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Donkwich posted:Don't most red states get more back from the federal government per taxpayer than blue states? Yep, at least the 2005 data showed that. I thought there was something more recent, but here have a table: http://taxfoundation.org/article/federal-spending-received-dollar-taxes-paid-state-2005 (I have no idea if taxfoundation.org is some sort of weird libertarian masturbation station so if that data set is hosed up I apologize.)
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# ? Jul 19, 2012 19:18 |
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# ? Apr 25, 2024 18:20 |
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King Zog posted:I'm a member of a Norwegian political discussion group on Facebook, and it's been flooded by Norwegian libertarians lately. I want to come up with arguments against this guy(translated by me): Ask them why Norway isn't a complete hellhole if regulations are bad (I'm assuming Norway has much stricter regulation than the US in most areas).
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# ? Jul 19, 2012 22:06 |
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oswald ownenstein posted:How do I deal with the idiots claiming that all the blue states (Michigan, NY, Cali) have major problems due to democrat rule, while the major red states (Texas) are booming? Don't even have to attack their thinking, attack their facts. Texas has a bigger budget shortfall than California, and doesn't even have a dumb proposition to blame for it. Texas isn't booming, that meme is at least a year old, here's Krugman on it.
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# ? Jul 19, 2012 22:32 |
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King Zog posted:I'm a member of a Norwegian political discussion group on Facebook, and it's been flooded by Norwegian libertarians lately. I want to come up with arguments against this guy(translated by me): Which group is this, please let me know so I can track these idiots down and murder them. Your translation is OK, I think - "Vedtatt" isn't really a word with a direct translation into English as far as I know. Explain that capitalism is a system of property relations in which the means of production are owned by private individuals, and that it is not at all touched by the institution of a central bank. Further, it might help to point out the mechanisms of monopolisation by which a market left to itself will eventually merge into one or two enormous, bloated and non-efficient providers. The economics behind this are really, really elementary and libertarians not getting it somewhat baffles me.
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# ? Jul 19, 2012 23:46 |
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V. Illych L. posted:libertarians not getting it somewhat baffles me. Really? Because it's pretty much what they do.
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 00:26 |
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Yeah capitalism tends to mean an industrial system of production where most of the means of production are privately controlled, it has never been seriously understood to be a pure laissez-faire system. Its also worth pointing out that capitalism isn't some sort of platonic ideal that floats above civilization. it isn't some eternal map written into the fabric of the universe that each country can choose to follow or shun. Rather capitalism is a specific set of historical institutions that emerged at a distinct point in history, in a distinct geographical region. Following this emergence in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe capitalism gradually replaced earlier feudal methods of production. This is a historically identifiable moment in time when, gradually, merchants began to accumulate sufficient resources to take various craft workers who had once been independent or part of separate guilds, and to concentrate those workers in a single location. Since the fifteenth century capitalism and industrialism have, of course, undergone substantial changes, and its true that gradually the class that has benefited the most from the development of capitalism has articulated a laissez-faire attitude that dictates that the 'state' should not interfere with the private marketplace. However this ideology should not be mistaken for capitalism which, just to restate the point, is a historically existent system rather than a set of abstract ideals. The next thing to note is that capitalism has always been a regional rather than a national phenomenon. From its very inception capitalism was an international system in which different geographical regions end up with dramatically different economic functions. Thus in Europe in the fifteenth century you already have an economic "core" developing centred on southern England, northern France and Belgium. This core comes to specialize in the developing of textiles - the advanced manufacturing sector of the day - thanks to government policies and state intervention. In Britain, for instance, Henry VII establishes tarrifs on the export of raw wool that causes French textile manufacturers to relocate into England. At the same time, however, Eastern Europe comes to specialize in the production of raw commodities such as grain. In the West, where textile manufacturing takes off, the emerging capitalist class requires the protection and subsidization of the state to develop. Meanwhile in the East the landlord class who own the vast estates where raw produce can be profitably grown and exported have the opposite interests: unlike manufactures, raw commodity producers don't require much state assistance. As a result they lobby for weak states that won't threaten them with high taxes. They also want to keep a large class of landless labourers at their beck and call. As a result the rise of textile manufacturing in western Europe coincides with the re-enserfment of Eastern Europe and Russia. This relationship - a set of wealthy high-wage core countries that specialize in whatever the advanced manufacturing technology of the era is who trade with a low wage collection of periphery countries that are kept locked into poorer activities like agriculture and mining - has always accompanied capitalism as a historical system. From the Dutch Republic to the British Empire to the American hegemony you'll invariably find that the state has played an extensive interventionist role, assisting the owners of capital in their struggles both domestically and internationally. Attributing American decline to over regulated is therefore spurious. Wealthy capitalist countries have never had laissez-faire economies. That treatment is invariably reserved for colonies - whether its internal colonies like Ireland or external ones like America's holdings in South America. Of course even if you don't want to look at capitalism from a historical perspective, the argument that America is over regulated fails on much simpler grounds as well. The American economy has unquestionably become much less regulated in the last 40 years. Even a serious liberal economist will acknowledge that. On top of this, for the entirety of the Bush administration virtually every government regulator became a literal apologist for their respective industry. Claiming that over regulation is at the heart of America's problems is idiotic because so far there has be little to no correlation between the level of regulation and the speed of economic growth... actually, if anything, there has been a correlation going the opposite direction to the one that Libertarians would like to believe in.
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 01:09 |
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Helsing posted:Claiming that over regulation is at the heart of America's problems is idiotic because so far there has be little to no correlation between the level of regulation and the speed of economic growth... actually, if anything, there has been a correlation going the opposite direction to the one that Libertarians would like to believe in. Ah but that's Bad Growth, which is never sustainable. Bad Growth is caused by artificially low interest rates which inflate bubbles. We know they are bubbles because they pop. When they don't pop, it was Good Growth all along and the Fed was holding back further growth with its artificially high interest rates.
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 03:24 |
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Orange Devil posted:Really? Because it's pretty much what they do. Libertarians are often reasonably intelligent people with an otherwise pretty sound grasp of market mechanisms and (instinctively at least) a decent understanding of power structures, at least in my experience. They just seem to be living in a sort of state where they can just pretend that inconvenient forces don't exist, and this is strange to me as it doesn't really mesh well with the atheism and hyper-rationality they claim otherwise. Sometimes, I feel like honest libertarians are one serious revelation away from turning into anarchists, frankly. It's just that this revelation never seems to come, and it troubles me a bit.
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 14:50 |
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V. Illych L. posted:Sometimes, I feel like honest libertarians are one serious revelation away from turning into anarchists, frankly. It's just that this revelation never seems to come, and it troubles me a bit. Which kind of anarchist, though? Anarcho-capitalist or 'true' socialist anarchists?
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 14:53 |
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I refuse to consider "anarcho"-capitalists as anarchists. I have too much respect for anarchism to lump it in with that sorry lot
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 14:55 |
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V. Illych L. posted:I refuse to consider "anarcho"-capitalists as anarchists. I have too much respect for anarchism to lump it in with that sorry lot Which is precisely why I asked; I figured you probably meant true anarchists. However, this is not a thing I've heard of. Many libertarians jump to anarcho-capitalism but I don't think I know of any who made the jump to anarchism. What is the revelation, that private property and the state are essentially the same, so if you are against one you must be against the other?
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 14:57 |
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Golbez posted:Which is precisely why I asked; I figured you probably meant true anarchists. Well the real fundamental thing is that you can't actually have capitalism without a strong central authority in place to protect capitalists. Libertarian anarchism makes less sense than just about any other political philosophy you care to name. It's straight up impossible. Capitalist economic systems are extremely volatile and crisis prone, and they'll fall apart almost instantly without a state in place to keep the system quasi-rational and stable. You need police to subvert and repress inevitable worker insurrection, you need taxpayer dollars to finance the basic infrastructure required to do business (imagine if the cost of keeping an educated, healthy, mobile workforce and transportation system had to be paid entirely by the owning class--anything like the concept of "profit" would become instantly implausible bordering on imaginary), you need a national military and intelligence community to create trade imbalances and third-world client states, and most importantly you need a judicial system to create the necessary legal fictions and enforce contracts to allow for corporations to begin with. It actually requires an astounding amount of force, coercion, violence, and repression to keep a "free market" system in place. You basically have to be a psychotic libertarian living on the moon to conceive of such a thing as "anarcho-capitalism". Libertarians are just such incredibly special, gifted logicians that they're able to reason themselves into perfectly contradictory ideologies and sustain their politics almost exclusively on a diet of spite and cognitive dissonance.
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 15:31 |
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Not that I want to turn this into a discussion on the philosophical merits of anarcho-capitalism, but Woozy posted:...most importantly you need a judicial system to create the necessary legal fictions and enforce contracts to allow for corporations to begin with. is wrong, in my experience. No anarchocapitalists that I know, and few libertarians, support the nature of the LLC and certainly not the legal fictions that accompany it. Golbez fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Jul 20, 2012 |
# ? Jul 20, 2012 15:40 |
I think any anarchic system, capitalist or otherwise, is inherently pretty unstable. I'm only aware of one extant society that was anarchist in any meaningful sense over the long term -- saga-era Iceland -- and eventually it turned into such an ongoing bloodbath that everyone voted to up and join Sweden's monarchy just so they'd have some semblance of order.
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 15:46 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I think any anarchic system, capitalist or otherwise, is inherently pretty unstable. I'm only aware of one extant society that was anarchist in any meaningful sense over the long term -- saga-era Iceland -- and eventually it turned into such an ongoing bloodbath that everyone voted to up and join Sweden's monarchy just so they'd have some semblance of order. ...I think you might have the wrong Scandinavian monarchy here. Pretty sure you're talking about the Old Pact or whatever it's called in English which subsumed Iceland into Norway and later Denmark, and that was a bit more complicated than simply feudal anarchism collapsing. In any event, libertarians seem to spot the problems of institutional oppression and then go on to solely attribute it to the state, instead of just using the same approach everywhere, which is my main problem with them.
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 16:16 |
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V. Illych L. posted:Libertarians are often reasonably intelligent people with an otherwise pretty sound grasp of market mechanisms and (instinctively at least) a decent understanding of power structures, at least in my experience. I'll take your word for it, but that's certainly not my experience. Libertarians tend to be the type to want to do away with affirmative action and see not a thing wrong with the kind of corporate dystopia their delusions of a free market will inevitably lead to. Corporations having literal power over life and death? Perfectly fine because the market dictates and people should've just bootstrapped themselves some health insurance. Also racism is over and if I own a company I should be allowed to serve only white people. These are not the thoughts of people with a decent understanding of power structures. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Jul 20, 2012 |
# ? Jul 20, 2012 16:18 |
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Orange Devil posted:Also racism is over and if I own a company I should be allowed to serve only white people. These are not the thoughts of people with a decent understanding of power structures. White people are such amateurs at racism. If they wanna go big time they should do it the Chinese way: only BUY from and do honest business with other Chinese, but allow and encourage people of other races to buy from you, concentrating wealth over time in the racial and family syndicates you've formed. It worked fantastically in Indonesia and is almost impossible to regulate against without seriously racist laws.
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 16:29 |
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V. Illych L. posted:Libertarians are often reasonably intelligent people with an otherwise pretty sound grasp of market mechanisms and (instinctively at least) a decent understanding of power structures, at least in my experience. They just seem to be living in a sort of state where they can just pretend that inconvenient forces don't exist, and this is strange to me as it doesn't really mesh well with the atheism and hyper-rationality they claim otherwise. Yes, I think that is true. The trick lies in convincing them that the state is not outside capitalism (incidentally, Helsing's above post gets at this point very well).
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 17:11 |
V. Illych L. posted:...I think you might have the wrong Scandinavian monarchy here. Pretty sure you're talking about the Old Pact or whatever it's called in English which subsumed Iceland into Norway and later Denmark, and that was a bit more complicated than simply feudal anarchism collapsing. That's likely, yeah, I get all you blonde wooden-shoe/windmill people confused. No hard feelings! I love your cocoa! Such pretty Fjords! And yeah, it does get complicated. Still it's the closest thing I'm aware of to an actual anarchistic society "succeeding" over the long term.
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 17:20 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:That's likely, yeah, I get all you blonde wooden-shoe/windmill people confused. Well this certainly is insulting.
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 17:48 |
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icantfindaname posted:Does anyone have any data on what other countries' single payers systems pay doctors for procedures, and also what the average quality of care in other countries is, if there is even a way to measure that? Here's a healthcare bomb that I drop (usually piecemeal) on Facebook when needed: healthcare spending per capita vs life expectancy http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/health/spend/cost_longlife75.gif doctors per patient http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/WorldStats/WDI-health-services-physicians.html (rank 47) infant mortality http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=29 (about the same as croatia) hospital beds per capita http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_hos_bed-health-hospital-beds (ranked 27 out of 30) 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-finds-45000-deaths-annually-linked-to-lack-of-health-coverage/ 62% of bankruptcies medical-related http://www.pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_study/Bankruptcy-2009.pdf
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 17:53 |
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Remember that Iceland had the same social classes as the other Scandinavian nations (Thralls, Carls and Jarls). That Austro-libertarian types point to a slave society, Iceland, as an example of statelessness just shows they don't fully understand what a state is. I've linked to it before but this is a great dismantling of their philosophy:- http://web.archive.org/web/20110726045150/http://www.fahayek.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=693
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 18:41 |
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If someone could explain to me how China developed after Mao Zedong i'd appreciate it. As far as i know they've turned into an almost totally free market state, where companies boom with massive profits at the expense of the workers. Does this not cause at least a bit of friction with Maoist doctrine? Or do they simply not give a drat about it anymore?
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 18:46 |
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http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/drodrik/Research%20papers/Chinaexports.pdfquote:The task is not made easier by the highly unconventional manner in which China has
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 18:49 |
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The relevant chapter of David Harvey's A Brief History Of Neoliberalism is a pretty good overview, I think. You can get it on Google Books here, or at least some of it.
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 19:17 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I think any anarchic system, capitalist or otherwise, is inherently pretty unstable. I'm only aware of one extant society that was anarchist in any meaningful sense over the long term -- saga-era Iceland -- and eventually it turned into such an ongoing bloodbath that everyone voted to up and join Sweden's monarchy just so they'd have some semblance of order. Well, maybe, but just in terms of how you argue with libertarians, the presumed ability of a capitalist system to grow forever without any threat of catastrophic collapse is very first misconception you need to be able to unequivocally smash in order to move forward. Libertarians are far too reactionary and petty to give any amount of poo poo about moral or emotional concerns. Even the fake outrage about "civil liberties" and all that isn't really about "rights" in terms of, like, freedoms that we have an irreducible moral obligation to protect. In fact, libertarian ideology at the core is just a codex for translating things humans care about to things robots can understand, so any talk of "freedom" is talk about how to get people to participate in market systems in the most efficient way or whatever. The good stuff about politics, i.e., the human element and the sense of justice and the right vs. wrong is always translated into the rational vs. the irrational according to the libertarian way of framing things. The way to break this is to show how capitalism is, regardless of what you think about it in moral terms, a system for which utter catastrophe is the only logical possibility. You don't have to say a word about evil corporations or oppression of the workers or any of that. The moral dimension is straight out. Libertarian-anarchism isn't stupid merely because it's immoral, but because it's totally irrational, which is something no actual libertarian could stomach. Whether anarchism is stable in practice is sort of irrelevant because it has the minimal advantage over capitalism of not being, in principle, utterly impossible to survive under. There might be plenty of pragmatic reasons that anarchism doesn't hold, but at the very least there aren't any logical reasons, which is more than you can say for capitalism.
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# ? Jul 20, 2012 19:20 |
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This might just be showing my utter lack of understanding of both economics and political science at this level, but why does capitalism require growth? I agree that eventually further growth would simply have to be impossible, but why couldn't you have some sort of capitalist system in an economy where there's no further growth? Again, this is completely due to my ignorance on the subject, but isn't capitalism just a description for any system that lets you exchange some sort of currency for goods or services? Or is there more to it that I don't get?
Idran fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jul 21, 2012 |
# ? Jul 21, 2012 04:18 |
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Idran posted:This might just be showing my utter lack of understanding of both economics and political science at this level, but why does capitalism require growth? The proper definition of "capitalism" is a system in which the means of production are privately owned. The term you're looking for is market capitalism, which depends on markets (places in which buyers and sellers receive information about eachother and buy/sell goods/services) distributing resources efficiently. This concept is based solely around competition. For competition to take place in any meaningful sense, growth has to occur, since it will denote winners and losers and allow inefficient resources (the businesses that lose) to be absorbed by those using resources efficiently. If you're not growing in a market capitalist economy, you're declining. The sort of scenario you're talking about would be a command economy, in which various persons (who may or may not be state oriented) direct exactly how much is produced in an economy and for whom. Without this sort of coordination, someone will, inevitably, seek to dominate their rivals as long as the means of production are privately owned.
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 04:54 |
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Vermain posted:For competition to take place in any meaningful sense, growth has to occur, since it will denote winners and losers and allow inefficient resources (the businesses that lose) to be absorbed by those using resources efficiently.
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 07:18 |
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Strudel Man posted:Hey, this seems pretty clearly false. Like, if only a hundred widgets are sold a year forever, JiffyWidg and Widg-o-Matic Industries can still compete over those sales. They can, but it's a lot easier to just collude, jack up the prices sky high and split the sales.
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 07:31 |
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Also, investors require a return on investment and if there is not sufficient growth this will lead to rapid accumulation of wealth at the top. This is bad because without growth it also means there is finite wealth, so more of it at the top means less at the bottom. At the same time, the majority of demand comes from the bottom, since that's where the most people are combined with marginal utility value of money. Without demand, production falls, investment falls, employment falls, this further concentrates wealth and demand falls further. It's bad and leads to the whole system falling apart. Concentrated wealth at the top leading to too little demand from the bottom is also coincidentally the reason for the current ongoing crisis. Growth alleviates this problem by introducing new wealth to the system. This means that even if the rich capture the largest share of this new wealth, as is inevitably the case, they can still maintain positive and even increasing returns on investment while not draining the wealth out of the rest of society. With enough growth, both the bottom and the top can increase their total wealth, even if the top increases their wealth faster. This doesn't so much solve the problem described in the first paragraph, but it does mean it's not an immediate issue. With enough growth this process can continue for decades or longer, giving the appearance that capitalism works, while in fact the inherent contradiction of driving the economy through consumption while having the mechanisms of production governed by wealth accumulation is always present (ie. one of te reasons why capitalism doesn't even work in theory).
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 13:01 |
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Add to that the political-economical necessity of maximising growth in a capitalist system (due to every significant cohort having a decided interest in promoting growth at all costs for reasons explained earlier) and you get a situation in which zero-growth capitalism is not only economically impossible but also, well, politically so. Incidentally, this is a significant part of why labour unions are often among the harshest opponents of revolutionary socialism; they thrive in high-growth conditions, and revolutionary uncertainty means that they have a lot to loose. If growth ceased, this would no longer be the case.Strudel Man posted:Hey, this seems pretty clearly false. Like, if only a hundred widgets are sold a year forever, JiffyWidg and Widg-o-Matic Industries can still compete over those sales. Unless the widgets all break after one year, this situation would still involve growth, you realise
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 13:37 |
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:They can, but it's a lot easier to just collude, jack up the prices sky high and split the sales. you completely missed the point.
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 15:59 |
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V. Illych L. posted:Unless the widgets all break after one year, this situation would still involve growth, you realise
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 16:12 |
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Strudel Man posted:Economic growth refers to an increase in the rate of economic activity, so no, it would not. You didn't justify the 'if' at the beginning of your suggestion for fixed widget sales. There's a few criteria to justify if that 'if' can be true and they're all nonsense. Namely; infinite resources to produce widgets at identical extraction rates, permanently fixed production costs, infinite money in the purchasers hands to continue purchasing widgets, a one sector economy so that there is no competition between widgets and anything else, no technological development to improve widgets or widget manufacture. Take any of these out and you introduce mechanisms for changes through competition which inevitably creates growth through the needs of competition (lowering prices, accessing new markets, defending against growing outsider, best returns on financing, etc). The idea of permanently fixed sales assumes a neverending pattern of buyers collecting widgets and sellers collecting money, which is also completely nonsensical if that's all they do.
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 17:06 |
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computer parts posted:you completely missed the point. No, because any competition in that situation would not be meaningful competition, it'd be at best theater.
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 17:09 |
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Thanks everyone for your replies, this was really helpful. This is all stuff that I feel like I should know more about, could anyone offer any good book recommendations that could work as a primer for learning more about this sort of thing? Different economic systems and their political implications, stuff like that. Whenever I watch a debate like this, either in D&D or elsewhere, I always feel like I'm just sitting on the sidelines only half-getting the points that are being made. I realize this might be off-topic, since this feels like it's at a more basic level than "help me debate"; apologies if so.
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 18:40 |
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Depending on how deep you want to get into it, Robert Hahnel's The ABCs of political economy is a pretty good introduction. Other than that, Marx's Capital remains the most powerful socialist critique of capitalism, though it can be really loving heavy and I'd recommend either using David Harvey's lecture series as company or one of the several companion books that have been released. Uh. That's Parecon and orthodox socialist critique, at least. You may want to read some anarchist writers as well, particularly Kropotkin's writings, though he doesn't really have a magnum opus as such.
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 19:02 |
So if you read a book like Capital that destroys capitalism, and a book like something Mises writes that destroys socialism, and it seems like you can probably find a book that posits good theories and decent inferences to destroy any established system or order or government, so where the hell do you decide to stand as an individual? Are there benefits and drawbacks to all systems and we need to identify which to use and which to discard on a case by case basis, and have a hodge-podge of existence that's always changing? I feel like I'm having a political identity crisis these days.
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 19:31 |
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# ? Apr 25, 2024 18:20 |
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Loving Life Partner posted:So if you read a book like Capital that destroys capitalism, and a book like something Mises writes that destroys socialism, and it seems like you can probably find a book that posits good theories and decent inferences to destroy any established system or order or government, so where the hell do you decide to stand as an individual? Every system has some downsides for somebody. You just gotta decide which side you are on and work from there. You better believe class war isnt over like your politicians and newspapers tell you. There is no perfect system yet created (nor will there ever be Id speculate). But there might be ones that are a LOT better for the average man than Capitalism. In fact there is, we know about at least one such system already. The thing is we arent even really discussing anything like an alternative to Capitalism or, for a vast majority, articulate why we dont think it is working the way we think it should. The closest we come is saying "lets go back to the 50's!" without even thinking why that cant ever happen (for most people, people here often talk about these things). Not being given the language and the knowledge to properly put forth our critiques hampers the hope of any change. That goes before we even get the stage where the 1% etc will resist any changes we wish to make for the better (from a working class point of view).
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# ? Jul 21, 2012 19:58 |