Three disasters, one cause: profit
POSTED BY: SignyM
UPDATED: Monday, June 14, 2010 21:15
VIEWED: 6422
PAGE 6 of 8
SignyM
The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. I think you should take a more skeptical look at socialism, and look closely, and historically at all of its incarnations. Then examine with the most cynical eye to see what might have been the cause of the failure in the problems which resulted. Don't just assume you know those causes, consider all possibilities.
If you want my two cents, here's the root of the entire problem: socialism is a system in which the decisions are made by a small group of intellectuals and then implemented across a broad spectrum of humanity. What this really means is that there are fewer brains involved in the decision making process than in a free market society. Certainly, by all means, a free market society as we know it is not ideal. There are still a limited number of brains involved, but at least anyone can become one of those brains without the approval of a ruling body, and any such body is going to express some sort of bias because it is made of humans.
Also, while I will concede that some humans are smarter than other humans, I'm not sure it is a significant detail. Any study of animal psychology or entomology seems to indicate that a larger number of brains yields a superior result if those brains are within a factor of two in size, and I believe all humans are, parse some major brain damage.
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Geezer,
I don't think that Europe is a good comparison.
1) European counties are capitalist democracies, and are increasingly so. The US is arguably more socialist than Europe now, judging by the breakdown of our economy, on a percentage basis and the number of american social programs currently running.
2) Europe's population is and has been well off and educated, and has been benefiting from imperialism for centuries. The economic edge of Europe is fairly undeniable if you look at the world stage, regardless of what local govts. decided to do with that edge.
3) european states are smaller in their centralization than America. Very few european social programs are EU based, or federal, most are state based. Large scale centralization tends to be much more conducive to creating a permanent peasant class.
4) many american states are already as "socialist" as europe's, and have large scale costly social programs, some with very dubious results and serious side effects, but it's still nothing on either side of the Atlantic which classifies really as socialism. The European parties involved are generally not socialist parties, and this sort of stuff tends to fall much more into the category of social safety net more than social engineering.
A fair comparison would be a like comparison. For the US you would need another large scale federal system like the USSR to compare it to, a comparison the proponents never care to make. For small states, comparing statewide policies of Hungary vs. Iowa or something like that would be fair, I don't know if it's been done. I know that there's a mobility problem in Iowa that has been the result of farm subsidies, say what you will about that.
But the most obvious comparison to me would be one where capitalists have complete control vs. one of similar demographics whirr socialists have complete control, and particularly where this has been true for a while. Neither side gets credit for inheriting someone else's success.
I think North Korea vs. South Korea; East Germany vs. West Germany; North Yemen vs. South Yemen; Zimbabwe vs. Tanzania or Botswana; the D.R. Congo vs. The Rep of Congo; SSR China vs. SE China vs. Japan; Syria vs. Turkey or Iran; Albania vs. Italy. Sure, I'll grant Haiti vs. Cuba in the other direction, but then consider Cuba vs. Miami. I'm pretty sure of where the balance of this one falls.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:Quote:Why not? That would be a big improvement over what we've got now!
Better not be Socialism.
Oh come on!
Socialism, the Marxist 'state owns the means of production' version you must be espousing if you desire the downfall of Capitalism, has never worked. In countries where it has been applied, it has generally led to a concentration of both political and economic power in the hands of a privileged few that even the most greedy capitalist couldn't dream about. It's led to planned famines, labor camps, purges, round-ups of dissidents or just those not sufficiently doctrinaire, massive forced relocations, massive secret police forces and a large percentage of the population informing on the rest, betrayal of allies, crappy industrial products, and bad science.
SignyM, I get the feeling that you are hauntingly like the progressives and intellectuals in the U.S. and France preceding and following WWII, who were so in love with the ivory tower ideal of Socialism that they categorically refused to believe that there were purges, forced labor camps and gulags in Soviet Russia, despite the testimony of folks who'd been there, because it spoiled their fantasy.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
Which is pretty irrelevant to anything I posted, but if you feel the need to grasp at straws to defend capitalism feel free.
Actually you're doing pretty well for me. The European welfare states you cite as so successful all have largely Capitalist, free-market economies. Many are reducing state ownership of the industries the government once had. Not one has what could be called a Socialist economy.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Quote:
Originally posted by Geezer:Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
Which is pretty irrelevant to anything I posted, but if you feel the need to grasp at straws to defend capitalism feel free.
Actually you're doing pretty well for me. The European welfare states you cite as so successful all have largely Capitalist, free-market economies. Many are reducing state ownership of the industries the government once had. Not one has what could be called a Socialist economy.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
I see we're playing the game where you make things up and claim them to be true
. It is, for the record, very telling that rather than react to what I said, you strawman it and go off on a tangent. Did I mention anything about Socialist economies? I believe I did not. Thanks for acknowledging I'm right on just about every point I guess...The States you claim are capitalist are in fact mixed economies. For all your hand waving and evidence-less claims, not a one of them has a Capitalist economy, rather a mixed economy, which is by definition a mixture of capitalist and socialist economic principles.
Still you haven't answered my question, how is that national debt, the one that had to be expanded to stop capitalism collapsing under it's own weight?
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CIT: Straw-manning is Geezer's stock-in-trade.
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I probably don't need to point out that nowhere is a free-market in place anymore. Which, honestly, would have it's own brand of problems. Businessmen/women in general will have more money than the consumers/employees in the population, and more money means more ability to suppress any bad information that might discourage the public from buying. Even on a local level this can be true, so the trick is figuring out how to keep businesses small enough and local enough to make them answerable to market forces. Or, if you remove the idea of a market from the equation, democratically answerable to the public.
I don't necessarily think a mandate on how big a business can be would be the answer, granted that would get it done in a hurry, but I think large businesses are ultimately unsustainable. I think eventually that better understanding of economic forces will have people opt for smaller, more community friendly business. If the end goal is to make sure your family and future generations are taken care of for a long time, that's really the only way to go.
Regulations protect the public, and are important, at the same time they might prevent the business world from having the necessary epiphanies that would stop these abuses from happening. And when regulation fails, when regulation becomes friendly or slip shod, well. We are stagnant, and we don't seem to be learning from our mistakes. But we also don't have any really good methods to limit damage to the public when something does go wrong, economically, mechanically, or product-wise.
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So anyway, to answer your question: I think I know what we SHOULD do, what I'm not sure about is exactly how to get there from here. As I have said many many times over, I think the interim economic answer is "cooperatives" and the interim political answer is "democracy", and the backbone is "non-commercial communication" (I know Geezer will dismiss as quickly as he dismisses "socialism".) But the long answer is more complex.
First of all, you cannot eliminate "government". Government performs functions which a "marketplace" never can and never will: broad-scope vision, conflict resolution, blue-sky research. And sometimes that government is going to have to be "big" government solving "big" problems like global climate change and open-ocean depletion. Even if the economy consisted of cooperatives operating in a competitive environment, cooperatives would STILL tend towards maximally-efficient monopolies. But efficient monopolies are unstable: they concentrate capital and are sensitive to even small disruptions (like the fire in a plant in Japan which caused the world supply of capacitor resins to disappear for three months). So there has to be a "firewall" between the economy and its own worst trends, because that "firewall" doesn't naturally exist in a capital-based economy.
In the best sense, government would represent community working groups dedicated to solving specific problems, even if that working group is international fishermen solving open-ocean depletion.
BTW: There is a book which details how working groups manage the problems of the commons- in one example how Swiss herder cooperatives manage common-pasture rights. The title and author escape me but I will try to find it. The key to problem resolution is direct communication. However, I'm not sure if this model applies to problems which have more than a monkey-sphere of actors, so more procedures would prolly have to be created.
There are still many remaining questions:
How do we get "there" from "here"? And what are the long-term solutions to capital concentration and hierarchy formation?
As far as cooperatives are concerned, the biggest problem right now is that private banks control the flow of money. Having worked with a guy who was in several cooperatives, he says even cooperatives with solid business plans have a hard time getting loans bc banks rightly see cooperatives as a long-term threat to their business model. One of the reasons why Mondragon is so successful is because it has its own bank. So cooperatives need to create alternate funding: perhaps their own cooperative bank. Ultimately, they might even create their own Nonbank International Capital Exchange. (NICE. ) Ultimately, the problems of monopolism and concentration of capital might be found in better ways to create and exchange capital, or do away with it altogether.
In terms of government: You DO have the power to gain control of government. Unlike China, this is a democracy. Rather than tearing government down right away, you should use government to reform corporations FIRST. Sequence is important. Like the old joke says It's not ready, fire, aim. And trust me, if you can successfully use government to chip away at corporations, you will have ALREADY solved many of the problem that we currently have with government!
Finally, communication. There is something both seductive and dangerous in broadcast media (and alas, also in the virtual world as a whole, which distances people from authentic experience).
Anyway, I'm kind running out of time. I'll have to pick this up later, but I want to leave you with this thought: What I'm proposing isn't a long-term solution to the problem of relentless economic integration, collectivization, and concentration of capital, which is as a permanent trend in any capital-based economy. The only "natural" firewalls to these trends are distance and disaster. As fuels become more scarce, distance may re-localize economies. (Goods and people need to move as freely as capital for fully-integrate
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Quote:
Government performs functions which a "marketplace" never can and never will: broad-scope vision, conflict resolution, blue-sky research.
Most of these go towards military applications. :x
Probably why space travel research is petering out. That, and they realized that sending people away from earth eliminates commercial control over them.
In a non-market system I would expect you'd still end up with a lot of advances just being made with people who have the curiosity and interest in the field.
I also wonder just how much of the current scientific advances were private versus government. There's some dispute over which invented the internet, for example. Both sides of the debate seem to have a vested interest in claiming they did the most work: seems to have been more of a joint effort, really, or analogous work being done at the same time to address similar problems.
Calculus was invented twice in history, and supposedly with no overlap in the research involved. Sometimes there's just a need that comes up in the course of scientific/technological progress.
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