The poor and Capitalism?
If you read Karl Marx Manifesto about the extra surplus that workers make, why do the rich AND working class feel they deserve it? Isn't it for the poor? Who speaks for the poor?
I've read some Anarchy philosophy too and they claim during the Renaissance, when Capitalism was born, that Capitalism's surplus would go to the poor and solve the lower class problems. Do we do this at all in America (not tax money)? Has it fallen short of its promise?
I've read some Anarchy philosophy too and they claim during the Renaissance, when Capitalism was born, that Capitalism's surplus would go to the poor and solve the lower class problems. Do we do this at all in America (not tax money)? Has it fallen short of its promise?
Comments (122)
An example of what nations do with surplus.
Do you think capitalists play no role in the profits that are made?
If you are a marxist, then I imagine you believe in Marx's theory of value?
The good news is capitalism affords equal opportunity to everyone (the poor and rich included)
The bad news is all people are not created equal. Some are smarter than most. It's the smart ones that invent products and services that hit off in the market and the rest of us have to spend our money on.
Capitalist do play a role but their salary is included already when a company breaks even. IF they do not break even or just break even then nothing gets distributed at that company.
And, I am assuming Marx had a point or else it wouldn't be, but no not a Marxist. The people of the Renaissance herald Capitalism about that fact. I am just asking "What happened?"
An incorrupt state under socialism and its supporters would speak for the poor. The state would be in control of the surplus to distribute fairly to society, meaning, in theory, those who were poor under capitalism either shouldn't be poor or should be less so. It wouldn't go directly to the rich [i]or[/I] the workers [I]or[/I] the poor, whether they feel they deserve it or otherwise. If the surplus went directly to the poor, then the poor would become the upper class, and everyone else would become a lower class. The formerly poor would be privileged to do what they please with the undue wealth they privately own.
Damn right Capitalism affords us great things. It lifts all boats.
People are good at different things you betcha.
I'm saying that there is all that in the lower class disabled, terminally ill, etc. I'm not talking dollars here but material goods that may be a generation behind or will depreciate. Or "I have so many I don't know what to do with them" Which happens doesn't it?
So, it's quite sad and odd that the rich don't feel a sense of responsibility for the poor. I guess, it's poor vs poor in the end.
They worked for it, so it's theirs.
Instead of giving tax money for them to buy things... we just give them the things in the first place.
It would help because they might waste the tax money.
A second reason for keeping the poor poor is that they are a living warning to the working class:
A) See that line of unemployed people out there? Demand too much and you will be joining them.
B) Step out of line and you'll be fired -- because you can conveniently be replaced.
Quoting Drek
Who the hell told you that surplus value was for the poor? Nothing could be further from the facts! Surplus value is what capitalists live for: Surplus value makes up the income stream of the rich. (Marx's short work Value, Price, and Profit elaborates how surplus value is accumulated.
Quoting Drek
Capitalism is good at cooking up new products, but that it lifts all boats is wishful thinking. Not everyone has a boat to lift. Most people will just have to swim or sink as the tide of capitalism rises. In fact, much of the income flowing to the richest segment of the world's population (the dozen or so very, very, very rich people that have more wealth than half of mankind) lifts only the boats of speculators. That is so because much of the super rich income comes from manipulating financial instruments, and these instruments have nothing directly to do with production.
The problem with all this cash flowing into the hands of a vanishingly small number of super rich is that the trillions of dollars in cash ceases to have a productive role in the world economy. Investing in credit default swaps, currency trading, and other esoterica doesn't generate new production, innovation, or better lives for anyone. (It doesn't do much for the super rich either, because they are already over the top. What more could they possibly want that they don't already have, other than more more and more of the same?)
Eat the rich!
I thought when you are making a bunch of something, it's not always a 1 to 1 sale in inventory so some things don't get sold (that surplus). While things get outdated (product life cycle) or rot... so why not give the outdated/day old food aka no one wants to buy to people that could benefit. Like a computer, a 2018 model, sits in inventory for awhile it's past the point of no return no one wants it, they want new.
There are communication errors/delays between producer seller and consumer. when things become HOT then they ramp up their inventory When things cool down, you are left with a lot of inventory because there was a delay and no one is buying cause things cooled down. Another way that things get wasted. I'm not saying socialism is better, not touching the money supply. Our excess products.
If Marx was complaining that Capitalists made any profit at all then that's not good business sense.
That was not the complaint. The surplus value argument was not about getting a fair share. Marx objected to collective bargaining because it accepted the terms of the deal as given.
Rightly or wrongly, the Marx idea was based upon changing the terms of the transaction.
Now that is either possible or not. But it is useless to read Marx in any other terms. That is the only thing he cared about.
"Surplus value" isn't the stuff that is left over after a sale. Here's a simple illustration.
In one pile is iron ore. In another pile is coal. Next to the coal and iron ore is a blast furnace. Iron ore, by itself, isn't worth a lot. It is basically red gravel. Coal by itself isn't worth a lot, nor is a cold blast furnace. But you own the ore, the coke, and the blast furnace, and you want to make some money. How do you do that?
You hire some iron workers to heat up the blast furnace with the coal and then add iron ore. It takes a lot of work and skill to run a blast furnace; to know how hot it should be; how long the ore will need to melt into slag and iron; to know how much oxygen to add, how and when to draw off the iron, and so on.
The workers have used their knowledge and energy to produce ingots of high quality iron. You own the
finished iron which is worth a lot more than the raw ore and coal. Where did the extra [surplus] value come from?
The surplus value came from the labor of the iron workers. By working the ore and coal into iron ingots, they greatly increased the value of the ore and coal. The greater value (of the iron ingots) less the cost of labor is surplus value.
Labor creates all wealth, because wealth depends on raw materials being worked up into finished goods by workers.
The workers are paid for the labor, not for the surplus value. The capitalist keeps the surplus value. Aren't the wages tied to the surplus value? No. Wages are tied to income from selling products (or services). Once the capitalist sells the iron ingots to Ford to make pickup trucks, he can pay the workers.
Farmers work the land and sell the crop. Garment workers take cloth (their raw material) and turn it into clothing. Butchers take cows (their raw material) and turn the cow into steaks, roasts, and hamburger. Tanners take cow hides and turn them into leather. Shoemakers take the raw material o leather and turn it into shoes. And so on.
The Capitalist will say, "but I owned all the raw materials, the blast furnace, and the factories. I told the workers what to do. I bought machines to make their work easier. I am the one that created the wealth." Except: the raw materials (like iron ore) could sit there forever without becoming a product. Even if machines are used, other workers made the machines.
Now, the capitalist could kill a cow and cut it up and sell it. In which case he would be a butcher, not a capitalist. A capitalist could buy some cloth and make a suit for me. In which case he would be a tailor, not a capitalist.
Does this help? If not, read Value Price and Profit here. It's free.
DISCLAIMER: It has been a long time since I read Value, Price, and Profit. It is possible that I have not accurately represented what Marx said. Feel free to correct my report.
According to a management consultant, “Employees can (and should) be underpaid, overworked, exhausted and then discarded.” The aim is to maximise the value of the company in the short term, with a view to cashing out when it is sold at an IPO.
Workers create surplus value, but don't expect gratitude from capitalists!
Quote from "Lab Rats by Dan Lyons and Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler review – powerless at work" From Guardian Book Reviews. Read it and weep.
Is he asking for a more variable wage one that's more in accordance to "true value"? Fixed to me would be good if your company can't sell shit or is starting out but the bad side is workers are only getting paid half, but if it becomes variable if doing well... wages should rise. OR is that what he's speaking against? (I'm saying the better the company does, the better the wage. And as the business cycle fluctuates so does the wage) (True value would be like what the actual equilibrium price is not some arbitrary price.)
If you have more efficient machines and producing 1000 yarns vs 10 yarns in a given hour, yarn should definitely be lower in price... but wouldn't the wage too? And the Capitalist would take a hit too?
Nowadays it takes something like 10 cents to make a shirt in India or whatever then it magically becomes a $50 shirt... that doesn't make sense either.
I can't believe workers are getting paid half the efforts... I see the relation to Serfdom
If his math is right... isn't 50% profit enough to be true to the workers instead of taking the 200% pure profits.
Doing the hard thing for justice is good in and of itself and for the results.. no matter how profitable or pleasurable being unjust is?
Capitalists are at odd with their consumers too who also probably happen to be workers.
I'm trying... :cry:
You are doing fine. Nobody dipped into Marx and instantly got it all. I read it several times as part of a socialist study group. It takes time for these contrary ideas to sink in.
Marx was describing how capitalism worked -- that's what Das Capital and Value, Price, and Profit is about. He wasn't interesting in specifying what the workers wages should be, because in his view, the workers should get it all--that is, the value of the goods they created. He hoped that at some point the capitalist would be done away with -- not by lining the capitalists up and shooting them, but by replacing capitalism and capitalists with socialism. Will it happen? I don't know.
Quoting Drek
They are getting paid less than that! As a rule of thumb, the cost of producing a product is usually about 1/10th of the retail price. So, where does the rest of the products retail price come from?
Take your shirt: Somebody has to design the cloth; somebody else makes the cloth. Somebody else designs the shirt; then somebody makes the shirt; then the shirt has to be washed, pressed, and put into a package; then the shirt has to be marketed; then the shirt has to be shipped to the various countries whose stores bought the shirt; then the shirt has to be transported to the warehouse of the buyer; eventually it gets to Walmart. Walmart advertises the shirt. You go buy it. You are paying for everything that happened along the way, and all the profit margins that each handling company tased on. That's why your $5 shirt ends up costing $50--or more. Maybe much more.
Capitalists don't have it easy. If they make too much of something, the price of it drops and they may lose a lot of money. If they don't make enough of it, they lost opportunity to sell the stuff. Sometimes customers decide they don't like something and won't buy it -- and the company is screwed (sort of). Maybe the company went into debt buying up other companies and can't afford to pay the interest -- then it goes belly up eventually. Like Sears and Penney's. Some companies like Neiman Marcus cater to very rich customers and can afford less volume on merchandise that is marked up a lot.
Manufacturers (or any other capitalist) pays no more to get workers to stay on the job that is necessary. Profitability doesn't determine wages. What determines wages is how much per hour it takes to get a worker to apply for the job. Here's an example:
Hormel (bacon, ham, etc.) used to be a union shop and paid pretty good wages to the local almost all white workers in Austin, Minnesota. After Hormel cut wages, the workers went on strike and Hormel hired temporaries. Eventually the striking workers were replaced permanently and the plant became an all Mexican immigrant plant paying much lower wages for worse working conditions. White workers would not work for greatly reduced wages. Mexicans would because the average lower rate here is still higher than the much lower rate of wages in Mexico.
Quoting Drek
There is nothing just about the Capitalist System. It is based on ruthless exploitation.
That's sad because I live near that place. A Mexican claimed to me that white people don't like that type of work. When how you explained it it's because it's way better than where they are at in Mexico. So coming from nothing anything looks good. Illegal immigration is an issue too... taking some of the bargaining power. I've seen Mexicans mail back money to Mexico too. Whatever that means.
So like in India with the grain... their rich class feels there is no incentive to give to their own starving people? Want to sell it to deepen their pockets... I don't get it. Can a business owner say no to a profit incentive? They'll be the only class left though then they'll have to work themselves.
I always thought the worker and the capitalist were important and we help the poor. The capitalist is in the best position to help the poor. We are all at each other's throats it seems. Maybe that's how the evil want it - divided we fall. The worst of both socialism and capitalism.
I thought capitalism was suppose to prevent this when we are suppose to have a common bond with each other (brotherly love and the fellow American). Capitalism is suppose to harness greed "invisible hand", for everyone's benefit.
What if it's not a a socialist or capitalist thing but a question of human nature?
How about this? Capitalism in the middle, and socialism at the extremes.
The goal should be to create a middle class society. The rich are taxed to bring them down in to the middle class, while the poor are subsidized (primarily through education) to bring them up in to the middle class.
Within the middle class things work much as they do already, because we all need and benefit from incentives to improve our skills, advance our education etc.
So the middle class would not be a single uniform category, but would contain within it a range of incomes, just as it already does. But nobody would have a billion dollars, and nobody would be sleeping in the streets.
Bernie Sanders was on the right track with his proposal to make college free (like high school) paid for by the super rich.
Crank is right, a tiny number of people are hogging a huge percentage of the wealth of modern society. That needs to end. Here's an article which addresses the subject...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-richest-1-percent-now-owns-more-of-the-countrys-wealth-than-at-any-time-in-the-past-50-years/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.403c0d3a0313
A quote from the article:
That kind of thinking is very much inside of the box. It doesn't have to be theirs. In practical terms, it doesn't do enough to address the problem of inequality, and if you don't consider that a serious problem, then [i]that[/I] is the problem. Nurses do more for society than many of the highest earners. How, for example, is making a profit from the labour of low paid workers, selling materialistic toot we don't really need, enabling a life of luxury, whilst nurses who perform an invaluable service to society to the benefit of everyone, yet struggle to get by, a fairer vision of society?
I understand but what is valued by society? A technician or a discoverer or inventor. A nurse is technician who only knows how to do something but s/he is valued less than the person inventor who made the nurse's job possible or easier.
I'm not against equality. I'm just pointing out one of its causes.
Well, if you actually ask society - and you can pick any society because you'll get the same result - most people say they value nurses more. There is a conflict between what people believe and what people accept, and what people think is ethical versus what people think is desirable. Inventors of materialistic toot are much less valuable then inventors of tools which aid public services. Yet under our current capitalistic model, that distinction doesn't matter in terms of the wealth you'll receive if successful. I think that it should.
Quoting TheMadFool
You were putting forward the bog standard reasoning of the bog standard capitalist, and I responded by pointing out a big problem with it, namely that it doesn't do enough to address the problem of inequality.
It seems reasonable that someone who makes all nurse's jobs easier should be compensated more than a single nurse. But the pay doesn't need to be 1,000X more to motivate that contribution.
As example, Steve Jobs didn't invent Apple to become a billionaire, he did so because he had a huge ego and he wanted everyone to witness the impact he could have upon the world. He would have happily invented Apple for a million dollars, if society judged that to be an impressive sum (thus making Jobs an impressive person in the eyes of society), and if that was enough for him to continue doing what he enjoyed doing.
We're never going to have pure equality, and we shouldn't have. People should have incentives to do their best work. We just need to dial back the wild excesses in the system. As example, according to Wikipedia...
Ok, so Amazon is a pretty amazing service which provides great value, but wouldn't 100 Million be sufficient reward, instead of 100 Billion?
If it's international, then the little weasels would have nowhere to scurry off to in order to avoid paying a fair share. And I don't believe for a second that there'd be a critical lack of innovators willing to cooperate. It would just filter out the less ethical ones, and it would be their loss anyway. They can suit themselves. If for them it's either crazy excess or nothing, then they can have nothing.
You're right. The fault doesn't lie with valuation. Rather the degree of valuation is disproportionate.
See above.
Of course we could simply stop buying their "materialistic toot", a great phrase which I intend to steal and re-license under my own name, making me an over night multi-trillionaire. Buh! Mere billions are for losers!!
That's the spirit! Now, on to the next task: start wars with other countries? I feel there aren't enough wars right now. I love a good war.
Or maybe I´m mistaken and he had a positive side for philosophy, like Freddie Mercury that was talented for music.
Yeah, you are. Believe or not, even bad people can have good ideas. (Cf. ad hominem).
@Jake I say stop buying their stuff too (guilty as charged). We've had these big corporations since I was little, and nothing has changed. While the small business gets regulated to the ground so nothing new crops up. The only way something new crops up is if it's a new sector in the economy (Bill Gates anyone) but then it protects itself from newcomers (buying patents). What happened to healthy competition (dual monopolies don't count)? I don't have many qualms with capitalism in essence but to me this isn't the capitalism that was meant to be, it's corrupted.
A strong middle class is a strong country no doubt.
@Jake As for free college, I dunno, why not make high school harder and actually an accomplishment? Now, hiring you need a BA to do stuff that never required it plus we get the debt. Technological advancement and jobs being SO complicated now isn't a good reason for me. Kids regardless of school learn computers. It just bars less off people from accomplishing anything, and may have to do military service to get college paid for (if you happen to agree with the war then it doesn't conflict). They seem to just water down the curriculum for the sake of kid's feelings too. And at the end of the day what is really taught?
I think it is Socialism for the Capitalist right now.
I say attack the 14th Amendment as corporations are not people... that's a starting point
"The good news is capitalism affords equal opportunity to everyone (the poor and rich included)
The bad news is all people are not created equal. Some are smarter than most. It's the smart ones that invent products and services that hit off in the market and the rest of us have to spend our money on."
Well said!
Wages are meant to be based on productivity and merit. When you arbitrarily increase the value of something, fewer people want it. We did that with cigarettes, for example. Regardless of how big a company gets, it's never worth it to pay someone say, $12/hour when their productivity earns you something like $10/hour. That's the reason that teenagers, black teenagers in particular, have so much trouble getting jobs. It's also why automation is making such strides in replacing human laborers. We've incentivized business owners to invest in automation because they're becoming more cost-effective than people. It may not seem like it, but allowing business owners to pay someone only what their labor is worth is the only way to lift up the poor. Nearly every instance of the elimination of poverty has been the result of Free-Market Capitalism, the tenets of which require that people make exchanges based on their personal value.
"Smith & Wesson sometimes, Kalashnikov, Ruger, Glock, SIg Sauer. And I wish the need of it weren't so. "
lol. this is why i pray for a short life everyday.
Do you consider Scandinavia well-fare state (free education at all levels, universal healthcare, high taxes on the rich) as socialism or capitalism? Are poor people doing better or worse than a system that is more "capitalistic" in your view?
When you say "meant to be" do you mean "actually are"?
Quoting Kenshi
Do you mean arbitrarily increase the cost? How would you arbitrarily increase the value of something? And in the case of cigarettes, if your talking about the increase in cost due to taxes, was it arbitrary or was it based on internalizing the real cost to society (second hand smoke, various social costs for people dying prematurely) into the cost of the product?
Quoting Kenshi
Neither proponents of capitalism nor socialism (of whatever form) argue about people producing more than their wage. The discussion is, given that producing more than one's wage is a given for an activity to be economic, what is done with the surplus.
In a an "ideal capitalist" system (what proponents of capitalism imagine when they justify capitalism), owners of capital get capital by working harder, being smarter and more innovative, in investing and building businesses and however the surplus is divided up is fair.
In capitalism as it is actually implemented today, owners of capital are able to own land and housing and monopolies on various needs and extract rents from the working class who do not have capital. In our actual reality, a large part of this rent extracting capital originates prior to our modern democracies in feudal rights, profits of wars, appropriating land and minerals from natives etc. and another large part of this rent extracting capital is due to government protected monopolies, through laws a tiny part of this capital is put to work to form through legal forms of propaganda and influence as well as illegal forms of corruption (a self reinforcing loop); an example of this feedback loop is passing laws that expand the domain of "legal influence" into what was previously "corruption" such as reinterpreting a bride to require an explicit recorded agreement and reinterpreting a campaign contribution to require an explicit and recorded plan for how the contribution helps. Another part of this capital is accumulated due to externalizing costs of production to society as well as direct state subsidies; again, with this capital put to work to stop people from trying to fix such distortions in the market. Another part of this capital is due to labour law and environmental law arbitrage where production can be outsourced to countries where worker protection is less or non-existent as well as it being even easier to externalize costs of production, such as pollution, onto both local and global society; and again this capital can also be put to frustrate attempts of workers in nations with better laws to correct this arbitrage. In other words, privately controlled capital is able to change the structure of society to benefit privately held capital.
In this latter case, proponents of capitalism generally say "what's wrong, all these practices are just looking out for number one; if people can't get together to protect their own interest to reverse ill gotten gains, manage monopolies through one way or another, internalize the true cost of production, and make trade rules that prevents labour and environmental law arbitrage to force down wages, then that's their fault! However, notice that the argument that when the "rich win, they're just winners" is not actually an argument in favour of the system; when workers manage to win on one of these issues the same people don't say "look at that, the workers won, good for them", but rather they invent and spread fantastical propaganda that they know to be false: privately owned land is just more efficient regardless of whether it originated in feudalism or colonialism, and colonialism and slavery benefited the collonized and slaves for that matter and taught them manners and civilization and gave them technology so it was a good exchange for them, climate change and pollution doesn't exist and in anycase the burden of proof is on whoever wants to limit a chemical in food or environment to prove beyond a doubt not within science and risk-benefit framework a company would use but a bizarre system of argument where anything goes and nothing needs to be consistent or make sense, and if a country is able to lower production costs by being a communist dictatorship without any labour or environmental laws nor any freedom of speech or right to assembly, well that's just the magic of capitalist competition at work and the whole world is benefiting from a reduction in the cost of commodities.
Marx views these rent extracting capital structures as one of two main mechanisms surplus value is appropriated by the owners of capitalism.
Which brings us to your next point:
Quoting Kenshi
If slavery wasn't a benefit to the black community (do you agree with this), then there are negative consequences to the black community that persist through time while positive consequences of the owners of the capital that was created with black labour during slavery. Would you say that slavery was a capitalism at work with wages based on productivity and merit? If not, why is it fair for the for the descendants of black slaves to inherit the negative consequences of the institution of slavery, but descendants of slaver owners inherit the positive consequences (the surplus value the slaves created)?
Likewise, if the black community today has less home ownership (less of an ability to keep a large part of their wage by avoiding rents) because lending policy was structured by the already wealthier class to not only explicitly exclude blacks communities but on-top-of-this make a condition that white recipients of federally subsidized home-loans cannot build close to a black home. If this wasn't a fair structure, again how is the system today completely fair? If education of the next generation is tightly tied to the wealth of previous generations, is this a merit based system if nearly every generation has had unfair appropriation of their labour or structures that ensure a large part of the wages they do earn go to rents?
If you have no good answers for the above questions, how do you explain your view is not just vanilla racism?
Quoting Kenshi
"They're becoming more cost-effective than people" as a recent phenomena? One of Marx's main predictions is that capitalism is relentlessly replacing human labour with automation. The question is who should own this form of capital.
Quoting Kenshi
Subsidized education does not help the poor? Nor universal health-care? If so, how are states in Europe with free education at all levels as well as free retraining when factories shutdown and universal healthcare harming the poor? or at least not benefiting them, if the only way to help the poor is through paying what the labour is worth?
Quoting Kenshi
Do you agree that poverty has been reduced in communist China over the last couple of decades? If so, are people really better off with the strengthening of the communist regime due to the West sending large sums of investment and importing large quantities of goods, even if they seem less poor on the surface? I.e. if the poverty reduction is real and truly a benefit to live in a much more powerful totalitarian regime with democracy potentially far less likely and further off. I.e. is the poverty reduction really a true benefit to the Chinese people even if the communist regime is much stronger due to working with Western goverments and corporations to deploy labour law and environmental arbitrage? If so, is this true benefit within the Chinese communist system, due to capitalism working as the only way to benefit the poor (that this poverty reduction was due to people freely exchanging their personal value under capitalism)? Please explain.
Likewise, within states that provide free education and universal health care, voted by democratic processes, and that have low poverty rates, is there no link between these things? How do you argue the poverty reductions were only due to the free market working? For instance, Finland was very poor before and after WWII, now it is considered a rich country; the Fin's believe they have benefited from large investments in education and other social programs since WWII. Do you disagree this is the case; that Finn's would be equally or more rich without such programs and have even less poor?
2: I think that's mostly semantics, but yes. And the motivation behind arbitrarily increasing the cost is irrelevant. My point was that it de-incentivizes people to purchase the good/service in question.
3: Capitalism is about the "free" exchange of goods and services. Capitalists often call for less government control of the market for exactly the things that you mention. There's a reason that the practices you talk about are known as "Crony Capitalism", because everyone knows that those are examples of capitalism being exploited, not implemented. As far as your land owning argument is concerned, the only places I've ever heard of where that kind of thing actually happens is in big leftist cities like New York or L.A., places where government spending on social programs are very high with the highest minimum wages as well as high taxes on the wealthy.
4: Many, MANY more black people came to this country voluntarily than they ever did as slaves. Only 2-8% of whites owned slaves when it was legal, and there's no way that anywhere close to the majority of whites are descended from slave owners, nor blacks descended from slaves. I say that the system is fair because good life choices are the biggest deciding factor in long term wealth, not race/color. The poverty rate of black married couples is 7%, the poverty rate of white single parents is over 20%. The Brookings Institution (a Liberal think-tank) found that American citizens that graduated high school, didn't have children before marriage and worked full time almost never wound up in poverty, and given the number of ways that one can ruin themselves financially, there's no reason to immediately assume that the remainder were poor because of some kind of bias. Also, "good responses"? I really hope that doesn't mean what I think it means. Also, "racism"? I'm black, so is my grandmother who grew up incredibly poor, and despite being a single mother of 2, she went to college on a loan, got her degree and worked her way up to a 6-figure salary, a 3-bedroom house and 2 cars. Living proof of what I'm talking about. (It's just an example, I'm not claiming that anecdotal evidence is finalizing)
5: No, it's not a recent phenomena, it's just of particular concern to people today. Automation is on the whole, a good thing considering all of the affordable luxuries we now have as opposed to people of the same, or in many cases even greater economic strata, say a century ago. Plus, even with all of the automation and outsourcing that has and does occur, the vast majority of us are still employed. Even if you think that automation is entirely bad, you're only making it worse by arbitrarily raising the cost of labor.
6: I wouldn't say that those things don't help the poor. I just think that the market is a more powerful tool to solve the problems associated with those institutions than the state. Also, I think it's disingenuous to say that something is good because it's free. In England, you are far more likely to die during a hospital visit, forcing universal health care on people was deemed a human rights violation by the Canadian Supreme Court, etc.
7: I said "nearly". Even so, China is a free trade GIANT. They also only really lift people up when they display excellence of some kind and greatly impose on the freedoms of such ones. My support of Capitalism is really more about freedom than anything else. Even though China is rich, it's not free. So no, I don't think the citizens of China are well off, but it has nothing to do with Capitalism. In regards to the Scandinavian countries, Sweden is probably the most successful and they have VERY low tax rates on big businesses and the wealthy, it's the middle and lower classes that are funding their welfare state. The Prime Minister of Denmark openly said to stop pointing to them as a beacon of socialist success. "Denmark is FAR from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a MARKET economy", he said. They also don't have to spend very much on defense. The U.S. has the largest defense budget in the world and spends more than the next 26 highest spending countries combined. This is because the U.S. has a vested interest in keeping as many countries free and trading as possible, because that keeps the country rich. Most of the free world benefits from this, ESPECIALLY the smaller European countries. At the end of the day, all of the Scandinavian countries employ Capitalism just to stay afloat, and in some ways are MORE Capitalist that we are. They don't even have a minimum wage. Every time I've tried to find it, I'm given graphs of "average earnings", not minimum. They understand that the rich are the ones stimulating their economy and that without them, the whole thing would crash and burn.
I'd just like to conclude by saying that you are very well spoken and intellectually challenging, which I greatly appreciate. I get the feeling that neither of us is going to budge on this, but I appreciate you forcing me to try rationalizing my positions. I hope we can both agree that we both want what's best for our poor and just don't see eye-to-eye on the solution to poverty, rather than assuming malicious intent of the other. Cheers!
One of the most important societal changes in the world is to educate young women. I’m not suggesting that would solve all the worlds problems, but it sure as hell is known to help human society on many seemingly disconnected fronts.
I learnt some interesting things about subsidies that seem to damage poorer countries yet long term it actually serves to protect them. These topics are so complex that it’s all too easy to fixate on one particular aspect - and if we face facts we have to put our weight behind SOMETHING in life and in doing so it can be extraordinarily hard to admit we’ve made an error once we’ve committed.
Over all it seems to me that the human race (as a global entity) has matured a reasonable amount over the past several decades - at a cost of course; that is unavoidable!
I'm not sure how long people will insist on using "Scandinavia" as a model for the supremacy of socialism parroting a moron socialist like Bernie Sanders, but those nations are capitalist, yes. They transfer heavy taxation from all economic classes into social programs and institutions, but neither the state nor the public owns the means of production, and obviously the primary factor contributing to their "happiness" is a state of cultural, ethnic and religious homogeneity (approximately 90%).
If the motivation is not arbitrary, then the action is not arbitrary. You can just say "increasing the cost decreased motivation to buy". The only reason to add "arbitrary" is to try to avoid saying "for the purpose of internalizing the true cost to society". It is not just semantics.
Do you agree that increasing the cost of cigarettes internalizes the true cost to society in the cost paid for the product? Do you agree that this is a good policy to follow with cigarettes as well as any other product? Why or why not?
Quoting Kenshi
Yes, I mention in my post that there are two definitions of capitalism used by the proponents of capitalism: hypothetical "free markets" is one definition and "the US / Western system as it is today" is another definition. These definitions are of course not referring to the same thing.
For instance, when you say "Nearly every instance of the elimination of poverty has been the result of Free-Market Capitalism" you are clearly referring to systems that actually have and do exist.
If capitalists can use their money to pass laws to make "crony-capitalism" legal; how is this "exploiting capitalism". They've used their capital to make more capital, what's the problem vis-a-vis capitalism. Should constraints be placed on people who control large stores of capital to convert part of their capital into influence that legalizes and promotes "crony capitalism"? What should these constraints be? If there shouldn't be constraints as people should be "free to use their money as they way" and this leads to the crony capitalism being amplified, entrenched and a positive feedback loop of using crony capitalism to get generate more capital to generate more crony capitalism, how then should this problem be solved?
When you say "practices you talk about are known as 'Crony Capitalism', because everyone knows that those are examples of capitalism being exploited, not implemented" does this include the politicians implementing crony-capitalism into law and the lobby groups promoting to the public these crony capitalists laws are actually good or freedom or whatever? If these people know they are exploiting capitalism for their own benefit, how does this contradict the motivation to make as much profit as possible? Is anyone in the wrong? If not, presumably it's up to the people to stop them, but it f there is no economic benefit to engage as a citizen in politics as the effort to vote does not equate with the likelihood of affecting the outcome (free rider problem), then how are people who don't engage in politics in the wrong for likewise following their own interest?
Quoting Kenshi
What are the numbers here? "Many, MANY" seems to me like orders of magnitude, what do you mean by this in terms of numbers?
Quoting Kenshi
I did not say "all whites" nor a majority of whites, I said the descendants of slave owners that benefit from capital accumulated during the slavery. Is it fair they keep the benefits of slavery? To start, only even in principle. If it's fair, was slavery just and simply capitalism at work (free folk using their labour to kidnap people and use them as slaves)? If it wasn't fair nor capitalism at work, should the stocks of capital that resulted from slavery that still exist today that are used to extract rents, an example of capitalism working? My question here is not whether there is a practical method of separating slave-derived capital from other forms of capital, my question is one of principle of whether such stocks of capital are fair or not? Would such capital come from "'free' exchange of goods and service" which you claim capitalism is and so it seems to follow all stocks of capital are examples of the result of "'free' exchange of goods and services", does this include the capital that resulted from slavery? Or does capitalism not include all forms of capital. If not, please explain.
Quoting Kenshi
I don't see what your point here is and I don't think you understood my argument.
If there are no structural reasons that "especially black teenagers can't find jobs"; i.e. if there are no processes in society that have disadvantaged black teenagers, that the only variable is that they are black and they can't get a job because they are not willing to work for low wages; then the only variable left is that they are black. If the only variable is that they are black, then they are poor in a fair system because they are black and because the system is fair it must be that black people are less capable.
To remind you of your words, you say "Regardless of how big a company gets, it's never worth it to pay someone say, $12/hour when their productivity earns you something like $10/hour." and you follow from this premise with the conclusion that "That's the reason that teenagers, black teenagers in particular, have so much trouble getting jobs."
The premise is true for all people, but you say it's particularly true for black teenagers. If there isn't some unfair structures within society built up over time to disadvantage black teenagers (that the system isn't fair), then your argument is it's particularly hard for black teenagers to get a job because they are black. You have no other variables in your argument and you seem to be saying the system is fair, so again, how is this not vanilla racism to attribute the cause of black "under performance" to the variable of being black?
What would "good responses" mean in this context other than solid arguments that address my questions? I don't see this or any of your response addresses my questions.
Quoting Kenshi
I don't view automation as bad. I was simply pointing out that the "socialist" issue around automation is who gets all the benefits, who owns capital (the means of producing things); socialism has no problem with automation.
To provide food for though, a lot (most) of fundamental R&D is paid by the state because it is too early stage and too high risk for investors to finance. In other words, workers through their taxes fund a large part of the R&D that results ultimately in new automation that replaces their jobs; yet, the worker that is replaced doesn't benefit in this scenario. Should the state not fund R&D with people's taxes? Should part of the value produced by automation be redistributed back to the worker who's taxes helped create it (for instance, through things like re-training, health-care, general safety net while finding a new job)?
Quoting Kenshi
I'm no sure you understand what your words "Nearly every instance of the elimination of poverty has been the result of Free-Market Capitalism" mean. By saying "nearly every instance" is due to X, this implies it's a very small part that is due to not-X.
I am glad you have revised your position, and agree that universal health care and free education help the poor. However, please explain how a free market is a more powerful tool to provide education and healthcare or that going without these things is a counter-intuitive help to the poor. Also, in the case of education, please keep in mind a "voucher system" is still public funded education; IQuoting Kenshi
have zero problem in principle with a voucher system, if it is the same voucher for all students it is public-funded-education and fair (whether vouchers and which kind of voucher system and if and what kind of quality control is needed, is more effective than public school boards, is a different subject). Free-market education is not public funded voucher system, but children only getting education that they or their parents can afford, and someone not being able to pay for something means not getting that something.
Quoting Kenshi
Yes, I agree China is a free trade giant, is this a good example of capitalism? You seem to equate capitalism with free trade, so is communist China a good example of capitalism and the wealth the communist party has accumulated a good example of capitalism at work?
Quoting Kenshi
I'm not sure what this means, but I understand that you admire parts of the Chinese communist party system? Or no?
Quoting Kenshi
How does this follow from China being a free trade giant due to integration with the global capital system? Since you agree that the Chinese are not better off because they are not more free (we agree here), how is capitalism not involved if the wealth and power of the communist dictatorship is due to integration with free markets? Is the global free market system not an example of capitalism?
Quoting Kenshi
But above you said that a free market system is more effective than universal health care and free education. If Sweden is a success, did they achieve this despite inefficient well fair state policies or because of them?
It's not clear what your position is on universal health care and free education.
Quoting Kenshi
Yes, Scandinavia is a market economy, but not anything close to a free market economy. The Scandinavian countries have a social democratic system with a strong well fair state. There are a lot of environmental regulations, there are strong unions, there is free education at all levels, free money for the poor and various poverty programs, there is universal health care, there are tax and tariff systems that seek to internalize the true cost of products.
Do you view all these policies as example of well run free market system? If not, how does this square with your view that these countries are a "success"?
Quoting Kenshi
I'm not sure how this argument follows. How are the Scandinavian countries "more Capitalist"? Also, keep in mind that Finland has conscription and is not part of NATO, and so has hundreds of thousands of reservists; Sweden too has conscription (we Finn's just don't take them seriously).
Quoting Kenshi
I'm not sure about the other Scandinavian countries, but in Finland it is true there is no mandated minimum wage across all industries. However, there is a law that if unions representing 50% of an industry come to an agreement with their counter-party employers on a minimum wage, this minimum becomes law for the whole industry; i.e. smaller unions or non-unionized businesses cannot undercut the large unions. It is basically the extreme opposite of right-to-work laws. Is this Finnish approach to minimum wage a good example of "more capitalism" in the sense of free trade based on personal value? Why or why not?
Quoting Kenshi
I have not assumed any malicious intent, so please be at ease. Where I am unsure of your position I have asked for clarification. I appreciate you reading and responding to my post. I think it is premature to assume no one will budge. I have moved a lot on all these issues over the years.
However, when you say that the debate has "helped you rationalize your positions", it is an interesting phrasing. One interpretation is that you already decided your on your conclusions even if you had no good reason to at the time, and now generating reasons backwards from your conclusions. Another interpretation is that you have strong intuitions that require more work to articulate. Perhaps a combination of both. Maybe worth thinking about.
Since you are replying to a Kenshi who's replying to me, it seems implied that you are referring to my "blaming capitalism". However, please correct me if I'm wrong and you are referring to others in the thread or just people out there.
If you bothered reading my post, no where did I blame "all the woes of the world" on capitalism. If you furthermore read carefully, I focused on specific issues such as crony-capitalism, free education at all levels, universal health care, publicly funded poverty reduction programs of any sort. My main purpose was to respond to the idea that "only capitalism" has reduced poverty.
I make clear that capitalism is used in two sense, an hypothetical free market in some contexts, and in other contexts as the essentially Western "system as is" (where if we are talking about technology, it's an example of how "capitalism" of the first time works in practice, and if we're talking about market failures and monopolies this is due to the system not being real capitalism but big government and social programs are preventing getting the benefits of real capitalism; i.e. the system is and is not capitalism depending on context). So, depending on how capitalism is used I may or may not various things to say.
In some contexts, proponents of these first two definitions of capitalism use a third definition of capitalism simply referring to the need of "capital tooling and investment" to make anything. I agree.
So it depends what we're talking about. If we're talking about markets with regulations to internalize the true cost of production into the cost of the product and regulations to prevent working condition and environmental arbitrage, I have no problem with such markets. If this is what someone means by "capitalism" then I do not view this as a problem for society. If someone wants to use this definition of capitalism but not use a reasoned science and precautionary based risk-benefit framework to evaluate "true-costs" but rather a hodgepodge of fanciful reasoning originating with paid propagandists, then I do have a problem.
Likewise, if by capitalism you mean "market based economy" where education at all levels if free (including retraining), healthcare is universal, voting is proportional, there is robust public transportation, public funded news and cultural programs, housing is subsidized for the less wealthy, and taxes are progressive, the budget balanced, parties get money for each vote they get and private campaign financing is limited and strict, a very wide definition of corruption, and there is conscription for the defense of the nation but a constitutional block to invading another country, then I can get behind your definition of capitalism. Do these policies count as capitalism at work for you?
I have only skimmed over a little of the thread. I was responding to the post before mine and trying to express a much neglected issue (education of young women) regarding social harmony, economic stability, population growth and environmental issues.
I was referring to the general feel of “people out there” and judging by the post I was half-replying to I can see you’re not looking at this in a superficial way - so consider yourself corrected ;)
Hope I find time to dip in a bit more, or at least have a proper read of the interesting exchange you’re having.
1: It's arbitrary because market value has nothing to do with the health of society. If it did, it ought to just be banned.
2: I do NOT condone every way that people gain capital. No Capitalist does. Using the state to get rich is socialist if anything.
3: I got this from a New York Times article. Here's the link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/21/nyregion/more-africans-enter-us-than-in-days-of-slavery.html
4: Who are you even talking about? How do you even know that these people exist? Even if we knew, at least some of them would be black. Thomas Jefferson had 6 black children. Also, most wealthy people are self-made, not heirs, so it seems to me that this issue is a non-sequitur.
5: Black teenagers generally live in big cities with bloated minimum wages and terrible government-funded schools. This combination has made it far worse for them economically.
6: R&D is not the same thing as automation. They accomplish entirely different tasks. People DO benefit from automation. If not for factories or GMOs, we'd lose immeasurable resources and many would starve, not to mention the number of technological advances that few people would be able to afford anymore. In terms of whether or not the government should be handling such things, why? 75% of all FDA approved drugs come from the U.S., nearly entirely privately funded. If not for the FDA (a Government Program), even MORE medicine would be available to people. So no, I don't think that the state is particularly well equipped to deal with R&D.
7: Where do you think these countries got the money and resources to do these things? Capitalism and Free Trade. Doctors and teachers don't work for free, In your case, they're tax funded. Taxes come from income which is created by the market. Under Communism/Socialism/Marxism, no new capital is created and everything becomes horrible. To quote Margaret Thatcher: "The problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Don't twist my words into saying that free healthcare and education are good things. My issue with them is that they're unsustainable. The market would be better at handling these things because competition drives quality up and costs down. Private/Charter schools in the U.S. are objectively better than public schools. There is also the issue of morality: What if I don't want to go to college? It's still my financial concern that other people get to go? On what grounds do you or anyone else claim the fruits of MY labor? Why should anyone be forced to pay for something that doesn't benefit them? Also, a voucher system is NOT the same as free schooling. It just means that you get to decide where your money goes.
8: Vouchers are SELF funded. It's YOUR money.
9: China is a good example of how Capitalism produces wealth. THAT DOESN'T MEAN THAT IT'S OK TO HAVE AN OPPRESSIVE STATE. With more freedom, China would be great. Why isn't it free? Communism. Why is it rich? Capitalism. Capitalism>Communism
10: No
11: Despite. They understand, at the very least, that stealing from the rich is not an avenue towards prosperity for the poor. THAT is the point that I was trying to make. Also, I said "MOST successful", not "successful", not "superior", not "exemplary". If they were a free market, EVERYTHING would be better for them for the reasons I've already given.
12: See argument 11
13: ANY European country would be absolutely CRUSHED by the U.S., Russia, China or Iran. Exactly ONE of those countries is interested in protecting Western Europe. Because of that, Western European countries don't need to spend too much on defense, so they have more money in the budget to spend on social programs.
14: "IN SOME WAYS" are more capitalistic than we are. In that they don't overly tax the wealthy and have no minimum wage.
15: Workers negotiating with employers as to their pay is in no way anti-Capitalist. Unions are terrible for a host of other reasons. In the U.S., all of the worst teachers and schools are unionized. NONE of the private schools work with the unions, and are ALL better than ALL public schools.
16: I've had and witnessed these kinds of debates and conversations many times. I've only ever seen 1 person switch sides. I'm not claiming to know you or your inclinations.
You're saying smoking does not lead to ill health for both smokers and anyone inhaling second-hand smoke?
Quoting Kenshi
You are really ready to ban everything that is bad for society's health? For instance, if it was shown that car exhaust was bad for society's health, you'd support just banning cars outright, and certainly any elective use of cars?
Quoting Kenshi
Capitalists that use the state corruption to gain more capital condemn themselves?
I don't follow; there actually socialists?
Some capitalists (people who have and control large sums of capital) only believe in gaining more power and wealth for themselves; in other words, they believe in "might is right". They not capitalists in your view? Or do they not exist? Or are they actually socialists? What version of socialism do they follow?
If and when a capitalist corrupts the organs of the state to increase their capital and influence, this is not socialism.
The expression of "socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor" when capitalists get bailouts and subsidies; it is pointing out the capitalists that argue for people "competing fairly" without a social safety net, and no government intervention in markets and certainly no subsidies for competing industries or the poor, suddenly want a safety net for their company and industries and state intervention to "maintain market stability" when their own interests are threatened and of course to keep the subsidies their own industries have been receiving for decades. The point that is being driven at, is these capitalists who fund propaganda (via think tanks, owning media, etc.) against safety nets, government intervention and subsidies, only bring out these arguments when they serve their interests. When it doesn't serve their interests, they suddenly have a different set of arguments supporting government intervention, subsidies and bailouts.
In other words, they are hypocrites. "Socialism for the rich" is supposed to be ironic, not that they are actually socialists.
However, for certain forms of libertarian and conservative ideology, this creates a problem, as if it is claimed that the rich produce value and social good for everyone by pursuing their own interests, then it follows from this that if you can gain by corrupting the government and court systems and get away with it, then you have followed your own interest and gained handsomely, so what is the problem?
So, is there are moral problem of corrupting the state for one's own benefit? Why isn't this "being good at competing" within society? If it's not good, is there a problem with the idea of competition as the basis for value creation? If so where? Likewise, if there is a problem, who should try to fix it, what arguments should they make to justify fixing it, and what steps should be taken?
Quoting Kenshi
This does not address the question. The question I raise are in principle. If in principle, the slave trade was capitalism doing good by creating wealth through people competing to capture slaves and extract value from them, as with any resource, then there's nothing more to discuss.
However, if you want to deflect, let's deal with your deflection. "Most wealthy people are self-made" is simply untrue. Most wealthy people are born in the upper class and remain in the upper class; it's called social mobility and there are statistics available for the present and the past.
Quoting Kenshi
You clearly do not understand my argument. You have made another argument where the only variable tying black teenagers to their conditions is that they are black. Therefore, from your argument we must conclude the conditions are because of their blackness.
Quoting Kenshi
Did I say R&D is the same as automation?
I'm sorry but I will not be able to continue the discussion if there's no good faith read my words; if you say I say something, quote me.
I said "workers through their taxes fund a large part of the R&D that results ultimately in new automation that replaces their jobs".
I am clearly referring to the "R&D that results ultimately in new automation". That statement does not exclude other forms of R&D, so that quibble is not available. As for substance, what's the alternative to automation resulting from R&D? That it is spontaneously invented?
I also clearly state that the issue is not about automation itself.
I literally say "I don't view automation as bad. I was simply pointing out that the "socialist" issue around automation is who gets all the benefits, who owns capital (the means of producing things); socialism has no problem with automation."
The question is who benefits. In our system as it is today, governments fund, especially the early speculative and high risk components, the R&D which later industry employs to automate; that funding is through taxes that the workers contribute to, who then lose their job. My question is that is this a fair setup? If the workers contribute to the automation, shouldn't they also benefit? For instance, through a social safety net being available to deal with job loss that is disproportionately contributed to by the taxes on the wealthy that have the direct benefit of automation (i.e. through a progressive tax that pays for social systems that benefit directly the worker being automated; as the rich do not need public transport or subsidized education or healthcare, as they can afford it).
Quoting Kenshi
It's you that implied Scandinavia are examples of capitalism working, even quoting the Danish King, which, as a Finn, isn't much of an authority on anything (Finland has no king, Finland needs no king).
Scandinavia has universal health care and free education at all levels, so if you use Scandinavia to support your arguments as successful "market economies", my question was how do you explain these social systems they employ. How are they able to compete as high-tech, high-innovation countries with an inefficient public health and education system? If they've succeeded despite these inefficient systems, what's the mechanism?
You proposed these arguments, how is it twisting your words to ask you to explain how your arguments work?
Quoting Kenshi
This is just more bad faith debate without reading what I say.
I say a publicly funded voucher system is a public system, not an example of a private system. A private education system is one where you only get the education you can afford.
If you pay taxes that fund a public education system, either through vouchers or public school boards, you are funding things that don't benefit you.
A voucher system is free schooling if your parents would not otherwise afford any school. Going to university for free is free schooling for the students that do not pay. Now, is there a cost that is paid by not-the-student, yes. I think I have been pretty clear that taxes pay for these systems.
Now, the grounds that the government, and society insofar as the government represents society, can use to tax you is simply that it can. Nearly all societies have taxes, and nearly all societies have tax systems where the rich pay more taxes than the poor. There are different reasons society's have had to justify taxes.
But, before going into those reasons, isn't it just winning at competition to be able to tax? Agreed, it's not winning if those taxes are counter-productive, but assuming they are productive and benefit most people, isn't this most people getting together as a team and "winning" against individuals that would rather not be taxed? Why should the winning side need to justify their actions to the losing side? Seems like sour grapes.
Quoting Kenshi
There are two voucher systems. I clearly state publicly funded vouchers. For tax-rebate based vouchers, this is simply the ability to take the money in one's taxes that would otherwise represent contribution to one's children's schooling, and use it to pay or partly pay for private schooling. However, one is still paying taxes (especially if one has kids) that cover the schooling of any child of poor parents who is going to school (whether that system is vouchers or public school board). It's another debate which of these public systems is better and under what policies. Neither are a free market system where people can only buy what they can afford. Both are public, and I state ahead of time I am referring to both systems as public funded schooling precisely to avoid obfuscation with "market principles" in a public system: if you are supporting market principles in a public system, you are still supporting a public system created due to collectivist concerns (the difference is only on the technical implementation of the system; there is no ideological difference). A free market education system is one where parents buy the education services they can afford; just like if you can't afford a fancy car in a free market system society does not buy you that car, if you can't afford education for your children society does not buy you that education.
Quoting Kenshi
Do you have any arguments to back this view up? Did China use a free market capitalism to train their workforce? Did they use unregulated markets with little state intervention?
Your argument seems to be backwards, that anything you consider good you attribute to capitalism, anything you consider bad you attribute to socialism and / or communism. If capitalists are corrupting the state, that's "bad" capitalists. If China has industrialized, that must be capitalism (nothing to do with the "great leap forward", or Western nations and firms agreeing to "open china up" and use wage and environmental arbitrage to produce cheaper, not because of a free market where people are free, but because China has a tyrannical oppressive state that crushes any movement that wants freedom, better working conditions, better environmental laws). Who has benefited? We agree it's not really the poor as they are not more free. So who has gotten all this wealth? Is it through honest, nose to the grind stone competition? Or is it mostly through state corruption?
Quoting Kenshi
This is simply factually wrong.
Your saying that without the US, Russia, China and Iran would invade the EU?
Now, if you're talking about the cold war with the Soviet Union, where there was a legitimate threat to invasion, it's still a complicated issue between the US overestimating Soviet forces (largely thanks to employing the Nazi in charge of soviet intelligence who wanted more budgets and more Nazi friends hired, and a bigger Soviet threat aided that), and UK and France having a Nuclear deterrent as well.
But it doesn't matter as the cold war is over. China or Iran invading the EU is simply laughable.
In the case of Russia, they have a lot of tanks, missiles and planes, so I would grant there is some sort of contest in a full-scale invasion of the EU by Russia absent the US. I still wouldn't bet on Russia though, the EU has a larger population, far larger military budget, many states have conscription (which is a significant force multiplier). Russia has far more nuclear weapons than the UK or France, but you don't need thousands to maintain a nuclear deterrent; hundreds will do.
However, if you feel Russia, China and/or Iran would invade the EU without the US around, please explain how this is both politically and militarily likely to succeed?
The alternative, is that US military spending is not in the benefit of Europe; it benefits US elite interests. Not only could the US military budget be easily reduced to pay for universal health-care, it's not even economically necessary to do so. The US health-care system costs more as a percentage of GDP than European peers with worse outcomes, and so changing to a European style health care system would simply shift money currently spent today on private insurance (with mandated "no negotiating" prices) to a single payer system that could, with money to spare that could then be used to increase military spending!
But, more importantly, which one is it: The US must sacrifice it's health-care (foregoing a more efficient and beneficial public system) to spend on its military to protect fragile Europeans ability to pay for a public health care system? Or is it that a private free market health care system is more efficient and benefits everyone and makes society better, and so the US is only helping somehow for Europe to harm itself with public health care systems?
There's one more critical problem with your arguments, perhaps the root, which warrants much more time, so I will put it in it's own comment.
This is I think the core issue, and deserves more unpacking and critique than the erroneous understanding of voucher systems vs actual free markets (where no money of parents to pay for school would equal no schooling).
I want to address here, your question "On what grounds do you or anyone else claim the fruits of MY labor?"
This is the usual contention of libertarians (I'm not sure you identify yourself as that or not, but it's a principle they often bring up). The general pattern is first arguing that a public system is actually worse for the poor somehow, but if that fails due to actual evidence out there in the world that social safety system help the poor, then the real belief comes out which is "taxes are theft".
So, "On what grounds do you or anyone else claim the fruits of MY labor?"
First, on what grounds to you claim the fruits of other people labour to pay for the US military? Or police, or court houses? You seem to be supportive of the US military as well as against corruption. These things are paid by taxes; you are supporting policies which are funded by the government "claiming the fruits of people's labour" to fund.
There's only two places to go for libertarians from here. First, is to say "oh yeah, taxes are theft, the military and police and legal system are paid by taxes, so, yes, these systems need to be also privatized". I don't think this is your case, but I have argued with many libertarians who advance this; that paying for military and police protection should be "opt in". Of course, the break-down of law-and-order in society has actually happened, and people do seek to pay for protection; that's where the term mafia comes from, private justice groups in Southern Italy that emerged to protect people from crime when the tax-funded government became ineffective. Somehow, this form of libertarian can manage to believe the outcomes of the exact conditions they are advocating for actually coming to pass many times in human history, isn't relevant to their argument: free market justice would be more efficient and more moral than public funded justice.
So, the other alternative is to bite the bullet as it were and accept some public institutions are required and need to be paid by a tax system where the rich pay more (as the lowest common denominator can't pay for the system). However, this system of argument becomes just "taxes aren't stealing if it supports policies I support, but it is stealing if it pays for policies I don't support"; libertarians of this group believe that "oh, it's obvious" is some sort of argument, and there need not be any criteria to determine what services should be public and what should be a free market. Obviously, it's not obvious, otherwise there wouldn't be the first group of libertarians claiming that those institutions too should be free market, nor would there be people claiming those and additional institutions should be publicly funded. The only criteria available is of course "it's good for society to have a military, police, and justice system"; notice that it is not "good for everyone", as such systems aren't good for the leaders of criminal gangs that benefit from lawlessness.
So, if taxes are stealing, "fruits of labour appropriation", then this principle doesn't actually matter if you are in this second line of reasoning. And I would agree that taxes are labour and value appropriation, and under certain definitions of stealing I would even say "yes, it's theft of the majority on minority groups using violence"; the state (when functioning) is a monopoly on violence in a region; taking things using violence is the simple definition of theft, unless we basically add taxes as an exemption (which is how society actually uses the term; it's theft if it's not through the justice system, if it is through the justice system, and no corruption occurred that an effective justice system would try to correct, then it's by definition just and we call it taxes instead).
Now, there's a third group of libertarians that are aware the above lines of reasoning go nowhere; making everything free market and nothing paid for would mean not having the conditions of what is meant by a free market (protection of private property, both internal and external, contract enforcement, and a hodgepodge of other regulations of the market, such as consumer or investor protections, that a given libertarian supports), and as soon as we say "taxes are fine for A, because it benefits society as a whole" then it is open season to debate what other things can be supported with the exact same argument: such as universal health care, education, worker protections and safety nets, as well as limits to monopoly formation and wealth accumulation whenever it is more dangerous than beneficial to society.
So, this third group, though often using the "taxes are theft" when dealing with less sophisticated opponents or potential converts, argues in the presence of more sophisticated opponents that yes there is a criteria, which is whatever maximizes personal liberties on the whole. So the state can in fact infringe on your liberties, such as exacting a tax, if it on the whole maintains more people's liberties than not.
Since you are in the second camp, that taxes are theft, we should for now stay on that topic, but I wanted to foreshadow the two places to go from there: either everything is free market, including defense and justice, and there is no tax (state enforced theft) at all, or then, regardless of whether we call it theft or not, taxes are fine under some conditions, if it maximizes personal liberties overall. Now, there's a fatal flaw to this third argument as well, but it's only relevant if you are abandoning the "On what grounds do you or anyone else claim the fruits of MY labor?" position. I don't want to assume that is a foregone conclusion.
You realize that "what seems to you" is fairly incompatible with "officialness".
What's your standard for deciding a debate is no longer productive?
And productive for whom?
Quoting Kenshi
Yes, I don't think you understand many of my points. You have yet to respond on what other variable than "being black" affects job prospects for black teenagers. You did not understand by "public vouchers" I meant "public vouchers", a public education system where the rich subsidize the poor.
Quoting Kenshi
Yes, many of your positions I do not understand your supporting arguments or how you resolve apparent contradictions, that is why I have asked many questions.
Quoting Kenshi
I didn't use the word accuse. My claim, for instance vis-a-vis education, was that I was pretty clear that in referring to public education, a public paid voucher based system is still a public system and not a free market system. So by responding about tax-rebate voucher system where the "money is your own" you were not responding to the question. If a free market system is more efficient, then zero education subsidies for the poor would be more efficient (people competing freely for education services): if not, then it is not a free market system.
So this is one example. If you did respond to the actual question, please cite where you do so.
Quoting Kenshi
Where do I accuse you of thinking things that you don't. I even say things like "I don't know if you identify as Libertarian", but since it's a argument libertarians often make I think it is useful to present that context for the benefit of other forum participants. Precisely to avoid accusing you of thinking or saying anything you haven't, I ask many questions and specify when I am unsure if a counter-argument applies to your position, which is very unclear to me so I ask questions.
Quoting Kenshi
How do you know if I am likely to budge or not? If your position is simply true and you have good evidence, shouldn't you be confident of persuading anyone seeking the truth of matters? Do you have evidence I am not seeking the truth? Do you have epistemological grounds to know our positions are simply unbridgeable regardless of facts or truth seeking or debate? Or, are you simply not confident your arguments hold up to scrutiny?
Now, if you don't have time, what time constraint is there? Perhaps in this case simply say you don't have time but you may return when you do? Or then that you must pace out your responses.
If you don't have answers to the above questions, you may be confused as to what goes on here. On a philosophy forum, participants generally do not expect to persuade each other in a couple of comments and generally do not even place a requirement of confidence in persuading other interlocutors to there positions as condition for continuing debates.
If it is necessary for you, then speak for yourself, but don't imply that it is a mutual belief that we will not budge from our position or that it is a mutual sentiment that we should therefore not discuss further. Both conditions I would view as irrelevant to continuing to debate. And for my own part, I feel it is actually quite likely that your position will budge, perhaps not today, but based on your comments there is plenty of potential triggers for aporic doubts to flood your entire world view; generally, it is some personal experience, not debate on a forum, that leads to such reflections, but, if I was a betting man required to place a wager on scant information (as most gambling entails), then I would wager events will eventually emerge in your personal life (whether yourself or someone you know) that leads to a re-evaluation of the issue of public health care, education and other social programs. On that day, I will be smiling ... but only because I tend to smile everyday, it's a likely coincidence. For, if free market capitalism turns out not to be the most efficient system, it should be manifest in many practical scenarios.
The mark of a civilised society is how it treats this collective.
Some welfare systems are constructed on the understanding of the vital role played by the least, economically, fortunate in society, and treat the poor with dignity. Classically liberal economies blame the poor for their own penury.
As others have stated, there are some people that are so to say "smarter" than others. This, in my opinion, doesn't make anyone better than another. Each kind of person plays an essential role in society.
¿!?
If The State owns and maintains supreme control of the livelihood of The People, needless to say at gunpoint, then his comment is close to the mark--albeit semantically slightly inaccurate.
You accidentally confused capitalism with socialism. It's the capitalists who are the elite class that takes from the poor.
Socialist position: No need for slaves; no room for masters.
Socialism requires a high degree of micromanaging of the people by a government system. Usually, this results in starvation, corruption, and brutal violence as seen throughout the world in nations that embraced actual socialism. Removing the property from the "rich" essentially takes away from the working class.
Believe me, I know this. I have a jerk for a boss who is sexist against women and pays me well below the living wage for my area. If government restrictions were actually reduced it would be easier for me to find a decent job because other people of the "rich" class would be willing to hire me. This is the case for my relative area, as I am developing a side business in which I am well paid for the work I do for those who are considered "wealthy." (unfortunately, that all goes to basic living expenses to make up for that which my "job" doesn't pay for) Hence, I support the reduction of taxes and decreasing government handouts towards "poor" people, aka people unwilling to work harder and longer. For those who actually need help, private charities and religious organizations should be given liberty to assist those they deem in need of such help. Thus, those who actually need help would gain it. Again, from my experience, the government's system of assisting those in need is an unflexible wall of red tape. They refuse to help me.
And what do you think corporations are doing if not micromanaging people in a corporate system?
Quoting Waya
So your boss is a jerk, he doesn't pay you enough, and this is the government's fault?
Why don't you keep the blame where you laid it: on your boss's doorstep? He's the one deciding to underpay you and maybe harass you to boot.
For some odd reason unknown to me you would prefer to blame non-existent socialism for your problems instead of a harsh, capitalist system which doesn't give a shit about you.
Possibly, but you said this: Quoting Waya
You might argue with Marx's proposed solution to the woes of capitalism. You can certainly argue with practical communism, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism etc. But it's not so easy to disagree with his analysis.
Unwilling? Or unable?
Here is a recent interchange I had on Twitter:
Tweeter 1: The Tories said privatisation of the railways would give us "better, more efficient and cheaper trains". Today rail fares go up by 3.1% while punctuality is at a 12-year low. Meanwhile in Luxembourg they are making all public transport free from 2019.
Tweeter 2: Another leftie after free stuff.
Pattern-chaser: Free? We all pay. That's the point of socialism: from each according to their means, and to each (or all) according to their (our) needs. And we share the cost. It's not free, it's mutual care. Love thy neighbour?
This offers an alternative perspective to your own. I can't guarantee it's more accurate, although it seems so to me.
Scandinavian countries aren't socialist, they are capitalist. Period.
They surely have a long tradition of social-democrats in power and many welfare programs and state programs that seem to be socialism for an American, but in the end the system is based on capitalism. I would object that we let socialism to be defined by those who use it just as an swearword.
The misconception does exist, though. I remember one Cuban, who was member of the Cuban communist party, saying that he thought Cuba's objective would be to be like Sweden. Well, Sweden is quite capitalist. The capitalists just maintain a low profile.
Now the main question is why are poor left poor and rich getting richer??? Or why there are many poor and fewer rich day by day.....So many good answers have been given here and all are in the context of a sustainable society. Each society defines poor by its own rules, such as one country's poor can be equal to a medium income family in another. All societies can not be brought under one definition but what can be brought is how to manage and control.... It is said that in a well balanced community rich contribute more to society other than they pay taxes. Why? Now many will disagree and justify their disagreement by saying that they have worked for it, yes they have but poor have worked much harder than what rich have worked for? You for example work for $30 for an hour in a chair with nice cloths on and on the other hand poor works for $8 for an hour in a much harsher environment.
The more we keep this difference the more poor will be brought in to the society. The more their is this difference the more troubles we will face. Yes to manage this a good governance is required and unfortunately we are washing our hands of such governments on daily bases. It has become a race of survival rather a race for a better future. We have lost track of humanity and sanity long time ago. There are good suggestions among all these posts but despite they being good they will all be suggestions. Governments need to be stronger to survive and in this game of survival there is no place for week or poor. They are being used as fuel to run the so called economist engines of the rich.....
Not true. I'm able to develop other ways to make money. I'm not trapped by one job, nor am I stuck making the exact same amount as everyone else. I see this as very wrong.
I am not being micromanaged because I can leave at any point, it's just not the most strategic thing to do right now. They are destroying themselves with their dishonesty.
Quoting Bitter Crank
No, this is not the government's fault that my boss is a jerk. It is the government's fault for increasing taxes on people who make more, which decreases my chances at making a profit through my own business and for making quality healthcare unaffordable because of extremely bad policy and laws regarding it.
His findings are unpractical and fantasy. The resulting attempts of such practice show increased death rates. If one cannot practice such ideology then it is a bad ideology.
I can't speak of the train system you've used as an example, but I can say that the US post office, which is a public service, shows itself to be an extremely bad example with lower quality service and non-competitive pricing. I can't think of a public service that I can speak highly of, it seems to be lower quality in general and significantly slower.
As for "mutual care" there is no care whatsoever involved. It's either pay or you go to jail or worse. If it was care, then we would have charities where people could donate according to their means. Love is not forced. If it truly shared the cost, then those in leadership would starve right along with the people in their unpractical plan, but indeed they do not. They merely create a larger gap between the classes causing almost everyone to submit to the depths of poverty and starvation while they prosper. They merely use "fairness" to gain an advantage in order to oppress the actual workers.
So when conservatives in the US characterize universal health care, free education, and other state run social programs as "socialism", this is just propaganda? These programs are completely compatible with capitalism as it is understood by US conservatives?
Actually yes.
Apart from Norway, which could indeed finance it's welfare programs through oil revenue (which it actually doesn't, it basically only spends the interest on the oil revenue and hence sits on a vast sovereign wealth fund), no other country could have sustained the welfare state without a functioning private sector and a capitalist system. All of the countries have successful large corporations that have succeeded quite well in the global market. All the countries have their modest billionaires, who don't make a fuss about themselves (and especially don't run for political office). To say that they aren't capitalist somehow anymore is simply silly.
You see, one has to put these things into perspective and remember the narrative and the discourse when US politicians talk about the Scandinavian/Nordic states. The whole thing gets politicized when Bernie says anything good about the Nordic states. Hence the conservative politicians/commentators have to bash these countries, namely Sweden. As Trump said: "Remember Sweden? Sweden!" They can argue that the Nordic States have problems with their welfare state and public sector costs, which is partly true, yet you really have to understand that these aren't huge existential problems. The countries aren't on the verge of collapse as Venezuela is. The countries have gotten into debt, but so have other Western countries too. None of the countries have been as reckless as Greece has been with their public finances. And let's just remember that health care costs per citizen are a lot bigger in the US than in any Nordic country, even Norway. (So just what system is unsustainable?)
The objectives are basically domestic in the US debate, which should be clear to people. The bashing of especially Sweden is a perfect example. As crime is easier to understand than finance and economics, I'll give the following example. So the cherished right-wing argument goes that the city of Malmö has no-go zones and has increased violence thanks to an open door immigration policy. Yes, indeed Malmö has an uptick on violence and it's murder rate is about 3 (to 100 000 people annually). In Finland it's about 1,4, so Malmö is indeed more violent than my town. Yet the US has a murder rate above 5 to 100 000 people, and in Chicago the murder rate is at 23 or something. Hence the US is on average a far more dangerous place than Malmö.
Yet nobody talks about the actual no-go areas in Chicago and that in a short while the non-hispanic whites in the US will lose their majority status. It doesn't help anybody's agenda. Why? Naturally as Americans know quite well their surroundings they live in , they simply aren't horrified about these issues. You cannot instill panic in the same way. You really have to find a true white supremacist who is concerned about his own racial status. Otherwise even if you are a Trump supporter, it's just "meh".
Hence the argument has to be taken to a country that actually Americans don't know in order to create this idea that the Bernie type socialism is bad and that social welfare programs are incompatible with an economy based on free market capitalism. Yes, Europe is doomed.
This is your starting point ...
And your end point is:
Quoting ssu
So ... in other words, Scandinavian social programs are incompatible with US conservatives understanding of the term capitalism (due to propaganda? if so, I agree) and are an example of socialism (from their point of view)?
And furthermore, what you call "Bernie type socialism" is actually correctly labeled capitalism?
I don't see how your argument functions.
I wanted to be clear we agree on that before continuing the discussion, as if people disagree, I'd be interested to hear how that works.
If we do agree, then I'd move on to pointing out the word "socialism" also has many different meanings depending on context as does capitalism. With many definitions, Scandinavia has strong socialist component. Even in the Marxist sense: strong unions that de facto share in the ownership of the means of production, perhaps not equally but more than zero, government regulation of industry which is also de facto voter, whom are mostly workers, share of ownership of the means of production. In the sense that socialism is used to refer to strong social safety nets, again a strong socialist component with this definition. In the sense socialism is used to represent the idea that government should advance the "public interest" over "private interests, based on a moral system of property rights defined by those interests", again a strong component of this definition of socialism in Scandinavia.
Likewise, if socialism is used to mean tyrannical micro management by a centralized bureaucracy with zero democratic oversight, then Scandinavia has little of this socialism. If socialism is used to mean a complete absence of a market economy, this also doesn't describe Scandinavia.
Your comments, for all their confidence, reveal a near total ignorance of Marxism.
Basically Bernie Sanders is close to European style social-democracy, which accepts the capitalist system. This social democratic view limits the actions of the government to a confined space of taxation, welfare programs and some limited role of the government in the economy, but doesn't truly challenge the private ownership of capital.
Quoting boethius
In the last sentence lies the crucial point: It's not a path to socialist tyranny. The welfare programs aren't a stepping stone to something larger. The Nordic model starts from the basic understanding that government programs are paid by tax revenue and because it's the private sector's job to create this tax revenue, the private sector and the capitalist system is basically left alone. This fight is about the level of taxation etc. with the right. True socialism (in my view) starts from the idea that government can and indeed it is it's role is to own the industries and services in the economy and hence make the revenues required by itself.
Nordic social democracy doesn't go to that. For example, the Swedish Social Democrat party has been the largest party in the country for a hundred years or so (if I remember correctly) and typically has been in the government, but this hasn't lead to de facto socialism.
Though we are in fairly good agreement, it would be misleading to say Scandinavia leaves private sector alone in the sense of deregulation. The government doesn't own (much) of the private sector, yes, but everything is very much regulated, so I wouldn't say it "leaves it alone".
Quoting ssu
I don't think the argument of what "the true definition" of something is, is productive. Words are conventions, conventions can change as well as be specified further by other language in a given context.
Marxist socialism essential feature is for the means of production to be owned by the workers; Marx does not specify much how this would be organized or accomplished. However, the world socialism and socialist both pre-date Marx as well as have evolved since. I would say it's not very historically accurate to equate socialism with Marxism.
Very few people today I would guess are using socialism to refer to all industries run by the state, or even just enough industries run by the state to generate the revenue the state needs. For instance, lot's of countries own industries and generate all or most of their revenue with them; some of them consider themselves and are considered to be socialist, some not.
I would argue that the broad usage of socialism in the US today is to refer to social programs; to which the conservatives would cry "that's socialism!", so after trying and failing to educate on the difference of social democracy and social programs and whatever "socialism" is loaded with, Bernie Sanders decided to just own the term, so now it's evolving to mean what Sanders is referring to (in many, certainly not all contexts), which we agree is basically the Scandinavian style social programs.
Of course. There naturally is a political struggle between the right and the left in every Nordic country. But my emphasis is in that there are broad areas that are left alone also.
Quoting boethius
I agree.
It is very important to understand the discourse and it's political environment, the context what is referred to when talking about "socialism" or the right and the left. One example is that I assume that many Trump supporters don't know that Angela Merkel is actually a conservative and a right-winger.
It seems like such a simple thing, but in praxis, it shows how so many pro-rich policies are made solely for the benefit of a tiny elite. In effect, therefore, capitalism is not even capable of satisfying majoritarian impulses, let alone ensure equality of opportunity to all. Moreover, capitalism and the free market have also not been able to ensure free/affordable healthcare or housing. Capitalism conquers by supply. An excess of supply eventually creates demand, which is really only resignation.
I think it is not possible to say what it is that capitalism really promised initially. The American Dream, perhaps? But that is too shallow an ideal. Capitalism, as has been argued, does not enable equality, but forces homogeneity instead (Source: The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time). Proactive governance is one tenable way to address this problem, which means holding governments accountable for failing to ensure basic quality of life and entitlements.
I think we're in agreement on substance, but I think the term "left alone" can be misleading to people who have never been to Scandinavia.
I agree that plenty of things happen due to either market dynamics or personal freedoms, but I think, for our American friends here, it's important to point out that the justifications for these market relations and freedoms are not US style libertarian in nature and there is little belief in free market ideology.
What also can sometimes cause confusion is that Scandinavian's have often never been to the US and never interacted with US libertarian or free-market ideology. So, a Scandinavian may easily present free university, lot's of grants to startups, free retraining, state interventions in industry to make failing industries a less disruptive process as well as help capitalize new future growth industries, universal health care, internalizing environmental and social costs of products and services, strong unions, government monopoly on gambling, state funded news, lot's of public transportation, the very existence of Kela, regulations about everything, long maternity and paternity leaves, long vacations, high aggressively progressive taxes, the state just ordering the telecoms to cut their fees in half or double the bandwidth (since technology has improved, so prices or service much change), as all good ways to run a "free market" and view themselves very close to a "free market" country, relative for instance Stalinism (which is of course is pretty true).
In talking with my Finnish friends about US politics, they are often have a hard time making a clear concept of US libertarianism as well as believing that there are many people who hold this view.
But from afar, there are many similar words being used (market, freed, efficiency) that can be easily be misconstrued on each side as agreement. I.e. Scandinavians are generally surprised that there exists a philosophy that views the above mentioned regulations and programs as incompatible with a free market, or that "free market" and just "market" can mean very different things.
Scandinavians, in my experience, generally view welfare state as preferential based, you might prefer lower taxes in exchange for less of the above social programs. But it is generally outside their concept of politics that the government is not responsible to address those social issues with the power and the taxes it has (i.e. that the government should actually leave the poor alone, and interfering is an immoral act that deprives the poor of the character building exercise of becoming not-poor, and whatever terrible lives the poor might live in realizing why and how-not-to-be-poor is an essential part of their heroes journey).
Scandinavians will also obviously agree that taxes can't be 100% and too high taxes can be counter productive that there is an optimum in which the affects on markets such as private investment and attracting talent need to be considered, but likewise state investments in social programs as well as R&D, infrastructure and business may also need funding and contribute to a competitive economy.
So (usually) I find, Scandinavians believe US conservatives and Libertarians motivated by a preference to have lower taxes but then accepting less social welfare policies as a consequence (that it's a trade off other cultures may decide differently) or then that, on occasion, certain taxes may very well be counterproductive. However, Scandinavians are generally unaware that there is a belief that discussion of taxes can be other than efficiency or preference based, that some people view taxes as fundamentally immoral and that no social programs of the kind listed above would lead to a better society for most people and, even if the market didn't that it would be immoral to put in place those social programs via tax -- that if the market failed to deliver which it won't (if it was truly free) but if it didn't for whatever reason, charity would solve those social issues more effectively than government social programs.
Likewise, the very idea of freedom is only partially understood by Scandinavians in the US libertarian sense of non-interference by the state, the other sense in which freedom is understood is the right to participate in democracy and vote for what you believe in, which can include all the social programs above and more.
To make matter more confusing, even when Scandinavians discuss freedom in the libertarian sense, they may come to very different conclusions: "to ensure a free society we must tightly regulate privacy concerns and make sure business, much less the state, does not invade the privacy of citizens online or elsewhere" (leading to much tighter restrictions on what can be done with data, the right to download all one's data, the right to be deleted from a tech companies database, the right not to be tracked in a store etc. without any ability to get around those regulations with TOS), whereas US libertarians discussing the same issue may likely conclude "to ensure a free society we must not-regulate business and whatever TOS a business and a citizen agrees to is a private matter between the business and the user, and any complaining about being unable to avoid the business in question due to a de facto monopoly in their service area must be ignored because the investors and owners of that business are just exercising their freedom to try and make a monopoly -- and them succeeding is just them being awesome, go make your own business!".
Quoting ssu
Well, Merkel would be far left in the US political spectrum, she even "let in the Muslims", so I think it's a valid conclusion when looking from the US perspective, that she is a leftist (maybe even to the left of Bernie Sanders) and that there are parties with significant support even farther left than her.
Ideologically, the extreme-right in Europe is only in step with the right in the US on topics like immigration and nationalism and maintaining or strengthening whatever racist institutions are around (which Europe certainly has). As far as I know, there is no right wing party with any significant support that has abolishing healthcare and public education and public transport as a core part of their platform. For instance, the True Finns make it a point to say they aren't against the principle of the welfare state; likewise the Front Nationale in France, just that only Finns/French should be benefiting. Even "corporate friendliness" is not an extreme right-wing thing (as EU corporations generally like the existence of the EU and don't like racism and getting tied to Neo-Nazism, directly or indirectly; so I don't see the extreme-right in Europe viewing the very wealthy or multinational corporations as natural or likely allies; which is to say the right in the EU and US style libertarians have very little ideological overlap, but of course there are neo-Nazis in the US too, which I wouldn't expect any US libertarian to be sympathetic with, though I maybe wrong and there could be some bizarre libertarian-neo-Nazi mix happening; basic point being, comparing the right in the EU and the right in the US is a complicated task).
This is so true. In fact it's great to talk about the issue with Finns who have moved or been in the US. Many fall in love with the libertarian side of the US. The simple fact is that individual rights, even if they basically do exist here too, aren't on the forefront of the political narrative. A lot of people would find the US far better than they now think if only they would have been there. As one Finn who had moved to Florida noted to me: it's absolutely great when you have a job and you don't get ill. I personally remember nearly 40 years ago as a little boy the huge contrast between Finland and Seattle. Now the Supermarkets and television in Finland are similar as they were already in the US back then, but 40 years ago Finland was quite different.
Quoting boethius
100% true. The fact is that European conservatives and right-wingers would be surely labeled RINO's in the US. They would be basically right-wing democrats or centrist republicans.
Quoting boethius
This is one of the things people should understand especially when they hear about the "far right" in Europe.
I've become quite sceptical when the media says a party in some European country is fascist and their leader is a 'neonazi'. It's just similar as saying that Jeremy Corbyn is a marxist. Yeah right, the labour party in the UK surely promotes marxism. I really demand the real ideological quote that makes it evident. Many times it isn't the "far right" (or the far-left) at all. It is equivalent to thinking that every person that voted Trump in the US is a racist alt-right bigot, because they hated Obama. The obvious note is that yes, there are few who indeed are neo-nazis, but they are really a small minority. Yet the political tribalism makes it so that people cannot see this: they surely notice the absurdity when their own side is said to harbour extremist views, but when the focus is the side they oppose, they eagerly accept similar trash-talk.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5Hrn6vnOjRs
Help the discussion how? Please elaborate.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/?fbclid=IwAR1FJ9VcytY5vs0hgjC1EzqObkOZlBvKdCbQD6sdbVI0CilvwAIIm415iNc
Too much of a change, or moving the discussion on?
Though of course a substantive answer from @I like sushi would be welcome, globalizing the debate is I think a natural step.
Some global capitalism issues, such as wage and environmental arbitrage, have been mentioned, but in discussing poverty in sub-Saharan Africa there are strong consequences of colonialism and neo-colonialism, both of which can be discussed in a framework of capitalism.
As for solutions, what's fortunate turn of events today is that renewable energy can be used independently of the global energy-transport infrastructure (of course you need to be connected enough to get the technology to where you are in the first place, but once there the efficiency of your connection does not determine what is economically viable), and, energy being the base of economic activity, I believe this can be truly revolutionary. The technology doesn't guarantee a political outcome, but my view it's a powerful tool in inclusive community based political action against poverty.
Of course, there are many other issues at play in comparing first world and sub-Saharan African energy usages. Do you find this disparity congruent with your expectations of capitalism as it is, incongruent, or do you find other factors more important?
My biased expectation of this kind of fallacy is probably telling in and of itself. Nice to see a thread that doesn’t go off the deep end.
The UK, where I live, is a relatively crowded place, and relatively wealthy place. But it is not an entirely pleasant place to live. The man-made environment is ugly, noisy, polluted, stressful, unhealthy, and inconvenient. It is the result four submission to the 'necessities of production', where the methods are those of slash and burn agriculture - clear the land, suck the nutrients out of the soil, abandon and move on. Such is industry - it does not need to clean up after itself, and so finds it uncompetitive to do so.
And so we live in each others' waste, and are only out of fear beginning to wonder if we need to. We have never much asked how we would like to live together. The necessities have always seemed inescapable, but this is only because they have happened without thought or plan, they are really just accidents. Capitalism is the rule of accident, of grabbing whatever has value, and dumping whatever has none. Socialism is making a plan, and making rules of behaviour to implement the plan. Or perhaps that is wrong entirely. I don't think it matters much whether it is those words or some other words i use to make a distinction that I think is more important than political convention.
What is important is, for sure, to have modern medicine and dentistry, to have good communications, to have food and shelter, security, and a pleasant environment. Now the problem at the moment is that production is not making itself responsible for cleaning its own mess plastic in the sea, fumes in the city, pesticides in the countryside, CO2 in the atmosphere ... and if a rule is made here, industry will go elsewhere where there is no rule, because if one doesn't a competitor will. This is the industrial tragedy of the commons.
But we manage, together, to regulate a water and sewage system according to rules, we manage to have a police and justice system, we regulate and limit ourselves in all sorts of ways to make our environment work, and with a little thought we can solve the problems we have not yet addressed. Perhaps you will not be able to pour petrol into your car, and fumes into the atmosphere any more, the way you are not allowed any more to pour waste chemicals into the rivers. And much will be made of a totalitarian nanny state infringing your God given liberties.
Some fuckwit builder has poured his waste concrete into the sewer. This is what we are doing to the planet. Let's stop being so fuckwitted as to think there is some issue of liberty in such behaviour; it is an act of tyranny.
That’s peculiar? I visited last year and found it to be quite magnificent, beautiful, quiet, efficient and clean.
These things are relative, and I'm a miserable old whinger. But it depends where you come from. It's very hard to get away from the drone of traffic, and in most of the cities the air pollution is bad. Public transport is poor, and to be a pedestrian or cyclist in the city is dangerous and unpleasant. When I were a lad, most children walked to school. Now hardly any do. I imagine a visitor heads for the beauty spots and historic attractions that are well maintained rather than the abandoned steelworks and docks and the mouldering terraced houses of the old industrial towns.
There's a lesson in these comparisons:
Do you know that the GDP of China was equivalent of the Netherlands in the 1990's? It actually was and earlier it was far lower as the Chinese really had to fight off the possibility of famine.
And now the GDP is second to the US. There is no possibility of famine in China. So what happened? Did Bob Geldof save the Chinese? No?
Quoting unenlightened
Ah yes, the nice things. Dental hygiene is often forgotten!
Quoting unenlightened
Oh those irresponsible unethical wily capitalists!
So unenlightened, is that really what industry gives to the Third World? Environmental problems? Sweatshops? Nothing else? How do you add up these two parts of your commentary?
I've said some stuff. You say some stuff, and then we'll compare. But try not to create a straw man argument based on the virtue of the poor. People without legs don't run in the corridors, but it is not a great virtue.
For the sake of perspective in the UK, and most of Europe, the traffic is not that bad, the pollution is relatively low, overcrowding is as good a non-existent, public transport is really good (Berlin is especially good in that area!), but I’ll grant that it does seem “unpleasant” if you’ve never been out of Europe for a prolonged period of time.
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I'm not trying to bully you. I just wanted to ask a question about how economic growth and the rise of prosperity do fit to the traditional narrative.
In our lifetime we have witnessed the largest expansion of wealth and prosperity and the decline of absolute povetry especially with the rapid historical economic growth in China, but also the growth in South East Asia in general. Also India has made rapid progress.
Yet where do we see this in the discourse about global povetry? Usually nowhere.
By "fight off possibility of famine", do you mean the great leap forward?
Quoting ssu
At least for now.
As for what happened, the US cut a deal with the Chinese to open up their economy so multi-national corporations could employ wage and environmental arbitrage to move union factory jobs from the West to China and produce at a fraction of the cost. In exchange for a stable political climate (i.e. no unions allowed communist China) to carry out the outsourcing, China can control their currency, never be bothered by the West about human rights, and keep developing world status even with the second largest GDP as you mention.
Another key factor is China has burned large amounts of coal to power their growth. So, to reduce things to trade and capitalism "working" to lift up the Chinese peasantry, is not the full picture.
To measure societal progress to begin with, of only one metric of being less vulnerable to famine (for now), reducible to GDP, I don't think is a very good approach. To compare China before and after economic opening, is also a false dichotomy; trade rules that would have avoided, at least, environmental arbitrage would have been easy to implement (that things must be produced to the same environmental standards as would be in the West).
Also, in terms of global perspective, industries were starting to clean up and become more efficient with all the environmental regulations coming online. Had industry been unable to simply sidestep those regulations by outsourcing to China, there would have been much more pressure on efficiency and alternative energies much sooner, and we'd be in a better position vis-a-vis climate change today with less total emissions and a more efficient industrial system (both in terms how things are produced and what things are produced).
In terms of an example of capitalism succeeding, it's not necessarily straightforward task to argue that Communist China is exemplary. Though, I'm not sure that's your intention.
Quoting ssu
Pointing to (dollar measured) poverty decreases as the ultimate sign of progress of validation of the global economic system and neoliberal ideology that has been running things for the last decades, seems to me very much the mainstream.
I'd say the most popular author on these issues in mainstream is Steven Pinker who basically argues that everything is fine and dandy, heavily relying on decreases in dollar measured poverty which has been mostly in China, and the naysayers are wrong because naysayers have been wrong in the past. At least in English media. And I'd say most people offering criticism (allowed to talk) in the mainstream will still accept this general framework, and then offer a few worries about sustainability and human rights and some potential tweaks to address those issues. Serious deviation I don't think you will find in the mainstream, US and British media at least.
Criticism of this framework is more widespread in environmental and development aid circles, where the China model is not a desirable system for either humans or the environment; that permanent normalized WTO trade relations with China was a mistake on all fronts.
Prometheus Unchained
Corporate patents steal from inventors, the real creators of wealth. After awhile, geniuses get sick of being Cash Cows for Corporate Cowboys and creativity stops. There have always been concentrations of wealth, but material progress only came with the advancement of science the past few hundred years.
Investment is necessary but not decisive. It's like an ignition key: you can't go anywhere without it, but it's only worth a few dollars. It is not the motor. Therefore Capitalism has nothing to brag about, but it controls the broadcast of brag.
The flip side of that is that it controls the way High IQs are treated, as freaks and social losers. Submitting to this by becoming a nerd is self-destructive; it is an insult to intelligence. Straight-A students must become Alpha Males; only then will they stand up to the King Apes and tame them. They must get at least 50% of the value of corporate patents. With the wealth they created and deserve, they will soon drive out the investors whom we are so foolishly dependent on today.
Socialite Socialism
Marx was an upper-class snob who had nothing but contempt for the proletariat. He married a Patty Hearst type countess and was put under her spell of post-guillotine hereditary power's scheme to take over democratic movements and impose its own Born to Rule tyranny on the workers. Communism is State Capitalism, nothing more than a Capitalist hostile takeover, with the workers screwed either way.
The true revolution should be to abolish all birth privileges, the true source of this evil and fake alternative. No inheritance, no trust funds, no living off an allowance in college. Notice that the university is the cradle of Communism, which proves that it itself is for richkids with "independent incomes."
"Prep school" is short for PREPare for college. Instead, all students should be paid a higher salary than they can expect anywhere else at that age, and free tuition. That will get the most talented, not the bluebloods and their boytoys who represent the student body in this decadent society.
thats a better idea of how things should work than most.
People with money are more likely to have family members who become lawyers and politicians. People who can write laws a certain way (detailed a certain way) can have alot of power in how the economics of a particular society play out. I do think there are practical laws at the state level that could greatly help the poor without raising taxes. I know a guy who has a software based assisted bartering website idea. If it worked it could reduce (keyword reduce) the reliance on money. Many businesses already use some forms of bartering.
Yeah Bitter Crank really did add something to the conversation. (no sarcasm)
Well, on a global scale the UK is certainly on the low end of the scale in regards to pollution, traffic and danger. Most people never really get the chance to see this though.
How do you suggest the High IQs get this 50% value? The low IQ's should just vote in laws to hand it to them?
Though I understand your frustrations with the patent system, perhaps consider it is a symptom and not a small defect that can be fixed as you describe.
Also, the people running the corporations didn't muscle their way to the top, they are generally among the High IQs you wish to benefit.
When people with straight-A's are ostracized it's, in my experience, because of either intense family pressure to perform academically, to the exclusion of other things conducive to socialization (in the context of values that are not conducive to socialization to begin with); and/or simply the time commitment required excludes socialization; and/or a competitive drive so strong with one's peers that it is self-ostracizing mixed with a submission to authority and obsession with institutional value signaling that is also self-ostracizing (to most high-school students, who are generally in some level of confrontation or rebellion, either because they see there is something wrong with the whole system or because they are building and asserting their identity which is likely to nor fully aline with family or institutional expectations); and/or a sense of superiority and entitlement beliefs (for instance, that people who work for corporations for an agreed wage and agreed contractual terms simply deserve 50% of the patent profits, without any consideration of whether other parts of the system upon which patent-value depends are fair for inferior Low IQs or less privileged people) that are again self-ostracizing.
However, if the person in question is really that smart, then in graduate level education they will finally be among peers they can respect and who have equal reverence for intellectual performances and institutional value signalling.
Well, that "great leap" indeed caused a famine that killed officially 15 million, and perhaps twice the number, yet I meant to say that after the last death rattles of Maoism, Communist China still had to be really careful in avoiding famine in the 1970's.
Quoting boethius
Deng Xiaoping's famous argument, "It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat." explains quite well the Chinese Communists approach to Capitalism. Of course communists living in the West don't at all see it in the same way.
Quoting boethius
Yet here's the problem: look at what they really embrace for their 'more responsible' and 'just' economic growth.
Usually they aren't at all inspired if a country embraces liberalism and capitalism and starts working up the steps in the globalized market. No, the most ardent critical commentators see the as the 'positive' approach Venezuela of Hugo Chávez (before the problems were evident) or other socialist countries. I even remember this praise about Eritrea, which is a really odd dictatorship.
I think the reason is that because the whole perspective about capitalism and free market economy is negative, then those economies that not only curb the excesses, but actual obstruct the market mechanism are hailed as something good.
Agreed. I just wanted it to be clear, to anyone unfamiliar, that large famines did occur.
Quoting ssu
The problem I was alluding to was not that engaging in global capitalism has not been good for Chinese Deng Xiaoping and other elites, but rather that, for Western neoliberal or neoconservative commentators, that using it as an example of capitalism working must deal with the very large state interventions in every sector as well as the uncomfortable efficiency of capitalism (according to neoliberal/conservative metrics) under a completely totalitarian state; for instance, I remember, I believe Bloomberg article, a while discussing how it's a close race this century to see if capitalism runs better under despotic regimes than democratic and investors are reevaluating the assumption of last century that capitalism needed democracy. For the bloomberg context there's nothing else to say, but these issues I think are serious problem for someone, for instance in a philosophy context, using China as an example of how capitalism is "good".
Quoting ssu
I'd invite you to view this as possibly a strawman projection; this is not in my experience what the "ardent critical commentators", at least the informed one's, argue; though please point me to sources that make these claims if I have simply missed this literature.
In terms of Chavez, the main issue is with American imperialism in South America and opposition to that. So, in this framework, Chavez was good vis-a-vis showing US interests could be opposed, but I don't think many informed commentators believed Chavez's plans were guaranteed to work. There's the strong impact of the price of oil on Venezuelan state finances as well as US actions (intelligence or economic) that could easily frustrate Chavez's policies.
There was of course defense of Venezuelan's right to self determination and to vote for a "socialist" and right to be left alone in implementing those policies, vis-a-vis fairly open talk in US neoconservative circles that it's time for a coup and assassination of Chavez. People in the West defending Chavez, while he was alive, was mostly with respect to US hawks calls to kill him, and then of course immediately being branded by such hawks as communist sympathizers. Likewise, anyone with an interest in South American politics is keenly aware revolutions for democracy and social progress can easily turn to despotism, either in reaction to US policy or because of the personalities involved. Whether it's a "step in the right direction" when things go wrong is always debatable.
However, I am very doubtful any ardent commentator was pointing to Venezuela as the example of "social democracy done right" and a soon-to-be great model to follow, but rather as examples of national mineral resource revenue distributed to the poor as obviously better than simply being pocketed by elites and foreign companies (without implying it's a long term economic strategy); Chavez was extremely popular for a reason.
In any-case, I agree with the comment that "they aren't at all inspired if a country embraces liberalism and capitalism and starts working up the steps in the globalized market". In an ecological framework, if the global economic system isn't sustainable, becoming more dependent on that system and destroying wholesale natural resources isn't a good thing. For instance, increasing GDP by cutting down the Amazon for cattle and corn, or killing a river with a damn, or unregulated highly polluting mining, is not a real benefit to anyone. Furthermore, the single biggest contributor to sustained economic growth in impoverished places is education; this is a pretty strong consensus in the development aid sector and it is not supplied by embracing Western capitalism. Of course, embracing democracy, education, valuing the environment (and policies can follow from these things that create sustainable economic Growth) can seem like embracing Western values, and some extent it is, but I would not say it's embracing liberalism and capitalism as it is really practiced (privatization, no environmental regulations for poor countries, no nationalization of resources, lot's of corruption); an example of a the "third way" model would be Costa Rica.
Expansion of wealth, economic growth, rapid progress. Are these all the same thing? Are they the thing that matters? I wonder if we could talk about the concept of 'enough'?
Enough is a variable feast that I have been trying to point towards above. Growth and progress are antagonistic to enough. It is natural, and normal, that one grows, and then becomes full grown, that one makes progress and then arrives.
I'm just watching a program about beard products. Sales have quadrupled in the last year. Beard oil sells for £40 per 100 ml. I have had a beard for fifty years, and once bought a pair of scissors. Nobody needs beard oil. Nobody is happier for beard oil. This is not growth or progress, it is insanity gone mad It has happened because after putting five blades on the razor, there was nowhere left to go.
When you are starving, and there are dirt roads, there is progress to be made, but once there is enough to eat, more food is not progress, and once the roads are paved, covering everyone's garden in slabs and tarmac is not progress.
Capitalism has come always in many flavors. Yet the amount of Chinese billionaires shows that indeed the Chinese system is a hybrid. To me modern China is more of an example of fascism than socialism.
What has been especially problematic has been the insistence that 'capitalism' has to go with a liberal democracy or that they somehow are intrinsically together. Earlier it was the German Empire, then the Third Reich, which were capitalist at some level, yet not at all liberal.
Quoting boethius
You think so? Just look at what people said before the problems were totally evident.
Just to give one example of a multitude of commentaries, here is Richard Gott of the Guardian in May 2005:
See Chávez leads the way
And there you see it. The Chavez worshipper assures us that Capitalism is alive and well in Venezuela, denies that Chavez is an out-of-fashion state socialist and is only curbing the "savage neo-liberalism". Yes, a golden goose that cannot be ignored indeed.
This is what I'm talking about. From earlier times I have books written by Westerners who praise the Maoist cultural revolution against the decadent capitalist West. So my point again: look at what the critics give as examples of positive approaches to solving the problems. What are they enthusiastic about. It's quite telling.
But wouldn't you agree, unenlightened, that what has happened in China is that kind of progress that you do accept? It genuinely has been about turning dirt roads to highways, creating the World's biggest high-speed rail system and an impressive effort in renewable energy resources among other things. The scale of the development is at first hard to understand.
If I would have born as a Chinese person, the country at my birth (1971) was something totally different than now. My actual country is a lot more similar to the one it was in 1971 than China then compared to the country today. I don't like the Chinese communists, but they sure have done quite a historical job.
Have I not made fairly clear what I approve of and disapprove of? I not going to endorse "what happened in China" in some absolute sense. Good things have happened, and a high price has been paid in other bad things happening. To some extent they have been able because of the lateness of development to make a very speedy change from a peasant farming economy to a high tech post-industrial one, but it is the lateness rather than any special political talent that allowed them to bypass the steam age, for example.
I get the feeling that for most of the people, life has become better overall, though it is hard to judge. Endless toil in the field has been replaced with toil in the factory; food and health has improved but so has stress and environmental degradation. But it is not communism, you needn't worry; China has reverted to its traditional form of government - a bureaucracy. Mandarins rule ok.
The self-declared "supreme law of the land" was devised behind closed doors by lawyers for the Colonial 1%.
In order to get paid what they're worth, superior minds must copy the successful change made by superior athletes, who earn as much as a thousand times what they did before they unionized. Besides being properly rewarded as a kid, at age 18 Derek Jeter got almost a million dollars to put himself through baseball's equivalent of college education. Over and above that and his salary for twenty years, the Yankees got 250 times what they had invested in him.
Likewise, apply what you claim about the effects of parental pressure and focusing on one goal to student athletes. Despite all that, they become popular social players anyway. They don't get intimidated by blowhard club owners. The difference is that only a few members of the hereditary plutocracy get richer off them, whereas High IQs create all the surplus wealth of the rest of the parasite regime.
Don't expect the solution to come from those who propose and control our false options. What you say in objection is a misinterpretation that benefits the status quo. Education, from K to PhD must be changed to imitate the success America has had in developing athletic talent. As it is slowly going sterile times, we are set up like some small island that gets its prosperity from how many athletes it can develop fully.
Taken what you said literally would be very condescending. They still were in the same Century, you know.
Quoting unenlightened
Even if I'm not a huge fan of Stephen Pinker, on this issue I do agree with him (even if he ignores the first and second Congo Wars in his statistics).
A lot of things have indeed got better. Looking at the lives of my grandparents who saw a civil war when they were children and were young adults WW2, a lot has been better. We haven't had WW3 as people in the 1980's feared. Violence has fallen, medicine has improved and life expectancy has gone up. At least in my country life expectancy has gone up as in other OECD countries.
And I know saying the above annoys people because we should be critical, we shouldn't stop in trying to make things better and improve the current. Yet that desire to be critical about the present shouldn't make us blind to the improvements that have happened.
...and the observation that the USA seems to have fallen behind the other countries in recent times, and the UK may be showing the same trait.
Yeah well, not actually intended as a jab. :roll:
But actually your point is one reason why we have this disparity. Things have gotten better especially in China and India, it has been somewhat OK like in my country and the US it has been bad for everyone else than just the upper class. Who haven't seen improvement are the blue-collar class, the lower mddle class. I think the support for Trump is one symptom of this.
Make Every Dynasty Die Nasty
Until hereditary privileges are identified as the perpetual cause of societal decline, we will keep sliding into the pit. Those born in the 1% have an incredibly illogical twenty times the representation in the present 1% that a rational distribution would result in. Bootlickers will point out, instead, that 80% got there on their own, but such a lopsided structure has to mean that they got there by methods created to serve the hereditary 1%, without unbiased merit and without any benefit to the 99%.
There was a time when you did have actual hereditary privileges. Yet there is a difference with having classes and having a caste-system. The problem is the meritocratic nature of our society. Even if meritocracy has it obvious positive sides, it does have also the negative sides.
Quoting TheSageOfMainStreet
I don't understand exactly what your point is here. Please elaborate.
Why Enter a Race Where the 1% Sets Up Its Sons Halfway to the Finish LIne?
For example, the San Diego area also represents 1% of our population. What if one out of five Senators, one out of five network CEOs, etc. had been born in that area? How could you possibly state honestly that we live in a meritocracy unless you actually believed that the weather in Southern California produced superior individuals? What makes your delusion even more submissive is that such overwhelming representation at the top would necessitate that people class-climb based on pleasing that clique rather than on merit. If one out of five major-league baseball players were from there, it would logically imply that only rare individuals played that game in the rest of the country and would probably have to move there to develop their natural skills. So we have to insert ourselves into flattering the conceited born-rich dominating dumbos.
You obviously don't understand meritocracy and basic economics and actually my point about meritocracy. You see, a meritocracy doesn't mean every is just fine.
First: Wealth,business, good education possibilities and higher income earning usually concentrate. It's not a phenomenon just related to the United States, you see it nearly in every country where typically the Capital region is this giant magnet for commerce and wealth. In the US this is evident too (even if Washington DC isn't so important). Just look a these maps:
Where the Gross Domestic Product is made, with the size by GDP, not geographical size:
Where the top universities are:
Where the billionaires live in the US:
Do you notice the pattern? With the exception of Texas and perhaps Illinois, everything else between California and New York (and the North-East) is fly-over country where people vote Trump. Yet, all of the above are totally possible in a meritocracy. A meritocracy means that there is the possibility of social mobility, it isn't denied, but it surely doesn't mean that the possibilities would be the same everywhere. You likely have to move away from the countryside, if you have been born as a child to some farmers. And here kicks in all the things where a meritocracy starts to get similar to a class system with lower social mobility. There's a multitude of factors why this can indeed happen.
If the educational system breaks down and the school were the poor put their children are a lot worse than where the rich put their own, the end result is obvious. A meritocracy looks for ability, not for representation of the whole population.
Conversation I had with a Bircher Granny in Lake Forest, Illinois.
'Do you believe in socialised medicine?'
'Well, ma'am, I would not be here without it!'
'So you want the soviets to take over the world!'
'Wuh?'
Any upholder of peace that had to choose between the Orange Baboon and Hilarious Hilary should call a moratorium on all political discussion for at least a year.
The Unnatural Status Quo Is a Paradise for Preppie Parasites
Similar to the Free Market fallacy, it is a distortion of the way things have to be for continuous prosperity. We don't have to accept the self-serving propaganda that things just naturally fall into such a distribution. It is all by design, and will lead to our downfall. If we have to do it on our own, so must the children of the rich. They block our way and must be removed. The race must go to the fastest, not to the "fatherest."
Property and money are social constructs.
Therefore to be a capitalist is to be a socialist.
Virgins can talk about sex too, you know.
And why not?
I recall one article explain it this way: imagine a situation where the 200 richest people in the world now find themselves amidst hundreds of millions of billionaires, and all of them want access to the most exclusive beach resorts. It is highly unlikely that they will get in line for many months together with the rest to access such.
Another article offered another explanation, as it depicted one billionaire despairing that his wealth decreased from $20 billion to $19 billion while his rivals did better.
In short, the rich will not give up even part of their wealth because wealth gives them a type of power that allows them to lord it over others. Also, for them, this is a game of numbers, where the one with the highest numbers wins.
The problem being that our societies are not meritocratic?
But as explained earlier, the same fraction used to end poverty leads to increased sales of goods and services, and thus more wealth for the rich.