Don't Become a Sucker for Capitalists.

Post Reply New Topic

Fiscal libertarianism(Laissez-Faire capitalism/supply-side economics) has been a staple of American conservatives for generations. It is based on Calvinist mythology that the free market is some kind of magical thing that regulates itself and there is a "hidden order" that is divinely inspired.

So they;'ve use "socialism" as a dog whistle for decades and now it is starting to backfire. A lot of Americans are fed up with corporatism and there is a worldwide backlash against global capitalism.

No mythology, just the brutal reality that even the mightiest cannot ignore the laws of competition.

Fair question. I'll rephrase my scenario to better address the concept of effectiveness which is a good point on your part. Let's say we're playing a "pay to win" game, and I have a slightly higher K/D than you, but I have bought tokens which purchase upgrades and you are playing with starter sets and perhaps some early unlocks.

Now let's say we're putting together a team for a tournament, and all players have the same access to weapons and upgrades. Which among us is the superior choice?

To step outside the metaphor, let's consider the player who's "paying to win" as a manifestation of generational affluence and the player with starter sets as a manifestation of generational scarcity. I'm not saying the children of the poor will be equal to those of the rich (due to the genetic issues I keep mentioning), but some of them will be on the better side of the bell curve in terms of ability and will nevertheless be less likely to reach the achievement of those born on the worse side of the bell curve but with affluence. In this way of thinking, the notion of merit is shattered and replaced by...for lack of a better term...."privilege."

It depends. Do the upgrades take practice to use well compared to the basic set? How long does the team have to train me on the upgrades before the tournament? If the team manager has the time for me to get upto speed on the upgrades I'm the better choice. If the tournament is in a week and it will take me 6 months to get better than you on the upgrades than you are the better choice.

I don't think we're actually disagreeing much here. We both agree that:

1. There are advantages to being born to affluence relative to poverty.

2. Effectiveness differences may be due to both resources and ability.

3. It is reasonable to make hiring decisions on a combination of potential and effectiveness.

The real question is what if anything should be done to "level the playing field?" Short of stripping children from their parents I don't see how it is possible to make the playing field even. Even if you remove all money from the equation having parents of a certain type will still be advantageous. For example if you're aspiring to be a doctor having a parent who is a doctor guide you along the way is advantageous compared to someone who has a parent who is a plumber.

No I don't think we're disagreeing on the notion of potential/effectiveness...we're just using the concept to illustrate our differing biases on our politics.

I consider your point here a part of the reasonable limitations of redistributing advantage. Not much can be done to prevent advantage passing from a doctor to their child in terms of proficiency in the medical profession. Much can be done regarding penalties incurred from generational resource scarcity, however. I see little reason that most children can't grow up in an environment without survival stress and the lack of cultural/intellectual sophistication that leaves poor children at an immense disadvantage when competing with others.

There's a complexity regarding "fairness," and I think our back-and-forth has illuminated these nuances rather well. One cannot simply throw their hands in the air and say "well true equality is impossible therefore don't equalize anything" in my opinion. Some things can and should be addressed to further equality and benefit the actualization of human potential broadly. Some things can not be equalized and must be accepted, like the distribution of intelligence along a bell curve, for instance.

I feel like none of that matters unless we save the planet. As far as scientists are concerned we are readily creating our own doom. We should probably address that before worrying about big brother or this or that....because if we're all dead none of that will matter anymore. Best to save the planet and work out the kinks later, unfortunately at this time not sure there are enough people in on this idea.

At this time you cannot just ignore plastic pollution or air pollution and hope it goes away, and cover your ears and go bla bla bla when it comes to climate change, its a real issue in your face and maybe people you know will suffer due to the worse weather conditions going on, all over the world. Sorry to get a little off topic, but the ignorance of that topic is beyond anyoying. "well this part of the world has snow so global warming is fake news' the melting icebergs and such apparently don't exist in that fantasy mindset. Yet some people with that mindset have a lot of power and influence which is very unfortunate.

This is the part where I ask you what should be equalized, and why this cannot be done in the framework of a capitalist society? I think the world would be better if we didn't have children growing up in poverty. I don't see how private ownership and free markets percludes initiatives to eliminate poverty. I do believe that property rights and free markets have lifted millions out of poverty over the course of human history.

I desire the equalization of the genome as it relates to scarcity/abundance adaptations in particular. I see economics and its relation to familial competition as the means of this inequality.

Private ownership creates disparities of competitiveness between social classes which permits relative poverty as the inheritor class siphons the productive value of the others. The poor must compete in a market in which the costs of goods and living are impacted by the greater wealth in society. The current crisis in the U.S. housing market is a good example of this, in which the market has decided it is most profitable to construct expensive apartments/houses or to use them as a means of storing capital (like what wealthy Chinese families are doing) and middle class and affluent neighborhoods use their collective political power to prevent affordable apartments/houses from being built because it degrades the market value of their property (along with bringing in what they perceive to be undesirable cultural influence). Even if they could not use a government (if you're of the anarchist or libertarian disposition), they would form exclusive communities to preserve perceived advantage against undesirables, probably by means of militia.

My position is that technology, literacy/education, trade, and commerce have lifted millions out of poverty, not property rights (in particular as it relates to inheritance of capital over generations).

The big problem with socialism is if everything is distributed equally, what incentive is there to work harder than the next guy?

I have a socialist friend and when I asked him, he told me that in his socialist society, surgeons get no more resources/benefits than cashiers, because everything is distributed equally. The obvious problem with that is there is no incentive to take on the harder jobs if you stand to benefit as much from more menial labour. And it gets worse if people who aren't working at all receive the same as everyone who is working. What incentive is there to work?

Without private ownership all commerce and incentives are by necessity driven by centrally planned governmental decree. That is say we have a doctor with years of medical training and providing a valuable service to society. If the doctor does not have the right to own anything, than all they have is allocated to them by society (via the government) but still owned by society. Now if the doctor wants to exchange the resources allocated to them they have to do so at the governments pre-set levels otherwise the system collapses. Unequal exchanges (relative to the government set rates) allow for the accumulation of wealth and ownership and is in actuality indistinguishable from capitalism.

So in the ideal operation of this we have certain services and goods are exchangeable for other services and goods at a fixed rate set by a central authority. If the case is that goods and services are not exchangeable than our society lacks any incentives to provide valuable services (IE if a doctor gets the same as someone who does not work). If goods and services can be exchanged freely than we are operating under de-facto private ownership and are indistinguishable from capitalism.

People can say that Soviet Union Stalinism wasn't true communism and have a point. What they can't say is that Soviet Union Stalinism wasn't a command economy and it demonstrated all the failures of a command economy. Markets are too complex for a small group of people to efficiently set prices as evidenced by the Soviet Union's notorious economic inefficiency and wide-spread poverty.

Property rights are inextricably linked to free market trading. Free market trading has developed the technology, education, literacy that has benefited so many people.

People complain about the generational uber-rich because in their mind they haven't earned anything. But the only way to actually passively earn money is to loan it out to people who have better uses for it and get repaid with interest.

I failed to qualify my position on private ownership and certain nuances I have in my position regarding ownership of entities. I have stated my position on this more thoroughly in other threads, but obviously you can only rebut the information I am directly providing to you now, in which case your response is reasonable.

I support private ownership of a single individual who has built a successful enterprise and also his startup investors. I do not support splitting ownership into high volume traded shares on a public marketplace, and I do not support his or her right to pass any ownership to heirs. I would have the state take ownership when the founder no longer wishes to manage the entity or upon death, given compensation (once again this is a voluntary transaction) along with those initial investors based upon a standardized measurement system (expert reviewed, publicly available, and preferably somewhat automated to discourage unscrupulous behavior) to assess current value and future sustainability and growth (so as to make a good investment with state revenue).

So people can own things within limitations. I am not proposing a command economy or state "management." I would have the entities be run as they are now, with internal hierarchies with a profit incentive related to increasing their personal compensation which would be variable based upon skill of labor. It's just that profits which now normally proceed to shareholders would instead become revenue for the state to provide social services and upkeep various expenditures.

You might say to me "well that's kind of capitalist really," and my retort will be the narrow definition of capitalism I provided that began our argument. I'm not interested in semantic debates, however, and will relent to whatever terminology you find most suitable to describe my specific position.

This is an interesting proposal and not one I've seen before. I'll have to think through all the ramifications, but my initial reaction is you will end up with an entirely state run economy. Without investment money people won't be able to build companies to compete with the state run ones. Unless the state is providing startup capital for competitors to its own industries, but that is putting an awful lot of trust in the state.

Neither socialism or communism are equal wealth distribution. In a communist world, different communes would naturally have access different recources, due to their geographical locations.

And that's ok, because scientific socialists aren't trying to eliminate wealth inequality. What we do wan't to eliminate are class distinctions, because class systems squander human development and potential.


People that want to be doctors will be doctors. People that want to be janitors will be janitors.

The incentive is their own aspirations.

If a society has specific manual labour that needs performed, and there aren't enough volunteers. The commune can throw the task on rotation.

Some day in the future nearly every job may become fully automated. Socialism can allow everyone to benefit from automation, instead of the few.

People would have to acquire investment money from successful individuals who want passive income in their retirement so they can live a superior lifestyle. I am fine with these sort of "low level capital returns." I can also see startup investment in my sort of model becoming diffused into many small investors "nickel and diming" their contributions, which is different from continuously trading fractions of ownership at high volume. A lot of entities are successful before they become massively publicly traded, so I do feel this model already has modern precedent in terms of being functionable.

So there is investment money. On that realization, I would say that startups would find equal difficulty competing with established juggernauts as they do now. The state has an interest in permitting this and not rigging the market because it would eventually (either upon transaction or death) acquire an entity which has outcompeted its own assets, enhancing the value of the "public portfolio" over a long period of time.

As to state investment of startups...I also find this dubious considering corruption and other factors. The state can accurately assess an already successful businesses' value, in my opinion. It cannot so easily assess a "theoretical businesses'" value. I am not taking a firm position on whether the state should itself make investments to startups and will leave such a conversation to those with greater expertise than I.

Also...I want to once again emphasize that it is not "state run" but "state owned." I do not wish to destroy the motivations inherent to profit driven internal hierarchies and replace it with inefficient bureaucratic management (although anyone who has insight to how corporations work will tell you that they themselves are not really the most efficient in terms of decision making, either. They are slightly better at it than the state, however.)

Taken me a while to get back to this (have had a crazy few days at work). I think your investment pool is still going to be significantly smaller than the current investment pool for a simple reason: you don't have any generationally accrued wealth as large pots of money to invest. Also having it such that companies cannot be publicly traded but still allowing small investments seems to me just a less efficient means of doing the same thing.

I still hate "state owned." In my view the state already has too much power without giving it additional things to own. I know there are those who think the "investment class" of the U.S. has too much economic and political power, but this would essentially be giving the government that power in addition to the power it already has.

I am intending to follow up with you Antrax. I've just been busy, highly stressed, and a bit avoidant. I want to provide a quality response and am just not up to it at this moment. I'm a bit zapped.

I do want to say that I have appreciated the nature of our exchange. You can debate someone you disagree with in a polite, reality oriented fashion without getting personally bitter because someone challenges you.

So many people can't do that, and I strongly respect your ability to do so. I crave that sort of back and forth. I'll respond when I am better capable of summoning the intellectual energy.