You may be right, I was really just trying to be open to the concept that perhaps in some industries patents are needed. As a general rule, I agree with Franklin.
>Ben Franklin was proud to file some really innovative patents, like bifocals and swimming fins
Absurdly false. Franklin did invent those, and many other things, but he never owned a single patent in his life and vehemently opposed patents. He argued against patent laws in congress on the basis that ideas are not property and should benefit society as far as possible - which means having the invention built by whoever can do it the cheapest, regardless of who had the idea. Now I would say Franklin's thoughts were correct for his day, some industries today are different (the article points out pharmaceuticals as a good example) and in those industries it is genuinely in the public interest to have patents - but they are the minority of industries.
So when the Nazi's had unpaid slaves working in their factories, they were engaging in slavery.
>Socialism seeks the "good of society". It is willing to take from the man who has more to give to the man who does not.
But it only takes what was there BEFORE he earned, which isn't HIS to begin with, it's a debt, and must be paid. Unearned wealth is NOT hard to define well - simple maths. What did you get BEFORE you were working ? And we won't even claim ALL of that (simply because it's not practical) - just that the more you started out with, the more your obligations become.
>Two principles: Workers (group) over business owners (individuals) False, most businesses are owned by multiple people (shareholders). And workers ARE individuals, while businesses are NOT (much as capitalism like to treat them as if they are).
>You said Chairman Mao was a "state-socialist". He murdered millions of Chinese for various reasons; those who Mao murdered were no less a part of Chinese society than Jews were of German society.
I said he was a politician abusing power and that this would happen REGARDLESS of what philosophy he claimed to believe in. One of the worst and cruellest dictators of the previous century was an arch-capitalist (Pinochet) with one of the most free and unregulated markets that has ever existed. You can be a murderous bastard regardless of what economic policies you enact. But that's politics, the PHILOSOPHY of socialism is about what kind of society you want.
As for your constant contradiction between "social good" and "individual rights" - that is only a contradiction if you're too stupid to understand the idea of balancing competing needs. The trick is to find a balance where individuals are the most free - and since BOTH those goals are about freedom, the balance isn't THAT hard to imagine. But in practice it can be tricky narrow down. This is where libertarian socialism has an edge - unlike free market capitalism it's NOT a utopian philosophy, it doesn't think there is ONE answer to every thing. In fact it thinks that for EVERY problem there are thousands of solutions and no single one is best,there is merely the best setup IN THIS COMMUNITY AT THIS TIME. The reason for government by consensus is to allow communities to try out various ideas, with everybody having the power to institute a change if the idea isn't working, and find solutions that serve their individual AND collective needs the best.
>Let's look at your 3 statements here on what you want your socialism to be, and to do. It has business licenses, it is democratic, and it is "stateless". "Will of the People" means you must either hold elections (to determine the will of the people), or have an appointed/elections representative who presumably knows what the will of the people is at all times. That is a system of gov't.
Yes anarchism is a system of government but devoid of politicians, or holders of power. People vote directly on laws.
>: A group of people represent the governing authority in a location I agree. Nobody represents in my system, all people have equal voting power on every decision.
Read the wikipedia page on participism for a practical example of a possible socialist libertarian system.
>Does your stateless socialism lack police? Yes. > Is your stateless socialism free of criminals? No but criminals should be cared for by society, rather than punished.
>Under your system, a farmer who farms enough food for 100 people has clear excess; society is justified in taking 99% of it and giving it to 99 other people. This farmer has no right to the fruits of his labor; he has no right to own that food beyond what what society decides to allow him. That farmer has no incentive to put in that level of effort next time; maybe he farms enough food for 50 people, or 10 people. Now you have a shortage of food, if there's 99 other people who want to be fed. Farming food takes time and skill; those 99 other people may not be able to farm food for their own needs. Now what? Force the farmer to always farm enough for 100 people?
Bullshit. I said nothing of the kind. What part of "Only unearned wealth is redistributed" don't you understand ?
>but I don't know how you define basic human "need"; and whether that is universally objective or based on society's wealth level
Ancient and long done. Look up Maslow's pyramid. No society is just unless everybody is at LEAST at level 3. State socialism ends up with nobody ABOVE that - capitalism ends up with most people not getting that far, both those outcomes are disasters in their own right.
> and a belief that someone is keeping score (God if you're religious, society if you're not)
Bullshit. You're rejecting the possibility that somebody may simply value other lives (especially multiple lives) more than their own outright, as if you can read all the minds on earth.
I have direct family history of the opposite. An uncle who died saving several workers in a factory gas leak. He was a senior executive, they were minimum wage workers, he judged their lives more than his own.
>Recall that my definition of socialism has consistently been that it uses the principle of "the good of society outweighs the right of the individual".
Even THAT false definition doesn't apply to the Nazis since the jews were a PART of society. You cannot EVER be both segregationalist AND socialist the two concepts are mutually exclusive.
> Remember also that they marketed themselves to the German people of the 1930s as a socialist party
Just like China markets itself to the Chinese people as a democracy. Believe NOTHING a politician says, ever, THEN you'll start learning things about reality.
>You may not personally favor state socialism, but right now you are defending the idea of state socialism from Nazi membership.
No I am defending truth and honest debate from lies and stupidity.
>For some reason, you feel threatened by the inclusion of a national socialist party as a type of "state socialism"
Not "a" but "that". THAT one doesn't belong there, others do. The Appartheid government was nationalist and socialist (if terribly executed socialism - remember they actually believed they were UPLIFTING black people), but the German Nazi's were not socialist.
>Your definition of socialism has been about how to implement it right; but your definition of socialism does not exclude ot
>The United States is still technically at war with North Korea - 9/11 was still a terrorist attack.
Now you're being facetious, 9/11 wasn't done by North Korea. If it had been, it would not be a terrorist attack, just an attack. Or would you suggest that the London Blitz was a terrorist attack too because so many civilians got killed ? If so, then the US government are the biggest terrorist organisation in the world.
>There are still Arab countries technically at war with Israel - when a suicide bomber blows himself up in an Israeli pizza parlor it is still a terrorist attack
Not if he is acting on orders from another government, or if he is deliberately trying to replace one government with another. The latter is called a "revolution". Though of course, the governments being revolted against tend to call it terrorism. Or are you now going to suggest that it's reasonable to call the Boston Tea Party an act of terrorism ?
> Iraq is still facing an insurgency from Sunni nationalists - when Al Qaeda blows up a car bomb in a marketplace it is still a terrorist attack.
Insurgency is not terrorism. That's why it's called insurgency.
>but anti-government rebels can engage in terrorism. Only if they deliberately target civilians. Which is something that even proper armed forces sometimes do - even though they claim to try not to.
> The Viet Cong often engaged in terrorism and atrocity, such as the during the Battle for Hue. And the use of napalm carpet-bombing by the USA was NOT terrorism ?
It's been said that the only difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is whose side your on. There's some truth to that.
Either way, I don't consider 95% of the deaths in Iraq, Syria and similar nations to be Jihadi terrorism, that's just warfare. Ugly, terrible warfare - but what other kind has there ever been ?
>So what do you do to a business that does not operate in the way you like it to? You use the power of society to change how they function. You confiscate and repurpose property because it's for the "good of society".
No need, you simply don't give businesses a license to operate unless they are structured that way. We have a limited number of business structures NOW, we're just reducing the number a little further. The law has ALWAYS been involved in what is allowable structures for business, If only to ensure that there is a clearly line of accountability if the business breaks other laws.
>That's what we call "statist" power. Only if you have a state. If all people are equal in power, then it's simply "the will of the people".
>The only way for it to not be statist is if you make it voluntary on the part of the business owner to comply By your logic capitalism is statist now since it doesn't make the one-share-one-vote system in corporations voluntary.
>But you've already said that that level of freedom for the business owner is unacceptable.
Because it intrudes on the freedom of others. Nobody has the freedom to have power over others. That's exactly where ALL freedom MUST end.
>Food is property. So on one hand, one has the right to owning some bare minimum level of food for consumption; but on the other hand, one does not have any right to owning any property (which includes food). Once again, contradictory.
No contradiction at all in fact, the two sentences support one another. I never said nobody has property rights - I said property rights are a revocable right. Sometimes some of some people's property rights need to be reduced or revoked to protect the rights of others. So for example, some tax money in a state system should go to welfare. Arguably you can construct welfare in many ways and I'm the first to admit that current systems have major flaws - but the principle isn't wrong, an advantage of socialist libertarianism is that it can solve practical flaws of implementation like that with great rapidity. The question then becomes - whose rights should be curtailed and to what extent ? The system I propose as the most fair and just is to consider privilege a debt to society. That is to say, what we redistribute is not that which you earned, but a portion of that which you did NOT earn.
>Your idea of freedom is warped. In some locales, food may just grow off trees, but in much of the world, food exists because people must put in a lot of work to grow it
My idea of freedom has it's roots in the oldest known legal system on earth. The mosaic code. Among other things it declares: "A man walking across your field can leave with all he can carry in his stomache, but cannot bring a bag." - this is the "right to eat law". He can eat himself full, but he can't take MORE than he needs to eat. It also thus specifically curtails property law by saying you cannot call it 'trespass' to walk over your field. Indeed modern law systems still recognize that - it's generally known as something like the "right to wander". Two verses later it says "the final harvest of grapes may not be picked or sold. It is to be left for the widows and orphans" Clear reductions in property rights (from the SAME law system that first invented them with a prohibition on theft) to protect the rights of those with less privilege. As it happens, 70% of the people on the planet still claim that they LIVE by this law, yet any modern application of those principles are often opposed by people who claim to be part of that 70% (Christians). Now THAT is contradictory.
>Whose duty is it to provide food for one's freedom to eat? Everybody's but the degree of the duty is determined by the level of excess you have.
>Is someone forced to be a farmer? "Someone" is forced to be a farmer now, or we ALL die. We don't need to decide by decree WHO should be the farmer, we just need to leave the opportunity to farm and there will be farmers.
>you end up with millions of people enslaved to a system that they can't escape that treats women, minorities, and non-muslims as second class citizens
That sounds completely indistinguishable from fundamentalist Christian conservatives in the United States today - Santorum style. The ONLY difference is that in the United States they are constrained by two factors: a constitution that prohibits religious interference with the law, and the fact that they can't ever get elected. They are a massive group - just not big ENOUGH.
Even so - Rush Limbaugh style conservatives love to call women whores for using birth control.
I fail to see how Islam is in any way unique.
All religions have their crazy fundamentalists and they are almost ALWAYS a minority but whenever those fundamentalists happen to get into positions of power - they abuse them according to their fundamentalism. Islam currently has some countries where this is the case. The major reason the west went for secular states however is because EXACTLY THE SAME THING used to happen there until we did.
If you let religions dictate laws, you get atrocities, it doesn't matter WHICH religion. Hell the Budhists of Tibet used to practise a form of mass slavery and call it "karma" and Budhism is probably the most rational and peaceful religion ever concieved.
By definition any country that is experiencing an insurgency, civil war, civil uprising or state of war with another country cannot be counted as having had a "terrorist" attack. Remember that the appartheid government used to call the anti-appartheid activists "terrorists" as well - that view held even LESS water because they were in a state of war at the time (that was merely a civil component to the international war with Cuba on the Namibian border).
So discount all the arab spring deaths, all the insurgencies and the like - and THEN recount. It's not terrorism if you rebel against your government (much as governments like to call it that), even if it is on religious grounds. It's a lot of things (and if it targets civilians none of them are good) but it's by definition NOT terrorism.
>This philosophy is what makes you socialist: The group trumps the individual. The individual exists to benefit society; and if they do not provide any benefit, society can do whatever it wants to them.
I am socialist, but I am not statist. I am a LIBERTARIAN socialist. I believe in individual freedom above all. But that is exactly WHY I reject capitalism. Capitalism has done nothing but turn the vast majority of people into serfs, and before that outright slaves - the only reason it replaced slaves with serfs is because serfs are a better investment (you don't lose money when serfs die).
So economically - I believe that a FORM of socialism with no state at all is the best way to PROMOTE individual liberty. Nobody can have ANY freedom without the freedom to eat.
I believe that those who create, must own the means of production and the resulting profits. That's my first principle. The businesses must be owned by their workers, and run by their workers.
I believe that nobody can have authority over another except the collective vote of all. Government not by consent (that's not GOOD enough), but government by consensus. Everybody must have an equal say in the laws they live under, or it's ALREADY oppression. That's my second principle.
I believe that humans evolved as a cooperative rather than a competitive species. We are much more bonobo than chimpanzee, we are at our strongest and achieve our greatest aims when we work together rather than try to trip one another up. To this end I believe society has a duty towards those with less, to ensure that ALL in society has at least a bare minimum standard of living, if even one person doesn't have it - your society has ALREADY FAILED. That's the third principle.
Property is NOT liberty. Property is a tool, a means to an end, a useful tool at times - but it can also be used for great evil. So like any tool that can be used for good or evil, it's use must be constrained so that those with more of it cannot use it for evil (to oppress those without). The end result of absolute property rights is that sooner or later, there is nothing left unowned, and a generation born that are trespassers from birth - with nowhere to live, nowhere to produce, and no right to be alive. We're already on the verge of that. It's already begun in some places. People get more, resources do not. That's my fourth principle: property is just a tool and must be used for the good of others, or lost.
Economic power is just as prone to abuse as political power, therefore the only way to have a free society is to have all trade among people of EQUAL economic power (that's not the same thing as equal WEALTH - though that would be ONE way to achieve it, I don't personally believe it's guaranteed to be the best way). If we are all to be equal before the law, we must all be equal in power of contract as well. Only when employees really CAN dare to quit, can they negotiate for FAIR contracts (as an example). That is the fifth principle: freedom from economic OR political oppression.
Practically everything in your post was ideological restating of the bullshit they teach in schools without ever questioning the underlying fundamentals (no the natural urge of people are NOT to increase individual wealth - the VAST majority of people OPPOSE greed and consider it a BAD thing whom they actively seek to avoid in their lives - and ALL the religions on earth reflect the universality of that view by declaring it sinful - capitalism rewards the tiny minority who EMBRACE greed - psychopaths by the WHO definition). So I figured I'd state MY ideological positions without bothering to back them up further as well. Most of what you say about right libertarianism shows you have no idea what it IS or what it's principles are. I did NOT use the USA as an example of it because it has NEVER been a right libertarian state. I used the writings of the US's strong right libertarian CONTINGENT (and their most notable LEADERS) as the basis of my view. Read Ayn Rand
>While also noting that Communism has been behind the worst butchery in human history despite any good intentions on their part; this makes it an extremely dangerous and despicable failed ideology
That is a half-truth. There has never been a communist state in all of history. The USSR certainly wasn't. The half that is true is that a lot of the people who served it and committed it's atrocities believed in the ideology of communism - which the USSR did not in fact subscribe to. It was in fact a system of state-capitalism.
>Your summary of Capitalism as a belief, on the other hand, is just a strawman. I wasn't stating a definition of capitalism (nor was the previous line a definition of communism) the lines were specific and contextual - it was a reference ONLY to how these ideologies see the relationship of man to man, nothing more and nothing less. Capitalism does not demand that your actions serve a useful purpose, it tries to match reward to usefulness - but it does not demand it. That was the point I was trying to make -a contrast between the two ideologies on this particular point.
That said, I'm no fan of communism - I think it was a failed ideology in most aspects - I wasn't trying to defend it, I think capitalism and communism are both failed ideologies and both incredibly dangerous.
> But there is in fact a way for a "right libertarian" to answer it: Short version: You have a right to conquest only if you win.
So you believe that right libertarians support a right of conquest ? Because I've never heard a right libertarian express that. In fact they tout their system as being superior precisely because it does NOT recognize a right of conquest. It demands a government to prevent conquest - it holds property rights sacred, a human right which nobody can take away, not even the government, but which that government is duty-bound to protect. That's their stated belief - it does not have anything in common with your version of it. Rothbard, Rand, Von Mises - I can't think of a single major right libertarian voice who has ever stated otherwise.
>You say the poor are now justified to take a piece of property and claim it as their own under the "right of conquest.
Context here, a lot of left libertarians do not recognize rights of ownership in property that is not in use. They believe that the destitute have the right to make their homes in, for example, abandoned buildings. I am highly sympathetic to this idea - though I don't support it, I am of the pacifist school of left libertarians who believe it is better to replace capitalism than to try and displace it by force. I do believe they have that right, I just don't think that exercising it would do them any good.
> Now what is to keep the original owners of said property from conquering the property back? And as the two groups conquer the property back and forth, who really owns the land now? That's most of human history summed up - this is why I don't support this as a practical course of action, my core point is that property rights are a granted right, not a natural one, and this dichotomy highlights WHY this is the case. More interestingly though - that scenario wouldn't happen like that, it never has once since the turn of the 20th century. The destitute and poor outnumber the land-owners by far too much. Even with the force of government behind them they couldn't conquer it back if it's done en masse, it was done in a few places - the poor won (things tended to go rather badly LATER on because they gave new governments too much power but that's not relevant to their original victory). If it's a sufficiently large uprising, the government won't back the "owners" anyway, since the much larger contingent of non-owners are the votes they need.
> To own something, you must be able to defend your claim of onwership.
You may be right - but that is decidedly NOT a right libertarian point of view. Their view is that property rights are a human, natural right - and that the purpos
>Ron Paul is the guy who does NOT want government to give any specific privileges to businesses, he is the guy who does not want the government to steal any rights from people and sell those to other people (or businesses).
Wow, you are stupid. I specifically said that not giving business less right IS to sell them our freedom. Ron Paul doesn't want to RESTRICT businesses EITHER.
If he doesn't actively SUPPORT regulation to RESTRICT business, then he ALREADY sold us out.
My point is that calling businesses the same individuals is stupid. Even for a one-man business it's a logical fallacy as it allows people to double-dip their rights. I have civil right X as me, and AGAIN as my business.
My point is that because businesses don't behave like people and are not constrained like people they cannot have equal rights to people - the only way to get a level playing field is to counter-act their power by reducing their rights.
Businesses ought to have LESS rights than private individuals - that's what the government is for, to protect the rights of private citizens from all that threaten it - be it foreign invaders or private companies. One of those rights is equal access to markets, which cannot EXIST unless corporate power is regulated because in the absence of regulation corporate power can and WILL be used to prevent market-access for competitors, especially smaller and newer competitors.
>Freedom of an individual IS freedom of business, individuals run business.
But individuals have conscience and free choice. They cannot be actively PREVENTED from doing good (or at least avoiding harm) by a law that REQUIRES them to put profit above all other considerations. In other words, individuals may run businesses, but busineses don't BEHAVE like individuals do. More-over there is a natural constraint to the power and money an individual can achieve - because individuals die. Businesses don't die, they live as long as it's possible to make profit (often far longer than humans do) which skews the balance a lot, and frequently their future paths will be in direct contradiction to their founding principles. Compare Henry Ford's attitude to wage calculations with that of the Ford Corporation today.
>Conducive enough that you will predict the amount of socialism based on political system alone?
Not conclusively, but I can identify a trend - more of X tends to lead to more of Y without making Y dependent on X.
>In order for the resources to be stolen, someone else must have a rightful claim to it first. Who was it stolen from? Society?
Nope, Native Americans. I didn't say the people living there did the stealing. I just said it had been stolen. Buying stolen property doesn't make it unstolen however, no matter how many people have sold it since. You didn't read my blog link then.
>I call bullshit. Apple's wealth is ideas and execution. For every 30 dollars apple spends on an ipod, only 1 dollar is spent on labor. Apple's wealth is exploitation. More than anything it's stealing other people labour by buying it for far less than a living or fair wage on the basis that nobody else is offering them anything better and their own government doesn't give a shit.
> I consider it the converse; society owes Steve a huge debt for creating all those neat products with his ideas Steve Jobs was one of the most evil businessmen to ever live. Creating walled gardens is NOT something I think he should be thanked for. Society ought to HATE him more than most businessmen. I wouldn't say he was as bad as most oil company CEO's but he was certainly worse than most other I.T. CEO's. He's own co-founder quit the company because he couldn't live with his conscience in light of what it became !
>and that debt is paid and realized in the reputation Steve gained, and the money that people have voluntarily traded for his products.
Even if, for the sake of argument, I agreed with you (lets say we use a CEO I actually LIKE like say Bob Young instead), That has NOTHING to do with what I am talking about. The debt anybody who ISN'T born into poverty owes to everybody who IS - is completely unrelated.
>Your analogy is flawed because you chose only to look at the critical components for car operation.
Well then you could argue that in a worker-owned business there wouldn't be any ROOM for non-critical staff. After all, if your income is a share of the profit, you sure as hell won't give a share to somebody whom you don't NEED to give it to. That's less for EVERYBODY else. But what you're basically saying is that corporations are in the habit of employing people they don't really need, and NOT in the habit of doing things like mass-layoffs to try and ensure that there are nobody superfluous on the payroll, ever ? Strange, because that's the exact OPPOSITE of what all of them seem to do.
>If an LED goes out on the dashboard, the car does not operate at 100%; yet this failure is not equal to engine failure. Each part has a contribution, but not every part is strictly necessary. That's debateable anyway. Most LED's on my car's dashboard are warnings of problems - which if I don't get them in time will LEAD to one of those critical components failing. The Oil-light for example is therefore not worth the cost of an LED, but actually worth the cost of every single engine part that would be damaged if I had an oil leak and kept driving because I didn't have the LED to tell me about it.
>And she probably does, or she wouldn't get hired in the first place Yes, that proves MY point, not yours.
>Everyone is equal before the law. A gay man is just as able to get married to a woman as a straight man.
That's NOT equality before the law. The law right now gives straight people the right to choose who they want to marry with almost no restrictions. While gay people have a massive restriction - that in fact rules out everybody they may actually WANT to marry.
>We don't reject marriage licenses based on lack of romantic love; and "we really really love each other" doesn't allow either a polygamous or incestuous marriage between man and woman.
I already argued that it ought to, and in good time it will.
>If I take you at your word here, the amount of "socialism" in a society is proportional to the amount of democracy built into the system. This is a contradiction of your earlier claim that socialism is purely economic and utterly apolitical. You don't get it both ways; pick one.
The two points are not contradictory in fact. Socialism is not a political philosophy - but some political systems are certainly more conducive to socialist systems arising. Porn is not political but will be much more easily produced in a country that respects free speech. This is not a contradiction at all.
>Here, you have just said that society owns everything; that effort->reward is a complete illusion.
I did not say anything of the kind. I merely said that effort + privilege > effort alone. And I said that socialists hold privilege to be a debt owed to society. This is not a contradiction either since privilege by definition is NOT earned.
>Let's try to apply your theory of capitalism. Explain how Apple stole its way to its billion dollar warchest.
Apple was founded by people who lived in houses on stolen land, their business headquarters are on stolen land. Every single resource that goes into their products are taken from stolen land.
>They started as a small company out of someone's garage; who did they steal from to build up to their current multibillion empire? The garage was already built on stolen land out of bricks made from stolen clay and wood cut from stolen trees.
>All labor is not equal. (For example, deliberately pointless work does not create value no matter how many man hours are put in)
This is a bit more subtle. Within a single company certainly all labour really is equal - the maths is simple. Let's take me. I'm an engineer who gets a very high salary (in the top 5% earners in my country in fact), I get that to make products our customers pay a lot for. My skills were expensive to acquire. We have a receptionist who answers phones and takes messages. Her skills cost a lot less to require and she gets paid a lot less - standard capitalist distribution. But it's false. If she wasn't there, I would have to spend MY time doing those things, which is time I could then NOT spend making products. So the real VALUE contribution of her to the company per hour is exactly the same as me. Since this is slashdot, here is a car analogy. A car has a fanbelt, cheap to make and easy to replace. It also has a flywheel, a much more complicated and expensive part that costs a lot more to make and replace. But take out EITHER and the car won't run. So their value to the car is identical. The only reason to pay more for a flywheel job is to encourage people to take them (since they have to invest more in their skills). But this is not actually needed. People become engineers even when engineers are badly paid (when I first studied engineering it was among the worst paid careers in my country - and hard to find work in). They do it because they love engineering. We'll lose the ones who are in it for the money sure, but all THAT will do is mean we get better engineered products.
> You are flipping around the definitions; instead of the "no gay marriage" position being dominant in society, you make the "gay marriage" position dominant, even over the objection of a MAJORITY of people in a democratic system.
I make the principle of "everybody is equal before the law" dominant. The whole reason for things like constitutional democracies is to allow you to DO things like that. To prevent democracy from being a tyranny of the majority. There is no liberty at ALL until everybody IS equal before the law.
>And why not something like polygamous or incestual marriages? The latter has solid scientific arguments against it - but even so, I am not in principle opposed to it. I would speak out against it, but I would demand the government must NOT. The former OUGHT to be legal as well. There just aren't enough people who want it for it to be a po
>Democracies are tyrannies of the majority. If a minority is coerced into sacrificing for the greater good - how is it socialism if a democracy does it, but not-socialism if done by a dictatorship?
I suppose I would say it's more a difference of principle than of practical outcome. The difference is that in a (working) democracy nobody has any MORE power than you do to affect the outcome of a decision. Republics are less democratic than anarchies - hence it's less socialist in them than it would be in an anarchy (since representatives can coerce things which the vote did not support).
>Under that principle, if the majority (society) demands the fruits of an individual laborer's work, they can rightfully take it. Again, socialism as I have defined it. Again, incompatible with your definition of socialism (where the laborer's right to his own work is sacred).
Not sacred, that implies religion, this is about justice. And I never SAID that SOCIETY cannot have a share of a labourers work - that is completely outside the SCOPE of what is or is not socialism. My definition applies to who keeps the PROFITS of productive labour. Socialism is any belief system that those profits should go to those who PERFORM the labour, rather than to employers. The things you refer to - to a socialist is a completely unrelated topic. That is about the fact that no man is an island. All success is at least partially attributable to privilege (and any sociologist will confirm this: there is NO more reliable prediction about a child's future income than the income of his parents). Capitalists see privilege as an inherent right (with a few exceptions - Jefferson for example instituted the first estate tax to reduce privilege and prevent the rise of an aristocracy). Socialists see privilege as a debt to society. You got where you are on hard work (it's false that socialists deny this - they very much accept it) but ALSO thanks to privileges. Socialists believe those privileges are a LOAN, not a PROPERTY - and must be repaid, by extending privilege to OTHER people who have less (a pay-it-forward kind of loan - an idea first proposed by a capitalist in fact: Benjamin Franklin). But that is not a defining attribute of socialism, a lot of socialists believe this - enough that most socialisms include systems to achieve this (such as tax-funded schools), but many people reject this and are STILL socialists as they believes workers must own businesses.
>We're using different definitions for Capitalism. I define it as "private ownership" Well if we can just make up our own definitions we're never going to get anywhere. Private ownership is an attribute of most capitalist systems but it's hardly the definition of capitalism. Capitalism is a system of trade entrepreneurship is enabled by access to capital - there are many other ways entrepreneurship can work, but this concept is what sets capitalism appart from other market systems (free and non-free). This is it's defining attribute. A side effect of this is that in any capitalism power is apportioned according to capital obtained - which is why all capitalism tends to degenerate into fascism.
> The business owner owns the equipment and land And not a single one of them own it by any concept that can be called just. That's rather a long argument with a lot of defining evidence. Too much to write out now, but luckily, I have a blogpost on the topic I can link you to. http://silentcoder.co.za/2012/01/the-libertarians-part-1-who-are-the-thieves/ When socialist libertarians say the workers must own those as well - it's because we know it was their property in the first place and it was stolen.
>businesses can fail, after all; the owner can lose everything even as the worker walks away with his wages That's a common argument, and a false one. For the vast majority of people - the vast majority of their wages is spent on basic requirements to
I have no doubt that what you are suggesting is a significant factor (indeed "all my friends are there" is part of the 'valuable service' I mentioned). Occam's razor suggests it's a major factor in their success since it is certainly the easiest explanation. The question I raised was: is it really the ONLY factor ?
So it's impossible in your model to flip a perfect coin in zero gravity ? Or anything close enough to it to resemble it?
Newton's law says if I'm in an orbit where the sun and earth's gravitational theory is balanced and I flip the coin straight ahead of me, it will keep going round and round forever.
That's not "coming down" is it? So the probability of it doing none of your predicted things is still not zero. Especially when we HAVE the technology to do this experiment. We do basically the same thing with satelites all the time.
>What the hell? Yes, they are! What is the probability that a perfect coin will land either heads or tails? The probability is 1. What is the probablity that it will land neither? The probability is 0. It's pretty simple.
Unless your definition of "perfect coin" is "has no a thickness of 0" (as in a Euclidian 2-dimensional perfect circle) that was a really bad example. But anything that can still be called a coin at all (even if perfect) has not 2 but 3 sides. True coming down on the third side is incredibly rare - but it does happen. If you claim a 2-dimensional only coin, then your concept falls even further flat since 2-dimensional objects wouldn't obey gravity (no real matter = no real mass = no gravitational force) so THAT perfect coin actually wouldn't come down at all.
So for any real coin the probability that it will land either heads or tails is very close to 1. The probability that it will not come down is very close to 0 (if you flick it in zero gravity there is no "down" to speak off - and since that is possible, the probability is not completely 0) and there is even a tiny probability that it will come down NEITHER - and land on it's side. Rare as that may be, it does happen, it's happened to me more than once. They tend to roll like a wheel for a bit and then stop. If they are on a smooth surface like a table and have enough rolling time to decelerate gradually - they don't topple over.
I agree with you that there are 0 and 1 probabilities. The probability of any human not wearing an (as yet at least impossible to design) special suit surviving a trip to the center of the sun is 0. The probability of a radiactive piece of uranium decaying is 1 (we can't predict the exact time - but we can predict that it WILL happen and there is no known condition that can prevent it).
First they will build a miniaturization ray, and shrink the LHC into a couple of pipes that can fit on a tile about a foot on each side. The result is called a "flux capacitor".
>Now that the most brilliant people on this planet have found what was just waiting there to be found, they can focus on helping the rest of us build actual stuff with it
The Higgs boson does indeed exist then all the stuff in the universe is ALREADY built with it. That's sorta the point.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be right, I was really just trying to be open to the concept that perhaps in some industries patents are needed. As a general rule, I agree with Franklin.
>Ben Franklin was proud to file some really innovative patents, like bifocals and swimming fins
Absurdly false. Franklin did invent those, and many other things, but he never owned a single patent in his life and vehemently opposed patents. He argued against patent laws in congress on the basis that ideas are not property and should benefit society as far as possible - which means having the invention built by whoever can do it the cheapest, regardless of who had the idea.
Now I would say Franklin's thoughts were correct for his day, some industries today are different (the article points out pharmaceuticals as a good example) and in those industries it is genuinely in the public interest to have patents - but they are the minority of industries.
>Slavery is making one man serve another.
So when the Nazi's had unpaid slaves working in their factories, they were engaging in slavery.
>Socialism seeks the "good of society". It is willing to take from the man who has more to give to the man who does not.
But it only takes what was there BEFORE he earned, which isn't HIS to begin with, it's a debt, and must be paid.
Unearned wealth is NOT hard to define well - simple maths. What did you get BEFORE you were working ? And we won't even claim ALL of that (simply because it's not practical) - just that the more you started out with, the more your obligations become.
>Two principles: Workers (group) over business owners (individuals)
False, most businesses are owned by multiple people (shareholders). And workers ARE individuals, while businesses are NOT (much as capitalism like to treat them as if they are).
>You said Chairman Mao was a "state-socialist". He murdered millions of Chinese for various reasons; those who Mao murdered were no less a part of Chinese society than Jews were of German society.
I said he was a politician abusing power and that this would happen REGARDLESS of what philosophy he claimed to believe in. One of the worst and cruellest dictators of the previous century was an arch-capitalist (Pinochet) with one of the most free and unregulated markets that has ever existed. You can be a murderous bastard regardless of what economic policies you enact. But that's politics, the PHILOSOPHY of socialism is about what kind of society you want.
As for your constant contradiction between "social good" and "individual rights" - that is only a contradiction if you're too stupid to understand the idea of balancing competing needs. The trick is to find a balance where individuals are the most free - and since BOTH those goals are about freedom, the balance isn't THAT hard to imagine. But in practice it can be tricky narrow down. This is where libertarian socialism has an edge - unlike free market capitalism it's NOT a utopian philosophy, it doesn't think there is ONE answer to every thing. In fact it thinks that for EVERY problem there are thousands of solutions and no single one is best,there is merely the best setup IN THIS COMMUNITY AT THIS TIME. The reason for government by consensus is to allow communities to try out various ideas, with everybody having the power to institute a change if the idea isn't working, and find solutions that serve their individual AND collective needs the best.
You've basically defined self-interest as "whatever you do", I suppose I can reasonably feel you would add "unless violently coerced."
Well if you can redefine your concepts to include EVERY possibility, then you can make any argument sound like you won it, that is however a fallacy.
>Let's look at your 3 statements here on what you want your socialism to be, and to do. It has business licenses, it is democratic, and it is "stateless". "Will of the People" means you must either hold elections (to determine the will of the people), or have an appointed/elections representative who presumably knows what the will of the people is at all times. That is a system of gov't.
Yes anarchism is a system of government but devoid of politicians, or holders of power. People vote directly on laws.
>: A group of people represent the governing authority in a location
I agree. Nobody represents in my system, all people have equal voting power on every decision.
Read the wikipedia page on participism for a practical example of a possible socialist libertarian system.
>Does your stateless socialism lack police?
Yes.
> Is your stateless socialism free of criminals?
No but criminals should be cared for by society, rather than punished.
>Under your system, a farmer who farms enough food for 100 people has clear excess; society is justified in taking 99% of it and giving it to 99 other people. This farmer has no right to the fruits of his labor; he has no right to own that food beyond what what society decides to allow him. That farmer has no incentive to put in that level of effort next time; maybe he farms enough food for 50 people, or 10 people. Now you have a shortage of food, if there's 99 other people who want to be fed. Farming food takes time and skill; those 99 other people may not be able to farm food for their own needs. Now what? Force the farmer to always farm enough for 100 people?
Bullshit. I said nothing of the kind. What part of "Only unearned wealth is redistributed" don't you understand ?
>but I don't know how you define basic human "need"; and whether that is universally objective or based on society's wealth level
Ancient and long done. Look up Maslow's pyramid. No society is just unless everybody is at LEAST at level 3. State socialism ends up with nobody ABOVE that - capitalism ends up with most people not getting that far, both those outcomes are disasters in their own right.
> and a belief that someone is keeping score (God if you're religious, society if you're not)
Bullshit. You're rejecting the possibility that somebody may simply value other lives (especially multiple lives) more than their own outright, as if you can read all the minds on earth.
I have direct family history of the opposite. An uncle who died saving several workers in a factory gas leak. He was a senior executive, they were minimum wage workers, he judged their lives more than his own.
>Recall that my definition of socialism has consistently been that it uses the principle of "the good of society outweighs the right of the individual".
Even THAT false definition doesn't apply to the Nazis since the jews were a PART of society. You cannot EVER be both segregationalist AND socialist the two concepts are mutually exclusive.
> Remember also that they marketed themselves to the German people of the 1930s as a socialist party
Just like China markets itself to the Chinese people as a democracy. Believe NOTHING a politician says, ever, THEN you'll start learning things about reality.
>You may not personally favor state socialism, but right now you are defending the idea of state socialism from Nazi membership.
No I am defending truth and honest debate from lies and stupidity.
>For some reason, you feel threatened by the inclusion of a national socialist party as a type of "state socialism"
Not "a" but "that". THAT one doesn't belong there, others do. The Appartheid government was nationalist and socialist (if terribly executed socialism - remember they actually believed they were UPLIFTING black people), but the German Nazi's were not socialist.
>Your definition of socialism has been about how to implement it right; but your definition of socialism does not exclude ot
>The United States is still technically at war with North Korea - 9/11 was still a terrorist attack.
Now you're being facetious, 9/11 wasn't done by North Korea. If it had been, it would not be a terrorist attack, just an attack. Or would you suggest that the London Blitz was a terrorist attack too because so many civilians got killed ?
If so, then the US government are the biggest terrorist organisation in the world.
>There are still Arab countries technically at war with Israel - when a suicide bomber blows himself up in an Israeli pizza parlor it is still a terrorist attack
Not if he is acting on orders from another government, or if he is deliberately trying to replace one government with another. The latter is called a "revolution". Though of course, the governments being revolted against tend to call it terrorism. Or are you now going to suggest that it's reasonable to call the Boston Tea Party an act of terrorism ?
> Iraq is still facing an insurgency from Sunni nationalists - when Al Qaeda blows up a car bomb in a marketplace it is still a terrorist attack.
Insurgency is not terrorism. That's why it's called insurgency.
>but anti-government rebels can engage in terrorism.
Only if they deliberately target civilians. Which is something that even proper armed forces sometimes do - even though they claim to try not to.
> The Viet Cong often engaged in terrorism and atrocity, such as the during the Battle for Hue.
And the use of napalm carpet-bombing by the USA was NOT terrorism ?
It's been said that the only difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is whose side your on. There's some truth to that.
Either way, I don't consider 95% of the deaths in Iraq, Syria and similar nations to be Jihadi terrorism, that's just warfare. Ugly, terrible warfare - but what other kind has there ever been ?
>So what do you do to a business that does not operate in the way you like it to? You use the power of society to change how they function. You confiscate and repurpose property because it's for the "good of society".
No need, you simply don't give businesses a license to operate unless they are structured that way. We have a limited number of business structures NOW, we're just reducing the number a little further. The law has ALWAYS been involved in what is allowable structures for business, If only to ensure that there is a clearly line of accountability if the business breaks other laws.
>That's what we call "statist" power.
Only if you have a state. If all people are equal in power, then it's simply "the will of the people".
>The only way for it to not be statist is if you make it voluntary on the part of the business owner to comply
By your logic capitalism is statist now since it doesn't make the one-share-one-vote system in corporations voluntary.
>But you've already said that that level of freedom for the business owner is unacceptable.
Because it intrudes on the freedom of others. Nobody has the freedom to have power over others. That's exactly where ALL freedom MUST end.
>Food is property. So on one hand, one has the right to owning some bare minimum level of food for consumption; but on the other hand, one does not have any right to owning any property (which includes food). Once again, contradictory.
No contradiction at all in fact, the two sentences support one another. I never said nobody has property rights - I said property rights are a revocable right. Sometimes some of some people's property rights need to be reduced or revoked to protect the rights of others. So for example, some tax money in a state system should go to welfare. Arguably you can construct welfare in many ways and I'm the first to admit that current systems have major flaws - but the principle isn't wrong, an advantage of socialist libertarianism is that it can solve practical flaws of implementation like that with great rapidity.
The question then becomes - whose rights should be curtailed and to what extent ? The system I propose as the most fair and just is to consider privilege a debt to society. That is to say, what we redistribute is not that which you earned, but a portion of that which you did NOT earn.
>Your idea of freedom is warped. In some locales, food may just grow off trees, but in much of the world, food exists because people must put in a lot of work to grow it
My idea of freedom has it's roots in the oldest known legal system on earth. The mosaic code. Among other things it declares:
"A man walking across your field can leave with all he can carry in his stomache, but cannot bring a bag." - this is the "right to eat law". He can eat himself full, but he can't take MORE than he needs to eat. It also thus specifically curtails property law by saying you cannot call it 'trespass' to walk over your field. Indeed modern law systems still recognize that - it's generally known as something like the "right to wander".
Two verses later it says "the final harvest of grapes may not be picked or sold. It is to be left for the widows and orphans"
Clear reductions in property rights (from the SAME law system that first invented them with a prohibition on theft) to protect the rights of those with less privilege.
As it happens, 70% of the people on the planet still claim that they LIVE by this law, yet any modern application of those principles are often opposed by people who claim to be part of that 70% (Christians). Now THAT is contradictory.
>Whose duty is it to provide food for one's freedom to eat?
Everybody's but the degree of the duty is determined by the level of excess you have.
>Is someone forced to be a farmer?
"Someone" is forced to be a farmer now, or we ALL die. We don't need to decide by decree WHO should be the farmer, we just need to leave the opportunity to farm and there will be farmers.
>you end up with millions of people enslaved to a system that they can't escape that treats women, minorities, and non-muslims as second class citizens
That sounds completely indistinguishable from fundamentalist Christian conservatives in the United States today - Santorum style. The ONLY difference is that in the United States they are constrained by two factors: a constitution that prohibits religious interference with the law, and the fact that they can't ever get elected. They are a massive group - just not big ENOUGH.
Even so - Rush Limbaugh style conservatives love to call women whores for using birth control.
I fail to see how Islam is in any way unique.
All religions have their crazy fundamentalists and they are almost ALWAYS a minority but whenever those fundamentalists happen to get into positions of power - they abuse them according to their fundamentalism. Islam currently has some countries where this is the case.
The major reason the west went for secular states however is because EXACTLY THE SAME THING used to happen there until we did.
If you let religions dictate laws, you get atrocities, it doesn't matter WHICH religion. Hell the Budhists of Tibet used to practise a form of mass slavery and call it "karma" and Budhism is probably the most rational and peaceful religion ever concieved.
By definition any country that is experiencing an insurgency, civil war, civil uprising or state of war with another country cannot be counted as having had a "terrorist" attack.
Remember that the appartheid government used to call the anti-appartheid activists "terrorists" as well - that view held even LESS water because they were in a state of war at the time (that was merely a civil component to the international war with Cuba on the Namibian border).
So discount all the arab spring deaths, all the insurgencies and the like - and THEN recount. It's not terrorism if you rebel against your government (much as governments like to call it that), even if it is on religious grounds. It's a lot of things (and if it targets civilians none of them are good) but it's by definition NOT terrorism.
>This philosophy is what makes you socialist: The group trumps the individual. The individual exists to benefit society; and if they do not provide any benefit, society can do whatever it wants to them.
I am socialist, but I am not statist. I am a LIBERTARIAN socialist. I believe in individual freedom above all. But that is exactly WHY I reject capitalism. Capitalism has done nothing but turn the vast majority of people into serfs, and before that outright slaves - the only reason it replaced slaves with serfs is because serfs are a better investment (you don't lose money when serfs die).
So economically - I believe that a FORM of socialism with no state at all is the best way to PROMOTE individual liberty. Nobody can have ANY freedom without the freedom to eat.
I believe that those who create, must own the means of production and the resulting profits.
That's my first principle. The businesses must be owned by their workers, and run by their workers.
I believe that nobody can have authority over another except the collective vote of all. Government not by consent (that's not GOOD enough), but government by consensus. Everybody must have an equal say in the laws they live under, or it's ALREADY oppression.
That's my second principle.
I believe that humans evolved as a cooperative rather than a competitive species. We are much more bonobo than chimpanzee, we are at our strongest and achieve our greatest aims when we work together rather than try to trip one another up. To this end I believe society has a duty towards those with less, to ensure that ALL in society has at least a bare minimum standard of living, if even one person doesn't have it - your society has ALREADY FAILED.
That's the third principle.
Property is NOT liberty. Property is a tool, a means to an end, a useful tool at times - but it can also be used for great evil. So like any tool that can be used for good or evil, it's use must be constrained so that those with more of it cannot use it for evil (to oppress those without). The end result of absolute property rights is that sooner or later, there is nothing left unowned, and a generation born that are trespassers from birth - with nowhere to live, nowhere to produce, and no right to be alive. We're already on the verge of that. It's already begun in some places. People get more, resources do not.
That's my fourth principle: property is just a tool and must be used for the good of others, or lost.
Economic power is just as prone to abuse as political power, therefore the only way to have a free society is to have all trade among people of EQUAL economic power (that's not the same thing as equal WEALTH - though that would be ONE way to achieve it, I don't personally believe it's guaranteed to be the best way).
If we are all to be equal before the law, we must all be equal in power of contract as well. Only when employees really CAN dare to quit, can they negotiate for FAIR contracts (as an example).
That is the fifth principle: freedom from economic OR political oppression.
Practically everything in your post was ideological restating of the bullshit they teach in schools without ever questioning the underlying fundamentals (no the natural urge of people are NOT to increase individual wealth - the VAST majority of people OPPOSE greed and consider it a BAD thing whom they actively seek to avoid in their lives - and ALL the religions on earth reflect the universality of that view by declaring it sinful - capitalism rewards the tiny minority who EMBRACE greed - psychopaths by the WHO definition).
So I figured I'd state MY ideological positions without bothering to back them up further as well.
Most of what you say about right libertarianism shows you have no idea what it IS or what it's principles are. I did NOT use the USA as an example of it because it has NEVER been a right libertarian state. I used the writings of the US's strong right libertarian CONTINGENT (and their most notable LEADERS) as the basis of my view. Read Ayn Rand
>While also noting that Communism has been behind the worst butchery in human history despite any good intentions on their part; this makes it an extremely dangerous and despicable failed ideology
That is a half-truth. There has never been a communist state in all of history. The USSR certainly wasn't. The half that is true is that a lot of the people who served it and committed it's atrocities believed in the ideology of communism - which the USSR did not in fact subscribe to. It was in fact a system of state-capitalism.
>Your summary of Capitalism as a belief, on the other hand, is just a strawman.
I wasn't stating a definition of capitalism (nor was the previous line a definition of communism) the lines were specific and contextual - it was a reference ONLY to how these ideologies see the relationship of man to man, nothing more and nothing less. Capitalism does not demand that your actions serve a useful purpose, it tries to match reward to usefulness - but it does not demand it. That was the point I was trying to make -a contrast between the two ideologies on this particular point.
That said, I'm no fan of communism - I think it was a failed ideology in most aspects - I wasn't trying to defend it, I think capitalism and communism are both failed ideologies and both incredibly dangerous.
> But there is in fact a way for a "right libertarian" to answer it: Short version: You have a right to conquest only if you win.
So you believe that right libertarians support a right of conquest ? Because I've never heard a right libertarian express that. In fact they tout their system as being superior precisely because it does NOT recognize a right of conquest. It demands a government to prevent conquest - it holds property rights sacred, a human right which nobody can take away, not even the government, but which that government is duty-bound to protect.
That's their stated belief - it does not have anything in common with your version of it. Rothbard, Rand, Von Mises - I can't think of a single major right libertarian voice who has ever stated otherwise.
>You say the poor are now justified to take a piece of property and claim it as their own under the "right of conquest.
Context here, a lot of left libertarians do not recognize rights of ownership in property that is not in use. They believe that the destitute have the right to make their homes in, for example, abandoned buildings. I am highly sympathetic to this idea - though I don't support it, I am of the pacifist school of left libertarians who believe it is better to replace capitalism than to try and displace it by force. I do believe they have that right, I just don't think that exercising it would do them any good.
> Now what is to keep the original owners of said property from conquering the property back? And as the two groups conquer the property back and forth, who really owns the land now?
That's most of human history summed up - this is why I don't support this as a practical course of action, my core point is that property rights are a granted right, not a natural one, and this dichotomy highlights WHY this is the case. More interestingly though - that scenario wouldn't happen like that, it never has once since the turn of the 20th century. The destitute and poor outnumber the land-owners by far too much. Even with the force of government behind them they couldn't conquer it back if it's done en masse, it was done in a few places - the poor won (things tended to go rather badly LATER on because they gave new governments too much power but that's not relevant to their original victory). If it's a sufficiently large uprising, the government won't back the "owners" anyway, since the much larger contingent of non-owners are the votes they need.
> To own something, you must be able to defend your claim of onwership.
You may be right - but that is decidedly NOT a right libertarian point of view. Their view is that property rights are a human, natural right - and that the purpos
>Ron Paul is the guy who does NOT want government to give any specific privileges to businesses, he is the guy who does not want the government to steal any rights from people and sell those to other people (or businesses).
Wow, you are stupid. I specifically said that not giving business less right IS to sell them our freedom. Ron Paul doesn't want to RESTRICT businesses EITHER.
If he doesn't actively SUPPORT regulation to RESTRICT business, then he ALREADY sold us out.
My point is that calling businesses the same individuals is stupid. Even for a one-man business it's a logical fallacy as it allows people to double-dip their rights.
I have civil right X as me, and AGAIN as my business.
My point is that because businesses don't behave like people and are not constrained like people they cannot have equal rights to people - the only way to get a level playing field is to counter-act their power by reducing their rights.
Businesses ought to have LESS rights than private individuals - that's what the government is for, to protect the rights of private citizens from all that threaten it - be it foreign invaders or private companies.
One of those rights is equal access to markets, which cannot EXIST unless corporate power is regulated because in the absence of regulation corporate power can and WILL be used to prevent market-access for competitors, especially smaller and newer competitors.
>Freedom of an individual IS freedom of business, individuals run business.
But individuals have conscience and free choice. They cannot be actively PREVENTED from doing good (or at least avoiding harm) by a law that REQUIRES them to put profit above all other considerations.
In other words, individuals may run businesses, but busineses don't BEHAVE like individuals do. More-over there is a natural constraint to the power and money an individual can achieve - because individuals die. Businesses don't die, they live as long as it's possible to make profit (often far longer than humans do) which skews the balance a lot, and frequently their future paths will be in direct contradiction to their founding principles. Compare Henry Ford's attitude to wage calculations with that of the Ford Corporation today.
So your definition of the the free market working is "it makes poor people die so rich people don't have to" ? ... Yeah sounds about right.
>Conducive enough that you will predict the amount of socialism based on political system alone?
Not conclusively, but I can identify a trend - more of X tends to lead to more of Y without making Y dependent on X.
>In order for the resources to be stolen, someone else must have a rightful claim to it first. Who was it stolen from? Society?
Nope, Native Americans. I didn't say the people living there did the stealing. I just said it had been stolen. Buying stolen property doesn't make it unstolen however, no matter how many people have sold it since.
You didn't read my blog link then.
>I call bullshit. Apple's wealth is ideas and execution.
For every 30 dollars apple spends on an ipod, only 1 dollar is spent on labor. Apple's wealth is exploitation. More than anything it's stealing other people labour by buying it for far less than a living or fair wage on the basis that nobody else is offering them anything better and their own government doesn't give a shit.
> I consider it the converse; society owes Steve a huge debt for creating all those neat products with his ideas
Steve Jobs was one of the most evil businessmen to ever live. Creating walled gardens is NOT something I think he should be thanked for. Society ought to HATE him more than most businessmen.
I wouldn't say he was as bad as most oil company CEO's but he was certainly worse than most other I.T. CEO's.
He's own co-founder quit the company because he couldn't live with his conscience in light of what it became !
>and that debt is paid and realized in the reputation Steve gained, and the money that people have voluntarily traded for his products.
Even if, for the sake of argument, I agreed with you (lets say we use a CEO I actually LIKE like say Bob Young instead), That has NOTHING to do with what I am talking about. The debt anybody who ISN'T born into poverty owes to everybody who IS - is completely unrelated.
>Your analogy is flawed because you chose only to look at the critical components for car operation.
Well then you could argue that in a worker-owned business there wouldn't be any ROOM for non-critical staff. After all, if your income is a share of the profit, you sure as hell won't give a share to somebody whom you don't NEED to give it to. That's less for EVERYBODY else.
But what you're basically saying is that corporations are in the habit of employing people they don't really need, and NOT in the habit of doing things like mass-layoffs to try and ensure that there are nobody superfluous on the payroll, ever ? Strange, because that's the exact OPPOSITE of what all of them seem to do.
>If an LED goes out on the dashboard, the car does not operate at 100%; yet this failure is not equal to engine failure. Each part has a contribution, but not every part is strictly necessary.
That's debateable anyway. Most LED's on my car's dashboard are warnings of problems - which if I don't get them in time will LEAD to one of those critical components failing. The Oil-light for example is therefore not worth the cost of an LED, but actually worth the cost of every single engine part that would be damaged if I had an oil leak and kept driving because I didn't have the LED to tell me about it.
>And she probably does, or she wouldn't get hired in the first place
Yes, that proves MY point, not yours.
>Everyone is equal before the law. A gay man is just as able to get married to a woman as a straight man.
That's NOT equality before the law. The law right now gives straight people the right to choose who they want to marry with almost no restrictions. While gay people have a massive restriction - that in fact rules out everybody they may actually WANT to marry.
>We don't reject marriage licenses based on lack of romantic love; and "we really really love each other" doesn't allow either a polygamous or incestuous marriage between man and woman.
I already argued that it ought to, and in good time it will.
I notice you co
>If I take you at your word here, the amount of "socialism" in a society is proportional to the amount of democracy built into the system. This is a contradiction of your earlier claim that socialism is purely economic and utterly apolitical. You don't get it both ways; pick one.
The two points are not contradictory in fact. Socialism is not a political philosophy - but some political systems are certainly more conducive to socialist systems arising. Porn is not political but will be much more easily produced in a country that respects free speech. This is not a contradiction at all.
>Here, you have just said that society owns everything; that effort->reward is a complete illusion.
I did not say anything of the kind. I merely said that effort + privilege > effort alone.
And I said that socialists hold privilege to be a debt owed to society. This is not a contradiction either since privilege by definition is NOT earned.
>Let's try to apply your theory of capitalism. Explain how Apple stole its way to its billion dollar warchest.
Apple was founded by people who lived in houses on stolen land, their business headquarters are on stolen land. Every single resource that goes into their products are taken from stolen land.
>They started as a small company out of someone's garage; who did they steal from to build up to their current multibillion empire?
The garage was already built on stolen land out of bricks made from stolen clay and wood cut from stolen trees.
>All labor is not equal. (For example, deliberately pointless work does not create value no matter how many man hours are put in)
This is a bit more subtle. Within a single company certainly all labour really is equal - the maths is simple. Let's take me. I'm an engineer who gets a very high salary (in the top 5% earners in my country in fact), I get that to make products our customers pay a lot for. My skills were expensive to acquire. We have a receptionist who answers phones and takes messages. Her skills cost a lot less to require and she gets paid a lot less - standard capitalist distribution.
But it's false. If she wasn't there, I would have to spend MY time doing those things, which is time I could then NOT spend making products. So the real VALUE contribution of her to the company per hour is exactly the same as me.
Since this is slashdot, here is a car analogy. A car has a fanbelt, cheap to make and easy to replace. It also has a flywheel, a much more complicated and expensive part that costs a lot more to make and replace. But take out EITHER and the car won't run. So their value to the car is identical.
The only reason to pay more for a flywheel job is to encourage people to take them (since they have to invest more in their skills). But this is not actually needed. People become engineers even when engineers are badly paid (when I first studied engineering it was among the worst paid careers in my country - and hard to find work in). They do it because they love engineering. We'll lose the ones who are in it for the money sure, but all THAT will do is mean we get better engineered products.
> You are flipping around the definitions; instead of the "no gay marriage" position being dominant in society, you make the "gay marriage" position dominant, even over the objection of a MAJORITY of people in a democratic system.
I make the principle of "everybody is equal before the law" dominant. The whole reason for things like constitutional democracies is to allow you to DO things like that. To prevent democracy from being a tyranny of the majority.
There is no liberty at ALL until everybody IS equal before the law.
>And why not something like polygamous or incestual marriages?
The latter has solid scientific arguments against it - but even so, I am not in principle opposed to it. I would speak out against it, but I would demand the government must NOT. The former OUGHT to be legal as well. There just aren't enough people who want it for it to be a po
As an aside, the blogpost I linked is part of a four-part series, if you are interested - the rest are here:
http://silentcoder.co.za/?s=The+Libertarians&searchsubmit=
>Democracies are tyrannies of the majority. If a minority is coerced into sacrificing for the greater good - how is it socialism if a democracy does it, but not-socialism if done by a dictatorship?
I suppose I would say it's more a difference of principle than of practical outcome. The difference is that in a (working) democracy nobody has any MORE power than you do to affect the outcome of a decision. Republics are less democratic than anarchies - hence it's less socialist in them than it would be in an anarchy (since representatives can coerce things which the vote did not support).
>Under that principle, if the majority (society) demands the fruits of an individual laborer's work, they can rightfully take it. Again, socialism as I have defined it. Again, incompatible with your definition of socialism (where the laborer's right to his own work is sacred).
Not sacred, that implies religion, this is about justice. And I never SAID that SOCIETY cannot have a share of a labourers work - that is completely outside the SCOPE of what is or is not socialism. My definition applies to who keeps the PROFITS of productive labour. Socialism is any belief system that those profits should go to those who PERFORM the labour, rather than to employers.
The things you refer to - to a socialist is a completely unrelated topic. That is about the fact that no man is an island. All success is at least partially attributable to privilege (and any sociologist will confirm this: there is NO more reliable prediction about a child's future income than the income of his parents). Capitalists see privilege as an inherent right (with a few exceptions - Jefferson for example instituted the first estate tax to reduce privilege and prevent the rise of an aristocracy). Socialists see privilege as a debt to society. You got where you are on hard work (it's false that socialists deny this - they very much accept it) but ALSO thanks to privileges.
Socialists believe those privileges are a LOAN, not a PROPERTY - and must be repaid, by extending privilege to OTHER people who have less (a pay-it-forward kind of loan - an idea first proposed by a capitalist in fact: Benjamin Franklin).
But that is not a defining attribute of socialism, a lot of socialists believe this - enough that most socialisms include systems to achieve this (such as tax-funded schools), but many people reject this and are STILL socialists as they believes workers must own businesses.
>We're using different definitions for Capitalism. I define it as "private ownership"
Well if we can just make up our own definitions we're never going to get anywhere. Private ownership is an attribute of most capitalist systems but it's hardly the definition of capitalism. Capitalism is a system of trade entrepreneurship is enabled by access to capital - there are many other ways entrepreneurship can work, but this concept is what sets capitalism appart from other market systems (free and non-free). This is it's defining attribute.
A side effect of this is that in any capitalism power is apportioned according to capital obtained - which is why all capitalism tends to degenerate into fascism.
> The business owner owns the equipment and land
And not a single one of them own it by any concept that can be called just. That's rather a long argument with a lot of defining evidence. Too much to write out now, but luckily, I have a blogpost on the topic I can link you to.
http://silentcoder.co.za/2012/01/the-libertarians-part-1-who-are-the-thieves/
When socialist libertarians say the workers must own those as well - it's because we know it was their property in the first place and it was stolen.
>businesses can fail, after all; the owner can lose everything even as the worker walks away with his wages
That's a common argument, and a false one. For the vast majority of people - the vast majority of their wages is spent on basic requirements to
I have no doubt that what you are suggesting is a significant factor (indeed "all my friends are there" is part of the 'valuable service' I mentioned). Occam's razor suggests it's a major factor in their success since it is certainly the easiest explanation.
The question I raised was: is it really the ONLY factor ?
So it's impossible in your model to flip a perfect coin in zero gravity ? Or anything close enough to it to resemble it?
Newton's law says if I'm in an orbit where the sun and earth's gravitational theory is balanced and I flip the coin straight ahead of me, it will keep going round and round forever.
That's not "coming down" is it? So the probability of it doing none of your predicted things is still not zero. Especially when we HAVE the technology to do this experiment. We do basically the same thing with satelites all the time.
>What the hell? Yes, they are! What is the probability that a perfect coin will land either heads or tails? The probability is 1. What is the probablity that it will land neither? The probability is 0. It's pretty simple.
Unless your definition of "perfect coin" is "has no a thickness of 0" (as in a Euclidian 2-dimensional perfect circle) that was a really bad example.
But anything that can still be called a coin at all (even if perfect) has not 2 but 3 sides. True coming down on the third side is incredibly rare - but it does happen.
If you claim a 2-dimensional only coin, then your concept falls even further flat since 2-dimensional objects wouldn't obey gravity (no real matter = no real mass = no gravitational force) so THAT perfect coin actually wouldn't come down at all.
So for any real coin the probability that it will land either heads or tails is very close to 1. The probability that it will not come down is very close to 0 (if you flick it in zero gravity there is no "down" to speak off - and since that is possible, the probability is not completely 0) and there is even a tiny probability that it will come down NEITHER - and land on it's side. Rare as that may be, it does happen, it's happened to me more than once. They tend to roll like a wheel for a bit and then stop. If they are on a smooth surface like a table and have enough rolling time to decelerate gradually - they don't topple over.
I agree with you that there are 0 and 1 probabilities. The probability of any human not wearing an (as yet at least impossible to design) special suit surviving a trip to the center of the sun is 0.
The probability of a radiactive piece of uranium decaying is 1 (we can't predict the exact time - but we can predict that it WILL happen and there is no known condition that can prevent it).
First they will build a miniaturization ray, and shrink the LHC into a couple of pipes that can fit on a tile about a foot on each side.
The result is called a "flux capacitor".
>Now that the most brilliant people on this planet have found what was just waiting there to be found, they can focus on helping the rest of us build actual stuff with it
The Higgs boson does indeed exist then all the stuff in the universe is ALREADY built with it. That's sorta the point.
Aaah, thanks, that answers my question nice and informatively.