Anything that has a chance of increasing survival rates in t

[OrionAnderson]

Random--

Of course, I still don't know quite how to discuss this with you. I'd need to understand what motivates you in order to make a good argument.

See, a discussion of economic principles is a discussion of how best to structure a society.

If you *really* care only about yourself, academic arguments about how to organize society don’t matter a tall. You don’t care about abstract economic issues because they affect people who aren’t you.

When deciding between capitalism and communism the questions you ask are: is the profit I can wring out of the workers under capitalism greater than or less than the profit I can reap through corruption based on the rank I get in the communist regime?

Since we don’t know much about you, certainly not what position you’d get under communism, we can’t say which would be more lucrative for you specifically.

But you *do* seem to want to discuss politics, and you do seem to have philosophy-based opinions, so tell me:

Who or what do you care about?

[RandomCasualty]

1171070793[/unixtime]]
When deciding between capitalism and communism the questions you ask are: is the profit I can wring out of the workers under capitalism greater than or less than the profit I can reap through corruption based on the rank I get in the communist regime?

I believe our fundamental difference of opinion is this.

Society isn't just measured by it's current ability to sustain its populations. It's measured by its ability to grow in the future as well. Socialism, as I've said before, is awesome at producing goods. And goods sustain a society, but they don't advance it. Technological developments enhance society, not the incredibly efficient manner in which you produce shoes.

Since we don’t know much about you, certainly not what position you’d get under communism, we can’t say which would be more lucrative for you specifically.

Now, I'm not entirely interested in just helping myself as you seem to think. But I do know this... People are motivated by hope and desire to make things better. Nobody likes stagnation where your life is as it is and nothing will change that. People are even more willing to endure some really shitty work solely for the prospect of hope. It's really why the US took off as the country it is. The whole American Dream of becoming rich and famous drew all sorts of people here. Heck, they knew they had to endure hardship and that they may never achieve that goal, but they came nonetheless.

Despite how awful we treat our workers, there's still an abundance of workers. They don't all go flying off to China or Cuba, and we're not holding them here by gunpoint. So we must be doing something right.

Socialism sounds nice for people suffering right now, because it's a quick fix. But once you get into socialism and realize that you've hit the glass ceiling. Then it starts to suck, because there is no dream of more success, there's no hope of improvement. That's your life, period. And people get pretty depressed when there's no hope. Yeah, you can get them to make a nice pair of shoes or other boring repetitive tasks, but you certainly won't get them dreaming up many new ideas.

And heck when it comes to ideas and inventions, nobody can dispute American ingenuity. We developed the first atomic bomb, the lightbulb, the computer... hell it's hard to look at almost anything relatively modern in your house and find something that wasn't an American invention.

And why are we so good at that? Hell, China's population outnumbers ours by a heck of a lot... but you know, I don't see lots of innovation coming out of China.

Who or what do you care about?

If I was to suggest the perfect society, it would be one where effectively, your pay is determined by how much you benefit society at large. If you hurt society, you get punished.

Natural competition is going to be a part of life, So generally you just accept that businesses are going to compete, but you make sure that they don't do stuff like pollute the environment. But a little oneupsmanship is a good thing, because it means your businesses are constantly trying to improve things. Cheaper and better ways to ship goods, new services to offer the public and so on.

In socialism there's really no reason to ever improve anything, because the government owns all the crap, and has no competition ever. You keep thinking that the government is going to be nice and start giving out all these new features and benefits, but there's absolutely no reason for them to. They can just leave everything the same from year to year and nobody can do a damn thing about it.

The government's role should be one primarily designed to steer independents in the right direction, sometimes going as far as to independently fund projects for the common good. So if a lot of people are dying of cancer and corporations don't seem to care, the government can fund that research with tax money.

If you really want to make higher education available to everyone who wants it, you need more than free schools. You need free food, apartments, and health care to support them through school.

Well yeah, the poor are going to have to work harder on that. They may not be able to choose the exact school they wanted or may have to risk going without health care. And I can sympathize, but that's just the way things go. You need much more luck to make it as a poor person, but so long as it's still possible, that's the best we can do.

As soon as we go to socialism, you effectively doom everyone to failure, because nobody can succeed at all. Remember, socialism is awesome if you just change to it, but if you're born under it, then it's an incredibly static society with little to no room for advancement.

Talented people improve society, not workers. If you want society to improve, you must reward those with talent, even if it means somewhat punishing your existing workers.

But Capitalism is a system based on competition. And as we know, a competition has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Somebody loses, and somebody wins. There's no restart, it just goes until all the losers can't play anymore and then it's over.

Well capitalism tends to work more like a counterstrike deathmatch server rather than a single game. Sometimes you get some people winning and doing well, but others eventually join, sometimes people team up to bring down the big guy and so on.

Not to mention capitalism also has the government to help regulate buisnesses. Note that I'm not promoting an entirely free market economy where companies are left to do whatever the hell they want. I think some Anti-Trust legislation is a good thing.

You want the competition to be constant, and sometimes you need to throw the underdogs a bone and handicap the big guys to ensure that the battle continues.

And while capitalism can collapse, so can socialism. It just doesn't fall apart in the same way. Capitalism creates problems with its low class, and eventually it falls apart in a mass revolution of rich versus poor. Socialism on the other hand alienates its talented people and eventually falls apart due to competition with other non-socialist nations who steal away all the talent. Not to mention socialism is much more vulnerable to a corrupt government because there is no freedom of the press (the government owns all news). So it's real easy for the government to lie to its people when everyone works for the government.

[Crissa]

When was the last time Capitalism advanced anything?

No, really, when?

-Crissa

[Username17]

Society isn't just measured by it's current ability to sustain its populations. It's measured by its ability to grow in the future as well. Socialism, as I've said before, is awesome at producing goods. And goods sustain a society, but they don't advance it. Technological developments enhance society, not the incredibly efficient manner in which you produce shoes.

The thing is: research breakthroughs are shoes. You can produce them.

Science isn't having brilliant people sit on hills and wait for apples to fall on them, it's a structured process of exhaustive testing. It takes a whole lot of work, a whole lot of collaborative work to get any real science accomplished.

Everything that could be done by having brilliant people go off on their own and be mavericks is over and done with. The world doesn't have Teslas anymore, it has research teams. When you make a new drug you need hundreds of people performing destructive testing on rats, and synthesizing and resynthesizing the material over and over again under slightly different conditions to find a process that makes for maximum purity.

If you can efficiently produce "things", you can efficiently produce research. Because it really is a "thing".

-Username17

[OrionAnderson]

Random --

I suspect we're having a disagreement over terminology.

You've said you favor antitrust legislation, bones for the underdog, government-funded research, public education, and presumeably government-provided healthcare (unless that cure for cancer is just getting auctioned to the free market [hint: bad idea])

Remind me why you're not a socialist?

[RandomCasualty]

1171304617[/unixtime]]

The thing is: research breakthroughs are shoes. You can produce them.

Well no... workers don't produce breakthroughs, only very smart people do. Putting a bunch of mediocre people in a room try to produce Shakespeare with chimps and typewriters.

Science isn't having brilliant people sit on hills and wait for apples to fall on them, it's a structured process of exhaustive testing. It takes a whole lot of work, a whole lot of collaborative work to get any real science accomplished.

I dont' know, Einstein didn't do a heck of a lot of collaboration or have huge teams of researchers.

While there aren't many one man research teams anymore, you'd still rather have a team of talented people than a bunch of lowly unimaginative workers.

You've said you favor antitrust legislation, bones for the underdog, government-funded research, public education, and presumeably government-provided healthcare (unless that cure for cancer is just getting auctioned to the free market [hint: bad idea])

Remind me why you're not a socialist?

Mainly because I like people to have some degree of hope for advancement.

Socialism is a giant depressing box, and you can't think outside of it.

[OrionAnderson]

Random--

Do you, or do you not, understand that socialism and communism are not the same thing?

[Crissa]

Einstein did work with teams of researchers. In his off time from his entry level job he went to consortiums and met with his friends who actually had university positions and talked and had his math checked and got suggestions and fantisized.

...Later in life, he went off into seclusion and tried to make the Unified Field Theory...

And guess what? That didn't work.

Yes, you need smart people for breakthroughs. But right now your random bunch of slubs includes smart people.

'Smart' includes those curious, capable, and educated - which in no way matches 'people with money' or 'people with pieces of paper from colleges'

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty]

1171409453[/unixtime]]
Yes, you need smart people for breakthroughs. But right now your random bunch of slubs includes smart people.

'Smart' includes those curious, capable, and educated - which in no way matches 'people with money' or 'people with pieces of paper from colleges'

Problem is that your system doesn't reward smart and talented people all that much, at least not compared to capitalism.

The easiest way to explain it is with a sports team analogy. You're running a baseball team. Now under capitalism, good players get millions of dollars and ballboys and other lesser positions get minimum wage. You're effectively saying that you want to grossly reduce the amount of money you give to your star players so you can increase the salary of the ballboys and the guys running the concessions stands. And you're saying it's not going to impact how good your team is.

The moment you switch to a socialist philosophy, all your good players jump ship to some team who pays them more and you're left with some happy ballboys and a team that couldn't win a game. Because you can get any old joe to be a ballboy or run a concession stand, but there's only one Babe Ruth or Roger Clemens. And all the happy ball boys in the world aren't going to make your team win. Yeah, you may have the best ball park ever, but your team still loses.

All people aren't equal, some are more valuable to your team (or society) than others, and you really do want to give them incentives to stay.

[RandomCasualty]

1171380418[/unixtime]]
Do you, or do you not, understand that socialism and communism are not the same thing?

Yes, I understand this. But they're pretty close for the most part.

Communism merely includes some centralized dictatorship like individual or political party. But besides that, the beliefs are very similar.

[Crissa]

So...

The mere fact that you are wrong doesn't sway you from insisting that Capitalism rewards innovation and not nepotism/cronyism?

-Crissa

[Username17]

Random: that's not even remotely true as to the difference between socialism and communism. Marx uses the term "dictatorship" to mean "having the last word". So in his words a democracy under capitalism is a "dictatorship of capitol" because no matter what the people decide to do, Walmart can simply destroy the economy by leaving (other capitalists may undermine their action by sneaking in afterwards, but the point is that the last word is had by the owners of corporations collectively). A communist democratic state is a "dictatorship of the prolitariate" because the state has the final word because it is the owner of the economy defining enterprises.

---

But let's address your sports metaphor: Who's the richest man on the team? Is it Alex Rodriguez with his salary of 25.7 million dollars?

Nope.

It's the Yankees owner, George Steinbrenner who rakes in over 150 million dollars a year. (Note: the Yankees generae "negative 50 million dollars" on their own merits for tax purposes, but have separate television distribution rights that generate over 200 million dollars).

And under a Marxist redistribution, industries own themselves - so the workers (that is, the players) would get to split up the profits. So if anything, Alex would see even more money - there'd be another 50 million dollars on the table to split up into payroll!

---

Which is the core problem with your analysis: under a Marxist revision, the very people you say should get more money get more money. Productive people such as star workers and successful researchers get big bucks. The people who don't make big money legally are corporate raiders - those non-productive elements of society that simply take a fraction of all produced wealth and burn it - those people are banned entirely.

Some of them will still exist, we call them "the mob", but under communism you simply relegate all the extortionists to the criminals bin rather than under capitalism where the most successful become "legitimate" and get to write the laws in their favor.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1171536862[/unixtime]]
And under a Marxist redistribution, industries own themselves - so the workers (that is, the players) would get to split up the profits. So if anything, Alex would see even more money - there'd be another 50 million dollars on the table to split up into payroll!

Ok, I have no idea how this works exactly... I thought the government owned all the businesses. If businesses own themselves who decides who gets what salary?

Also, the reason investors make a lot of money is because businesses (especially small ones) need money. They couldn't run without it. I'm not sure where you expect new businesses to get money in your model, since you want to basically remove the benefits for investing capital in businesses.

[Catharz]

1171541447[/unixtime]]

1171536862[/unixtime]]
And under a Marxist redistribution, industries own themselves - so the workers (that is, the players) would get to split up the profits. So if anything, Alex would see even more money - there'd be another 50 million dollars on the table to split up into payroll!

Ok, I have no idea how this works exactly... I thought the government owned all the businesses. If businesses own themselves who decides who gets what salary?

The workers.

[Crissa]

1171541447[/unixtime]]Also, the reason investors make a lot of money is because businesses (especially small ones) need money. They couldn't run without it. I'm not sure where you expect new businesses to get money in your model, since you want to basically remove the benefits for investing capital in businesses.

Investors are like workers. They have an interest in seeing the business succeed - but instead of bidding their sweat and blood, they're bidding their money (or prior sweat) and blood.

Under our current model, investors are supposed to get the most money out of it (but generally don't), get taxed less than workers (not even counting social security etc), and are first in line for money when the venture goes under (workers are last in line, if at all).

-Crissa

[Digestor]

Hey frank/crissa, what would you say if I said true communism = anarchy? (and meant it as a GOOD thing)

[Cielingcat]

Communism, so far as I know, calls for eventual dissolution of the state, so that seems accurate.

[Digestor]

That is basically what I would mean by it - though I'm curious as to how the two approach that matter.

regardless of their answer, I'll still be of a positive opinion of both.

[Crissa]

Uhh, Communism is community, Anarchy is no community.

I still wonder why RC doesn't reply to me. 'Cause I totally support competition in consumer goods; alternatives and choice are usually good things in many places. (Of course, choice of hospital emergency services is probably a bad idea)

-Crissa

[Digestor]

ehhhh I wouldn't say no community...

3. a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society.

If indeed the proletariat is in control then that means that everyone is in control - and if 'all' is true, then automatically its opposite is true in that no one is in control. Power is simply the relative difference of one having greater means or ability than another and is no tangible thing, so then if power is evenly distributed amongst the proletariat, then there is no actual power as the difference amongst them is 0, and so they are either A) All powerful or B) All powerless, which when universal, is identical...

I suppose anarchy is associated with chaos and arbitrary randomness more than actual power distribution...

At least, that's what I was thinking...

[Crissa]

Frank explained the definition of Anarchy thusly: It is the state of fighting against any form of rules or governance. Once the current set of rules and government is gone, a new form appears, which is automatically not anarchy.

The definition of anarchy is self-rule, where the one base unit is the person. In communism, the base unit is the community.

The elite in Europe called Democracy by the name of 'mob rule' and equated it with Anarchy at the time.

...But this was a conversation about costs vs benefit which devolved to cost vs benefit of various economic systems. The reason it stumbled is that currently there are few or narrow examples of other types of economies because of the selfish nature of Capitalism doesn't want to co-exist with others. (Basically, Capitalism allows some people to skip ahead, and so those people will always attempt, despite the fact that this hurts a majority of others)

-Crissa

[Digestor]

By that definition I suppose so - yes, I'd agree. Guess it really depends on how we define government (and its forms (or lack) there of).

[Cielingcat]

So far as I'm aware, the theories of anarchy that aren't shit are based on a society governed by the willing cooperation of everyone. Anarchy in this sense is being used literally, i.e., a society without rulers. The people in charge of anything are everyone who cares to contribute to it; a business is run by the people who work in it, a community by the people who live there, etc.

Of course, I might be wrong and this has nothing to do with the political theory of anarchy, in which case I've said nothing.

[Digestor]

I agree with what you said - though I suppose we could define Anarchy in a billion different ways (much similar to how Chaos works in d&d I guess...), being as such - it's just a matter of interpretation.

[Catharz]

Anarchy could also be considered a state independant of laws and offices. This does not negate power structures or 'social acceptability,' it simply makes them based off of (implicit) interpersonal relationships rather than explicit defined/written systems.

It is, however, possible to have an anarchistic capitalist system by that definition, just as it is possible to have a communist beurocracy. What you view as being the ideal communism id then a matter of opinion. I'd lean towards Anarchy because of the failure of utillity theory, and probably because I'm an American.

I really like the anarchist/socialist "Culture"of Ian Bank's novels, but the fact that they function only because of (literal!) deus ex machina is not reassuring...