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I apologize if someone in this thread already has made an economical argument. went through about 15 pages and everyone seems focused on "human nature".
The Great Depression taught the world unrestricted Laissez-faire capitalism will eventually fail. In order for capitalism in general to work, the market needs to be competitive. The issue is, market is never perfectly competitive.
It is easy for bigger entities in the market to drive smaller ones out of business through sheer means of force. (i.e. A company with large market share can lower its price below its cost until its competitors are out of business, since it can last longer due to its size) Eventually creating bunch of monopolies which are not economically efficient entities in a market.This is what happened during the 20s in USA, and when these companies failed due to sudden decrease in demand, the market could not handle the shock and collapsed.
The argument against a state is that state creates inefficiency by control, and market would do fine if not better without this control. unrestricted capitalism was a failed experiment in that the Laissez-faire market itself ironically created inefficiency through monopolies.
While taxes indeed create inefficiency, the government creates efficiency by creating rules in the market, such as Anti-Trust laws.The states' job (a capitalistic one anyway) is to steer the market towards reaching the perfect competition.
Financial market is another big one. Who gets to control supply of money in an unrestricted market? Go back to bartering? Standardization (not just money for this) leads to efficiency and in turn leads to faster development. Same thing with investment markets like stocks and bonds. Even with a government entities like SEC in place, people STILL find way to cheat the stock market. Without any regulations in these markets, its too easy to exploit the system especially in an age of the internet.
Also, things that should be public, like healthcare (yes americans, it should be public) and education. Health care because of moral hazard and adverse selection, education because of unequal opportunity among people. Go look up Akerlof's lemon argument if you want to know more about why private health insurance doesn't work.
Education...in an unrestricted market, people who have rich parents have enormous advantage over people who have poor parents simply because schools would not be free in this kind of society.hell, calling the police wouldn't be free. House on fire? $$$ please. I'm sorry you can't drive this way because you didn't pay the fee to my company.
People argue that with enough demand, laws, infrastructure and other things will be created through private means. They are probably right. And people in this kind of society would pay dues to road companies, police companies, schools, hospitals and fire stations instead of the government, paying just as much "tax" if not more. In fact I think we would have to pay more since everything would be localized but that is beside the point.
So what's the difference? Firms are out to maximize profit. DEMOCRATIC government is out to look out for public interest.Result of Anarcho-captalism will be disgusting social inequality where the rich gets best of all and the poor are left in the dust with even smaller opportunities than now. Big companies driving everyone else out of business, essentially becoming a government entities. And when these enormous companies fail, the society will collapse.
TL;DR The Great Depression already taught us why unrestricted capitalism is bad.
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On September 18 2010 13:04 scion wrote:
I apologize if someone in this thread already has made an economical argument. went through about 15 pages and everyone seems focused on "human nature".
On September 18 2010 13:04 scion wrote:
The Great Depression taught the world unrestricted Laissez-faire capitalism will eventually fail. In order for capitalism in general to work, the market needs to be competitive. The issue is, market is never perfectly competitive.
It is easy for bigger entities in the market to drive smaller ones out of business through sheer means of force. (i.e. A company with large market share can lower its price below its cost until its competitors are out of business, since it can last longer due to its size) Eventually creating bunch of monopolies which are not economically efficient entities in a market.This is what happened during the 20s in USA, and when these companies failed due to sudden decrease in demand, the market could not handle the shock and collapsed.
The argument against a state is that state creates inefficiency by control, and market would do fine if not better without this control. unrestricted capitalism was a failed experiment in that the Laissez-faire market itself ironically created inefficiency through monopolies.
While taxes indeed create inefficiency, the government creates efficiency by creating rules in the market, such as Anti-Trust laws.The states' job (a capitalistic one anyway) is to steer the market towards reaching the perfect competition.
Perfect competition is the perfect nirvana fallacy... not only is it unrealistic, but it is questionable whether it is desirable at all. Perfect competition would have you thinking that the market reaches an ideal point where all suppliers sell the same crap, at the same price, side by side on the supermarket shelves. But this is ridiculous. Market competition is not about that at all. Market competition IS about product and price discrimination, about positional advantages, about cutting corners and trying to be the best.
Like you said, the market is never perfectly competitive, but that is a great thing. It would suck to live in a world where government mandates everyone to be equal. What you call perfect competition is actually "no competition", because the best are handicapped by regulation, and the worst are subsidized at the cost of everyone else. Hardly desirable.
I would recommend neoclassicals to stop looking at charts for economical guidance and instead ask themselves whether breaking legs can lead to greater economical performance. A much easier and accurate question; one that doesn't assume people are robots who follow a one-line utility function at that. Perfect competition would be great for robots, I'll agree with that.
Also
On September 18 2010 13:04 scion wrote:
This is what happened during the 20s in USA
No it was not, I invite you to see the revisionist evidence on the case, and stop accepting the statist excuses at face value. See any related link on the OP.
On September 18 2010 13:04 scion wrote:
Financial market is another big one. Who gets to control supply of money in an unrestricted market? Go back to bartering? Standardization (not just money for this) leads to efficiency and in turn leads to faster development. Same thing with investment markets like stocks and bonds. Even with a government entities like SEC in place, people STILL find way to cheat the stock market. Without any regulations in these markets, its too easy to exploit the system especially in an age of the internet.
Are you saying the socialized inspector or watchdog is better than a private one? Because this is what comes down to. Never mind that you're criticizing a state watchdog for not being able to do what he's supposed to do (I agree with that), but you're implying that no one else could do any better. Why?
Technology goes both ways; as much as it helps fraudsters, it helps investigators as well, so unless you want to elaborate on why is the case that technology enables fraud more than defense, I don't feel like elaborating myself.
On September 18 2010 13:04 scion wrote:
Also, things that should be public, like healthcare (yes americans, it should be public) and education. Health care because of moral hazard and adverse selection, education because of unequal opportunity among people. Go look up Akerlof's lemon argument if you want to know more about why private health insurance doesn't work.
That is a ridiculous argument, I'm sorry but it makes 0 sense. It can be applied to anything. Even government itself. It's an argument of risk, right? Because the seller can assess risks better, it means he has an "unfair" advantage. Of course he does, he also has the "advantage" of being able to set prices, of producing or servicing only what he wants, and many other "advantages". But the market doesn't rely on honesty or angels. It relies on free market entry, aka what I call competition (you have a twisted version thereof most likely), meaning that if someone's getting away with selling horrible garbage, it not only sends a bad message about that seller's inefficient servicing for customers all around eventually, but it sends a positive message to potential entrepreneurs to enter that market, outperform that ass, and profit themselves with delivering a more efficient and honest product.
If I'm not mistaken, it also seems Akerlof's arguments are most used in regulated environments, where most people are FORCED to buy the same shit, well then, obviously there's going to be a problem there, but it's not because of limited information or some other lame excuse, it's because the market aka consumers and businesses aren't allowed to adapt. Whenever the government intervenes with it's own idea of what "competition" is, it stifles it with the government's own limited knowledge, not fixing the problem at all and possibly creating new external ones.
And speaking of government, it should be regarded as the institution filled with the most lemons in history anyways. The socialized choice of representatives will always give the advantage to those politically connected to sell the public out on empty promises and excuses.
On September 18 2010 13:04 scion wrote:
Education...in an unrestricted market, people who have rich parents have enormous advantage over people who have poor parents simply because schools would not be free in this kind of society.hell, calling the police wouldn't be free. House on fire? $$$ please. I'm sorry you can't drive this way because you didn't pay the fee to my company.
Who pays the schools today, and why can't those same people afford education without the state? It's the people themselves; schools are paid through property taxes of the region... the idea that the poor couldn't wipe their own butts without the state is a joke. It's actually the opposite, the state education makes people more impoverished. $10k/year/student, when private schools do it for $2.5k? That's ideal for you?
State roads, with 300k deaths a year, gas tax with 50 cents per every gallon? All drivers already pay abusive prices to the monopolized street owner aka state...
I don't know about firefighters but I hear most of them are funded voluntarily. Please provide evidence that 1- they aren't and cannot be paid voluntarily, and 2- it would be more efficient to pay them through taxes, before you pull out the gunverment.
On September 18 2010 13:04 scion wrote:
People argue that with enough demand, laws, infrastructure and other things will be created through private means. They are probably right. And people in this kind of society would pay dues to road companies, police companies, schools, hospitals and fire stations instead of the government, paying just as much "tax" if not more. In fact I think we would have to pay more since everything would be localized but that is beside the point.
It wouldn't be more expensive, nor would it necessarily be more localized. Competing entrepreneurs would determine what model is most efficient to provide a service, and that can be either small or international depending on the demand and the service.
On September 18 2010 13:04 scion wrote:
So what's the difference? Firms are out to maximize profit. DEMOCRATIC government is out to look out for public interest.Result of Anarcho-captalism will be disgusting social inequality where the rich gets best of all and the poor are left in the dust with even smaller opportunities than now. Big companies driving everyone else out of business, essentially becoming a government entities. And when these enormous companies fail, the society will collapse.
Biased comparison. Both systems seek to fulfill demand. A fair examination would be to compare the incentives and mechanisms of a representative v. entrepreneur.
Also, the greatest monopoly is the state, so if you're against an entity forcibly putting people out of business, how about looking at the Leviathan itself? Businesses can only put one another out of business by better supplying demand, hardly a perversion of the NAP or private property, and hardly something undesirable either. If it wasn't representative of consumer demand, then people can simply stop buying.
On September 18 2010 13:04 scion wrote:
TL;DR The Great Depression already taught us why unrestricted capitalism is bad.
The Great Depression already taught us that government intervention only makes it worse. Certainly wages are sticky upward when president Hoover calls for every businesses to keep them up (along with other things), when they should go down, and then, certainly unemployment is going to go 20% because of that.
Again, I invite you to look at the material in the OP.
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Sanya12364 Posts
On September 18 2010 13:04 scion wrote:
While taxes indeed create inefficiency, the government creates efficiency by creating rules in the market, such as Anti-Trust laws.The states' job (a capitalistic one anyway) is to steer the market towards reaching the perfect competition.
Anti-trust laws as oligopoly protectionist laws are even more harmful to the consumer than the monopolies they proport to prevent.
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money, education, health care, fire stations, policing are all no problems for a market to provide. Fire protection service used to be provided by entrepreneurs and it can easy be provided by them again. Plenty of houses in California are protected by private fire protection companies.
DEMOCRATIC government is out to look out for public interest.
So idealistic and naive.
Government will look out for its OWN INTERESTS. This is true of any organization. In a democracy, the feedback for bad behavior is in elections. This has certain flaws and short comings. In a marketplace, the feedback for bad behavior is going out of business or public stonewalling and other forms of ill-will. This has another set of flaws and short comings.
The Great Depression already taught us why unrestricted capitalism is bad.
The Great Depression was a great experiment with government manipulation of capitalism. The unrestricted capitalism argument was made in 1932 and bureaucrats were given their tools in 1933 and 1934. Yet, the depression droned on for years afterwards including an echo depression starting in 1937.
And Hoover was no free marketeer, himself.
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Tan geng I still don't know if you're a minarchist or what
care to explain?
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Oh man you wrote alot.
On September 18 2010 16:30 Yurebis wrote:
No it was not, I invite you to see the revisionist evidence on the case, and stop accepting the statist excuses at face value. See any related link on the OP.
While there is still state involved, economy before the great depression was extremely liberal capitalism, with minimal government intervention, especially compared to today. As you probably know, monopolies arose in bunch of key industry like steel, oil and automobile because of it. Rampant insider trading within the stock market led to its collapse. While I agree that it wasn't a completely unrestricted capitalism (duh) I do not see how the market would prevent such behavior when there are even less rules.
Are you saying the socialized inspector or watchdog is better than a private one? Because this is what comes down to. Never mind that you're criticizing a state watchdog for not being able to do what he's supposed to do (I agree with that), but you're implying that no one else could do any better. Why?
Technology goes both ways; as much as it helps fraudsters, it helps investigators as well, so unless you want to elaborate on why is the case that technology enables fraud more than defense, I don't feel like elaborating myself.
You didnt answer the key question in my paragraph. Who controls the supply of money in a Anarcho capitalism? One of the biggest power a government have is the power to print money. If you leave this to a firm, surely they will use this enormous power to form a government of their own?
Firms exist to make profit. Who is going to pay these investigators for what reasons? Let's say there was a demand for fraud investigators. Under current system, it is the representative of the public interest, aka the state, that is paying the investigators.
Without such entity, who is supposed to pay these guys? NYSE? the Investors?
Fraud firms have no incentive to pay for obvious reasons.
Honest firms have no incentive because they wouldn't use/need the service.
Investors would pay for auditing a firm they would like to invest but for fraud investigation? why should they pay when it wasn't their fault?
[B]On September 18 2010 16:30 Yurebis wrote:
That is a ridiculous argument, I'm sorry but it makes 0 sense. It can be applied to anything. Even government itself. It's an argument of risk, right? Because the seller can assess risks better, it means he has an "unfair" advantage. Of course he does, he also has the "advantage" of being able to set prices, of producing or servicing only what he wants, and many other "advantages". But the market doesn't rely on honesty or angels. It relies on free market entry, aka what I call competition (you have a twisted version thereof most likely), meaning that if someone's getting away with selling horrible garbage, it not only sends a bad message about that seller's inefficient servicing for customers all around eventually, but it sends a positive message to potential entrepreneurs to enter that market, outperform that ass, and profit themselves with delivering a more efficient and honest product.
If I'm not mistaken, it also seems Akerlof's arguments are most used in regulated environments, where most people are FORCED to buy the same shit, well then, obviously there's going to be a problem there, but it's not because of limited information or some other lame excuse, it's because the market aka consumers and businesses aren't allowed to adapt. Whenever the government intervenes with it's own idea of what "competition" is, it stifles it with the government's own limited knowledge, not fixing the problem at all and possibly creating new external ones.
And speaking of government, it should be regarded as the institution filled with the most lemons in history anyways. The socialized choice of representatives will always give the advantage to those politically connected to sell the public out on empty promises and excuses.
I don't think you understood the lemon argument.
Let me lay the argument out, using Health insurance industry as an example.
Let's say there are 2 types of people, the healthy and the unhealthy.
The unhealthy people want health insurance because they know they will have to go see a doctor often. (bad family history, smoker, bad life style, ect...)
Where as healthy people sort of want health insurance if its cheap. They won't be needing it much after all.
Basic coverage plans will be good deal for the sickly people. The result is people who are confident about their needs will purchase health insurance. Meaning they WILL have to use the insurance at some point.
As you probably know, insurance cannot thrive with most of the customers making a claim. Insurers are forced to cut benefits and raise the premium to cover its cost, causing people in the middle (sort of healthy) to cancel because its too expensive. This forces insurance companies to raise the premiums even higher in order to stay in business. In the end, only the most sickly and the rich will be able to afford health insurance.
Sure, the health insurance company can attempt to make more thorough background check in order to make better estimate, but the nature of this business dictates that they will NEVER be able to accurately guess a person's medical cost. If insurance companies cannot estimate the cost better than its consumer, it will simply go out of business under the burden of claims. Sickly consumers also have plenty of incentive to lie about their history.
Insurance industry can only thrive under "mutual ignorance". That's why theft/fire/automobile insurance sort of work. where as for health, you KNOW your own health. You KNOW your family history. Insurance companies dont.
This is why people keep saying Healthcare in USA is failing. This is why the USA is spending 12% of its GDP on health care. (as of 2002) compared to Canada (9%) , UK (6%) and Japan (6%) This is why 47 million+ Americans are uninsured.
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This topic fast becoming trivial and boring. There exists such thing as constitutional engineering and stuff, but it is usually based on already working models, or nearly working models. However, the topic's political debate is spiraling downwards and it is becoming as already mentioned theorycrafting and science fiction. Hell, science fiction is sooooo much more interesting than what this topic has become.
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On September 18 2010 16:30 Yurebis wrote:
Who pays the schools today, and why can't those same people afford education without the state? It's the people themselves; schools are paid through property taxes of the region... the idea that the poor couldn't wipe their own butts without the state is a joke. It's actually the opposite, the state education makes people more impoverished. $10k/year/student, when private schools do it for $2.5k? That's ideal for you?
State roads, with 300k deaths a year, gas tax with 50 cents per every gallon? All drivers already pay abusive prices to the monopolized street owner aka state...
I don't know about firefighters but I hear most of them are funded voluntarily. Please provide evidence that 1- they aren't and cannot be paid voluntarily, and 2- it would be more efficient to pay them through taxes, before you pull out the gunverment.
The rich already has better education under current system. MUCH better in fact. Under current system, private schools are not necessarily meant to make profit, but rather for prestige and higher quality education. Even amongst public schools, there are significant gaps between richer area and poorer areas.
The great equalizer here is the state. The state collects tax from its populace, and redistributes to public schools in a way so that poorer area that can't afford a school gets as much funding as richer areas's public school. The differences between 2 area even amongst public school occur because as you mentioned, portion of the property tax goes to fund portion of the public school system. If this were to be replaced by a private system, firms have no incentive to provide decent education to poorer areas that can't afford it. (the base funding from State/province government is gone)
Road and the firefighter I said sarcastically. However about the road, Japan is a great example of this. Lot of roads are tolled and the prices are absurdly high because there is no regulation on it. Unless you are gona claim firms will build multiple freeway between LA and San Francisco to compete, which would be completely absurd waste of space and create economic inefficiency through opportunity cost of the land.
On September 18 2010 16:30 Yurebis wrote:
It wouldn't be more expensive, nor would it necessarily be more localized. Competing entrepreneurs would determine what model is most efficient to provide a service, and that can be either small or international depending on the demand and the service.
It would definitely be more expensive for the less wealthy areas. I said before, State act as the equalizer. State collects money from the wealthy and redistributes it so that everyone gets equal funding. If the wealthy suddenly only pays for his own police, school, and other public service, it would in fact not become any more expensive than it is now for the wealthy. but for the less wealthy, they've suddenly lost Federal, state, provincial funding and likely to give up on certain services.
On September 18 2010 16:30 Yurebis wrote:
Biased comparison. Both systems seek to fulfill demand. A fair examination would be to compare the incentives and mechanisms of a representative v. entrepreneur.
Also, the greatest monopoly is the state, so if you're against an entity forcibly putting people out of business, how about looking at the Leviathan itself? Businesses can only put one another out of business by better supplying demand, hardly a perversion of the NAP or private property, and hardly something undesirable either. If it wasn't representative of consumer demand, then people can simply stop buying.
Business can put one another by aggressively lowering its price below its cost, which is by no means having better knowledge of supply and demand. By lowering the revenue below its cost, firm will suffer, but so will the competitor. If your firm is bigger, it can outlast their firm. After your competition starves out, you can then set the price to whatever you want.
Also, Who do you think has better incentive to provide better public welfare structure to the less wealthy? The government, who treats these people as potential voters or Firms, who are out to make more profit? Firms have no reason to provide less wealthy areas with anything more than what they can pay, which is going to be FAR less than what they are getting now.
This brings us to the great "equal opportunity" argument. This is a fundamental policy for any developed nation's education policy. To provide everyone with equal opportunity. The reason why less wealthy areas receive funding from federal/provincial/state government. (However, I do not mean they have equal chance now)
When firms control education, kids unlucky enough to be born of a poor parents will have far less opportunity than they do now. In fact, it may become like 18th century where there were no middle class, but rich employers and the labourers.
On September 18 2010 16:30 Yurebis wrote:
The Great Depression already taught us that government intervention only makes it worse. Certainly wages are sticky upward when president Hoover calls for every businesses to keep them up (along with other things), when they should go down, and then, certainly unemployment is going to go 20% because of that.
Again, I invite you to look at the material in the OP.
Now that i've read this, I think you are mixing up what I said. What I meant was, era BEFORE the great depression was unrestrictive free market. We had firms doing whatever they want up until that point. It is when the Great Depression hit, people realized government needs to control certain aspects in the market in order to maintain stability and fairness.
Hoover is a terrible example. Hoover did not think The great depression was a big problem and believed free market would fix itself. It did not, so he made some terrible efforts to restore the economy (that didn't work) in order to win the election.
The whole point of talk of government intervention is NOT, I repeat, NOT to get an economy out from a slum. The point is, the regulations set in place will prevent economy from going down that road in the first place. Subprime crisis is good example. It is no where near the level of the Great depression, nor will it get to that level. We got into a recession because of it, not a depression.
Again, what I meant was events leading upto the great depression was a lesson about unrestricted economy, NOT the depression itself.
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Anti-trust laws as oligopoly protectionist laws are even more harmful to the consumer than the monopolies they proport to prevent.
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money, education, health care, fire stations, policing are all no problems for a market to provide. Fire protection service used to be provided by entrepreneurs and it can easy be provided by them again. Plenty of houses in California are protected by private fire protection companies.
You didn't make any arguments why anti trust laws are harmful than monopolies.
It prevents price fixing and abusing firm's size to destroy the market.
Again, Lack of these laws lead us to the Great depression, because in a free economy, big firms eventually take over smaller firms using its size, and when it fails, there is nothing that can replace it immediately, causing chaos such as the Great depression.
For the wealthy, it does not matter what the system is. Monarchy, Communism, Fascism, it will end up all working for the rich, because they have the resources to make their life comfortable.
I'd like to ask you, Are there any people below upper middle class that uses private fire protection companies?
So idealistic and naive.
Government will look out for its OWN INTERESTS. This is true of any organization. In a democracy, the feedback for bad behavior is in elections. This has certain flaws and short comings. In a marketplace, the feedback for bad behavior is going out of business or public stonewalling and other forms of ill-will. This has another set of flaws and short comings.
Idealistic? I merely stated what it was meant to be.Time and again I say this. In an unrestricted market, the most dominant firm will eventually take over the majority of the market share. History has taught us this. Election replaces the government. There are no equivalent replacement for a monopoly.
What about necessary goods? like gasoline? Speaking of which, who should BP answer to if there were "no representation of the public interest"? Are you gona stop buying BP oil to protest for the spill? because people attempted that and BP is doing just fine.
The Great Depression was a great experiment with government manipulation of capitalism. The unrestricted capitalism argument was made in 1932 and bureaucrats were given their tools in 1933 and 1934. Yet, the depression droned on for years afterwards including an echo depression starting in 1937.
And Hoover was no free marketeer, himself.
I agree with your first sentence. Let me state what i said again.. The events leading upto the great depression taught us that unrestricted free market is bad. Both the government and freemarket is terrible for getting an economy out of such state. the point of the government is prevent economy from going into such state in the first place.
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Just reading the old book "To have or to be?" by Erich Fromm. It's from 1976 but already adressing the same issues beeing discussed all the time today.
Actually I didn't read past the first chapter yet (started yesterday), but as the title states it's about the difference in defining yourself via your possession or via yourself.
He critizes the idea of greed as the main idea of kapitalism and shows how it even changes our language towards using "to have" plus nouns instead of only verbs to describe the same thing.
Also how the general mentality shifted, using poems as an example... the modern english poem, a man picking a flower to examine it more closely although it means killing the flower, compared to an old japanese poem which only describes the flower beeing seen. And, as a compromise, Goethe who digs out the whole flower and plants it in his garden so it can live although he took it.
About the capitalism overall, he says that we move right towards our own doom with our eyes open, but without changing anything for real. Gotta continue reading now ^^
Volker Pispers, german cabarret artist, also shows some prime examples of how absurd capitalism is.
Volkswagen stated that they need 7% additional productivity per year to stay in germany.
This means either producing the same amount of cars with 7% less workers. Won't work for a long time because you soon have no workers left at all, and this way you can't produce cars.
Other way is reducing their loans by 7% a year. Won't work either because soon they wouldn't get anything anymore and nobody would work without a loan.
So the only way working on long range is producing 7% more cars for the same cost each year. But, already, there are 20% more cars beeing produced than bought. And the increase is exponential...
To assisst this kind of growth as it's required in kapitalism, our children would have to by a new car every month at least.
So, capitalism slowly reaches the own limits. No way to avoid that. Productivity can't increase forever as markets are saturated at a certain levels and production costs/loans can't be decreased beyound a certain limit.
I think the whole idea of capitalism simply is a surrender. We surrender to bad traits of humans. It's like "Ok, our previous systems could not deal with bad humans as things like greed and egoism will damage our system. So we just make greed and egoism be the main path in our system and try to make the best of it".
That's a declaration of surrender, nothing else. It's logic that a system based on greed, egoism and eternal growth can't work forever, it's just a question of time until the limits are reached and the system will change drastically.
I think the general idea of granting freedom to everyone is good, but groups and companies have to be restricted in some way. It would be hard to find an overall formula on how that should happen but it might be possible to find one. However, I think the best way is to start living with the least consumption of ressources. For example heading for 100% clean power. Yeah I know it's gonna take a long time but we should be able to do it until 2100 or something like that with relative ease.
Then trying to use regrowing ressources like wood to the best possible amount, replacing things like plastic, while aiming for the most efficient way of recycling non-regrowing ressources like metals as efficiently as possible.
Also democracy heavily depends on the education of the citizens so I hope it will become much much better as well... Should be the prime path to have more mutual understanding on earth leading to less conflicts.
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On September 18 2010 20:09 teekesselchen wrote:
Just reading the old book "To have or to be?" by Erich Fromm. It's from 1976 but already adressing the same issues beeing discussed all the time today.
Actually I didn't read past the first chapter yet (started yesterday), but as the title states it's about the difference in defining yourself via your possession or via yourself.
He critizes the idea of greed as the main idea of kapitalism and shows how it even changes our language towards using "to have" plus nouns instead of only verbs to describe the same thing.
Also how the general mentality shifted, using poems as an example... the modern english poem, a man picking a flower to examine it more closely although it means killing the flower, compared to an old japanese poem which only describes the flower beeing seen. And, as a compromise, Goethe who digs out the whole flower and plants it in his garden so it can live although he took it.
About the capitalism overall, he says that we move right towards our own doom with our eyes open, but without changing anything for real. Gotta continue reading now ^^
Volker Pispers, german cabarret artist, also shows some prime examples of how absurd capitalism is.
Volkswagen stated that they need 7% additional productivity per year to stay in germany.
This means either producing the same amount of cars with 7% less workers. Won't work for a long time because you soon have no workers left at all, and this way you can't produce cars.
Other way is reducing their loans by 7% a year. Won't work either because soon they wouldn't get anything anymore and nobody would work without a loan.
So the only way working on long range is producing 7% more cars for the same cost each year. But, already, there are 20% more cars beeing produced than bought. And the increase is exponential...
To assisst this kind of growth as it's required in kapitalism, our children would have to by a new car every month at least.
So, capitalism slowly reaches the own limits. No way to avoid that. Productivity can't increase forever as markets are saturated at a certain levels and production costs/loans can't be decreased beyound a certain limit.
I think the whole idea of capitalism simply is a surrender. We surrender to bad traits of humans. It's like "Ok, our previous systems could not deal with bad humans as things like greed and egoism will damage our system. So we just make greed and egoism be the main path in our system and try to make the best of it".
That's a declaration of surrender, nothing else. It's logic that a system based on greed, egoism and eternal growth can't work forever, it's just a question of time until the limits are reached and the system will change drastically.
I think the general idea of granting freedom to everyone is good, but groups and companies have to be restricted in some way. It would be hard to find an overall formula on how that should happen but it might be possible to find one. However, I think the best way is to start living with the least consumption of ressources. For example heading for 100% clean power. Yeah I know it's gonna take a long time but we should be able to do it until 2100 or something like that with relative ease.
Then trying to use regrowing ressources like wood to the best possible amount, replacing things like plastic, while aiming for the most efficient way of recycling non-regrowing ressources like metals as efficiently as possible.
Also democracy heavily depends on the education of the citizens so I hope it will become much much better as well... Should be the prime path to have more mutual understanding on earth leading to less conflicts.
Capitalism has no end, or more correctly, economy has no end. If there is a need for more productivity, market will figure out a way to produce it. I'm sure people in the middle ages thought the amount of steel we produce now is downright impossible to obtain.
Greed is such an ugly word. "Maximize" is the term used in economics.
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On September 18 2010 20:36 scion wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2010 20:09 teekesselchen wrote:
Just reading the old book "To have or to be?" by Erich Fromm. It's from 1976 but already adressing the same issues beeing discussed all the time today.
Actually I didn't read past the first chapter yet (started yesterday), but as the title states it's about the difference in defining yourself via your possession or via yourself.
He critizes the idea of greed as the main idea of kapitalism and shows how it even changes our language towards using "to have" plus nouns instead of only verbs to describe the same thing.
Also how the general mentality shifted, using poems as an example... the modern english poem, a man picking a flower to examine it more closely although it means killing the flower, compared to an old japanese poem which only describes the flower beeing seen. And, as a compromise, Goethe who digs out the whole flower and plants it in his garden so it can live although he took it.
About the capitalism overall, he says that we move right towards our own doom with our eyes open, but without changing anything for real. Gotta continue reading now ^^
Volker Pispers, german cabarret artist, also shows some prime examples of how absurd capitalism is.
Volkswagen stated that they need 7% additional productivity per year to stay in germany.
This means either producing the same amount of cars with 7% less workers. Won't work for a long time because you soon have no workers left at all, and this way you can't produce cars.
Other way is reducing their loans by 7% a year. Won't work either because soon they wouldn't get anything anymore and nobody would work without a loan.
So the only way working on long range is producing 7% more cars for the same cost each year. But, already, there are 20% more cars beeing produced than bought. And the increase is exponential...
To assisst this kind of growth as it's required in kapitalism, our children would have to by a new car every month at least.
So, capitalism slowly reaches the own limits. No way to avoid that. Productivity can't increase forever as markets are saturated at a certain levels and production costs/loans can't be decreased beyound a certain limit.
I think the whole idea of capitalism simply is a surrender. We surrender to bad traits of humans. It's like "Ok, our previous systems could not deal with bad humans as things like greed and egoism will damage our system. So we just make greed and egoism be the main path in our system and try to make the best of it".
That's a declaration of surrender, nothing else. It's logic that a system based on greed, egoism and eternal growth can't work forever, it's just a question of time until the limits are reached and the system will change drastically.
I think the general idea of granting freedom to everyone is good, but groups and companies have to be restricted in some way. It would be hard to find an overall formula on how that should happen but it might be possible to find one. However, I think the best way is to start living with the least consumption of ressources. For example heading for 100% clean power. Yeah I know it's gonna take a long time but we should be able to do it until 2100 or something like that with relative ease.
Then trying to use regrowing ressources like wood to the best possible amount, replacing things like plastic, while aiming for the most efficient way of recycling non-regrowing ressources like metals as efficiently as possible.
Also democracy heavily depends on the education of the citizens so I hope it will become much much better as well... Should be the prime path to have more mutual understanding on earth leading to less conflicts.
Capitalism has no end, or more correctly, economy has no end. If there is a need for more productivity, market will figure out a way to produce it. I'm sure people in the middle ages thought the amount of steel we produce now is downright impossible to obtain. Greed is such an ugly word. "Maximize" is the term used in economics.
More is not necessarily better though. Even if there is a demand, the best thing to do doesn't have to be to produce more. Capitalism would go on increasing production indefinitely as long as some one is buying it even if the externalities end up hurting third persons more than it is helping the seller and buyer and even if the production is slowly destroying the environment and depleting the resources of tomorrow.
A constant exponential increase in production being good in the past is not proof that there will not come a point when it is bad. (Or maybe that point has already come.)
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Sanya12364 Posts
On September 18 2010 19:42 scion wrote:
Now that i've read this, I think you are mixing up what I said. What I meant was, era BEFORE the great depression was unrestrictive free market. We had firms doing whatever they want up until that point. It is when the Great Depression hit, people realized government needs to control certain aspects in the market in order to maintain stability and fairness.
Far from it. The Great Depression was sown after World War I when agricultural output outpaced demand. It stayed that way throughout the 1920's. What happened in the 1920's was easy money from banks to everyone including farmers and New York Fed support of the British pound. This led to farmers getting into horrible debt to tread water and a bubble economy in the rest of the economic sectors.
When the inflationary bubble broke in 1929, the British pound also fell apart as the New York Fed withdrew its support. Normally, this would a bank panic and lots of banks would have gone out of business, property would shuffle around, and the economy would recover. A few things made this one worse. It was an international phenomenon because of the activities of the New York Fed. A drought hit the midwest and many farms became non-performing. Retaliatory tariffs against Smoot-Hawtley further hit the vulnerable American agriculture and reduced global trade in general. When it rains, it pours?
On September 18 2010 19:42 scion wrote:
Hoover is a terrible example. Hoover did not think The great depression was a big problem and believed free market would fix itself. It did not, so he made some terrible efforts to restore the economy (that didn't work) in order to win the election.
Hoover started trying to "fix" the economy right away. Smoot-Hawtley was in June of 1930 - not 9 months into the bubble correction. Hoover conspired to keep prices high, purchased a lot of agricultural goods and left them out to rot, asked businessmen to keep wages high instead of lowering them and employing more people. A huge tax increases was passed in 1932 and local governments followed suit in an effort to try to maintain the size of government while the rest of the economy shrank.
Underlined statement is dead on. Compare and contrast Hoover policies and Roosevelt policies. They're nearly identical in rationale.
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Sanya12364 Posts
On September 18 2010 17:02 Yurebis wrote:
Tan geng I still don't know if you're a minarchist or what
care to explain?
I don't know. When you're 50000 feet up, it all looks the same, but I would proceed forward one step at a time.
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On September 18 2010 20:44 DrainX wrote:
More is not necessarily better though. Even if there is a demand, the best thing to do doesn't have to be to produce more. Capitalism would go on increasing production indefinitely as long as some one is buying it even if the externalities end up hurting third persons more than it is helping the seller and buyer and even if the production is slowly destroying the environment and depleting the resources of tomorrow.
A constant exponential increase in production being good in the past is not proof that there will not come a point when it is bad. (Or maybe that point has already come.)
Heh I was merely stating the fundamental economic concept.
I would argue that when market realize the potential threat of certain production, the demand will seize to exist. CFC and ozone layer is great example of this.
But, you may be right when it comes to current argument about global warming. Some scientists even believe its already too late and even some economists believe that when the market realizes the danger, it could be already be late.
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On September 18 2010 20:58 TanGeng wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2010 19:42 scion wrote:
Now that i've read this, I think you are mixing up what I said. What I meant was, era BEFORE the great depression was unrestrictive free market. We had firms doing whatever they want up until that point. It is when the Great Depression hit, people realized government needs to control certain aspects in the market in order to maintain stability and fairness.
Far from it. The Great Depression was sown after World War I when agricultural output outpaced demand. It stayed that way throughout the 1920's. What happened in the 1920's was easy money from banks to everyone including farmers and New York Fed support of the British pound. This led to farmers getting into horrible debt to tread water and a bubble economy in the rest of the economic sectors. When the inflationary bubble broke in 1929, the British pound also fell apart as the New York Fed withdrew its support. Normally, this would a bank panic and lots of banks would have gone out of business, property would shuffle around, and the economy would recover. A few things made this one worse. It was an international phenomenon because of the activities of the New York Fed. A drought hit the midwest and many farms became non-performing. Retaliatory tariffs against Smoot-Hawtley further hit the vulnerable American agriculture and reduced global trade in general. When it rains, it pours? Show nested quote +On September 18 2010 19:42 scion wrote:
Hoover is a terrible example. Hoover did not think The great depression was a big problem and believed free market would fix itself. It did not, so he made some terrible efforts to restore the economy (that didn't work) in order to win the election.
Hoover started trying to "fix" the economy right away. Smoot-Hawtley was in June of 1930 - not 9 months into the bubble correction. Hoover conspired to keep prices high, purchased a lot of agricultural goods and left them out to rot, asked businessmen to keep wages high instead of lowering them and employing more people. A huge tax increases was passed in 1932 and local governments followed suit in an effort to try to maintain the size of government while the rest of the economy shrank. Underlined statement is dead on. Compare and contrast Hoover policies and Roosevelt policies. They're nearly identical in rationale.
I'm not here to argue about history, stay on topic. I'm going to keep this short. RELATIVELY speaking, the 20s economy is unrestricted free market compared to what we have now. Take a look at what happened to the steel, automobile, oil, finance, and ect. In fact, Top 200 firms assets were bigger than rest of American economy.
Farms produced alot due to demand during the War. Europe was in no position to grow food, not because government told farmers to produce more food.
Stock market back then were ridiculously unrestricted. No real measurement in place to stop insider trading. One mass panic was GG for the market. Now we have a system in place where stockmarket will close if there is a mass panic.
Hoover's effort in the earlier year was minimal at best as he let the economy fail expecting it to pick it back up by itself. You are right in that he attempted FDR style aid to the economy during his term but it was NOTHING compare to the New Deal.
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Sanya12364 Posts
1920's was freer than the current market place. That's a separate issue from trying to blame the freedom for the depression. What freedom caused the depression?
One big panic and GG? Historically bank panics, even the largest of them lasted two to three years. That sounds like a pretty mild GG.
If FDR style aid started in 1930, why didn't the economy recover to its original size until 10 years later? Hoover's intervention wasn't as large as FDR's but what did FDR's do? A small recovery until early 1937 and then an echo depression through 1938? Again compare this to the two to three years for a bank panic.
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scion please edit the quotes on this post. they are tan geng's, not mine. I will answer to your post soon, ty.
On September 18 2010 21:02 TanGeng wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2010 17:02 Yurebis wrote:
Tan geng I still don't know if you're a minarchist or what
care to explain? I don't know. When you're 50000 feet up, it all looks the same, but I would proceed forward one step at a time.
Haha
fair enough.
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On September 18 2010 19:12 scion wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2010 16:30 Yurebis wrote:
No it was not, I invite you to see the revisionist evidence on the case, and stop accepting the statist excuses at face value. See any related link on the OP. While there is still state involved, economy before the great depression was extremely liberal capitalism, with minimal government intervention, especially compared to today. As you probably know, monopolies arose in bunch of key industry like steel, oil and automobile because of it. Rampant insider trading within the stock market led to its collapse. While I agree that it wasn't a completely unrestricted capitalism (duh) I do not see how the market would prevent such behavior when there are even less rules.
No. You're cherry picking evidence to correlate with the great depression. Simply asserting it to be casually related won't do.
And not being able to see how people would manage risk, absent the socialized watchguards that always fail, is an argument from ignorance. If you want me to explain how, I could, but I'm not going to for someone who just proclaims that it's impossible and apparently has no interest to know. Ask me properly and I may oblige.
On September 18 2010 19:12 scion wrote:Show nested quote +Are you saying the socialized inspector or watchdog is better than a private one? Because this is what comes down to. Never mind that you're criticizing a state watchdog for not being able to do what he's supposed to do (I agree with that), but you're implying that no one else could do any better. Why?
Technology goes both ways; as much as it helps fraudsters, it helps investigators as well, so unless you want to elaborate on why is the case that technology enables fraud more than defense, I don't feel like elaborating myself. You didnt answer the key question in my paragraph. Who controls the supply of money in a Anarcho capitalism? One of the biggest power a government have is the power to print money. If you leave this to a firm, surely they will use this enormous power to form a government of their own?
Who controls the supply of shoes in ancap? Whoever makes shoes, obviously; why is it an issue to start with? Are you entitled to having things and services? I hope you don't think that.
Free, noncoercive institutions, profit off realized demand. If a bank is found to be corrupt, it loses reputation and goes bankrupt, instead of you know, persisting no matter what in case the state supports it.
Will a shoe seller become a hegemony and exploit everyone with their terrible, overpriced shoes? I don't know, but I would think not, and the market incentives to prevent that are more responsive than political ones. In fact, political interests would tell you that the tendency to centralize beyond return is something that the state does more often, and incentivizes with every regulation.
The banks are already a monopoly, and already use the state. You seem to have the causation chain inverted. Banks don't emerge out of proportion first, then raise their own private armies to coerce the population. That is economically unfeasible. Banks would have to overcharge their customers in order to not only provide the usual banking services, but to stockpile weapons and militias until the day they're able to gamble it all. A much easier way to massively coerce - and the way it has been done so far - is to use the legitimized statist apparatus that already exists, and pay some ten thousand dollars in lobby, leaving the police force and federal agents to be paid by the slaves themselves...
You don't get to make the population pay for it's own slavemasters UNLESS the population doesn't see it as coercion. You, the outlaw institution, would just go bankrupt in ancap. I hope this was enough of a briefing.
On September 18 2010 19:12 scion wrote:
Firms exist to make profit. Who is going to pay these investigators for what reasons? Let's say there was a demand for fraud investigators. Under current system, it is the representative of the public interest, aka the state, that is paying the investigators.
Without such entity, who is supposed to pay these guys? NYSE? the Investors?
Fraud firms have no incentive to pay for obvious reasons.
Honest firms have no incentive because they wouldn't use/need the service.
Investors would pay for auditing a firm they would like to invest but for fraud investigation? why should they pay when it wasn't their fault?
It could be managed by the stock exchange organization, yeah. They can charge a minimal, <1% fee on every transaction that occurs. Maybe they already do that, I don't know, stock market is not my forte, but it's hardly difficult to charge a service for people voluntarily and publically joined in a certain market environment.
Honest firms and investors don't have an incentive to catch the cheating opposition? Are you really saying that? Certainly they do, and certainly everyone in the stock market would be willing to ingress to certain rules and fees that make the market possible. Dishonest firms that don't simply wouldn't be able to enter. And guess what, if it's something that no one can agree to, then too bad, everyone misses out on the opportunity of having a stock market period. No rules, no game, but at least no one will be cheated. Though of course, I believe that they will agree on some viable model. It's too much money to be missing.
On September 18 2010 19:12 scion wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2010 16:30 Yurebis wrote:
That is a ridiculous argument, I'm sorry but it makes 0 sense. It can be applied to anything. Even government itself. It's an argument of risk, right? Because the seller can assess risks better, it means he has an "unfair" advantage. Of course he does, he also has the "advantage" of being able to set prices, of producing or servicing only what he wants, and many other "advantages". But the market doesn't rely on honesty or angels. It relies on free market entry, aka what I call competition (you have a twisted version thereof most likely), meaning that if someone's getting away with selling horrible garbage, it not only sends a bad message about that seller's inefficient servicing for customers all around eventually, but it sends a positive message to potential entrepreneurs to enter that market, outperform that ass, and profit themselves with delivering a more efficient and honest product.
If I'm not mistaken, it also seems Akerlof's arguments are most used in regulated environments, where most people are FORCED to buy the same shit, well then, obviously there's going to be a problem there, but it's not because of limited information or some other lame excuse, it's because the market aka consumers and businesses aren't allowed to adapt. Whenever the government intervenes with it's own idea of what "competition" is, it stifles it with the government's own limited knowledge, not fixing the problem at all and possibly creating new external ones.
And speaking of government, it should be regarded as the institution filled with the most lemons in history anyways. The socialized choice of representatives will always give the advantage to those politically connected to sell the public out on empty promises and excuses. I don't think you understood the lemon argument. Let me lay the argument out, using Health insurance industry as an example. Let's say there are 2 types of people, the healthy and the unhealthy. The unhealthy people want health insurance because they know they will have to go see a doctor often. (bad family history, smoker, bad life style, ect...) Where as healthy people sort of want health insurance if its cheap. They won't be needing it much after all. Basic coverage plans will be good deal for the sickly people. The result is people who are confident about their needs will purchase health insurance. Meaning they WILL have to use the insurance at some point. As you probably know, insurance cannot thrive with most of the customers making a claim. Insurers are forced to cut benefits and raise the premium to cover its cost, causing people in the middle (sort of healthy) to cancel because its too expensive. This forces insurance companies to raise the premiums even higher in order to stay in business. In the end, only the most sickly and the rich will be able to afford health insurance. Sure, the health insurance company can attempt to make more thorough background check in order to make better estimate, but the nature of this business dictates that they will NEVER be able to accurately guess a person's medical cost. If insurance companies cannot estimate the cost better than its consumer, it will simply go out of business under the burden of claims. Sickly consumers also have plenty of incentive to lie about their history. Insurance industry can only thrive under "mutual ignorance". That's why theft/fire/automobile insurance sort of work. where as for health, you KNOW your own health. You KNOW your family history. Insurance companies dont.
Sigh. I *have* addressed the issue. Your insurance example just reverses the knowledge advantage. In that, customers can assess risks better than the business, and they can kind of rip off the insurance companies and other honest customers. So insurances become more expensive, and/or honest customers are driven out. Okay, what is wrong with that? You yourself have answered how to better deal with risks - you raise costs because the risks increased. Big whoop-dee-doo. That's what insurance companies do. Believe me, they know how to best allocate their resources, because if they did not, they would go broke either to their own faults, or to better competing actuaries.
What the STATE does however.. does NOT solve such an issue. What can they do, if not merely enforce their own limited knowledge, their arbitrary risk assessment onto everyone? How can they know that's ideal? How can you know it's ideal? I say you cannot, the only way you could, is if you let consumers and business adapt to the best of EVERYONE's knowledge. Any deviation from that, is necessarily subpar. Either too much insurance will be bought, and the market gets further inflated, further overpriced, or too little, which well, also increases costs overall because people are unprotected from risk. The STATE does not have the necessary market signals to know what to do, they only have their inefficient bureaucrats who could care less what happens to the economy, as long as they stay in power, and get elected for "saving" the poor elderly who can't afford health insurance (even though they're indirectly paying for it anyway, now even more inflated than before)
On September 18 2010 19:12 scion wrote:
This is why people keep saying Healthcare in USA is failing. This is why the USA is spending 12% of its GDP on health care. (as of 2002) compared to Canada (9%) , UK (6%) and Japan (6%) This is why 47 million+ Americans are uninsured.
See the mises healthcare portal at http://mises.org/daily/3737.
Healthcare was a non-issue until the AMA started to get government backing and propped up their salaries by raising barriers of entry for uncertified doctors. Surely the cost of healthcare is going to go up when in order to practice it, you have to be a member of their gang. Less doctors, less healthcare. Duh.
After that scam, everything else just aggravated the issue. Further and further making healthcare an artificially scarce resource.
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On September 18 2010 20:36 scion wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2010 20:09 teekesselchen wrote:
Just reading the old book "To have or to be?" by Erich Fromm. It's from 1976 but already adressing the same issues beeing discussed all the time today.
Actually I didn't read past the first chapter yet (started yesterday), but as the title states it's about the difference in defining yourself via your possession or via yourself.
He critizes the idea of greed as the main idea of kapitalism and shows how it even changes our language towards using "to have" plus nouns instead of only verbs to describe the same thing.
Also how the general mentality shifted, using poems as an example... the modern english poem, a man picking a flower to examine it more closely although it means killing the flower, compared to an old japanese poem which only describes the flower beeing seen. And, as a compromise, Goethe who digs out the whole flower and plants it in his garden so it can live although he took it.
About the capitalism overall, he says that we move right towards our own doom with our eyes open, but without changing anything for real. Gotta continue reading now ^^
Volker Pispers, german cabarret artist, also shows some prime examples of how absurd capitalism is.
Volkswagen stated that they need 7% additional productivity per year to stay in germany.
This means either producing the same amount of cars with 7% less workers. Won't work for a long time because you soon have no workers left at all, and this way you can't produce cars.
Other way is reducing their loans by 7% a year. Won't work either because soon they wouldn't get anything anymore and nobody would work without a loan.
So the only way working on long range is producing 7% more cars for the same cost each year. But, already, there are 20% more cars beeing produced than bought. And the increase is exponential...
To assisst this kind of growth as it's required in kapitalism, our children would have to by a new car every month at least.
So, capitalism slowly reaches the own limits. No way to avoid that. Productivity can't increase forever as markets are saturated at a certain levels and production costs/loans can't be decreased beyound a certain limit.
I think the whole idea of capitalism simply is a surrender. We surrender to bad traits of humans. It's like "Ok, our previous systems could not deal with bad humans as things like greed and egoism will damage our system. So we just make greed and egoism be the main path in our system and try to make the best of it".
That's a declaration of surrender, nothing else. It's logic that a system based on greed, egoism and eternal growth can't work forever, it's just a question of time until the limits are reached and the system will change drastically.
I think the general idea of granting freedom to everyone is good, but groups and companies have to be restricted in some way. It would be hard to find an overall formula on how that should happen but it might be possible to find one. However, I think the best way is to start living with the least consumption of ressources. For example heading for 100% clean power. Yeah I know it's gonna take a long time but we should be able to do it until 2100 or something like that with relative ease.
Then trying to use regrowing ressources like wood to the best possible amount, replacing things like plastic, while aiming for the most efficient way of recycling non-regrowing ressources like metals as efficiently as possible.
Also democracy heavily depends on the education of the citizens so I hope it will become much much better as well... Should be the prime path to have more mutual understanding on earth leading to less conflicts.
Capitalism has no end, or more correctly, economy has no end. If there is a need for more productivity, market will figure out a way to produce it. I'm sure people in the middle ages thought the amount of steel we produce now is downright impossible to obtain. Greed is such an ugly word. "Maximize" is the term used in economics.
No end? It only takes a few decades to make a growth expectation of 5% a year go explode into over a thousand percent. At that point you almost have no employees left, all working for you barely recieve any loan and you still have to build a few hundred percent more items at the same cost. There are limits to growth. Worst case would be that every company stopping to grow gets swallowed by a still growing company, resulting in one company sololey dominating the market. That's the point where growth can stop following current logics. But not before that.
How would you try to kill a 300kg guy? By starving him? Na, that would take an eternity.
Just give him everything to eat he wants and he won't last long. That's the logic killing capitalism 
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On September 18 2010 20:44 DrainX wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2010 20:36 scion wrote:On September 18 2010 20:09 teekesselchen wrote:
Just reading the old book "To have or to be?" by Erich Fromm. It's from 1976 but already adressing the same issues beeing discussed all the time today.
Actually I didn't read past the first chapter yet (started yesterday), but as the title states it's about the difference in defining yourself via your possession or via yourself.
He critizes the idea of greed as the main idea of kapitalism and shows how it even changes our language towards using "to have" plus nouns instead of only verbs to describe the same thing.
Also how the general mentality shifted, using poems as an example... the modern english poem, a man picking a flower to examine it more closely although it means killing the flower, compared to an old japanese poem which only describes the flower beeing seen. And, as a compromise, Goethe who digs out the whole flower and plants it in his garden so it can live although he took it.
About the capitalism overall, he says that we move right towards our own doom with our eyes open, but without changing anything for real. Gotta continue reading now ^^
Volker Pispers, german cabarret artist, also shows some prime examples of how absurd capitalism is.
Volkswagen stated that they need 7% additional productivity per year to stay in germany.
This means either producing the same amount of cars with 7% less workers. Won't work for a long time because you soon have no workers left at all, and this way you can't produce cars.
Other way is reducing their loans by 7% a year. Won't work either because soon they wouldn't get anything anymore and nobody would work without a loan.
So the only way working on long range is producing 7% more cars for the same cost each year. But, already, there are 20% more cars beeing produced than bought. And the increase is exponential...
To assisst this kind of growth as it's required in kapitalism, our children would have to by a new car every month at least.
So, capitalism slowly reaches the own limits. No way to avoid that. Productivity can't increase forever as markets are saturated at a certain levels and production costs/loans can't be decreased beyound a certain limit.
I think the whole idea of capitalism simply is a surrender. We surrender to bad traits of humans. It's like "Ok, our previous systems could not deal with bad humans as things like greed and egoism will damage our system. So we just make greed and egoism be the main path in our system and try to make the best of it".
That's a declaration of surrender, nothing else. It's logic that a system based on greed, egoism and eternal growth can't work forever, it's just a question of time until the limits are reached and the system will change drastically.
I think the general idea of granting freedom to everyone is good, but groups and companies have to be restricted in some way. It would be hard to find an overall formula on how that should happen but it might be possible to find one. However, I think the best way is to start living with the least consumption of ressources. For example heading for 100% clean power. Yeah I know it's gonna take a long time but we should be able to do it until 2100 or something like that with relative ease.
Then trying to use regrowing ressources like wood to the best possible amount, replacing things like plastic, while aiming for the most efficient way of recycling non-regrowing ressources like metals as efficiently as possible.
Also democracy heavily depends on the education of the citizens so I hope it will become much much better as well... Should be the prime path to have more mutual understanding on earth leading to less conflicts.
Capitalism has no end, or more correctly, economy has no end. If there is a need for more productivity, market will figure out a way to produce it. I'm sure people in the middle ages thought the amount of steel we produce now is downright impossible to obtain. Greed is such an ugly word. "Maximize" is the term used in economics. More is not necessarily better though. Even if there is a demand, the best thing to do doesn't have to be to produce more. Capitalism would go on increasing production indefinitely as long as some one is buying it even if the externalities end up hurting third persons more than it is helping the seller and buyer and even if the production is slowly destroying the environment and depleting the resources of tomorrow. A constant exponential increase in production being good in the past is not proof that there will not come a point when it is bad. (Or maybe that point has already come.)
Yes, that's just a non-sequitur criticism. People will do whatever they want to do. The issue with constant growth is not one of capitalism, it is one of neoclassical interpretations that may come to the conclusion that their utility functions are the only thing people think about. Austrian economics make no such assumptions as to what people want, it is value-free™. lols
Also even neoclassicals can defend against that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseconomy_of_scale
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