Why capitalism?

Why do you support capitalism?

Is there any reason?

These are not rhetoretical question. I really don't get it.

To me at least, capitalism is very anti-human.


We have the opportunity to cover the needs of the whole world population, easily, yet this is not happening. Not because there is something we haven't "figured out", but because we live in a system that does not care if people die of poverty, malnutrition, thirst, easily cureable diseases.


And as for the industrialized world. Even if capitalism in the industrialized world has a lot of "wealth", that wealth does not go to ordinary people, but someone detached from our world, our daily lives.

Just look at copyright laws. They create a lot of problems.

The lack of free healthcare.That's something we need if we are to survive, live healthy lives and become old. Even here, in the industrialized world, people die because people cannot afford medicine.


There are millions of people in this world who work hard 12 hours a day or more and yet they will die old and poor, with physical (as well as mental) problems due to a hard and difficult life.

There are people in Mexico who work all day and when they come home, they can't use the tap because the water is too expensive.

Capitalism solves the incentive problem inherient in communism.

That is the one thing that the left has never been able to get around.

How do you motivate people to go to work to benefit others?

Only those of a collective mind will be enthusiatic about the notion.

Drunkeness was and still is a huge promblem in the Soviet Union.

People prefer to go get frunk rather than contribute their labor to a cause they did not believe in.

Hutterite colonies work just fine here in Manitoba. Rhey are entirely collective organizations who operate in a capitalist environment.

Now they believe and they don't drink. They own huge parcels of land that their hard work has entitled them too.

That is the one advantage capitalism has over socialism. A socialist communty can exist within a capitalist country.

The opposite is not true. The socialists would not and can not permit the private ownership of the means of production if socialism is to suceed in equality of wages.


It is capitalism that has raised the standard of living all over planet Earth by allowing those who produce to keep the fruits of their labors.

It thereafter becomes worthwhile to think about the work that one is doing and come up with more efficient ways of accomplishing the task.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

I understand what you mean, there was a plant discovered in malaysia that was super effective at killing the HIV virus, the problem was that they never found that tree again. Wouldn't be impossible but would require effort and funds.

becuase no one wnats to fund a cure ot HIV :lol:

Exactly my point, there are treatment drugs that are a multi million dollar making drug so the corporations would rather have a temporary solution that lasted forever then a cure that would make profit them for a few years then go dry.

.

regardless, people in america don't work because they feel as if they're contributing to some kind of metaphysical, ideological good. they work because they have to. ideology plays very little role in average, day-to-day activities. granted, that's not a good thing, as people should feel self-consciousness and reflectiveness in all they do (and under different circumstances, they probably would be sensitive to culture and ideology), but that's simply not the case today. and that shouldn't be surprising.

yes, but the fact that it's still a problem in russia (and other places as well) indicates nothing good about the new system there. i can't speak of drunkeness before and after the soviet union, as i wouldn't even know where to get such statistics, but i think i can, with some justification, speculate that russian people now are more desperate than before.

i don't want to apologize for the soviet union, but simply because state-socialism/state-capitalism sucks doesn't mean that the present alternative isn't a crock of shit, too. it is, and by all indications, russia is worse off now, by far.

anyway, do you still believe that africa is poor because of marxist ideologues?

well, i'd change "the fruits of their labor" to "some fruits of their labor." there's a difference, and that's the difference of stipulation. again, we simply have more of that in our philosophy. we take some of your basic premises, and don't develop them half-way and leave them hanging in the air. instead, we throw them to their natural conclusions, and modify our ideas accordingly.

anyway, i don't think any sensible critique of capitalism will deny that capitalism raised the standard of living all over planet earth. raised. in some places, it still is raising, but in most of the western world, it's raised all it can. indeed, it's raised itself into defunctness.

which is why places such as africa require capitalist investment & development for the sake of creating modern socio-economic relations between the people. yet, after a time, it'll stop raising, and it'll be proper to speak only in the past tense: raised.

and that's the argument -- at a certain point, capitalism seeks to be progressive, or necessary. let it raise all it can -- i have no problem with that. let it raise until it outlives its usefulness.

but then, let's get on with better things, and no longer speak in the past tense.

Aye this is true. But to be fair russia is hardly a fully free market nation.

it's certainly not fully free-market, just as the rest of the world isn't fully free-market. but, there's no reason to believe that if the politicians would somehow implement a libertarian economy (of course, they'd never do that, as they have their own self-interest in mind), the people would suddenly become sensitive to ideology, to their own place in the world, and stop drinking.. all for the sake of "the new system."

and i hope that regardless of world ideology, drinking will continue.. everywhere. :lol:

Yeah, because if they were a fully free market nation the life expectancy would plummet from 61 to 40!

But their life expectancy is a good example of how bad things have got in Russia. It's not even limited to Russia. Much of Eastern Europe is facing the same situation now that their corrupted form of socialism is gone.

Even looking at Cuba, their life expectancy is higher and their infant mortality rate lower than the U.S.!

nah you are both going a bit over board there. I was merely pointing out that "to be fair", the argument could be made that russia "isn't really capitalist".
This site is the site which will often see comments such as "cuba isn't really communist" or "stalin wasn't a communist" or yada yada yada.

oh, i know.. that's why i said that in the event that the free-market actually is implemented in russia, there's still no reason to believe that russians would drink less on account of a new ideology -- indeed, ideology, even in a fully capitalist society, would play very little role in people's day-to-day considerations.

it doesn't have to be that way, but, under the circumstances, it is.. and it will be so, even under free-market circumstances.

I see no evidence of any other system.

There's no such thing as 'socialism' anymore. The international socialist movement is dead. There's nothing left.

To be anti-human is to be human, to a certain degree.

Humans are not 'good'; that's your mistake. That's your starting assumption, and it's a false one.

In fact, humans are, more than anything, conflicted. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, mostly terribly ignorant.

I love how you try to 'systemitize' the problem.

It's not 'the system'.

It's 'people'. Your neighbors, your friends. They don't care if 30,000 kids die a day. Honest fact.

Most people don't care. I believe I see why Communism is such an appealing belief-system; it allows you suspend reality (much like religion) and pretend that things can or will all be perfect soon, 'if only we fix things'.

I agree that problems should be fixed, but I also know they will never be solved because they are primarily human problems.

We could have helped Africa many times over if all the aid money wasn't stolen, and the people didn't live under oppressive regimes.

I agree, they're terrible.

And guess what? 95% or more of people don't know the first thing about them, or how terrible they are.

Guess what that means? The problem won't get solved.

I fully support free healthcare.

In fact, I can think of no way in which communism would be superiour to modern liberal democratic state health-care.

And yet instead of saving, most people in America today are in debt to buy expensive cars and televisions.

A lot of Mexico is desert.

It's not that I don't think a lot of these problems can be solved; I do. But they can only be solved through pragmatic, meaningful change to existing policy, not by pie-in-the-sky nonsense that died in 1968.

There's no reason, none at all, why the liberal democracy cannot be a perfect, ideal system except for one: human frailty.

Properly ran, a liberal democracy would be perfect, don't you agree? If the problems of greed and exploitation could be solved by heavy progressive taxation.

There's nothing that can't conceivably be solved by liberal democracy that can't be solved by communism.

So why institute one system for another when the problem is people? Create rational, humanistic people and you fix the problems.

No need to smash the apparatus of the state. Use it.

If you were in a desert island and you had to climb palm trees and get coconuts to eat, you were doing this because you had to, not, because you wanted. I think that all work is because you have to, not because you wanted to.

Amazingly enough Capitalism has never been tried anywhere on the face of the Earth.


We have a mixed economy. The State intervenes in everyway imaginable.


In America, the Constitution enshrines "merchantalism" into the economic system with the Interstate Commerce clause, which has been usurped to mean exactly what the government wants it to mean.

In Canada, the BNA Act of 1867 (2 years after the civil war) enshrined our federal government as all powerful in financial affairs. Canadians do not own property rights.


A capilalist society would have no corporations because there would be no need for them.

There could be unions and every other kind of association free men could think of but they get no special privilidge from the state either.

The Gold Standard would prevail so there would be no fractional reserve banking or any of that kind of chicanery. No just priniting up money to inflate away the purchasing power of the savers.

No state meddling in the economy is what Capitalism would mean.

http://www.mises.org/liberal.asp

Not only does Ludwig Von Mises destroy all the economic arguements of Socialism in his great 1922 book of the same name, in 1927 he writes "Liberalismus." The book was translated and released in the West in the 1960's (I believe) as "The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth."

It is a blueprint for how to govern planet Earth.

http://www.mises.org/liberal.asp

Chapter 4 would be a most enlightening read. Mises condenses Socialism

http://www.mises.org/books/socialism/contents.aspx
http://www.mises.org/liberal/ch2sec4.asp

4. The Impracticability of Socialism

I read this and it's a load of crap, it attacks a state capitalist (what you would call socialism) society and not an actual mode of socialism which is actually run by workers.

basically this is mises' wording of the human nature argument. In socialist society there are many more incentives than just money, i.e. that you actually control how society works, how you work, where you work, what to produce, in which way you like to be organized with your fellow workers. The alienation of labour is abolished and thats why people will work.

The ability to calculate a workers input into the economy would be easy. In capitalism abstract labour is the the basis of calculation and what we refer to as "value" this would be true of socialism i.e. one hour of "simple labour" is equal to anothers regardless of how much they produce. Although value ceases to exist in socialism i think abstract labour will still be the basis of accounting.

That common denominator is the labour hour. Although there is no exchange there is accounting and it becomes all the more important in socialism as mises notes.

Yes there would be. Since costs of things are represented by the average labour embodied in them we would be able to determine if one route is more costly or not. The reason this railway line would be built in the first place is because workers have met in thier workers councils and have decided that their is absolute need for a railway line from A to B.

This is where mises fails, if this happend then you don't have socialism, we have a minority of people who because of their relationship to the means of production constitute themselves as a class over others and basically own the means of production regardless of the propaganda they pump out and the apologists who defend it. [

And that's mises' problem he thinks russia = socialism. The only leadership in socialist society are workers councils which organises millions of workers to make decisions when needed. A bureaucracy would be useless since workers meet up with other workers councils to decide what must be produced.

It's basically the natural evolution of Capitalism to have it eventually needing state intervention. With each boom and bust cycle every business in order to get enough resources to be more profitable again needs to merge with smaller businesses for more resources and become more competitive against other competitors with less resources. It's basic economy of scale.

But, once you've reached a certain size, what would be the consequence of your failure once you're big enough to affect the economy of the entire country? If you let something like GM to fail which employs hundreds of thousands of workers and have operations world-wide and which have an indirect affect on the economy of small businesses what would that do to the national economy or international economy for that matter? Also, this same process is happening in other Capitalist countries. Huge conglomerates that have massive financial and material resources to enable them the out-compete small businesses nationally and internationally is also arising in other countries and they'll be competing against your businesses (imperialism). You would need to nurture and protect you own huge conglomerates to avoid hostile takeover by foreign economic powers.

State intervention on behalf of big businesses is inevitable once Capitalism reaches a certain stage in it's development, otherwise you're simply committing national economic suicide.

But, how will that stop commodity speculation where gold can be accumulated and then sold off only when people are willing to pay more than the reserve price for it because they want to join into the bidding frenzy? Same with real-estate. Like gold, there's only a limited amount of land available, but that never prevented people playing the realestate game from starting as a small landholder to becoming big landlords who have an oligopoly over land prices for rent and sale. What makes gold any different?

A society which is run by workers is called syndicalism.
It is even more preposturous than socialism.

http://www.mises.com/humanaction/chap33sec1.asp

Human Action. Ludwig von Mises


1. The Syndicalist Idea


Wherein Mises explains the notion of "Eliminate the idle parasites, the entrepreneurs and capitalists, [p. 813] and give their "unearned incomes" to the workers! Nothing could be simpler."

http://www.mises.com/humanaction/chap33sec2.asp

2. The Fallacies of Syndicalism

On Mises goes to reveal why the worker controlled system will fail. The system does not appreciate that the entrepeneur is a worker too. The most important worker in satisfying the wants of consumers.

What workers committee would give meek geeky Bill Gates any serious consideration? Who would have listened to Henry Ford? The banks turned him down and no doubt the workers committee would have thought he was nuts too.

The American government has a "workers committee" with a million dollar budget working on the notion of powered flight in the early 1900's. The military gathered all the best minds from all the top universities and that 1 million would be 100 million today. Results nada, nothing, zilch, zero.

One day, two bicycle mechanic's come flying on by to show them how it was all done on the cheap using spare bicycle parts and a little ingenuity.

What "workers committee" would have given the Wright Brothers the time of day?

Bill Gates, Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers most likely would have remained silent rather than be thought the fool by the "workers committee."

Now lets talk about what workers committee would have approved the funds for Trivial Pursuit!

tigerman,

do you still think african marxists are responsible for african poverty ? can you please discuss that within the context of my private message / old post ?

oh, here's the link to the discussion:

http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/ind...howtopic=54221

unfortunately, only one person replied.. it should be more, considering that i'm challenging a very popular notion on these boards.