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On July 27 2011 02:10 BlackFlag wrote:Show nested quote +On July 27 2011 02:06 BestZergOnEast wrote:
BlackFlag, if laissez-faire capitalism leads to a broad poverty across all people why has this not happened in places where laissez-fair capitalism was tried? Actually quite the opposite. Can you back up your theory with some cases in point? We're seeing it right now, as states will go bankrupt left and right, broad masses of people become poor. This fuels the fascist fire.
The states going bankrupt are Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. This has everything to do with the euro and their inability to control their own currency not laissez-faire economic policy, but regardless, only one of those countries is particularly laissez-faire. And I would still rather live in either of those countries than some of the non-laissez-faire shitholes throughout the world.
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No sir, your statement saying my statement is untrue is untrue. So there.
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On July 27 2011 02:10 BestZergOnEast wrote:
Yeah, but without private ownership of the means of production no one really gives a fuck to go out and invent something, since they don't get any benefit from doing so. In fact they would probably get punished for slacking off work if they attempted to invent something, since without private property you need a state to force people to do things or they don't get done.
I've already mentioned before that open source communities invent stuff. They break your theory. Please revise your assumptions.
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On July 27 2011 02:02 domovoi wrote:Show nested quote +On July 27 2011 01:56 BlackFlag wrote:
Until the 80ies the economic policy was nowhere near "laissez-faire". It was pretty protectionistic (at least in parts) and very often had government-interventions (at least in Europe). Increase in living standards has much more to do with technology. And if the technological progress has to do, or was "provided" by capitalism is, at least, debatable. Relative to the '40s and relative to the USSR, the West was very laissez-faire in the '60s and '70s. I'm not sure why you continue to think economic policy has little to do with economic growth when there are so many examples that prove otherwise: Taiwan, Singapore, Korea and Japan vs. pre-'80s China; China today vs. pre-'80s China; Vietnam today vs. pre-'80s Vietnam, the West vs. the USSR during the Cold War. There isn't much useful technology that can be mainly attributed to government expenditure. Even the internet, a government project, did not obtain its level of reach and usefulness until there was a market for it. Cars and household appliances have dramatically improved. Consumer gadgets, personal computers, and software, etc.
Virtually all scientific and technological progress comes from state funding. The research and development occurs in state funded institutions and when it reaches a certain point a commercial entity makes something of it and distributes it to the public. The primary cost and effort is done by the state.
Of course if a privately funded institution operated in the same manner it would achieve the same result but I seriously doubt any corporation or combination of them would be able to run a multi-decade, multi-national research and development program because it might turn out to be useful, as was the case of the Internet. And their distribution is only for people who afford it. If it's something like medicine then without state involvement poor people won't have access to the technology.
The scale required for modern science like for example medicine and the required input in terms of time and resources requires institutions of hundreds of thousands of people to produce results and the funding for that have never come from the private corporations and I really don't see how it ever could. It requires the support of several societies.
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None of those countries is laissez-faire. Ireland might have a slightly freer economy than the rest.... but laissez-faire translates to 'leave it alone'. No government intervention in the economy. Hong Kong was an example of one. Botswana was as well. AFAIK there aren't any left.
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Open source communities hardly break my theory; after all, the non open source movement is a whole lot more successful.
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On July 27 2011 02:11 BestZergOnEast wrote:
In which currently laissez-faire countries is this happening BlackFlag?
Every European country (except the scandinavian ones) have massive debt, those rescue packages are just putting the bankrupt a short later. When the "PIGS" fall, the stable countries like Germany or France will fall too. And now every European country is cutting spending which massivly hurts the people and creates high unemployment and also puts them in a state of recession.
And in the USA, the unemployment is high and 40 million people (I think?) need food stamps. Do you call this rich? And this is just the start, because it will become worse, because when the USA fall, China or Japan will also become massive massive problems. It's a chain reaction.
My english is leaving me at the moment, because I am in a hurry.
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You said, "without private property, no one gives a fuck to go out and do stuff". But people in Open Source communities do give a fuck and do stuff. This is a contradiction. Your initial assumption is wrong.
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On July 27 2011 02:12 domovoi wrote:Show nested quote +On July 27 2011 02:08 BlackFlag wrote:On July 27 2011 02:02 domovoi wrote:On July 27 2011 01:56 BlackFlag wrote:
Until the 80ies the economic policy was nowhere near "laissez-faire". It was pretty protectionistic (at least in parts) and very often had government-interventions (at least in Europe). Increase in living standards has much more to do with technology. And if the technological progress has to do, or was "provided" by capitalism is, at least, debatable. Relative to the '40s and relative to the USSR, the West was very laissez-faire in the '60s and '70s. I'm not sure why you continue to think economic policy has little to do with economic growth when there are so many examples that prove otherwise: Taiwan, Singapore, Korea and Japan vs. pre-'80s China; China today vs. pre-'80s China; Vietnam today vs. pre-'80s Vietnam, the West vs. the USSR during the Cold War. There isn't much useful technology that can be mainly attributed to government expenditure. Even the internet, a government project, did not obtain its level of reach and usefulness until there was a market for it. Cars and household appliances have dramatically improved. Consumer gadgets, personal computers, and software, etc. I'm not talking about government inventing things, I'm thinking that a democratic and open society that tries to make it's people intelligent provides the reason why things get invented. In a totalitarian dictatorship were everyone who doesn't follow the rules, get's offed, from where shall the intelligent people come that think outside the box? I'm just saying an open, democratic society doesn't have to be capitalist, so another open anti-capitalist society could just have invented as much technology. Do you also believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster? There's never been an open, democratic society that wasn't capitalist. There have been quite a lot of anti-capitalist totalitarian societies. I'll leave it to you to figure out why, but in the meantime, there simply isn't any reason to think today's society could form an open, democratic society without capitalism. That might change in the distant future, but that requires a level of belief usually reserved for the ultra-religious.
So, you wanna tell me that capitalism exists since day number one? Or does capitalism just exist since the industrial revolution? What were those societies before? Totalitarian communist dictatorships? hmmm?
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Virtually all technological progress comes from state funding? No. Cars are the product of private enterprise. if it wasn't for AOL, compuserve etc. the internet would be nothing. We all have personal computers because of Bill Gates, no Bill Clinton. The state does spend a god awful amount of money on 'research and development' (read, welfare for scientist) and so does the market. And you are right. No private enterprise could run a multi decade project because it might just possibly might be useful. Only government can spend billions of dollars on things that no one needs or wants. Private enterprise makes sure all the money is spent usefully. The idea that we wouldn't have the internet without government is absurd; ever since the days of Turing the internet was inevitable. We understood computers. We understood communication. Sooner or later, someone would put two and two together.
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On July 27 2011 01:58 BestZergOnEast wrote:
Of course it follows. Man acts purposefully. Purpose implies the use of reason. Otherwise it would be involuntary, a reflex. Action is in the same class as reason; one cannot act w/o using reason.
What? I'm going to show you how this is bad for your case in two ways.
First: See, this is why I was worried about this 'proof' nonsense and skeptical about the deductive logic. One of the principles of good argumentation in logic is clarity: you make sure your terms are thoroughly defined and difficult to construe any other way than the way intended - otherwise, you're obfuscating. So lets parse out your key terms:
'Purposefully' - I take this to mean 'acts with a conscious goal', given that they tend to harp on about a telos.
Reason - As far as I can tell, you're using it in the classical 'conscious rational cognition' sense.
Translated then, 'Man acts purposefully' means 'All human action has a goal, which is the product of rational cognition'.
See, I'd translated that as a weaker claim, because I think the weaker claim is much more viable than this one.
So here's your argument:
1) Man acts purposefully (as understood above).
2) If an action has a purpose, it must be a product of reason.
3) Man's actions are a product of reason.
Lets use the same example I used earlier in more detail - moral reasoning. Your position would be committed to the claim that all moral reasoning has the same telos, which, given the constant Aristotle citation in the literature, is probably eudaimonia or 'human flourishing'. If this is incorrect, let me know. Also, this seems to me to require some justification. Further, you're committed to saying that all moral choices are products, primarily, of reasoning. The work of Joshua Greene, Jesse Prinz, and others suggests that our moral choices are rationalized after we've already made them. That is, they're not a product of reasoning, even if they're justified post-hoc. Thus, even if we grant that all moral actions have a unified purpose, the second premise isn't true: an action can have a purpose and not be a product of reasoning.
Second: This one is much quicker. Let's instead conceptualize your opening conditional as something like this:
1) If man acts purposefully, then all actions are a product of reason.
(I can justify to you why this is a fair way to reconstruct your argument if you'd like, but I get the impression you don't know a lot about formal logic, so I'm going to just ask you to take my word for it unless you really, really don't want to).
Now, let's plug in the data from empirical science:
2) Not all actions are a product of reason.
3) Man does not act purposefully.
Oops.
Edit: Fun fact #251234. In the Aristotelean sense, something can have a telos without having reason.
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On July 27 2011 02:15 Potatisodlaren wrote:
Virtually all scientific and technological progress comes from state funding. The research and development occurs in state funded institutions and when it reaches a certain point a commercial entity makes something of it and distributes it to the public. The primary cost and effort is done by the state.
"Virtually all"? Bogus. Even assuming what you say is true, where state-funded institutions invent the barebones of the goods, it is the market that makes it something of value. But there are a lot of very important counterexamples: e.g. in the IT industry, Google, Facebook, Apple's iDevices, Windows & OS X, the PC.
Moreover, government participation in the market is as legitimate as private participation in the market. However, BlackFlag advocates government monopoly in the market, so modern examples of useful government R&D in a competitive market don't really compare to that extreme of a situation.
The scale required for modern science like for example medicine and the required input in terms of time and resources requires institutions of hundreds of thousands of people to produce results and the funding for that have never come from the private corporations and I really don't see how it ever could. It requires the support of several societies.
Medicine is a weird enough market that government participation in R&D makes a lot of sense.
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No, Detrius, that's not what I said.
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On July 27 2011 01:51 domovoi wrote:Show nested quote +It doesn't really matter how the European continent was devastated, what matters is it weakened the industrial competition faced by the US.
The rapid growth experienced by the United States is not something you can attribute strictly to economic policy. I don't get why people make this argument. Western European GDP recovered to its pre-war levels within a decade, and yet both the US and Europe have managed to have pretty high and consistent growth since then thanks to essentially increasingly laissez-faire policies (especially relative to our good friend the USSR). So economic policy plays a much bigger role in explaining the wealth of Western nations today than the relative power of countries immediately following World War II. Not to mention places like China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam.
You took the wrong idea from my post. See the next line:
Developing nations such as Costa Rica make a strong case for the importance of democracy over lasseiz-faire policies.
That is my argument, democracy is more important than economic developments because people vote in their own self interest, electing poeple who promise to do things in their own interest. (Fun Fact: this actually horrified the founding fathers)
I was commenting on BestZerg's ridiculous dismissal of the effects of recent history on the global economy. Saying WW2 was a result of government policy, then ignoring the economic effects on that basis is insane.
He claimed that our affluence was due to policies during a time period where the federal government relied only on tariffs to raise income. (very laisse-faire) I would agree that economic policy over the last 80 years has in many ways a greater impact on today's economics than WW2 but "more" is different than "all."
On July 27 2011 01:52 BestZergOnEast wrote:Democracy & laissez-faire are not in conflict. You can have both. Of course it seems likely that eventually democracy will undo laissez-faire (stupid rent seekers) but theoretically at least it seems they should be able to coexist. What else aside from economic policy (or more specifically a lack there of) do you attribute America's meteoric rise to the top? Show nested quote +The industrial revolution was only made possible by investment in infrastructure by state governments in addition to advances in mechanics Do you and Mr. Walton hold this true for all industrial revolutions, or only the American one? Either way that's just laughable, like if the government hadn't given some money to a crony of theirs we'd never come up with mass production. Nigga Please!
Historically laissez-faire has been seen by populations of democracies to be in conflict with democracy. So what "should" be possible "theoretically" is not really relevant. Despite its name it is not viewed as "fair" in societies with universal suffrage. Considering that people act with purpose and polit bodies reject your argument, maybe something is wrong with your system?
You're wrong, your arguments are all begged questions or non-sequiters and after this reply I am done, you are now going in circles with baseless challenges or just making your claims more vague. But yes most possibly all industrial revolutions relied upon government investment in transportation such as canals and railroads to make mass production viable. Without these investments markets cannot be reached and mass production makes no sense.
I gave you a small list of things that are related to America's rise to the top, you need to stop putting forth false choices, there are a multitude of relevant factors just saying "laisse faire did it" is not a reasonable argument. It has no substance, you see that don't you?
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We have personal computers because of IBM. IBM standardized the PC components so that parts on one system could be swapped with parts from another system. It was to their own detriment in the end as competitors moved in and IBM now stops making PCs.
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On July 27 2011 02:21 BestZergOnEast wrote:
No private enterprise could run a multi decade project because it might just possibly might be useful. Only government can spend billions of dollars on things that no one needs or wants.
Hell Yeah! Just like those early transportation systems that made mass production viable... err wait... that doesn't seem quite right.
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On July 27 2011 02:23 BestZergOnEast wrote:
No, Detrius, that's not what I said.
Really, that's exactly what you said. I can bold quote the portion of the sentence if you want?
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On July 27 2011 02:21 BlackFlag wrote:
So, you wanna tell me that capitalism exists since day number one? Or does capitalism just exist since the industrial revolution? What were those societies before? Totalitarian communist dictatorships? hmmm?
Talk about logic fail.
1) You say: open, democratic anti-capitalist society would be better.
2) I say: all open, democratic societies have been capitalist, moreover all anti-capitalist societies have been totalitarian. So no reason to think a democratic, anti-capitalist society is possible.
3) You say: but some capitalist societies were totalitarian!
Do you see the logical fallacy?
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On July 27 2011 02:23 domovoi wrote:Show nested quote +On July 27 2011 02:15 Potatisodlaren wrote:
Virtually all scientific and technological progress comes from state funding. The research and development occurs in state funded institutions and when it reaches a certain point a commercial entity makes something of it and distributes it to the public. The primary cost and effort is done by the state. "Virtually all"? Bogus. Even assuming what you say is true, where state-funded institutions invent the barebones of the goods, it is the market that makes it something of value. But there are a lot of very important counterexamples: e.g. in the IT industry, Google, Facebook, Apple's iDevices, Windows & OS X, the PC. Moreover, government participation in the market is as legitimate as private participation in the market. However, BlackFlag advocates government monopoly in the market, so modern examples of useful government R&D in a competitive market don't really compare to that extreme of a situation. Show nested quote +The scale required for modern science like for example medicine and the required input in terms of time and resources requires institutions of hundreds of thousands of people to produce results and the funding for that have never come from the private corporations and I really don't see how it ever could. It requires the support of several societies. Medicine is a weird enough market that government participation in R&D makes a lot of sense.
STOP LYING! I nowhere in this thread adcovated government monolopy. Or could you maybe show me the part where I am in favor of government monopoly?
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detrius, yes please show me where I said that exactly.
Except roads have a very clear and obvious function, even before cars. So I'm afraid that's just a whole lot of fail on your part.
I suppose what you mean is societies have voted against laissez-faire. That is not at all as saying democracy and laissez-faire are incompatible. In fact, since america was a liassiez-faire economy from 1776->1914, and it was also a republic during this time, clearly you are wrong.
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EPT
