Jesus Appalled By Americans?
POSTED BY: Mavourneen
UPDATED: Monday, April 9, 2007 23:32
VIEWED: 11915
PAGE 14 of 15
Hey Geezer, how was the yardwork?
It seems to me that what you're saying is that capitalism is great, but only if restrained by anti-trust (and other?) regulation. At the same time, you don't see any "alternatives' to capitalism despite the fact that it seems to require government intervention in order to work well.
Capitalism has its pluses. One of the driving forces behind capitalism is the desire to get more work for less money. Sometimes that means creating conditions of dire poverty and scavenging off sub-surviving labor. But sometimes that means harnessing energy and technology towards automation and creating divisions of labor that make more economic sense.
The other plus of capitalism is profit. When a business doesn't "spend" everything it "makes" that can be called savings. And "savings" are a good thing because it can be used for progress.
The downside ... and it is a significant downside... is that money tends to concentrate in the hands of the wealthy over time. As businesses accumulate money they do several things with it: they invest in more automation which drives people out of work, or they buy up market share which allows them to raise prices (and accumulate more money and....), or they buy government policies and protections and tax breaks which allow them to pay their workers less. It is a non-linear system with a positive feedback cycle built in: capital accumulates more capital.
ASIDE from the fact that it's "not fair" to deprive people of the means to make a living, when money concentrates too much the market for goods disappears. Inventory builds up, more people get laid off, and the economy takes a quick cycle down the drain. (The Geat Depression) In other words, it's an unstable system: it's either going up or going down. Keynes tried to solve this problem by by controlling the money supply through the introduction of inflation: injecting money into the class of people that buy things.
The trick to creating a decent economic system would be to harness the capitalist drive towards productivity while guiding the distribution of wealth and protecting "the commons".
Ya up for that task of thinking up such a system?
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Always look upstream.
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Well, apparently not. Too bad. It's a big idea, can use all the brains that care to work on it.
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Always look upstream.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
While individual nations or regions may apply anti-monopoly laws indivudually, there is no international (ie cross-border, trans-oceanic) effort to rein in multinationals.
Aha! Now the hidden agenda comes out. You're using anti-monopoly action as a reason to create a NEW WORLD ORDER! You thought you were so clever, but I'm on to your plan! Nothing can stop me from telling the...what was tha
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
We already HAVE a NWO!
I wish I was doing yardwork (sigh). Hope yours was productive and satisfying.
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Always look upstream.
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I keep thinking about the baboon society where the most aggressive males ate the tainted meat and died ... and the rest lived happily ever after.
Maybe we don't need an alternative to capitalism / monopolism. Maybe we just need to reboot the initial conditions that trigger all sorts of contorted responses in society - and the rest will follow.
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I think there's a "Yes... but" answer to that comment. Biologists have recently noted that at certain population thresholds, a population will behave very differently, and the transition is quite abrupt. Birds will flock, fish will school, and colonies will... colonize? For example, if an ant population falls below a certain level the scouts will behave in random fashion because the "follow this" pheremone doesn't get refreshed quickly enough to create a viable trail. Therefore, long trails of ants never get establised, and food-finding becomes stochastic. If I recall correctly, the threshold for ant colony behavior is about 100. The laws gvoerning these interactions are fairly simple, but also somewhat obscure.
I think the same happens with people, although prehsp not so mechanistically. Most people can remember up to about 100 individuals. As long as the population interaction stays below that level, then individual bad behavior can be handled on an interpersonal level, and getting rid of... or somehow limiting... the bad actors would probably work.
But human interact indirectly with thousands of people, and the bad actors may be beyond any individual's knowledge of the full scope of their behavior and effect, since most people only interact with them on a very limited basis. The laws governing our collective interactions are not like the laws governing our individual interactions. They are probably simple, but we haven't figured them out yet.
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Always look upstream.
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I agree.
I was just thinking that as a group, people are probably responding to things outside of individual perception. One, as you suggest, may be overall group size. (Though Mohenjo-Daro argues otherwise.) One might be presence or absence of dominant / aggressive individuals, or relative proportion of them. One might be concentration or dispersal of resources. All of these can reconfigure ape and monkey societies. And human society is also entirely subject to these initial conditons as well (M-D again as a prime but not sole example.) There are all sorts of modifications to be made that could revamp the order of things.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
The trick to creating a decent economic system would be to harness the capitalist drive towards productivity while guiding the distribution of wealth and protecting "the commons".
Exactly. But you still need the capitalist economic system to finance the distribution of the wealth and protection of society. No other economic model will produce the money needed to pay the bills.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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"But you still need the capitalist economic system to finance the distribution of the wealth and protection of society. No other economic model will produce the money needed to pay the bills."
Hunh? Have you never heard of non-monetary economies? There are many, even today. And yet somehow they survive without even money, let alone 'capitalism'.
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I'm for a system other than Capitalism, if we had Anarchy. Otherwise it's just government controlled redistribution of wealth, no different than the kind we have now, and we see how good that's working out for us. Our kids will be raised as idiots because of it, and their kids, likrly, won't even have the burden of thinking for themselves anymore once you throw in the happy fun pills on top of the lack of anything resembling an education. No child left behind..... right.
I'm for Capitalism if it were truly Capitalism and we truly had a free market. I don't believe that any of us here in RWED fall for the illusion that either is the case.
Everything the government takes control of goes to shit because nobody is ever held accountable for anything that happens once the money is out of the people's hands. If they waste billions of our dollars on something that doesn't work, they simply wash their hands of it and move onto the next project that is either doomed to fail miserably and/or will further curtail our freedoms and liberties. Occasionally they let one of their scapegoats fall and become prey to the public (Nixon, Rumsfield, Gonzalez, George Ryan and others come to mind), but the gears never stop turning. This is simply the Government shedding it's skin like the snake that it is.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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