Look, don't take it personally. There are just certain groups, such as wikipedians, libertarians, and Apple fans, that I can't help but troll mercilessly. It's an addiction, but I have not found a self help group for those addicted to offending the easily offended.
So a slave is only worth his market price? I mean, in his own society, he might have been a chief or a skilled hunter. But obviously, our society is the only one that counts in determining worth. You know, us. Not them, over there. They shouldn't really get a say.
Everyone gets a vote in our free market, a vote saying how valuable they think things and people should be. Except, it isn't one man, one vote, it is one dollar, one vote. Those who have the most dollars get the most say in determining the value of things and people. And considering the wealth inequality in our country, what that means is that the top 1% get more say in what the value of things are than the bottom 90%.
There is no contradiction, you just haven't thought through what society really is, minus the comforting illusions.
Huh. What an odd situation. Here we have people without jobs, and no money to buy the things they need. If only there were something those people could do to work at creating the things they and others need, why, we'd kill two birds with one stone, wouldn't we? They would have jobs, AND things!
I mean, I'm not criticizing capitalism or the free market for failing in the simple task of matching things that need to be done with people not currently doing anything, heavens no. Obviously, we have the best of all possible systems and any "failings" of are simply because, uh, well.... Hey! look at that interesting thing over there!
We obviously don't have a shortage of labor. We have a system that is incapable of matching the labor available to the work that needs doing.
You assume that labor actually operates under the laws of supply and demand. First off, you learned some economics, so you know the paper about lemons? As in, bad cars? It talks about the effects of information imbalance on the market. Well, the labor market is a prime example of this effect. Workers know more about their true value than bosses do, therefore, bosses must assume that all workers are overstating their value and therefore, all bosses systematically undervalue labor.
Capitalism values capital more than labor. It's systemic. And the owning class see each other as valuable, while the working class are replaceable. Thus systematically devaluing labor again. Your theory also assumes people are rational actors, this has been disproven by many, many recent experiments. The owning class do not make decisions based on their rational self interest. Many of them, for instance, would bankrupt themselves rather than give in to worker demands because giving in puts them lower down on the old totem pole, and being high in the social hierarchy is the real reason they became rich in the first place. They would rather go bankrupt and be able to say "Fuck you!" to the workers than pay a fair wage and be seen as an equal. That is culturally systemic to the owning class, and they make the rules because they have the capital.
I would be more than happy to pick up trash, it's not demeaning doing what needs to be done. I just wouldn't like being forced into it, and then scorned for having to do it. Heck, if everyone spent two hours a day doing the shitty jobs rather than forcing them onto the unfortunate, we'd get the shitty jobs done with plenty of time left over to do what we like.
When you try to score points in an argument based on guesses and assumptions, you will usually lose.
Many, many people have the talent for running a business successfully, but no capital and therefore, no chance to prove it. The illusion that running a business takes some kind of special genius is a self serving illusion perpetuated by the people who run businesses. You know why so many businesses fail? Because shitheads with no skills, no brains, but plenty of good old fashioned daddy-money are the ones who get to start businesses. It's got nothing to do with how hard it is.
In the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain, they have a 90% startup success rate, because everyone is encouraged to start a cooperative, and they are given all the help they need, from cooperative lending, to cooperative staffing, to cooperative business planning. It's not hard. Anyone can do it. Only in capitalist societies where the barrier to entry is set so high only the rich can start a business do we see the reverse, with the majority of startups failing. It's not that rich people are idiots, or even less intelligent than average. It's just that they believe their own lies, and you can't be that delusional and function well.
"The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good." --Gordon Gekko
One of the primary benefits of positions of power is that no one is going to shatter your comforting and self serving illusions. The only people with the power to do so have the same illusions you do.
I would like to see a better source for that than some investment banker's blog and a crappy scan of a document anyone could have created in five minutes. Heck, they could have at least put it on Waste Management stationary...
Not that I'm saying it's wrong, just that someone with an obvious axe to grind and no reliable sources is a bit hard to trust.
My point is that plenty of people do get up in the morning motivated by false promises of being able to improve their lives. If everyone who tried to improve their life actually succeeded, who would be left to do the crappy jobs? That is my point. Not everyone who works hard and makes smart choices gets ahead. Statistically speaking, in our economy, they can't all get ahead. We like to think the ones that fail, fail due to character defects, bad choices, or poor work ethics. But we're fooling ourselves. Structurally, it isn't possible for everyone who tries to get the 'good' job they are looking for.
We don't need any lumberjacks, sanitation workers, or construction workers. In our new post-productive society, everybody gets to be whatever they want! There are no crappy jobs that need to be done. Everyone is qualified to be a surgeon. Everyone gets to be president. We don't need our garbage picked up.
Look, we tell our children and ourselves that in America, anyone can be whatever they want to be. What did we expect would happen? Some jobs get no respect and shitty pay, despite the fact that they absolutely need to get done. Because, you know, once you've figured out that there isn't really a career in art history, you still need to pay off those college loans. Looks like the DOT is hiring road crews!
Why can't we admit that not everyone gets to be a fashion model, a football star, or a CEO? Why do we emphasize the importance of some jobs, like advertising executive or investment banker, that add nothing of real value to humanity, while denigrating those who pick up our trash? I mean, is my day going to suck if I don't get to see any catchy ads? Probably not, but I've been around a garbage workers strike, and that shit ain't pretty.
We overvalue positions of leadership and expertise, while lying that everyone could do those jobs. And tons of unqualified people rush to fill those jobs, because they were told they could, and that those jobs were more important than hauling garbage. But let's face it: most people don't have what it takes to become a surgeon or a CEO. Does that mean they are worthless? No. It takes all kinds of work to make a complex society run. We should not overvalue certain jobs and undervalue others, because that creates societal inefficiencies where we have too many people trying for the fun, high paying, well respected jobs. And meanwhile, the people actually doing the crucial dirty work get shit on by society.
No marketing drone is worth hundreds or thousands of times what a sewer worker is worth. Yet our society says they are. If we have too many people going to university, maybe the answer isn't to say, "Hey, realistically most of you are fucking plebes who will never work in whatever you majored in. You should practice your table-waiting and ditch digging instead." Maybe we should instead strive for a more egalitarian society where everyone's contribution is respected. I respect a dishwasher who works hard and does a good job more than I respect a CEO who golfs all the time and takes credit for his underlings hard work. But society says this privileged douchebag is worth thousands of times more than the guy who washes dishes. So what do we expect people to do? Everyone wants to be that pampered and privileged CEO, nobody wants to build bridges and roads. And so we have Wall Street profiting while the economy crumbles, and meanwhile, most of our infrastructure is falling apart.
Mistakes happen over and over again with regularity, and calls to fix these mistakes are met with paranoia and outright hostility. Any normal people were driven out of wikipedia long ago, all that are left are vicious, petty, power hungry control freaks. I don't take it personally, crazy people can't really be held accountable for their craziness. I just don't interact with them.
Do you understand that what I wrote was satire? People are demanding that Apple sell Flash based programs in Apple's store. Which is like me demanding that you let me use your property to do whatever I want.
I wanna be a Care Troll Oh It will be so great to when I'm a Care Troll Oh I can hardly wait to be a Care Troll And do the things Care Trolls do. Oh I wanna be a Care Troll like you!
Seriously, care troll, we all know about the leak. It's not news. And here in America, we don't care what government some washed up ex-empire elects. Jon Stewart is always on about something, how is that news? This isn't the beeb, this is Slashdot, and you know what we care about? Xkcd and douchebag wikipedia editors, that's what.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. It may be true, but it does not follow. In order to show that wikipedia is not a good source of information, you would need to perform an analysis of the content to discover the average error rate, and you would need to show that the error rate is significantly greater than in other information sources. Wikipedia has been proven by independent analysis to be at least as accurate than other Encyclopedias.
Just remember, lots of great things were created by assholes. The fact that they were assholes does not negate the value of their creations. Yes, anyone can edit wikipedia, but there are thousands of power hungry jerks watching every page for a chance to deny an edit. And that means that the only edits that stay are those that can stand up to the scrutiny of people looking for any excuse to remove them.
Wikipedia articles and wikipedia 'personalities' are two different things. You can use the articles while ignoring the personalities. Of course, if you want to edit the articles, you have to deal with the personalities, but who edits articles? Antisocial, egotistical wingnuts with too much time on their hands, that's who. You don't have to join the Cult of Wales to use wikipedia.
Anyone can run Flash on an iPhone or iPad. After all, they own the hardware and they can legally do anything that is physically possible with it. If it isn't physically possible, well, whose fault is that? Apple is under no compunction to make it easy for them, and is certainly under no compunction to sell things they don't like in their App store. I'd like it if my local Christian book store sold my hard core Joseph on Mary porn, but oddly enough, they refuse to. I complained they were taking away my freedom, but everyone just laughed at me. So I took my business elsewhere, which is exactly what you can do. Problem solved, without forcing someone to do something with their own property, against their will.
So get up offa that keyboard, come open the door and let me in. And go make me a sandwich while I use your computer to develop in Flash. You have Mountain Dew and Cheetos, right? No? You bastard! Stop infringing on my freedom to eat and drink what I want and go get me some!
To answer your question, "who cares," let me just point out that the post you responded to was not making a point, it was responding to a point. The point was "Why doesn't EA do this?" and the response was "because it isn't as profitable as the things EA is doing now." I hope you get the point, your point was beside the point. How many was that? Seven? Point point point!
Sorry, I just meow watched "Super Troopers" and that joke is stuck in my head meow.
Agreed. Everyone has a right to the product of their own labor. But in the free market, it is the owning class that gets the product of everyone's labor. And property is not the product of anyone's labor!
I never said that everyone should have an equal stake. With democratically controlled resources, the collective owners can vote to give certain members more. As an example, look at pirates. Pirates elected a captain, who got a larger stake than others. Why didn't everyone just vote for themselves? They realized that they weren't leaders, and they could get more if they let a real leader lead, so they voted for the man they thought would net them the most loot. That is equality of opportunity, not outcome.
It would be in the owner's self interest to clear cut. Take down all the old growth trees, screwing the forest, and using the profits to buy more old growth forest. It is more profitable to ruin a forest and move on than manage it sustainably. In fact, without regulations, that's what actually happens in the real world Did you really not know that? t is important to note that newly clear cut land is usually incredibly non-productive: all the nutrients and biomass were in the trees. How did you think the trees got so big?
Marx was wrong about a great many things. There was a reason the Soviet Union killed all its anarchists. There was a reason Trotsky got an ice pick to the head. You want to know who I respect, politically? Not Marx. Trotsky, Proudhon, Chomsky, the social anarchist thinkers. José Arizmendiarrieta, the founder of the Mondragon Collective.
Now that is an interesting case study, he was a liberal Catholic priest in one of the poorest areas of Spain. He turned it into an industrial powerhouse in less than fifty years. Mondragon illustrates the blend of public and private I think we should strive towards. Everything there is a cooperative, and anyone who wants to can start there own. In fact, there are cooperative banks to lend the money, cooperative business consultants to help plan, cooperative staffing agencies to staff the place, and cooperative ad agencies to get the word out. Ninety percent of new cooperatives in Mondragon last more than five years. In the US, only ten percent of new businesses do the same.
Capitalism is not efficient. You are confusing capitalism and the free market. Capitalism is about capital, lending money for profit: otherwise known as the sin of usury. Capitalism encourages rent seeking behavior: sitting back and collecting money with little risk and no effort.
The free market IS efficient. Trust me, it pains me a little to say that, and my younger, more radical self would probably have called present me a sellout, but I'm not dogmatic and I do change my views when presented with compelling evidence. But is it the most efficient? That depends.
One thing planned economies lack is price signals. However, with proper communications systems, we can replace the price signals of the free market with even better intelligence. This was tried, and it was working. Unfortunately, it was tried in South America. In Chile. If you can't guess what happened next, you don't know US history very well. That's right, we aided pro-capitalist rebels in deposing the democratically elected leader of Chile, Salvador Allende. You might want to look up Project Cybersyn. It's fascinating what a third world country could do with 1960s era analog electronics.
Also, free markets fail to operate efficiently under certain conditions, namely when there is imbalance of information, when there are positive or negative externalities, or when there is a natural monopoly, where it is actually more efficient to have one supplier, as with sewers and roads. What do we do with the cases where the free market fails?
The fact that all resource have been appropriated by private concerns today does not negate the fact that at one point, anyone could use them. If a corporation can own a resource, any other group can too. Even 'all of humanity,' or would all of humanity have to join a corporation before they could assert collective ownership?
I believe in ownership of personal property. Clothes, food, electronics, toys, even houses. Not real estate. Private property requires very little threat of force to maintain ownership. Real estate, on the other hand, requires a much greater threat of force. Keeping others from using your clothes, not so hard. Keeping others from using your land, much harder. We, as a society, expend a LOT of effort protecting the real estate of the owning class, and for what? How does that benefit the rest of us? Why should we agree to such a system if we aren't getting anything out of it? Just so we have the illusory idea that maybe we, too, can own land one day? How many of the six billion people on the planet own land? Not so many, so why should the majority of non-land owning humans support the right to own land? They are getting nothing more than empty promises from the deal.
You still haven't explained what you think gives a person ownership privileges. What is the basis for ownership, in your esteem?
All property comes from natural resources. In my ideal world, those resources would be transformed into goods through collectively managed production, while the finished goods would be privately owned. Collective control of resources provides protection from the Tragedy of the Privates, where private owners exploit and deplete natural resources so they can accumulate capital to buy another block of resources to exploit and deplete. Collective owners will not deplete a resource and move on, as their children will depend on that resource. As an example, clear cutting over sustainable forestry. Clear cut and move on, leaving the loggers in an area with no employment, or manage a forest sustainably, so there will be jobs for generations. Which do we do?
I'd just like to point out that I've argued my points with specifics, whereas you've resorted to emotionally charged generalities and have not explained the basis of your reasoning. You have demonstrated the process of starting with a foregone conclusion and arguing backwards towards points that support it. You know what must be right and true, it's just a matter of cherry picking the right data and emotionally charged sound bites to support it.
This is always the way it goes arguing with libertarians and free marketeers. As I stated, the real reason you support the ideals you do is to maintain your own power and privilege within the system. You can't admit your reasons to yourself, so you are left with a sense of certainty about your position, but no idea how you arrived at that certainty. Well, you arrived there through unbridled self interest at the expense of others.
You've illustrated my point exactly. You think people deserve whatever they can take, and if others don't like it, tough. Of course, in a true free market everyone only gets what others think they deserve, too. I mean, exchanges are voluntary, Right? But as you've demonstrated, here, you don't want that kind of free market. You want the kind of 'free' market that is free only for the elites, that preserves your own power over others.
It's funny, you give up pretty easily. You say, "Oh my God, you believe this that and the other, that means I don't even have to respond to your arguments. I can just point out that you're a commie, and I win!" Well, I'm not a commie. I believe in private ownership, just not private ownership of natural resources.
What is the justification for taking something that was at one point free for all to use, and turning it into something private? By doing so, you are stealing from the rest of humanity. I've heard the argument that when one adds one's work to a natural resource, that justifies ownership. And yet, when you hire someone to work on your yard, they don't own it. Because you owned it first. And all of us could use any resource before it was privatized through the use of force and coercion, so when you mix your work with a natural resource, you are working on something already collectively owned, and your effort does not give you ownership rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, don't take it personally. There are just certain groups, such as wikipedians, libertarians, and Apple fans, that I can't help but troll mercilessly. It's an addiction, but I have not found a self help group for those addicted to offending the easily offended.
Are you by chance a brain surgeon as well? Travel through any solid rock recently?
So a slave is only worth his market price? I mean, in his own society, he might have been a chief or a skilled hunter. But obviously, our society is the only one that counts in determining worth. You know, us. Not them, over there. They shouldn't really get a say.
Everyone gets a vote in our free market, a vote saying how valuable they think things and people should be. Except, it isn't one man, one vote, it is one dollar, one vote. Those who have the most dollars get the most say in determining the value of things and people. And considering the wealth inequality in our country, what that means is that the top 1% get more say in what the value of things are than the bottom 90%.
There is no contradiction, you just haven't thought through what society really is, minus the comforting illusions.
Huh. What an odd situation. Here we have people without jobs, and no money to buy the things they need. If only there were something those people could do to work at creating the things they and others need, why, we'd kill two birds with one stone, wouldn't we? They would have jobs, AND things!
I mean, I'm not criticizing capitalism or the free market for failing in the simple task of matching things that need to be done with people not currently doing anything, heavens no. Obviously, we have the best of all possible systems and any "failings" of are simply because, uh, well.... Hey! look at that interesting thing over there!
We obviously don't have a shortage of labor. We have a system that is incapable of matching the labor available to the work that needs doing.
You assume that labor actually operates under the laws of supply and demand. First off, you learned some economics, so you know the paper about lemons? As in, bad cars? It talks about the effects of information imbalance on the market. Well, the labor market is a prime example of this effect. Workers know more about their true value than bosses do, therefore, bosses must assume that all workers are overstating their value and therefore, all bosses systematically undervalue labor.
Capitalism values capital more than labor. It's systemic. And the owning class see each other as valuable, while the working class are replaceable. Thus systematically devaluing labor again. Your theory also assumes people are rational actors, this has been disproven by many, many recent experiments. The owning class do not make decisions based on their rational self interest. Many of them, for instance, would bankrupt themselves rather than give in to worker demands because giving in puts them lower down on the old totem pole, and being high in the social hierarchy is the real reason they became rich in the first place. They would rather go bankrupt and be able to say "Fuck you!" to the workers than pay a fair wage and be seen as an equal. That is culturally systemic to the owning class, and they make the rules because they have the capital.
I would be more than happy to pick up trash, it's not demeaning doing what needs to be done. I just wouldn't like being forced into it, and then scorned for having to do it. Heck, if everyone spent two hours a day doing the shitty jobs rather than forcing them onto the unfortunate, we'd get the shitty jobs done with plenty of time left over to do what we like.
When you try to score points in an argument based on guesses and assumptions, you will usually lose.
Many, many people have the talent for running a business successfully, but no capital and therefore, no chance to prove it. The illusion that running a business takes some kind of special genius is a self serving illusion perpetuated by the people who run businesses. You know why so many businesses fail? Because shitheads with no skills, no brains, but plenty of good old fashioned daddy-money are the ones who get to start businesses. It's got nothing to do with how hard it is.
In the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain, they have a 90% startup success rate, because everyone is encouraged to start a cooperative, and they are given all the help they need, from cooperative lending, to cooperative staffing, to cooperative business planning. It's not hard. Anyone can do it. Only in capitalist societies where the barrier to entry is set so high only the rich can start a business do we see the reverse, with the majority of startups failing. It's not that rich people are idiots, or even less intelligent than average. It's just that they believe their own lies, and you can't be that delusional and function well.
"The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good." --Gordon Gekko
One of the primary benefits of positions of power is that no one is going to shatter your comforting and self serving illusions. The only people with the power to do so have the same illusions you do.
I would like to see a better source for that than some investment banker's blog and a crappy scan of a document anyone could have created in five minutes. Heck, they could have at least put it on Waste Management stationary...
Not that I'm saying it's wrong, just that someone with an obvious axe to grind and no reliable sources is a bit hard to trust.
My point is that plenty of people do get up in the morning motivated by false promises of being able to improve their lives. If everyone who tried to improve their life actually succeeded, who would be left to do the crappy jobs? That is my point. Not everyone who works hard and makes smart choices gets ahead. Statistically speaking, in our economy, they can't all get ahead. We like to think the ones that fail, fail due to character defects, bad choices, or poor work ethics. But we're fooling ourselves. Structurally, it isn't possible for everyone who tries to get the 'good' job they are looking for.
We don't need any lumberjacks, sanitation workers, or construction workers. In our new post-productive society, everybody gets to be whatever they want! There are no crappy jobs that need to be done. Everyone is qualified to be a surgeon. Everyone gets to be president. We don't need our garbage picked up.
Look, we tell our children and ourselves that in America, anyone can be whatever they want to be. What did we expect would happen? Some jobs get no respect and shitty pay, despite the fact that they absolutely need to get done. Because, you know, once you've figured out that there isn't really a career in art history, you still need to pay off those college loans. Looks like the DOT is hiring road crews!
Why can't we admit that not everyone gets to be a fashion model, a football star, or a CEO? Why do we emphasize the importance of some jobs, like advertising executive or investment banker, that add nothing of real value to humanity, while denigrating those who pick up our trash? I mean, is my day going to suck if I don't get to see any catchy ads? Probably not, but I've been around a garbage workers strike, and that shit ain't pretty.
We overvalue positions of leadership and expertise, while lying that everyone could do those jobs. And tons of unqualified people rush to fill those jobs, because they were told they could, and that those jobs were more important than hauling garbage. But let's face it: most people don't have what it takes to become a surgeon or a CEO. Does that mean they are worthless? No. It takes all kinds of work to make a complex society run. We should not overvalue certain jobs and undervalue others, because that creates societal inefficiencies where we have too many people trying for the fun, high paying, well respected jobs. And meanwhile, the people actually doing the crucial dirty work get shit on by society.
No marketing drone is worth hundreds or thousands of times what a sewer worker is worth. Yet our society says they are. If we have too many people going to university, maybe the answer isn't to say, "Hey, realistically most of you are fucking plebes who will never work in whatever you majored in. You should practice your table-waiting and ditch digging instead." Maybe we should instead strive for a more egalitarian society where everyone's contribution is respected. I respect a dishwasher who works hard and does a good job more than I respect a CEO who golfs all the time and takes credit for his underlings hard work. But society says this privileged douchebag is worth thousands of times more than the guy who washes dishes. So what do we expect people to do? Everyone wants to be that pampered and privileged CEO, nobody wants to build bridges and roads. And so we have Wall Street profiting while the economy crumbles, and meanwhile, most of our infrastructure is falling apart.
You found a way to make Slashdotters actually click through to the article. Now, if only you could find a way to make them read it.
Mistakes happen over and over again with regularity, and calls to fix these mistakes are met with paranoia and outright hostility. Any normal people were driven out of wikipedia long ago, all that are left are vicious, petty, power hungry control freaks. I don't take it personally, crazy people can't really be held accountable for their craziness. I just don't interact with them.
Um, yeah. We agree on that. Adobe and Apple both suck, which is what makes this bitch-fest so damn amusing.
Do you understand that what I wrote was satire? People are demanding that Apple sell Flash based programs in Apple's store. Which is like me demanding that you let me use your property to do whatever I want.
Dude, that's a user page. Anyone can put up anything on their user page.
I wanna be a Care Troll
Oh It will be so great to when I'm a Care Troll
Oh I can hardly wait to be a Care Troll
And do the things Care Trolls do.
Oh I wanna be a Care Troll like you!
Seriously, care troll, we all know about the leak. It's not news. And here in America, we don't care what government some washed up ex-empire elects. Jon Stewart is always on about something, how is that news? This isn't the beeb, this is Slashdot, and you know what we care about? Xkcd and douchebag wikipedia editors, that's what.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. It may be true, but it does not follow. In order to show that wikipedia is not a good source of information, you would need to perform an analysis of the content to discover the average error rate, and you would need to show that the error rate is significantly greater than in other information sources. Wikipedia has been proven by independent analysis to be at least as accurate than other Encyclopedias.
Just remember, lots of great things were created by assholes. The fact that they were assholes does not negate the value of their creations. Yes, anyone can edit wikipedia, but there are thousands of power hungry jerks watching every page for a chance to deny an edit. And that means that the only edits that stay are those that can stand up to the scrutiny of people looking for any excuse to remove them.
Wikipedia articles and wikipedia 'personalities' are two different things. You can use the articles while ignoring the personalities. Of course, if you want to edit the articles, you have to deal with the personalities, but who edits articles? Antisocial, egotistical wingnuts with too much time on their hands, that's who. You don't have to join the Cult of Wales to use wikipedia.
Anyone can run Flash on an iPhone or iPad. After all, they own the hardware and they can legally do anything that is physically possible with it. If it isn't physically possible, well, whose fault is that? Apple is under no compunction to make it easy for them, and is certainly under no compunction to sell things they don't like in their App store. I'd like it if my local Christian book store sold my hard core Joseph on Mary porn, but oddly enough, they refuse to. I complained they were taking away my freedom, but everyone just laughed at me. So I took my business elsewhere, which is exactly what you can do. Problem solved, without forcing someone to do something with their own property, against their will.
So get up offa that keyboard, come open the door and let me in. And go make me a sandwich while I use your computer to develop in Flash. You have Mountain Dew and Cheetos, right? No? You bastard! Stop infringing on my freedom to eat and drink what I want and go get me some!
To answer your question, "who cares," let me just point out that the post you responded to was not making a point, it was responding to a point. The point was "Why doesn't EA do this?" and the response was "because it isn't as profitable as the things EA is doing now." I hope you get the point, your point was beside the point. How many was that? Seven? Point point point!
Sorry, I just meow watched "Super Troopers" and that joke is stuck in my head meow.
Agreed. Everyone has a right to the product of their own labor. But in the free market, it is the owning class that gets the product of everyone's labor. And property is not the product of anyone's labor!
I never said that everyone should have an equal stake. With democratically controlled resources, the collective owners can vote to give certain members more. As an example, look at pirates. Pirates elected a captain, who got a larger stake than others. Why didn't everyone just vote for themselves? They realized that they weren't leaders, and they could get more if they let a real leader lead, so they voted for the man they thought would net them the most loot. That is equality of opportunity, not outcome.
It would be in the owner's self interest to clear cut. Take down all the old growth trees, screwing the forest, and using the profits to buy more old growth forest. It is more profitable to ruin a forest and move on than manage it sustainably. In fact, without regulations, that's what actually happens in the real world Did you really not know that? t is important to note that newly clear cut land is usually incredibly non-productive: all the nutrients and biomass were in the trees. How did you think the trees got so big?
Marx was wrong about a great many things. There was a reason the Soviet Union killed all its anarchists. There was a reason Trotsky got an ice pick to the head. You want to know who I respect, politically? Not Marx. Trotsky, Proudhon, Chomsky, the social anarchist thinkers. José Arizmendiarrieta, the founder of the Mondragon Collective.
Now that is an interesting case study, he was a liberal Catholic priest in one of the poorest areas of Spain. He turned it into an industrial powerhouse in less than fifty years. Mondragon illustrates the blend of public and private I think we should strive towards. Everything there is a cooperative, and anyone who wants to can start there own. In fact, there are cooperative banks to lend the money, cooperative business consultants to help plan, cooperative staffing agencies to staff the place, and cooperative ad agencies to get the word out. Ninety percent of new cooperatives in Mondragon last more than five years. In the US, only ten percent of new businesses do the same.
Capitalism is not efficient. You are confusing capitalism and the free market. Capitalism is about capital, lending money for profit: otherwise known as the sin of usury. Capitalism encourages rent seeking behavior: sitting back and collecting money with little risk and no effort.
The free market IS efficient. Trust me, it pains me a little to say that, and my younger, more radical self would probably have called present me a sellout, but I'm not dogmatic and I do change my views when presented with compelling evidence. But is it the most efficient? That depends.
One thing planned economies lack is price signals. However, with proper communications systems, we can replace the price signals of the free market with even better intelligence. This was tried, and it was working. Unfortunately, it was tried in South America. In Chile. If you can't guess what happened next, you don't know US history very well. That's right, we aided pro-capitalist rebels in deposing the democratically elected leader of Chile, Salvador Allende. You might want to look up Project Cybersyn. It's fascinating what a third world country could do with 1960s era analog electronics.
Also, free markets fail to operate efficiently under certain conditions, namely when there is imbalance of information, when there are positive or negative externalities, or when there is a natural monopoly, where it is actually more efficient to have one supplier, as with sewers and roads. What do we do with the cases where the free market fails?
The fact that all resource have been appropriated by private concerns today does not negate the fact that at one point, anyone could use them. If a corporation can own a resource, any other group can too. Even 'all of humanity,' or would all of humanity have to join a corporation before they could assert collective ownership?
I believe in ownership of personal property. Clothes, food, electronics, toys, even houses. Not real estate. Private property requires very little threat of force to maintain ownership. Real estate, on the other hand, requires a much greater threat of force. Keeping others from using your clothes, not so hard. Keeping others from using your land, much harder. We, as a society, expend a LOT of effort protecting the real estate of the owning class, and for what? How does that benefit the rest of us? Why should we agree to such a system if we aren't getting anything out of it? Just so we have the illusory idea that maybe we, too, can own land one day? How many of the six billion people on the planet own land? Not so many, so why should the majority of non-land owning humans support the right to own land? They are getting nothing more than empty promises from the deal.
You still haven't explained what you think gives a person ownership privileges. What is the basis for ownership, in your esteem?
All property comes from natural resources. In my ideal world, those resources would be transformed into goods through collectively managed production, while the finished goods would be privately owned. Collective control of resources provides protection from the Tragedy of the Privates, where private owners exploit and deplete natural resources so they can accumulate capital to buy another block of resources to exploit and deplete. Collective owners will not deplete a resource and move on, as their children will depend on that resource. As an example, clear cutting over sustainable forestry. Clear cut and move on, leaving the loggers in an area with no employment, or manage a forest sustainably, so there will be jobs for generations. Which do we do?
I'd just like to point out that I've argued my points with specifics, whereas you've resorted to emotionally charged generalities and have not explained the basis of your reasoning. You have demonstrated the process of starting with a foregone conclusion and arguing backwards towards points that support it. You know what must be right and true, it's just a matter of cherry picking the right data and emotionally charged sound bites to support it.
This is always the way it goes arguing with libertarians and free marketeers. As I stated, the real reason you support the ideals you do is to maintain your own power and privilege within the system. You can't admit your reasons to yourself, so you are left with a sense of certainty about your position, but no idea how you arrived at that certainty. Well, you arrived there through unbridled self interest at the expense of others.
You've illustrated my point exactly. You think people deserve whatever they can take, and if others don't like it, tough. Of course, in a true free market everyone only gets what others think they deserve, too. I mean, exchanges are voluntary, Right? But as you've demonstrated, here, you don't want that kind of free market. You want the kind of 'free' market that is free only for the elites, that preserves your own power over others.
It's funny, you give up pretty easily. You say, "Oh my God, you believe this that and the other, that means I don't even have to respond to your arguments. I can just point out that you're a commie, and I win!" Well, I'm not a commie. I believe in private ownership, just not private ownership of natural resources.
What is the justification for taking something that was at one point free for all to use, and turning it into something private? By doing so, you are stealing from the rest of humanity. I've heard the argument that when one adds one's work to a natural resource, that justifies ownership. And yet, when you hire someone to work on your yard, they don't own it. Because you owned it first. And all of us could use any resource before it was privatized through the use of force and coercion, so when you mix your work with a natural resource, you are working on something already collectively owned, and your effort does not give you ownership rights.