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Does anyone have an idea of how we get from where we are to this Scandinavian social democracy (which as practiced is still unsustainable) in the decade we have to get there if we want to keep the probability of mass extinction under ~50%?
When I entertain electoralism the closest I can come is.
Sanders wins 2020. First 2 years are nothing but roadblocks, and like Obama, he's handed an economy in free fall. During that time disillusioned Sanders supporters and socialists unite to replace the entirety of congress and the Senate and in Sanders second term he can sign the radical legislation necessary to avert what the best available science tells us is near certain doom otherwise.
People that aren't supporting Sanders as that sort of last hope seem to completely avoid reconciling how voting for anyone but Sanders keeps us on a trajectory toward irreversible (on a non geological time scale) and catastrophic ecological collapse.
As far as I can tell the science says anyone accepting anything less radical than Sanders is supporting not only dooms the global south (as the Scandinavian model does) but makes global catastrophic climate collapse certain.
I can't imagine and don't think anyone can, a scenario where Biden wins the nomination and we make the radical changes in the time needed through any other explanation than magic and hope.
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On January 08 2020 00:42 RenSC2 wrote:
I'll defend capitalism.
Let's start with a true story. Many years ago, my father ran the IT department for a company. After the fall of the USSR, the company brought in some Russian immigrants to work in his IT department. My father found out they were stealing from the company and wanted to fire them. His boss, the owner (and founder) of the company instead said something like, "They're not bad, they're ignorant. They grew up in socialism and the only way to get ahead in socialism is to steal. We'll work with them." The owner, a true self-made billionaire with Russian ancestry, felt pity for them and wanted to help them. He recognized that the methods of getting ahead in socialism are corruption and theft. If you can re-educate people to teach them that in capitalism you can get ahead through hard work, then you can end up with some good employees and those employees can end up with a better life than they'd ever have under socialism.
People want to get ahead. I'm going to take that as a self-evident truth. In socialism, the outlet for that desire is loyalty to the system (like KGB members getting ahead, hello Mr. Putin) or to outright steal. Ethics and morals be damned. Capitalism directs that desire into something much healthier. It directs it into innovation and hard work. Yes, theft can get you ahead in capitalism too, but at least there it's not the only way.
Capitalism is essentially a force of nature. If you can accept that people can own things (which is not unique to capitalism), then capitalism is a natural extension of that ownership: you can use what you own to make money. You can use your own labor to make money. You can use the piece of land you own to make money. You can use the factory on the land to make money. You can use the money to make money.
Anything else is either saying that people can't own things or is trying to cut people off from the nature of ownership.
Having said that, unrestrained capitalism is not good. The government is supposed to be the check on capitalism to keep its excesses in check. The government is the part where society gets to vote and say, "hey, you have too much". Unfortunately, some of the people who should be educating society on a better form of capitalism have instead decided that the bankruptcy of socialism is better. We've seen socialism, it isn't a new idea, every implementation the world has seen stinks.
If instead, you worked to curb the excesses of capitalism through educating the population, then you'd have more success and end up with a better system. For starters, teach people that taxes aren't all bad. The inheritance tax should be high. If it's a 90% tax over 100 million (or pick your number), then you can prevent infinite generational wealth while still allowing a parent to set up their children for life. You also de-incentivize excess wealth because you'll never get to use it (currently true) and 90% of it will go back to the government anyways (not currently true). Right now, a large portion of people who will never be effected by the inheritance tax voted to get rid of it (part of the Republican platform).
If you also used the government to force people to pay for their ecological destruction, then you'd get different calculus on various capitalistic endeavors. Things like a carbon tax could greatly change society for the better by making some activities unprofitable. However, again, we've been conditioned to think taxes = bad. Fight that fight and the environment has a chance. Pretending that socialism has answers when it has never had any answer for the environment before seems quite dubious.
Finally, there are some areas where socialism can be used in a capitalistic society. I look to socialism to set a floor. Everyone deserves the law, so police and the courts should be socialized (they already are, socialists love the socialized police force /s). Everyone deserves basic health protection so the fire departments and healthcare should be socialized (fire usually is, healthcare not really... an area where I'd love to see universal healthcare). Everyone deserves a basic education so we have public schools and libraries (although I'm not a fan of free college, I think that's past the limit of basic education).
In my ideal society, government sets the floor through socialism and curbs the excess through taxes (which also pay for the socialism); however, we allows capitalism to work in the middle. Many European countries are headed in that direction. The US has a reasonable structure to move in that direction, but it takes people pushing for it, rather than trying to throw the whole thing out and implement something that has never worked before in some magical undefined new way.
I like your anecdote a lot. It shows that in socialism, the people who want to get ahead of others in undue ways had to resort to covert methods, like corruption and theft. Under capitalism, your father saw these corrupt methods and reacted with a sense of injustice. It is unfair that these people are trying to get ahead in undue ways. Your father's boss, being a parasite that feeds off of his workers, understood and sympathized with the willingness of these people to get ahead at the expense of others, and so he showed them the legal ways of doing that (it's not "hard work", I don't know if I have to get into that).
You can say "people want to get ahead" if you want, but it's not indicative of what we should do about it. People want to have sex with the people who they are attracted to, doesn't mean laws shouldn't be concerned with whether they have the consent of these people. People want to get ahead in sports, doesn't mean laws against doping are counterintuitive. People want to get more power in politics, doesn't mean authoritarianism is awesome. In fact, it is the very fact that people want those types of things that makes it necessary that our system tries and prevents them from achieving that. We need to dig a little deeper than just what human instincts are, we need to determine if that human instinct is something that we want our society built around or not.
The first thing to realize is that capitalism doesn't reward "people" for wanting to improve their conditions, it rewards "me" for wanting to improve "my" condition. In order to function capitalism requires a majority of individuals to be in the lower class and stepped on by others. We can see that you understand that at least subconsciously since you said "get ahead", which implies that there are other individuals that are behind you rather than just all individuals moving forward and fulfilling their potential. So the society that you create isn't good for "people", it's good for "the specific people that are winning at society". Such is the way of competition.
Capitalism is most definitely not a force of nature. It literally doesn't exist in nature, it is purely a human construct. Fascism is also a human construct, and socialism is also a human construct.
"People can't own things" is too restrictive a description. You can't own things if you plan on using these things to make money off of other people just for owning them. If you have a toothbrush and you own that, it's not exactly the same as being a CEO or a landlord.
The issue I have with your vision is that it still kind of says that capitalism is bad. It states that we need the government to bring some good regulation in order to limit its excesses, but I'm not seeing what it is exactly about capitalism that justifies that we keep it and regulate it, instead of just figuring out better systems. When it comes to that, you just reverted back to "we tried some other things and they were bad", and "it's a force of nature". Neither are convincing arguments.
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On January 07 2020 23:50 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2020 23:42 Gorsameth wrote:On January 07 2020 23:26 Nebuchad wrote:On January 07 2020 23:03 Gorsameth wrote:On January 07 2020 22:54 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 07 2020 22:39 Gorsameth wrote:On January 07 2020 20:44 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 07 2020 20:25 Gorsameth wrote:On January 07 2020 20:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 07 2020 20:11 Gorsameth wrote:
[quote]always wanting more with not enough regard for the consequences has been a thing long before capitalism. Changing economic models isn't going to change humanity into peace loving hippies in tune with nature.
It does change our incentives and priorities though. Wanting more without regard for consequences is more profitable (rewarded) under capitalism. Wanting more without regard for consequences is in conflict with everything about socialism. So capitalists can destroy our ecology, enslave children, kill millions, etc.. and none of that is in conflict with capitalism. Sigh, your still ignoring the actual people in your system and just assuming they will act perfectly. But sure, explain to me how your system would stop a person from accepting ecological damage. I'm not ignoring them, I'm pointing out capitalism is inherently unethical and immoral because it prioritizes profit above everything else and exists in a society that's had a couple hundred years of being indoctrinated with the idea that's the best we can do. As we said, it's not "accept ecological damage or don't" it's prioritizing profit over a sustainable and just system. There's no assumption of perfect actors. As I've said, it starts with raising class consciousness and spreading critical pedagogy. At the crux of this is recognizing that capitalism is designed to be exploitative and that exploitation is capitalism working as designed. The laws designed to correct that issue are in opposition to capitalism or designed to legalize the cruelty. Socialism is designed to not be exploitative and exploiting the masses is socialism NOT working (or not socialism). The laws to make socialism sustainable and just are based in socialist ideals as opposed to in contradiction with them as capitalists will always tell you about laws reigning in capitalism. That capitalism is leading us off an ecological cliff while child slaves mine raw earth minerals with their bare hands without enough compensation to live isn't capitalism failing. That same scenario is unquestionably in conflict with socialism. EDIT: A very simple example of this is how companies argue if they didn't exploit people they would put themselves at legal risk from their shareholders for not maximising profit. Hiding behind things like shareholders is just a convenient argument. I don't buy the idea that without them we wouldn't have things like sweatshops. Still don't see anything about how your changing human nature other then 'because'. There has been no successful socialist system, your going to have to come up with more then "it will just work" and until you do I don't see much point in discussing that socialism will fix everything through magic. Because we aren't changing "human nature". We're changing a system that rewards the worst parts of the society with concentrating wealth into one's own hands as THE point. No one is talking about magic or saying "it will just work"? No, you were talking about climate change. Not wealth inequality. it's literally leading us to probable extinction And if you want to talk about wealth inequality then yes socialism is supposed to stop that. Except that every attempt at it has failed and that is something you need to address if you want to convince people to move to a socialist economy. This is where you come in and help us, possibly? But as you know since you've been in the forum before, we don't have no answer for this and we do address it. GH's main answer is critical pedagogy. Mine is to acknowledge that the versions of socialism that include giving more power to the state so that it implements socialism are very vulnerable to turning authoritarian, and therefore I prefer a version that centers democracy, not just in the government but also in the workplace. Some of Bernie's platform goes in that direction with incentives for cooperatives. Once we're there, increase the incentives, increase the disincentives for being an owner. Tax the fuck out of them too. Make their life substantially worse. I have no problem with cooperatives and taxing the fuck out of the rich, but that is just as possible under capitalism. I edited the post with some other stuff that I wish I had said. I'm aware that social democracy is capitalist, thanks. The issue with social democracy is that it only limits the power of the enemy instead of eliminating it. We all agree that it's the first step, it's just that if we stop there, the system will be progressively undermined and it will progressively drift right again, as is the inherent logic of capitalism, and in 90 years we'll be back at the same point with people saying that we need to go back to social democracy again (unless we're all busy trying to survive ecofascism in the case of these specific 90 years, of course). I don't think you can eliminate 'the enemy' so long as your dealing with people (Which is why I hope AI's will be an answer in the future, but that is a different discussion entirely). People are greedy and selfish, in a very broad sense. We want to improve our own lives and take enjoyment from being better then our fellows. And I don't think that is something capitalism has imprinted on us, but something that is within us all and has been for the entirety of human existence.
So both systems, Capitalist and Socialist will have to deal with people and their needs and nature.
And Capitalism, for all its flaws and there are many, recognises this and uses it as a force for innovation and improvement through the free market (where applicable, the free market doesn't work with everything).
And to bring this back to what my original disagreement with GH started with, I don't think economic Socialism would save the environment and lead to a change in how we perceive the world, we would still want more for less and accept the environmental cost as something that we don't really see anyway. Its not going to reduce our energy needs, publicly owned farms are not going to cut livestock, industry's aren't going to clean up their output just because the owner changed. Ignoring the environmental results of our way of life isn't a Capitalist problem, its a people problem.
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The enemy isn't greed and selfishness Gors, it's the owner class.
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On January 08 2020 01:35 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 00:42 RenSC2 wrote:
I'll defend capitalism.
Let's start with a true story. Many years ago, my father ran the IT department for a company. After the fall of the USSR, the company brought in some Russian immigrants to work in his IT department. My father found out they were stealing from the company and wanted to fire them. His boss, the owner (and founder) of the company instead said something like, "They're not bad, they're ignorant. They grew up in socialism and the only way to get ahead in socialism is to steal. We'll work with them." The owner, a true self-made billionaire with Russian ancestry, felt pity for them and wanted to help them. He recognized that the methods of getting ahead in socialism are corruption and theft. If you can re-educate people to teach them that in capitalism you can get ahead through hard work, then you can end up with some good employees and those employees can end up with a better life than they'd ever have under socialism.
People want to get ahead. I'm going to take that as a self-evident truth. In socialism, the outlet for that desire is loyalty to the system (like KGB members getting ahead, hello Mr. Putin) or to outright steal. Ethics and morals be damned. Capitalism directs that desire into something much healthier. It directs it into innovation and hard work. Yes, theft can get you ahead in capitalism too, but at least there it's not the only way.
Capitalism is essentially a force of nature. If you can accept that people can own things (which is not unique to capitalism), then capitalism is a natural extension of that ownership: you can use what you own to make money. You can use your own labor to make money. You can use the piece of land you own to make money. You can use the factory on the land to make money. You can use the money to make money.
Anything else is either saying that people can't own things or is trying to cut people off from the nature of ownership.
Having said that, unrestrained capitalism is not good. The government is supposed to be the check on capitalism to keep its excesses in check. The government is the part where society gets to vote and say, "hey, you have too much". Unfortunately, some of the people who should be educating society on a better form of capitalism have instead decided that the bankruptcy of socialism is better. We've seen socialism, it isn't a new idea, every implementation the world has seen stinks.
If instead, you worked to curb the excesses of capitalism through educating the population, then you'd have more success and end up with a better system. For starters, teach people that taxes aren't all bad. The inheritance tax should be high. If it's a 90% tax over 100 million (or pick your number), then you can prevent infinite generational wealth while still allowing a parent to set up their children for life. You also de-incentivize excess wealth because you'll never get to use it (currently true) and 90% of it will go back to the government anyways (not currently true). Right now, a large portion of people who will never be effected by the inheritance tax voted to get rid of it (part of the Republican platform).
If you also used the government to force people to pay for their ecological destruction, then you'd get different calculus on various capitalistic endeavors. Things like a carbon tax could greatly change society for the better by making some activities unprofitable. However, again, we've been conditioned to think taxes = bad. Fight that fight and the environment has a chance. Pretending that socialism has answers when it has never had any answer for the environment before seems quite dubious.
Finally, there are some areas where socialism can be used in a capitalistic society. I look to socialism to set a floor. Everyone deserves the law, so police and the courts should be socialized (they already are, socialists love the socialized police force /s). Everyone deserves basic health protection so the fire departments and healthcare should be socialized (fire usually is, healthcare not really... an area where I'd love to see universal healthcare). Everyone deserves a basic education so we have public schools and libraries (although I'm not a fan of free college, I think that's past the limit of basic education).
In my ideal society, government sets the floor through socialism and curbs the excess through taxes (which also pay for the socialism); however, we allows capitalism to work in the middle. Many European countries are headed in that direction. The US has a reasonable structure to move in that direction, but it takes people pushing for it, rather than trying to throw the whole thing out and implement something that has never worked before in some magical undefined new way.
I like your anecdote a lot. It shows that in socialism, the people who want to get ahead of others in undue ways had to resort to covert methods, like corruption and theft. Under capitalism, your father saw these corrupt methods and reacted with a sense of injustice. It is unfair that these people are trying to get ahead in undue ways. Your father's boss, being a parasite that feeds off of his workers, understood and sympathized with the willingness of these people to get ahead at the expense of others, and so he showed them the legal ways of doing that (it's not "hard work", I don't know if I have to get into that). You can say "people want to get ahead" if you want, but it's not indicative of what we should do about it. People want to have sex with the people who they are attracted to, doesn't mean laws shouldn't be concerned with whether they have the consent of these people. People want to get ahead in sports, doesn't mean laws against doping are counterintuitive. People want to get more power in politics, doesn't mean authoritarianism is awesome. In fact, it is the very fact that people want those types of things that makes it necessary that our system tries and prevents them from achieving that. We need to dig a little deeper than just what human instincts are, we need to determine if that human instinct is something that we want our society built around or not. The first thing to realize is that capitalism doesn't reward "people" for wanting to improve their conditions, it rewards "me" for wanting to improve "my" condition. In order to function capitalism requires a majority of individuals to be in the lower class and stepped on by others. We can see that you understand that at least subconsciously since you said "get ahead", which implies that there are other individuals that are behind you rather than just all individuals moving forward and fulfilling their potential. So the society that you create isn't good for "people", it's good for "the specific people that are winning at society". Such is the way of competition. Capitalism is most definitely not a force of nature. It literally doesn't exist in nature, it is purely a human construct. Fascism is also a human construct, and socialism is also a human construct. "People can't own things" is too restrictive a description. You can't own things if you plan on using these things to make money off of other people just for owning them. If you have a toothbrush and you own that, it's not exactly the same as being a CEO or a landlord. The issue I have with your vision is that it still kind of says that capitalism is bad. It states that we need the government to bring some good regulation in order to limit its excesses, but I'm not seeing what it is exactly about capitalism that justifies that we keep it and regulate it, instead of just figuring out better systems. When it comes to that, you just reverted back to "we tried some other things and they were bad", and "it's a force of nature". Neither are convincing arguments.
And you miss the obvious. If the CEO didn't create the company, thousands of people don't have jobs or they have jobs at worse companies. To call him a parasite seems very wrong. He used his hard work (started with 1 store) and out competed a lot of competition to become a billionaire. He created opportunity for people. People wanted to work for him. That doesn't sound like a parasite.
The other obvious thing that you missed is the amount of wealth in capitalist societies. Socialism seems to breed poverty. Capitalism has often bred wealth. America's poor are often fat. They live a wealthier life than the a large number of people in socialist countries (enjoy the Maduro diet, etc). Capitalism may be about each person striving for themselves (although I'd also argue for their families/friends as well), but the opportunity is open to everyone. So in actuality, huge swathes of people "get ahead" and society as a whole gets richer through more innovation and productivity.
Directing human nature in a healthy way is much better than trying to deny it. So yes, you need laws directing nature, but you don't try to cut off nature. To use your example, men want to have sex with attractive women. There is no law saying that men can't have sex. Instead, there are laws that require consent, and to get consent men have to make themselves attractive in some way. The laws around sex direct men to be better versions of themselves and improve society. Much like Capitalism directs greed into a richer society.
As for your toothbrush, in your system, I can own my own toothbrush. Cool. But I can't lend it out to someone else for something in return? Okay, gross in this case, but why not? Who distributes the toothbrushes if I cannot? The government? Who makes the toothbrushes? The government? And why would they do that? Profit. Control. Socialism creates centralized power at the expense of the people. In capitalism, the power is distributed between anyone who owns things and ownership starts with your own time and effort (assuming the abolition of actual slavery).
For the last bit, I am saying that you don't have any solutions. You sit on the sideline and provide nothing except criticism. My system actually seems to work in the real world.
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I don’t think it’s possible to argue with GHs stance of critical pedagogy as beneficial to society. Additionally, it’s clear that the only way capitalism will address climate change is if a substantial and educated consumer base demands it in their products and refuses to buy or use anything else, which is neither likely nor feasible for various reasons. Regulations are the only option in the current system.
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On January 08 2020 01:47 Nebuchad wrote:
The enemy isn't greed and selfishness Gors, it's the owner class. And how did the owner class come into existence? Not just in Capitalism but throughout history, through greed and selfishness.
The owner class is a symptom and you talked about wanting to do more then just fight the symptoms.
And before someone gets the wrong idea, I'm not saying people can't be good and caring for another, even complete strangers. But not everyone is perfect and it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch.
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On January 08 2020 02:13 RenSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 01:35 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 00:42 RenSC2 wrote:
I'll defend capitalism.
Let's start with a true story. Many years ago, my father ran the IT department for a company. After the fall of the USSR, the company brought in some Russian immigrants to work in his IT department. My father found out they were stealing from the company and wanted to fire them. His boss, the owner (and founder) of the company instead said something like, "They're not bad, they're ignorant. They grew up in socialism and the only way to get ahead in socialism is to steal. We'll work with them." The owner, a true self-made billionaire with Russian ancestry, felt pity for them and wanted to help them. He recognized that the methods of getting ahead in socialism are corruption and theft. If you can re-educate people to teach them that in capitalism you can get ahead through hard work, then you can end up with some good employees and those employees can end up with a better life than they'd ever have under socialism.
People want to get ahead. I'm going to take that as a self-evident truth. In socialism, the outlet for that desire is loyalty to the system (like KGB members getting ahead, hello Mr. Putin) or to outright steal. Ethics and morals be damned. Capitalism directs that desire into something much healthier. It directs it into innovation and hard work. Yes, theft can get you ahead in capitalism too, but at least there it's not the only way.
Capitalism is essentially a force of nature. If you can accept that people can own things (which is not unique to capitalism), then capitalism is a natural extension of that ownership: you can use what you own to make money. You can use your own labor to make money. You can use the piece of land you own to make money. You can use the factory on the land to make money. You can use the money to make money.
Anything else is either saying that people can't own things or is trying to cut people off from the nature of ownership.
Having said that, unrestrained capitalism is not good. The government is supposed to be the check on capitalism to keep its excesses in check. The government is the part where society gets to vote and say, "hey, you have too much". Unfortunately, some of the people who should be educating society on a better form of capitalism have instead decided that the bankruptcy of socialism is better. We've seen socialism, it isn't a new idea, every implementation the world has seen stinks.
If instead, you worked to curb the excesses of capitalism through educating the population, then you'd have more success and end up with a better system. For starters, teach people that taxes aren't all bad. The inheritance tax should be high. If it's a 90% tax over 100 million (or pick your number), then you can prevent infinite generational wealth while still allowing a parent to set up their children for life. You also de-incentivize excess wealth because you'll never get to use it (currently true) and 90% of it will go back to the government anyways (not currently true). Right now, a large portion of people who will never be effected by the inheritance tax voted to get rid of it (part of the Republican platform).
If you also used the government to force people to pay for their ecological destruction, then you'd get different calculus on various capitalistic endeavors. Things like a carbon tax could greatly change society for the better by making some activities unprofitable. However, again, we've been conditioned to think taxes = bad. Fight that fight and the environment has a chance. Pretending that socialism has answers when it has never had any answer for the environment before seems quite dubious.
Finally, there are some areas where socialism can be used in a capitalistic society. I look to socialism to set a floor. Everyone deserves the law, so police and the courts should be socialized (they already are, socialists love the socialized police force /s). Everyone deserves basic health protection so the fire departments and healthcare should be socialized (fire usually is, healthcare not really... an area where I'd love to see universal healthcare). Everyone deserves a basic education so we have public schools and libraries (although I'm not a fan of free college, I think that's past the limit of basic education).
In my ideal society, government sets the floor through socialism and curbs the excess through taxes (which also pay for the socialism); however, we allows capitalism to work in the middle. Many European countries are headed in that direction. The US has a reasonable structure to move in that direction, but it takes people pushing for it, rather than trying to throw the whole thing out and implement something that has never worked before in some magical undefined new way.
I like your anecdote a lot. It shows that in socialism, the people who want to get ahead of others in undue ways had to resort to covert methods, like corruption and theft. Under capitalism, your father saw these corrupt methods and reacted with a sense of injustice. It is unfair that these people are trying to get ahead in undue ways. Your father's boss, being a parasite that feeds off of his workers, understood and sympathized with the willingness of these people to get ahead at the expense of others, and so he showed them the legal ways of doing that (it's not "hard work", I don't know if I have to get into that). You can say "people want to get ahead" if you want, but it's not indicative of what we should do about it. People want to have sex with the people who they are attracted to, doesn't mean laws shouldn't be concerned with whether they have the consent of these people. People want to get ahead in sports, doesn't mean laws against doping are counterintuitive. People want to get more power in politics, doesn't mean authoritarianism is awesome. In fact, it is the very fact that people want those types of things that makes it necessary that our system tries and prevents them from achieving that. We need to dig a little deeper than just what human instincts are, we need to determine if that human instinct is something that we want our society built around or not. The first thing to realize is that capitalism doesn't reward "people" for wanting to improve their conditions, it rewards "me" for wanting to improve "my" condition. In order to function capitalism requires a majority of individuals to be in the lower class and stepped on by others. We can see that you understand that at least subconsciously since you said "get ahead", which implies that there are other individuals that are behind you rather than just all individuals moving forward and fulfilling their potential. So the society that you create isn't good for "people", it's good for "the specific people that are winning at society". Such is the way of competition. Capitalism is most definitely not a force of nature. It literally doesn't exist in nature, it is purely a human construct. Fascism is also a human construct, and socialism is also a human construct. "People can't own things" is too restrictive a description. You can't own things if you plan on using these things to make money off of other people just for owning them. If you have a toothbrush and you own that, it's not exactly the same as being a CEO or a landlord. The issue I have with your vision is that it still kind of says that capitalism is bad. It states that we need the government to bring some good regulation in order to limit its excesses, but I'm not seeing what it is exactly about capitalism that justifies that we keep it and regulate it, instead of just figuring out better systems. When it comes to that, you just reverted back to "we tried some other things and they were bad", and "it's a force of nature". Neither are convincing arguments. And you miss the obvious. If the CEO didn't create the company, thousands of people don't have jobs or they have jobs at worse companies. To call him a parasite seems very wrong. He used his hard work (started with 1 store) and out competed a lot of competition to become a billionaire. He created opportunity for people. People wanted to work for him. That doesn't sound like a parasite. The other obvious thing that you missed is the amount of wealth in capitalist societies. Socialism seems to breed poverty. Capitalism has often bred wealth. America's poor are often fat. They live a wealthier life than the a large number of people in socialist countries (enjoy the Maduro diet, etc). Capitalism may be about each person striving for themselves (although I'd also argue for their families/friends as well), but the opportunity is open to everyone. So in actuality, huge swathes of people "get ahead" and society as a whole gets richer through more innovation and productivity. Directing human nature in a healthy way is much better than trying to deny it. So yes, you need laws directing nature, but you don't try to cut off nature. To use your example, men want to have sex with attractive women. There is no law saying that men can't have sex. Instead, there are laws that require consent, and to get consent men have to make themselves attractive in some way. The laws around sex direct men to be better versions of themselves and improve society. Much like Capitalism directs greed into a richer society. As for your toothbrush, in your system, I can own my own toothbrush. Cool. But I can't lend it out to someone else for something in return? Okay, gross in this case, but why not? Who distributes the toothbrushes if I cannot? The government? Who makes the toothbrushes? The government? And why would they do that? Profit. Control. Socialism creates centralized power at the expense of the people. In capitalism, the power is distributed between anyone who owns things and ownership starts with your own time and effort (assuming the abolition of actual slavery). For the last bit, I am saying that you don't have any solutions. You sit on the sideline and provide nothing except criticism. My system actually seems to work in the real world.
It's only true that they would have had to work at worse places with worse bosses if you assume capitalism as a premise. Which, again, isn't a defense. I don't agree that it seems wrong to call him a parasite, the way he makes money is that people create value in his enterprise through their labor and he gets some of the profits not because of his personal level of hard work but because he owns it.
Socialism doesn't "seem to breed poverty", socialism tends to emerge in societies that are poorer, often due to being at the wrong end of imperialism (and now neoliberalism). Some of the societies that underwent socialism saw a large improvement in their wealth and their overall level of society, Burkina Faso and Bolivia being the biggest examples I believe. I believe you can make a similar argument even with the USSR but I'm not interested in doing that since I don't like the USSR very much.
You did nothing to demonstrate that we are directing greed in a healthy way, you just said that it was human nature.
In my system the people who make the toothbrushes are the people who work in toothbrush factories (lol, I don't know), they just happen to own their own factory through workplace democracy, and therefore they get the full value of their labor instead of having a capitalist feed off of them.
Again we're attacking other systems rather than defending capitalism though, I hope nobody is surprised 
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On January 08 2020 02:24 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 01:47 Nebuchad wrote:
The enemy isn't greed and selfishness Gors, it's the owner class. And how did the owner class come into existence? Not just in Capitalism but throughout history, through greed and selfishness. The owner class is a symptom and you talked about wanting to do more then just fight the symptoms. And before someone gets the wrong idea, I'm not saying people can't be good and caring for another, even complete strangers. But not everyone is perfect and it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch.
It came into existence because once people got tired of the idea that it was destiny that lords and aristocrats should rule over us, the bourgeois came in and said "This idea of ruling over other people is awesome, we shouldn't get rid of it, but this time it's going to be good because there's a meritocracy that justifies us ruling over other people, instead of divine right."
And then everyone clapped. Also they killed a bunch of the Diggers and communards, but you know, mostly just everyone clapped.
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On January 08 2020 02:24 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 01:47 Nebuchad wrote:
The enemy isn't greed and selfishness Gors, it's the owner class. And how did the owner class come into existence? Not just in Capitalism but throughout history, through greed and selfishness. The owner class is a symptom and you talked about wanting to do more then just fight the symptoms. And before someone gets the wrong idea, I'm not saying people can't be good and caring for another, even complete strangers. But not everyone is perfect and it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch.
I see the owner class somewhat like an untreated infection. It is normal for wealth accumulation to naturally occur, but it is important that those knots are combed out of society. Billionaires are proof our system is broken. There is just no reason for people to have that much money. It is a moral failing on their part to have that much money because all of them know that even if they put no thought into it and donated 200 million to low income medical programs, they would save thousands of lives. Because they know this, it is a moral imperative for them to save those lives.
I don't have the data to say where the cutoff is, but no matter what, someone shouldn't have $1,000,000,000. There needs to be a point after which people simply can't accrue for wealth because that money could be saving a lot of lives. No, it does not mean any money above what I need to survive should go to helping other people survive. Maybe the cutoff is 500M, who knows. But I DO know that 1B is far beyond reason. Too many HUMAN lives could be saved if these people donated the money. I see it no differently than choosing not to save someone from drowning.
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On January 08 2020 02:33 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 02:13 RenSC2 wrote:On January 08 2020 01:35 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 00:42 RenSC2 wrote:
I'll defend capitalism.
Let's start with a true story. Many years ago, my father ran the IT department for a company. After the fall of the USSR, the company brought in some Russian immigrants to work in his IT department. My father found out they were stealing from the company and wanted to fire them. His boss, the owner (and founder) of the company instead said something like, "They're not bad, they're ignorant. They grew up in socialism and the only way to get ahead in socialism is to steal. We'll work with them." The owner, a true self-made billionaire with Russian ancestry, felt pity for them and wanted to help them. He recognized that the methods of getting ahead in socialism are corruption and theft. If you can re-educate people to teach them that in capitalism you can get ahead through hard work, then you can end up with some good employees and those employees can end up with a better life than they'd ever have under socialism.
People want to get ahead. I'm going to take that as a self-evident truth. In socialism, the outlet for that desire is loyalty to the system (like KGB members getting ahead, hello Mr. Putin) or to outright steal. Ethics and morals be damned. Capitalism directs that desire into something much healthier. It directs it into innovation and hard work. Yes, theft can get you ahead in capitalism too, but at least there it's not the only way.
Capitalism is essentially a force of nature. If you can accept that people can own things (which is not unique to capitalism), then capitalism is a natural extension of that ownership: you can use what you own to make money. You can use your own labor to make money. You can use the piece of land you own to make money. You can use the factory on the land to make money. You can use the money to make money.
Anything else is either saying that people can't own things or is trying to cut people off from the nature of ownership.
Having said that, unrestrained capitalism is not good. The government is supposed to be the check on capitalism to keep its excesses in check. The government is the part where society gets to vote and say, "hey, you have too much". Unfortunately, some of the people who should be educating society on a better form of capitalism have instead decided that the bankruptcy of socialism is better. We've seen socialism, it isn't a new idea, every implementation the world has seen stinks.
If instead, you worked to curb the excesses of capitalism through educating the population, then you'd have more success and end up with a better system. For starters, teach people that taxes aren't all bad. The inheritance tax should be high. If it's a 90% tax over 100 million (or pick your number), then you can prevent infinite generational wealth while still allowing a parent to set up their children for life. You also de-incentivize excess wealth because you'll never get to use it (currently true) and 90% of it will go back to the government anyways (not currently true). Right now, a large portion of people who will never be effected by the inheritance tax voted to get rid of it (part of the Republican platform).
If you also used the government to force people to pay for their ecological destruction, then you'd get different calculus on various capitalistic endeavors. Things like a carbon tax could greatly change society for the better by making some activities unprofitable. However, again, we've been conditioned to think taxes = bad. Fight that fight and the environment has a chance. Pretending that socialism has answers when it has never had any answer for the environment before seems quite dubious.
Finally, there are some areas where socialism can be used in a capitalistic society. I look to socialism to set a floor. Everyone deserves the law, so police and the courts should be socialized (they already are, socialists love the socialized police force /s). Everyone deserves basic health protection so the fire departments and healthcare should be socialized (fire usually is, healthcare not really... an area where I'd love to see universal healthcare). Everyone deserves a basic education so we have public schools and libraries (although I'm not a fan of free college, I think that's past the limit of basic education).
In my ideal society, government sets the floor through socialism and curbs the excess through taxes (which also pay for the socialism); however, we allows capitalism to work in the middle. Many European countries are headed in that direction. The US has a reasonable structure to move in that direction, but it takes people pushing for it, rather than trying to throw the whole thing out and implement something that has never worked before in some magical undefined new way.
I like your anecdote a lot. It shows that in socialism, the people who want to get ahead of others in undue ways had to resort to covert methods, like corruption and theft. Under capitalism, your father saw these corrupt methods and reacted with a sense of injustice. It is unfair that these people are trying to get ahead in undue ways. Your father's boss, being a parasite that feeds off of his workers, understood and sympathized with the willingness of these people to get ahead at the expense of others, and so he showed them the legal ways of doing that (it's not "hard work", I don't know if I have to get into that). You can say "people want to get ahead" if you want, but it's not indicative of what we should do about it. People want to have sex with the people who they are attracted to, doesn't mean laws shouldn't be concerned with whether they have the consent of these people. People want to get ahead in sports, doesn't mean laws against doping are counterintuitive. People want to get more power in politics, doesn't mean authoritarianism is awesome. In fact, it is the very fact that people want those types of things that makes it necessary that our system tries and prevents them from achieving that. We need to dig a little deeper than just what human instincts are, we need to determine if that human instinct is something that we want our society built around or not. The first thing to realize is that capitalism doesn't reward "people" for wanting to improve their conditions, it rewards "me" for wanting to improve "my" condition. In order to function capitalism requires a majority of individuals to be in the lower class and stepped on by others. We can see that you understand that at least subconsciously since you said "get ahead", which implies that there are other individuals that are behind you rather than just all individuals moving forward and fulfilling their potential. So the society that you create isn't good for "people", it's good for "the specific people that are winning at society". Such is the way of competition. Capitalism is most definitely not a force of nature. It literally doesn't exist in nature, it is purely a human construct. Fascism is also a human construct, and socialism is also a human construct. "People can't own things" is too restrictive a description. You can't own things if you plan on using these things to make money off of other people just for owning them. If you have a toothbrush and you own that, it's not exactly the same as being a CEO or a landlord. The issue I have with your vision is that it still kind of says that capitalism is bad. It states that we need the government to bring some good regulation in order to limit its excesses, but I'm not seeing what it is exactly about capitalism that justifies that we keep it and regulate it, instead of just figuring out better systems. When it comes to that, you just reverted back to "we tried some other things and they were bad", and "it's a force of nature". Neither are convincing arguments. And you miss the obvious. If the CEO didn't create the company, thousands of people don't have jobs or they have jobs at worse companies. To call him a parasite seems very wrong. He used his hard work (started with 1 store) and out competed a lot of competition to become a billionaire. He created opportunity for people. People wanted to work for him. That doesn't sound like a parasite. The other obvious thing that you missed is the amount of wealth in capitalist societies. Socialism seems to breed poverty. Capitalism has often bred wealth. America's poor are often fat. They live a wealthier life than the a large number of people in socialist countries (enjoy the Maduro diet, etc). Capitalism may be about each person striving for themselves (although I'd also argue for their families/friends as well), but the opportunity is open to everyone. So in actuality, huge swathes of people "get ahead" and society as a whole gets richer through more innovation and productivity. Directing human nature in a healthy way is much better than trying to deny it. So yes, you need laws directing nature, but you don't try to cut off nature. To use your example, men want to have sex with attractive women. There is no law saying that men can't have sex. Instead, there are laws that require consent, and to get consent men have to make themselves attractive in some way. The laws around sex direct men to be better versions of themselves and improve society. Much like Capitalism directs greed into a richer society. As for your toothbrush, in your system, I can own my own toothbrush. Cool. But I can't lend it out to someone else for something in return? Okay, gross in this case, but why not? Who distributes the toothbrushes if I cannot? The government? Who makes the toothbrushes? The government? And why would they do that? Profit. Control. Socialism creates centralized power at the expense of the people. In capitalism, the power is distributed between anyone who owns things and ownership starts with your own time and effort (assuming the abolition of actual slavery). For the last bit, I am saying that you don't have any solutions. You sit on the sideline and provide nothing except criticism. My system actually seems to work in the real world. It's only true that they would have at to work at worse places with worse bosses if you assume capitalism as a premise. Which, again, isn't a defense. I don't agree that it seems wrong to call him a parasite, the way he makes money is that people create value in his enterprise through their labor and he gets some of the profits not because of his personal level of hard work but because he owns it. Socialism doesn't "seem to breed poverty", socialism tends to emerge in societies that are poorer, often due to being at the wrong end of international capitalism. Some of the societies that underwent socialism saw a large improvement in their wealth and their overall level of society, Burkina Faso and Bolivia being the biggest examples I believe. I believe you can make a similar argument even with the USSR but I'm not interested in doing that since I don't like the USSR very much. You did nothing to demonstrate that we are directing greed in a healthy way, you just said that it was human nature. In my system the people who make the toothbrushes are the people who work in toothbrush factories (lol, I don't know), they just happen to own their own factory through workplace democracy, and therefore they get the full value of their labor instead of having a capitalist feed off of them. Again we're attacking other systems rather than defending capitalism though, I hope nobody is surprised
Nobody is surprised that you can't defend socialism.
Who builds the toothbrush factory? In a society without ownership, who has the capital to build a toothbrush factory in the first place? Does socialism only work if you take over a capitalist society first? And then it slowly fades away and society breaks down as the old capitalist structures break down? Hello Venezuela.
In practical socialism, the government ends up making all the decisions like that because they are the only ones who have the power. The factory workers become slave laborers at the government's will. Those that refuse will end up in the gulags or with a bullet in the head.
In capitalism, a capitalist sees the opportunity and builds the factory. Then the workers give their labor in exchange for the opportunity created by the capitalist and make some money off of it. It's a symbiotic relationship, not parasitic. If the worker is smart, he saves up a bit and enjoys some of the greater benefits of capitalism as well. It's a highly functional system.
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On January 08 2020 02:48 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 02:24 Gorsameth wrote:On January 08 2020 01:47 Nebuchad wrote:
The enemy isn't greed and selfishness Gors, it's the owner class. And how did the owner class come into existence? Not just in Capitalism but throughout history, through greed and selfishness. The owner class is a symptom and you talked about wanting to do more then just fight the symptoms. And before someone gets the wrong idea, I'm not saying people can't be good and caring for another, even complete strangers. But not everyone is perfect and it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch. I see the owner class somewhat like an untreated infection. It is normal for wealth accumulation to naturally occur, but it is important that those knots are combed out of society. Billionaires are proof our system is broken. There is just no reason for people to have that much money. It is a moral failing on their part to have that much money because all of them know that even if they put no thought into it and donated 200 million to low income medical programs, they would save thousands of lives. Because they know this, it is a moral imperative for them to save those lives. I don't have the data to say where the cutoff is, but no matter what, someone shouldn't have $1,000,000,000. There needs to be a point after which people simply can't accrue for wealth because that money could be saving a lot of lives. No, it does not mean any money above what I need to survive should go to helping other people survive. Maybe the cutoff is 500M, who knows. But I DO know that 1B is far beyond reason. Too many HUMAN lives could be saved if these people donated the money. I see it no differently than choosing not to save someone from drowning. I pretty much agree. I'm in favor of much higher taxes for the super rich (and them actually paying it) and massive inheritance taxes to kill generational wealth.
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On January 08 2020 02:59 RenSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 02:33 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 02:13 RenSC2 wrote:On January 08 2020 01:35 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 00:42 RenSC2 wrote:
I'll defend capitalism.
Let's start with a true story. Many years ago, my father ran the IT department for a company. After the fall of the USSR, the company brought in some Russian immigrants to work in his IT department. My father found out they were stealing from the company and wanted to fire them. His boss, the owner (and founder) of the company instead said something like, "They're not bad, they're ignorant. They grew up in socialism and the only way to get ahead in socialism is to steal. We'll work with them." The owner, a true self-made billionaire with Russian ancestry, felt pity for them and wanted to help them. He recognized that the methods of getting ahead in socialism are corruption and theft. If you can re-educate people to teach them that in capitalism you can get ahead through hard work, then you can end up with some good employees and those employees can end up with a better life than they'd ever have under socialism.
People want to get ahead. I'm going to take that as a self-evident truth. In socialism, the outlet for that desire is loyalty to the system (like KGB members getting ahead, hello Mr. Putin) or to outright steal. Ethics and morals be damned. Capitalism directs that desire into something much healthier. It directs it into innovation and hard work. Yes, theft can get you ahead in capitalism too, but at least there it's not the only way.
Capitalism is essentially a force of nature. If you can accept that people can own things (which is not unique to capitalism), then capitalism is a natural extension of that ownership: you can use what you own to make money. You can use your own labor to make money. You can use the piece of land you own to make money. You can use the factory on the land to make money. You can use the money to make money.
Anything else is either saying that people can't own things or is trying to cut people off from the nature of ownership.
Having said that, unrestrained capitalism is not good. The government is supposed to be the check on capitalism to keep its excesses in check. The government is the part where society gets to vote and say, "hey, you have too much". Unfortunately, some of the people who should be educating society on a better form of capitalism have instead decided that the bankruptcy of socialism is better. We've seen socialism, it isn't a new idea, every implementation the world has seen stinks.
If instead, you worked to curb the excesses of capitalism through educating the population, then you'd have more success and end up with a better system. For starters, teach people that taxes aren't all bad. The inheritance tax should be high. If it's a 90% tax over 100 million (or pick your number), then you can prevent infinite generational wealth while still allowing a parent to set up their children for life. You also de-incentivize excess wealth because you'll never get to use it (currently true) and 90% of it will go back to the government anyways (not currently true). Right now, a large portion of people who will never be effected by the inheritance tax voted to get rid of it (part of the Republican platform).
If you also used the government to force people to pay for their ecological destruction, then you'd get different calculus on various capitalistic endeavors. Things like a carbon tax could greatly change society for the better by making some activities unprofitable. However, again, we've been conditioned to think taxes = bad. Fight that fight and the environment has a chance. Pretending that socialism has answers when it has never had any answer for the environment before seems quite dubious.
Finally, there are some areas where socialism can be used in a capitalistic society. I look to socialism to set a floor. Everyone deserves the law, so police and the courts should be socialized (they already are, socialists love the socialized police force /s). Everyone deserves basic health protection so the fire departments and healthcare should be socialized (fire usually is, healthcare not really... an area where I'd love to see universal healthcare). Everyone deserves a basic education so we have public schools and libraries (although I'm not a fan of free college, I think that's past the limit of basic education).
In my ideal society, government sets the floor through socialism and curbs the excess through taxes (which also pay for the socialism); however, we allows capitalism to work in the middle. Many European countries are headed in that direction. The US has a reasonable structure to move in that direction, but it takes people pushing for it, rather than trying to throw the whole thing out and implement something that has never worked before in some magical undefined new way.
I like your anecdote a lot. It shows that in socialism, the people who want to get ahead of others in undue ways had to resort to covert methods, like corruption and theft. Under capitalism, your father saw these corrupt methods and reacted with a sense of injustice. It is unfair that these people are trying to get ahead in undue ways. Your father's boss, being a parasite that feeds off of his workers, understood and sympathized with the willingness of these people to get ahead at the expense of others, and so he showed them the legal ways of doing that (it's not "hard work", I don't know if I have to get into that). You can say "people want to get ahead" if you want, but it's not indicative of what we should do about it. People want to have sex with the people who they are attracted to, doesn't mean laws shouldn't be concerned with whether they have the consent of these people. People want to get ahead in sports, doesn't mean laws against doping are counterintuitive. People want to get more power in politics, doesn't mean authoritarianism is awesome. In fact, it is the very fact that people want those types of things that makes it necessary that our system tries and prevents them from achieving that. We need to dig a little deeper than just what human instincts are, we need to determine if that human instinct is something that we want our society built around or not. The first thing to realize is that capitalism doesn't reward "people" for wanting to improve their conditions, it rewards "me" for wanting to improve "my" condition. In order to function capitalism requires a majority of individuals to be in the lower class and stepped on by others. We can see that you understand that at least subconsciously since you said "get ahead", which implies that there are other individuals that are behind you rather than just all individuals moving forward and fulfilling their potential. So the society that you create isn't good for "people", it's good for "the specific people that are winning at society". Such is the way of competition. Capitalism is most definitely not a force of nature. It literally doesn't exist in nature, it is purely a human construct. Fascism is also a human construct, and socialism is also a human construct. "People can't own things" is too restrictive a description. You can't own things if you plan on using these things to make money off of other people just for owning them. If you have a toothbrush and you own that, it's not exactly the same as being a CEO or a landlord. The issue I have with your vision is that it still kind of says that capitalism is bad. It states that we need the government to bring some good regulation in order to limit its excesses, but I'm not seeing what it is exactly about capitalism that justifies that we keep it and regulate it, instead of just figuring out better systems. When it comes to that, you just reverted back to "we tried some other things and they were bad", and "it's a force of nature". Neither are convincing arguments. And you miss the obvious. If the CEO didn't create the company, thousands of people don't have jobs or they have jobs at worse companies. To call him a parasite seems very wrong. He used his hard work (started with 1 store) and out competed a lot of competition to become a billionaire. He created opportunity for people. People wanted to work for him. That doesn't sound like a parasite. The other obvious thing that you missed is the amount of wealth in capitalist societies. Socialism seems to breed poverty. Capitalism has often bred wealth. America's poor are often fat. They live a wealthier life than the a large number of people in socialist countries (enjoy the Maduro diet, etc). Capitalism may be about each person striving for themselves (although I'd also argue for their families/friends as well), but the opportunity is open to everyone. So in actuality, huge swathes of people "get ahead" and society as a whole gets richer through more innovation and productivity. Directing human nature in a healthy way is much better than trying to deny it. So yes, you need laws directing nature, but you don't try to cut off nature. To use your example, men want to have sex with attractive women. There is no law saying that men can't have sex. Instead, there are laws that require consent, and to get consent men have to make themselves attractive in some way. The laws around sex direct men to be better versions of themselves and improve society. Much like Capitalism directs greed into a richer society. As for your toothbrush, in your system, I can own my own toothbrush. Cool. But I can't lend it out to someone else for something in return? Okay, gross in this case, but why not? Who distributes the toothbrushes if I cannot? The government? Who makes the toothbrushes? The government? And why would they do that? Profit. Control. Socialism creates centralized power at the expense of the people. In capitalism, the power is distributed between anyone who owns things and ownership starts with your own time and effort (assuming the abolition of actual slavery). For the last bit, I am saying that you don't have any solutions. You sit on the sideline and provide nothing except criticism. My system actually seems to work in the real world. It's only true that they would have at to work at worse places with worse bosses if you assume capitalism as a premise. Which, again, isn't a defense. I don't agree that it seems wrong to call him a parasite, the way he makes money is that people create value in his enterprise through their labor and he gets some of the profits not because of his personal level of hard work but because he owns it. Socialism doesn't "seem to breed poverty", socialism tends to emerge in societies that are poorer, often due to being at the wrong end of international capitalism. Some of the societies that underwent socialism saw a large improvement in their wealth and their overall level of society, Burkina Faso and Bolivia being the biggest examples I believe. I believe you can make a similar argument even with the USSR but I'm not interested in doing that since I don't like the USSR very much. You did nothing to demonstrate that we are directing greed in a healthy way, you just said that it was human nature. In my system the people who make the toothbrushes are the people who work in toothbrush factories (lol, I don't know), they just happen to own their own factory through workplace democracy, and therefore they get the full value of their labor instead of having a capitalist feed off of them. Again we're attacking other systems rather than defending capitalism though, I hope nobody is surprised Nobody is surprised that you can't defend socialism. Who builds the toothbrush factory? In a society without ownership, who has the capital to build a toothbrush factory in the first place? Does socialism only work if you take over a capitalist society first? And then it slowly fades away and society breaks down as the old capitalist structures break down? Hello Venezuela. In practical socialism, the government ends up making all the decisions like that because they are the only ones who have the power. The factory workers become slave laborers at the government's will. Those that refuse will end up in the gulags or with a bullet in the head. In capitalism, a capitalist sees the opportunity and builds the factory. Then the workers give their labor in exchange for the opportunity created by the capitalist and make some money off of it. It's a symbiotic relationship, not parasitic. If the worker is smart, he saves up a bit and enjoys some of the greater benefits of capitalism as well. It's a highly functional system.
Marx certainly believed that we needed capitalism first in order to have better things next, yeah. Also, who cares? We do have a capitalist society to take over, it's not a problem if we need it.
Why do the societal structures break down if workers own their labor instead of a boss? What has Venezuela got to do with anything? Did Venezuela get rid of its owner class while I wasn't looking?
Your line of attack against socialism consists of discarding socialism, presenting "practical socialism" instead, which is bad, and saying that it's bad. You're right, I can't defend against that. It's not very impressive though. I am similarly unsurprised that you can't defend even an honest depiction of capitalism, for what it's worth.
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On January 08 2020 02:59 RenSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 02:33 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 02:13 RenSC2 wrote:On January 08 2020 01:35 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 00:42 RenSC2 wrote:
I'll defend capitalism.
Let's start with a true story. Many years ago, my father ran the IT department for a company. After the fall of the USSR, the company brought in some Russian immigrants to work in his IT department. My father found out they were stealing from the company and wanted to fire them. His boss, the owner (and founder) of the company instead said something like, "They're not bad, they're ignorant. They grew up in socialism and the only way to get ahead in socialism is to steal. We'll work with them." The owner, a true self-made billionaire with Russian ancestry, felt pity for them and wanted to help them. He recognized that the methods of getting ahead in socialism are corruption and theft. If you can re-educate people to teach them that in capitalism you can get ahead through hard work, then you can end up with some good employees and those employees can end up with a better life than they'd ever have under socialism.
People want to get ahead. I'm going to take that as a self-evident truth. In socialism, the outlet for that desire is loyalty to the system (like KGB members getting ahead, hello Mr. Putin) or to outright steal. Ethics and morals be damned. Capitalism directs that desire into something much healthier. It directs it into innovation and hard work. Yes, theft can get you ahead in capitalism too, but at least there it's not the only way.
Capitalism is essentially a force of nature. If you can accept that people can own things (which is not unique to capitalism), then capitalism is a natural extension of that ownership: you can use what you own to make money. You can use your own labor to make money. You can use the piece of land you own to make money. You can use the factory on the land to make money. You can use the money to make money.
Anything else is either saying that people can't own things or is trying to cut people off from the nature of ownership.
Having said that, unrestrained capitalism is not good. The government is supposed to be the check on capitalism to keep its excesses in check. The government is the part where society gets to vote and say, "hey, you have too much". Unfortunately, some of the people who should be educating society on a better form of capitalism have instead decided that the bankruptcy of socialism is better. We've seen socialism, it isn't a new idea, every implementation the world has seen stinks.
If instead, you worked to curb the excesses of capitalism through educating the population, then you'd have more success and end up with a better system. For starters, teach people that taxes aren't all bad. The inheritance tax should be high. If it's a 90% tax over 100 million (or pick your number), then you can prevent infinite generational wealth while still allowing a parent to set up their children for life. You also de-incentivize excess wealth because you'll never get to use it (currently true) and 90% of it will go back to the government anyways (not currently true). Right now, a large portion of people who will never be effected by the inheritance tax voted to get rid of it (part of the Republican platform).
If you also used the government to force people to pay for their ecological destruction, then you'd get different calculus on various capitalistic endeavors. Things like a carbon tax could greatly change society for the better by making some activities unprofitable. However, again, we've been conditioned to think taxes = bad. Fight that fight and the environment has a chance. Pretending that socialism has answers when it has never had any answer for the environment before seems quite dubious.
Finally, there are some areas where socialism can be used in a capitalistic society. I look to socialism to set a floor. Everyone deserves the law, so police and the courts should be socialized (they already are, socialists love the socialized police force /s). Everyone deserves basic health protection so the fire departments and healthcare should be socialized (fire usually is, healthcare not really... an area where I'd love to see universal healthcare). Everyone deserves a basic education so we have public schools and libraries (although I'm not a fan of free college, I think that's past the limit of basic education).
In my ideal society, government sets the floor through socialism and curbs the excess through taxes (which also pay for the socialism); however, we allows capitalism to work in the middle. Many European countries are headed in that direction. The US has a reasonable structure to move in that direction, but it takes people pushing for it, rather than trying to throw the whole thing out and implement something that has never worked before in some magical undefined new way.
I like your anecdote a lot. It shows that in socialism, the people who want to get ahead of others in undue ways had to resort to covert methods, like corruption and theft. Under capitalism, your father saw these corrupt methods and reacted with a sense of injustice. It is unfair that these people are trying to get ahead in undue ways. Your father's boss, being a parasite that feeds off of his workers, understood and sympathized with the willingness of these people to get ahead at the expense of others, and so he showed them the legal ways of doing that (it's not "hard work", I don't know if I have to get into that). You can say "people want to get ahead" if you want, but it's not indicative of what we should do about it. People want to have sex with the people who they are attracted to, doesn't mean laws shouldn't be concerned with whether they have the consent of these people. People want to get ahead in sports, doesn't mean laws against doping are counterintuitive. People want to get more power in politics, doesn't mean authoritarianism is awesome. In fact, it is the very fact that people want those types of things that makes it necessary that our system tries and prevents them from achieving that. We need to dig a little deeper than just what human instincts are, we need to determine if that human instinct is something that we want our society built around or not. The first thing to realize is that capitalism doesn't reward "people" for wanting to improve their conditions, it rewards "me" for wanting to improve "my" condition. In order to function capitalism requires a majority of individuals to be in the lower class and stepped on by others. We can see that you understand that at least subconsciously since you said "get ahead", which implies that there are other individuals that are behind you rather than just all individuals moving forward and fulfilling their potential. So the society that you create isn't good for "people", it's good for "the specific people that are winning at society". Such is the way of competition. Capitalism is most definitely not a force of nature. It literally doesn't exist in nature, it is purely a human construct. Fascism is also a human construct, and socialism is also a human construct. "People can't own things" is too restrictive a description. You can't own things if you plan on using these things to make money off of other people just for owning them. If you have a toothbrush and you own that, it's not exactly the same as being a CEO or a landlord. The issue I have with your vision is that it still kind of says that capitalism is bad. It states that we need the government to bring some good regulation in order to limit its excesses, but I'm not seeing what it is exactly about capitalism that justifies that we keep it and regulate it, instead of just figuring out better systems. When it comes to that, you just reverted back to "we tried some other things and they were bad", and "it's a force of nature". Neither are convincing arguments. And you miss the obvious. If the CEO didn't create the company, thousands of people don't have jobs or they have jobs at worse companies. To call him a parasite seems very wrong. He used his hard work (started with 1 store) and out competed a lot of competition to become a billionaire. He created opportunity for people. People wanted to work for him. That doesn't sound like a parasite. The other obvious thing that you missed is the amount of wealth in capitalist societies. Socialism seems to breed poverty. Capitalism has often bred wealth. America's poor are often fat. They live a wealthier life than the a large number of people in socialist countries (enjoy the Maduro diet, etc). Capitalism may be about each person striving for themselves (although I'd also argue for their families/friends as well), but the opportunity is open to everyone. So in actuality, huge swathes of people "get ahead" and society as a whole gets richer through more innovation and productivity. Directing human nature in a healthy way is much better than trying to deny it. So yes, you need laws directing nature, but you don't try to cut off nature. To use your example, men want to have sex with attractive women. There is no law saying that men can't have sex. Instead, there are laws that require consent, and to get consent men have to make themselves attractive in some way. The laws around sex direct men to be better versions of themselves and improve society. Much like Capitalism directs greed into a richer society. As for your toothbrush, in your system, I can own my own toothbrush. Cool. But I can't lend it out to someone else for something in return? Okay, gross in this case, but why not? Who distributes the toothbrushes if I cannot? The government? Who makes the toothbrushes? The government? And why would they do that? Profit. Control. Socialism creates centralized power at the expense of the people. In capitalism, the power is distributed between anyone who owns things and ownership starts with your own time and effort (assuming the abolition of actual slavery). For the last bit, I am saying that you don't have any solutions. You sit on the sideline and provide nothing except criticism. My system actually seems to work in the real world. It's only true that they would have at to work at worse places with worse bosses if you assume capitalism as a premise. Which, again, isn't a defense. I don't agree that it seems wrong to call him a parasite, the way he makes money is that people create value in his enterprise through their labor and he gets some of the profits not because of his personal level of hard work but because he owns it. Socialism doesn't "seem to breed poverty", socialism tends to emerge in societies that are poorer, often due to being at the wrong end of international capitalism. Some of the societies that underwent socialism saw a large improvement in their wealth and their overall level of society, Burkina Faso and Bolivia being the biggest examples I believe. I believe you can make a similar argument even with the USSR but I'm not interested in doing that since I don't like the USSR very much. You did nothing to demonstrate that we are directing greed in a healthy way, you just said that it was human nature. In my system the people who make the toothbrushes are the people who work in toothbrush factories (lol, I don't know), they just happen to own their own factory through workplace democracy, and therefore they get the full value of their labor instead of having a capitalist feed off of them. Again we're attacking other systems rather than defending capitalism though, I hope nobody is surprised Nobody is surprised that you can't defend socialism. Who builds the toothbrush factory? In a society without ownership, who has the capital to build a toothbrush factory in the first place? Does socialism only work if you take over a capitalist society first? And then it slowly fades away and society breaks down as the old capitalist structures break down? Hello Venezuela. In practical socialism, the government ends up making all the decisions like that because they are the only ones who have the power. The factory workers become slave laborers at the government's will. Those that refuse will end up in the gulags or with a bullet in the head. In capitalism, a capitalist sees the opportunity and builds the factory. Then the workers give their labor in exchange for the opportunity created by the capitalist and make some money off of it. It's a symbiotic relationship, not parasitic. If the worker is smart, he saves up a bit and enjoys some of the greater benefits of capitalism as well. It's a highly functional system.
It seems you didn't understand the exercise?
On January 07 2020 23:02 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2020 16:12 RvB wrote:On January 07 2020 10:37 Nebuchad wrote:On January 07 2020 10:22 Sermokala wrote:
The problem is that I have no idea what he actually is,If he was a tankie that would be a thing. If he was a democratic socialist that would be a thing. If he was for any of those ideologies that nailed down even a shred of what he's actually trying to get at those would be real things to discuss. But instead, we never get past "socialism" or the great revolution that he has planned to totally work that isn't trying to be violent but will be violent because the people he's revolting against will use violence so he needs everyone to be on board to use violence from the start to defend the revolution.
Its like the entire saga around "abolish the police" where he shouted at anyone defending even the most basic premise of what the police did and called them nothing more than an ocupying force. Then once we finally got him to crack that shell he revealed that his entire plan was to replace one police organization with dozens if not more organizations doing the exact same thing as the police. We all had a laugh at this and how insane it was but it took weeks and weeks of intense drilling down to get there.
I don't agree with the people in the thread more often than not. But everyone else is under the pretense that you have to provide arguments for your points and to explain your opinion when someone questions it. GH is not under this pretense and refuses to provide the most basic explanations or arguments for what he advocates for most if not all the time.
So yeah I'll admit it would be nice to attack what he advocates for. Its what everyone else does. Do you not believe that "This is bad, I'd like something else, but I don't want to build something else alone, I'd like us to create the specificities of the something else together among the people who agree that this is bad" is a valid position? I find that to be a much better starting point for honest discussion than imposing any specific version of change as the basis for the conversation. What if I'm talking with someone who likes socialism as an idea but also strongly wants less government? If I shut down libertarian socialism and anarchism from the discussion, then I shut them down, and they're someone who would have been strong allies in what we're trying to achieve. You say defending their ideal practical vision is what everyone else does but I seriously don't think that's true at all. For most of the posters of this forum I have a very vague idea of what they're for and a very clear idea of what they're against. I know much more about GH wants than I do about what you want. And in discourse overall, not just this forum, the most common defenses of capitalism rely on pointing the finger to the other systems and arguing against them, rather than arguing for capitalism. I think the bolded is untrue and indicates that the viewpoints you engage in are limited. There are many defenders of capitalism on it's own merits even on a medium such as the internet which is overwhelmingly left wing. There are plenty on this forum as well (me included). Ok, let's do it, let's defend capitalism without talking about how other systems are bad. Do you want to start or do you want me to provide an attack? I'm going to answer more posts but overall I really recommend reading Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher.
So if "socialism" or a country that's dabbled in it gets typed up, you're doing it wrong
On January 08 2020 03:04 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 02:48 Mohdoo wrote:On January 08 2020 02:24 Gorsameth wrote:On January 08 2020 01:47 Nebuchad wrote:
The enemy isn't greed and selfishness Gors, it's the owner class. And how did the owner class come into existence? Not just in Capitalism but throughout history, through greed and selfishness. The owner class is a symptom and you talked about wanting to do more then just fight the symptoms. And before someone gets the wrong idea, I'm not saying people can't be good and caring for another, even complete strangers. But not everyone is perfect and it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch. I see the owner class somewhat like an untreated infection. It is normal for wealth accumulation to naturally occur, but it is important that those knots are combed out of society. Billionaires are proof our system is broken. There is just no reason for people to have that much money. It is a moral failing on their part to have that much money because all of them know that even if they put no thought into it and donated 200 million to low income medical programs, they would save thousands of lives. Because they know this, it is a moral imperative for them to save those lives. I don't have the data to say where the cutoff is, but no matter what, someone shouldn't have $1,000,000,000. There needs to be a point after which people simply can't accrue for wealth because that money could be saving a lot of lives. No, it does not mean any money above what I need to survive should go to helping other people survive. Maybe the cutoff is 500M, who knows. But I DO know that 1B is far beyond reason. Too many HUMAN lives could be saved if these people donated the money. I see it no differently than choosing not to save someone from drowning. I pretty much agree. I'm in favor of much higher taxes for the super rich (and them actually paying it) and massive inheritance taxes to kill generational wealth.
I think most sensible people do (though there shouldn't be super rich people to tax if it's working), the point of contention is really whether we can under the current system and if not (most argue we can't) how to change the system.
Which brings us to the major hurdle of electoralism in the US. We need to change the system, in order to change the system we have to change the politicians, and we can't change the politicians before changing the system.
Sanders is the last potential vestige of hope to break that cycle in time for us to do anything with electoralism imo.
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On January 08 2020 02:59 RenSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 02:33 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 02:13 RenSC2 wrote:On January 08 2020 01:35 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 00:42 RenSC2 wrote:
I'll defend capitalism.
Let's start with a true story. Many years ago, my father ran the IT department for a company. After the fall of the USSR, the company brought in some Russian immigrants to work in his IT department. My father found out they were stealing from the company and wanted to fire them. His boss, the owner (and founder) of the company instead said something like, "They're not bad, they're ignorant. They grew up in socialism and the only way to get ahead in socialism is to steal. We'll work with them." The owner, a true self-made billionaire with Russian ancestry, felt pity for them and wanted to help them. He recognized that the methods of getting ahead in socialism are corruption and theft. If you can re-educate people to teach them that in capitalism you can get ahead through hard work, then you can end up with some good employees and those employees can end up with a better life than they'd ever have under socialism.
People want to get ahead. I'm going to take that as a self-evident truth. In socialism, the outlet for that desire is loyalty to the system (like KGB members getting ahead, hello Mr. Putin) or to outright steal. Ethics and morals be damned. Capitalism directs that desire into something much healthier. It directs it into innovation and hard work. Yes, theft can get you ahead in capitalism too, but at least there it's not the only way.
Capitalism is essentially a force of nature. If you can accept that people can own things (which is not unique to capitalism), then capitalism is a natural extension of that ownership: you can use what you own to make money. You can use your own labor to make money. You can use the piece of land you own to make money. You can use the factory on the land to make money. You can use the money to make money.
Anything else is either saying that people can't own things or is trying to cut people off from the nature of ownership.
Having said that, unrestrained capitalism is not good. The government is supposed to be the check on capitalism to keep its excesses in check. The government is the part where society gets to vote and say, "hey, you have too much". Unfortunately, some of the people who should be educating society on a better form of capitalism have instead decided that the bankruptcy of socialism is better. We've seen socialism, it isn't a new idea, every implementation the world has seen stinks.
If instead, you worked to curb the excesses of capitalism through educating the population, then you'd have more success and end up with a better system. For starters, teach people that taxes aren't all bad. The inheritance tax should be high. If it's a 90% tax over 100 million (or pick your number), then you can prevent infinite generational wealth while still allowing a parent to set up their children for life. You also de-incentivize excess wealth because you'll never get to use it (currently true) and 90% of it will go back to the government anyways (not currently true). Right now, a large portion of people who will never be effected by the inheritance tax voted to get rid of it (part of the Republican platform).
If you also used the government to force people to pay for their ecological destruction, then you'd get different calculus on various capitalistic endeavors. Things like a carbon tax could greatly change society for the better by making some activities unprofitable. However, again, we've been conditioned to think taxes = bad. Fight that fight and the environment has a chance. Pretending that socialism has answers when it has never had any answer for the environment before seems quite dubious.
Finally, there are some areas where socialism can be used in a capitalistic society. I look to socialism to set a floor. Everyone deserves the law, so police and the courts should be socialized (they already are, socialists love the socialized police force /s). Everyone deserves basic health protection so the fire departments and healthcare should be socialized (fire usually is, healthcare not really... an area where I'd love to see universal healthcare). Everyone deserves a basic education so we have public schools and libraries (although I'm not a fan of free college, I think that's past the limit of basic education).
In my ideal society, government sets the floor through socialism and curbs the excess through taxes (which also pay for the socialism); however, we allows capitalism to work in the middle. Many European countries are headed in that direction. The US has a reasonable structure to move in that direction, but it takes people pushing for it, rather than trying to throw the whole thing out and implement something that has never worked before in some magical undefined new way.
I like your anecdote a lot. It shows that in socialism, the people who want to get ahead of others in undue ways had to resort to covert methods, like corruption and theft. Under capitalism, your father saw these corrupt methods and reacted with a sense of injustice. It is unfair that these people are trying to get ahead in undue ways. Your father's boss, being a parasite that feeds off of his workers, understood and sympathized with the willingness of these people to get ahead at the expense of others, and so he showed them the legal ways of doing that (it's not "hard work", I don't know if I have to get into that). You can say "people want to get ahead" if you want, but it's not indicative of what we should do about it. People want to have sex with the people who they are attracted to, doesn't mean laws shouldn't be concerned with whether they have the consent of these people. People want to get ahead in sports, doesn't mean laws against doping are counterintuitive. People want to get more power in politics, doesn't mean authoritarianism is awesome. In fact, it is the very fact that people want those types of things that makes it necessary that our system tries and prevents them from achieving that. We need to dig a little deeper than just what human instincts are, we need to determine if that human instinct is something that we want our society built around or not. The first thing to realize is that capitalism doesn't reward "people" for wanting to improve their conditions, it rewards "me" for wanting to improve "my" condition. In order to function capitalism requires a majority of individuals to be in the lower class and stepped on by others. We can see that you understand that at least subconsciously since you said "get ahead", which implies that there are other individuals that are behind you rather than just all individuals moving forward and fulfilling their potential. So the society that you create isn't good for "people", it's good for "the specific people that are winning at society". Such is the way of competition. Capitalism is most definitely not a force of nature. It literally doesn't exist in nature, it is purely a human construct. Fascism is also a human construct, and socialism is also a human construct. "People can't own things" is too restrictive a description. You can't own things if you plan on using these things to make money off of other people just for owning them. If you have a toothbrush and you own that, it's not exactly the same as being a CEO or a landlord. The issue I have with your vision is that it still kind of says that capitalism is bad. It states that we need the government to bring some good regulation in order to limit its excesses, but I'm not seeing what it is exactly about capitalism that justifies that we keep it and regulate it, instead of just figuring out better systems. When it comes to that, you just reverted back to "we tried some other things and they were bad", and "it's a force of nature". Neither are convincing arguments. And you miss the obvious. If the CEO didn't create the company, thousands of people don't have jobs or they have jobs at worse companies. To call him a parasite seems very wrong. He used his hard work (started with 1 store) and out competed a lot of competition to become a billionaire. He created opportunity for people. People wanted to work for him. That doesn't sound like a parasite. The other obvious thing that you missed is the amount of wealth in capitalist societies. Socialism seems to breed poverty. Capitalism has often bred wealth. America's poor are often fat. They live a wealthier life than the a large number of people in socialist countries (enjoy the Maduro diet, etc). Capitalism may be about each person striving for themselves (although I'd also argue for their families/friends as well), but the opportunity is open to everyone. So in actuality, huge swathes of people "get ahead" and society as a whole gets richer through more innovation and productivity. Directing human nature in a healthy way is much better than trying to deny it. So yes, you need laws directing nature, but you don't try to cut off nature. To use your example, men want to have sex with attractive women. There is no law saying that men can't have sex. Instead, there are laws that require consent, and to get consent men have to make themselves attractive in some way. The laws around sex direct men to be better versions of themselves and improve society. Much like Capitalism directs greed into a richer society. As for your toothbrush, in your system, I can own my own toothbrush. Cool. But I can't lend it out to someone else for something in return? Okay, gross in this case, but why not? Who distributes the toothbrushes if I cannot? The government? Who makes the toothbrushes? The government? And why would they do that? Profit. Control. Socialism creates centralized power at the expense of the people. In capitalism, the power is distributed between anyone who owns things and ownership starts with your own time and effort (assuming the abolition of actual slavery). For the last bit, I am saying that you don't have any solutions. You sit on the sideline and provide nothing except criticism. My system actually seems to work in the real world. It's only true that they would have at to work at worse places with worse bosses if you assume capitalism as a premise. Which, again, isn't a defense. I don't agree that it seems wrong to call him a parasite, the way he makes money is that people create value in his enterprise through their labor and he gets some of the profits not because of his personal level of hard work but because he owns it. Socialism doesn't "seem to breed poverty", socialism tends to emerge in societies that are poorer, often due to being at the wrong end of international capitalism. Some of the societies that underwent socialism saw a large improvement in their wealth and their overall level of society, Burkina Faso and Bolivia being the biggest examples I believe. I believe you can make a similar argument even with the USSR but I'm not interested in doing that since I don't like the USSR very much. You did nothing to demonstrate that we are directing greed in a healthy way, you just said that it was human nature. In my system the people who make the toothbrushes are the people who work in toothbrush factories (lol, I don't know), they just happen to own their own factory through workplace democracy, and therefore they get the full value of their labor instead of having a capitalist feed off of them. Again we're attacking other systems rather than defending capitalism though, I hope nobody is surprised Nobody is surprised that you can't defend socialism. Who builds the toothbrush factory? In a society without ownership, who has the capital to build a toothbrush factory in the first place? Does socialism only work if you take over a capitalist society first? And then it slowly fades away and society breaks down as the old capitalist structures break down? Hello Venezuela. In practical socialism, the government ends up making all the decisions like that because they are the only ones who have the power. The factory workers become slave laborers at the government's will. Those that refuse will end up in the gulags or with a bullet in the head. In capitalism, a capitalist sees the opportunity and builds the factory. Then the workers give their labor in exchange for the opportunity created by the capitalist and make some money off of it. It's a symbiotic relationship, not parasitic. If the worker is smart, he saves up a bit and enjoys some of the greater benefits of capitalism as well. It's a highly functional system.
Three massive problems with your argument.
1) You jump to conclusions and claim that every socialist society will end up like the USSR. This is not necessarily true.
2) You state that people become "slaves to the government's will" in socialism. What is the meaningful difference between being a slave to a socialist government and being a slave to capitalist corporations?
3) You assume that the ownership class got their money and resources from hard work. This is very rarely true. The majority got it through crimes, exploitation, inheritance, and favors given due to their race, sex, or nepotism.
As others have pointed out, your arguments are flawed because you are assuming the conclusion; that capitalism is good. You're arguing with a lot of capitalist dogma and just assuming it is true without actually defending the validity of any of it.
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On January 08 2020 03:06 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 02:59 RenSC2 wrote:On January 08 2020 02:33 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 02:13 RenSC2 wrote:On January 08 2020 01:35 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 00:42 RenSC2 wrote:
I'll defend capitalism.
Let's start with a true story. Many years ago, my father ran the IT department for a company. After the fall of the USSR, the company brought in some Russian immigrants to work in his IT department. My father found out they were stealing from the company and wanted to fire them. His boss, the owner (and founder) of the company instead said something like, "They're not bad, they're ignorant. They grew up in socialism and the only way to get ahead in socialism is to steal. We'll work with them." The owner, a true self-made billionaire with Russian ancestry, felt pity for them and wanted to help them. He recognized that the methods of getting ahead in socialism are corruption and theft. If you can re-educate people to teach them that in capitalism you can get ahead through hard work, then you can end up with some good employees and those employees can end up with a better life than they'd ever have under socialism.
People want to get ahead. I'm going to take that as a self-evident truth. In socialism, the outlet for that desire is loyalty to the system (like KGB members getting ahead, hello Mr. Putin) or to outright steal. Ethics and morals be damned. Capitalism directs that desire into something much healthier. It directs it into innovation and hard work. Yes, theft can get you ahead in capitalism too, but at least there it's not the only way.
Capitalism is essentially a force of nature. If you can accept that people can own things (which is not unique to capitalism), then capitalism is a natural extension of that ownership: you can use what you own to make money. You can use your own labor to make money. You can use the piece of land you own to make money. You can use the factory on the land to make money. You can use the money to make money.
Anything else is either saying that people can't own things or is trying to cut people off from the nature of ownership.
Having said that, unrestrained capitalism is not good. The government is supposed to be the check on capitalism to keep its excesses in check. The government is the part where society gets to vote and say, "hey, you have too much". Unfortunately, some of the people who should be educating society on a better form of capitalism have instead decided that the bankruptcy of socialism is better. We've seen socialism, it isn't a new idea, every implementation the world has seen stinks.
If instead, you worked to curb the excesses of capitalism through educating the population, then you'd have more success and end up with a better system. For starters, teach people that taxes aren't all bad. The inheritance tax should be high. If it's a 90% tax over 100 million (or pick your number), then you can prevent infinite generational wealth while still allowing a parent to set up their children for life. You also de-incentivize excess wealth because you'll never get to use it (currently true) and 90% of it will go back to the government anyways (not currently true). Right now, a large portion of people who will never be effected by the inheritance tax voted to get rid of it (part of the Republican platform).
If you also used the government to force people to pay for their ecological destruction, then you'd get different calculus on various capitalistic endeavors. Things like a carbon tax could greatly change society for the better by making some activities unprofitable. However, again, we've been conditioned to think taxes = bad. Fight that fight and the environment has a chance. Pretending that socialism has answers when it has never had any answer for the environment before seems quite dubious.
Finally, there are some areas where socialism can be used in a capitalistic society. I look to socialism to set a floor. Everyone deserves the law, so police and the courts should be socialized (they already are, socialists love the socialized police force /s). Everyone deserves basic health protection so the fire departments and healthcare should be socialized (fire usually is, healthcare not really... an area where I'd love to see universal healthcare). Everyone deserves a basic education so we have public schools and libraries (although I'm not a fan of free college, I think that's past the limit of basic education).
In my ideal society, government sets the floor through socialism and curbs the excess through taxes (which also pay for the socialism); however, we allows capitalism to work in the middle. Many European countries are headed in that direction. The US has a reasonable structure to move in that direction, but it takes people pushing for it, rather than trying to throw the whole thing out and implement something that has never worked before in some magical undefined new way.
I like your anecdote a lot. It shows that in socialism, the people who want to get ahead of others in undue ways had to resort to covert methods, like corruption and theft. Under capitalism, your father saw these corrupt methods and reacted with a sense of injustice. It is unfair that these people are trying to get ahead in undue ways. Your father's boss, being a parasite that feeds off of his workers, understood and sympathized with the willingness of these people to get ahead at the expense of others, and so he showed them the legal ways of doing that (it's not "hard work", I don't know if I have to get into that). You can say "people want to get ahead" if you want, but it's not indicative of what we should do about it. People want to have sex with the people who they are attracted to, doesn't mean laws shouldn't be concerned with whether they have the consent of these people. People want to get ahead in sports, doesn't mean laws against doping are counterintuitive. People want to get more power in politics, doesn't mean authoritarianism is awesome. In fact, it is the very fact that people want those types of things that makes it necessary that our system tries and prevents them from achieving that. We need to dig a little deeper than just what human instincts are, we need to determine if that human instinct is something that we want our society built around or not. The first thing to realize is that capitalism doesn't reward "people" for wanting to improve their conditions, it rewards "me" for wanting to improve "my" condition. In order to function capitalism requires a majority of individuals to be in the lower class and stepped on by others. We can see that you understand that at least subconsciously since you said "get ahead", which implies that there are other individuals that are behind you rather than just all individuals moving forward and fulfilling their potential. So the society that you create isn't good for "people", it's good for "the specific people that are winning at society". Such is the way of competition. Capitalism is most definitely not a force of nature. It literally doesn't exist in nature, it is purely a human construct. Fascism is also a human construct, and socialism is also a human construct. "People can't own things" is too restrictive a description. You can't own things if you plan on using these things to make money off of other people just for owning them. If you have a toothbrush and you own that, it's not exactly the same as being a CEO or a landlord. The issue I have with your vision is that it still kind of says that capitalism is bad. It states that we need the government to bring some good regulation in order to limit its excesses, but I'm not seeing what it is exactly about capitalism that justifies that we keep it and regulate it, instead of just figuring out better systems. When it comes to that, you just reverted back to "we tried some other things and they were bad", and "it's a force of nature". Neither are convincing arguments. And you miss the obvious. If the CEO didn't create the company, thousands of people don't have jobs or they have jobs at worse companies. To call him a parasite seems very wrong. He used his hard work (started with 1 store) and out competed a lot of competition to become a billionaire. He created opportunity for people. People wanted to work for him. That doesn't sound like a parasite. The other obvious thing that you missed is the amount of wealth in capitalist societies. Socialism seems to breed poverty. Capitalism has often bred wealth. America's poor are often fat. They live a wealthier life than the a large number of people in socialist countries (enjoy the Maduro diet, etc). Capitalism may be about each person striving for themselves (although I'd also argue for their families/friends as well), but the opportunity is open to everyone. So in actuality, huge swathes of people "get ahead" and society as a whole gets richer through more innovation and productivity. Directing human nature in a healthy way is much better than trying to deny it. So yes, you need laws directing nature, but you don't try to cut off nature. To use your example, men want to have sex with attractive women. There is no law saying that men can't have sex. Instead, there are laws that require consent, and to get consent men have to make themselves attractive in some way. The laws around sex direct men to be better versions of themselves and improve society. Much like Capitalism directs greed into a richer society. As for your toothbrush, in your system, I can own my own toothbrush. Cool. But I can't lend it out to someone else for something in return? Okay, gross in this case, but why not? Who distributes the toothbrushes if I cannot? The government? Who makes the toothbrushes? The government? And why would they do that? Profit. Control. Socialism creates centralized power at the expense of the people. In capitalism, the power is distributed between anyone who owns things and ownership starts with your own time and effort (assuming the abolition of actual slavery). For the last bit, I am saying that you don't have any solutions. You sit on the sideline and provide nothing except criticism. My system actually seems to work in the real world. It's only true that they would have at to work at worse places with worse bosses if you assume capitalism as a premise. Which, again, isn't a defense. I don't agree that it seems wrong to call him a parasite, the way he makes money is that people create value in his enterprise through their labor and he gets some of the profits not because of his personal level of hard work but because he owns it. Socialism doesn't "seem to breed poverty", socialism tends to emerge in societies that are poorer, often due to being at the wrong end of international capitalism. Some of the societies that underwent socialism saw a large improvement in their wealth and their overall level of society, Burkina Faso and Bolivia being the biggest examples I believe. I believe you can make a similar argument even with the USSR but I'm not interested in doing that since I don't like the USSR very much. You did nothing to demonstrate that we are directing greed in a healthy way, you just said that it was human nature. In my system the people who make the toothbrushes are the people who work in toothbrush factories (lol, I don't know), they just happen to own their own factory through workplace democracy, and therefore they get the full value of their labor instead of having a capitalist feed off of them. Again we're attacking other systems rather than defending capitalism though, I hope nobody is surprised Nobody is surprised that you can't defend socialism. Who builds the toothbrush factory? In a society without ownership, who has the capital to build a toothbrush factory in the first place? Does socialism only work if you take over a capitalist society first? And then it slowly fades away and society breaks down as the old capitalist structures break down? Hello Venezuela. In practical socialism, the government ends up making all the decisions like that because they are the only ones who have the power. The factory workers become slave laborers at the government's will. Those that refuse will end up in the gulags or with a bullet in the head. In capitalism, a capitalist sees the opportunity and builds the factory. Then the workers give their labor in exchange for the opportunity created by the capitalist and make some money off of it. It's a symbiotic relationship, not parasitic. If the worker is smart, he saves up a bit and enjoys some of the greater benefits of capitalism as well. It's a highly functional system. Marx certainly believed that we needed capitalism first in order to have better things next, yeah. Also, who cares? We do have a capitalist society to take over, it's not a problem if we need it. Why do the societal structures break down if workers own their labor instead of a boss? What has Venezuela got to do with anything? Did Venezuela get rid of its owner class while I wasn't looking?
So socialism only works if it takes over a capitalist society. Yet a capitalist society can spring up from a guy grabbing some rocks out of the ground and trading them for someone else's property.
Let's get back to it. The socialists take over the toothbrush factory that the capitalists built. It works for awhile. Hurrah. Then the machines start wearing down over time. Who pays to replace the large machinery? The workers who have no capital? No, you need a new capitalist to come in and pay for that new machinery. Except, nobody has an incentive to do so because they can't profit off it in a socialist society. Perhaps the government steps in, except now it has control. The laborers only work if the government says so. People only get toothbrushes if the government says so.
In capitalism, when the machines break down, the capitalist who has been accumulating capital can put some of that capital back into the machinery (or get a loan if he didn't save up enough) and the laborers don't need to worry about their jobs. People can buy a toothbrush in a free market that keeps the price low. Seems a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
Venezuela is relevant because is had a socialist takeover. It had a profitable Oil Industry built by capitalism, the socialists took it over and used its profits for awhile to benefit the people a little and the politicians a lot. Then the industry started to break down. Now the people are starving. I guess you don't defend Venezuelan socialism like GH has?
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On January 08 2020 03:21 RenSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 03:06 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 02:59 RenSC2 wrote:On January 08 2020 02:33 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 02:13 RenSC2 wrote:On January 08 2020 01:35 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 00:42 RenSC2 wrote:
I'll defend capitalism.
Let's start with a true story. Many years ago, my father ran the IT department for a company. After the fall of the USSR, the company brought in some Russian immigrants to work in his IT department. My father found out they were stealing from the company and wanted to fire them. His boss, the owner (and founder) of the company instead said something like, "They're not bad, they're ignorant. They grew up in socialism and the only way to get ahead in socialism is to steal. We'll work with them." The owner, a true self-made billionaire with Russian ancestry, felt pity for them and wanted to help them. He recognized that the methods of getting ahead in socialism are corruption and theft. If you can re-educate people to teach them that in capitalism you can get ahead through hard work, then you can end up with some good employees and those employees can end up with a better life than they'd ever have under socialism.
People want to get ahead. I'm going to take that as a self-evident truth. In socialism, the outlet for that desire is loyalty to the system (like KGB members getting ahead, hello Mr. Putin) or to outright steal. Ethics and morals be damned. Capitalism directs that desire into something much healthier. It directs it into innovation and hard work. Yes, theft can get you ahead in capitalism too, but at least there it's not the only way.
Capitalism is essentially a force of nature. If you can accept that people can own things (which is not unique to capitalism), then capitalism is a natural extension of that ownership: you can use what you own to make money. You can use your own labor to make money. You can use the piece of land you own to make money. You can use the factory on the land to make money. You can use the money to make money.
Anything else is either saying that people can't own things or is trying to cut people off from the nature of ownership.
Having said that, unrestrained capitalism is not good. The government is supposed to be the check on capitalism to keep its excesses in check. The government is the part where society gets to vote and say, "hey, you have too much". Unfortunately, some of the people who should be educating society on a better form of capitalism have instead decided that the bankruptcy of socialism is better. We've seen socialism, it isn't a new idea, every implementation the world has seen stinks.
If instead, you worked to curb the excesses of capitalism through educating the population, then you'd have more success and end up with a better system. For starters, teach people that taxes aren't all bad. The inheritance tax should be high. If it's a 90% tax over 100 million (or pick your number), then you can prevent infinite generational wealth while still allowing a parent to set up their children for life. You also de-incentivize excess wealth because you'll never get to use it (currently true) and 90% of it will go back to the government anyways (not currently true). Right now, a large portion of people who will never be effected by the inheritance tax voted to get rid of it (part of the Republican platform).
If you also used the government to force people to pay for their ecological destruction, then you'd get different calculus on various capitalistic endeavors. Things like a carbon tax could greatly change society for the better by making some activities unprofitable. However, again, we've been conditioned to think taxes = bad. Fight that fight and the environment has a chance. Pretending that socialism has answers when it has never had any answer for the environment before seems quite dubious.
Finally, there are some areas where socialism can be used in a capitalistic society. I look to socialism to set a floor. Everyone deserves the law, so police and the courts should be socialized (they already are, socialists love the socialized police force /s). Everyone deserves basic health protection so the fire departments and healthcare should be socialized (fire usually is, healthcare not really... an area where I'd love to see universal healthcare). Everyone deserves a basic education so we have public schools and libraries (although I'm not a fan of free college, I think that's past the limit of basic education).
In my ideal society, government sets the floor through socialism and curbs the excess through taxes (which also pay for the socialism); however, we allows capitalism to work in the middle. Many European countries are headed in that direction. The US has a reasonable structure to move in that direction, but it takes people pushing for it, rather than trying to throw the whole thing out and implement something that has never worked before in some magical undefined new way.
I like your anecdote a lot. It shows that in socialism, the people who want to get ahead of others in undue ways had to resort to covert methods, like corruption and theft. Under capitalism, your father saw these corrupt methods and reacted with a sense of injustice. It is unfair that these people are trying to get ahead in undue ways. Your father's boss, being a parasite that feeds off of his workers, understood and sympathized with the willingness of these people to get ahead at the expense of others, and so he showed them the legal ways of doing that (it's not "hard work", I don't know if I have to get into that). You can say "people want to get ahead" if you want, but it's not indicative of what we should do about it. People want to have sex with the people who they are attracted to, doesn't mean laws shouldn't be concerned with whether they have the consent of these people. People want to get ahead in sports, doesn't mean laws against doping are counterintuitive. People want to get more power in politics, doesn't mean authoritarianism is awesome. In fact, it is the very fact that people want those types of things that makes it necessary that our system tries and prevents them from achieving that. We need to dig a little deeper than just what human instincts are, we need to determine if that human instinct is something that we want our society built around or not. The first thing to realize is that capitalism doesn't reward "people" for wanting to improve their conditions, it rewards "me" for wanting to improve "my" condition. In order to function capitalism requires a majority of individuals to be in the lower class and stepped on by others. We can see that you understand that at least subconsciously since you said "get ahead", which implies that there are other individuals that are behind you rather than just all individuals moving forward and fulfilling their potential. So the society that you create isn't good for "people", it's good for "the specific people that are winning at society". Such is the way of competition. Capitalism is most definitely not a force of nature. It literally doesn't exist in nature, it is purely a human construct. Fascism is also a human construct, and socialism is also a human construct. "People can't own things" is too restrictive a description. You can't own things if you plan on using these things to make money off of other people just for owning them. If you have a toothbrush and you own that, it's not exactly the same as being a CEO or a landlord. The issue I have with your vision is that it still kind of says that capitalism is bad. It states that we need the government to bring some good regulation in order to limit its excesses, but I'm not seeing what it is exactly about capitalism that justifies that we keep it and regulate it, instead of just figuring out better systems. When it comes to that, you just reverted back to "we tried some other things and they were bad", and "it's a force of nature". Neither are convincing arguments. And you miss the obvious. If the CEO didn't create the company, thousands of people don't have jobs or they have jobs at worse companies. To call him a parasite seems very wrong. He used his hard work (started with 1 store) and out competed a lot of competition to become a billionaire. He created opportunity for people. People wanted to work for him. That doesn't sound like a parasite. The other obvious thing that you missed is the amount of wealth in capitalist societies. Socialism seems to breed poverty. Capitalism has often bred wealth. America's poor are often fat. They live a wealthier life than the a large number of people in socialist countries (enjoy the Maduro diet, etc). Capitalism may be about each person striving for themselves (although I'd also argue for their families/friends as well), but the opportunity is open to everyone. So in actuality, huge swathes of people "get ahead" and society as a whole gets richer through more innovation and productivity. Directing human nature in a healthy way is much better than trying to deny it. So yes, you need laws directing nature, but you don't try to cut off nature. To use your example, men want to have sex with attractive women. There is no law saying that men can't have sex. Instead, there are laws that require consent, and to get consent men have to make themselves attractive in some way. The laws around sex direct men to be better versions of themselves and improve society. Much like Capitalism directs greed into a richer society. As for your toothbrush, in your system, I can own my own toothbrush. Cool. But I can't lend it out to someone else for something in return? Okay, gross in this case, but why not? Who distributes the toothbrushes if I cannot? The government? Who makes the toothbrushes? The government? And why would they do that? Profit. Control. Socialism creates centralized power at the expense of the people. In capitalism, the power is distributed between anyone who owns things and ownership starts with your own time and effort (assuming the abolition of actual slavery). For the last bit, I am saying that you don't have any solutions. You sit on the sideline and provide nothing except criticism. My system actually seems to work in the real world. It's only true that they would have at to work at worse places with worse bosses if you assume capitalism as a premise. Which, again, isn't a defense. I don't agree that it seems wrong to call him a parasite, the way he makes money is that people create value in his enterprise through their labor and he gets some of the profits not because of his personal level of hard work but because he owns it. Socialism doesn't "seem to breed poverty", socialism tends to emerge in societies that are poorer, often due to being at the wrong end of international capitalism. Some of the societies that underwent socialism saw a large improvement in their wealth and their overall level of society, Burkina Faso and Bolivia being the biggest examples I believe. I believe you can make a similar argument even with the USSR but I'm not interested in doing that since I don't like the USSR very much. You did nothing to demonstrate that we are directing greed in a healthy way, you just said that it was human nature. In my system the people who make the toothbrushes are the people who work in toothbrush factories (lol, I don't know), they just happen to own their own factory through workplace democracy, and therefore they get the full value of their labor instead of having a capitalist feed off of them. Again we're attacking other systems rather than defending capitalism though, I hope nobody is surprised Nobody is surprised that you can't defend socialism. Who builds the toothbrush factory? In a society without ownership, who has the capital to build a toothbrush factory in the first place? Does socialism only work if you take over a capitalist society first? And then it slowly fades away and society breaks down as the old capitalist structures break down? Hello Venezuela. In practical socialism, the government ends up making all the decisions like that because they are the only ones who have the power. The factory workers become slave laborers at the government's will. Those that refuse will end up in the gulags or with a bullet in the head. In capitalism, a capitalist sees the opportunity and builds the factory. Then the workers give their labor in exchange for the opportunity created by the capitalist and make some money off of it. It's a symbiotic relationship, not parasitic. If the worker is smart, he saves up a bit and enjoys some of the greater benefits of capitalism as well. It's a highly functional system. Marx certainly believed that we needed capitalism first in order to have better things next, yeah. Also, who cares? We do have a capitalist society to take over, it's not a problem if we need it. Why do the societal structures break down if workers own their labor instead of a boss? What has Venezuela got to do with anything? Did Venezuela get rid of its owner class while I wasn't looking? So socialism only works if it takes over a capitalist society. Yet a capitalist society can spring up from a guy grabbing some rocks out of the ground and trading them for someone else's property. Let's get back to it. The socialists take over the toothbrush factory that the capitalists built. It works for awhile. Hurrah. Then the machines start wearing down over time. Who pays to replace the large machinery? The workers who have no capital? No, you need a new capitalist to come in and pay for that new machinery. Except, nobody has an incentive to do so because they can't profit off it in a socialist society. Perhaps the government steps in, except now it has control. The laborers only work if the government says so. People only get toothbrushes if the government says so. In capitalism, when the machines break down, the capitalist who has been accumulating capital can put some of that capital back into the machinery (or get a loan if he didn't save up enough) and the laborers don't need to worry about their jobs. People can buy a toothbrush in a free market that keeps the price low. Seems a hell of a lot better than the alternative. Venezuela is relevant because is had a socialist takeover. It had a profitable Oil Industry built by capitalism, the socialists took it over and used its profits for awhile to benefit the people a little and the politicians a lot. Then the industry started to break down. Now the people are starving. I guess you don't defend Venezuelan socialism like GH has?
I trust Neb will indulge you further than I'm willing but I just want to point out at least 2 things you don't seem to be aware of.
1. Markets aren't capitalism, they exist in socialism too.
2. Socialism doesn't criminalize workers keeping capital for repair and replacement of equipment. It prevents one asshole "owner" from deciding he's just going to liquidate the factory and buy a yacht with his workers pensions when shit breaks.
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Why don't the workers have capital? They can also get loans if they don't have enough, which is what a capitalist in that situation would do most of the time (like you even said yourself, I just realized, rofl).
Do you think perhaps you're not giving a very fair description of what happened in Venezuela?
We nationalized the oil, that's socialism
...
Industry breaks down
...
Checkmate socialism?
Edit: should have mentioned that markets aren't exclusive to capitalism, thanks GH.
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On January 08 2020 03:21 RenSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2020 03:06 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 02:59 RenSC2 wrote:On January 08 2020 02:33 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 02:13 RenSC2 wrote:On January 08 2020 01:35 Nebuchad wrote:On January 08 2020 00:42 RenSC2 wrote:
I'll defend capitalism.
Let's start with a true story. Many years ago, my father ran the IT department for a company. After the fall of the USSR, the company brought in some Russian immigrants to work in his IT department. My father found out they were stealing from the company and wanted to fire them. His boss, the owner (and founder) of the company instead said something like, "They're not bad, they're ignorant. They grew up in socialism and the only way to get ahead in socialism is to steal. We'll work with them." The owner, a true self-made billionaire with Russian ancestry, felt pity for them and wanted to help them. He recognized that the methods of getting ahead in socialism are corruption and theft. If you can re-educate people to teach them that in capitalism you can get ahead through hard work, then you can end up with some good employees and those employees can end up with a better life than they'd ever have under socialism.
People want to get ahead. I'm going to take that as a self-evident truth. In socialism, the outlet for that desire is loyalty to the system (like KGB members getting ahead, hello Mr. Putin) or to outright steal. Ethics and morals be damned. Capitalism directs that desire into something much healthier. It directs it into innovation and hard work. Yes, theft can get you ahead in capitalism too, but at least there it's not the only way.
Capitalism is essentially a force of nature. If you can accept that people can own things (which is not unique to capitalism), then capitalism is a natural extension of that ownership: you can use what you own to make money. You can use your own labor to make money. You can use the piece of land you own to make money. You can use the factory on the land to make money. You can use the money to make money.
Anything else is either saying that people can't own things or is trying to cut people off from the nature of ownership.
Having said that, unrestrained capitalism is not good. The government is supposed to be the check on capitalism to keep its excesses in check. The government is the part where society gets to vote and say, "hey, you have too much". Unfortunately, some of the people who should be educating society on a better form of capitalism have instead decided that the bankruptcy of socialism is better. We've seen socialism, it isn't a new idea, every implementation the world has seen stinks.
If instead, you worked to curb the excesses of capitalism through educating the population, then you'd have more success and end up with a better system. For starters, teach people that taxes aren't all bad. The inheritance tax should be high. If it's a 90% tax over 100 million (or pick your number), then you can prevent infinite generational wealth while still allowing a parent to set up their children for life. You also de-incentivize excess wealth because you'll never get to use it (currently true) and 90% of it will go back to the government anyways (not currently true). Right now, a large portion of people who will never be effected by the inheritance tax voted to get rid of it (part of the Republican platform).
If you also used the government to force people to pay for their ecological destruction, then you'd get different calculus on various capitalistic endeavors. Things like a carbon tax could greatly change society for the better by making some activities unprofitable. However, again, we've been conditioned to think taxes = bad. Fight that fight and the environment has a chance. Pretending that socialism has answers when it has never had any answer for the environment before seems quite dubious.
Finally, there are some areas where socialism can be used in a capitalistic society. I look to socialism to set a floor. Everyone deserves the law, so police and the courts should be socialized (they already are, socialists love the socialized police force /s). Everyone deserves basic health protection so the fire departments and healthcare should be socialized (fire usually is, healthcare not really... an area where I'd love to see universal healthcare). Everyone deserves a basic education so we have public schools and libraries (although I'm not a fan of free college, I think that's past the limit of basic education).
In my ideal society, government sets the floor through socialism and curbs the excess through taxes (which also pay for the socialism); however, we allows capitalism to work in the middle. Many European countries are headed in that direction. The US has a reasonable structure to move in that direction, but it takes people pushing for it, rather than trying to throw the whole thing out and implement something that has never worked before in some magical undefined new way.
I like your anecdote a lot. It shows that in socialism, the people who want to get ahead of others in undue ways had to resort to covert methods, like corruption and theft. Under capitalism, your father saw these corrupt methods and reacted with a sense of injustice. It is unfair that these people are trying to get ahead in undue ways. Your father's boss, being a parasite that feeds off of his workers, understood and sympathized with the willingness of these people to get ahead at the expense of others, and so he showed them the legal ways of doing that (it's not "hard work", I don't know if I have to get into that). You can say "people want to get ahead" if you want, but it's not indicative of what we should do about it. People want to have sex with the people who they are attracted to, doesn't mean laws shouldn't be concerned with whether they have the consent of these people. People want to get ahead in sports, doesn't mean laws against doping are counterintuitive. People want to get more power in politics, doesn't mean authoritarianism is awesome. In fact, it is the very fact that people want those types of things that makes it necessary that our system tries and prevents them from achieving that. We need to dig a little deeper than just what human instincts are, we need to determine if that human instinct is something that we want our society built around or not. The first thing to realize is that capitalism doesn't reward "people" for wanting to improve their conditions, it rewards "me" for wanting to improve "my" condition. In order to function capitalism requires a majority of individuals to be in the lower class and stepped on by others. We can see that you understand that at least subconsciously since you said "get ahead", which implies that there are other individuals that are behind you rather than just all individuals moving forward and fulfilling their potential. So the society that you create isn't good for "people", it's good for "the specific people that are winning at society". Such is the way of competition. Capitalism is most definitely not a force of nature. It literally doesn't exist in nature, it is purely a human construct. Fascism is also a human construct, and socialism is also a human construct. "People can't own things" is too restrictive a description. You can't own things if you plan on using these things to make money off of other people just for owning them. If you have a toothbrush and you own that, it's not exactly the same as being a CEO or a landlord. The issue I have with your vision is that it still kind of says that capitalism is bad. It states that we need the government to bring some good regulation in order to limit its excesses, but I'm not seeing what it is exactly about capitalism that justifies that we keep it and regulate it, instead of just figuring out better systems. When it comes to that, you just reverted back to "we tried some other things and they were bad", and "it's a force of nature". Neither are convincing arguments. And you miss the obvious. If the CEO didn't create the company, thousands of people don't have jobs or they have jobs at worse companies. To call him a parasite seems very wrong. He used his hard work (started with 1 store) and out competed a lot of competition to become a billionaire. He created opportunity for people. People wanted to work for him. That doesn't sound like a parasite. The other obvious thing that you missed is the amount of wealth in capitalist societies. Socialism seems to breed poverty. Capitalism has often bred wealth. America's poor are often fat. They live a wealthier life than the a large number of people in socialist countries (enjoy the Maduro diet, etc). Capitalism may be about each person striving for themselves (although I'd also argue for their families/friends as well), but the opportunity is open to everyone. So in actuality, huge swathes of people "get ahead" and society as a whole gets richer through more innovation and productivity. Directing human nature in a healthy way is much better than trying to deny it. So yes, you need laws directing nature, but you don't try to cut off nature. To use your example, men want to have sex with attractive women. There is no law saying that men can't have sex. Instead, there are laws that require consent, and to get consent men have to make themselves attractive in some way. The laws around sex direct men to be better versions of themselves and improve society. Much like Capitalism directs greed into a richer society. As for your toothbrush, in your system, I can own my own toothbrush. Cool. But I can't lend it out to someone else for something in return? Okay, gross in this case, but why not? Who distributes the toothbrushes if I cannot? The government? Who makes the toothbrushes? The government? And why would they do that? Profit. Control. Socialism creates centralized power at the expense of the people. In capitalism, the power is distributed between anyone who owns things and ownership starts with your own time and effort (assuming the abolition of actual slavery). For the last bit, I am saying that you don't have any solutions. You sit on the sideline and provide nothing except criticism. My system actually seems to work in the real world. It's only true that they would have at to work at worse places with worse bosses if you assume capitalism as a premise. Which, again, isn't a defense. I don't agree that it seems wrong to call him a parasite, the way he makes money is that people create value in his enterprise through their labor and he gets some of the profits not because of his personal level of hard work but because he owns it. Socialism doesn't "seem to breed poverty", socialism tends to emerge in societies that are poorer, often due to being at the wrong end of international capitalism. Some of the societies that underwent socialism saw a large improvement in their wealth and their overall level of society, Burkina Faso and Bolivia being the biggest examples I believe. I believe you can make a similar argument even with the USSR but I'm not interested in doing that since I don't like the USSR very much. You did nothing to demonstrate that we are directing greed in a healthy way, you just said that it was human nature. In my system the people who make the toothbrushes are the people who work in toothbrush factories (lol, I don't know), they just happen to own their own factory through workplace democracy, and therefore they get the full value of their labor instead of having a capitalist feed off of them. Again we're attacking other systems rather than defending capitalism though, I hope nobody is surprised Nobody is surprised that you can't defend socialism. Who builds the toothbrush factory? In a society without ownership, who has the capital to build a toothbrush factory in the first place? Does socialism only work if you take over a capitalist society first? And then it slowly fades away and society breaks down as the old capitalist structures break down? Hello Venezuela. In practical socialism, the government ends up making all the decisions like that because they are the only ones who have the power. The factory workers become slave laborers at the government's will. Those that refuse will end up in the gulags or with a bullet in the head. In capitalism, a capitalist sees the opportunity and builds the factory. Then the workers give their labor in exchange for the opportunity created by the capitalist and make some money off of it. It's a symbiotic relationship, not parasitic. If the worker is smart, he saves up a bit and enjoys some of the greater benefits of capitalism as well. It's a highly functional system. Marx certainly believed that we needed capitalism first in order to have better things next, yeah. Also, who cares? We do have a capitalist society to take over, it's not a problem if we need it. Why do the societal structures break down if workers own their labor instead of a boss? What has Venezuela got to do with anything? Did Venezuela get rid of its owner class while I wasn't looking? So socialism only works if it takes over a capitalist society. Yet a capitalist society can spring up from a guy grabbing some rocks out of the ground and trading them for someone else's property. Let's get back to it. The socialists take over the toothbrush factory that the capitalists built. It works for awhile. Hurrah. Then the machines start wearing down over time. Who pays to replace the large machinery? The workers who have no capital? No, you need a new capitalist to come in and pay for that new machinery. Except, nobody has an incentive to do so because they can't profit off it in a socialist society. Perhaps the government steps in, except now it has control. The laborers only work if the government says so. People only get toothbrushes if the government says so. In capitalism, when the machines break down, the capitalist who has been accumulating capital can put some of that capital back into the machinery (or get a loan if he didn't save up enough) and the laborers don't need to worry about their jobs. People can buy a toothbrush in a free market that keeps the price low. Seems a hell of a lot better than the alternative. Venezuela is relevant because is had a socialist takeover. It had a profitable Oil Industry built by capitalism, the socialists took it over and used its profits for awhile to benefit the people a little and the politicians a lot. Then the industry started to break down. Now the people are starving. I guess you don't defend Venezuelan socialism like GH has?
Others are doing a fine job of addressing your arguments, Ren, but hot damn is the second sentence of that post poorly conceived. Totally baseless caveman capitalism hypotheticals are not only summarily unhelpful, they reveal the extent to which your defense of capitalism is totally dissociated from the actual material history of human economy. At that rate, you might as well either go in another direction or admit defeat.
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EPT
