There's always some excuse why you deserve it. I don't buy that it is your money and I don't buy that you deserve expensive health care that you are unwilling to pay for yourself.
The "totalitarian theory" that makes such an equation does not seek knowledge about both concepts, it intends a relativization of facist and, significantly, National Socialist crimes.
Which is reasonable, because ideology is irrelevant to whether a state is totalitarian or not. But sure, being murdered by a Communist is clearly morally better than being murdered by a Nazi.
since the value of property is defined by economic activity
It's not. For example, a fancy mansion is quite expensive, but it doesn't generate or represent economic activity. Instead it is contrary status signaling - namely, I've expended a considerable amount of wealth to build and maintain this mansion.
Capitalism works no better. There are MANY limits to capitalism on normal human behavior which are required for it to work well. And from 1980 to 2000 many of those limitations were removed because the concentration of wealth and power grew great enough to capture the government.
Reality disagrees. As I've pointed out many times before on Slashdot, in the last twenty years, two thirds of humanity saw an increase of roughly 30% or more in their income adjusted for inflation. That is a huge change that is unparalleled in human history. And the obvious cause is global trade. Capitalism drives that trade.
We already have that capitalism works better especially in the presence of the "psychopaths". The psychopaths don't "need to go", they need to be regulated and channeled. Capitalism does that.
And the government wouldn't be setting interest rate at zero to prevent deflation. Deflation should have been occuring in the u.s. for the last 16 years.
Why veer into monetary policy? It's just not that important. Whether the money administrators manage the currency well or auger it into the ground, the society still remains and new currencies can be created in order to continue to trade.
There is a lot of reason to argue what the limits if what we know are. And at this time, intelligence and consciousness are not understood at all. It is important to keep that in mind, or bullshit deductions will come out.
Actually, no there isn't a lot of reason. After all, what is the point of arguing the limits of what we know, if we don't have a clue what those limits are aside from some very weak mathematical results?
Moving on, we have three obvious things here. First, that we have a demonstration of intelligence and consciousness. Second, that physical laws apply everywhere on Earth. We have yet to find an exception, be it in some remote place or the human brain. There's no reason to expect intelligence and consciousness to be properties we can't make, given that we already can, just not in a way that would be considered "artificial".
Third, there is a long, long history of people claiming things are impossible merely because they haven't yet been done. It's a terrible argument and it just doesn't work.
Had Dr. Gallo proposed a cure that was shown not to work, would you be barebacking Nigerian prostitutes?
You can certainly cherry pick examples of technological improvements which seem to have benefited workers
That's how counterexamples to a universal claim work. I cherrypicked a counterexample, thus, the claim is false, end of story. Further, some of these counterexamples are pretty damn broad, like computers or air conditioning.
The claim in the quote is that the more industrialized production becomes, the less the power of the worker, and the larger the alienation of the worker from the fruits of their labor.
Which again is patently false. The US has being industrializing for a long time and the power of the worker has increased for most of that time.
The massive increase in prevalence of high turnover, low-wage, low-skill jobs in the US over the last several decades is stark evidence that what Marx was talking about is still happening to this day.
That labor is competing with foreign labor that is vastly cheaper. Further, the US have a lot of supposedly pro-labor regulation, policy, and law that has made this particular problem worse. When you interfere with employment and drive up its cost, sabotage new business creation, and just in general, make your society a crappier place to employ people, then it's no surprise that employees have less bargaining power than they used to.
youre free market ignorance accepts the dog eat dog screw anyone to get ahead mentality as normal, in which some or many suffer so the few can prosper obscenely relative to the weakest.
And what does that have to do with markets?
it has this way through out human history. yes some tribes lived that way. but typically not long, particularly once the strongman died. he most successful tribes, and now nations, are those that DO seek a greater equality among their members, allowing all to prosper and benefit, not just the strongest amongst them.
There are two things to note here. First, this demonstrates the absurdity of the original poster's claim that this common human behavior, displayed throughout history, is "abnormal".
Second, markets readily provide that equality, that prosperity, and that benefit.
what that mentality misses is that it doesn't have to be that way. every can benefit at the same time. in our a world someone with 100 billion dollars doesn't really live all that much better than someone with only 1 billion. yet that same 99billion excess would raise the comfort and quality of life of several thousand peoples, while that billionaire loses almost nothing in the exchange.
Which would be a huge waste of that vast wealth. If one looks at people with wealth in that neighborhood, one sees two kinds of people, those who obtained it through mostly beneficial and productive activities and those who obtained it by stealing vast amounts from others. The above robin hood impulse you display helps the latter group thrive. They are smarter about stealing than you are.
Further, it's worth noting that the hundred billionaire, even of the parasitic sort, employs far more than a few thousand people. They are already doing more to help their fellow man than your theft of their wealth would do.
that's why a pure free market, why pure capitalism, is untenable.
it does really good as making an economy work, and allocating resources.
but it royally screws over the people at the edges.
it chews them up and spits them out, creating new edges as it consumes the weakest in the group, constantly shrinking the size of the group it benefits.
Well, there is this huge gap between a pure free market and stealing 99% of some rich dude's wealth because you think he has too much and wouldn't miss it. I just think that the sweet spot is a hell of a lot closer to a pure free market.
But my point wasn't complete and perfect disengagement from current human society, though that is achievable, but rather that with modest work and good life choices, you can choose what trades you make. There's simply too huge a span between your modest needs and what you can acquire from the world to support the claim that markets "own" or "control" us as the original poster claimed.
Where does this shit come from? By all definitions it is abnormal. Just because there are plenty of incidents does not mean that a significant portion of the population are like that.
Just an observation of normal human behavior. Labeling it abnormal and claiming it's not common is just delusion.
Don't waste my time with this amateur pop psychology. You describe common human behavior. That right there makes it normal. It's only your rhetorical spin (and most certainly not some sort of clinical evaluation) that declares this behavior to be "psychopathy". Your semantics games won't disguise that people will behave like people, no matter how you choose to label the behavior or how deviant and abnormal you choose to think that behavior is.
Only a system which can handle and channel that behavior productively will work. Capitalism is one such system.
A market can mean lots of things
It doesn't mean what you claimed.
Basically in reality the closest we get to a free market would be a 'Fence', interesting in that the products do enter that market upon an actual 'Free' basis and it is unregulated until of course the psychopaths who run it get caught and they regulate right out of existence.
Black markets don't cease to exist because a few people get caught every now and then. And of course, due to the illegality usually associated with such things, they aren't free markets.
Free markets are only approximate. Nobody ever claims the ideal can be achieved. But they tend to be good at the task of matching people who need stuff with people who supply it. That's it. That's all they are supposed to do.
Small amounts of socialism exists quite comfortably in capitalist countries.
FIFY. It's worth remembering that all these countries have severely cut back on a lot of their socialist policies. Turns out, for example, that it wasn't a good idea to have a government phone company.
And we need to keep in mind that the fundamental characteristics of these countries is not that they happen to have socialist policies, but rather that they have capitalism, rule of law, and democracy. The combination of those three pretty much guarantees that they'll have comfortable and to some degree, affordable socialist policies.
The difference is that Dr. Gallo both never claimed to have a cure and never had that cure fail repeatedly and spectacularly in the real world. I think the abject failure of Marx's solutions is a strong indication that his analysis is deeply flawed. But you don't need to take my word for it. There's already a quote from the beginning that we can study:
"within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital."
The obvious rebuttal is that the premises are false. For example, labor unions are a typical social construct in capitalism that doesn't result in the claimed consequences. Or consider job search engines. Are workers worse off because the hiring process has been improved a bit? Are we, workers worse off due to technological improvements to worker productivity like computers or air conditioning?
Why should we trust this spew of verbiage when the initial assumptions are patently false?
And let us not forget that so many people, the middle class (or "bourgeoisie"), just aren't living with this sort of drudgery. Marx tried to ignore this group and categorize thema as being more or less enemies of the working class ("proletariat").
So want to see socialism, first the psychopaths have to go, quite simply they will corrupt any ism they are a part of, attempt to turn it into an authoritarian state where they have control and can dominate and exploit the citizens of that society.
The problem here is that your so-called "psychopaths" are normal humans exhibiting normal human behavior. That's the thing about capitalism and markets, you don't need to get rid of normal human behavior in order for them to work well.
The 'Free Market' is straight up marketing lie because it is wholly and totally dependent upon nothing in that market ever being Free, everything 'owned' and 'controlled', so that those with the most can control and exploit those with the least. With everything that can be owned being owned, including all of the essentials to life, so that denial of life becomes the tool of exploitation of the not free at all market place of human lives.
You don't even know what a market is. It's not some magic controlling beast, it is merely an avenue for trade - trade which you don't have to participate in.
Hell, I was even there long enough to have experienced their health care system after I got a wisdom tooth removed in Helsinki. Cost me $25 (which the dentist wouldn't take because he said it had been a pleasure to practice English with me).
Just because it didn't cost you a lot doesn't mean it was cheap. Capitalism paid for that bit of social welfare.
It continues to amuse me how people claim that countries like this aren't socialist hellholes because of the socialism.
I don't see how it's a counterexample to the claim that property tax is a tax on economic activity. Can you elaborate?
Well, first, there is the obvious. Property taxes don't tax economic activity. If I don't own property, I can still generate economic activity, but economic activity that isn't taxed. Conversely, I can own land which is left fallow. The land would have inherent value, despite my lack of use of it, because of potential economic activity and such. So I would pay a tax on something that doesn't actually generate economic activity.
Second, once a government entity collects taxes via one of these particular means (but not the other), they have considerable incentive to introduce policies to increase the revenue from one means while not impairing the other. For example, they can choose to spur economic activity in order to increase taxes from economic activity (such as income taxes).
The actual example of the broken window fallacy is a case of deliberately breaking windows along streets of a city in order to spur economic activity. It doesn't affect someone who either doesn't own a window or doesn't have their windows right next to the street where they can be broken. The very poor and the very rich are unaffected by this particular approach.
Also, if one pursues strategies for increasing property values rather than increasing economic activity, then breaking windows runs counter to the goal.
Just proves my point: You have no clue what you are talking about.
No. For I'm knowledgeable enough to assess everyone else's competence in this matter.
The observation of intelligence in humans is an interface observation, it is completely unclear whether it gets created there and how that would work if so.
You are of course speaking of a "soul". And why wouldn't an AI had one too? Humans demonstrate it can be done assuming the thing exists in the first place, of course.
Understanding why we may never have strong AI (i.e. as dumb as an average human), requires actual insights into the the subject matter on a level you cannot acquire in a year or two.
Given that no one currently has that insight - no matter their level of training, and the existence of humans demonstrates that strong AI can exist, then I really don't see the point of your post.
And in any case property tax does end up being a tax on economic activity also, or at least on economic value, which is determined by economic activity.
The Broken Window Fallacy is the classic counterexample. Among other things, it's a means to disengage (and of course, tax) economic activity from the value of property.
But that means it's no longer a market as we understand it, and no longer capitalism as it was envisioned.
This is a non sequitur. It does not follow that because Silicon Valley is a little weird and a little high pressure, that somehow we have to abandon our concepts of economics.
So your premise is that we will go from machines with no autonomous intelligence at all, directly to super-genius intelligence? Without passing through the ant, lizard, cow, and monkey levels of intelligence first?
But it does create a bunch of opportunity for the government to shut down your business on grounds of not taking legally sufficient precautions against underage access. It's a balancing act of liability for credit card fraud vs. liability for fines for noncompliance.
No, it didn't. From Wikipedia, the highest operating estimate is 800 PBq versus 5200 PBq. Further, 80% of that radiation is thought to have fallen in the ocean. So that looks like less than 1/30th the release of Chernobyl on land.
Slashdot Mirror
If I pay taxes, it's my money too.
There's always some excuse why you deserve it. I don't buy that it is your money and I don't buy that you deserve expensive health care that you are unwilling to pay for yourself.
The "totalitarian theory" that makes such an equation does not seek knowledge about both concepts, it intends a relativization of facist and, significantly, National Socialist crimes.
Which is reasonable, because ideology is irrelevant to whether a state is totalitarian or not. But sure, being murdered by a Communist is clearly morally better than being murdered by a Nazi.
You're the first I've seen to use that particular reasoning.
That doesn't sound like a good deal to me. What would I get under socialism?
Heh, quite a bit till you run out of other peoples' money. Funny how many of the socialism arguments boil down to greed.
since the value of property is defined by economic activity
It's not. For example, a fancy mansion is quite expensive, but it doesn't generate or represent economic activity. Instead it is contrary status signaling - namely, I've expended a considerable amount of wealth to build and maintain this mansion.
Capitalism works no better. There are MANY limits to capitalism on normal human behavior which are required for it to work well. And from 1980 to 2000 many of those limitations were removed because the concentration of wealth and power grew great enough to capture the government.
Reality disagrees. As I've pointed out many times before on Slashdot, in the last twenty years, two thirds of humanity saw an increase of roughly 30% or more in their income adjusted for inflation. That is a huge change that is unparalleled in human history. And the obvious cause is global trade. Capitalism drives that trade.
We already have that capitalism works better especially in the presence of the "psychopaths". The psychopaths don't "need to go", they need to be regulated and channeled. Capitalism does that.
And the government wouldn't be setting interest rate at zero to prevent deflation. Deflation should have been occuring in the u.s. for the last 16 years.
Why veer into monetary policy? It's just not that important. Whether the money administrators manage the currency well or auger it into the ground, the society still remains and new currencies can be created in order to continue to trade.
There is a lot of reason to argue what the limits if what we know are. And at this time, intelligence and consciousness are not understood at all. It is important to keep that in mind, or bullshit deductions will come out.
Actually, no there isn't a lot of reason. After all, what is the point of arguing the limits of what we know, if we don't have a clue what those limits are aside from some very weak mathematical results?
Moving on, we have three obvious things here. First, that we have a demonstration of intelligence and consciousness. Second, that physical laws apply everywhere on Earth. We have yet to find an exception, be it in some remote place or the human brain. There's no reason to expect intelligence and consciousness to be properties we can't make, given that we already can, just not in a way that would be considered "artificial".
Third, there is a long, long history of people claiming things are impossible merely because they haven't yet been done. It's a terrible argument and it just doesn't work.
Had Dr. Gallo proposed a cure that was shown not to work, would you be barebacking Nigerian prostitutes?
You can certainly cherry pick examples of technological improvements which seem to have benefited workers
That's how counterexamples to a universal claim work. I cherrypicked a counterexample, thus, the claim is false, end of story. Further, some of these counterexamples are pretty damn broad, like computers or air conditioning.
The claim in the quote is that the more industrialized production becomes, the less the power of the worker, and the larger the alienation of the worker from the fruits of their labor.
Which again is patently false. The US has being industrializing for a long time and the power of the worker has increased for most of that time.
The massive increase in prevalence of high turnover, low-wage, low-skill jobs in the US over the last several decades is stark evidence that what Marx was talking about is still happening to this day.
That labor is competing with foreign labor that is vastly cheaper. Further, the US have a lot of supposedly pro-labor regulation, policy, and law that has made this particular problem worse. When you interfere with employment and drive up its cost, sabotage new business creation, and just in general, make your society a crappier place to employ people, then it's no surprise that employees have less bargaining power than they used to.
youre free market ignorance accepts the dog eat dog screw anyone to get ahead mentality as normal, in which some or many suffer so the few can prosper obscenely relative to the weakest.
And what does that have to do with markets?
it has this way through out human history. yes some tribes lived that way. but typically not long, particularly once the strongman died. he most successful tribes, and now nations, are those that DO seek a greater equality among their members, allowing all to prosper and benefit, not just the strongest amongst them.
There are two things to note here. First, this demonstrates the absurdity of the original poster's claim that this common human behavior, displayed throughout history, is "abnormal".
Second, markets readily provide that equality, that prosperity, and that benefit.
what that mentality misses is that it doesn't have to be that way. every can benefit at the same time. in our a world someone with 100 billion dollars doesn't really live all that much better than someone with only 1 billion. yet that same 99billion excess would raise the comfort and quality of life of several thousand peoples, while that billionaire loses almost nothing in the exchange.
Which would be a huge waste of that vast wealth. If one looks at people with wealth in that neighborhood, one sees two kinds of people, those who obtained it through mostly beneficial and productive activities and those who obtained it by stealing vast amounts from others. The above robin hood impulse you display helps the latter group thrive. They are smarter about stealing than you are.
Further, it's worth noting that the hundred billionaire, even of the parasitic sort, employs far more than a few thousand people. They are already doing more to help their fellow man than your theft of their wealth would do.
that's why a pure free market, why pure capitalism, is untenable. it does really good as making an economy work, and allocating resources. but it royally screws over the people at the edges. it chews them up and spits them out, creating new edges as it consumes the weakest in the group, constantly shrinking the size of the group it benefits.
Well, there is this huge gap between a pure free market and stealing 99% of some rich dude's wealth because you think he has too much and wouldn't miss it. I just think that the sweet spot is a hell of a lot closer to a pure free market.
But you really do have to participate.
But my point wasn't complete and perfect disengagement from current human society, though that is achievable, but rather that with modest work and good life choices, you can choose what trades you make. There's simply too huge a span between your modest needs and what you can acquire from the world to support the claim that markets "own" or "control" us as the original poster claimed.
Where does this shit come from? By all definitions it is abnormal. Just because there are plenty of incidents does not mean that a significant portion of the population are like that.
Just an observation of normal human behavior. Labeling it abnormal and claiming it's not common is just delusion.
Only a system which can handle and channel that behavior productively will work. Capitalism is one such system.
A market can mean lots of things
It doesn't mean what you claimed.
Basically in reality the closest we get to a free market would be a 'Fence', interesting in that the products do enter that market upon an actual 'Free' basis and it is unregulated until of course the psychopaths who run it get caught and they regulate right out of existence.
Black markets don't cease to exist because a few people get caught every now and then. And of course, due to the illegality usually associated with such things, they aren't free markets.
Free markets are only approximate. Nobody ever claims the ideal can be achieved. But they tend to be good at the task of matching people who need stuff with people who supply it. That's it. That's all they are supposed to do.
Small amounts of socialism exists quite comfortably in capitalist countries.
FIFY. It's worth remembering that all these countries have severely cut back on a lot of their socialist policies. Turns out, for example, that it wasn't a good idea to have a government phone company.
And we need to keep in mind that the fundamental characteristics of these countries is not that they happen to have socialist policies, but rather that they have capitalism, rule of law, and democracy. The combination of those three pretty much guarantees that they'll have comfortable and to some degree, affordable socialist policies.
"within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital."
The obvious rebuttal is that the premises are false. For example, labor unions are a typical social construct in capitalism that doesn't result in the claimed consequences. Or consider job search engines. Are workers worse off because the hiring process has been improved a bit? Are we, workers worse off due to technological improvements to worker productivity like computers or air conditioning?
Why should we trust this spew of verbiage when the initial assumptions are patently false?
And let us not forget that so many people, the middle class (or "bourgeoisie"), just aren't living with this sort of drudgery. Marx tried to ignore this group and categorize thema as being more or less enemies of the working class ("proletariat").
So want to see socialism, first the psychopaths have to go, quite simply they will corrupt any ism they are a part of, attempt to turn it into an authoritarian state where they have control and can dominate and exploit the citizens of that society.
The problem here is that your so-called "psychopaths" are normal humans exhibiting normal human behavior. That's the thing about capitalism and markets, you don't need to get rid of normal human behavior in order for them to work well.
The 'Free Market' is straight up marketing lie because it is wholly and totally dependent upon nothing in that market ever being Free, everything 'owned' and 'controlled', so that those with the most can control and exploit those with the least. With everything that can be owned being owned, including all of the essentials to life, so that denial of life becomes the tool of exploitation of the not free at all market place of human lives.
You don't even know what a market is. It's not some magic controlling beast, it is merely an avenue for trade - trade which you don't have to participate in.
and have worked in
I see you've enjoyed the capitalism too.
Hell, I was even there long enough to have experienced their health care system after I got a wisdom tooth removed in Helsinki. Cost me $25 (which the dentist wouldn't take because he said it had been a pleasure to practice English with me).
Just because it didn't cost you a lot doesn't mean it was cheap. Capitalism paid for that bit of social welfare.
It continues to amuse me how people claim that countries like this aren't socialist hellholes because of the socialism.
Of course if you assume physicalism, then you can deduce physicalism.
And if you assume woo, you can deduce woo. There's little point to arguments we can't say anything concrete about.
I don't see how it's a counterexample to the claim that property tax is a tax on economic activity. Can you elaborate?
Well, first, there is the obvious. Property taxes don't tax economic activity. If I don't own property, I can still generate economic activity, but economic activity that isn't taxed. Conversely, I can own land which is left fallow. The land would have inherent value, despite my lack of use of it, because of potential economic activity and such. So I would pay a tax on something that doesn't actually generate economic activity.
Second, once a government entity collects taxes via one of these particular means (but not the other), they have considerable incentive to introduce policies to increase the revenue from one means while not impairing the other. For example, they can choose to spur economic activity in order to increase taxes from economic activity (such as income taxes).
The actual example of the broken window fallacy is a case of deliberately breaking windows along streets of a city in order to spur economic activity. It doesn't affect someone who either doesn't own a window or doesn't have their windows right next to the street where they can be broken. The very poor and the very rich are unaffected by this particular approach.
Also, if one pursues strategies for increasing property values rather than increasing economic activity, then breaking windows runs counter to the goal.
Just proves my point: You have no clue what you are talking about.
No. For I'm knowledgeable enough to assess everyone else's competence in this matter.
The observation of intelligence in humans is an interface observation, it is completely unclear whether it gets created there and how that would work if so.
You are of course speaking of a "soul". And why wouldn't an AI had one too? Humans demonstrate it can be done assuming the thing exists in the first place, of course.
Understanding why we may never have strong AI (i.e. as dumb as an average human), requires actual insights into the the subject matter on a level you cannot acquire in a year or two.
Given that no one currently has that insight - no matter their level of training, and the existence of humans demonstrates that strong AI can exist, then I really don't see the point of your post.
Nobody but you mentioned governments forcing farmers to do anything.
It's not a huge stretch to expect that something new gets forced on farmers when a lot of stuff already gets forced on them.
And in any case property tax does end up being a tax on economic activity also, or at least on economic value, which is determined by economic activity.
The Broken Window Fallacy is the classic counterexample. Among other things, it's a means to disengage (and of course, tax) economic activity from the value of property.
But that means it's no longer a market as we understand it, and no longer capitalism as it was envisioned.
This is a non sequitur. It does not follow that because Silicon Valley is a little weird and a little high pressure, that somehow we have to abandon our concepts of economics.
So your premise is that we will go from machines with no autonomous intelligence at all, directly to super-genius intelligence? Without passing through the ant, lizard, cow, and monkey levels of intelligence first?
How slowly do you think that's going to take?
But it does create a bunch of opportunity for the government to shut down your business on grounds of not taking legally sufficient precautions against underage access. It's a balancing act of liability for credit card fraud vs. liability for fines for noncompliance.
No, it didn't. From Wikipedia, the highest operating estimate is 800 PBq versus 5200 PBq. Further, 80% of that radiation is thought to have fallen in the ocean. So that looks like less than 1/30th the release of Chernobyl on land.