Perhaps you and I don't mean the same thing by "capitalism".
It is possible to create a world economy in which every one can participate, but the road from here to there is not "the free market" but redistribution of wealth so that their children will be able to compete.
And the market is already doing that. It's the poor countries that handle a lot of manufacturing nowadays, because we can get away with paying them less. The weakening of the US Dollar is an adjustment for how overvalued it was in the past--it is weakening now so America can truly participate in the same economy as the third world. The abolition of protectionist policies over Western agriculture will help more, as will ending the corruption in the IMF and World Bank.
The advantage this redistribution has over your plan is that it is, in the long run, mutually beneficial. Your proposal amounts to a confiscatory zero-sum game which in practice would be a negative-sum game due to inefficiency. Your proposal will also never actually happen in the real world unless you can convince the billion or two people in modern, industrial first-world countries to surrender their wealth for your altruistic purposes. Whereas the redistribution that is happening and can happen to a greater extent in the market happens to the benefit of the first-world consumer.
Communism, by definition, also doesn't involve violence. It's just that you have to kill so many dissidents on the fast track to communism.
Ignoring that aspect of it, communism involves a redistribution of wealth, correct? How exactly are you going to get people to redistribute their wealth if they don't agree to? The state will have to enforce it. That's organized violence.
I don't care very much for which reason I am killed. My point is that capitalism creates commercial thugs and communism government thugs.
Perhaps "mercantilism" would be the better term. A free market, by definition, doesn't involve organized violence. Or, in other terms, it's not a very free market for the people who get killed.
A part of the African population can no longer live because they cannot produce anything that the part of the population that can produce valuable things want to have, because there is a world market.
Perhaps capitalism cannot solve the problems that mercantile imperialism created. Or perhaps they starve thanks to modern day mercantilists and their eternal cry of imperialist nationalism: "They're taking our jobs!"
Any good war has too much for a single movie. 2 hours of film vs. 20 hours of TV in a single season alone. The Dominion War in Deep Space Nine ran three or four seasons, too. So the Romulan War belongs on Enterprise, not in a movie.
Sorry to hear you lost your job. I agree that there's a lot of corruption in the system, and I think a lot of that stems from the limited liability laws that corporations have. However, I'd like to reply to something you said.
Don't begin to try to defend exec salaries based on them actually producing anything of any value. The worker is the one that does this, not the CEO or board of directors.
I think that's exactly what managers need to realize. Managers don't do anything. They're supposed to organize and help the actual workers of the business do whatever is most profitable. Good management can help workers accomplish something and is beneficial, however, poor management is usually counterproductive.
Enterprise is so far off course its going to exit the galaxy. Its good but its not trek, and its pulling concepts out of the trek archive that only the hardcore trekkies can follow to try to survive...not a good plan. What they need is a good hardcore war, but its not really in the cards because of Trek Cannon for the time period.
Hello? Romulan War anyone? (In fact, if you saw the end of the Vulcan story arc...they may be going in exactly this direction).
Imperialism, involving organized violence against native populations, is responsible for a lot of mass murders. And a lot of that imperialism was for the benefit of commercial concerns. That doesn't make capitalism responsible, as any system where people go around killing/enslaving native populations and plundering their land and possessions is, oh, perhaps, plundering, and not a free market.
We are not unable to feed the world population. It's a distribution problem caused by the fact that the people we are unable to feed live under quasi-feudal regimes that plunder the people's food and sell it outside the country to fund their armies. That's not capitalism, that's plunder by government thugs.
I won't even go into the hundreds of firms who show terrible financials yet continue to payout hundreds of millions to executives. Or the firms who actually fire the execs but still pay them tens of millions. Doesn't the notion of the golden parachute blow out your argument by definition - these people are being paid millions of dollars to make sure they don't come in to work!
Golden parachutes are an insurance, for the employee, against being fired. Severance pay is standard, although still lavish for executives.
Nonetheless, you're just reinforcing my point. Of course there are a lot of overpaid, bad executives. That goes to show how rare good executives are, which is exactly my point.
Your appelate term "poverty-laden" is one of the most laughable things I've heard in a while. Do you have any idea what Russia was like before the planned economy took hold? It was 90% peasant, with a 5% literacy rate. From that terribly backward poing, it eventually became the number 2 power in the world, rivaling the vaunted capitalist US. Interesting fact: since the restablishment of capitalism in Russia in 1991, the average life span has fallen about 15 years. That hardly provides good evidence for capitalism's superiority.
Communism worked well for the short term in Russia, but collectivization isn't easy by any means. Remember that the first attempt at collectivization of farms (Lenin's) resulted in famine. Lenin was forced to implement the "New Economic Policy", re-establishing a market based farming system. Stalin later succeeded in collectivization. That, combined with the war effort for World War II, built a Russian industrial base. Also keep in mind the failed Cambodian attempt at collectivization, where they ended up having to shoot everyone who didn't cooperate (which was a remarkably large number.)
The Soviet Union proper suffered a lot of economic problems even after its remarkable transformation. Your telling of events is short-sighted, even propagandistic. But it's not all puppies and roses in Soviet Russia. Communism resulted in big changes in the short term, but even in Soviet times, the aftereffects of that took hold. Of course, non-market systems tend to hide a lot of economic costs and consequences. When Russia went to a market system for the first time in their history (sorry, pre-1917 Russia was feudalist, not capitalist, even Marx knew the difference), the costs of 70 years of communism were apparent. Between that and the massive shakeups in society, it's no wonder Russia isn't doing well. That doesn't mean capitalism is bad for the economy--it means sudden collapse of the social and political system is bad for the economy. But that's just common sense.
Another example; look at China: simillar in inital stats to capitalist India, and developing from about the same time period; China industrialized faster, and raised almost all of it's quality of life indicators, including average life span, at a rate great than India. Most QOL indicators are still above the average in India.
India isn't capitalist. India has excessive regulation and state control choking economic growth. China, once again, saw great short-term growth, but what about Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore--nations with relatively free markets that saw comparable growth as well?
Indeed, do you have any idea how poverty stricken most of the capitalist countries on this planet are? Guess what; the vast majority of the third world isn't communist. In fact, only one nation is. It speaks to sheer arrogance that first world nations think the system they use, that exploints the rest of the earth's populace and keeps them impoverished, is good for anyone but them.
Most of these impoverished countries, once again, aren't capitalist. They're usually petty dictatorships where the army takes all the food and lets the people starve, or at least some sort of feudalism.
As for "murder-fest", but do you have ANY idea, any idea at all, how many people have been killed in capitalist countrys, from causes directly related to the economic anarchy, redundancy, and blind competition encouraged by capitalism?
Perhaps you could clarify. In any case, murder by government was the leading cause of preventable death in the 20th century, and communist governments led in the mass murder. That's simple historical fact, and nothing capitalism ever did matches it.
Now, factor in the wars that capitalist nations start with each other, all following the profit incentive of "protecting thier interests," (The world wars were started by countries with capitalist economic models. Basic history there.) and you've got a total far, far,
"Executive compensation" is high because, guess what? It's remarkably rare to find good executives. The constrained supply of usable executives leads to...you guessed it...a higher price if you want to hire one. It's not an easy job, and even those who are hired manage to fail at an alarmingly large rate. If you think executives should be paid less, I invite you to try and run a large business in the healthcare industry hiring "some guys" off the street to work as executives for $60,000 a year. Let's see how that works out.
All this complaining about executive compensation misses the point and ignores all economic reality.
That alone would stop population growth--people don't have children if they can't afford them.
However that line is a purly a joke at its finest. Have you ever noticed sometimes it's the poorest people who seem to have the most children?
I was making a generalization. There are exceptions to every generality. Also keep in mind that, in the wealthy Western nations that you and I both probably live in, the poor often receive government assistance which--wait for it--increases if you have more children, creating an economic incentive for larger families. Also keep in mind that, in aforementioned wealthy Western nations, people have a certain degree of economic freedom. People can be born poor, but if they're smart, they're often not so poor later in life. Who's left among the poor, then? Less intelligent people who make less intelligent decisions, with a few more dumb people who come from rich or middle-class families but managed to piss away their wealth. Now, in economically unfree nations like China, smart people born poor stay poor. But they're still smart enough not to have kids, at least as long as they're the ones carrying the cost.
Note again that I'm speaking in generalities, and there are many, many exceptions.
"Consider these facts: The land area of Texas is some 262,000 square miles and current UN estimates of the world's population (for 12 October 1999) are about 6 billion. By converting square miles to square feet -- remember to multiply by 5,280 feet per mile twice -- and dividing by the world's population, one readily finds that there are more than 1,217 square feet per capita. A family of 5 would thus occupy more than 6,085 square feet of living space. Even in Texas, that's a mansion." --Population Research Institute
Note that, given mountains and riverbanks and other geological irregularities, it's not possible to use Texas to house everyone. However, also note that Texas is a spectacularly small portion of the world's land surface area.
There is, as of now, no such thing as overpopulation. The entire world population could live in Texas comfortably, and each family could have a relatively large plot of land, leaving the entire rest of the world for farming, industrial production, and resource gathering. China is not suffering from overpopulation. They are suffering from underproduction. The Chinese economy is too weak to support and feed the people who are being born. Also, their economic system doesn't always impose the costs of raising children onto the parents. That alone would stop population growth--people don't have children if they can't afford them.
However, the Chinese want to preserve their backward, inefficient amalgamation of fascism, communism, and crony capitalism. The only way to do that is by stemming population growth.
If anyone actually reads Atlas Shrugged, they'll notice most of the villains are failing businessmen, who get special government protection to beat up on more successful competitors.
she is at least agreeing with you on that the corporation should not be merged with the government.
Quite right. Rand spoke of a "separation of state and economics of the same type and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church."
Well, that may be nice for you, but those "third party stores" gave this po' college student a 90% discount off the list price of a textbook last year. That's one of the reasons I still bother to check Amazon for books.
>>I guess we shouldn't go after people who may have commited a murder either.
>
>That's right, we shouldn't.
>-snip-
>Getting a warrent isn't that tough...
And who do you get a warrant for? People who may have committed a murder. You do not have to actually prove that they did commit the murder in order to get the warrant.
This usually happens with stock and other investments where the value varies based on investors' collective estimate of the value of the company. The pervasiveness of the stock market (compared to bonds and other interest-bearing investments) is the cause of this.
money that cost much more that it's value. With interest and all.
Do you know why interest exists? Many reasons--time value of money and such--but the reason it *can* exist is because businesses can borrow money, and spend that money in capital investment--making windows, perhaps--and make more than enough profit to pay the interest. The business benefits, and so does the lender, who got a cut of the window-maker's profit.
What do you think "investment" is? Do you know how banks make money? More money for investment means more money that people can borrow in order to buy houses and cars (something that definitely stimulates the economy), or to finance businesses (same).
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you and I don't mean the same thing by "capitalism".
It is possible to create a world economy in which every one can participate, but the road from here to there is not "the free market" but redistribution of wealth so that their children will be able to compete.
And the market is already doing that. It's the poor countries that handle a lot of manufacturing nowadays, because we can get away with paying them less. The weakening of the US Dollar is an adjustment for how overvalued it was in the past--it is weakening now so America can truly participate in the same economy as the third world. The abolition of protectionist policies over Western agriculture will help more, as will ending the corruption in the IMF and World Bank.
The advantage this redistribution has over your plan is that it is, in the long run, mutually beneficial. Your proposal amounts to a confiscatory zero-sum game which in practice would be a negative-sum game due to inefficiency. Your proposal will also never actually happen in the real world unless you can convince the billion or two people in modern, industrial first-world countries to surrender their wealth for your altruistic purposes. Whereas the redistribution that is happening and can happen to a greater extent in the market happens to the benefit of the first-world consumer.
Communism, by definition, also doesn't involve violence. It's just that you have to kill so many dissidents on the fast track to communism.
Ignoring that aspect of it, communism involves a redistribution of wealth, correct? How exactly are you going to get people to redistribute their wealth if they don't agree to? The state will have to enforce it. That's organized violence.
I don't care very much for which reason I am killed. My point is that capitalism creates commercial thugs and communism government thugs.
Perhaps "mercantilism" would be the better term. A free market, by definition, doesn't involve organized violence. Or, in other terms, it's not a very free market for the people who get killed.
A part of the African population can no longer live because they cannot produce anything that the part of the population that can produce valuable things want to have, because there is a world market.
Perhaps capitalism cannot solve the problems that mercantile imperialism created. Or perhaps they starve thanks to modern day mercantilists and their eternal cry of imperialist nationalism: "They're taking our jobs!"
Any good war has too much for a single movie. 2 hours of film vs. 20 hours of TV in a single season alone. The Dominion War in Deep Space Nine ran three or four seasons, too. So the Romulan War belongs on Enterprise, not in a movie.
Sorry to hear you lost your job. I agree that there's a lot of corruption in the system, and I think a lot of that stems from the limited liability laws that corporations have. However, I'd like to reply to something you said.
Don't begin to try to defend exec salaries based on them actually producing anything of any value. The worker is the one that does this, not the CEO or board of directors.
I think that's exactly what managers need to realize. Managers don't do anything. They're supposed to organize and help the actual workers of the business do whatever is most profitable. Good management can help workers accomplish something and is beneficial, however, poor management is usually counterproductive.
Enterprise is so far off course its going to exit the galaxy. Its good but its not trek, and its pulling concepts out of the trek archive that only the hardcore trekkies can follow to try to survive...not a good plan. What they need is a good hardcore war, but its not really in the cards because of Trek Cannon for the time period.
Hello? Romulan War anyone? (In fact, if you saw the end of the Vulcan story arc...they may be going in exactly this direction).
Imperialism, involving organized violence against native populations, is responsible for a lot of mass murders. And a lot of that imperialism was for the benefit of commercial concerns. That doesn't make capitalism responsible, as any system where people go around killing/enslaving native populations and plundering their land and possessions is, oh, perhaps, plundering, and not a free market.
We are not unable to feed the world population. It's a distribution problem caused by the fact that the people we are unable to feed live under quasi-feudal regimes that plunder the people's food and sell it outside the country to fund their armies. That's not capitalism, that's plunder by government thugs.
I won't even go into the hundreds of firms who show terrible financials yet continue to payout hundreds of millions to executives. Or the firms who actually fire the execs but still pay them tens of millions. Doesn't the notion of the golden parachute blow out your argument by definition - these people are being paid millions of dollars to make sure they don't come in to work!
Golden parachutes are an insurance, for the employee, against being fired. Severance pay is standard, although still lavish for executives.
Nonetheless, you're just reinforcing my point. Of course there are a lot of overpaid, bad executives. That goes to show how rare good executives are, which is exactly my point.
Since when does communist equate with totalitarian dictator? Granted, it more often then not turns out this way...
Looks like you answered your own question.
Your appelate term "poverty-laden" is one of the most laughable things I've heard in a while. Do you have any idea what Russia was like before the planned economy took hold? It was 90% peasant, with a 5% literacy rate. From that terribly backward poing, it eventually became the number 2 power in the world, rivaling the vaunted capitalist US. Interesting fact: since the restablishment of capitalism in Russia in 1991, the average life span has fallen about 15 years. That hardly provides good evidence for capitalism's superiority.
Communism worked well for the short term in Russia, but collectivization isn't easy by any means. Remember that the first attempt at collectivization of farms (Lenin's) resulted in famine. Lenin was forced to implement the "New Economic Policy", re-establishing a market based farming system. Stalin later succeeded in collectivization. That, combined with the war effort for World War II, built a Russian industrial base. Also keep in mind the failed Cambodian attempt at collectivization, where they ended up having to shoot everyone who didn't cooperate (which was a remarkably large number.)
The Soviet Union proper suffered a lot of economic problems even after its remarkable transformation. Your telling of events is short-sighted, even propagandistic. But it's not all puppies and roses in Soviet Russia. Communism resulted in big changes in the short term, but even in Soviet times, the aftereffects of that took hold. Of course, non-market systems tend to hide a lot of economic costs and consequences. When Russia went to a market system for the first time in their history (sorry, pre-1917 Russia was feudalist, not capitalist, even Marx knew the difference), the costs of 70 years of communism were apparent. Between that and the massive shakeups in society, it's no wonder Russia isn't doing well. That doesn't mean capitalism is bad for the economy--it means sudden collapse of the social and political system is bad for the economy. But that's just common sense.
Another example; look at China: simillar in inital stats to capitalist India, and developing from about the same time period; China industrialized faster, and raised almost all of it's quality of life indicators, including average life span, at a rate great than India. Most QOL indicators are still above the average in India.
India isn't capitalist. India has excessive regulation and state control choking economic growth. China, once again, saw great short-term growth, but what about Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore--nations with relatively free markets that saw comparable growth as well?
Indeed, do you have any idea how poverty stricken most of the capitalist countries on this planet are? Guess what; the vast majority of the third world isn't communist. In fact, only one nation is. It speaks to sheer arrogance that first world nations think the system they use, that exploints the rest of the earth's populace and keeps them impoverished, is good for anyone but them.
Most of these impoverished countries, once again, aren't capitalist. They're usually petty dictatorships where the army takes all the food and lets the people starve, or at least some sort of feudalism.
As for "murder-fest", but do you have ANY idea, any idea at all, how many people have been killed in capitalist countrys, from causes directly related to the economic anarchy, redundancy, and blind competition encouraged by capitalism?
Perhaps you could clarify. In any case, murder by government was the leading cause of preventable death in the 20th century, and communist governments led in the mass murder. That's simple historical fact, and nothing capitalism ever did matches it.
Now, factor in the wars that capitalist nations start with each other, all following the profit incentive of "protecting thier interests," (The world wars were started by countries with capitalist economic models. Basic history there.) and you've got a total far, far,
"Executive compensation" is high because, guess what? It's remarkably rare to find good executives. The constrained supply of usable executives leads to...you guessed it...a higher price if you want to hire one. It's not an easy job, and even those who are hired manage to fail at an alarmingly large rate. If you think executives should be paid less, I invite you to try and run a large business in the healthcare industry hiring "some guys" off the street to work as executives for $60,000 a year. Let's see how that works out.
All this complaining about executive compensation misses the point and ignores all economic reality.
Sure, Steve was an asshole earlier in life. But he's now accepted Lisa into his family and, as I recall, he also paid for her college education.
Yeah, I know, IHBT, etc.
Have you ever seen an iPod box? Those things are several times the size of the iPod.
That alone would stop population growth--people don't have children if they can't afford them.
However that line is a purly a joke at its finest. Have you ever noticed sometimes it's the poorest people who seem to have the most children?
I was making a generalization. There are exceptions to every generality. Also keep in mind that, in the wealthy Western nations that you and I both probably live in, the poor often receive government assistance which--wait for it--increases if you have more children, creating an economic incentive for larger families. Also keep in mind that, in aforementioned wealthy Western nations, people have a certain degree of economic freedom. People can be born poor, but if they're smart, they're often not so poor later in life. Who's left among the poor, then? Less intelligent people who make less intelligent decisions, with a few more dumb people who come from rich or middle-class families but managed to piss away their wealth. Now, in economically unfree nations like China, smart people born poor stay poor. But they're still smart enough not to have kids, at least as long as they're the ones carrying the cost.
Note again that I'm speaking in generalities, and there are many, many exceptions.
"Consider these facts: The land area of Texas is some 262,000 square miles and current UN estimates of the world's population (for 12 October 1999) are about 6 billion. By converting square miles to square feet -- remember to multiply by 5,280 feet per mile twice -- and dividing by the world's population, one readily finds that there are more than 1,217 square feet per capita. A family of 5 would thus occupy more than 6,085 square feet of living space. Even in Texas, that's a mansion." --Population Research Institute
Note that, given mountains and riverbanks and other geological irregularities, it's not possible to use Texas to house everyone. However, also note that Texas is a spectacularly small portion of the world's land surface area.
Check your math.
There is, as of now, no such thing as overpopulation. The entire world population could live in Texas comfortably, and each family could have a relatively large plot of land, leaving the entire rest of the world for farming, industrial production, and resource gathering. China is not suffering from overpopulation. They are suffering from underproduction. The Chinese economy is too weak to support and feed the people who are being born. Also, their economic system doesn't always impose the costs of raising children onto the parents. That alone would stop population growth--people don't have children if they can't afford them.
However, the Chinese want to preserve their backward, inefficient amalgamation of fascism, communism, and crony capitalism. The only way to do that is by stemming population growth.
If anyone actually reads Atlas Shrugged, they'll notice most of the villains are failing businessmen, who get special government protection to beat up on more successful competitors.
she is at least agreeing with you on that the corporation should not be merged with the government.
Quite right. Rand spoke of a "separation of state and economics of the same type and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church."
And of course, China has a real incentive of making sure U.S. companies don't lose money
They will. The purpose of foreign policy is to give them an incentive. This is how international politics works.
Well, that may be nice for you, but those "third party stores" gave this po' college student a 90% discount off the list price of a textbook last year. That's one of the reasons I still bother to check Amazon for books.
Are you GAY?
Are you a...never mind.
>>I guess we shouldn't go after people who may have commited a murder either.
>
>That's right, we shouldn't.
>-snip-
>Getting a warrent isn't that tough...
And who do you get a warrant for? People who may have committed a murder. You do not have to actually prove that they did commit the murder in order to get the warrant.
Dumbass.
That's so unfair to everyone else making System Preferences, Terminal, and Console apps for Mac OS X.
This usually happens with stock and other investments where the value varies based on investors' collective estimate of the value of the company. The pervasiveness of the stock market (compared to bonds and other interest-bearing investments) is the cause of this.
money that cost much more that it's value. With interest and all.
Do you know why interest exists? Many reasons--time value of money and such--but the reason it *can* exist is because businesses can borrow money, and spend that money in capital investment--making windows, perhaps--and make more than enough profit to pay the interest. The business benefits, and so does the lender, who got a cut of the window-maker's profit.
What do you think "investment" is? Do you know how banks make money? More money for investment means more money that people can borrow in order to buy houses and cars (something that definitely stimulates the economy), or to finance businesses (same).
That's what we call the Broken Window Fallacy.