The consumers want one thing -- competition. Competition happens when government stays away from the market.
Actually, I think you will find that consumers just want a good product - not competition per se.
Competition itself is rather unattractive as it wastes resources that might be better utilized through cooperation and also has the nasty consequence of creating losers for all the winners that it creates.
A further problem is that the effectiveness of propaganda techniques used in advertising means that it is more profitable to invest in deceptive marketing and appearance than in the quality of a product.
How nice of you to generalize and lump all fundamentalist Christians into a big category as if every one them comes to their conclusions through the same straw man reasoning that you give when in fact there a wide variety of reasons any one person in that category has come to his or her beliefs including both rational and irrational ones.
For instance, I consider myself a fundamentalist Christian in the sense that I take the Bible to be true and the foundations of what Christian beliefs represent. However, I did not come to embrace this belief system because of blind faith in the Bible like in the well-known condescending caricature thrown around by presumptious atheist types.
Based upon my reason and experiences, I have a belief in a creator that we may call God. This belief is logically first in my religious belief system. Likewise, based upon my studying of historical evidences and my reason, I have belief in the accuracy of the content of the Gospels and the Epistles. Together with my knowledge of cultures of the time, my experiences, my knowledge of human nature, and my belief in God, I reasoned that Jesus of Nazareth was miraculously resurrected and that what He claimed about His relationship to God was true and that He spoke the truth. Finally, based upon historical accuracy when verifiable as well as the fact that Jesus and the early Church appear to have accepted the accuracy of the Old Testament scriptures, I accept them as such as well.
I have no desire to get into the various reasons why I believe in God or what reasoning brought me to believe in Jesus and His teachings. My point is that despite your stereotype, many Christians do not start with the Bible, but instead come to accept the Bible in the same way that you might accept the word of a trusted friend.
Finally, you may call the Bible "HIGHLY UNRELIABLE" if you like, but in so far as it is verifiable, it stands up remarkably well to critical examination. Yes, one can engage in hair-splitting over sections here and there if that is your cup of tea, and I have spent no small amount of time doing this sort of thing, but I have found that the questions raised always have reasonable answers and that usually the folks trying to find problems with the text are precommitted to disbelief rather than open minded enquirers. The real "problem" is the miraculous events recorded in it come smashing into conflict with any a priori commitment to the philosophy of naturalism.
I have found that at the heart of the matter is the world view of belief or disbelief. If you for one reason or another have accepted belief in a divine creator, then this changes the meaning of the very evidences one sees. Likewise, if you have for one reason or another rejected the belief in a creator and the possibility of miracles from the start, then even should something miraculous happen right before your eyes, you would still find means of doubting it. When we consider evidence, it is always colored by our fundamental worldviews.
The problem with a tiered internet is that large corporations could effectively censor via economic power dissenting voices that they don't like the same way that they do in other forms of media today. It's not a matter of "entitlement". It's a matter of protecting something of social value - namely the flourishing of freedom of speech on the internet.
What's your point with all this "entitlement" talk? Of course, you're not currently entitled to a neutral internet. That's the whole point of the discussion in that many of us are demanding the government to give us that very entitlement instead of granting a few corporations the entitlement to enjoy a high degree of power over the internet.
You're comments seem to take intellectual property (and presumably property in general) as though it were something sacred when in reality any form of property is just another entitlement or right that our current society has deemed useful to grant. Without a government or some form of social institution to uphold it, there is no such thing as property. At most there are possessions, those "things" that I or another person are currently using.
As far as intellectual property goes, the very concept is a flawed construct with no substance. Information is not an object that one can possess like a car or a toothbrush. When I share information with someone else, I am not losing the information and neither is the person who originally shared the information with me. This is quite different from a material possession where I must lose the object or steal it from someone else to give it to another person.
Patents, copyrights, and trademarks - the concepts that it is currently en vogue to collectively refer to as intellectual property - are outdated ideas that were created as solutions to the problem of providing incentives for the production of certain social goods. The intellectual property tag is a recent mental sleight of hand designed to capitalize upon our society's placing property rights on a sacred pedestal as though they were inalienable. There are alternative ways of solving the problems that patents, copyrights, and trademarks solved - ones that not only make more sense in the digital age, but that also eliminate the social ills that stem from the current solutions.
There are no naturally occurring rights. An entitlement or right is something that only exists when society in the form of ordered institutions decides to grant said right. As such, rights are not absolute and can be given or taken away. There is nothing inherit in the nature of the universe that entitles a musician or software company to have a monopoly on an idea and allow them to extract profit from this idea at the expense of artificially restricting people's freedom and ability to share information.
In short, we don't just have to get "used to it" when it comes to not having an entitlement to net neutrality or not legally being able to share information freely with a friend. A government can give corporations benefits, pork, and tax loops if the corporations lubricate the political campaign funds with generation contributions. Government granted rights are subject to change in the currents of power shifts. Likewise, a government can give people certain rights if the people fight for them. If people don't like the restrictions placed on them by the government, then they can fight for the freedoms that they desire. It's the only way historically that societies have made true advancements in human freedom.
As an advocate of human freedom, I am opposed to any State actions that seek to widen the powers of corporations especially when at the same time said actions will undercut our society's current gains in freedom. That is why I am very much opposed to the proposed two-tier internet and wish to see network neutrality protected.
Before I continue, I would like to applaud the comment from your post script. It's nice to discuss something like this without getting heated about it. We're two people with differing views but that doesn't mean we can't be polite to one another and even friendly in our discourse.:)
Now in regards to your main comment:
I don't agree with your analysis of the imbalances between central planning and capitalist free market economies. In both economies, you *might* be able to get ahead if you play by the system. In the centrally planned economy, you would need to join the party and impress the right people, etc. to get into planning or government positions with more power both politically and economically. Similarly, in our society, you generally have to know the right people, impress the right people in authority over you, sometimes have a little bit of good fortune, and often have a certain level of good genes or base wealth.
Yes, everybody likes to buy into the American Dream of rising from rags to riches, but that story's not the norm, rather it is the exception that proves the rule. While there are cases of rags to riches, I have never seen one myself. What I have seen is lower middle class kids (highly priviledged to begin with) moving into the upper middle class when they either have lots of talent, drive, or ambition. Sometimes, if the right opportunity hits, they may even move into the upper class by climbing the corporate ladder. But you're not likely to see a poor kid find himself becoming the CEO of some corporation let alone through honest hard work.
In a capitalist society, economic renumeration is based upon property ownership, power, and to some degree performance. We must ask ourselves if this is a just system of renumeration. Is it right to reward wealth with greater wealth? Is it right to reward someone for winning the genetic lottery? Is it right to reward someone for owning the means of production? Is it right to reward someone because they have more power and influence? I submit that in a just society, renumeration should only be given based upon one's efforts in producing a product valued by society (excluding the case of those who cannot work due to injury, illness or age).
In other words, a person should not be given a bigger slice of the economic pie just because they are smarter, have more influence, own a company, or have wealth inherited from daddy. As a programmer with a job sitting on my ass all day in a usually pleasant atmosphere, I shouldn't be making many times more than a person cleaning offices and toilets in my building all night. While I have my complaints about my job just like the next person, when I honestly compare it to many, many other jobs that pay much worse, I not only have a higher paying job, but I have one that is also more empowering, requires less labor, and has also sorts of cushy benefits.
But I can hear you saying that I went to college and have an education, etc. That's true, but why should that entitle me to a bigger slice of the pie for a more pleasant job? I know that even if it paid more than programming, I wouldn't want to do janitor work unless it paid a LOT more than programming and that says something about the kind of job it is and how injust it is to reward it with less pay than a more pleasant and empowering job.
I'm getting off the topic so rather than trying to reproduce a lot of information, I'll just say this: I am in favor of an economic system known as participatory economics or Parecon for short. This is a system that is different from both Soviet style central planning and Western style market capitalism. It is an economy that implements economic democracy and freedom, seeking to give everyone equal economic power with no hierarchies of those with power and those without it. Similarly, politically I favor libertarian socialism. In short, I am in favor of true bottom-up democracy in both politics and economics instead of what we have in Western "democracies" where elites gov
The only "advantages" to competition stem from our economy's basis in profit driven capitalism.
I am quite aware of the centrally planned economic system found in the old Soviet Union along with the fact that it was not an example of a communist economic system (where workers own and govern the means of production - not capitalists or government/party coordinators). I do not advocate centrally planned economies as they lead to the same kind of imbalances in economic and political power as capitalism only with different groups of people accumulating power. I favor a democratic participatory economy that ensures that people have equal power both politically and economically.
While I am not in favor of centrally planned economies and find much to criticize about them, I will give the devil his due and don't like painting false pictures that give too much credit to capitalism.
Was the Soviet Union wasteful? Yes, of course it was (how could it not be when its economic system created a power struggle between workers and coordinators), but that's not telling the whole story because as it turns out, the Soviet Union was not as wasteful as modern capitalist economies and actually outperformed its Western competitors for decades until its growth rates dipped below the capitalist nations in the beginning of the 80's when the problems of the state apparatus began to cause the country to fall apart. The Soviet Union's chief albatross was its dictatorial one-party political system not its economic system (which as I mentioned earlier still has its own problems).
The whole vote with your money by buying/not buying line from free market ideologues completely ignores the reality of markets and makes patently false assumptions that real markets consist of informed, rational, consumers when in the real world markets consist of often poorly informed consumers purchasing on irrational impulses conditioned through marketing.
In real world markets where misinformation is rampant and companies can outperform through image over substance, the consumer is the loser.
Even if we lived in a free market where every consumer had perfect information about the products that they purchased, we would still suffer from the waste of this competition between two competing formats. Think of how much of society's limited resources have been spent on developing each format separately and how one company's efforts will all be essentially a big waste once one of the format wins.
If socialism is so fragile that it can only work in theory, we should look for another theory.
Socialism is not fragile. It has worked quite well during brief episodes of history. The fact that civil wars, foreign plotted coups or embargos have destroyed all successes does not make Socialism fragile. This merely shows how much timing is important and how much the US and Western powers fear the idea of economic democracy and justice. It's just sad that Lenin and his followers played into their hands by setting up a dictatorship model and giving a useful straw man with which capitalists could terrorize people and distract them from the democratic and liberating ideas of socialism (as opposed to the Statist theories of Marx and Lenin to supposedly achieve socialism).
The lesson to learn from the Soviet Union and other so-called socialist countries is that using the tools of oppression to liberate people is a contradiction. You cannot liberate people by using the State. Power over others corrupts. The State must be abolished and power must be given into the hands of people directly both politically and economically.
That tired excuse has been used so many times that it's difficult to count them. "Proper socialism" has been tried countless times--the result is always disaster, and the blame is always placed on outsiders (Trotskyites!) who are allegedly sabotaging the socialist experiment.
That's just a bunch of hand waving. Show me a truly socialist country and THEN show me how that socialism contributed to its downfall or flaws and then maybe you will have something.
And don't just claim that all examples so far haven't been "true" socialism. If no true socialism has ever prevailed, then you must wonder why every single socialist experiment ends up degenerating into something else.
Well, the fact is that there have been several attempts and that they have all gone astray for differing reasons, but that by no means logically discredits the basic idea unless you can show that the idea logically caused the attempts to fail.
Several of the attempts failed because of allegiance to the ideas of Marx and Lenin and the idea that there must be a dictatorship by some vanguard party. Others failed for reasons of foreign sabotage or warfare.
The Anarchist-Syndicalist revolution during the Spanish Civil War actually had great successes, but was defeated ultimately because Franco's forces and the Communist forces had access to better weapons through German/Italian support and Soviet support respectively.
Several attempts in Latin American countries ranging from moderate attempts a wealth redistribution all the way to Marxist revolutions, were crushed by CIA coups, US Military intervention, and the funding of paramilitary squads.
Capitalism drastically raised the standard of living for everyone. Unions had little or nothing to do with it. Union participation has been decreasing since the 1930s and the standard of living for the middle class has increased dramatically since then.
Unions and strikes had everything to do with the increases in pay and in working conditions for the lower classes during the late 1800's and the early to mid 1900's. But then Union Leaders started becoming part of the system instead of a challenge to it and so started to become irrelevant. Not to mention the fact that war propaganda whipped the US into a patriotic fury during World War I and World War II and then US propaganda indoctrinated the masses with a deep fear of communism and the Soviet Union and associated them with unions and virtually any left-leaning movements. The combined effects caused unions to stop having much utility during the time period that you cite.
So what did cause the standard of living to rise? It wasn't capitalism, but rather technology, the opening of new markets with the crumbling empires of Europe, and the fact that in order to preserve itself the system has to increase the standard of living of everyone to some degree or else it breaks down via revolution or depression. As the economy grows from exploitation and technology, the crumbs from the powerful also get bigger.
Our country was rich before it traded with the 3rd world in any substantial form. The vast majority of the trade with the 3rd world we currently conduct is a result of reductions in trade barriers since the 1980s. Trade with the 3rd world was very slight during the first half of the 20th century--about all we imported was fruit from central america.
Well of course it was wealthy before then! It started off as a part of the wealthy British Empire in the resource rich land of North America. Then, it proceeded to expand across the entire continent from east to west and had other expansion desires as well. The US "liberated" Cuba and acquired favorable conditions for its businesses there during the Spanish-American war. As a bonus, we got the Philippines which we proceeded to crush when it rebelled against being our new territory and then we proceeded to make it a n
Well, you wouldn't accumulate money per se because for each planning period - barring emergencies or special considerations - you would only consume what you had planned to consume for the planning period. However, you could opt to plan to consume less than you are entitled to consume during a given period so as to consume more in a later period and this would effectively be similar to savings. However, you wouldn't have much need for truly huge savings as one does in a capitalist economy because basic human necessities and most likely even the average consumption level would continue to be provided for you after you were no longer able to work due to illness or age.
Taxes don't really play a role in a parecon because taxes are a means to pay for government employees and/or a means to redistrubute wealth (whether for good or ill). In a parecon, a government employee is payed in the same way that any other person is, i.e. a system of democratic planning through negotiations between workers councils and consumers councils. There is no need for a redistribution of wealth because in a parecon, everyone consumes roughly the same amount of the pie that society produces with small variations stemming from how much effort a person wishes to put forth.
The mechanics of parecon and how it differs from a capitalist (mixed or otherwise) economy (like the US) or a centrally planned economy (like the old Soviet Union) are too complicated for a detailed discussion here that would do them justice, but if you are interested you can find a wealth of information on the web here:
http://www.zmag.org/parecon/indexnew.htm
On the contrary, from what I've gathered from history, proper socialism has never been given a chance to sustain itself because the frightened forces of the upper classes in capitalist countries have always fought to sabotage and destabilize the governments and economies of countries that try socialist experiments.
Planned economies have proven quite excellent and sustainable as any large corporation's internal economy is essentially a planned one and hardly an efficient one at that, but they seem to do the job. Just imagine what an efficiently and democratically planned economy could achieve.
Capitalism only raised the standard of living for the upper classes in America. The rest came from social struggles from the lower classes (unions, strikes, etc.) and from the threat of true economic revolution. To keep the masses happy, small reforms were allowed so as to undercut the power of radical groups that sought to actually destroy the system. That way the system can survive and control is maintained with a minor loss of wealth from the controlling class to the lower and middle classes. The middle classes themselves act as a kind of buffer between the rich and the poor, so that the masses are divided and less capable of challenging those who accumulate and consolidate power and wealth.
Our country's massive and obscene wealth is built upon our businesses preying upon the blood and sweat of the poor in third-world countries. Our political and economic power acts like a siphon that sucks raw wealth from weak countries into our deep pockets.
We rose to power on the free market system and wouldn't be what we are today without it.
We rose to power by:
Starting off with a nice chunk of resource rich land acquired by revolting against the already powerful British empire
Aggressively expanding across resource rich North America through wars and genocide
Well-timed enties into World War I and World War II that consolidated world power into our hands from the ashes of the warring European empires
Ruthless elimination of any challenges to our power via warfare and CIA operations aimed at destabilization
Economic imperialism where our businesses drain natural resources and wealth from other countries through unbalanced negotiating power between the locals and the invading corporations.
Now other countries are rising up thanks (in some small part) to us spreading democracy and freedom around the world.
Last time, I checked China wasn't a beacon of democracy and freedom.
Furthermore, rather than spreading democracy and freedom, the history of the US Military and the CIA is filled with examples of us sabotaging democracies abroad and replacing them with dictatorships that offer our businesses favorable trade environments. Latin American history is full of colorful examples.
This is not the case under a participatory economy (parecon). By design, wealth and power do not accumulate in a parecon.
Under a parecon, businesses are organized in a non-hierarchical fashion with democratic self-management while renumeration is based upon effort instead of a combination of power, genetics, and luck.
Slashdot Mirror
The consumers want one thing -- competition. Competition happens when government stays away from the market.
Actually, I think you will find that consumers just want a good product - not competition per se.
Competition itself is rather unattractive as it wastes resources that might be better utilized through cooperation and also has the nasty consequence of creating losers for all the winners that it creates.
A further problem is that the effectiveness of propaganda techniques used in advertising means that it is more profitable to invest in deceptive marketing and appearance than in the quality of a product.
How nice of you to generalize and lump all fundamentalist Christians into a big category as if every one them comes to their conclusions through the same straw man reasoning that you give when in fact there a wide variety of reasons any one person in that category has come to his or her beliefs including both rational and irrational ones.
For instance, I consider myself a fundamentalist Christian in the sense that I take the Bible to be true and the foundations of what Christian beliefs represent. However, I did not come to embrace this belief system because of blind faith in the Bible like in the well-known condescending caricature thrown around by presumptious atheist types.
Based upon my reason and experiences, I have a belief in a creator that we may call God. This belief is logically first in my religious belief system. Likewise, based upon my studying of historical evidences and my reason, I have belief in the accuracy of the content of the Gospels and the Epistles. Together with my knowledge of cultures of the time, my experiences, my knowledge of human nature, and my belief in God, I reasoned that Jesus of Nazareth was miraculously resurrected and that what He claimed about His relationship to God was true and that He spoke the truth. Finally, based upon historical accuracy when verifiable as well as the fact that Jesus and the early Church appear to have accepted the accuracy of the Old Testament scriptures, I accept them as such as well.
I have no desire to get into the various reasons why I believe in God or what reasoning brought me to believe in Jesus and His teachings. My point is that despite your stereotype, many Christians do not start with the Bible, but instead come to accept the Bible in the same way that you might accept the word of a trusted friend.
Finally, you may call the Bible "HIGHLY UNRELIABLE" if you like, but in so far as it is verifiable, it stands up remarkably well to critical examination. Yes, one can engage in hair-splitting over sections here and there if that is your cup of tea, and I have spent no small amount of time doing this sort of thing, but I have found that the questions raised always have reasonable answers and that usually the folks trying to find problems with the text are precommitted to disbelief rather than open minded enquirers. The real "problem" is the miraculous events recorded in it come smashing into conflict with any a priori commitment to the philosophy of naturalism.
I have found that at the heart of the matter is the world view of belief or disbelief. If you for one reason or another have accepted belief in a divine creator, then this changes the meaning of the very evidences one sees. Likewise, if you have for one reason or another rejected the belief in a creator and the possibility of miracles from the start, then even should something miraculous happen right before your eyes, you would still find means of doubting it. When we consider evidence, it is always colored by our fundamental worldviews.
The problem with a tiered internet is that large corporations could effectively censor via economic power dissenting voices that they don't like the same way that they do in other forms of media today. It's not a matter of "entitlement". It's a matter of protecting something of social value - namely the flourishing of freedom of speech on the internet.
What's your point with all this "entitlement" talk? Of course, you're not currently entitled to a neutral internet. That's the whole point of the discussion in that many of us are demanding the government to give us that very entitlement instead of granting a few corporations the entitlement to enjoy a high degree of power over the internet.
You're comments seem to take intellectual property (and presumably property in general) as though it were something sacred when in reality any form of property is just another entitlement or right that our current society has deemed useful to grant. Without a government or some form of social institution to uphold it, there is no such thing as property. At most there are possessions, those "things" that I or another person are currently using.
As far as intellectual property goes, the very concept is a flawed construct with no substance. Information is not an object that one can possess like a car or a toothbrush. When I share information with someone else, I am not losing the information and neither is the person who originally shared the information with me. This is quite different from a material possession where I must lose the object or steal it from someone else to give it to another person.
Patents, copyrights, and trademarks - the concepts that it is currently en vogue to collectively refer to as intellectual property - are outdated ideas that were created as solutions to the problem of providing incentives for the production of certain social goods. The intellectual property tag is a recent mental sleight of hand designed to capitalize upon our society's placing property rights on a sacred pedestal as though they were inalienable. There are alternative ways of solving the problems that patents, copyrights, and trademarks solved - ones that not only make more sense in the digital age, but that also eliminate the social ills that stem from the current solutions.
There are no naturally occurring rights. An entitlement or right is something that only exists when society in the form of ordered institutions decides to grant said right. As such, rights are not absolute and can be given or taken away. There is nothing inherit in the nature of the universe that entitles a musician or software company to have a monopoly on an idea and allow them to extract profit from this idea at the expense of artificially restricting people's freedom and ability to share information.
In short, we don't just have to get "used to it" when it comes to not having an entitlement to net neutrality or not legally being able to share information freely with a friend. A government can give corporations benefits, pork, and tax loops if the corporations lubricate the political campaign funds with generation contributions. Government granted rights are subject to change in the currents of power shifts. Likewise, a government can give people certain rights if the people fight for them. If people don't like the restrictions placed on them by the government, then they can fight for the freedoms that they desire. It's the only way historically that societies have made true advancements in human freedom.
As an advocate of human freedom, I am opposed to any State actions that seek to widen the powers of corporations especially when at the same time said actions will undercut our society's current gains in freedom. That is why I am very much opposed to the proposed two-tier internet and wish to see network neutrality protected.
Before I continue, I would like to applaud the comment from your post script. It's nice to discuss something like this without getting heated about it. We're two people with differing views but that doesn't mean we can't be polite to one another and even friendly in our discourse. :)
Now in regards to your main comment:
I don't agree with your analysis of the imbalances between central planning and capitalist free market economies. In both economies, you *might* be able to get ahead if you play by the system. In the centrally planned economy, you would need to join the party and impress the right people, etc. to get into planning or government positions with more power both politically and economically. Similarly, in our society, you generally have to know the right people, impress the right people in authority over you, sometimes have a little bit of good fortune, and often have a certain level of good genes or base wealth.
Yes, everybody likes to buy into the American Dream of rising from rags to riches, but that story's not the norm, rather it is the exception that proves the rule. While there are cases of rags to riches, I have never seen one myself. What I have seen is lower middle class kids (highly priviledged to begin with) moving into the upper middle class when they either have lots of talent, drive, or ambition. Sometimes, if the right opportunity hits, they may even move into the upper class by climbing the corporate ladder. But you're not likely to see a poor kid find himself becoming the CEO of some corporation let alone through honest hard work.
In a capitalist society, economic renumeration is based upon property ownership, power, and to some degree performance. We must ask ourselves if this is a just system of renumeration. Is it right to reward wealth with greater wealth? Is it right to reward someone for winning the genetic lottery? Is it right to reward someone for owning the means of production? Is it right to reward someone because they have more power and influence? I submit that in a just society, renumeration should only be given based upon one's efforts in producing a product valued by society (excluding the case of those who cannot work due to injury, illness or age).
In other words, a person should not be given a bigger slice of the economic pie just because they are smarter, have more influence, own a company, or have wealth inherited from daddy. As a programmer with a job sitting on my ass all day in a usually pleasant atmosphere, I shouldn't be making many times more than a person cleaning offices and toilets in my building all night. While I have my complaints about my job just like the next person, when I honestly compare it to many, many other jobs that pay much worse, I not only have a higher paying job, but I have one that is also more empowering, requires less labor, and has also sorts of cushy benefits.
But I can hear you saying that I went to college and have an education, etc. That's true, but why should that entitle me to a bigger slice of the pie for a more pleasant job? I know that even if it paid more than programming, I wouldn't want to do janitor work unless it paid a LOT more than programming and that says something about the kind of job it is and how injust it is to reward it with less pay than a more pleasant and empowering job.
I'm getting off the topic so rather than trying to reproduce a lot of information, I'll just say this: I am in favor of an economic system known as participatory economics or Parecon for short. This is a system that is different from both Soviet style central planning and Western style market capitalism. It is an economy that implements economic democracy and freedom, seeking to give everyone equal economic power with no hierarchies of those with power and those without it. Similarly, politically I favor libertarian socialism. In short, I am in favor of true bottom-up democracy in both politics and economics instead of what we have in Western "democracies" where elites gov
The only "advantages" to competition stem from our economy's basis in profit driven capitalism.
I am quite aware of the centrally planned economic system found in the old Soviet Union along with the fact that it was not an example of a communist economic system (where workers own and govern the means of production - not capitalists or government/party coordinators). I do not advocate centrally planned economies as they lead to the same kind of imbalances in economic and political power as capitalism only with different groups of people accumulating power. I favor a democratic participatory economy that ensures that people have equal power both politically and economically.
While I am not in favor of centrally planned economies and find much to criticize about them, I will give the devil his due and don't like painting false pictures that give too much credit to capitalism.
Was the Soviet Union wasteful? Yes, of course it was (how could it not be when its economic system created a power struggle between workers and coordinators), but that's not telling the whole story because as it turns out, the Soviet Union was not as wasteful as modern capitalist economies and actually outperformed its Western competitors for decades until its growth rates dipped below the capitalist nations in the beginning of the 80's when the problems of the state apparatus began to cause the country to fall apart. The Soviet Union's chief albatross was its dictatorial one-party political system not its economic system (which as I mentioned earlier still has its own problems).
Precisely!
The whole vote with your money by buying/not buying line from free market ideologues completely ignores the reality of markets and makes patently false assumptions that real markets consist of informed, rational, consumers when in the real world markets consist of often poorly informed consumers purchasing on irrational impulses conditioned through marketing.
In real world markets where misinformation is rampant and companies can outperform through image over substance, the consumer is the loser.
Even if we lived in a free market where every consumer had perfect information about the products that they purchased, we would still suffer from the waste of this competition between two competing formats. Think of how much of society's limited resources have been spent on developing each format separately and how one company's efforts will all be essentially a big waste once one of the format wins.
Competition is wasteful.
The lesson to learn from the Soviet Union and other so-called socialist countries is that using the tools of oppression to liberate people is a contradiction. You cannot liberate people by using the State. Power over others corrupts. The State must be abolished and power must be given into the hands of people directly both politically and economically.
That's just a bunch of hand waving. Show me a truly socialist country and THEN show me how that socialism contributed to its downfall or flaws and then maybe you will have something.
Well, the fact is that there have been several attempts and that they have all gone astray for differing reasons, but that by no means logically discredits the basic idea unless you can show that the idea logically caused the attempts to fail.
Several of the attempts failed because of allegiance to the ideas of Marx and Lenin and the idea that there must be a dictatorship by some vanguard party. Others failed for reasons of foreign sabotage or warfare.
The Anarchist-Syndicalist revolution during the Spanish Civil War actually had great successes, but was defeated ultimately because Franco's forces and the Communist forces had access to better weapons through German/Italian support and Soviet support respectively.
Several attempts in Latin American countries ranging from moderate attempts a wealth redistribution all the way to Marxist revolutions, were crushed by CIA coups, US Military intervention, and the funding of paramilitary squads.
Unions and strikes had everything to do with the increases in pay and in working conditions for the lower classes during the late 1800's and the early to mid 1900's. But then Union Leaders started becoming part of the system instead of a challenge to it and so started to become irrelevant. Not to mention the fact that war propaganda whipped the US into a patriotic fury during World War I and World War II and then US propaganda indoctrinated the masses with a deep fear of communism and the Soviet Union and associated them with unions and virtually any left-leaning movements. The combined effects caused unions to stop having much utility during the time period that you cite.
So what did cause the standard of living to rise? It wasn't capitalism, but rather technology, the opening of new markets with the crumbling empires of Europe, and the fact that in order to preserve itself the system has to increase the standard of living of everyone to some degree or else it breaks down via revolution or depression. As the economy grows from exploitation and technology, the crumbs from the powerful also get bigger.
Well of course it was wealthy before then! It started off as a part of the wealthy British Empire in the resource rich land of North America. Then, it proceeded to expand across the entire continent from east to west and had other expansion desires as well. The US "liberated" Cuba and acquired favorable conditions for its businesses there during the Spanish-American war. As a bonus, we got the Philippines which we proceeded to crush when it rebelled against being our new territory and then we proceeded to make it a n
Well, you wouldn't accumulate money per se because for each planning period - barring emergencies or special considerations - you would only consume what you had planned to consume for the planning period. However, you could opt to plan to consume less than you are entitled to consume during a given period so as to consume more in a later period and this would effectively be similar to savings. However, you wouldn't have much need for truly huge savings as one does in a capitalist economy because basic human necessities and most likely even the average consumption level would continue to be provided for you after you were no longer able to work due to illness or age.
Taxes don't really play a role in a parecon because taxes are a means to pay for government employees and/or a means to redistrubute wealth (whether for good or ill). In a parecon, a government employee is payed in the same way that any other person is, i.e. a system of democratic planning through negotiations between workers councils and consumers councils. There is no need for a redistribution of wealth because in a parecon, everyone consumes roughly the same amount of the pie that society produces with small variations stemming from how much effort a person wishes to put forth.
The mechanics of parecon and how it differs from a capitalist (mixed or otherwise) economy (like the US) or a centrally planned economy (like the old Soviet Union) are too complicated for a detailed discussion here that would do them justice, but if you are interested you can find a wealth of information on the web here: http://www.zmag.org/parecon/indexnew.htm
On the contrary, from what I've gathered from history, proper socialism has never been given a chance to sustain itself because the frightened forces of the upper classes in capitalist countries have always fought to sabotage and destabilize the governments and economies of countries that try socialist experiments.
Planned economies have proven quite excellent and sustainable as any large corporation's internal economy is essentially a planned one and hardly an efficient one at that, but they seem to do the job. Just imagine what an efficiently and democratically planned economy could achieve.
Capitalism only raised the standard of living for the upper classes in America. The rest came from social struggles from the lower classes (unions, strikes, etc.) and from the threat of true economic revolution. To keep the masses happy, small reforms were allowed so as to undercut the power of radical groups that sought to actually destroy the system. That way the system can survive and control is maintained with a minor loss of wealth from the controlling class to the lower and middle classes. The middle classes themselves act as a kind of buffer between the rich and the poor, so that the masses are divided and less capable of challenging those who accumulate and consolidate power and wealth.
Our country's massive and obscene wealth is built upon our businesses preying upon the blood and sweat of the poor in third-world countries. Our political and economic power acts like a siphon that sucks raw wealth from weak countries into our deep pockets.We rose to power by:
Now other countries are rising up thanks (in some small part) to us spreading democracy and freedom around the world.
Last time, I checked China wasn't a beacon of democracy and freedom.
Furthermore, rather than spreading democracy and freedom, the history of the US Military and the CIA is filled with examples of us sabotaging democracies abroad and replacing them with dictatorships that offer our businesses favorable trade environments. Latin American history is full of colorful examples.
This is not the case under a participatory economy (parecon). By design, wealth and power do not accumulate in a parecon. Under a parecon, businesses are organized in a non-hierarchical fashion with democratic self-management while renumeration is based upon effort instead of a combination of power, genetics, and luck.