorporate many aspects of capitalism into their economic systems…which is the primary reason they ARE even nominally successful today.

Lets not get too rash about this maybe we could take one country divide it and let one half be run by communists and the other half by capitalists. We could wait 50 years and see which is better. My prediction is that the communist half would experience famine, poverty, gulags, and repression.
I also predict that the capitalist side would see prosperity and democracy.
This is not a hard prediction since everywhere communism is tried famine and despair reign and everywhere capitalism is tried wealth is created.

Getting back to the OP. Systematic poverty is not intractable, it’s just very very difficult. Thing is, poverty is normal. It isn’t that we have to explain the bizarre spectacle of people in poverty. What we have to explain is how some people aren’t in poverty.

How did that happen? Well, for a great many centuries, the way to become wealthy was to own a bunch of land, and everyone who lived and worked on that land had to give you a portion of their production. It’s not easy becoming rich by taking grains of rice one by one out of the fingers of starving subsistence farmers but over the centuries people have done it. The main way is to take some of that stolen rice and distribute it to guys with swords and horses, and if the farmers don’t like it they can answer to your thugs. The feudal system is easy to understand, it works exactly like the mafia, only with no cops.

Some people think that the world still works this way. There is a finite amount of stuff in the world, and the way you get rich is to pry the stuff out of the fingers of poor people. Except where did your car and your iPod come from? Did they just grow out of the ground? Wealth has to be created, it doesn’t just drop from the sky.

I mean, in one sense the raw materials, land, sunlight, water, air, and so on do just drop out of the sky. But they drop out of the sky in Somalia just the same as in Norway. The oil under Qatar has been there for thousands of years and the Qatari emirs were just the guys who owned the biggest herd of goats.

Human organization and ingenuity is needed to turn worthless toxic black goo into valuable gasoline and fuel oil. Like, a lot of organization and ingenuity. No, more than that.

I’m not sure minor economic powers don’t also suffer from this issue. Qatar has been mentioned and I don’t think $100K annually is the average wage for ALL the workers there, just the citizens. We’d have a big advantage if we could just deport the poor like they could do in Qatar. I think we’d find every society has some segment of their population who are financially irresponsible. There’s a reason for poverty that’s separate from economic or political systems.

Uh.

Libertarianism is and always has been fundamentally anti-capitalist in orientation.

Communism is freedom: by guaranteeing each individual an equal share of social wealth, each individual is left free to pursue whatever peaceful ends s/he wishes without having to subordinate hirself to someone else or to a collective simply to ensure access to the material requirements of survival.

Why is it that when you attempt to describe the supposed ills of communism, you list a bunch of things that happened in a non-communist society?

No True Scotsman, ehe? :stuck_out_tongue:

Not at all. It’s not fallacious to say that something that lacks all the essential and fundamental characteristics of a communist society (general-reciprocity exchange, egalitarian distribution of wealth, no hierarchy, no social classes) is in fact not communist.

But who does the work? For an equal share, I’m going to sit on my dead ass and do nothing. I don’t get it, if everybody is equally poor, how does that solve poverty?

Breaking news from Jellybeantopia, a new an free source of FD&C Red #5 has been found. But we have to send a ship to get it clear round the world. The workers can’t afford this, so forget them. Problem is that if one of the owners invests all his jelly beans, and the ship sinks, he’ll be worse off that the workers. Each owner will not take that risk. Ah, wise owners decide to pool their jelly beans and share the risk of this venture, so if the ship sinks, they’ll hurt, but all survive and remain better off than workers.

Capitalism at it’s finest.

How so? It’s my understanding that one of the major tenets of libertarianism is of laissez-faire capitalism.

And the fundamental flaw of communism is that it takes away the incentives for individuals to create the social wealth it needs to distribute. It just assumes the wealth is already just sitting out there. That’s why only fuckups, hippies and academics are proponents of communism.
Also, by definition, communism IS subordinating yourself to a collective.

Kind of in the same way that a society that lacks all essential characteristics of laissez-fair capitalism isn’t, well, a laissez-fair capitalist country, no? :stuck_out_tongue: The thing is, since no society has been able to be the True Scotsman of the Communist, it says something about trying to achieve the ideal. Trying to hand wave away the fact that many countries have made the attempt to be communist, consider themselves to BE communist countries, and all of them have been a pretty epic failure (except those who have morphed their economic systems, ironically, into quasi-capitalist ones) is a bit ridiculous…IMHO. Real world implementation of a political or economic philosophy/system is all sufficient data to determine what is possible in the real world. Attempting to perpetually hand wave that away and say that they aren’t REALLY communist countries while holding up some utopian idea that has never been implemented isn’t an argument that holds much water.

Then your understanding is incorrect.

Once again, your understanding is incorrect. In a communist society, people do what needs to get done because, well, shit’s gotta get done to live and have a functioning society. Just like they did before capitalist exploitation and oppression came along.

False.

Absolutely correct. A laissez-faire capitalist society, fortunately, does not and has not ever existed. If it did, it would be even more of an authoritarian nightmare than what we have today.

To be perfectly clear: I know exactly what the so-called laissez-faire advocates want–after all, I was one of them for a decade and a half.

Not actually relevant. It’s like saying no one should build an airplane since no one’s built an airplane before (at the time during which that had in fact been the case).

This is also demonstrably false. The very idea of a “communist country” is a contradiction in terms. It’s certainly not something that can be accomplished via a state, or a chauvinistic social order.

Are you thinking of the Soviet Union and its ilk? None of them ever considered themselves to have achieved communism. In fact, if you had the slightest semblance of a clue as to their claimed (though not actual) ideological program, you’d know that had they ever claimed to be a communist society, the very justification for their state (which is patently incompatible with communism) would cease to exist, and they were smart enough to recognize this.

Yes but communism in the developing world usually has the support of large groups of peasants and low level workers who realize their lives aren’t getting better. In those situations there is wealth among the business and political elite that just isn’t being redistributed well. You claim only hippies, academics and fuckups support communism but under its height communists controlled about 1/3 of the planet. Granted they were run by fuckups like Stalin & Mao, but the rise of communism as a worldwide phenomena didn’t occur in a vacuum where only hippies and academics wanted it.

I think communism has fallen apart as an ideology (even the remaining 5 communist governments on earth have mostly given up on the concept of economic communism) but democratic socialism has taken over as a middle road to still support economic growth and democratic institutions while ensuring the economic growth benefits everyone.

As far as poverty, as long as GDP keeps growing and income inequality goes down poverty should decline. But if GDP grows and grows but all the growth goes to the top 5% then you are not only not going to see a decline in poverty, you will see larger and larger political pushes to the left to redistribute the wealth to reduce poverty like latin america has seen in the last decade.

Venezuela under Chavez cut the poverty rate in half. If the US had the income inequality of a place like France then poverty here would be far less. If GDP grows and a nation gets wealthier and wealthier, but the economic system doesn’t distribute it well, the population will become restless. In a democratic system that likely means the rise of democratic socialist politicians. In an authoritarian dictatorship it means the rise of communist guerrilla fighters.

I was going to suggest that the Mortgage Backed Security market was a laissez-faire example, except there were no government rules protecting property rights. I’m looking at some states using laissez-faire in their Real Estate market, no regulation, no subsidies and no tariffs; and a minimum amount of rules protecting property rights. It’s a “buyer beware” environment, once escrow closes, the new owner is on the hook for the spent nuclear fuel rods buried on the property, they have absolutely no civil recourse against the previous owners.

You should study the history of the Amana Colonies in eastern Iowa. It’s a textbook example of a successful communist society. They did quite well as long as their religious imperative lasted.

We tried this in Jellybeantopia, but a couple of the former workers didn’t want to give up 2 jelly beans to get the needed FD&C Red #5. So we shot them and used their jelly beans instead. A happy ending for a failed experiment.