Well, in today's America you are not forced to work for someone at the point of a gun AND you get to choose who you work for.
Not by gunpoint, but by threat of starvation. And you can't choose who you work for when you have to be lucky to find someone who lets you work for him in the first place.
And while I, too, prefer to live in a country that does not force you to do anything at gun point, the "freedom to starve" is just as usefull as the "freedom to get shot" when you're stuck in some shitty job but have to consider yourself lucky for having a job at all.
But as you said. someone has to do those jobs. It is not like everyone could just choose some other job. Someone has to do those jobs. And in every society there will be the poor sods who are forced into those jobs.
Ah, yes.. the Maerican Dream. The firm believe that no one will ever be stuck in a shitty job because everyone has lots of chances to find something better. Or to paraphrase John Steinbeck. There aren't any poor people in America. Just " temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
I completly agree with you that a planned economy wont work, but for other reasons.
That isn't nearly enough. You can't just base demand projections on historical figures and census data. That doesn't tell you anything about how supply and demand are likely to change. You have to predict what people are going to want, and what they're going to be willing and able to give up in exchange, whether that means money, barter, or simply goods which won't be available due to limited production capacity.
Ah ha. Projections based on historical figures won't work, but predictions (based on what else besides historical figures and market research) would work?
The government has tons of information (mostly collected by the local businesses), but it's the wrong kind of information.
Then what would keep gouvernment from collecting the right information? If that information is available to someone, the gouvernment can get access to it.
And even in our normal economy, companies now have to think on that "centralised" country-level, too. A car company does not have local factories everywhere, so they also need to project the demand for certain models country or even world wide. That's even more difficult that
The idea that you can manage supply and demand with nothing but high-level statistics and census data is why planned economies are doomed to experience shortages and surpluses. You can't even trust people to report their own preferences accurately on a survey; their actions often contradict their words.
Why are they doing that? Either because they don't know their own preferences or need for - say combine harvesters - when the fill out the survey. But that would effect ALL plannings based on that survey, no matter if it's done by a local dealer or big gouvernment. Or option B) what happend in real life so far: As there never has been a surplus of anything useful, people knew that they would get onkly half of their projected need. So if they needed 5 combine harvesters, they would put down a demand of 10.
Running a profitable business is as much as art as it is a science, and as with any other art, details matter. The local business owner has a much better idea of what his customers want and are willing to pay for his goods than any central planner working from a "big picture" perspective.
Again: nothing would keep a gouvernment from hiring those "artists/scientists" if that is needed to have things running smoothly.
Nothing of what you mentioned above. It's simply that those high paying jobs are reserved not for people with an intrest in running a working economy, but the Nephews of El Presidente! That's why it never worked so far.
And we shouldn't try really it either, because of the stakes.
Moreover, the local business owner has far more at stake in getting his estimates right
From a high-level overall risks are not distributed as you mentioned above. a local merchant who made an error has to close shop for some reason is quite a small risk to a society. One greengrocer less... so what. But if something goes wrong in a centrally planned economy, the whole country will go down the drain as there are no competitors as a redundant backup.
Don't know about USSR, but I went to university in the then Ex-GDR and got to talk to quite a few people who remembered the so called "actually existing socialism" (which neither really worked nor was ever close to the ideal of socialism)
8 years after the fall of the Berlin wall may have been enough to look back starry eyed, but the guys there agreed that whatever bad sides that regime had, it provided the citizens with a job to pay the rent for a (shoe-box sized..) apartment and bread, potatoes and cabbage.
I don't knoe if that's worth the risk of going to jail for not voting for the right party or even not being able to buy anything besides bread, potatoes and cabbage, but I think it should be at leats noted.
Good point. But it's the outer world that goes by the rules of private property themself and the outer world that therefor - by its own rules - has to respect private property. And the monastery itself respects that the outer world has that concept.
Aehmm... a gouvernment with an overview over internal and external politics and economic data HAS more information available than any businessman on its own. For example who - if not the gouvernment - has access to census data and can use that data to estimate the need for certain goods? (x pounds of bread and rice per person, y cars and TVs per household) A local businessman would not only need that data, but also additional data on what percantage of those TVs and rice will be bought in his store and what percantage in his competitors store. (and as all competitors would have to stock that amount +x% it would lead to more overstocking than if only one central vendor would have to stock the estimate +x%. Usually overstocking is undesired waste, unless overproduction is considered part of "economic growth". But that's another kettle of fish along with planned obsolescence)
And humans are designed to work and plan with incomplete information. Ask anyone in the military about that. Incomplete information about the enemies capabilities never stopped anyone from waging war against someone.
So even if planned economy never worked so far, that's for other reasons. (Usually the planing commitee being manned with persons caring more for their own well being in combination with a political system without a possibility to remove them from office.)
In short there was definitely a concept of wealth and ownership under the feudal system. There was an employee of the month type incentive as well sure, but Kinghts were absolutely their for the economic benefits not just fame.
Basically what I said. But it wasn't based on currency. Just because they didn't have to buy that accomodation and food, that doesn't mean that it was free. And it wasn't only based on material goods, but also, as you mentioned, on reputation.
But my point stands that "reward" for effort has not to be handed out in some currency. It can be goods, land, loot or your daily ration of bread and rice. Which would neither mean that the serf is working for free nor that he gets his bread for free.
My "fame" example was going on from there. For that to work you either need to be able to cash in on that fame somehow (e.g. a "famous" knight getting a job at some other duke's court with better perks or getting that spot at "Celebrity Intern") or have basic food and housing taken care of otherwise. (Socialist government handing out shelter and rations or as a part of a work-for-tangible-goods deal like above)
Having that whole currency system instead makes everything easier, of course, but fails if the monetary reward falls below what is needed for food, housing and health.
Dumb terminals evolved into "smart" PCs as networking evolved from mainframe computing to powerfull clients.
The the Web shifted things back to server side computing with the browsers as dumb terminals. Now those formerly dumb terminals become smarter and do more of the workload client-sided. I can see a pattern here.
The next step that already started in paraless is moving the servers to become clients on a SaaS platform as GoogleAppEngine or Amazon AWS.
They already seized the entire oil industry, railroads, paper mills.
Nobody will invest in Venezuela any more.
Which in itself isn't neccessarily bad.
When you have someone investing in your company (buying stocks or similar), you give up control over your company to the stockholders and investors. They will make descisions about your company that they benefit from. Only in theory these would be long term investors and they would benefit from what would benefit of your company, too.
Short time investors just want to make money fast and don't care if they destroy a company by doing so.
On the other hand, if you want to keep control of your company, you need to make sure you have the funds for doing so without external investors.
While I don't doubt your examples, they wouldn't be complete without an example where community cann live without private property. Namely monasteries and Kibuzes.
Reading crap like Atlas Shrugged is like repeatedly having unprotected sex with somebody with AIDS and a dozen other STDs.
I nurture an ardent belief in classical, liberal free market economics. Like Newton's laws of motion, they clearly describe so much about the real world that they can't be denied, even if they're incomplete and fall far short of describing complex phenomena.
That's an excellent comparision. Newtons laws describe how masses attract each other. i.e. it's not only the earth attracting the apple, but it is also the apple that is attracting the earth. This perfectly explains the movements of stellar bodies like in our solar system.
Here on earth, it only explains why still everything is going downhill.
I choose my books carefully. Free will and choice are so very illusory. The ideas you choose to consume will inevitably consume you. They become part of your mental vocabulary, circumscribe the way you express yourself to others and to your own self, and therefore define yourself.
Do yourself a favor and look up "filter bubble". That's when you're getting your information only from sources that confirm your existing opinion, because you tend to pick those from the plethora of sorces available nowadays. If you ignore new ideas on purpose, it's usually called ignorance.
The classic albums were mostly a work of the musicians, their producer and a sound engineer.
Todays music as a work of a commitee formed by the marketing department, that studies market research to find out what composer and producer to hire, that cast artists that have to fit the role description that has been agreed on.
Well, if I plan to sell TVs, I need to hire someone whose expertise is selling TVs. No matter if I'm a country or a electronic retailer.
Espescially if you're a country. If a retailer fails at selling TVs, Crazy Eddy goes down the drain and no one would notice. You don't want your country to fail just because they didn't know how to sell their stuff.
In theory, there are pros for planned econoomy. But the biggest con is that so far, no one got it to work...
A currency-less economic system would either be based on barter (which is basically what we still have - just with currency units to make it more convinient) or on some kind of honor system, where you do the best for your society (read: working at whatever is needed and you're good at) and society takes care of your material needs. But as you mentioned, this wouldn't be "free" as you'd still be expected (or bound by honor) to do some work.
This works quite well in a Kibuz, but on a larger scale, there would be people who would actually mistake their loaf of bread as "free". This still could work, if overall productivity would be high enough compared to the additional burden of such freeriders.
Entrepreneurism is well known to be what drives economies.
What drives capitalistic economies, I beg to differ. It would not drive a planned economy, and setting up a free market is in no way the only form of economy.
On the other hand it seems that a prospering planned economy would need a plan classes better than what Venezuela is doing... (Heck I doubt they have a plan at all!)
So why shouldn't everything be free? Because without money, most people will not exert effort beyond their own existance which is why communism and pure socialism tend to migrate to oppressive implementations. So in short, the people and human nature say it shouldn't be free.
You're partly right, but then stop mid-track. You're absolutely right that there needs to be an incentive to show that "effort beyond existance", but in theory this could anything that is seen as a reward. You'rer educing that to money because that's what we're currently are used to as the only form of reward.
How could the native americans have a society for centuries without a concept of wealth and currency? Or go back a few hundred years in Europe. People from knights to bards did not queue up to work for a king because of huge monetary saleries. (even if the job provided a higher standard of living than most people had). The incentive that made them "exert effort" was fame.
But this worked only as fame and appreciation something valueable. Neither an aluminium chip with "Hero of Work" embossed or "Employee of the month" are worth anything today.
Then - at last when you're already in jail - the proper thing to do would have been to hand the passowrd over to the judge along with a letter explaining the illegal stuff that's going to happen and ask the judge (or if he sees neccessary: a court) to decide on the legal status. That's what the judical system is for and cleans you of the idea that you're extorting someone
Slashdot Mirror
Why install it at all and not just bin it as soon it wants internet access?
Either you have that problem on iThings too or you're ignoring the pre-install permission list on Android for some unknwon reason.
Because you have to start counting SOMEWHERE.
Well, in today's America you are not forced to work for someone at the point of a gun AND you get to choose who you work for.
Not by gunpoint, but by threat of starvation. And you can't choose who you work for when you have to be lucky to find someone who lets you work for him in the first place.
And while I, too, prefer to live in a country that does not force you to do anything at gun point, the "freedom to starve" is just as usefull as the "freedom to get shot" when you're stuck in some shitty job but have to consider yourself lucky for having a job at all.
But as you said. someone has to do those jobs. It is not like everyone could just choose some other job. Someone has to do those jobs. And in every society there will be the poor sods who are forced into those jobs.
Ah, yes.. the Maerican Dream. The firm believe that no one will ever be stuck in a shitty job because everyone has lots of chances to find something better.
Or to paraphrase John Steinbeck. There aren't any poor people in America. Just " temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
I completly agree with you that a planned economy wont work, but for other reasons.
That isn't nearly enough. You can't just base demand projections on historical figures and census data. That doesn't tell you anything about how supply and demand are likely to change. You have to predict what people are going to want, and what they're going to be willing and able to give up in exchange, whether that means money, barter, or simply goods which won't be available due to limited production capacity.
Ah ha. Projections based on historical figures won't work, but predictions (based on what else besides historical figures and market research) would work?
The government has tons of information (mostly collected by the local businesses), but it's the wrong kind of information.
Then what would keep gouvernment from collecting the right information? If that information is available to someone, the gouvernment can get access to it.
And even in our normal economy, companies now have to think on that "centralised" country-level, too. A car company does not have local factories everywhere, so they also need to project the demand for certain models country or even world wide. That's even more difficult that
The idea that you can manage supply and demand with nothing but high-level statistics and census data is why planned economies are doomed to experience shortages and surpluses. You can't even trust people to report their own preferences accurately on a survey; their actions often contradict their words.
Why are they doing that? Either because they don't know their own preferences or need for - say combine harvesters - when the fill out the survey. But that would effect ALL plannings based on that survey, no matter if it's done by a local dealer or big gouvernment. Or option B) what happend in real life so far: As there never has been a surplus of anything useful, people knew that they would get onkly half of their projected need. So if they needed 5 combine harvesters, they would put down a demand of 10.
Running a profitable business is as much as art as it is a science, and as with any other art, details matter. The local business owner has a much better idea of what his customers want and are willing to pay for his goods than any central planner working from a "big picture" perspective.
Again: nothing would keep a gouvernment from hiring those "artists/scientists" if that is needed to have things running smoothly.
Nothing of what you mentioned above. It's simply that those high paying jobs are reserved not for people with an intrest in running a working economy, but the Nephews of El Presidente! That's why it never worked so far.
And we shouldn't try really it either, because of the stakes.
Moreover, the local business owner has far more at stake in getting his estimates right
From a high-level overall risks are not distributed as you mentioned above. a local merchant who made an error has to close shop for some reason is quite a small risk to a society. One greengrocer less... so what. But if something goes wrong in a centrally planned economy, the whole country will go down the drain as there are no competitors as a redundant backup.
Don't know about USSR, but I went to university in the then Ex-GDR and got to talk to quite a few people who remembered the so called "actually existing socialism" (which neither really worked nor was ever close to the ideal of socialism)
8 years after the fall of the Berlin wall may have been enough to look back starry eyed, but the guys there agreed that whatever bad sides that regime had, it provided the citizens with a job to pay the rent for a (shoe-box sized..) apartment and bread, potatoes and cabbage.
I don't knoe if that's worth the risk of going to jail for not voting for the right party or even not being able to buy anything besides bread, potatoes and cabbage, but I think it should be at leats noted.
Good point. But it's the outer world that goes by the rules of private property themself and the outer world that therefor - by its own rules - has to respect private property. And the monastery itself respects that the outer world has that concept.
people fall into one of two groups: those who run things, and their slaves.
Which is different from todays corporate America exactly how? (Except of course that they aren't called slaves...)
Aehmm... a gouvernment with an overview over internal and external politics and economic data HAS more information available than any businessman on its own. For example who - if not the gouvernment - has access to census data and can use that data to estimate the need for certain goods? (x pounds of bread and rice per person, y cars and TVs per household) A local businessman would not only need that data, but also additional data on what percantage of those TVs and rice will be bought in his store and what percantage in his competitors store. (and as all competitors would have to stock that amount +x% it would lead to more overstocking than if only one central vendor would have to stock the estimate +x%. Usually overstocking is undesired waste, unless overproduction is considered part of "economic growth". But that's another kettle of fish along with planned obsolescence)
And humans are designed to work and plan with incomplete information. Ask anyone in the military about that. Incomplete information about the enemies capabilities never stopped anyone from waging war against someone.
So even if planned economy never worked so far, that's for other reasons. (Usually the planing commitee being manned with persons caring more for their own well being in combination with a political system without a possibility to remove them from office.)
Yes, as I said: Money simplifies that whole process.
btw. I think potato backed currency should be the way to go, at least in the case of hyperinflation you can make booze out of them.
That's almost straight out of Terry Pratchett's "Making Money"
In short there was definitely a concept of wealth and ownership under the feudal system. There was an employee of the month type incentive as well sure, but Kinghts were absolutely their for the economic benefits not just fame.
Basically what I said. But it wasn't based on currency. Just because they didn't have to buy that accomodation and food, that doesn't mean that it was free. And it wasn't only based on material goods, but also, as you mentioned, on reputation.
Yes.. Guilty of oversimplification.
But my point stands that "reward" for effort has not to be handed out in some currency. It can be goods, land, loot or your daily ration of bread and rice. Which would neither mean that the serf is working for free nor that he gets his bread for free.
My "fame" example was going on from there. For that to work you either need to be able to cash in on that fame somehow (e.g. a "famous" knight getting a job at some other duke's court with better perks or getting that spot at "Celebrity Intern") or have basic food and housing taken care of otherwise. (Socialist government handing out shelter and rations or as a part of a work-for-tangible-goods deal like above)
Having that whole currency system instead makes everything easier, of course, but fails if the monetary reward falls below what is needed for food, housing and health.
Dumb terminals evolved into "smart" PCs as networking evolved from mainframe computing to powerfull clients.
The the Web shifted things back to server side computing with the browsers as dumb terminals. Now those formerly dumb terminals become smarter and do more of the workload client-sided. I can see a pattern here.
The next step that already started in paraless is moving the servers to become clients on a SaaS platform as GoogleAppEngine or Amazon AWS.
They already seized the entire oil industry, railroads, paper mills.
Nobody will invest in Venezuela any more.
Which in itself isn't neccessarily bad.
When you have someone investing in your company (buying stocks or similar), you give up control over your company to the stockholders and investors. They will make descisions about your company that they benefit from. Only in theory these would be long term investors and they would benefit from what would benefit of your company, too.
Short time investors just want to make money fast and don't care if they destroy a company by doing so.
On the other hand, if you want to keep control of your company, you need to make sure you have the funds for doing so without external investors.
While I don't doubt your examples, they wouldn't be complete without an example where community cann live without private property. Namely monasteries and Kibuzes.
Reading crap like Atlas Shrugged is like repeatedly having unprotected sex with somebody with AIDS and a dozen other STDs.
I nurture an ardent belief in classical, liberal free market economics. Like Newton's laws of motion, they clearly describe so much about the real world that they can't be denied, even if they're incomplete and fall far short of describing complex phenomena.
That's an excellent comparision. Newtons laws describe how masses attract each other. i.e. it's not only the earth attracting the apple, but it is also the apple that is attracting the earth. This perfectly explains the movements of stellar bodies like in our solar system.
Here on earth, it only explains why still everything is going downhill.
I choose my books carefully. Free will and choice are so very illusory. The ideas you choose to consume will inevitably consume you. They become part of your mental vocabulary, circumscribe the way you express yourself to others and to your own self, and therefore define yourself.
Do yourself a favor and look up "filter bubble". That's when you're getting your information only from sources that confirm your existing opinion, because you tend to pick those from the plethora of sorces available nowadays. If you ignore new ideas on purpose, it's usually called ignorance.
Capitalism is "you're free to choose who to slave for".
That's capitalism in a working condition.
With the current job situation it's more like "You have to be glad if you find someone to slave for at all"....
Notice a pattern? The definition changes to fit whoever someone needs to have made a bogeyman out of.
Pretty soon you guys will finally be driven all the way to the right and call laissez-faire capitalism "socialism".
I think that line has already been crossed when simpkly the thought of everyone having health insurance has been called "socialism".
I call BS on that.
The classic albums were mostly a work of the musicians, their producer and a sound engineer.
Todays music as a work of a commitee formed by the marketing department, that studies market research to find out what composer and producer to hire, that cast artists that have to fit the role description that has been agreed on.
Well, if I plan to sell TVs, I need to hire someone whose expertise is selling TVs. No matter if I'm a country or a electronic retailer.
Espescially if you're a country. If a retailer fails at selling TVs, Crazy Eddy goes down the drain and no one would notice. You don't want your country to fail just because they didn't know how to sell their stuff.
In theory, there are pros for planned econoomy. But the biggest con is that so far, no one got it to work...
I completly agree with you here.
A currency-less economic system would either be based on barter (which is basically what we still have - just with currency units to make it more convinient) or on some kind of honor system, where you do the best for your society (read: working at whatever is needed and you're good at) and society takes care of your material needs. But as you mentioned, this wouldn't be "free" as you'd still be expected (or bound by honor) to do some work.
This works quite well in a Kibuz, but on a larger scale, there would be people who would actually mistake their loaf of bread as "free". This still could work, if overall productivity would be high enough compared to the additional burden of such freeriders.
Entrepreneurism is well known to be what drives economies.
What drives capitalistic economies, I beg to differ. It would not drive a planned economy, and setting up a free market is in no way the only form of economy.
On the other hand it seems that a prospering planned economy would need a plan classes better than what Venezuela is doing... (Heck I doubt they have a plan at all!)
So why shouldn't everything be free? Because without money, most people will not exert effort beyond their own existance which is why communism and pure socialism tend to migrate to oppressive implementations. So in short, the people and human nature say it shouldn't be free.
You're partly right, but then stop mid-track. You're absolutely right that there needs to be an incentive to show that "effort beyond existance", but in theory this could anything that is seen as a reward. You'rer educing that to money because that's what we're currently are used to as the only form of reward.
How could the native americans have a society for centuries without a concept of wealth and currency? Or go back a few hundred years in Europe. People from knights to bards did not queue up to work for a king because of huge monetary saleries. (even if the job provided a higher standard of living than most people had). The incentive that made them "exert effort" was fame.
But this worked only as fame and appreciation something valueable. Neither an aluminium chip with "Hero of Work" embossed or "Employee of the month" are worth anything today.
after all, how many developers do you need for a weather app.
so far they did a good job to keep the real annoying ads (flash, blinking, sound) out of their ads.
I never had an urge to block ads served by google
Then - at last when you're already in jail - the proper thing to do would have been to hand the passowrd over to the judge along with a letter explaining the illegal stuff that's going to happen and ask the judge (or if he sees neccessary: a court) to decide on the legal status. That's what the judical system is for and cleans you of the idea that you're extorting someone