Slavery never ended people

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Corporations don't need to get greedier for MORE people to lose homes. You're shoving words into my mouth.

And if he doesn't leave he gets shot. Prisons are funded with taxes, so execution would be the only option in a libertarian capitalist society.

You forgot the fact that Jews were forced to work for a boss or die. Democracy does exist in cooperatives.

'We've never known better' is a foolish reason to simply stop trying. If the world's problems could be resolved, only for our want to stay with the familiar, we would never grow as a species. Indeed the only reason capitalism ever came about in the first place was a willingness to expunge outdated ways of thinking.

The problem is we have reached a crux in the usefulness and life span of our existing system. We are witnessing runaway inflation, social disparity and dwindling fuel resources. It has become unsustainable and the short-termist way of the plutocrat, the banker and the lackey politician must be replaced by the rule of science, logic and common interest if we are to avoid a ecological, environmental and social catastrophe of an unprecedented magnitude.

Moreover, a better way of doing things is possible, if not for our hardheadedness and contemptful nature of politicians and media magnates leading us to believe that we have reached our peak as a species.


Its all relative and for the most part the luxuries we have are distractions utilised to solicit our mindless obedience and conformity in accepting the status quo. The prices of these luxuries you list are often beyond the spending capacity of bottom earners and vulnerable people are constantly encouraged to spend beyond their means. For those that can access these things, they are constantly bombarded with reality TV and inane messages through our high definition LCD screens that numb our mundane lives and do next to nothing to enrich us intellectually or emotionally.

Now, theres nothing inherently wrong with these technologies but their potential, and I should say our potential as a species is vastly misutilised and underutilised.

Technological progress has reached a slowdown in recent decades. One example is our over reliance on the 4 stroke combustion engine and the use of petroleum. The profits of large oil companies and their political sway undermine the will of leaders to implement green technology such as electric cars.

I suspect at this rate, we will hit a glass ceiling and technological progress will grind to a halt completely unless we destroy ourselves first.

At least us white folks don't have to worry about making reparations.

Slavery (or non-slavery) in the modern sense isn't determined by the colour of your skin. Its determined by the spending power of your parents.

The problem is competitive capitalism with voluntary price agreements is the only efficient way to match production with the wants and needs of society. There could be a requirement that large corporations and major private firms operate more like cooperatives, giving workers more say in terms of determining their compensation level. The argument against this is that without the promise of maximized corporate profits investors won't be motivated enough to provide equity. Not sure I buy this argument 100%. I think a more democratic market economy could function without the dominance of wall street and big finance.

the only way capitalism can become sustainable again is to stop producing more than we can consume. However that is neither acheiveable nor desirable, simply due to the force of the market (you cant tell people to stop doing business) and the fact that we are already struggling to feed people on our current product output.

Unless the system is replaced, inflation will continue and our current situation will continue to get worse and worse, heralding the takeover of tyrannical political systems and the associated terror and loss of life that comes with it.

Yah I think Libertarianism is the new communism. Even the name is borrowed from communist thought. They promise greater, universal wealth, but when they get into power, it'll only lead to a gross concentration of power and universal misery. The economic experiments of the Pinochet regime in the 1970's are a reflection of what we can expect in a "Libertarian" revolution, just as much as the economic experiments of Lenin or Mao showed us what to expect from a "communist" revolution. As well, Libertarian ideology is even coached in the idea that it'll lead to anarchy and universal liberation of humanity, much like communism.

It doesn't matter what you call it, communism, capitalism, republicanism, or fascism. These are just rhetorical points. The historical examples of the French and Russian revolutions show that power vacuums naturally lead to the few accumulating dangerous amounts of power over the many. If we dissolved the big, bad, evil representative government that Libertarians say is the cause of all ills, multinational corporations, would be left the de facto power, because they have the largest concentration of resources and property. Since they aren't voted in or out, or wouldn't be beholden to a constitution, they'd be totalitarian in principle.

I didn't shove words. You talked about interest rates.

You really mean an anarcho-capitalist society, because minarchist libertarians are fine with a government justice system.

That being said, such a system is more likely to move away from imprisonment than to ramp up to execution. So, the new focus would be on fines in this system that people generally don't advocate at all, therefore it is pointless.


No, the Jews were forced to die. These camps were very much death camps. They also aren't a central requirement for a system to be fascist.

Right.... so despite the original underpinnings of the term, it really only exists in a social form that barely exists, and all of the more popular ones, and foundational instances are irrelevant. Utterly ridiculous.

Yah, Mondragon in Spain and the Kibutzim in Israel are working examples of this, I'm all for genuine workplace democracy and worker ownership , since it decentralizes economic and political power. Also, I don't think a CEO in a high rise thousands of miles away from a factory ( or a politbureau official thousands of miles away from a centrally managed "cooperative" for that matter) is the best person to know how to run the factory. Really, the people who know how to run a machine or count inventory, those who actually work there, are the best suited people to make management decisions for the factory.

Well, we could shift to more nationally autonomous modes of production that aren't so dependent on global trade (worker self managed co-ops and traditional, small businesses). Rather than buy everything from huge conglomerates that supply goods manufactured thousands of miles away, it would really be in our best interests to produce everything necessary for survival on a more local level. I think it would ground us back to reality and provide true, economic security. Factor-e farm and its open source ecology project is doing a lot of good in providing free General Public License blueprints that demonstrate how to build machinery necessary for modern life on the local level without relying on multi-national corporations.

http://opensourceecology.org/

What this world needs is more pragmatic humanitarianism and less focus on rigid ideology. Failing to find peaceful ways to temper societal power imbalances, excesses, and injustices will just lead to more ideological extremism. The problem is ideologues never learn from their failures. The harder they fail the more they double down and dig their feet in. A rigid ideologue would rather go down burning and take the whole world with them as long as they get to keep the fire in their belly. Ideologues are also easily exploited to do the bidding of certain self-serving power-hungry individuals. The American Libertarian and "fiscal conservatism" has more than it's fair share of useful idiots today.

I didn't say anything about "stop trying". I said we don't have another solution, making the overly strong criticisms absurd.

Capitalism wasn't a matter of a "willingness to expunge old ways of thinking". It was a result of social evolutions, as you have to realize that Adam Smith wasn't inventing a system whole-cloth, he was describing facts he had seen about markets and putting them into a framework. The end result of these social evolutions, and some of these pushes was the modern system, but it wasn't created as rapidly or brutally as socialist efforts have been, or as socialist efforts would need to be given the frameworks in our background.


Runaway inflation?? What are you even talking about? Most societies have a sustainable rate of inflation. If they do not, that's largely the fault of the central bank, as central banks in many nations have had to reign in inflation when it starts getting out of hand. The entire matter of inflation is actually incredibly easy to solve once you get all of the major political players on board with the program. Why??? Because here's inflation:

MV=PY
PY is an abstraction for understanding the economy as a result of price(P) and output(Y). The other side is velocity(V) which is controlled by market forces and occasionally by government stimulus, and money supply(M) which is very strongly under the control of the central bank in almost every economy. Velocity is generally relatively stable, so while it's a variable, it's not the trickiest one unless the economy is in some sort of major catastrophe. Output is also something where it is pretty easy to provide projections for it. And actually a lot of economies do very GOOD at keeping inflation at a reasonably stable. It's mostly 3rd world nations that struggle, and that's also often due to the politics of the third world.

Every society has had some degree of social disparity, and technically, the social disparity of capitalism is less. Why? Because as income increases, the value of each unit of income decreases, so in most senses it is less of a gap from 40k to 40mil than it is from 4k to 40k.

As for dwindling fuel resources, that's hardly much of a criticism. Any system we'd devise would have dwindling fuel resources until another resource has been discovered. Historically, we've done that pretty automatically whether it's a shift from wood to coal, coal to gasoline, etc. In this case, there may be some reasons for concern, and we're not actually at the point of a massive problem yet, even though we are investing resources into finding other options. The closer we get to a problem state, the higher prices will be, and the more incentive by both politicians and business leaders to create another resource. Like all things it is imperfect, but it'd be hard to set up an incentive structure for the perfect approach anyway.

Also, to be direct, your last point of criticism seems rather silly.
1) You have no possible mechanism to arrive at your goals. You're objecting to the political nature of a political system. The problem is that political systems are political for a reason, and that's because people need to buy into a system in order to back it up. You're not going to get buy-in unless you're giving people power. And... because of that, you're not going to ever arrive at a system of "logic and science and common interest" in some ideal abstract sense, ever. There's no way for it to socially evolve, even if an idealist movement forms, the very real people in it will have disputes, and these disputes will be solved through powerbrokering, which undermines the "logic and science" shall rule thing.
2) Logic and science don't actually go against capitalism, instead our logic and science tell us that capitalism IS the best way to do things. Economists recognize that the capitalist system is very clever and they don't have a non-market solution to replace it, but they are the social scientists studying this phenomenon. They've developed LOTS of very clever logical models, and these logical models point out that capitalism is doing something very complicated that is very hard to do differently and better than what is being done now. In fact, if you have a problem with how capitalism works now, the best conceptual solutions we have are simply to fix a patch in it at the moment, by taxing or subsidizing some sort of behavior.
3) There's not going to be this uncontested logical and scientific answer to many problems. We're talking about social problems that are not fully understood, where there are debates on the goals and how serious they are and everything else, and if we're going in like that, we're not going to have a clean solution.


........... The problems are largely in terms of creating another viable economic system where the incentives are all aligned towards socially beneficial ends. As destructive as you claim capitalism is, it's actually remarkably good at giving people the incentive to do the right thing even if they have less than social reasons. That's why developing another system would be problematic, as we'd have to surpass a system that's actually very good at it's job, and that where we don't actually understand how it does it's job, or how to emulate these functions well where we need them to be emulated.

Additionally, even if possible, it's not plausible to change a system whole-cloth. In fact, such efforts have never worked, and they are unlikely to work because of how social systems do work.


Public education is free. A number of these luxuries are clearly within their purchasing power. Our food is tasty. That's pretty cheap. And honestly, a lot of people, without being very rich, enjoy a lot of luxuries.

That being said your criticisms are pretty freaking ridiculous. So, the society that has rebelled the most against it's status quo, where the people have the most socialization AGAINST their own current system, is now being claimed to solicit mindless obedience and conformity? The Catholic Church and the feudal system didn't just solicit mindless obedience, often they proclaimed their system was ordained by GOD. And yet with our system, much of the entertainment generated actually features prominent social institutions as the VILLAINS, instead of simply singing the praises. Haven't we all seen the movies where this evil corporation is trying to do something, and it's some group of children who comes to the rescue and stops them? Or how about Montgomery Burns, a criticism of the wealthy business man? http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... eExecutive That's big business right there, criticizing big business.

Even then, your criticism of pop culture is almost absurd. So.... capitalism is now the villain by providing cheap cultural goods for mass consumption? I mean, most people are just not going to want to sit back and watch A Tale of Two Cities anyway. And yet, I don't think it's right to claim that the things they do watch are just *terrible*. TV is actually a cultural medium that often promotes social change by including people and groups that are marginalized in one sense or another, that engages cultural values(whether it's to favor traditional ones, talk about emerging ones, or whatever else have you), and where our clever ideas often start to trickle-down, and of course where there are narratives constructed and where there's now a body of things to study. I mean, the joys of looking at pop culture become apparent just from looking through TVTropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage There's a lot of things to learn there, and most of it is just from studying narratives through pop culture.

And of course, it has to be recognized that there is also a growing body of cultural items that are created by individuals, not by networks. So, I'm sure most people have the experience of seeing something on Youtube that they think is clever, cool, funny, brilliant, or whatever else, or a favorite webcomic, or something of that nature.

And going on, this culture has actually made education INCREDIBLY CHEAP. So, you could learned and have formed an intelligent opinion about a lot of these issues by looking at youtube videos, reading blogs, finding a free lecture series through a college, and so on and so forth all facilitated by the current system. So, acting like this is some form of poison or toxin is just nuts!! ! This is probably literally the richest and most enjoyable culture to exist, as not ONLY do the masses get a mass culture full of diffuse experiences, but high culture also still exists, and cultural forms for varying populations and by varying populations also can exist.


I'd actually say we're doing pretty well, given that our species was never meant to have potential in the first place, and given that historically, the popular form of entertainment was often drunkenness. We're talking about revolutionary leaps. Sure, there may be a room for betterness, but the only sensible way to fail to recognize how great things are is to have no sense of history or perspective or understanding of why things have ended up working the way they do.


But, these same leaders could be expected to shift to an utterly new system? If there's a failure in will to reform the system, then why wouldn't there be a failure in will to drastically reform the system? I mean, unless you think bloody revolution is an option, this is really more of a problem for all people to have to solve, than a situation specific problem. (And even with any other hypothetical system, one has to recognize that the incentives of the participants is going to matter, and if they don't have the right incentives, the same problems will exist.)

That being said, even with this "eroded will", we're still making significant pieces of progress towards improving how we handle energy. Also, part of the issue is going to end up being commercial viability anyway. If the better solution were currently better in the handling of ALL of the relevant resources, why wouldn't it be on the market? You have to realize that a pricing system is a system for determining the relative scarcity of resources, so if electric cars are not being implemented or something else, you have to ask "Why are the prices wrong?" to get at a sensible critique. (You may want a more sweeping criticism of the price system, but if you're going to go after that, then the next question is "Then why do price systems work so damned well?" There's actually a large literature on prediction markets, and how successful prediction markets are compared to most other ways we try to predict things.)


I'm pretty sure you're incorrect.
1) Predictions like this are often wrong.
2) There are lots of world-shattering technologies that are probably possible, that we haven't developed yet, and that when we do, will be world shattering. (So, take AI. If we develop AI, then this would probably be worldshattering, even if the Singularity movement is wrong, and I put no stock in their estimated technological growth rates. However, it should be possible because if evolution is true, then logical arrangements of matter can form functioning intelligences. And if it's possible, then there should be no reason why we couldn't actualize it.)
3) I get the feeling that whatever you believe on an issue is somewhat negatively correlated with the truth. At least when it comes to the workings of social systems.

Well, I doubt it's as simple as "useful idiots". Especially given that politicians on any side are simply pawns of power groups anyway. The role of politics is partially just to mediate power.

I also don't think anti-capitalism is anything but a rigid ideology. It's not going to happen, and because of that, it can only move focus away from sane debates. Fortunately, it is too fringe to have any real power. So, if the world needs more pragmatic humanitarianism, then it needs more pragmatic capitalism.

The idea sounds ridiculous to me. Would you really want to grow oranges in Alaska? Even if you could, would it be a very sane use of resources? This sounds really more like a recipe for lowering people's living standards, and ending the potential for any amount of technological progress by destroying the economies of scale, including the economies of scale for innovations.

I'm not sure what you know about corporate structure, but CEOs don't run the factories, they delegate people to run the factories. In fact, corporations involve lots of delegation. The thing that a corporate structure does involve is the creation of a corporate culture, a unified corporate strategy, a unified corporate budget for various projects, and the pooling of resources for R&D and other aspects of research.

It's probably not the people who run the machines who are best to manage it either. It's probably the managers, as they're actually responsible for output evaluations, cost evaluations, etc. A guy who counts inventory only sees the inventory count, he doesn't aggregate the knowledge of other departments, he doesn't have to think about what goes on in the rest, and he may not be competent beyond his limited task. So, managers are selected because they are believed to be able to handle these higher level functions of resources, and also increase the efficiency of the people who are working(and there are studies showing that effective managers do a good job).

Now, the issue with democracy is that democracy really isn't necessarily an efficient way to run things, and often it isn't. Democracies are better for inputting values, but they are not good for policies, as the members of a democracy are usually not all experts. Instead, when implementing policies, you're better off delegating the task to the experts on that, and individual workers often have goals that are contrary to the good of the firm, and where they benefit by firm decisions that hurt the group. Democracy ends up having significant incentive problems where one group strongly benefits and others are only slightly hurt. It's not a magical solution, and it's not a solution desirable to implement in every possible domain. (Nor is a society un or anti-democratic because it doesn't implement democracy literally everywhere)

its called minimum wage and community service.