In the name of violence

[NovelGentry]

1) How did the idea of ownership of land come into existence? Who was the first to own land, and how did they come into this ownership? Did others begin owning land the same way?


2) How does capitalism sustain itself indefinitely? That is, how do profits continually increase without eventual saturation of human labor resources?

3) If they do eventually saturate human labor resources, how would they continue making profit without providing an indefinite amount of credit, which would remain only virtual profit? That is to say, if the people who produce their products are also the consumers? How would they increase product price while maintaining wages to sustain the same amount of profit? Would less not be able to afford? same thing if they decrease wages and maintain product price.

4) How does someone who is born into a poor family have equal opportunities to someone born into a rich family? (assuming the family is going to help them in their life endeavors)

Use this specific example if it helps:

The rich boy has the opportunity to never work a day in his life, living off his father's extensive stock portfolio and business assets.

By what cause does the poor boy have the ability to never work a day in his life and survive?

Or is this not an "opportunity"?

5) If someone is working 80+ hours a week, it is possible to say their life is consumed by work and work alone. Is this not the purpose of a machine?

6) We've all heard "living beyond our means" is bad, but for some people living beyond their means is the only way to live. If it is not possible, given the wages they're being paid, to live without credit, is it their fault for going into debt? Do you have a way to show it's possible for every person to live without credit?

7) How is it that 14% of the US population lives on less than $5 a day after the cost of shelter if we have equal opportunity? Is 14% of the US population just lazy?

-------------

I'm not so much looking for real answers to these issues, because I'm rather certain they don't exist. I'm moreso just looking to read some hilarious and baseless justification for them.

[NovelGentry]

BUMPITY BUMP IN THE FUCKING NIGHT

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

durrr . . . shut up stoopid comme. america will kills u!
you just love violence! the army wills stomp you!


Seriously though, do you actually expect anybody to respond to this? Probably two-thirds of these dorks base their belief in capitalism on some mythical "non-intiation of force". Confronted with the evident truth, they have little choice but to avoid it.

[Publius]

durrr . . . shut up stoopid comme. america will kills u!
you just love violence! the army wills stomp you!


Seriously though, do you actually expect anybody to respond to this? Probably two-thirds of these dorks base their belief in capitalism on some mythical "non-intiation of force". Confronted with the evident truth, they have little choice but to avoid it.

If I respond to this thread will you promise to shoot yourself?

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Originally posted by [email protected] 7 2005, 07:45 PM

durrr . . . shut up stoopid comme. america will kills u!
you just love violence! the army wills stomp you!


Seriously though, do you actually expect anybody to respond to this? Probably two-thirds of these dorks base their belief in capitalism on some mythical "non-intiation of force". Confronted with the evident truth, they have little choice but to avoid it.

If I respond to this thread will you promise to shoot yourself?
If yr response fails to justify the violence inherent in the capitalist system, will you promise to shoot a cop? ;)

[Publius]

Let the hilarity ensue.

Really though, if you're so much smarter than we are, why don't you actually do something instead of wasting your vast intellect grunting with trogdolytes such as us? Surely you could ammass all the world's capital with your superiour knowledge of the workings of the capitalist system and merely change America to communism on a whim.

You clearly ARE the greatest economist to ever live, what with your ability to reduce us seeming bastions of capitalist intelligentsia into mere puddles of gray matter soaking your carpet.

If you were so smart, how is it that only you and other communists realize it?


1) How did the idea of ownership of land come into existence? Who was the first to own land, and how did they come into this ownership? Did others begin owning land the same way?


The idea of land ownership came into existance after the idea of property in general as it's a logical continuation.

The first to own land were the first people who learned about agriculture and grew food for their own survival.

It's logical to say you own the spear you made, correct?

It's also logical to say you own the land in which you farm to sustain yourself. Agreed?

This concept went through some refinement, namely, governments being created that had control of land and then, on to fuedalism. Under these systems, the government or the local lord was in control of land and he would dole it out to serfs/peasants and other lords as he saw fit. This system sucked as property only existed for a very few.

Fast forward to the Enlightenment.

People had rights and freedoms and all that jazz. Also the concept of equal rights, including equal property rights.

Locke states that people had a right to own property and it was the states job to protect this as part of the social contract.

Skip ahead the the American revolution.

We have some documents we need to write. We base these off of Enlightment ideas of freedom and personal rights, namely the right to property.

How's that?

Of course you hate the concept of private property anyway so that was quite a useless task.


2) How does capitalism sustain itself indefinitely? That is, how do profits continually increase without eventual saturation of human labor resources?

Capitalism sustains itself indefinitely by continuing to increase efficiency, reduce costs and increase production. Basically, the same way it always has.

Profits continually increase becuase no point of saturation exists or could be reached if it did.

For that to happen the economy would have to be at the "end" as it were. There is no "end", only a contination. Perhaps great changes in the way things work in the economy, none can tell what things will be like in 300 years with any certainty, but the basic concepts of supply and demand and cost and profit will always be able to work.



3) If they do eventually saturate human labor resources, how would they continue making profit without providing an indefinite amount of credit, which would remain only virtual profit? That is to say, if the people who produce their products are also the consumers? How would they increase product price while maintaining wages to sustain the same amount of profit? Would less not be able to afford? same thing if they decrease wages and maintain product price.

Firstly, the amount of people isn't static and will continue to rocket upwards.

This alone should prevent any sort of saturation.

Secondly, this theory states that at some point the economy will be so perfect that the only way it can reduce cost is through labor. The economy isn't that efficient.

Thirdly, when could such a point ever be reached even if it were possible?

Even if this could theoritically happen, realistically, problems will always exist that prevent "perfect" productio such as natural diasters, human errors and general ineptitude.




4) How does someone who is born into a poor family have equal opportunities to someone born into a rich family? (assuming the family is going to help them in their life endeavors)

Use this specific example if it helps:

The rich boy has the opportunity to never work a day in his life, living off his father's extensive stock portfolio and business assets.

By what cause does the poor boy have the ability to never work a day in his life and survive?

Or is this not an "opportunity"?

He doesn't.

But would communism, or any other system for that matter, afford him and everyone else that oppurtunity? Logically, not everyone can refuse to work or nothing be done.

This is a non-issue.


5) If someone is working 80+ hours a week, it is possible to say their life is consumed by work and work alone. Is this not the purpose of a machine?

Yes, it's possible to say that. There are many different situations where this could happen, but yes, you could say that.

How is that the purpose of a machine?


6) We've all heard "living beyond our means" is bad, but for some people living beyond their means is the only way to live. If it is not possible, given the wages they're being paid, to live without credit, is it their fault for going into debt? Do you have a way to show it's possible for every person to live without credit?

Why wouldn't it be possible? Why should their wages be higher than market value? If the capitalist isn't making a profit off of their labor, he won't higher them.

Let me put it another way: Living beyond your means is fine if you understand the risk involved.

As such, if you don't want to take the risk, don't take out credit.


7) How is it that 14% of the US population lives on less than $5 a day after the cost of shelter if we have equal opportunity? Is 14% of the US population just lazy?


Because equal oppurtunity doesn't gurantee equal results.

And if the poor in America were so poor why is it that:

"Today, the expenditures per person of the lowest-income one-fifth (or quintile) of households equal those of the median American household in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation"



Here are some real statistics about poverty in America: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm



I'm not so much looking for real answers to these issues, because I'm rather certain they don't exist. I'm moreso just looking to read some hilarious and baseless justification for them.

You are so smart, it's my pleasure to provide you with even a minute fraction of an iota of enjoyment.

[praxus]

If you aren't going to listen, then quite frankly no one is going to respond seriously to this thread.

[NovelGentry]

It's logical to say you own the spear you made, correct?

It's also logical to say you own the land in which you farm to sustain yourself. Agreed?

These are two different analogies. If the first was anything like the second you would own the tree you made the spear from. It's logical to say you own the products of your labor as it's logical to say you own your labor power, however, it is not logical to say you own the material means by which that product came into existence.

We can only make what nature grants us the ability to combined with our labor power, it's safe to say we have rights to one, but that does not make it automatic that we have rights to another, particularly to restrict others from having an equal right to it.


Basically, the same way it always has.

It had continually reduced costs by employing cheap labor. When it saturated the labor market here and had to eventually sell it's products to people here, it had to increase their wage and find a new means of cheap labor. If you increase efficiency by machines you lay off workers, thus creating a smaller consumer market, thereby damaging profits. Indeed the first method is the preferred and usually is the cheapest as if the labor market is open to your exploitation, it is the cheapest. Thus it is most cost efficient to saturate the market before any other attempts at cost efficiency be seriously tried.

Exactly what other way can you increase cost efficiency without damaging current consumers or potential consumers?


Profits continually increase becuase no point of saturation exists or could be reached if it did.

So why have capitalists moved their production market to the third world? Certainly it had something to do with social compromises being established. Eight hour work days and illegalization of child labor for example, but why did those come? I suppose it was out of the moral imperitive of the government, right? Not like people were demanding better conditions and fairer treatment or anything. What makes you think the same won't happen in current cheap labor markets?


For that to happen the economy would have to be at the "end" as it were. There is no "end", only a contination. Perhaps great changes in the way things work in the economy, none can tell what things will be like in 300 years with any certainty, but the basic concepts of supply and demand and cost and profit will always be able to work.

Well at least we know you can SAY it will always be able to work. Unfortunately the growth of capitalism contradicts it's own ability to always work. The supply supply portion supersedes the damand however. If the supply is non existent, there can be no demand. If the supply is not cheap enough (cheap labor) demand will slow due to higher prices, and if cheap labor is no longer to be found, in order to sustain the same profit one has two options: 1) lower costs so demand increases and more product is sold at less money creating equal or more profit or 2) increase costs so that demand decreases but for each product sold equal or more profit is brought in. You could always increase wage to increase possible demand on higher priced products, but either way you're losing money on one end of the market.

You've done nothing to show profit can increase indefinitely, and little more than simply saying "It will work forever cause I said it will."


Firstly, the amount of people isn't static and will continue to rocket upwards.

Yes, and the earth grows in size with the human population too!

Capitalism is very rapid, compared with population growth it'd be difficult to say no labor market could ever be saturated, if it was possible to say that, third world nations would not necessarily be in the positions they are today.

Furthermore, as labor forces turn towards capitalism in such nations, there two becomes a bourgeois class in that nation which expands with that labor force increase.


This alone should prevent any sort of saturation.

It should, but it doesn't, instead it only shows up as booms and busts, excess and recess, to which the government regulation is necessary as an attempt to counter it.

It should, but the only way you could is by slowing capitalism down.


Secondly, this theory states that at some point the economy will be so perfect that the only way it can reduce cost is through labor. The economy isn't that efficient.

So perfect? I don't consider and unstable mess as perfect. This theory states oversupply will extend itself in the form of credit to keep profits going. It states that eventually this oversupply will extend itself in the form of new consumer markets which will of course spread into the current cheap labor markets and requires wage increase or price decrease. It states that capitalism is continually growing beyond it's demand and thus makes whatever bullshit attempt it can to deal with that just to save the almighty profit.

It states that eventually only so much can be done. The worst thing of all being of course that exploitation of the working class becomes sufficiently thorough, at least for a time, but the more thorough it gets, the more the working class becomes conscious of it and eventually overthrows it.


Thirdly, when could such a point ever be reached even if it were possible?

Are you looking for a date? I've never crunched the numbers, but I saw some crazy kid at Harvard who said he did -- he gave it a decade. I'm much more conservative. HAHAH Imagine that, me, conservative.

Given that China went from a capitalist labor market to a capitalist consumer market in several decades alone and it has a HUGE population, I'd guess maybe 50 years for the current third world nations before we see major exploitation under all markets.


Even if this could theoritically happen, realistically, problems will always exist that prevent "perfect" productio such as natural diasters, human errors and general ineptitude.

Yes, but capitalism rights these errors, at least to a certain degree, enough so that they don't barge in on it's profit parade. These are all matters of cost efficiency? are they not? If you have to keep reparing buildings on fault lines for your factories, would you not look to move your factories? In the long run would this not be more cost efficient?

It's like a runaway train coming up on a sharp bend in the track, and it's only increasing it's speed. Good luck having it not derail.


He doesn't.

But would communism, or any other system for that matter, afford him and everyone else that oppurtunity? Logically, not everyone can refuse to work or nothing be done.

This is a non-issue.

Well the difference is it affords everyone the opportunity not to work on the threat of life alone. Under capitalism this threat is only applicable to the working class. In fact, there is no threat for the capitalist if he doesn't work. Instead his only threat is if all his workers stop working, and indeed ALL the workers who produce what is necessary for society.

In essence, communism puts everyone in such a position. There is no threat to an individual life if they stop working, there is no threat to any life unless the great majoirty or all of the people start working. For the working class of capitalism the threat of death is nearly immediate upon this decision.

Again, this is an issue of equality. It's not an issue of saying we can all stop working and be fine. No one claims communism or any other system can do this, we only claim we can make the opportunity, that threat or lack there of, and the possibilities of life equal to all.


How is that the purpose of a machine?

Machines have a purpose other than work? The purpose of a machine is to work, always, it sleeps so long as there is no one running it. Capitalism brings human life to this level. We work one day, so that we may live to tomorrow, only so that we may work again. Certainly not all human life is this way under capitalism, lots of people have time to enjoy life. I can only recognize the own luxury that I have in light of my ability to post here, the luxury that I can spend such time doing this and still survive.


Why wouldn't it be possible? Why should their wages be higher than market value? If the capitalist isn't making a profit off of their labor, he won't higher them.

Let me put it another way: Living beyond your means is fine if you understand the risk involved.

As such, if you don't want to take the risk, don't take out credit

The risk of living beyond your means is the very same risk for some people as living by their means, starvation, freezing to death, dying of some disease that's easily preventable with proper medical attention.

There is nothing that credit does for some people accept prolong this. This does not make their eventual collapse under credit their fault. It was never their fault that they had to get the credit to begin with. Unless you consider dying a feasible option that would have given them a choice.

Their wages shouldn't be higher than "market value." Their wages should be equal to the product their labor produces. "Market value" need not exist.

If the capitalist doesn't exist they need not be hired by him, they need only to work to produce what is necessary to survive. Returning us to a very natural freedom, the freedom where we are limited by our existence alone.

I may have quoted this for you before, it is a section from my book, surely others around the board are getting sick of this by now:


The nature of freedom is that of dual meaning. In simplest terms the freedom of men is bound on two levels -- first by the nature of man himself as both a physical and metaphysical presence, and second by terms of survival, which have been placed on man by nature, but also by other men. To be truly free is to return to the true nature of man, whereby we are limited only by our own personal incapacity and that which is lent to us by natural survival.

Capitalism is indeed an infringement on the freedom of all men. It is first and foremost an infringement on the freedom of the working class, who must recognize wage-slavery as an order of survival. It is too, however, an infringement on the freedoms of the ruling class who are forced to uphold the mechanisms of capitalism or face the same fate as the working class. Subsequently the infringement on the freedom of the ruling class looks to extend the infringement on the freedom of the working class, i.e. the members of the ruling class are no more free to stop exploiting those of the working class than those of the working class are to be free from that exploitation, by chance that if they did, they too would be subjected to such exploitation.

The last sentence of the first paragraph is what we as communists seek to do. No more subjugation of labor of man by man, only by what is required for wanted existence.


Because equal oppurtunity doesn't gurantee equal results.

And yet you never REALLY explained how the capitalist and the working class man have equal opportunity.


And if the poor in America were so poor why is it that:

"Today, the expenditures per person of the lowest-income one-fifth (or quintile) of households equal those of the median American household in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation"

Credit has increased here, cheap labor has moved elsewhere. There are certain necessities of this society that are not exactly necessities of man. One example being swift transportation. Public transportation is not available in all areas, in fact, it's not available in most areas, particularly where people need to travel longer distances to get to work. In other places, where it is available it is unreliable and still costs a significant amount of money, sometimes even more than it would for a car and gas in the long run. Thus personal transporation has become something of a necessity for the working class here.

Also, you're taking it out of a cultural context. Look at how many of those median American households in 1970s only had one parent working. Now there are two, initially this might create a bit of a boom, until the system itself catches up (which it is obviously doing now). You say not everyone is an economist, yet you expect people to plan their personal finances as if they were one.

There's also probably a bunch of other reasons that I've not even touched light upon.


Here are some real statistics about poverty in America: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm

Again there are certain new necessities to life. For example, the reason microwaves and dishwashers may be a necessity is if no persons in the household have enough time to cook a real meal or wash dishes. While a VCR/DVD player and TV are luxuries the poverty stricken of other countries don't have, I don't find it acceptable that such miniscule forms of entertainment have become something of a norm. For you it would certainly seem OK if these people did nothing more than survived, again, like a machine.

This does not account for the age, price, or any factors for how they acquired this object. I can get a working VCR for around 3 bucks at a yard sale.

All that is done by showing their living conditions here is explaining the growth of capitalism in one country as it relates here. This is rather foolish as economies are established and perpetuated nationally speaking, thus what becomes relative for poverty in the US will not be what is relative for poverty in India. Certainly you can say "well quit *****ing, we don't have it so bad off." Then again, neither will people in India or China in a few more decades. That is the nature of capitalism. Furthermore, we fight for the global emancipation of the working class, not just those of the US.

The US statistic was used to show that it's not all peaches and cream here, something surely you would not recognize apparently since you don't look too far beyond your suburban realm.


You are so smart, it's my pleasure to provide you with even a minute fraction of an iota of enjoyment.

Thanks.

[NovelGentry]

If you aren't going to listen, then quite frankly no one is going to respond seriously to this thread.

As if you've bothered to listen to anything we've said.

[Lamanov]

[Skiping lines doesnt make you smarter] RE: pt.1 [today we'll deal with history, so it wont be too heavy for you all at once]

"The idea of land ownership came into existance after the idea of property in general as it's a logical continuation.
The first to own land were the first people who learned about agriculture and grew food for their own survival.
It's logical to say you own the spear you made, correct?
It's also logical to say you own the land in which you farm to sustain yourself. Agreed?"

- Idealist standpoint doesnt apply there. Its not logical, but rather blury. "Idea" of properity is a result of labour division. Groups that worked in one line of work [f.e. metalworking, agriculture..] decided to keep the tools or land they were working on. Old genitile norms were unweare of such measures and therefore couldnt stop it. This was the first base for exploatation and later - formation of state. It is no surprise that you adequately missed to answer the last question : "Did others begin owning land the same way", because not any hypocrit cappie can answer that question without knowing that there was usage of force.

"This concept went through some refinement, namely, governments being created that had control of land and then, on to fuedalism. Under these systems, the government or the local lord was in control of land and he would dole it out to serfs/peasants and other lords as he saw fit. This system sucked as property only existed for a very few."

- State was created by the higher class for it to preserve private properity, and its organs, such as standing armed force, judicial system, were created to ensure the means of exploatation. Capitalism is no different. Its a qualitative leap forward, no doublt, but within the same terms of existance of private properity.

"Also the concept of equal rights, including equal property rights."

- Equal properity rights in the terms of existance of private properity do not ensure equal properity, now do they ?

"Locke states that people had a right to own property and it was the states job to protect this as part of the social contract."

- Social contract theory doesnt apply any more. But even at that, half of this conception is true : its states' job to preserve properity. Turn the flipside : its states' job to ensure the exploatation.

"Of course you hate the concept of private property anyway so that was quite a useless task."

[u]- "Turn the flipside..."

[NovelGentry]

Grandios Post DJ-TC, as a new member my confidence has grown signficantly given you took the time to actually ensure he answered my questions ;).

I don't even bother to do that, I just argue the further points he makes.

[Publius]

Originally posted by [email protected] 7 2005, 09:45 PM




These are two different analogies. If the first was anything like the second you would own the tree you made the spear from. It's logical to say you own the products of your labor as it's logical to say you own your labor power, however, it is not logical to say you own the material means by which that product came into existence.

We can only make what nature grants us the ability to combined with our labor power, it's safe to say we have rights to one, but that does not make it automatic that we have rights to another, particularly to restrict others from having an equal right to it.

No, they're quite similair.

"Land" is just dirt, rocks, minerals, plants and animals living on the land.

Land isn't some magical form of property that transcends logic. The land you farm is yours as is the spear you make as is the wood in the spear you made.

It's not about restricting your equal rights, but preventing you from infringing on mine. If I work all year on a corn crop and you walk into my garden take it "because it isn't my land" you aren't excercising your rights, you're infringing on mine.

That it, in essence, what communism is. You stealing my corn.


It had continually reduced costs by employing cheap labor. When it saturated the labor market here and had to eventually sell it's products to people here, it had to increase their wage and find a new means of cheap labor. If you increase efficiency by machines you lay off workers, thus creating a smaller consumer market, thereby damaging profits. Indeed the first method is the preferred and usually is the cheapest as if the labor market is open to your exploitation, it is the cheapest. Thus it is most cost efficient to saturate the market before any other attempts at cost efficiency be seriously tried.

Exactly what other way can you increase cost efficiency without damaging current consumers or potential consumers?

It can employ more expensive labor if it increases the price of it's product.

So what you're saying is this: They hired the workers here. Than you state that they fired a bunch of workers becuase of advances in efficiency.

Couldn't efficiency continue to increase, therefore reducing the need for labor, therefore creating excess labor, therefore providing cheap labor, therefore creating new jobs, therefore creating more capital, therefore increasing efficiency, in an endless cycle?

Efficiency does not damage profits by reducing labor markets. That's hogwash. The effect of a certain advancement effects the whole of the labor force so little that the consumer market changes a few digits points behind a decimal while profits go up 10-20-30%.

Uneconomical garbage expected from a commie.

You increase efficiency through advancements in technology, technique, the marketplace and providing goods or services at or above market prices.


So why have capitalists moved their production market to the third world? Certainly it had something to do with social compromises being established. Eight hour work days and illegalization of child labor for example, but why did those come? I suppose it was out of the moral imperitive of the government, right? Not like people were demanding better conditions and fairer treatment or anything. What makes you think the same won't happen in current cheap labor markets?

For capital of course. They could have stayed here and had similar profits OR they could move and increase profits greatly to outdo the competitors.

There is no innate "need" for ultra-cheap labor, it's just very convenient.

And as an interesting note, child labor and over-10 hour workdays were almost non existant when the government passed legislation banning them. The free market fixed it's own problems.


Well at least we know you can SAY it will always be able to work. Unfortunately the growth of capitalism contradicts it's own ability to always work. The supply supply portion supersedes the damand however. If the supply is non existent, there can be no demand. If the supply is not cheap enough (cheap labor) demand will slow due to higher prices, and if cheap labor is no longer to be found, in order to sustain the same profit one has two options: 1) lower costs so demand increases and more product is sold at less money creating equal or more profit or 2) increase costs so that demand decreases but for each product sold equal or more profit is brought in. You could always increase wage to increase possible demand on higher priced products, but either way you're losing money on one end of the market.

You've done nothing to show profit can increase indefinitely, and little more than simply saying "It will work forever cause I said it will."

You keep leaving out technological advances. They spur the free market more than anything. Computers did more to help businesses than almost anything in history. Advances are constantly occuring and improving efficiency.

So you just choose to ignore inconvenient facts.



Yes, and the earth grows in size with the human population too!

Capitalism is very rapid, compared with population growth it'd be difficult to say no labor market could ever be saturated, if it was possible to say that, third world nations would not necessarily be in the positions they are today.

Furthermore, as labor forces turn towards capitalism in such nations, there two becomes a bourgeois class in that nation which expands with that labor force increase.

Communism avoids this problem by actively preventing population growth through a marxist technique known as "starvation".


It should, but it doesn't, instead it only shows up as booms and busts, excess and recess, to which the government regulation is necessary as an attempt to counter it.

It should, but the only way you could is by slowing capitalism down.

Government regulation is nevery necessary to correct the free market.


So perfect? I don't consider and unstable mess as perfect. This theory states oversupply will extend itself in the form of credit to keep profits going. It states that eventually this oversupply will extend itself in the form of new consumer markets which will of course spread into the current cheap labor markets and requires wage increase or price decrease. It states that capitalism is continually growing beyond it's demand and thus makes whatever bullshit attempt it can to deal with that just to save the almighty profit.

It states that eventually only so much can be done. The worst thing of all being of course that exploitation of the working class becomes sufficiently thorough, at least for a time, but the more thorough it gets, the more the working class becomes conscious of it and eventually overthrows it.

Credit does not exist to perpetuate the free market, credit exists as an industry in the free market.


Are you looking for a date? I've never crunched the numbers, but I saw some crazy kid at Harvard who said he did -- he gave it a decade. I'm much more conservative. HAHAH Imagine that, me, conservative.

Given that China went from a capitalist labor market to a capitalist consumer market in several decades alone and it has a HUGE population, I'd guess maybe 50 years for the current third world nations before we see major exploitation under all markets.

Didn't all the pinkos say the Great Depression was it? Sorry but cha luck.

When this 10 years and the 50 years go by, what will you say then? You're no better than the "armageddon is here!" Christians.


Yes, but capitalism rights these errors, at least to a certain degree, enough so that they don't barge in on it's profit parade. These are all matters of cost efficiency? are they not? If you have to keep reparing buildings on fault lines for your factories, would you not look to move your factories? In the long run would this not be more cost efficient?

It's like a runaway train coming up on a sharp bend in the track, and it's only increasing it's speed. Good luck having it not derail.

Yeah, capitalism is great at not getting caught up natural disasters.




Well the difference is it affords everyone the opportunity not to work on the threat of life alone. Under capitalism this threat is only applicable to the working class. In fact, there is no threat for the capitalist if he doesn't work. Instead his only threat is if all his workers stop working, and indeed ALL the workers who produce what is necessary for society.

In essence, communism puts everyone in such a position. There is no threat to an individual life if they stop working, there is no threat to any life unless the great majoirty or all of the people start working. For the working class of capitalism the threat of death is nearly immediate upon this decision.

Again, this is an issue of equality. It's not an issue of saying we can all stop working and be fine. No one claims communism or any other system can do this, we only claim we can make the opportunity, that threat or lack there of, and the possibilities of life equal to all.


So communism offers him an illusion? Great.



Machines have a purpose other than work? The purpose of a machine is to work, always, it sleeps so long as there is no one running it. Capitalism brings human life to this level. We work one day, so that we may live to tomorrow, only so that we may work again. Certainly not all human life is this way under capitalism, lots of people have time to enjoy life. I can only recognize the own luxury that I have in light of my ability to post here, the luxury that I can spend such time doing this and still survive.


I agree, it sucks, but very few people live under such situations.


The risk of living beyond your means is the very same risk for some people as living by their means, starvation, freezing to death, dying of some disease that's easily preventable with proper medical attention.

There is nothing that credit does for some people accept prolong this. This does not make their eventual collapse under credit their fault. It was never their fault that they had to get the credit to begin with. Unless you consider dying a feasible option that would have given them a choice.

Their wages shouldn't be higher than "market value." Their wages should be equal to the product their labor produces. "Market value" need not exist.

If the capitalist doesn't exist they need not be hired by him, they need only to work to produce what is necessary to survive. Returning us to a very natural freedom, the freedom where we are limited by our existence alone.

I may have quoted this for you before, it is a section from my book, surely others around the board are getting sick of this by now:



What if their labor doesn't produce much? Let them starve?

And you're quote is the exact same thing spouted by every socialist since Marx.


And yet you never REALLY explained how the capitalist and the working class man have equal opportunity.

What's preventing you from moving up?


Credit has increased here, cheap labor has moved elsewhere. There are certain necessities of this society that are not exactly necessities of man. One example being swift transportation. Public transportation is not available in all areas, in fact, it's not available in most areas, particularly where people need to travel longer distances to get to work. In other places, where it is available it is unreliable and still costs a significant amount of money, sometimes even more than it would for a car and gas in the long run. Thus personal transporation has become something of a necessity for the working class here.

Also, you're taking it out of a cultural context. Look at how many of those median American households in 1970s only had one parent working. Now there are two, initially this might create a bit of a boom, until the system itself catches up (which it is obviously doing now). You say not everyone is an economist, yet you expect people to plan their personal finances as if they were one.

There's also probably a bunch of other reasons that I've not even touched light upon.

That doesn't disprove anything I said, it's merely a correlary.





Again there are certain new necessities to life. For example, the reason microwaves and dishwashers may be a necessity is if no persons in the household have enough time to cook a real meal or wash dishes. While a VCR/DVD player and TV are luxuries the poverty stricken of other countries don't have, I don't find it acceptable that such miniscule forms of entertainment have become something of a norm. For you it would certainly seem OK if these people did nothing more than survived, again, like a machine.

This does not account for the age, price, or any factors for how they acquired this object. I can get a working VCR for around 3 bucks at a yard sale.

All that is done by showing their living conditions here is explaining the growth of capitalism in one country as it relates here. This is rather foolish as economies are established and perpetuated nationally speaking, thus what becomes relative for poverty in the US will not be what is relative for poverty in India. Certainly you can say "well quit *****ing, we don't have it so bad off." Then again, neither will people in India or China in a few more decades. That is the nature of capitalism. Furthermore, we fight for the global emancipation of the working class, not just those of the US.

The US statistic was used to show that it's not all peaches and cream here, something surely you would not recognize apparently since you don't look too far beyond your suburban realm.

Once again, you defer the point.


Answer me this: How will communism manage to produce as much as capitalism while still allowing everyone to take it easy? How can it make as much food, as many TVs and all kinds of other shit with a bunch of people working? As I stated earlier, people would be a lot "poorer" because the society couldn't maintaing anything but the barest essentials. If that.

[comrade_mufasa]

Surely you could ammass all the world's capital with your superiour knowledge of the workings of the capitalist system and merely change America to communism on a whim.
Would you say that Albert Einstien understood the physics of a fired bullet. I would think that he knew everthing about the physics of a fired bullet. That doesn't change the fact that I could have walk right up to him and shoot him in his face.

[Publius]

Poor analogy.

If someone knew everything about economics, they could easily amass a stupid amount of capital.

[Professor Moneybags]

How did the idea of ownership of land come into existence? Who was the first to own land, and how did they come into this ownership? Did others begin owning land the same way?

People were getting sick to death of having their farmland pillaged/looted by Barbarian Bill and his gang.

Is that hilarious enough for you ?

[NovelGentry]

The land you farm is yours as is the spear you make as is the wood in the spear you made.

But farming does not produce land. The land is already there. Creating a spear produces the spear. You're not producing the land, you're producing the plants and other such things you survive from. Indeed, they are two separate analogies.


If I work all year on a corn crop and you walk into my garden take it "because it isn't my land" you aren't excercising your rights, you're infringing on mine.

Again, by all means, it may be your corn crop, but the land itself is not yours. Furthermore, unless you made that corn crop independent of any other people in society, and if you yourself exist by your means only, then and only then can it be YOUR corn crop. The moment someone elses labor has contributed to that corn crop, even if it only by means of sustaining your life so that you could produce it, they too own a portion of that, as does whoever may have contributed to the survival of that person who contributed to yours, and so on and so on and so on.


That it, in essence, what communism is. You stealing my corn.

Communism is a recognition of the condition I just mentioned above. The corn is no more yours than it is those others who have contributed to it's production by sustaining you or giving you the things you need to produce it. It is no less yours either. It is a shared product.


It can employ more expensive labor if it increases the price of it's product.

But in doing so you have to raise the price of the product OVER the increased expense of labor, thus you STILL must increase exploitation. By increasing the product price, even if you increase the exchange value, in order to gain profit you must increase it more than the increase of the exchange value, and thus it will cost more to the person buying it. If this is happening in all forms of industry the working class will be able to afford less and less of what it produces as time moves on, creating greater and greater relative poverty.


So what you're saying is this: They hired the workers here. Than you state that they fired a bunch of workers becuase of advances in efficiency.

No, they hired a bunch of workers here. Then they fired them and replaced them with more advanced machines that were able to produce more. Then when they wanted even MORE profit, instead of rehiring labor here they hired cheaper labor elsewhere.


Couldn't efficiency continue to increase, therefore reducing the need for labor, therefore creating excess labor, therefore providing cheap labor, therefore creating new jobs, therefore creating more capital, therefore increasing efficiency, in an endless cycle?

If you increase eficiency, then you reduce need for labor, yes. That then creates excess labor, and yes, that creates cheap labor. There in lies the problem. Notice in that cycle you never said "therefore increasing the cost of labor."

But at some point the exchange value people are being paid will no longer be enough to suffice, and then what? That is when the capitalist must increase exchange value without increasing the use value of the product, or else they will have no more consumers for their product except themselves, which is hardly enough to sustain the consumer base their used to for the profit their used to. It contradicts their desire for growing profit. Or they can decrease the use value while maintaining the current exchange value, which also contradicts their desire for growing profits.

The only way it is sustainable is when they stop creating capital, when they stop growing. Capital begets capital, once again, it is growth. That is what capitalism is all about. If they stop doing this it's no longer capitalism. Could the system remain stagnant at this point and just work with what exists? Possibly with minor shifts in who controlls the capital, but even still you assume that people will never have a problem with their working class position -- I doubt that can last forever.


Efficiency does not damage profits by reducing labor markets. That's hogwash. The effect of a certain advancement effects the whole of the labor force so little that the consumer market changes a few digits points behind a decimal while profits go up 10-20-30%.

I'm not sure where I said it did. I said efficiency damages capitalism by growing labor markets until they're saturated and the only way to increase profit is to make them consumer markets. Then the only way to sustain them as consumer markets is through indefinitely increasing credit or by stopping the growth, aka: stopping the production of capital.


Uneconomical garbage expected from a commie.

Well the fact that you can't understand it only helps to contribute to the anger you feel and thus the insult you feel is necessary to prove my supposed inferiority.


You increase efficiency through advancements in technology, technique, the marketplace and providing goods or services at or above market prices.

Increasing efficiency through advancment in technology does occur, but it does so a) by replacing workers with more modern technology that can supplant their labor power or by b) producing more product for sale, which in turn requires a larger consumer market, which in turn requires more people to be paid, which in turn decreases cost efficiency of the system -- then you must find a new way to increase cost efficiency, something that NEVER catches up with you. Not possible, it always catches up with you.


For capital of course. They could have stayed here and had similar profits OR they could move and increase profits greatly to outdo the competitors.

Overcoming competitors will only buy you time. The first statement is simply baseless. If you mean similar profits to what they had here before, yes, they could have, but similar profits cannot be converted to capital, as upon doing so would require a larger market. If you mean similar profits that they got by moving to cheap third world labor, well that's just a laugh.


There is no innate "need" for ultra-cheap labor, it's just very convenient.

Convenient in the sense of cost-efficient, as other forms of cost efficiency bite you in the ass come the next recession.


And as an interesting note, child labor and over-10 hour workdays were almost non existant when the government passed legislation banning them. The free market fixed it's own problems.

Yeah, cause no one even had jobs, let alone a job that could provide them 10 hours of work or more and let alone one that could afford to hire the whole family.


You keep leaving out technological advances. They spur the free market more than anything. Computers did more to help businesses than almost anything in history. Advances are constantly occuring and improving efficiency.

So you just choose to ignore inconvenient facts.

I don't leave them out, I realize what they are. Replacement for human labor. Do they create new products, yes, they do, and thus they do create new labor markets, but then further technology destroys that new labor market by replacing human labor once again with more advanced machines to produce the same product. Against, there are ups and downs, backs and fourths, the general motion of the system, however, moves towards market saturation and the eventual collapse of the system itself.


Communism avoids this problem by actively preventing population growth through a marxist technique known as "starvation".

On the contrary. It actively avoids this problem by making the result of necessary labor the sustenence of the society which that labor comes from. There is no lost labor power to that society in the form of profit, which is then converted to capital only so that more can be lost.


Government regulation is nevery necessary to correct the free market.

Said Moses to his people. And this was the word of God.


Credit does not exist to perpetuate the free market, credit exists as an industry in the free market.

All industry in a free market exists to perpetuate the free market. Again, this is what capitalism is all about, growth.


Didn't all the pinkos say the Great Depression was it? Sorry but cha luck.

When this 10 years and the 50 years go by, what will you say then? You're no better than the "armageddon is here!" Christians.

Again, I cannot be sure of the time. I don't think anyone has that kind of knowledge. It's a rough estimate given the advancment of other countries into consumer markets in the face of capitalism.

I wasn't around before the great depression, but no doubt the longer the government sustains the system through careful regulation, the greater the depression will be. Depression when you think about it IS a self righting mechanism, assuming people will stand for the reemergence of capitalism. It starves a portion of the labor market and makes others somewhat willing to work for the bare minimum (reemergence of cheap labor) just because they need to survive. The question is once again, are people going to stand for it?

Really, the great depression and the ensuing social agitation was much of the reason you see the social compromise you do already and once again the government regulation that helps slow the process.

My goal is personally to make people realize this sort of thing BEFORE depression. I don't think we should have to be starving in the streets without jobs before we realize the system is fucked. I'd rather see people change it before we're in that kind of harm.


Yeah, capitalism is great at not getting caught up natural disasters.

Well no, capitalism doesn't always avoid it, in fact, sometimes they allow it in a last ditch effort attempt to at least maximize their current profit intake in a given geographical location.

http://www.iso.org.au/socialistworker/544/p7a.html


So communism offers him an illusion? Great.

If one is not willing to recognize that labor sustains life, indeed it does offer some an illusion. For the most part though communism offers no illusion as if the labor force weens the results will be directly seen in the availability of goods.


I agree, it sucks, but very few people live under such situations.

There are more who live in that situation than those who do not. Only 63% of the world in 1998 using a constant US dollar value from 1980. That rate is defined as having less than $2 a day to survive. Yes, that's right $2 a day at the value of the dollar in 1980.

Here's some of the information for children alone:

http://www.unicefusa.org/site/pp.asp?c=duLRI8O0H&b=262152

The best part is of course, you can find literally hundreds and probably thousands of articles online about the world poverty rate decreasing, citing examples in India, China, etc. And guess what I'll admit here, just because you're a very special person... they're true. World poverty IS decreasing (although still increasing in some parts of the globe such as Africa).

But then again, I'm well aware of why it's decreasing. China and India are the new consumer markets. Not to mention, between the two you're looking at a HUGE chunk of the world population. Great news is of course, this only helps to prove what I'm saying. You will continue to see people's lives improve there, and then in the current third world labor markets, upon which time Africa will probably become more of a full fledge labor market, and then eventually a consumer market there too! But then what?

Marx puts it very simply, "more thorough exploitation of old markets." *GASP* WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN? Given what I've said from this post and the previous one, you should be able to figure it out. For every minor boom and bust there will be only a single major boom, the rise of capitalism, and only a single major bust, it's eventual self-destruction.


What if their labor doesn't produce much? Let them starve?

What if their labor under capitalism doesn't produce much? Oh right, the bourgeoisie get off their chairs and help out, right? yeah I forgot about that.


And you're quote is the exact same thing spouted by every socialist since Marx.

Well there's a reason for that.


What's preventing you from moving up?

Me personally? Well before I can even think about owning private property I gotta pay off all my debt. Had I not accumulated this debt... well I wouldn't of had the education I do... had I not had that... well I'd never be paid much more than what was decent to live by, let alone been able to have a surplus sufficient enough to gain capital.

I'm a simple man, with simple wants in life, the most I'm trying to do is achieve enough money to live comfortably in a small house after retiring from my teaching job, and with the rest of my time write to my hearts content.

I will more than likely die lower in the wealth class structure than I am at this current time. I will likely die lower than the wealth class I was born into given my chosen profession etc. Had I wanted to move above, I'm not so sure I could have, but to be completely honest, I have no way of knowing because I've never tried.

If I came into this world with a true opportunity to increase my class status there's only one thing I can say that would have held me back, morals.


Once again, you defer the point.

I'm not so sure you ever properly understood the point, or what I or any of the rest of us here stand for.


Answer me this: How will communism manage to produce as much as capitalism while still allowing everyone to take it easy? How can it make as much food, as many TVs and all kinds of other shit with a bunch of people working? As I stated earlier, people would be a lot "poorer" because the society couldn't maintaing anything but the barest essentials. If that.

This is a ball of logical contradictions. Regardless of it's misunderstanding of the system itself, I'm going to point out these first because they are more interesting.

You're saying that society, which currently survives off the production of portion of the working class (yes, some working class people don't produce necessities) will be unable to survive when a greater portion of the working class is working to produce necessities?

Another strange one... you wonder how people can make as much food and as many TVs with a bunch of people working. What exactly is it you think producing food and TVs requires? looking in the mirror?

Now, for a more useful answer to your first question, which is the ONLY sentence out of that response that made any logical sense. Communism itself is not aimed at this... communism itself is not aimed at anything except the freedom of man and the coorperative existence of society. Socialism is in essence the progression of man into a society that is communism and is able to sustain itself under open and free production and consumption. Socialism unllike communism is a regulated socio-economic system which requires a person to work (assuming they can) to acquire the goods of society. This means that all the capitalists who exist now, or all the CEOs who do little to no real work will be put in such positions. Huge chunks of the population that currently do work applicable to capitalism only, will also be folded into the real working population. This means we're looking at an increase in the amount of laborers. Those who currently have no work for whatever reason and are on welfare will be put in a position where work is available. People who were laid off for cost-efficiency can now go back to work, and at the very same job they were doing before, because cost-efficiency no longer matters, because money no longer matters, because the so-called market no longer matters. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that by increasing the labor force one can first off decrease labor time, thus leaving more time to recreation, but also provide a HUGE oversupply of the necessary goods to society.

Of course as I have pointed out, the system must be designed so it does not rely on that oversupply, hence why there is something of a dynamic to ensure even consumption of labor power and it's given products in all different industries. The dynamic that does this is really a combination of different static economic rules, as well as dynamic constructs like the average social hour of labor.

I'm guessing you didn't read that paper I pointed you to.

[Lamanov]

Originally posted by Professor [email protected] 7 2005, 11:38 PM

How did the idea of ownership of land come into existence? Who was the first to own land, and how did they come into this ownership? Did others begin owning land the same way?

People were getting sick to death of having their farmland pillaged/looted by Barbarian Bill and his gang.

Is that hilarious enough for you ?
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :P :) :huh: <_< :angry: :angry:

riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. realllllylylylylyylyyyy scientific. tell u what, why dont you read F.Engels "Origin of Family, Private Properity and State" ? What ? you dont read... how is it "commes"... "commeyys"... "comuus" books ?

well, you ARE insulting my inteligence and knowledge. further more because im a history student, and this sounds more stupid to me than you can ever imagine.

[Professor Moneybags]

Originally posted by DJ&#045;[email protected] 7 2005, 11:46 PM
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :P :) :huh: <_< :angry: :angry:

riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. realllllylylylylyylyyyy scientific. tell u what, why dont you read F.Engels "Origin of Family, Private Properity and State" ? What ? you dont read... how is it "commes"... "commeyys"... "comuus" books ?

well, you ARE insulting my inteligence and knowledge. further more because im a history student, and this sounds more stupid to me than you can ever imagine.
Every heard of punctuation ? Thanks for the non-argument.

[Publius]

But farming does not produce land. The land is already there. Creating a spear produces the spear. You&#39;re not producing the land, you&#39;re producing the plants and other such things you survive from. Indeed, they are two separate analogies.

No, the land acts as the "means of production" per-se. They provide the materials and the means to make spears and corn and anything else.

If this does not satisfy you will you say everything contained on the land and everything produced from it is yours? Isn&#39;t that the same thing?



Again, by all means, it may be your corn crop, but the land itself is not yours. Furthermore, unless you made that corn crop independent of any other people in society, and if you yourself exist by your means only, then and only then can it be YOUR corn crop. The moment someone elses labor has contributed to that corn crop, even if it only by means of sustaining your life so that you could produce it, they too own a portion of that, as does whoever may have contributed to the survival of that person who contributed to yours, and so on and so on and so on.

Not at all. The corn exists solely because of my labor and my capital. I created it. Did others assist me in creating it? Yes. But it&#39;s wholly mine.

Just as I can&#39;t take credit for a book you wrote becuase my great uncle farmed beans your great grandfather ate, someone can&#39;t take my corn because he&#39;s connect to it due to the 6 degrees of seperation.

That does not follow. Following that logic, anything you have I&#39;m entitled to because I allow you to live. That logic won&#39;t work under capitalism or communism, it&#39;s nothing but destructive nihilism.



Communism is a recognition of the condition I just mentioned above. The corn is no more yours than it is those others who have contributed to it&#39;s production by sustaining you or giving you the things you need to produce it. It is no less yours either. It is a shared product.

The corn is mine because it exists because of my labor, thought and action. If you really believe you&#39;re entitled to anything anyone produces merely because of some "contribution" that may or may not exist, you have logic problems.

Also, do you have any way of proving that you directly or indirectly assisted the production of a particular thing? Without that, it can&#39;t be assumed that you contributed anything or are responsible for it.

Not to mention that this doesn&#39;t even matter because we live in a system of private property where you sell and forfeit your rights to your property. I know this isn&#39;t what you want but it&#39;s what we have.


But in doing so you have to raise the price of the product OVER the increased expense of labor, thus you STILL must increase exploitation. By increasing the product price, even if you increase the exchange value, in order to gain profit you must increase it more than the increase of the exchange value, and thus it will cost more to the person buying it. If this is happening in all forms of industry the working class will be able to afford less and less of what it produces as time moves on, creating greater and greater relative poverty.


But situations exist where you can improve lower the price and increase the expense of labor, say the Pepsi company reduces the alumimum amount in it&#39;s cans, saving money. You fail to take this into account.



No, they hired a bunch of workers here. Then they fired them and replaced them with more advanced machines that were able to produce more. Then when they wanted even MORE profit, instead of rehiring labor here they hired cheaper labor elsewhere.


But there is no distinction between labor "here" and labor "there". It&#39;s all the same.


If you increase eficiency, then you reduce need for labor, yes. That then creates excess labor, and yes, that creates cheap labor. There in lies the problem. Notice in that cycle you never said "therefore increasing the cost of labor."

But at some point the exchange value people are being paid will no longer be enough to suffice, and then what? That is when the capitalist must increase exchange value without increasing the use value of the product, or else they will have no more consumers for their product except themselves, which is hardly enough to sustain the consumer base their used to for the profit their used to. It contradicts their desire for growing profit. Or they can decrease the use value while maintaining the current exchange value, which also contradicts their desire for growing profits.

The only way it is sustainable is when they stop creating capital, when they stop growing. Capital begets capital, once again, it is growth. That is what capitalism is all about. If they stop doing this it&#39;s no longer capitalism. Could the system remain stagnant at this point and just work with what exists? Possibly with minor shifts in who controlls the capital, but even still you assume that people will never have a problem with their working class position -- I doubt that can last forever.

Again you wrongly assume that this apex can be reached. You are not takinging into account technological advances. For this to happen you have to state that advancement in technology will at some point stop. Will it?

You again state that wages will have to be lowered.

Labor goes up because profits go up. The capitalist can afford to pay his workers more in exchange for higher productivity, increased morale, or even the continuation of the wage slavery as you might state.

The price of labor does go up because profits go up.

It COULD last forever. It&#39;s certainly a more desirable system than communism.



I&#39;m not sure where I said it did. I said efficiency damages capitalism by growing labor markets until they&#39;re saturated and the only way to increase profit is to make them consumer markets. Then the only way to sustain them as consumer markets is through indefinitely increasing credit or by stopping the growth, aka: stopping the production of capital.

Efficiency damages capitalism? No it doesn&#39;t. It helps it in every way. You also assume that the entire world labor market will be saturated. I&#39;m not sure this is possible or at all likely to occur.


Well the fact that you can&#39;t understand it only helps to contribute to the anger you feel and thus the insult you feel is necessary to prove my supposed inferiority.

No, your economics are simply flawed.


Increasing efficiency through advancment in technology does occur, but it does so a) by replacing workers with more modern technology that can supplant their labor power or by b) producing more product for sale, which in turn requires a larger consumer market, which in turn requires more people to be paid, which in turn decreases cost efficiency of the system -- then you must find a new way to increase cost efficiency, something that NEVER catches up with you. Not possible, it always catches up with you.

Decreasing cost (Through innovation) increases sales. You will neve reach uniform sales of most products. Not everyone is going to want a boat. Not everyone is going to want a CD player.

What you&#39;re saying is that every market for every product will get so satuated nothing can be sold without drastically increasing the wages of labor?

That just isn&#39;t true in a market economy. Efficiency drives down cost, which drives down price, which drives up sales which drives up profit.

At no point will this cease to happen.


Overcoming competitors will only buy you time. The first statement is simply baseless. If you mean similar profits to what they had here before, yes, they could have, but similar profits cannot be converted to capital, as upon doing so would require a larger market. If you mean similar profits that they got by moving to cheap third world labor, well that&#39;s just a laugh.

How much time? We could be talking 10 years or 10,000 thousand years or never.

And the market is growing as more people get jobs.


Convenient in the sense of cost-efficient, as other forms of cost efficiency bite you in the ass come the next recession.

Companies can reduce cost extremely effectively without laying people off or reducing wages. Doing that cripples their production, ruining them in the long run. It&#39;s like eating your leg to prevent you from starving to death.


Yeah, cause no one even had jobs, let alone a job that could provide them 10 hours of work or more and let alone one that could afford to hire the whole family.

Plently of people had jobs. Well over 95%.


I don&#39;t leave them out, I realize what they are. Replacement for human labor. Do they create new products, yes, they do, and thus they do create new labor markets, but then further technology destroys that new labor market by replacing human labor once again with more advanced machines to produce the same product. Against, there are ups and downs, backs and fourths, the general motion of the system, however, moves towards market saturation and the eventual collapse of the system itself.

Just as .9999999 nears one?

Saturation will not be reached espescially because of population growth.




On the contrary. It actively avoids this problem by making the result of necessary labor the sustenence of the society which that labor comes from. There is no lost labor power to that society in the form of profit, which is then converted to capital only so that more can be lost.

The only result is sustenance because it&#39;s all that can be achieved. Sometimes.



All industry in a free market exists to perpetuate the free market. Again, this is what capitalism is all about, growth.

I&#39;m aware of that.

You portrayed credit to be some ingenious scheme to keep the system working.

All it is is another business.


Again, I cannot be sure of the time. I don&#39;t think anyone has that kind of knowledge. It&#39;s a rough estimate given the advancment of other countries into consumer markets in the face of capitalism.

I wasn&#39;t around before the great depression, but no doubt the longer the government sustains the system through careful regulation, the greater the depression will be. Depression when you think about it IS a self righting mechanism, assuming people will stand for the reemergence of capitalism. It starves a portion of the labor market and makes others somewhat willing to work for the bare minimum (reemergence of cheap labor) just because they need to survive. The question is once again, are people going to stand for it?

Really, the great depression and the ensuing social agitation was much of the reason you see the social compromise you do already and once again the government regulation that helps slow the process.

My goal is personally to make people realize this sort of thing BEFORE depression. I don&#39;t think we should have to be starving in the streets without jobs before we realize the system is fucked. I&#39;d rather see people change it before we&#39;re in that kind of harm.

Harm that may never occur.

And the Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve.


If one is not willing to recognize that labor sustains life, indeed it does offer some an illusion. For the most part though communism offers no illusion as if the labor force weens the results will be directly seen in the availability of goods.

But he can&#39;t quite. Or at least he and everyone else. It&#39;s an illusion based on a ponzi scheme. A ponzi scheme that enough people are big enough suckers to continue to work.






So when all labor is saturated, the system breaks down. But of course saturation will never occur due to increasing population, technological advancement and flaws in the system.




This is a ball of logical contradictions. Regardless of it&#39;s misunderstanding of the system itself, I&#39;m going to point out these first because they are more interesting.

You&#39;re saying that society, which currently survives off the production of portion of the working class (yes, some working class people don&#39;t produce necessities) will be unable to survive when a greater portion of the working class is working to produce necessities?

Another strange one... you wonder how people can make as much food and as many TVs with a bunch of people working. What exactly is it you think producing food and TVs requires? looking in the mirror?

Now, for a more useful answer to your first question, which is the ONLY sentence out of that response that made any logical sense. Communism itself is not aimed at this... communism itself is not aimed at anything except the freedom of man and the coorperative existence of society. Socialism is in essence the progression of man into a society that is communism and is able to sustain itself under open and free production and consumption. Socialism unllike communism is a regulated socio-economic system which requires a person to work (assuming they can) to acquire the goods of society. This means that all the capitalists who exist now, or all the CEOs who do little to no real work will be put in such positions. Huge chunks of the population that currently do work applicable to capitalism only, will also be folded into the real working population. This means we&#39;re looking at an increase in the amount of laborers. Those who currently have no work for whatever reason and are on welfare will be put in a position where work is available. People who were laid off for cost-efficiency can now go back to work, and at the very same job they were doing before, because cost-efficiency no longer matters, because money no longer matters, because the so-called market no longer matters. It doesn&#39;t take a rocket scientist to know that by increasing the labor force one can first off decrease labor time, thus leaving more time to recreation, but also provide a HUGE oversupply of the necessary goods to society.

Of course as I have pointed out, the system must be designed so it does not rely on that oversupply, hence why there is something of a dynamic to ensure even consumption of labor power and it&#39;s given products in all different industries. The dynamic that does this is really a combination of different static economic rules, as well as dynamic constructs like the average social hour of labor.

I&#39;m guessing you didn&#39;t read that paper I pointed you to.

But the efficiency will be much less. More people doing less is not better.

How do CEOs do little work? They produce little labor but provide more to their company than anyone else.

And point me to this paper.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Originally posted by [email protected] 7 2005, 10:57 PM
If someone knew everything about economics, they could easily amass a stupid amount of capital.
Alas, if only&#33;

Unfortunately, capitalism isn&#39;t about how much you understand, or how hard you work . . . It&#39;s mostly about a combination of force and dumb luck (e.g. Having a Mommy and Daddy who were either lucky or good at excerting force.)


The corn is mine because it exists because of my labor, thought and action. If you really believe you&#39;re entitled to anything anyone produces merely because of some "contribution" that may or may not exist, you have logic problems.

So, uh, why does my boss get the profit from the burger I cook?

No producer or product exists in a void. We are interdependant, and grand illusions of "Going it alone" are just that.

[t_wolves_fan]

1) How did the idea of ownership of land come into existence? Who was the first to own land, and how did they come into this ownership? Did others begin owning land the same way?

As far as U.S. history goes, it was James Madison who correctly noted that when individuals own property, it makes it much more difficult for the government to oppress him or her.

Remember, what government giveth, government can taketh away. Not so when one owns property on which they can sustain themselves.


2) How does capitalism sustain itself indefinitely? That is, how do profits continually increase without eventual saturation of human labor resources?

Continual innovation and technology. As technology improves, the best and brightest move up and work with the new technology, as do new entrants to the workforce. Older technologies still exist because not every business can afford to upgrade, and they employ lower-skilled employees.


3) If they do eventually saturate human labor resources, how would they continue making profit without providing an indefinite amount of credit, which would remain only virtual profit? That is to say, if the people who produce their products are also the consumers? How would they increase product price while maintaining wages to sustain the same amount of profit? Would less not be able to afford? same thing if they decrease wages and maintain product price.

Human labor resources are never saturated due to technology improvements, so your incoherent question is moot.


4) How does someone who is born into a poor family have equal opportunities to someone born into a rich family? (assuming the family is going to help them in their life endeavors)

Everyone has the same educational opportunities. If you are among the best and brightest you will receive a scholarship to attend the same school as the rich kid.

Attending a top-tier school is vastly overrated. State schools provide all the education you really need. After that, your own ingenuity and effort are all it really takes.


The rich boy has the opportunity to never work a day in his life, living off his father&#39;s extensive stock portfolio and business assets.

Which means there is one more job open for someone who does not have the same luxury, which is actually a benefit.


By what cause does the poor boy have the ability to never work a day in his life and survive?

Because life isn&#39;t fair. It never has been and never will be, no matter how much you use the government to try to correct every single unfair outcome. Worse, the more you try, the more freedom you take away from individuals.


5) If someone is working 80+ hours a week, it is possible to say their life is consumed by work and work alone. Is this not the purpose of a machine?

No, not really.

If everyone works the same amount and gets the same amount, how can you not honestly realize that every worker is part of a machine?


6) We&#39;ve all heard "living beyond our means" is bad, but for some people living beyond their means is the only way to live. If it is not possible, given the wages they&#39;re being paid, to live without credit, is it their fault for going into debt? Do you have a way to show it&#39;s possible for every person to live without credit?

It is not a requirement to go into debt at all. There is always another option, from getting another job to moving in with family to cutting expenses to seeking charity.


7) How is it that 14% of the US population lives on less than &#036;5 a day after the cost of shelter if we have equal opportunity? Is 14% of the US population just lazy?

Your problem is that you&#39;re confusing equal opportunity with equal outcome.

When people are free, there will be unequal outcomes.

And, I&#39;d like to see your source for the 14% percent living on &#036;5 a day. I bet it&#39;s a doozy.

[NovelGentry]

As far as U.S. history goes, it was James Madison who correctly noted that when individuals own property, it makes it much more difficult for the government to oppress him or her.

Remember, what government giveth, government can taketh away. Not so when one owns property on which they can sustain themselves.

While it is nice of you to reply, I meant how it actually came into existence. Who was the first person to say "This land is my land, it is not yours," and what was their basis for saying so?


Continual innovation and technology. As technology improves, the best and brightest move up and work with the new technology, as do new entrants to the workforce. Older technologies still exist because not every business can afford to upgrade, and they employ lower-skilled employees.

So labor markets never extend outside the bounds of a single capitalist nation? They do not extend as external labor markets become consumer markets for the global capitalist machine? History begs to differ.


Human labor resources are never saturated due to technology improvements, so your incoherent question is moot.

Well they haven&#39;t yet. My question was a conditional, IF it does. If you claim it doesn&#39;t, how can you support this given the growth of labor markets into various third world countries. Early on China and India, and now that they have grown as consumer markets into other nations of southeast asia.


Everyone has the same educational opportunities. If you are among the best and brightest you will receive a scholarship to attend the same school as the rich kid.

Attending a top-tier school is vastly overrated. State schools provide all the education you really need. After that, your own ingenuity and effort are all it really takes.

Your first statement is false. Scholarships are generally limited, often times scholarships are chosen on many other factors than simply your intelligence. For example, football scholarships and other sports scholarships. While some people have the ability to excel in these areas the general brunt of these scholarships are not available to many.

While I agree it&#39;s overrated, there are some people who cannot even afford state schooling, other people need to work while they are in high school in order to help out their family, these people are unable to concentrate on school as much as a child who has no other obligations to their own survival.


Which means there is one more job open for someone who does not have the same luxury, which is actually a benefit.

So what you&#39;re saying is, the labor market needs to expand as the general wealth of people in early capitalist nations moves upwards?


Because life isn&#39;t fair. It never has been and never will be, no matter how much you use the government to try to correct every single unfair outcome. Worse, the more you try, the more freedom you take away from individuals.

Something which is unfair is equal opportunity? So if a football game is rigged both teams have equal opportunity to win?


No, not really.

If everyone works the same amount and gets the same amount, how can you not honestly realize that every worker is part of a machine?

Not everyone has to work the same amount, nor does everyone get the same amount. There are people with the luxury of not becoming this extension.


It is not a requirement to go into debt at all. There is always another option, from getting another job to moving in with family to cutting expenses to seeking charity.

And if no other family will have you? If you are beyond what said charities allow as constituting a need for help, yet below the actual ability to sustain your own life, what of your options then?


Your problem is that you&#39;re confusing equal opportunity with equal outcome.

When people are free, there will be unequal outcomes.

And, I&#39;d like to see your source for the 14% percent living on &#036;5 a day. I bet it&#39;s a doozy.

You just said life is not fair, unequal outcome does not imply an unfair life, only unequal opportunity can do that. My source is the US Census bureau and statistics on average cost of housing.

Approx 14% of the nation lives below the poverty level, ~&#036;18,000 a year for a family of 4. What is considered affordable housing in the state of Massachusetts is above &#036;60,000 for a family of four. Approx &#036;44,000 a year for a single person. Other states have very similar income requirements for applicants of affordable housing units. Even some of the cheapest three bedroom apartments do not go below &#036;500 a month, excluding utilities. Taking this into account housing alone in some of the cheapest, dirtiest, and disgusting living conditions would be &#036;6,000 a year, leaving &#036;12,000 a year for a family of four. AKA: &#036;3,000 a year per person in the family for everything beyond their means for shelter. This is approx &#036;8 a day per person, assuming people make the highest possible amount they can while remaining under the poverty line. With relation to a four person family, smaller families, couples, and indiivduals have far lower income levels to be considered below the poverty line, without much decrease in the cost of living.

[t_wolves_fan]

While it is nice of you to reply, I meant how it actually came into existence. Who was the first person to say "This land is my land, it is not yours," and what was their basis for saying so?

Ok then chief, I believe it was John Lock in his 2nd Treatise of Government, who basically said that since each man owns his own body, he should own the fruits of his labor, and therefore should own the things he manipulates (i.e. land) with his labor.



So labor markets never extend outside the bounds of a single capitalist nation? They do not extend as external labor markets become consumer markets for the global capitalist machine? History begs to differ.

Not sure where on earth you got that. Of course labor markets extend outside a nation. That&#39;s why cheap (i.e less advanced) labor gets shipped to less advanced nations, while the more advanced nations&#39; workers work on the improved technology.



Well they haven&#39;t yet. My question was a conditional, IF it does. If you claim it doesn&#39;t, how can you support this given the growth of labor markets into various third world countries. Early on China and India, and now that they have grown as consumer markets into other nations of southeast asia.[/QUOTE

See above.

[QUOTE]

Your first statement is false. Scholarships are generally limited, often times scholarships are chosen on many other factors than simply your intelligence. For example, football scholarships and other sports scholarships. While some people have the ability to excel in these areas the general brunt of these scholarships are not available to many.

The lack or limit on scholarships and loans does not make my assertion false. That is because everyone has an equal opportunity to compete for them.


While I agree it&#39;s overrated, there are some people who cannot even afford state schooling, other people need to work while they are in high school in order to help out their family, these people are unable to concentrate on school as much as a child who has no other obligations to their own survival.

True enough, so it is then the responsibility first of the family to ensure the child has enough study time.



So what you&#39;re saying is, the labor market needs to expand as the general wealth of people in early capitalist nations moves upwards?

Not exactly, because class is highly fluid and not static. My family for instance has moved up about 6 levels since I was born. At the same time, you have formerly rich people who blow their inheritance on women, booze, and drugs and can end up back on the bottom of the pile.


Something which is unfair is equal opportunity? So if a football game is rigged both teams have equal opportunity to win?

Equality of outcomes does not guarantee equal opportunity.

For instance, if we have two kids who come from the same background, but one is an idiot and one is intelligent, then the idiot doesn&#39;t have the opportunity to get into MIT or work on nuclear physics.

Your analogy that a football game is "rigged" is false. Consider it more like this: The Philadelphia Eagles are playing the Arizona Cardinals. The Eagles have good players (privilege), the Cardinals suck (underprivileged). That the Cardinals suck while the Eagles are stocked with talent is not the fault of the league, nor the Eagles, and so as long as the rules are the same for both teams and the referees call the game squarely, there is equal opportunity for both teams to win.

The Cardinals might play an exceptional game (i.e. the poor family that watches its expenses, demands its kids do well in school, and stops having children it cannot afford); the Eagles might play a shitty game (i.e. the rich kid decides to drop out of school, do coke, have multiple wives and live beyond his means), and so the Cardinals may win.

Over the long term, if the Cardinals continue to play well (i.e. live and work smartly), they will improve and make the playoffs. The Eagles might win the game and go to the Superbowl, but if the Cardinals have improved they might beat the Eagles next season.

Now, if you want to complain that the referees in our society are watching out a little too much for the Eagles and not the Cardinals, I&#39;ll agree with you 1000%. However, if you&#39;re going to propose that the Eagles be forced to give Terrell Owens and 5 other good players to the Cardinals in exchange for 6 shitty players, and then they play the game, I&#39;m going to disagree with you 1000%.



And if no other family will have you?

First of all they should have you and our society should frown strongly upon those families that do not take care of their own.

In other words, people should look to family first, then government.


If you are beyond what said charities allow as constituting a need for help, yet below the actual ability to sustain your own life, what of your options then?

Then you should be eligible for government help, assuming you want to work and you want to improve your life.

If you have neither of those in mind, you should die quietly under a bridge.



You just said life is not fair, unequal outcome does not imply an unfair life, only unequal opportunity can do that. My source is the US Census bureau and statistics on average cost of housing.

Please post the link.

[dakewlguy]

1)
With humans starting to settle on certain land instead of roaming.


2)
The labour market saturating would increase profits, not reduce them. More people willing to do a job = lower price.


3)
No as with more labourers, essentially the same overall wage would be being payed, just less to each individual.


4)
Through state assistance in funding education. I myself come from a single parent unemployed family and am now in my second year of completing a degree, with a postgraduate degree lined up after that. I have not had any problems financially, thanks to the government providing financial support.


5) If someone is working 80+ hours a week, it is possible to say their life is consumed by work and work alone. Is this not the purpose of a machine?

No, there is more than 80 hours in a week. They would however be very inefficiant most probably, due to fatigue and low motivation, so it isn&#39;t a situation that is advisable.


6)
Credit and loans are a key way people and society as a whole become more wealthy. If it were not for them, our economy would be far far worse off. Even the governmet makes use of them.


7)
You are reffering to equality. Not equality of opportunity.

[NovelGentry]

Ok then chief, I believe it was John Lock in his 2nd Treatise of Government, who basically said that since each man owns his own body, he should own the fruits of his labor, and therefore should own the things he manipulates (i.e. land) with his labor.

That&#39;s all well and good, but a) Land is not fruit of his labor, it is the means by which he makes the fruit b) Locke would like nothing more than to ignore the fact society exists and without society the labor of a single man may not be so easily sustained, as that man himself might not be so easily sustained c) If Locke indeed said the land was the fruit of the man&#39;s labor, he was wrong d) Of course he would say all this, he was a capitalist, no?


Not sure where on earth you got that. Of course labor markets extend outside a nation. That&#39;s why cheap (i.e less advanced) labor gets shipped to less advanced nations, while the more advanced nations&#39; workers work on the improved technology.

So what happens when there is no more place to ship for cheap labor? Who does the cheap labor then?


See above.

So then you agree, the labor market extends, then I suppose I must return to the question, what makes you assume the labor market will not be saturated, you&#39;ve already said things about new technology, but despite all of our new and interesting technology the cheap labor market is still moving, still shifting, what happens when it has no where else to move or shift?

It seems no capitalist can answer this question.

You start with the argument "It won&#39;t get saturated, it expands, but the labor market won&#39;t get saturated." You readily admit it expands beyond every nation that progresses in capitalism, as those nations work on the newer technology while the cheap labor market inherits the old. Yet somehow there is no end to this cheap labor market? I&#39;ve heard "population grows with the technology, and thus the cheap labor market will never be outgrown. But if this was the case it&#39;d seem strange two of the most populated countries in the world have already been saturated and are now becoming consumer markets.

Do you have anything other than mere assertion to back up your argument?


The lack or limit on scholarships and loans does not make my assertion false. That is because everyone has an equal opportunity to compete for them.

But again, not everyone does. Some people have other things to worry about, like eating.


True enough, so it is then the responsibility first of the family to ensure the child has enough study time.

Well then it&#39;s not really equal opportunity -- some people don&#39;t have such family. Oh but they had the "opportunity" to, right? Well no, they really didn&#39;t, people die young when they can&#39;t afford proper care or proper means to survive. Your family, and your families ability to properly ensure you have equal opportunity is a luck factor. We do not choose what family we are born into, we do not even choose if we get family. We extend our family by being born, and we extend our family&#39;s existence, but we also extend society and society&#39;s existence, as such why does the same responsibility not apply to the whole of society?


Not exactly, because class is highly fluid and not static. My family for instance has moved up about 6 levels since I was born. At the same time, you have formerly rich people who blow their inheritance on women, booze, and drugs and can end up back on the bottom of the pile.

I&#39;m not sure I&#39;d consider it highly fluid, I&#39;m not sure I&#39;d consider it fluid at all. It&#39;s more of a plasma. For every single example of someone who does either (moves up or down) there are thousands of examples of people who do neither.


Equality of outcomes does not guarantee equal opportunity.

For instance, if we have two kids who come from the same background, but one is an idiot and one is intelligent, then the idiot doesn&#39;t have the opportunity to get into MIT or work on nuclear physics.

So what you&#39;re saying is that in order to have equality of outcome, people need equality of opportunity.

So far you&#39;ve said, equality of opportunity does not guarantee equality of outcomes, and equality of outcomes does not guarantee equality of opportunity. So where is it exactly that we get equality of either?

I&#39;m not saying the idiot has to get into MIT to work on nuclear physics, I&#39;m simply saying the idiot should have the same ability and for that matter opportunity to live as the person who works as a nuclear physicist. You don&#39;t have to agree, but if you don&#39;t, do not ever claim there is equal opportunity.


Your analogy that a football game is "rigged" is false. Consider it more like this: The Philadelphia Eagles are playing the Arizona Cardinals. The Eagles have good players (privilege), the Cardinals suck (underprivileged). That the Cardinals suck while the Eagles are stocked with talent is not the fault of the league, nor the Eagles, and so as long as the rules are the same for both teams and the referees call the game squarely, there is equal opportunity for both teams to win.

Quite the contrary, you said the outcome was unfair, which means something aversely affected the possible outcome of one team. My analogy was based on your words. If you&#39;d like to say outcome was unequal, that&#39;s fine, but then it begs the question why was it unequal? Of course someone has to win, but why did that particular team win? Better players? Better coaches? Why did they have better players? Why did they have better coaches?

Despite what you want to believe, outcome and opportunity are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they relate to one another quite clearly. The fact that the intelligent person can go to MIT to become a nuclear physicist is in itself an outcome of an opportunity, an opportunity you&#39;ve already agreed the idiot does not have.


The Cardinals might play an exceptional game (i.e. the poor family that watches its expenses, demands its kids do well in school, and stops having children it cannot afford); the Eagles might play a shitty game (i.e. the rich kid decides to drop out of school, do coke, have multiple wives and live beyond his means), and so the Cardinals may win.

Unfortunately, in order for the Cardinals to play an exceptional game, they have to do a lot more than the Eagles. The fact that they have to do more than the Eagles implies that it is not equal opportunity. Like pinning a flea weight boxer against a heavy weight boxer, he indeed has an opportunity to win, but only so long as his preparation and practice is favorably disproportionate to the heavy weight.

In short, you say because he can win it is equal opportunity, I say because the only way for him to win is to work a hell of a lot harder than the heavy weight that it is unequal. Again the capitalist isolation perspective takes effect -- you see this as "all someone has to do to succeed." But you do not see the inverse effects it has in other areas.

If the flea weight decides to try and up his weight using mass amounts of weight gainer and constantly working out, he has less time to work on his technique. In order for him to gain a single footing, he has to lack in another. This is not the case for the already heavyweight.

A person&#39;s life is finite, while one cannot determine exactly how long that period is, we know that no one lives forever. In order to increase income, one must sacrifice other things. More time working is less time spent with kids. One allows you to succeed in a monetary sense, the other allows you to succeed in a parental sense. For some families it is either or. For others it is a simple favor to one side. And for some it is not a problem at all. For the poor family they must work, hard, in some instances impossibly hard to gain. For the rich family they must fuck up, bad, in some instances impossibly bad to lose.

I&#39;m not sure how this can be considered equal, in any aspect.


First of all they should have you and our society should frown strongly upon those families that do not take care of their own.

In other words, people should look to family first, then government.

This is contradictory to your private property idea. If we are to look strongly on the so called individual right to private property we cannot look badly on what one decides to do with that private property, afterall, it&#39;s theirs.


Then you should be eligible for government help, assuming you want to work and you want to improve your life.

If you have neither of those in mind, you should die quietly under a bridge.

On the contrary, government help is generally limited in the exact same fashion, in fact, it tends to be less than most of the moderately generous charities. This was very much the case of my family, in which the government was our first and foremost form of help, then charity, then nothing. Not nothing because we no longer needed help, nothing because we were told we could "help ourselves" at this point. We were pointed in the direction of banks and things like that where we could get loans in order to give us a "buffer." This seemed OK at first, given that when we took out the loan both my parents were working, and in time their wage was to increase (usually the longer you work at a job the more money you make through raises). Of course this ability to help ourselves was broken, coincidentially at the exact same time my father&#39;s back was broken. The state refused disability on the grounds that my father had the ability to return to a job -- of course not the job he had, and of course not for the same amount of money.

But this was his fault, right?


Please post the link.

It&#39;s data compiled from a number of links:

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty.html -- most of which can be found here.

http://www.housingall.com/IncGuidlines.html -- here&#39;s some example of affordable housing guidelines, this differs for each state try google searches for "<state name> affordable housing guidelines"

There is no direct information for this, you&#39;re gonna have to read graphs and crunch numbers. Although here is a simpler table which shows you the income rate for different sizeds families quite quickly and easily for 2004.

http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/04poverty.shtml

Also here is a quick summary of the increase. If I&#39;m not mistaken the poverty rate in 2002 was approx 12.5%, there was an increase in 2003 of over 1% and an increase in 2004 as well, primarily among children under 18. It&#39;s hovering somewhere between 13% - 15% overall. I use 14% as the median.

http://www.prb.org/Template.cfm?Section=PR...ContentID=11621 (http://www.prb.org/Template.cfm?Section=PRB&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=11621)

[dakewlguy]

So then you agree, the labor market extends, then I suppose I must return to the question, what makes you assume the labor market will not be saturated, you&#39;ve already said things about new technology, but despite all of our new and interesting technology the cheap labor market is still moving, still shifting, what happens when it has no where else to move or shift?
Labour saturation is a good thing as I explain in my previous post.

[NovelGentry]

Labour saturation is a good thing as I explain in my previous post.

Indeed more people willing to do a job means profits increase, but this is not a good thing, as profits increase so does exploitation. Competition for what jobs there are pushes wages down, and before you know it workers cannot afford the products they produce by any means. This is then detrimental, you&#39;d see hard cycles of booms and busts, or possibly a big enough bust that people wouldn&#39;t care to go back.

[dakewlguy]

Originally posted by [email protected] 10 2005, 05:20 PM

Indeed more people willing to do a job means profits increase, but this is not a good thing, as profits increase so does exploitation. Competition for what jobs there are pushes wages down, and before you know it workers cannot afford the products they produce by any means. This is then detrimental, you&#39;d see hard cycles of booms and busts, or possibly a big enough bust that people wouldn&#39;t care to go back.
What makes you think this would lead to a reccession?

[t_wolves_fan]

That&#39;s all well and good, but a) Land is not fruit of his labor, it is the means by which he makes the fruit b) Locke would like nothing more than to ignore the fact society exists and without society the labor of a single man may not be so easily sustained, as that man himself might not be so easily sustained c) If Locke indeed said the land was the fruit of the man&#39;s labor, he was wrong d) Of course he would say all this, he was a capitalist, no?

I&#39;m no big expert on Locke, read the 2nd treatise back in college. He did not ignore the existence of society, (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/#3.1) but I think he was pretty libertarian.

I believe Locke said property ownership was necessary, otherwise man could not put his labors to work. Obviously, a farmer can&#39;t farm if he has no land on which to farm.

I&#39;m no expert on him, like I said, but that&#39;s how I remember it.



So what happens when there is no more place to ship for cheap labor? Who does the cheap labor then?

So then you agree, the labor market extends, then I suppose I must return to the question, what makes you assume the labor market will not be saturated, you&#39;ve already said things about new technology, but despite all of our new and interesting technology the cheap labor market is still moving, still shifting, what happens when it has no where else to move or shift?

It seems no capitalist can answer this question.

First of all this alleged saturation point is probably a good 1,000 years off, if it exists. The U.S. labor market is not saturated, and dozens of countries still have not been penetrated by globalism.

But, assuming every country went through what we&#39;ve gone through, they are still going to have a large population of uneducated, low-skill workers who are going to fill menial labor jobs, just like we do.

And if they don&#39;t, the market will create incentives to improve technology to do the jobs that no low-skilled workers exist to do.


You start with the argument "It won&#39;t get saturated, it expands, but the labor market won&#39;t get saturated." You readily admit it expands beyond every nation that progresses in capitalism, as those nations work on the newer technology while the cheap labor market inherits the old. Yet somehow there is no end to this cheap labor market? I&#39;ve heard "population grows with the technology, and thus the cheap labor market will never be outgrown. But if this was the case it&#39;d seem strange two of the most populated countries in the world have already been saturated and are now becoming consumer markets.

Do you have anything other than mere assertion to back up your argument?

I&#39;m not sure that evidence exists as we&#39;re making predictions about the future.

If the labor market does become saturated, then one or both of two things will happen: productivity will rise or technology will take the place of tasks for which no workers can be found. Or, third, those tasks will become obsolete.

Do you have evidence to back up your assertion that the labor market will become saturated?


Well then it&#39;s not really equal opportunity -- some people don&#39;t have such family. Oh but they had the "opportunity" to, right? Well no, they really didn&#39;t, people die young when they can&#39;t afford proper care or proper means to survive. Your family, and your families ability to properly ensure you have equal opportunity is a luck factor. We do not choose what family we are born into, we do not even choose if we get family. We extend our family by being born, and we extend our family&#39;s existence, but we also extend society and society&#39;s existence, as such why does the same responsibility not apply to the whole of society?

Interesting point. To a degree it does extend to the whole of society, which is why charity exists.

And yes, not everyone has family to turn to for aid. In those cases, society can and should help. With that I have little problem, nor do many conservatives, which is why they tend to give so much to charity.

There is a major distinction though between being responsible through charity, helping those in need through government programs, and communism. Communism cures the headache by cutting off the head. To help the very, very small minority of people who cannot rely on family, private charity, or sensible government action, it penalizes everyone by turning "responsibility" into compulsion at the barrell of a gun.

Further, communism or socialism actually diminishes responsibility by telling people they need not manage their own affairs. I meet a lot of poor people doing charity work. Most are hard-working and need a break. Others, and their number is many, just simply aren&#39;t responsible for themselves. They drink, they smoke, they do drugs, they have little or no work ethic, they have kids they can&#39;t afford to take care of. If I could design a system that gave the hardworking, unlucky types all the help they needed to get into the middle class (at which point it&#39;d be their responsibility to stay there), while telling the slackers and deadbeats to go fuck themselves (while still taking care of their innocent children), I&#39;d happily do it.

My parents had one kid, and that was all they could afford. They made damn sure not to have more (and if you want to use this as an argument to be pro-choice, I could perhaps agree with you). That was the responsible path. They didn&#39;t look at it as their right to have all the kids they wanted and that society should pay for it, they looked at it as their responsibility to live within their means. Socialism or communism on the other hand tells people, hey, no big deal what you do, because you get yours no matter what. And it is that aspect of it that I absolutely, without question oppose.



So what you&#39;re saying is that in order to have equality of outcome, people need equality of opportunity.

Umm...that&#39;s not what I was saying. In order to have equality of outcome, there is no opportunity. If the outcome has been predetermined, what is it you have an opportunity to do?



I&#39;m not saying the idiot has to get into MIT to work on nuclear physics, I&#39;m simply saying the idiot should have the same ability and for that matter opportunity to live as the person who works as a nuclear physicist. You don&#39;t have to agree, but if you don&#39;t, do not ever claim there is equal opportunity.

The idiot does have the same opportunity to live as the person who works as a nuclear physicist. Despite his intellectual deficiencies he still has the chance to prosper in any of a hundred fields of work.



Quite the contrary, you said the outcome was unfair, which means something aversely affected the possible outcome of one team. My analogy was based on your words. If you&#39;d like to say outcome was unequal, that&#39;s fine, but then it begs the question why was it unequal? Of course someone has to win, but why did that particular team win? Better players? Better coaches? Why did they have better players? Why did they have better coaches?

Because the Philadelphia Eagles understood the game better, played the game betterm and managed their affairs better.

It was perhaps "unfair" to the fans of the Cardinals, or a player on the Cardinals, that his or her team sucks. So what is that player or fan to do? They can work harder, play smarter, or join or root for a different team.

Let&#39;s try another analogy. There is a race to a finish line between two runners. There are rules that apply to both runners, which both understand, and agree to before the race (think of this as the process they go through as children where they learn how capitalism and competition work). They also understand that one runner will be picked by lottery to finish 10 yards ahead of the other (this is birth). Now, they have 1 month to prepare for the race (this is education).

Is it fair that one starts ahead of the other? No, not really. Do they have equal opportunity to win the race? Yes. The outcome is not predetermined. It is not the fault either runner that they lost the lottery. The racer who won the lottery to start ahead could slack off in his training because he assumes he will win. He could break his leg. He could do drugs and fall out of shape. He could die. The runner who lost the race could work his ass off to get in shape. He could go through a growth spurt and grow muscle.

Now, to further our analogy to make it even more realistic, let&#39;s say first prize is a gold medal (the CEO position), while second prize is a silver medal (a typical white collar position). The race is run and the guy who won the 10 yard head start still wins. The guy who started farther behind has still won a silver medal, is lauded for his performance, and given chances to run in future races. He doesn&#39;t have quite what the winner has, but he has something good.

Your assertion, if I read it correctly, is that because one runner ended up with something less the other runner, the system is broken. It doesn&#39;t matter that the losing runner did well, got a nice prize, and is doing ok (think of this as getting a decent, middle class job); he didn&#39;t get as much as the other runner and therefore the whole race needs to be scrapped. Not only does it need to be scrapped, and not only do both runners need to start at the same spot (which would be nice), but both runners need to finish at exactly the same time and both runners need to win the same gold medal.

My question is, if this is the case, why would I bother running?




Despite what you want to believe, outcome and opportunity are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they relate to one another quite clearly. The fact that the intelligent person can go to MIT to become a nuclear physicist is in itself an outcome of an opportunity, an opportunity you&#39;ve already agreed the idiot does not have.

And how exactly would you have us correct for intelligence differences? Would you have the government lobotomize the smart guy so he is as dumb as the idiot?

Is it the fault of the MIT grad that the other guy was born an idiot?



Unfortunately, in order for the Cardinals to play an exceptional game, they have to do a lot more than the Eagles. The fact that they have to do more than the Eagles implies that it is not equal opportunity. Like pinning a flea weight boxer against a heavy weight boxer, he indeed has an opportunity to win, but only so long as his preparation and practice is favorably disproportionate to the heavy weight.

We simply have differences of opinion on what constitutes "equal opportunity".

My definition is that as long as the game may be won by either team, as long as the rules are not biased, as long as the desire outcome doesn&#39;t have a preference who wins either way, then the opportunity for each team to put its talents to work to win is equal.

I do understand your position and is not entirely disagreeable. The problem is, meeting your definition and applying it would require what I deem to be an unconscionable level of government interference in our private affairs.


This is contradictory to your private property idea (the idea that famly should take care of their own). If we are to look strongly on the so called individual right to private property we cannot look badly on what one decides to do with that private property, afterall, it&#39;s theirs.

I don&#39;t see how that is so.


T
On the contrary, government help is generally limited in the exact same fashion, in fact, it tends to be less than most of the moderately generous charities. This was very much the case of my family, in which the government was our first and foremost form of help, then charity, then nothing. Not nothing because we no longer needed help, nothing because we were told we could "help ourselves" at this point. We were pointed in the direction of banks and things like that where we could get loans in order to give us a "buffer." This seemed OK at first, given that when we took out the loan both my parents were working, and in time their wage was to increase (usually the longer you work at a job the more money you make through raises). Of course this ability to help ourselves was broken, coincidentially at the exact same time my father&#39;s back was broken. The state refused disability on the grounds that my father had the ability to return to a job -- of course not the job he had, and of course not for the same amount of money.

But this was his fault, right?

NO. That was not his fault and the state was wrong to not pay disability. But that is an argument for reform of the disability system, not for communsim.





Also here is a quick summary of the increase. If I&#39;m not mistaken the poverty rate in 2002 was approx 12.5%, there was an increase in 2003 of over 1% and an increase in 2004 as well, primarily among children under 18. It&#39;s hovering somewhere between 13% - 15% overall. I use 14% as the median.

That is ok, I believe you. I understand poverty is a problem and I believe government has a role in alleviating it, or at least its effects. I am not so far right, libertarian in that regard. I believe our tax code and the way our safety net is structured is a big part of the problem. I think a third way that provides incentives for family and charity, with government serving as a last resort to provide the tools people need to better their lives (health care, education, transportation, etc.) is out there, the two sides are so busy shouting at each other they just can&#39;t see it.

You&#39;re fun to debate with, and unlike a few folks here I can see you put a lot of critical thought into your arguments.

[NovelGentry]

What makes you think this would lead to a reccession?

Everything leads to recession in capitalism, as I said in another post, it&#39;s a giant cycle, no matter where you start it&#39;s going to lead to recession, the problem is, such a recession would be global.

If labor markets are saturated, labor price goes down due to competition for labor. If labor price goes down, demand for products is less. If demand for product is less, interest rates drop so people can buy on credit. When people stack up enormous debt on credit and capitalism continues to try and expand past it&#39;s bounds, there will be little more than oversupply from an excessive workforce, consumption on credit from an underpaid working class. You&#39;re looking at a rapid decline in living conditions when there is obvious cost deficiency from oversupply and all these people start getting laid off and have all this credit to pay back. Then you&#39;re looking at yet a larger decline in wages as competition increases for what few jobs are less, and thus even those who still have jobs at this point, will not be able to pay off all their credit.

How exactly would this NOT lead to a recession?

What saving grace does saturating a labor market have? Entire nation&#39;s economy&#39;s are sustained on the basis of cheap labor and the exploitation of the third world. What&#39;s going to happen when there is no more cheap labor market?

[NovelGentry]

I believe Locke said property ownership was necessary, otherwise man could not put his labors to work. Obviously, a farmer can&#39;t farm if he has no land on which to farm.

Well again, Locke is wrong.


First of all this alleged saturation point is probably a good 1,000 years off, if it exists. The U.S. labor market is not saturated, and dozens of countries still have not been penetrated by globalism.

No, it&#39;s not completely saturated -- not yet. But again, saturated does not mean EVERYONE is working, saturated means all of those who can work, are working, on a general scale of things. The best way to tell when the labor market is saturated is when service jobs rule the entire economy. The US still has a good amount of agricultural and manufactured goods. Other markets grow with us, however, as we move towards market saturation, so do other countries. Early on, long before this trend was even as overt as it is, there were small labor markets existing external to capitalist countries. These labor markets did not only grow once those markets within those nations were saturated, they grew with saturation, more, that is how they grow.


But, assuming every country went through what we&#39;ve gone through, they are still going to have a large population of uneducated, low-skill workers who are going to fill menial labor jobs, just like we do.

Well as the labor market shifts, skilled or not, jobs move away. It now does this so rapidly that "preparing for a job of the future" becomes an impossibility for certain people, in certain parts of the world.


And if they don&#39;t, the market will create incentives to improve technology to do the jobs that no low-skilled workers exist to do.

You don&#39;t need low-skilled workers to fill these jobs. You need the WCR (Working Class Reserves), those who are so desperate for money because they can&#39;t find a stable position in any truly productive industry, that they will do anything to survive.

I&#39;m under the impression you&#39;ve never held a retail or equivalent job, and that if you have, you&#39;ve never talked to some of the people there. I would say 1/3 of the people who work retail jobs, including myself, are skilled laborers.

That number will of course increase.


I&#39;m not sure that evidence exists as we&#39;re making predictions about the future.

If the labor market does become saturated, then one or both of two things will happen: productivity will rise or technology will take the place of tasks for which no workers can be found. Or, third, those tasks will become obsolete.

Well now this is interesting... you&#39;re sliding. Before you said technology would increase to create new labor markets, new jobs, new industries... which was all well and good, but as I said, capitalism outruns these. Just look at computers and India. As a consequence you said the unskilled jobs alone would shift.

Now you&#39;re saying that such unskilled jobs will be replaced with the technology itself. For example, robots will clean our floors, yes?

This is really well and interesting, but what happens to those who still can clean floors, or who are cleaning floors. Again, you producer markets become your consumer markets, you can&#39;t fire workers and expect consumption to rise. People can&#39;t buy things when they&#39;re out of work. It&#39;s give and take -- and you are constantly giving and taking -- rising and falling -- booming and busting. The problem is of course as market saturation increases, these kinds of problems will be much harder felt.

And no, I&#39;m not talking about the minor fluctuations in the US economy, I&#39;m talking about the real busts. Every now and then you can see such busts effect entire industries, and in even longer gaps you can see it go cross industry and effect nations or more than one nation as a whole.



Do you have evidence to back up your assertion that the labor market will become saturated?

http://www.google.com/search?q=Market+satu...:en-US:official (http://www.google.com/search?q=Market+saturation&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official)

A lot of these focus on specific industries, some are general, some are specific.... mostly all of them have one thing in common. They talk about shifting the markets, both productive and consumer, away from where it is saturated (depending course on whether they are talking about productive saturation or consumer saturation).

[dakewlguy]

If labor price goes down, demand for products is less
Possibly, though possibly not. If labour price on its own was to go down, then aggregate demand would have to fall yeah. But in the context of labour market saturation - more people entering the labour market - the amount of people employed would rise, balancing the fall in price.


When people stack up enormous debt on credit and capitalism continues to try and expand past it&#39;s bounds, there will be little more than oversupply from an excessive workforce, consumption on credit from an underpaid working class. You&#39;re looking at a rapid decline in living conditions when there is obvious cost deficiency from oversupply and all these people start getting laid off and have all this credit to pay back. Then you&#39;re looking at yet a larger decline in wages as competition increases for what few jobs are less, and thus even those who still have jobs at this point, will not be able to pay off all their credit.
Government intervention through slowly increasing interest rates - such as is happening in the UK now, should prevent a sudden recession like this. If a government were to be less sensitive and push the economy too far into the red then I agree this could lead to very bad things(such as in the USA), but responsible governing of the economy should stop it.



What saving grace does saturating a labor market have? Entire nation&#39;s economy&#39;s are sustained on the basis of cheap labor and the exploitation of the third world. What&#39;s going to happen when there is no more cheap labor market?

Cheap labour shouldn&#39;t ever dissappear. The one possible reason it would is if unskilled labour were to fall in supply due to increased educational standards. But then with more people getting higher qualifications, skilled labour would fall in price because of increased supply.