The US taxpayer funded the Internet's inception. US ingenuity is largely responsible for its creation. And US industry is responsible for its commercial boom. If the UN wants to control the Internet then they can create their own rather than trying to leech on the work of others. The US has so much control over it because the US pioneered it; other nations are more than welcome to pioneer their own. (Like China working on their own OS instead of using US technology; how about China now pioneer their own superior Internet alternative?) This mentality that when some person/group/nation invents something amazing that the whole world has a right to leech of their work reminds me of a great quote from "Atlas Shrugged": "If we eliminate private fortunes, we'll have a fairer distribution of wealth. If we eliminate genius, we will have a fairer distribution of ideas." If you don't like it then petition your government or your UN to upstage the US by creating a better net.
This is why they wear red shirts. Ever see what happened to the red shirts under Kirk? They were used as cannon fodder. That, I believe, is the life they lived. They sign up for ship duty thinking they will serve a productive life and then Kirk feeds them to the aliens. This is why Kirk is my favourite captain!
This is why they wear red shirts. Ever see what happens to any person wearing a red shirt in any episode involving Kirk? It isn't pretty... The moral is, if you can't keep up with the productive people, like Scotty and Spock, then Kirk feeds you to the aliens. That is their role in the Federation: useless feeders feed the aliens.
It would seem to me that doing something productive would be creating newer and greater things, like a ship that can reach warp 30 or inventing a weapon that the borg cannot assimilate, rather than rotting one's life away doing work that does not promote progress, like working in a penal colony and calling it "social responsibility". My guess is that the Federation citizens who choose those jobs have no value to give to society so falsely rationalize their choice to throw away their "individual responsibility" to themselves and be a nobody by pretending it is a rewarding and productive job.
And I bet they also wear red uniforms. (At least during the Kirk days of the federation's history.)
Yeah, because cumbustible engines, cars, heart pacemakers, artificial hearts, airplanes, light bulbs, the Internet, GPS, most flavours of operating systems + Java, DRAM, microprocessors, PCs,..., were not invented in the US. Er, on second thought, they were.
It is unfortunate that the web site complains about how we work more hours than other Western nations but fails to mention that we produce the greatest amount of technological, scientific, etc. innovations of any nation no the planet. Not that working less is bad. Rather, we need to not be delluded into thinking that working less is nothing 100% pure good. The gains of working longer are more subtle. By being more industrious and creating more innovations, we speed up the increase in the standard of living via invention and mass production. By working less we have more spare time but also less progress. Taking it to the extreme, the idea that we should be able to sit on our butts most of the time doing nothing productive for maintaining our lives while still have a good and growing standard of living is demanding a fantasy devoid of any objective reality.
So yes, we work more than the medival workers as the web site says, but we are also progressing technology, industry, science, etc. and thus our standard of living many times faster than they ever did.
A better way to end the Oil Age is not for government to promote alternatives, but for government to stop promoting oil. Government puts up barriers to alternatives, either intentionally or unintentionally. For example, the tax code if used properly can make buying the most massive SUV you can find more profitable than buying a hybrid sedan. This is because they give tax breaks for heavy vehicles used for business (like trucks or large vans) but did not envision mainstream street cars weighing as much. So a self-employed person can get a $40,000 tax deduction for buying the most oil-dependent car on the market for "business" purposes. Plus the oil industry gets heaps of government subsidies and lower tax rates. Rather than subsidizing alternatives, a better solution is to stop subsidizing oil and make other industries pay equally low taxes as the oil companies so that there is an even playing field. Lowering the taxes to the least common denominator is important since high tax acts as a bigger barrier for small things than large corps, so the established oil industry would have more of an advantage if it and alternatives were paying equally high taxes than if both were paying equally low taxes. And I am sure there are plenty of other ways in which government makes barriers to alternatives.
And always remember: capitalism is not government control of the economy. So these barriers are anti-capitalist. A move towards capitalism via an actual seperation of commerce and State would help out a good deal in this scenario.
Hopefully this will irritate enough people that they will revolt against the TV. Then they will be forced to *gasp* enjoy outdoor activities like excercise or hiking through parks, or worse yet, forced to read books such as "Lord of the Rings" or "The Fountainhead"!
Seriously, though, you do not have a divine right to receive television signals in the format you demand. If broadcasters want to encrypt signals so they only work with DRM enabled TVs then so be it. (Though you do have a right to hack the TV you own and manufacturers have a right to make their TV however they want, regardless of what government says, as per the most basic principle of property rights upon which all rights are implemented.) So stop whining about how this will cut into your ability to see every episode of "Surviver" reality TV and start opening your mind to real reality.
Marx called for the abolition of all private property, which means there would be no free trade since the individuals of society would own everything. Free trade is a form of capitalism. Laissez faire capitalism to be exact, and the most pure form of capitalism. Marxism requires a government to intervene in the markets. For example, China with its pegged currency, control over the media, control over industry, etc. I suggest you read the works of prominent capitalists like Frederic Bastiat, Ayn Rand, the folks over at Cato, etc. to see for yourself.
This would be a case of capitalism trumping protectionism. By having real free trade, price fixing by region becomes impossible. (Unless you do some sort of technology BS like DVD regioning.) But for most things, like books, if you try to price fix by region and there are no barriers to international trade, then the books in the cheaper region will be resold in the expensive ones, undermining the producers attempt at price fixing. This is how real capitalism works once you have eliminated the policies of the pseudo-capitalists in the Republicans and socialists in the Democrats.
Of course, normally people here like to screem about all the lost jobs. This at least should help demonstrate the value of unfettered fair trade, the value of rejecting America's current uncapitalist economy and moving towards a fully capitalist free trade economy.
If you don't think this is capitalism, go read books by capitalists like Frederic Bastiat, Ayn Rand, Jim Lewis, etc. to see for yourself.
> Corporate politics is ruining what's left of the U.S., and is pulling a lot of other nations down with it.
That is very true. Though an emphasis on politics is needed. If we had a seperation of business and State, much like we demand a seperation of church and State, then many problem would be solved. Bear in mind that coporations running government only happens when your elected officials let it happen. Corporations can not legally engage in coersive acts if the government is not there to back them up using the government's legal monopoly on force. Corporations cannot buy government if the politicians have nothing to sell. Sadly, the People have allowed their elected officials to tightly couple business and government an an unholy marraige. So don't blame the corporations. Follow the money to find you crook. Where does it lead? It goes through Wall Street before taking a backroad into Capital Hill. If you think Wall Street is the problem, it's probably just a money laundering scheme for the folks down in DC.
So we have a document that is 366 pages long. I believe GATT, NAFTA, and WTO documents go into the tens of thousands of pages. The anaylsis linked to is correct in saying this is not a free trade agreement. Unfortunately, Democrats and Republicans think free trade means moving trade restrictions out of the hands of federal governments and into the hands of global governing bodies (like the WTO), which only moves control of trade from point A to point B. Here is a real free trade agreement; anything longer than this is an unfree managed trade agreement:
People in your nation may sell goods and services in our nation for any price people are willing to pay provided the producers received no government subsidies, and we will not tax them. People in our nation may sell goods and services in your nation for any price people are willing to pay provided the producers received no government subsidies, and you will not tax them.
Usually when/. stories are about government stepping in to stop those Big Bad Transnational Coporations, readers are frothing at the mouth to cheer on that government. Or when it's a story about an industry that isn't regulated enough we're all screaming for more regulation. Now that we see a socialist government stepping in to regulate the Internet, what happened to all the people who would normally be demanding we get this right here in the US of A since capitalism is so evil? Let this be a lesson: this is the sort of stupidity that happens when you let government run industry with its iron fist. As unplesant as unbridled industry can sometimes be, I'd gladly take the progress and inventions spawned forth from capitalist greed over the stagnant ineptitude of socialist beaurocrats, as seen in France.
"Brave, brave Concorde, you shall not have died in vain!" "Uh... I'm not quite dead, sir!" "Well...you shall not have been *mortally wounded* in vain!" "I think I could pull through, sir." "No no, sweet Concorde, stay here. I will send help as soon as I've accomplished a daring and heroic economic recovery of the airline industry in my own particular..." "Idiom, sir?" "Idiom!" "No, I feel fine, actually..." "Farewell, sweet Concorde!!" "I'll just stay here, then, shall I, sir?... Yeah."
I don't know enough about net infrastructure to debate privatization of it, but I can say that privatization of California power is not a valid comparson. It was never privatized. They just replaced one set of regulations with another set of regulations, quite possibly a worse set of regulations. For example, some "deregulated" energy lines still have price caps. This means less capital for the energy companies to invest in infrastructure upgrades but no market price checks to keep consumption under control, which artifially increases the load on the unupgraded infrastructure. And some "deregulated" (I use that word sarcastically) energy markets have regulations that force energy deliverers to deliver any competing supplier's power. This means investing in infrastructure helps everyone, but only the energy deliverer (who is also a supplier) gets hit with the costs. Thus it gives competitors an advantage when an energy delivery firm upgrades infrastructure, and so it gives energy delivery companies a disincentive to upgrade their lines. At least in the old method of regulation the monopoly was ensured a return on investment for investing in infrastructure upgrades.
I get so tired of people pointing to the California and the northeast blackout as testiments against deregulation when they were never even deregulated! They were just re-regulated. Never forget: a competetive market that exists only by virtue of government regulations is no more deregulated than a monopoly market that exists only by virtue of government regulations.
This is due to socialism. FDR worked hard at price and wage freezes during the war, so to allow people to get "raises" he offered tax breaks for employers to give their employees health insurance. That is where these programs originated. So that is a product of socialism, an attempt by the government to control people's wages. Though no one forces you to enroll in the employer's program. You can select "don't enroll". (And if you can't then your HR department is seriously screwed up!) The problem is that the government still offers tax breaks for these sorts of things, which makes it more expensive for yuo to go elsewhere. If government stopped intervening and gave equal tax breaks for all no matter where they got their insurance then you wouldn't have this problem.
I think what you attribute to Marx is more in synch with Emma Goldman, though I'm unfortunately not as familiar with her as I'd like...
I'm glad you brought this other issue up! There are three problems with it. One, it implies that those who run businesses don't work. Believe me, they do! Well, not always. You get slackers at all levels of a business, top executives and low level factory workers not an exception. But a well run business will have executives who work their butts off doing complex analyses, calculations, and forecasting that the vast majority of lazy bums off the street could never do.
Second, it gives capitalism a false description. I could go on about labour laws actually hurting things ("real" wages versus received wages by minimum wage induced inflation, minimum wage induced job displacement, etc.), but I think that'd get too far off track. So to stay focused, I'll point out that the quality workers in capitalism will rise up the pay scale. If you are an insurance owner and you see a field sales clerk who brings in triple the sales of any other, you promote that person to central office sales. If he continues to bring in twice as many sales, maybe you decide you want him in your marketing department to sell to the masses. The key is that this quality worker is a valuable partner for the business. If he does not get just compensation then off he goes to another company that will appreciate him. Thus your self interest will force you to reward him. And if he's really talented at not just sales and but also has a strong talent to run a business, he may then eventually run away with some VC to start his own company to run yours into the ground if he is not granted enough power to excercise his talent in your company.
Finally, sweatshops and so forth are largely due to a misclassification of property. Noting that property is the product of labour, ask yourself this: is land the product of your labour? I'm not talking about gardens, buildings, mines, roads and so forth that are created through labour upon the land, but just the raw land itself. The answer is no. Even people like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and the "father of capitalism and private property" Adam Smith have made statements along these lines. Thomas Paine in particular was a very strong advocate of this. This sort of thing leads into a land value tax, where the market value of the land but not the property built upon the land is taxed, but that's another story I won't get into extensivelly lest I write a novellete here. Essentially, capitalism which does not recognize that land can not be classified as property leads to land monopolies that cause sweat shops and so forth. (Similarly, Communism does not recognize that labour products are rightfully owned when in fact they can, a major flaw of that system.) I recommend research into "land value tax" and "geolibertarianism". (The latter is a branch of libertarianism that advocates this idea, but one does not need to be libertarian to advocate land value tax system.) There is also a faction in the Democrats called the Democratic Freedom Caucus that advocates LVT, and there is also the Thomas Paine Network for advocacy within Libertarian circles. Perhaps it's splitting hairs, but I personally would consider a system of free trade that does not classify land as pure property to still be capitalism. The spirit of capitalism is still very strong in that system, and many prominent capitalists of the past have said positive things about it.
What you describe is left-wing anarchy, or communism with a small letter c. Big letter C Communism is government that forces the abolishion of private property as per the writings of Marx. Stop by your local Revolution Books and you will see that Communism requires the existance of the State. Of course, either system is oppression. Property is the product of your labour. One must labour to promote one's life. Therefore, denying a right to property is denying one a right to promote his own life. Thus there is no right to your life without property; only the privilege to live if others are generous enough to promote your life. Property is the implementation of rights.
Sounds like you have a pretty crummy doctor and/or insurance company. Excercise your capitalist freedom to change to someone else. Maybe the hospital in the next town over runs a better operation than the one you went to, or maybe Bob's Insurance has less red tape than whatever company you are with. As for the $1,000, you would have paid it every April 15 under socialism, even if you didn't need the operation. Socialialism does not make things free. It only hides the cost so you don't realize how much it hurts your pocketbook.
Also, when you wait that long in socialism you really can't change providers. Sure, you could go to a private insurer if they hadn't been driven out of business by the government's forcibly subsidized monopoly. But you would be forced by the government to pay for the bad service whether you use it or not, so you thus have an explicit incentive to not seek out choice. Thus like many monopolies there is no market incentive for improvement. In fact, less incentive than a capitalistic monopoly since there is even less choice for the people; if I don't like my monopolistic electric bill then I try to use less air conditioning (market pressure on the electric company) or invest in more efficient light bulbs (market incentive for innovation) or look into installing some solar panels on my roof (more innovation). Monopolies suck, but government monopolies are the worst since the people are forced to subsidize them no matter how poor it is. Imagine how stagnant the technology coming out of an operating system monopoly would be if it was Congress using our taxes to create a "free" Operating System of the People with garunteed revenue (taxes) rather than Microsoft trying to stave off Apple, Sun, and Linux lest they lose revenue that was never garunteed for them. Now imagine that for other industries.
Well it beats communism or socialism where the state forces you down. A slim chance is better than no chance.
Plus I might add that often times failures are due to incompetance on the part of the failed person. For example, the 90% morons managing.COMs businesses in the last decade, the 90% morons coming up with moronic ideas for those.COM businesses, and the 90% morons who actually invested in those morons.
Sometimes the great American Dream of success is out of reach because you just suck.
Here's a good reason why capitalism rocks: China, the former USSR, Canada, etc. If you don't like capitalism, spend a few years in China to try out an alternative. See how you enjoy the shared poverty. (Good luck owning a car over there!) Enjoy living unaccounted for in a jail cell because you went to the wrong wen sites. If you want a lesser extreme, try Canada with their socialism. Then you can wait in line for months to years for non-critical medical procedures that you could have been performed swiftly in the US. Gape on awe at how subsidies artificially inflate demand for frivolous medical treatments and how it makes the market incapable of meeting the capacity of its people's demands. Or you could try living the good old US of A where price caps on the government controlled energy industry caused it to have less money for upgrading infrastructure while artificially increasing consumer demand due to abnormally low prices, encouraging excessive consumption of energy. Here's the formula for that non-capitalistic system: forced increased load + forced less investment capital = government induced failed energy system.
Here's an idea. One of you ingenious capitalists out there could recognize the frustration ISPs are having and so invent a distributed DNS system. Then sell the software to companies that would like to take a hand at selling DNS services. ISPs irrate with Verisign could sign on to this and select which node they want to use and pay that service provider. Those that provide unreliable service or features everyone hates would lose business to those that play nice. Problem solved.
Maybe that is not technologically feasible so better yet, come up with DNS software (like the people behind BIND sort of did) that stops the irritating "features" from Verisign and sell that to ISPs. End result: Verisign gets put in its place by empowered ISPs. Or even better, ISPs could band together for their mutual profit by writing something themselves and sharing it among those who helped create it, using mutual cooperation to increase productivity among all participants. They could then use this to their advantage by advertising it to prospective customers as an anti-spam feature since it helps preserve anti-spam software that checks for domain spoofing. This leads to greater demand for ISPs that block Verisign, and thus the people put Verisign in its place. There's capitalism at work!
> preferrably untouchable (for the moment) by ultra-capitalist org's like Verisign
Or preferrably ultra-capitalist orgs unlike verisign would be allowed to touch it so that they would have to give in to market pressure. A government created monopoly like we have here is not a capitalist system. And putting ultra-socialist regulatory orgs in control would do nothing to help. That eliminates any motivation for progress, as indicated by the stagnant state of our socially regulated energy grid. (Newsflash: it was never deregulated.) People and organizations are typically quite unmotivated when they have to work for the good of everyone but themselves...
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The US taxpayer funded the Internet's inception. US ingenuity is largely responsible for its creation. And US industry is responsible for its commercial boom. If the UN wants to control the Internet then they can create their own rather than trying to leech on the work of others. The US has so much control over it because the US pioneered it; other nations are more than welcome to pioneer their own. (Like China working on their own OS instead of using US technology; how about China now pioneer their own superior Internet alternative?) This mentality that when some person/group/nation invents something amazing that the whole world has a right to leech of their work reminds me of a great quote from "Atlas Shrugged": "If we eliminate private fortunes, we'll have a fairer distribution of wealth. If we eliminate genius, we will have a fairer distribution of ideas." If you don't like it then petition your government or your UN to upstage the US by creating a better net.
And in fact GTA3 was based on his own life experiences.
This is why they wear red shirts. Ever see what happened to the red shirts under Kirk? They were used as cannon fodder. That, I believe, is the life they lived. They sign up for ship duty thinking they will serve a productive life and then Kirk feeds them to the aliens. This is why Kirk is my favourite captain!
This is why they wear red shirts. Ever see what happens to any person wearing a red shirt in any episode involving Kirk? It isn't pretty... The moral is, if you can't keep up with the productive people, like Scotty and Spock, then Kirk feeds you to the aliens. That is their role in the Federation: useless feeders feed the aliens.
It would seem to me that doing something productive would be creating newer and greater things, like a ship that can reach warp 30 or inventing a weapon that the borg cannot assimilate, rather than rotting one's life away doing work that does not promote progress, like working in a penal colony and calling it "social responsibility". My guess is that the Federation citizens who choose those jobs have no value to give to society so falsely rationalize their choice to throw away their "individual responsibility" to themselves and be a nobody by pretending it is a rewarding and productive job.
And I bet they also wear red uniforms. (At least during the Kirk days of the federation's history.)
Like I said, it's got good and bad. If it has too much bad for you then don't work as much. Go live on a farm or something.
Yeah, because cumbustible engines, cars, heart pacemakers, artificial hearts, airplanes, light bulbs, the Internet, GPS, most flavours of operating systems + Java, DRAM, microprocessors, PCs, ..., were not invented in the US. Er, on second thought, they were.
It is unfortunate that the web site complains about how we work more hours than other Western nations but fails to mention that we produce the greatest amount of technological, scientific, etc. innovations of any nation no the planet. Not that working less is bad. Rather, we need to not be delluded into thinking that working less is nothing 100% pure good. The gains of working longer are more subtle. By being more industrious and creating more innovations, we speed up the increase in the standard of living via invention and mass production. By working less we have more spare time but also less progress. Taking it to the extreme, the idea that we should be able to sit on our butts most of the time doing nothing productive for maintaining our lives while still have a good and growing standard of living is demanding a fantasy devoid of any objective reality.
So yes, we work more than the medival workers as the web site says, but we are also progressing technology, industry, science, etc. and thus our standard of living many times faster than they ever did.
A better way to end the Oil Age is not for government to promote alternatives, but for government to stop promoting oil. Government puts up barriers to alternatives, either intentionally or unintentionally. For example, the tax code if used properly can make buying the most massive SUV you can find more profitable than buying a hybrid sedan. This is because they give tax breaks for heavy vehicles used for business (like trucks or large vans) but did not envision mainstream street cars weighing as much. So a self-employed person can get a $40,000 tax deduction for buying the most oil-dependent car on the market for "business" purposes. Plus the oil industry gets heaps of government subsidies and lower tax rates. Rather than subsidizing alternatives, a better solution is to stop subsidizing oil and make other industries pay equally low taxes as the oil companies so that there is an even playing field. Lowering the taxes to the least common denominator is important since high tax acts as a bigger barrier for small things than large corps, so the established oil industry would have more of an advantage if it and alternatives were paying equally high taxes than if both were paying equally low taxes. And I am sure there are plenty of other ways in which government makes barriers to alternatives.
And always remember: capitalism is not government control of the economy. So these barriers are anti-capitalist. A move towards capitalism via an actual seperation of commerce and State would help out a good deal in this scenario.
Hopefully this will irritate enough people that they will revolt against the TV. Then they will be forced to *gasp* enjoy outdoor activities like excercise or hiking through parks, or worse yet, forced to read books such as "Lord of the Rings" or "The Fountainhead"!
Seriously, though, you do not have a divine right to receive television signals in the format you demand. If broadcasters want to encrypt signals so they only work with DRM enabled TVs then so be it. (Though you do have a right to hack the TV you own and manufacturers have a right to make their TV however they want, regardless of what government says, as per the most basic principle of property rights upon which all rights are implemented.) So stop whining about how this will cut into your ability to see every episode of "Surviver" reality TV and start opening your mind to real reality.
Marx called for the abolition of all private property, which means there would be no free trade since the individuals of society would own everything. Free trade is a form of capitalism. Laissez faire capitalism to be exact, and the most pure form of capitalism. Marxism requires a government to intervene in the markets. For example, China with its pegged currency, control over the media, control over industry, etc. I suggest you read the works of prominent capitalists like Frederic Bastiat, Ayn Rand, the folks over at Cato, etc. to see for yourself.
This would be a case of capitalism trumping protectionism. By having real free trade, price fixing by region becomes impossible. (Unless you do some sort of technology BS like DVD regioning.) But for most things, like books, if you try to price fix by region and there are no barriers to international trade, then the books in the cheaper region will be resold in the expensive ones, undermining the producers attempt at price fixing. This is how real capitalism works once you have eliminated the policies of the pseudo-capitalists in the Republicans and socialists in the Democrats.
Of course, normally people here like to screem about all the lost jobs. This at least should help demonstrate the value of unfettered fair trade, the value of rejecting America's current uncapitalist economy and moving towards a fully capitalist free trade economy.
If you don't think this is capitalism, go read books by capitalists like Frederic Bastiat, Ayn Rand, Jim Lewis, etc. to see for yourself.
> Corporate politics is ruining what's left of the U.S., and is pulling a lot of other nations down with it.
That is very true. Though an emphasis on politics is needed. If we had a seperation of business and State, much like we demand a seperation of church and State, then many problem would be solved. Bear in mind that coporations running government only happens when your elected officials let it happen. Corporations can not legally engage in coersive acts if the government is not there to back them up using the government's legal monopoly on force. Corporations cannot buy government if the politicians have nothing to sell. Sadly, the People have allowed their elected officials to tightly couple business and government an an unholy marraige. So don't blame the corporations. Follow the money to find you crook. Where does it lead? It goes through Wall Street before taking a backroad into Capital Hill. If you think Wall Street is the problem, it's probably just a money laundering scheme for the folks down in DC.
Usually when /. stories are about government stepping in to stop those Big Bad Transnational Coporations, readers are frothing at the mouth to cheer on that government. Or when it's a story about an industry that isn't regulated enough we're all screaming for more regulation. Now that we see a socialist government stepping in to regulate the Internet, what happened to all the people who would normally be demanding we get this right here in the US of A since capitalism is so evil? Let this be a lesson: this is the sort of stupidity that happens when you let government run industry with its iron fist. As unplesant as unbridled industry can sometimes be, I'd gladly take the progress and inventions spawned forth from capitalist greed over the stagnant ineptitude of socialist beaurocrats, as seen in France.
"Brave, brave Concorde, you shall not have died in vain!" ... Yeah."
"Uh... I'm not quite dead, sir!"
"Well...you shall not have been *mortally wounded* in vain!"
"I think I could pull through, sir."
"No no, sweet Concorde, stay here. I will send help as soon as I've accomplished a daring and heroic economic recovery of the airline industry in my own particular..."
"Idiom, sir?"
"Idiom!"
"No, I feel fine, actually..."
"Farewell, sweet Concorde!!"
"I'll just stay here, then, shall I, sir?
I don't know enough about net infrastructure to debate privatization of it, but I can say that privatization of California power is not a valid comparson. It was never privatized. They just replaced one set of regulations with another set of regulations, quite possibly a worse set of regulations. For example, some "deregulated" energy lines still have price caps. This means less capital for the energy companies to invest in infrastructure upgrades but no market price checks to keep consumption under control, which artifially increases the load on the unupgraded infrastructure. And some "deregulated" (I use that word sarcastically) energy markets have regulations that force energy deliverers to deliver any competing supplier's power. This means investing in infrastructure helps everyone, but only the energy deliverer (who is also a supplier) gets hit with the costs. Thus it gives competitors an advantage when an energy delivery firm upgrades infrastructure, and so it gives energy delivery companies a disincentive to upgrade their lines. At least in the old method of regulation the monopoly was ensured a return on investment for investing in infrastructure upgrades.
I get so tired of people pointing to the California and the northeast blackout as testiments against deregulation when they were never even deregulated! They were just re-regulated. Never forget: a competetive market that exists only by virtue of government regulations is no more deregulated than a monopoly market that exists only by virtue of government regulations.
This is due to socialism. FDR worked hard at price and wage freezes during the war, so to allow people to get "raises" he offered tax breaks for employers to give their employees health insurance. That is where these programs originated. So that is a product of socialism, an attempt by the government to control people's wages. Though no one forces you to enroll in the employer's program. You can select "don't enroll". (And if you can't then your HR department is seriously screwed up!) The problem is that the government still offers tax breaks for these sorts of things, which makes it more expensive for yuo to go elsewhere. If government stopped intervening and gave equal tax breaks for all no matter where they got their insurance then you wouldn't have this problem.
I think what you attribute to Marx is more in synch with Emma Goldman, though I'm unfortunately not as familiar with her as I'd like...
I'm glad you brought this other issue up! There are three problems with it. One, it implies that those who run businesses don't work. Believe me, they do! Well, not always. You get slackers at all levels of a business, top executives and low level factory workers not an exception. But a well run business will have executives who work their butts off doing complex analyses, calculations, and forecasting that the vast majority of lazy bums off the street could never do.
Second, it gives capitalism a false description. I could go on about labour laws actually hurting things ("real" wages versus received wages by minimum wage induced inflation, minimum wage induced job displacement, etc.), but I think that'd get too far off track. So to stay focused, I'll point out that the quality workers in capitalism will rise up the pay scale. If you are an insurance owner and you see a field sales clerk who brings in triple the sales of any other, you promote that person to central office sales. If he continues to bring in twice as many sales, maybe you decide you want him in your marketing department to sell to the masses. The key is that this quality worker is a valuable partner for the business. If he does not get just compensation then off he goes to another company that will appreciate him. Thus your self interest will force you to reward him. And if he's really talented at not just sales and but also has a strong talent to run a business, he may then eventually run away with some VC to start his own company to run yours into the ground if he is not granted enough power to excercise his talent in your company.
Finally, sweatshops and so forth are largely due to a misclassification of property. Noting that property is the product of labour, ask yourself this: is land the product of your labour? I'm not talking about gardens, buildings, mines, roads and so forth that are created through labour upon the land, but just the raw land itself. The answer is no. Even people like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and the "father of capitalism and private property" Adam Smith have made statements along these lines. Thomas Paine in particular was a very strong advocate of this. This sort of thing leads into a land value tax, where the market value of the land but not the property built upon the land is taxed, but that's another story I won't get into extensivelly lest I write a novellete here. Essentially, capitalism which does not recognize that land can not be classified as property leads to land monopolies that cause sweat shops and so forth. (Similarly, Communism does not recognize that labour products are rightfully owned when in fact they can, a major flaw of that system.) I recommend research into "land value tax" and "geolibertarianism". (The latter is a branch of libertarianism that advocates this idea, but one does not need to be libertarian to advocate land value tax system.) There is also a faction in the Democrats called the Democratic Freedom Caucus that advocates LVT, and there is also the Thomas Paine Network for advocacy within Libertarian circles. Perhaps it's splitting hairs, but I personally would consider a system of free trade that does not classify land as pure property to still be capitalism. The spirit of capitalism is still very strong in that system, and many prominent capitalists of the past have said positive things about it.
What you describe is left-wing anarchy, or communism with a small letter c. Big letter C Communism is government that forces the abolishion of private property as per the writings of Marx. Stop by your local Revolution Books and you will see that Communism requires the existance of the State. Of course, either system is oppression. Property is the product of your labour. One must labour to promote one's life. Therefore, denying a right to property is denying one a right to promote his own life. Thus there is no right to your life without property; only the privilege to live if others are generous enough to promote your life. Property is the implementation of rights.
Sounds like you have a pretty crummy doctor and/or insurance company. Excercise your capitalist freedom to change to someone else. Maybe the hospital in the next town over runs a better operation than the one you went to, or maybe Bob's Insurance has less red tape than whatever company you are with. As for the $1,000, you would have paid it every April 15 under socialism, even if you didn't need the operation. Socialialism does not make things free. It only hides the cost so you don't realize how much it hurts your pocketbook.
Also, when you wait that long in socialism you really can't change providers. Sure, you could go to a private insurer if they hadn't been driven out of business by the government's forcibly subsidized monopoly. But you would be forced by the government to pay for the bad service whether you use it or not, so you thus have an explicit incentive to not seek out choice. Thus like many monopolies there is no market incentive for improvement. In fact, less incentive than a capitalistic monopoly since there is even less choice for the people; if I don't like my monopolistic electric bill then I try to use less air conditioning (market pressure on the electric company) or invest in more efficient light bulbs (market incentive for innovation) or look into installing some solar panels on my roof (more innovation). Monopolies suck, but government monopolies are the worst since the people are forced to subsidize them no matter how poor it is. Imagine how stagnant the technology coming out of an operating system monopoly would be if it was Congress using our taxes to create a "free" Operating System of the People with garunteed revenue (taxes) rather than Microsoft trying to stave off Apple, Sun, and Linux lest they lose revenue that was never garunteed for them. Now imagine that for other industries.
Well it beats communism or socialism where the state forces you down. A slim chance is better than no chance.
.COMs businesses in the last decade, the 90% morons coming up with moronic ideas for those .COM businesses, and the 90% morons who actually invested in those morons.
Plus I might add that often times failures are due to incompetance on the part of the failed person. For example, the 90% morons managing
Sometimes the great American Dream of success is out of reach because you just suck.
Here's a good reason why capitalism rocks: China, the former USSR, Canada, etc. If you don't like capitalism, spend a few years in China to try out an alternative. See how you enjoy the shared poverty. (Good luck owning a car over there!) Enjoy living unaccounted for in a jail cell because you went to the wrong wen sites. If you want a lesser extreme, try Canada with their socialism. Then you can wait in line for months to years for non-critical medical procedures that you could have been performed swiftly in the US. Gape on awe at how subsidies artificially inflate demand for frivolous medical treatments and how it makes the market incapable of meeting the capacity of its people's demands. Or you could try living the good old US of A where price caps on the government controlled energy industry caused it to have less money for upgrading infrastructure while artificially increasing consumer demand due to abnormally low prices, encouraging excessive consumption of energy. Here's the formula for that non-capitalistic system: forced increased load + forced less investment capital = government induced failed energy system.
Here's an idea. One of you ingenious capitalists out there could recognize the frustration ISPs are having and so invent a distributed DNS system. Then sell the software to companies that would like to take a hand at selling DNS services. ISPs irrate with Verisign could sign on to this and select which node they want to use and pay that service provider. Those that provide unreliable service or features everyone hates would lose business to those that play nice. Problem solved.
Maybe that is not technologically feasible so better yet, come up with DNS software (like the people behind BIND sort of did) that stops the irritating "features" from Verisign and sell that to ISPs. End result: Verisign gets put in its place by empowered ISPs. Or even better, ISPs could band together for their mutual profit by writing something themselves and sharing it among those who helped create it, using mutual cooperation to increase productivity among all participants. They could then use this to their advantage by advertising it to prospective customers as an anti-spam feature since it helps preserve anti-spam software that checks for domain spoofing. This leads to greater demand for ISPs that block Verisign, and thus the people put Verisign in its place. There's capitalism at work!
> preferrably untouchable (for the moment) by ultra-capitalist org's like Verisign
Or preferrably ultra-capitalist orgs unlike verisign would be allowed to touch it so that they would have to give in to market pressure. A government created monopoly like we have here is not a capitalist system. And putting ultra-socialist regulatory orgs in control would do nothing to help. That eliminates any motivation for progress, as indicated by the stagnant state of our socially regulated energy grid. (Newsflash: it was never deregulated.) People and organizations are typically quite unmotivated when they have to work for the good of everyone but themselves...