Capitalism depends on property rights and NOTHING else. It's not a system, but the natural order of things. Speaking of using your noodle, you should read some Rothbard. There's nothing in your naval useful for solving societal problems.
MESO-Rx
Anabolic Steroids
I would like to know what those of you who support trump will do when he loses the election?
- Thread starter Big_paul
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Uncle Ted
Banned
Capitalism is a system.
Who protects your property rights? Who pays taxes so they can protect your property rights. And not just property, but intellectual rights as well.
Capitalism is a monstrous system filled with hundreds of thousand of regulations and laws.
The Natural Order of Things is me grabbing a club to beat you over the head to take your property and any women I find sexually appealing. It's me dumping my toxic waste in the dark of the night to pollute your ground water as I drive off laughing.
We do have central planning in our current capitalistic system, perhaps your talking about a "pure fantasy" capitalism that doesn't exist in reality. Sort of like my preference for Anarchism that doesn't actually exist in reality either.
You must have missed the part where I recommend Rothbard over naval gazing. Authoritarian systems always result in the authoritarians taking advantage of their subjects. The US is no different.
Capitalism functions in spite of America's crony capitalist system, not because of it. It can never be stamped out, even under the most brutal authoritarian systems. Black markets thrive under those systems, and those systems fail when they attempt to stamp it out completely.
Free markets rise because they are more efficient than beating people with clubs and taking their stuff. The risk is lower, and the return is greater. Self defense, individual and organized, exists because not everyone figures that out.
Uncle Ted
Banned
Rothbard's ideas have probably filtered down to me listening to lots of Mises Institute lectures and podcasts by their keynote speakers.
Anarcho-Capitalism isn't something I'm against because it removes the centrally planned power of the state. However I suspect there would be a lot of pissed off people living under such a system.
I'm not for leftest Anarchism. Most of these idiots have ideas of little value, they remind me of the artsy fartsy types with there heads in the clouds.
I actually agree more with the Green Anarchist/Primitive Anarchist/anti-civilization even though most people would die, it's something that would in fact be the "Natural Order of Things" as nature and death are our truth.
Uncle Ted
Banned
I don't think you can stamp out capitalism either.
However do you let it do whatever people want regardless of consequences?
If I can make a profit sticking people in prison for bullshit crimes. If I can grind up old people and turn them into protein pellets instead of paying for them to lay around in retirement while turning a tidy little profit doing it, who is anyone to question this?
The problem is personal responsibility, not just to make a profit. I mean I can make a profit tearing down the entire rainforest, clubbing orangutans to death to harvest wood and turn it into farm land, but is it the right thing to do?
Capitalism depends on growth, it needs to gobble up everything including people. It becomes a machine. What takes 500 years to grow, capitalism can grind up and destroy in seconds.
The problem is in not observing nor defending property rights. Capitalism isn't "doing" anything. "We" don't let "it" do anything.
If you own your shit, you can do whatever you want with it as long as it doesn't interfere with someone else's shit. With respect to bullshit crimes, that's anything that doesn't interfere with other people's shit being dubbed a crime. Thus locking someone up for bullshit crimes is interfering with their shit, namely their person.
Capitalism does NOT depend on growth. Never has, never will. Fractional reserve banking, on the other hand, does depend on it. I believe you are confusing the two.
Profit seeking companies (and individuals) depend on growth, capital formation. Growth is a characteristic of capitalist/free societies just as abatement is a characteristic of socialist societies. Neither are dependent on those characteristics.
Test_Subject
New Member
So you're saying that the stock market isn't a capitalist institution because it depends on growth?
I don't buy that for a second, seeing as competitive markets are literally a defining characteristic of capitalism. Fail to grow your market share or profitability as a company and you're going to be tits up pretty quickly as investors bail and your company's value tanks.
Eventually, to force further growth, you have to start making business decisions that are ethically questionable because you have no more ethical means available to you as an organization by which to drive further value. You start cutting wages, skirting environmental regulations etc. because those types of cost-cutting options are the only recourse available to provide value to your shareholders.
Uncle Ted
Banned
I see capitalism as it exists today forcing interests payments that never end and thus the need to increase money supply.
It would be one thing if we traded with something of actual value, something that required a well calibrated amount of work to extract.
The problem with turning everything into private property is that some rich guy/guys could buy up all the valuable land and turn it into a toxic waste dump. This rich land owner would be dead eventually, who cleans up the mess after this prick kicks the bucket?
You have no choice but to protect vast swaths of land from industrialization if you care about future generations.
I'm not sure capitalism equals true freedom. For most people it would appear to be a system they are trapped in and one that lends itself to a long list of mental problems. If I go back to my childhood growing up in the early 70's, we didn't have much of anything, but I do remember spending all my time playing outdoors, swimming in the creeks, now those places are all gone, they were taken over with housing developments, the huge river that I swam in down the street from where I grew up is now nothing more than a trickle.
Uncle Ted
Banned
That's exactly the problem.
Capitalism by design forces you to exploit something or someone.
There is no equality under capitalism, the rich and powerful can do what they want to the rest of us and the police state is set up to protect that inequality.
Test_Subject
New Member
Hardly. Not even the capitalists want strict, free-market capitalism.
The banks were tripping over each other to get at the public handouts when the subprime market exploded. Not one of them refused the government handouts and said "well, we fucked up, so it's our responsibility to accept our fate as the free market dictates." And guess what? They're back to trading the same shitty CDOs under a different label...
Capital gains, socialized losses.
You two can continue without me, I'm sure. I'm unable to keep up with the logical fallacies. I don't have the time, since I work for a company that expects me to generate a profit.
Test_Subject
New Member
I'll save you some time: point out one logical fallacy that I've made.
I work from home, which is quite nice.
Uncle Ted
Banned
Flenser tell that company to piss off and you get in here and fix our fallacies.
I look at it like this. We grew up in the west, we are accustomed to our "system" of capitalism and so we are more likely to ignore problems.
It's sort of like the meat industry in China and in the United States. We are aghast at the Chinese treatment of animals, open market slaughter using a club to stun. However we in the west do this behind closed doors to hide reality that we kill far more animals then China does even with our much smaller population.
Has relentless propaganda that we have been fed disarm our ability to point at as George Carlin said "Something is really fucked up here folks and no one seems to notice or care".
There you go, multiple fallacies in one statement. Straw man, and correlation/causation fallacies.
Alas, I am part owner, and definitely a profit seeking individual.
Test_Subject
New Member
Since you believe that capitalism is not dependent on growth, and the stock market is unequivocably rooted in growth, it follows that you don't consider the stock market a truly capitalist institution. I asked if you believed that to be the case.
That's not a strawman at all. I'm not attributing a position to you, I'm addressing a glaring issue with your statement that capitalism isn't dependent on growth and asking you to clarify your position, which I don't see as tenable.
How exactly does one even go about building capital or coming to own the means of production with which to make a profit without growth, anyway?
Uncle Ted
Banned
Okay your logic class you took allows you to pick apart and discredit someone because they didn't quite sequence it the way you've been taught. You still have to face the fact that logic is entirely "subjective" even though a textbook tells you this is the way something has to be. (not to be a hardass, just that we need to accept other ways of arranging ideas that aren't found in rigid logic texts that were written down according to western societies standards).
However you get the gist of what T.-Subject is trying convey.
He pointed out the double standard of those that champion Capitalism and when reality crashes their dreams and ideology they expect some of that good old fashioned Socialism to save them.
Uncle Ted
Banned
Lets take a minute to observe that Socialism isn't necessarily Communism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinist, Maoist...ect.
There are books written on Socialism that I have read and none of them mentioned anything about rounding people up for a purge or one way trip to the gulag. Most of it was about shoring up the basics for everyone, food, shelter, education and healthcare.
Seems to me that can be done without any mention of Marxism.
Amish communities work together to build homes for each other without charge, feed their hungry, they seem to think this is valuable work without any form of coercion necessary.
There are books written on Socialism that I have read and none of them mentioned anything about rounding people up for a purge or one way trip to the gulag. Most of it was about shoring up the basics for everyone, food, shelter, education and healthcare.
Seems to me that can be done without any mention of Marxism.
Amish communities work together to build homes for each other without charge, feed their hungry, they seem to think this is valuable work without any form of coercion necessary.
Correct, but it’s the start of the pathway to communism, and typically leads to such. People get what they accept.
Which books are those? Socialism and Communism are both economical philosophies that share similarities. Main difference being socialism grants you the right to your own property, *with the intention of eventually taking it away.
Socialism emerged in response to the extreme economic and social changes caused by the Industrial Revolution,and particularly the struggles of workers. Many workers grew increasingly poor even as factory owners and other industrialists accrued massive wealth.
Then came Karl Marx.. the German political philosopher and economist who would become one of the most influential socialist thinkers in history. With his collaborator Friedrich Engels, Marx published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, which included a chapter criticizing those earlier socialist models as utterly unrealistic “utopian” dreams. His belief system is entirely based on the principles of Socialism. The 2 are easily linked and interchangeable. Communism is literally “Revolutionary Socialism”. This originated as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and came to be defined by Marx’s theories—taken to their extreme end. In fact, Marxists often refer to socialism as the first, necessary phase on the way from capitalism to communism. One cannot lead the pathway without it.
