Free market means prices are governed by the forces of supply and demand as opposed to laws/regulations. Subsidies will impact prices, but they don't regulate them. Historically, tariffs are quite destructive.
My brother who finally succumbed to a third bout of cancer would have been left financially destitute, if he lived in the states, after the first bout and would have likely died far sooner than he did.
I don't think so.
Here in the states many people live in fear of loosing their jobs and the healthcare that goes with it. For those whose employers provide healthcare insurance. Even with healthcare, a major medical issue can push people into bankruptcy!
While I was in college, I had no income at all, and I developed stage 4 chronic kidney disease. I was on medicaid and they paid all of the costs for getting me listed, doctor visits and all, and would have paid for the surgery, drugs, and everything, with no cost to me at all. I'm still listed, but I'm working now, and my current insurance will pay the full cost of surgery with zero deductible.
My brother-in-law received a lung transplant (1 million dollar operation) free of charge from medicaid. It varies by state, but most states provide any services that you need.
At any rate, if Canada's health care is so good, then why do so many of them go south for treatment? Truth be told, Canada's system is a joke compared to all other first world socialized healthcare systems.
Advertising was never about informing. It was always about sales. Information was a part of it and only as a means to sell.
Advertising is not about sales; it's about marketing. And yes, the two are quite distinct from one another. And yes, marketing is all about information.
Marketing focuses on things like building brand recognition and raising product awareness. Sales is the act of giving the consumer a product in exchange for money and/or the process of interacting with customers and negotiation to close a sale. Marketing is also a cost center, whereas sales is purely about driving revenue.
That isn't going to do us any favors in the global market, where China can easily take business away from US suppliers. Instead what the US should have done is match any of China's subsidies.
Not caused by, and even then, "banks" is misleading, because it was only one bank: The central bank; aka The Federal Reserve, aka The Fed. What kept the depression going after this was heavy deflation due to mismanagement on the part of the Fed. Milton Friedman explained it rather well:
But everyday citizens were to blame as well by means of doing what's called a run on the bank. A run on the bank will ruin ANY economy, no matter how it's run. Arizona saw another example of this a few years back when a gas pipeline broke, and people en masse decided that they wanted to fill up many gas cans of fuel, thinking that they'll never get any more for a long time. What resulted was a huge shortage, insanely long lines at the pump, with gas prices exceeding $5 per gallon when the rest of the country was at about $2 per gallon.
But get this -- it was all totally unnecessary. The broken gas pipeline only resulted in a 20% decrease in supply to the state, which wasn't enough to cause any major shortage, rather the big shortage was only caused by everyday people panicking. This is exactly what happened during the depression.
My question is... where does the First Amendment end and overt bribery begin?
Speech alone inherently cannot be bribery.
As it stands now, the CU verdict has pretty much put any electable seat in the country up for sale.
No, it really hasn't. There have been many elections since CU that put this notion completely to rest. During Colorado's state senatorial recall election, John Morse outspent his opponent 11 to 1, and still lost anyways. Hillary's campaign + superpacs outspent Trump's by 6 to 1, and look how that turned out.
But most importantly, remember Larry Lessig's Mayday PAC? I remember myself saying that it's not going to work here on slashdot, and he and his contributors found this out the hard way: The only politicians his PAC supported that got elected were already likely to win anyways without his help, and all of the rest of them lost.
In other words, advertising dollars only go so far to win elections, but if your candidate is less popular than their opponent, then all of the money in the world won't change a thing.
Or, do we just want to say that the invisible hand will take care of all this, as we ride down the lassez faire ideology into another Great Depression?
Actually the economy wasn't at all laissez-faire before the great depression. In fact, after the stock market crash, the economy began to recover until the government tried to "fix" the situation by adding tariffs, and that's where things really went wrong. Thomas Sowell describes it quite well:
Its not slippery at all, they're banning hate speech which is nearly always from conservative and fascist retards which is completely rational.
It obviously isn't working because fascism is actually gaining ground in the EU, where it isn't in the US, which doesn't ban any speech that doesn't advocate violence. By that I mean there isn't a single politician who openly identifies as such in the US, yet the combined EU has many of them, with up to 25% of the votes in many EU states going towards the local fascist party, and in some that party is actually the governing party:
Effectively what the EU is doing is saying that it must be up to private entities to censor speech, and that they must do it quickly, which opens up a gigantic can of worms: They're inevitably going to have to develop automated filters that will delete posts before a human can review them, which means many will just get deleted outright, and in the case where human review is required, you're just asking for somebody with a particular political view to delete content that *they* don't like, which would be perfectly legal, or even content that is really benign from any perspective at all, but was deleted because it was reviewed by somebody who just likes to quickly press the delete button so they can leave work early.
Even in the case where the police are the ones permitted to do the deleting off of these sites, they still go overboard for all of the above reasons, especially in cases where the difference between right and wrong is purely subjective.
Even as it is, it's already bad, and for no good reason. In the US, people are allowed to talk about their thoughts on subjects like immigration and openly debate it so that cooler heads can prevail, but the EU just hamfisted tells them what they will think on the subject as if they can just force cooler heads to prevail. One approach is going to draw less resentment and give less people an excuse to join clubs that are far off of the deep-end, and the other approach will encourage that environment while appearing to be the most tolerant group of people on the planet, even though it's a lie.
But that's not all! France seems keen to the idea of a Great Firewall of Europe to filter speech that has nothing at all to do with hate:
The US has been doing this a lot longer than the EU has, so we've had a lot more time to get it right. The EU has still yet to learn that censoring speech and being highly dismissive of certain portions of the population doesn't work, and then they wonder why they started two world wars. The US just received its reminder of this last November when the political elite were constantly dismissive instead of engaging towards relatively small yet still very important segment of the population, which resulted in a turd being planted in the white house. But fortunately it's not outright censorship, so we'll come out of it smelling like roses in the long run.
With regard to his last sentence, he's *sort of*, but not quite, on the right track about CNN. If you look at their headlines as of late, it's really heavy on the hyperbole. Take for example their (and many other mainstream media news organizations) reporting of the Google memo, labeling it an "anti-diversity" memo; this label is a bit disingenuous even if many interpret it this way, and I tend to think that a news organization that aims to be truthful would opt for a different label.
I don't know about you, but I had no inheritance and no parents to pay my way into college. Only two years after I graduated, I secured an $80k/year income in an area whose cost of living index is the same as the national average.
Yet there remains a broad consensus, even among scholars of the period, that [Adam] Smith was concerned by poverty but not by economic inequality itself. According to this view, Smith hoped to ensure that all members of society could satisfy their basic needs, but he was untroubled by relative differences in income and wealth.
Essentially, Smith didn't like extreme poverty, but beyond that he didn't see anything inherently wrong with income inequality, and in fact saw it as a required property of a flourishing economy. Virtually all capitalists hold this view.
Karl Marx advocated government ownership of the means of production, take by force from the capitalists, without compensation.
I'm well aware of this.
Please follow the link in TFA to the textbook, and see if you can find even a single passage that advocates anything even remotely comparable.
TFA specifically calls out issues of inequality, and Karl Marx is pretty much the first economist (even if he was a bad economist) to ever make an issue out of income inequality, which is also why he came up with his socioeconomic class system and the concept of class warfare.
Capitalism and socialism are not binary, it's not like a society chooses between them. It's a continuum.
I think you fundamentally don't understand what makes capitalism and what makes socialism. You can be forgiven for not understanding because most pundits don't know the difference either, which confuses the general population that doesn't take the time to understand economics in any detail. See my post here for an explanation:
In full capitalism, there would be *no* state regulation of anything.
That isn't capitalism, that's anarchy. Capitalism, even laissez-faire, requires government services, especially courts and police protection. Free markets cannot exist without stability offered by the rule of law for many, many reasons. Even the most ardent libertarian recognizes the rule of law, by the way; those who don't by definition are not libertarian, rather they are by definition anarchist. Anarchy doesn't necessarily even need money; if you need something, you can just steal it, after all.
*No* minimum society support network for those in need (either by the sin of being poor, or after being hit by a natural disaster).
You're talking about welfare, which is fully compatible with capitalism, and capitalism still works with or without it. When the government pulls money out of your pocket, it isn't artificially setting any prices, so it still remains a free market by definition.
No, state capitalism is when the means of production are privately owned, but the government places very tight controls on prices and wages, and maintains strict control of capital. Definitely not socialism.
This kind of system is super rare and ends up even worse than socialism does, because businesses have practically no financial backing and can't change their business strategy to respond to consumer demand. They also typically become unable to import anything, so the economy really suffers. This is why the stores in that country are almost always short supplied, and why Venezuela is currently in a food shortage crisis:
Currently, the only government that I'm aware of who does this is Venezuela, and the only reason they even get by at all is because there's a black market exchange rate that is a few orders of magnitude different than the official government mandated exchange rate.
I'm not sure why fake news seems to be news as of late. I remember around the 04 election and shortly after there was a lot of fake news going around about Bush with some of it even making it to the mainstream media, and in fact slashdot even posted a few.
And then there was memogate, aka rathergate, which needs no link. I remember when the paper was shown to be a forgery, and no document experts wanted to authenticate it, CBS acknowledged that it was probably fake, but continued to argue that the story was true anyways, even when it later turned out that the source of the story (who conveniently burned the "memo" after sending it) was somebody who hated Bush for a very long time. Slashdot's Kdawson made the same argument on a front page posting as well.
There were many, many others as well. If you peruse democraticunderground for posts around that time period, you'll find plenty, but very few ever made news in the mainstream media.
Fortunately, I think that the mainstream media mostly learned their lesson during that era, though I wouldn't be surprised if they forget it after a generation passes by.
That would absolutely run afoul of first amendment protections here. Canada and most of Europe are definitely heading down a slippery pro-censorship slope in this area as of late, so I personally wouldn't ever be in favor of anything that erodes the first amendment, or else we could very well do the same.
You can also find physicists that will say _anything_, even ones who have made otherwise good contributions. Take Nikola Tesla for example.
That aside, economics is actually whats called a soft science, but it's by far not alone in having that title, mainly because economic theories rely heavily on another well known soft science: Psychology. In fact, all social sciences are soft sciences, because people are highly unpredictable animals.
Pretty much the only hard natural sciences are all of the physics and chemistry disciplines, with biology *somewhat* being a hard science, but equally a soft one at the same time (look at the controversy over what diet is the best diet, for example.)
GP is correct; in fact he's one of the very few people on slashdot that I've seen that actually understand the differences between these economic systems.
You can be forgiven for assuming that socialism means welfare, because lesser educated democrats and republicans alike tend to think the same thing while also tending to speak the loudest, but they're both quite wrong, and in being wrong and outspoken they easily mislead economic laypersons.
The Scandinavian socialist countries (Denmark, Sweden, etc.) seem to be doing quite well for themselves. And there are plenty of capitalist countries where you wouldn't want to live there unless you were among the ruling elite.
This is false (or at least misleading) because those countries are capitalist in every sense of the word. For that sentence to make sense, you have to understand the difference between free market, welfare, and socialism.
Capitalism first and foremost means that the means of production is owned by private individuals, and they are sold on a free market.
Free market means that when you trade something, its price is determined by the forces of supply and demand, as opposed to a governing entity requiring otherwise. There are many schools of thought on just how unencumbered a market can to still be considered free, as even things like price ceilings or wage floors can still be considered free market, but that is another topic that is highly debatable with many valid arguments on all sides.
Welfare means that a governing entity is paying money to a private party on your behalf so that you can obtain something. For example in food stamps, the government is giving the merchant money so that they give you food.
Socialism means that the means of production (i.e. factories, farms, infrastructure) is owned by the government, and the people who do the producing (i.e. workers) are also employed by the government, and the government sets prices. This is also called a planned economy. If you look up the definition of socialism, you'll see exactly this, though it may also say that the means of production is communally owned, which in practice when a community sets rules and laws, the community is in fact a government.
Now, back to Scandinavian countries: They are, in fact, capitalist, with a strong welfare component, which again fits within capitalism without being socialism at all. However, just like all western countries, they do have a few socialized (read: government owned) industries. Examples include road construction, water utilities, power utilities, trash collection, etc. In some western countries (namely England) the health care industry is also government owned. In others, the health care system is still privatized but is entirely welfare driven (Australia for example.)
And in pretty much all ways, Capitalism, as envisioned as this unfettered beast which solves all problems, is a complete and utter fucking lie.
I don't recall anybody saying that. In this sense, capitalism is very much like democracy: Full of problems, but the best system we've come up with so far. Indeed, capitalism does democratize wealth unlike any other system that has come before it, and any other known system to this day. People who talk about how we need to replace capitalism always fail to explain what it would need to be replaced with. Most of them answer socialism, but you don't need to look hard at all to find out why socialism is terrible, and only the mentally blind can't see that.
That whole premise of people making rational decisions based on self interest with perfect available information while the other guys aren't cheating and lying and finding ways to scam you? That set of circumstances simply cannot happen, has never happened, and never will happen.
What do you mean it can't happen? It happens all the time. If you've ever bought or sold something and were perfectly satisfied with that exchange, then that's a perfect example of it working. That's not to say that things never go wrong though; they go wrong all the time, just like politicians in democracies are found to be corrupt all the time.
Both of these situations are exactly what laws are for. Communism, by the way, effectively says that laws should go away. That hasn't ever worked out too well, and in fact civilization by definition cannot exist without the rule of law.
The reality is, companies form cartels, companies lie and cheat their customers, and customers do crazy irrational shit.
I'd like to see any example in history where this possibility is eliminated with any system at all. If you don't have any, then what is your point? You want to complain to the world that life's a bitch? Well there are many people ahead of you, devoted capitalists included among them, so get in line.
The free market is a myth. It cannot exist in the idealized form attributed it, precisely because the honesty and integrity of the players cannot be relied on.
The term 'free market' only means one thing: Prices are governed by the forces of supply and demand, as opposed to a governing entity artificially setting prices (any entity that sets rules, laws, or regulations is a governing entity, even if it is a communal decision like socialism claims it has.)
That's all there is to it, and it's quite easy to demonstrate why it isn't a myth with a simple thought experiment:
If you had no shoes, you'd probably want to buy a pair and will be willing to fork over something in exchange for them. If you had 5 pairs of brand new shoes that all fit perfectly on the other hand, you're probably less interested in paying money (assuming you're interested at all) in buying a 6th pair.
See how that works? You have less supply of something that you demand, therefore you're willing to pay more for it. However if you have a higher supply of it, you're probably less demanding of another pair, thus less willing to pay more for it. That is what a free market is. Where it's not a free market is when the government says that you must pay at least X for it, even when somebody might be willing to sell it to you for less.
Now there are different schools of thought on when things do or don't become free market, such as if the government regulates that shoes must come equipped with Converse react juice (which does impact the price, though by just how much depends) or other things like whether the producer holds a monopoly. These are all debatable, and every viewpoint on them is valid. How we sort out the correct answer is entirely up to the politics involved, which in our case is run by a less than perfect democracy.
In any case, if somebody misrepresents what they're selling to you, then you can resort to
They did specifically mention inequality, which all flavors of socialism and communism claim to solve (which is false; all they do replace the meritocracy of capitalism with a political caste system that offers almost no chance for ordinary people to move up within.) This is also ignoring the fact that having equality is actually impossible to begin with.
Also (and I'm not sure if they mentioned this) anybody who subscribes to the idea of socioeconomic classes of rich, middle, and poor, is buying into a concept popular among communists who want to drive a wedge between people so they can have their glorious revolutions (which only end poorly for those who they claim to represent) under the farce concept called class warfare.
150 years ago when tractors started to be used for farming, Henry Ford couldn't build a factory in China and throw some bags of rice around and have people work for him to build cars.
It's a totally moot point because there wasn't any need for this to begin with. The domestic laborers were already cheap. Everybody in his time were MUCH poorer than they are today. Just to give you an idea:
Today's poor can afford cars, high resolution big screen TVs, mobile phones, personal computers, and food is so easy to afford that many poor people are obese. The poor of Ford's era didn't even have indoor plumbing, white clothing was only for rich people because only the rich could afford to work in conditions where white clothing wouldn't always get dirty, and only rich people could afford to eat often enough to become fat (the "rich mans clubs" back then were called fat man's clubs, where one had to weigh at least 200 lbs for the privilege of being a member.)
People don't generally benefit from greater technology, because as technology advances, expectations grow, requirements grow.
Are you really THAT stupid? So you mean that a mathematician wouldn't benefit from a calculator because now his expectations grow? So he's equally well off if he has to manually calculate the square root of 38.2382 by hand as part of a much larger equation? Seriously dude, you're fucking retarded if you can't see the problem with this. Being dumb enough to buy into Marxist school of thought is one thing, but this is a whole other level of retarded.
Another point that many people miss is that every single family today should not just be slightly more wealthy than they were in the 70's, they should be roughly doubly as wealthy
They are, very much so. In fact, let's even compare them to the 80's:
- 55" TVs in the 80s were so expensive, only the rich could afford them, and they had vastly inferior picture quality to the ones today that can be afforded by the poor. - Car phones were only affordable by very rich people to begin with, the areas they worked in were very limited, and they had a very high per minute fee with no data capability. Today's smartphones are small enough to fit in your pocket, can reach almost anywhere in the US, voice service is so cheap that carriers like T-Mobile let you make calls from anywhere in North America to anywhere in North America with unlimited minutes for a flat fee, in addition to providing greatly more bandwidth than 2400 baud modems of the era. - Personal computers of the 80s were very expensive and much slower than the ones today, some of them costing as much as $5,000, which today translates to $15,000. Nowadays you can even find homeless people carrying around laptops that would put those to shame. - VHS players cost a few hundred dollars in the 80's. Nowadays you can find blu-ray players for as cheap as $25 brand new.
These are all material goods, and therefore, wealth. And there are many, many other examples, like the price of food, the price of travel, etc, all being cheaper now than in the past.
What you perceive as 'even the poor are more wealthy' today is a small bump from what should have been a doubling of wealth that never manifested.
And you base this on what, besides absolutely nothing?
Stop saying people are more wealthy today. They are not.
If you actually think this, then you're dumber than the monkeys in this video, as Hans Rosling demonstrates:
I'm sure you'll hate this video and dismiss it, however, because it goes against every communist propaganda talking point you've ever spewed. But unfortunately for you, the numbers don't lie here; only your propaganda does.
In fact, your entire mindset about different economic classes and class warfa
A better question would be, why do people who have more money than they can ever spend in several lifetimes continue on hoarding more of it.
Probably because they don't. Bill Gates doesn't have $70 billion sitting in a bank account somewhere, rather the vast majority of that exists in the form of securities and other investments.
Does this dragon fever really drive the economy or make the world a better place?
Very much so. Have you ever had an idea for a business or product, but decided not to do it because you'd never be able to hire the engineers and factory labor to produce it? For that, you need somebody who has a lot more money than they'll ever need in their lifetime to invest in your business. This is how the vast majority of businesses either start or manage to scale well enough to produce really complex goods (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, SpaceX, and Tesla are great examples of this.) Tesla for example had to issue a bond in order to secure enough money to scale up their production of the Model 3.
The fact is, civilization as we know it just couldn't exist without people with lots of money taking big risks with it, mainly because they can afford to do so.
Capitalism only works to a certain point before it begins to breakdown. The best example would be the Roman Empire
Stop right there; the Roman Empire wasn't capitalist, so you'll need to try harder. Capitalism in its complete form has only existed for about 300-400 years, and to be very truthful, there are no good examples of Capitalism breaking down at all. Sure, democracies have fallen, but these are mostly attributable to political issues and less economic issues. Perhaps the best ammunition you might have against capitalism would be the Tulip Bubble or the Great Depression, but those weren't the end of their respective economies.
The idea of capitalism breaking down really comes from Karl Marx himself; and honestly, the problems he was trying to solve aren't even relevant anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Free market means prices are governed by the forces of supply and demand as opposed to laws/regulations. Subsidies will impact prices, but they don't regulate them. Historically, tariffs are quite destructive.
It already has, but it's more hype than reality.
My brother who finally succumbed to a third bout of cancer would have been left financially destitute, if he lived in the states, after the first bout and would have likely died far sooner than he did.
I don't think so.
Here in the states many people live in fear of loosing their jobs and the healthcare that goes with it. For those whose employers provide healthcare insurance. Even with healthcare, a major medical issue can push people into bankruptcy!
While I was in college, I had no income at all, and I developed stage 4 chronic kidney disease. I was on medicaid and they paid all of the costs for getting me listed, doctor visits and all, and would have paid for the surgery, drugs, and everything, with no cost to me at all. I'm still listed, but I'm working now, and my current insurance will pay the full cost of surgery with zero deductible.
My brother-in-law received a lung transplant (1 million dollar operation) free of charge from medicaid. It varies by state, but most states provide any services that you need.
At any rate, if Canada's health care is so good, then why do so many of them go south for treatment? Truth be told, Canada's system is a joke compared to all other first world socialized healthcare systems.
Advertising was never about informing. It was always about sales. Information was a part of it and only as a means to sell.
Advertising is not about sales; it's about marketing. And yes, the two are quite distinct from one another. And yes, marketing is all about information.
Marketing focuses on things like building brand recognition and raising product awareness. Sales is the act of giving the consumer a product in exchange for money and/or the process of interacting with customers and negotiation to close a sale. Marketing is also a cost center, whereas sales is purely about driving revenue.
That isn't going to do us any favors in the global market, where China can easily take business away from US suppliers. Instead what the US should have done is match any of China's subsidies.
That's like saying you have too many 8-track tapes lying around, so you're upset that car manufacturers no longer include an 8-track player.
The Great Depression was caused by banks.
Not caused by, and even then, "banks" is misleading, because it was only one bank: The central bank; aka The Federal Reserve, aka The Fed. What kept the depression going after this was heavy deflation due to mismanagement on the part of the Fed. Milton Friedman explained it rather well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
But everyday citizens were to blame as well by means of doing what's called a run on the bank. A run on the bank will ruin ANY economy, no matter how it's run. Arizona saw another example of this a few years back when a gas pipeline broke, and people en masse decided that they wanted to fill up many gas cans of fuel, thinking that they'll never get any more for a long time. What resulted was a huge shortage, insanely long lines at the pump, with gas prices exceeding $5 per gallon when the rest of the country was at about $2 per gallon.
But get this -- it was all totally unnecessary. The broken gas pipeline only resulted in a 20% decrease in supply to the state, which wasn't enough to cause any major shortage, rather the big shortage was only caused by everyday people panicking. This is exactly what happened during the depression.
My question is... where does the First Amendment end and overt bribery begin?
Speech alone inherently cannot be bribery.
As it stands now, the CU verdict has pretty much put any electable seat in the country up for sale.
No, it really hasn't. There have been many elections since CU that put this notion completely to rest. During Colorado's state senatorial recall election, John Morse outspent his opponent 11 to 1, and still lost anyways. Hillary's campaign + superpacs outspent Trump's by 6 to 1, and look how that turned out.
But most importantly, remember Larry Lessig's Mayday PAC? I remember myself saying that it's not going to work here on slashdot, and he and his contributors found this out the hard way: The only politicians his PAC supported that got elected were already likely to win anyways without his help, and all of the rest of them lost.
In other words, advertising dollars only go so far to win elections, but if your candidate is less popular than their opponent, then all of the money in the world won't change a thing.
Or, do we just want to say that the invisible hand will take care of all this, as we ride down the lassez faire ideology into another Great Depression?
Actually the economy wasn't at all laissez-faire before the great depression. In fact, after the stock market crash, the economy began to recover until the government tried to "fix" the situation by adding tariffs, and that's where things really went wrong. Thomas Sowell describes it quite well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Its not slippery at all, they're banning hate speech which is nearly always from conservative and fascist retards which is completely rational.
It obviously isn't working because fascism is actually gaining ground in the EU, where it isn't in the US, which doesn't ban any speech that doesn't advocate violence. By that I mean there isn't a single politician who openly identifies as such in the US, yet the combined EU has many of them, with up to 25% of the votes in many EU states going towards the local fascist party, and in some that party is actually the governing party:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
At any rate, here's why it's slippery:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
Effectively what the EU is doing is saying that it must be up to private entities to censor speech, and that they must do it quickly, which opens up a gigantic can of worms: They're inevitably going to have to develop automated filters that will delete posts before a human can review them, which means many will just get deleted outright, and in the case where human review is required, you're just asking for somebody with a particular political view to delete content that *they* don't like, which would be perfectly legal, or even content that is really benign from any perspective at all, but was deleted because it was reviewed by somebody who just likes to quickly press the delete button so they can leave work early.
Even in the case where the police are the ones permitted to do the deleting off of these sites, they still go overboard for all of the above reasons, especially in cases where the difference between right and wrong is purely subjective.
Even as it is, it's already bad, and for no good reason. In the US, people are allowed to talk about their thoughts on subjects like immigration and openly debate it so that cooler heads can prevail, but the EU just hamfisted tells them what they will think on the subject as if they can just force cooler heads to prevail. One approach is going to draw less resentment and give less people an excuse to join clubs that are far off of the deep-end, and the other approach will encourage that environment while appearing to be the most tolerant group of people on the planet, even though it's a lie.
But that's not all! France seems keen to the idea of a Great Firewall of Europe to filter speech that has nothing at all to do with hate:
https://cdt.org/blog/global-ap...
The US has been doing this a lot longer than the EU has, so we've had a lot more time to get it right. The EU has still yet to learn that censoring speech and being highly dismissive of certain portions of the population doesn't work, and then they wonder why they started two world wars. The US just received its reminder of this last November when the political elite were constantly dismissive instead of engaging towards relatively small yet still very important segment of the population, which resulted in a turd being planted in the white house. But fortunately it's not outright censorship, so we'll come out of it smelling like roses in the long run.
With regard to his last sentence, he's *sort of*, but not quite, on the right track about CNN. If you look at their headlines as of late, it's really heavy on the hyperbole. Take for example their (and many other mainstream media news organizations) reporting of the Google memo, labeling it an "anti-diversity" memo; this label is a bit disingenuous even if many interpret it this way, and I tend to think that a news organization that aims to be truthful would opt for a different label.
And that is a valid argument and it is debatable. Adam Smith actually covers this quite well.
If you can "move up" then you cannot by definition be equal.
I don't know about you, but I had no inheritance and no parents to pay my way into college. Only two years after I graduated, I secured an $80k/year income in an area whose cost of living index is the same as the national average.
That's definitely a meritocracy.
Adam Smith also mentioned inequality. So does that make him a Marxist as well?
I don't know if he specifically mentioned the word "inequality" at any time, but his opinion on the subject isn't one of endorsement:
https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...
Yet there remains a broad consensus, even among scholars of the period, that [Adam] Smith was concerned by poverty but not by economic inequality itself. According to this view, Smith hoped to ensure that all members of society could satisfy their basic needs, but he was untroubled by relative differences in income and wealth.
Another source explains it in more detail:
http://as.tufts.edu/politicals...
Essentially, Smith didn't like extreme poverty, but beyond that he didn't see anything inherently wrong with income inequality, and in fact saw it as a required property of a flourishing economy. Virtually all capitalists hold this view.
Karl Marx advocated government ownership of the means of production, take by force from the capitalists, without compensation.
I'm well aware of this.
Please follow the link in TFA to the textbook, and see if you can find even a single passage that advocates anything even remotely comparable.
TFA specifically calls out issues of inequality, and Karl Marx is pretty much the first economist (even if he was a bad economist) to ever make an issue out of income inequality, which is also why he came up with his socioeconomic class system and the concept of class warfare.
Capitalism and socialism are not binary, it's not like a society chooses between them. It's a continuum.
I think you fundamentally don't understand what makes capitalism and what makes socialism. You can be forgiven for not understanding because most pundits don't know the difference either, which confuses the general population that doesn't take the time to understand economics in any detail. See my post here for an explanation:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
In full capitalism, there would be *no* state regulation of anything.
That isn't capitalism, that's anarchy. Capitalism, even laissez-faire, requires government services, especially courts and police protection. Free markets cannot exist without stability offered by the rule of law for many, many reasons. Even the most ardent libertarian recognizes the rule of law, by the way; those who don't by definition are not libertarian, rather they are by definition anarchist. Anarchy doesn't necessarily even need money; if you need something, you can just steal it, after all.
*No* minimum society support network for those in need (either by the sin of being poor, or after being hit by a natural disaster).
You're talking about welfare, which is fully compatible with capitalism, and capitalism still works with or without it. When the government pulls money out of your pocket, it isn't artificially setting any prices, so it still remains a free market by definition.
That has also failed miserably.
Because anarchy fails miserably.
That's technically state capitalism.
No, state capitalism is when the means of production are privately owned, but the government places very tight controls on prices and wages, and maintains strict control of capital. Definitely not socialism.
This kind of system is super rare and ends up even worse than socialism does, because businesses have practically no financial backing and can't change their business strategy to respond to consumer demand. They also typically become unable to import anything, so the economy really suffers. This is why the stores in that country are almost always short supplied, and why Venezuela is currently in a food shortage crisis:
http://www.businessinsider.com...
Currently, the only government that I'm aware of who does this is Venezuela, and the only reason they even get by at all is because there's a black market exchange rate that is a few orders of magnitude different than the official government mandated exchange rate.
I'm not sure why fake news seems to be news as of late. I remember around the 04 election and shortly after there was a lot of fake news going around about Bush with some of it even making it to the mainstream media, and in fact slashdot even posted a few.
http://www.factcheck.org/2007/...
(Every now and then, somebody repeats the one about the constitution on slashdot and gets a +5 moderation.)
Also from CapitalBlue, which spread to many mainstream media sites before being quickly removed, and also unsubstantiated:
http://www.rense.com/general62...
And then there was memogate, aka rathergate, which needs no link. I remember when the paper was shown to be a forgery, and no document experts wanted to authenticate it, CBS acknowledged that it was probably fake, but continued to argue that the story was true anyways, even when it later turned out that the source of the story (who conveniently burned the "memo" after sending it) was somebody who hated Bush for a very long time. Slashdot's Kdawson made the same argument on a front page posting as well.
There were many, many others as well. If you peruse democraticunderground for posts around that time period, you'll find plenty, but very few ever made news in the mainstream media.
Fortunately, I think that the mainstream media mostly learned their lesson during that era, though I wouldn't be surprised if they forget it after a generation passes by.
That would absolutely run afoul of first amendment protections here. Canada and most of Europe are definitely heading down a slippery pro-censorship slope in this area as of late, so I personally wouldn't ever be in favor of anything that erodes the first amendment, or else we could very well do the same.
You can also find physicists that will say _anything_, even ones who have made otherwise good contributions. Take Nikola Tesla for example.
That aside, economics is actually whats called a soft science, but it's by far not alone in having that title, mainly because economic theories rely heavily on another well known soft science: Psychology. In fact, all social sciences are soft sciences, because people are highly unpredictable animals.
Pretty much the only hard natural sciences are all of the physics and chemistry disciplines, with biology *somewhat* being a hard science, but equally a soft one at the same time (look at the controversy over what diet is the best diet, for example.)
GP is correct; in fact he's one of the very few people on slashdot that I've seen that actually understand the differences between these economic systems.
You can be forgiven for assuming that socialism means welfare, because lesser educated democrats and republicans alike tend to think the same thing while also tending to speak the loudest, but they're both quite wrong, and in being wrong and outspoken they easily mislead economic laypersons.
The Scandinavian socialist countries (Denmark, Sweden, etc.) seem to be doing quite well for themselves. And there are plenty of capitalist countries where you wouldn't want to live there unless you were among the ruling elite.
This is false (or at least misleading) because those countries are capitalist in every sense of the word. For that sentence to make sense, you have to understand the difference between free market, welfare, and socialism.
Capitalism first and foremost means that the means of production is owned by private individuals, and they are sold on a free market.
Free market means that when you trade something, its price is determined by the forces of supply and demand, as opposed to a governing entity requiring otherwise. There are many schools of thought on just how unencumbered a market can to still be considered free, as even things like price ceilings or wage floors can still be considered free market, but that is another topic that is highly debatable with many valid arguments on all sides.
Welfare means that a governing entity is paying money to a private party on your behalf so that you can obtain something. For example in food stamps, the government is giving the merchant money so that they give you food.
Socialism means that the means of production (i.e. factories, farms, infrastructure) is owned by the government, and the people who do the producing (i.e. workers) are also employed by the government, and the government sets prices. This is also called a planned economy. If you look up the definition of socialism, you'll see exactly this, though it may also say that the means of production is communally owned, which in practice when a community sets rules and laws, the community is in fact a government.
Now, back to Scandinavian countries: They are, in fact, capitalist, with a strong welfare component, which again fits within capitalism without being socialism at all. However, just like all western countries, they do have a few socialized (read: government owned) industries. Examples include road construction, water utilities, power utilities, trash collection, etc. In some western countries (namely England) the health care industry is also government owned. In others, the health care system is still privatized but is entirely welfare driven (Australia for example.)
And in pretty much all ways, Capitalism, as envisioned as this unfettered beast which solves all problems, is a complete and utter fucking lie.
I don't recall anybody saying that. In this sense, capitalism is very much like democracy: Full of problems, but the best system we've come up with so far. Indeed, capitalism does democratize wealth unlike any other system that has come before it, and any other known system to this day. People who talk about how we need to replace capitalism always fail to explain what it would need to be replaced with. Most of them answer socialism, but you don't need to look hard at all to find out why socialism is terrible, and only the mentally blind can't see that.
That whole premise of people making rational decisions based on self interest with perfect available information while the other guys aren't cheating and lying and finding ways to scam you? That set of circumstances simply cannot happen, has never happened, and never will happen.
What do you mean it can't happen? It happens all the time. If you've ever bought or sold something and were perfectly satisfied with that exchange, then that's a perfect example of it working. That's not to say that things never go wrong though; they go wrong all the time, just like politicians in democracies are found to be corrupt all the time.
Both of these situations are exactly what laws are for. Communism, by the way, effectively says that laws should go away. That hasn't ever worked out too well, and in fact civilization by definition cannot exist without the rule of law.
The reality is, companies form cartels, companies lie and cheat their customers, and customers do crazy irrational shit.
I'd like to see any example in history where this possibility is eliminated with any system at all. If you don't have any, then what is your point? You want to complain to the world that life's a bitch? Well there are many people ahead of you, devoted capitalists included among them, so get in line.
The free market is a myth. It cannot exist in the idealized form attributed it, precisely because the honesty and integrity of the players cannot be relied on.
The term 'free market' only means one thing: Prices are governed by the forces of supply and demand, as opposed to a governing entity artificially setting prices (any entity that sets rules, laws, or regulations is a governing entity, even if it is a communal decision like socialism claims it has.)
That's all there is to it, and it's quite easy to demonstrate why it isn't a myth with a simple thought experiment:
If you had no shoes, you'd probably want to buy a pair and will be willing to fork over something in exchange for them. If you had 5 pairs of brand new shoes that all fit perfectly on the other hand, you're probably less interested in paying money (assuming you're interested at all) in buying a 6th pair.
See how that works? You have less supply of something that you demand, therefore you're willing to pay more for it. However if you have a higher supply of it, you're probably less demanding of another pair, thus less willing to pay more for it. That is what a free market is. Where it's not a free market is when the government says that you must pay at least X for it, even when somebody might be willing to sell it to you for less.
Now there are different schools of thought on when things do or don't become free market, such as if the government regulates that shoes must come equipped with Converse react juice (which does impact the price, though by just how much depends) or other things like whether the producer holds a monopoly. These are all debatable, and every viewpoint on them is valid. How we sort out the correct answer is entirely up to the politics involved, which in our case is run by a less than perfect democracy.
In any case, if somebody misrepresents what they're selling to you, then you can resort to
They did specifically mention inequality, which all flavors of socialism and communism claim to solve (which is false; all they do replace the meritocracy of capitalism with a political caste system that offers almost no chance for ordinary people to move up within.) This is also ignoring the fact that having equality is actually impossible to begin with.
Also (and I'm not sure if they mentioned this) anybody who subscribes to the idea of socioeconomic classes of rich, middle, and poor, is buying into a concept popular among communists who want to drive a wedge between people so they can have their glorious revolutions (which only end poorly for those who they claim to represent) under the farce concept called class warfare.
150 years ago when tractors started to be used for farming, Henry Ford couldn't build a factory in China and throw some bags of rice around and have people work for him to build cars.
It's a totally moot point because there wasn't any need for this to begin with. The domestic laborers were already cheap. Everybody in his time were MUCH poorer than they are today. Just to give you an idea:
Today's poor can afford cars, high resolution big screen TVs, mobile phones, personal computers, and food is so easy to afford that many poor people are obese. The poor of Ford's era didn't even have indoor plumbing, white clothing was only for rich people because only the rich could afford to work in conditions where white clothing wouldn't always get dirty, and only rich people could afford to eat often enough to become fat (the "rich mans clubs" back then were called fat man's clubs, where one had to weigh at least 200 lbs for the privilege of being a member.)
People don't generally benefit from greater technology, because as technology advances, expectations grow, requirements grow.
Are you really THAT stupid? So you mean that a mathematician wouldn't benefit from a calculator because now his expectations grow? So he's equally well off if he has to manually calculate the square root of 38.2382 by hand as part of a much larger equation? Seriously dude, you're fucking retarded if you can't see the problem with this. Being dumb enough to buy into Marxist school of thought is one thing, but this is a whole other level of retarded.
Another point that many people miss is that every single family today should not just be slightly more wealthy than they were in the 70's, they should be roughly doubly as wealthy
They are, very much so. In fact, let's even compare them to the 80's:
- 55" TVs in the 80s were so expensive, only the rich could afford them, and they had vastly inferior picture quality to the ones today that can be afforded by the poor.
- Car phones were only affordable by very rich people to begin with, the areas they worked in were very limited, and they had a very high per minute fee with no data capability. Today's smartphones are small enough to fit in your pocket, can reach almost anywhere in the US, voice service is so cheap that carriers like T-Mobile let you make calls from anywhere in North America to anywhere in North America with unlimited minutes for a flat fee, in addition to providing greatly more bandwidth than 2400 baud modems of the era.
- Personal computers of the 80s were very expensive and much slower than the ones today, some of them costing as much as $5,000, which today translates to $15,000. Nowadays you can even find homeless people carrying around laptops that would put those to shame.
- VHS players cost a few hundred dollars in the 80's. Nowadays you can find blu-ray players for as cheap as $25 brand new.
These are all material goods, and therefore, wealth. And there are many, many other examples, like the price of food, the price of travel, etc, all being cheaper now than in the past.
What you perceive as 'even the poor are more wealthy' today is a small bump from what should have been a doubling of wealth that never manifested.
And you base this on what, besides absolutely nothing?
Stop saying people are more wealthy today. They are not.
If you actually think this, then you're dumber than the monkeys in this video, as Hans Rosling demonstrates:
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...
I'm sure you'll hate this video and dismiss it, however, because it goes against every communist propaganda talking point you've ever spewed. But unfortunately for you, the numbers don't lie here; only your propaganda does.
In fact, your entire mindset about different economic classes and class warfa
A better question would be, why do people who have more money than they can ever spend in several lifetimes continue on hoarding more of it.
Probably because they don't. Bill Gates doesn't have $70 billion sitting in a bank account somewhere, rather the vast majority of that exists in the form of securities and other investments.
Does this dragon fever really drive the economy or make the world a better place?
Very much so. Have you ever had an idea for a business or product, but decided not to do it because you'd never be able to hire the engineers and factory labor to produce it? For that, you need somebody who has a lot more money than they'll ever need in their lifetime to invest in your business. This is how the vast majority of businesses either start or manage to scale well enough to produce really complex goods (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, SpaceX, and Tesla are great examples of this.) Tesla for example had to issue a bond in order to secure enough money to scale up their production of the Model 3.
The fact is, civilization as we know it just couldn't exist without people with lots of money taking big risks with it, mainly because they can afford to do so.
Capitalism only works to a certain point before it begins to breakdown. The best example would be the Roman Empire
Stop right there; the Roman Empire wasn't capitalist, so you'll need to try harder. Capitalism in its complete form has only existed for about 300-400 years, and to be very truthful, there are no good examples of Capitalism breaking down at all. Sure, democracies have fallen, but these are mostly attributable to political issues and less economic issues. Perhaps the best ammunition you might have against capitalism would be the Tulip Bubble or the Great Depression, but those weren't the end of their respective economies.
The idea of capitalism breaking down really comes from Karl Marx himself; and honestly, the problems he was trying to solve aren't even relevant anymore.