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ruveyn
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21 Nov 2012, 9:33 am

AspieOtaku wrote:
its called minimum wage and community service.


As long as people can refuse to work, the above miserable states do not constitute slavery. They never did. Slavery requires chains, hounds and whips. The Southrons practiced slavery prior to 1865. It has been almost totally ended since. The only people practicing slavery in the world are a few wicked Muslim slavers and a few Indian (Hindi, not American) who have not heard that slavery is illegal.

ruveyn



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21 Nov 2012, 1:25 pm

The title of this thread is correct, there are slaves in this world as we speak. But then you had to ruin it with your biased little rant. My turn, I think socialist principles have caused the bondage of more slaves then true capitalism. Especially since a true, libertarian for of capitalism has never existed. You can try to argue that, but I see no point.



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21 Nov 2012, 1:53 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
JNathanK wrote:
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.

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)

A lot of misconceptions about cooperatives.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFzjx2NJdNg[/youtube]



Last edited by RushKing on 21 Nov 2012, 4:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

marshall
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21 Nov 2012, 2:03 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
marshall wrote:
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.

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.

The problem is one group is particularly dis-honest about which power group they really represent.

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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.

That depends on your definition of anti-capitalism. If you're talking about utopian radicals, yes. If you're talking about critics of market liberalism, no. There are plenty of highly intelligent people making a strong case for there being holes in the basic assumptions and logic of a lot of mainstream economic thought. A lot of modern economists acknowledge these holes and modify their theory to account for them, but a lot of critics claim they still don't go far enough.

A lot of crisis theories can be attributed to Marx, but you don't need to appeal to Marxist orthodoxy to argue for them so it's rather unfair to dismiss them as dogma. Most intelligent critics of market liberalism still accept liberal criticisms of wide-scale collectivization as devised in Socialist countries. With the absence of price incentives Socialism fails to encourage adequate production to meet the wants and needs of society, in terms of both quality and quantity. That catastrophic shortages were fairly commonplace in Socialist societies demonstrates this beyond any reasonable doubt. But by the same token it is unwise to sweep under the rug the possibility that modern free-markets have a problem with distribution that can lead to a different kind of crisis, and discount the historical role of government intervention. There really hasn't ever been a good real-world laboratory demonstration of free markets resolving capital "C" Crises such as the Great Depression without government intervention.



Last edited by marshall on 21 Nov 2012, 6:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.

blackelk
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21 Nov 2012, 2:16 pm

The problem is that economics is a pseudoscience that is treated like a real science. It is closer to an ideology. We have all these ideologues from different camps saying this and that works, and give examples. But really nobody knows much about the subject. It's too complex and messy, so people just revert to their own ideology. I mean, a Marxist and a capitalist are equally driven by ethics as they are by the actual merit of their system. They each believe their system is not just better, but that it is more ethical.

As Taleb said, economists are about as accurate as astrologers in their predictions.

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A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

Much of what happens in history", he notes, "comes from 'Black Swan dynamics', very large, sudden, and totally unpredictable 'outliers', while much of what we usually talk about is almost pure noise. Our track record in predicting those events is dismal; yet by some mechanism called the hindsight bias we think that we understand them. We have a bad habit of finding 'laws' in history (by fitting stories to events and detecting false patterns); we are drivers looking through the rear view mirror while convinced we are looking ahead."


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marshall
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21 Nov 2012, 2:32 pm

Seabass wrote:
The title of this thread is correct, there are slaves in this world as we speak. But then you had to ruin it with your biased little rant. My turn, I think socialist principles have caused the bondage of more slaves then true capitalism. Especially since a true, libertarian for of capitalism has never existed. You can try to argue that, but I see no point.

I find it hilarious that market libertarians and socialists do the exact same thing. There has never been "true free-market capitalism" just like there has never been "true communism". In no way do such claims show that your more "pure" ideology will ever actually work in the real world. Come up with real arguments instead of regurgitating things you hear.



adb
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21 Nov 2012, 2:57 pm

marshall wrote:
I find it hilarious that market libertarians and socialists do the exact same thing. There has never been "true free-market capitalism" just like there has never been "true communism". In no way do such claims show that your more "pure" ideology will ever actually work in the real world. Come up with real arguments instead of regurgitating things you hear.

I'm not trying to stir up our disagreements, but I have a real question for you: What do you mean when you say "work in the real world"? It seems like there are many libertarian, capitalist, communist, and whatever else facets of everyday living that have some success and some failure. I'd like to better understand what metrics you would use to determine success for a society.



ruveyn
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21 Nov 2012, 2:58 pm

marshall wrote:
Seabass wrote:
The title of this thread is correct, there are slaves in this world as we speak. But then you had to ruin it with your biased little rant. My turn, I think socialist principles have caused the bondage of more slaves then true capitalism. Especially since a true, libertarian for of capitalism has never existed. You can try to argue that, but I see no point.

I find it hilarious that market libertarians and socialists do the exact same thing. There has never been "true free-market capitalism" just like there has never been "true communism". In no way do such claims show that your more "pure" ideology will ever actually work in the real world. Come up with real arguments instead of regurgitating things you hear.


Here is a plain fact. Slavery is illegal in the United States and it is NOT illegal in Saudi Arabia. Guess where most of the slavery is?

ruveyn



RushKing
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21 Nov 2012, 4:51 pm

ruveyn wrote:
marshall wrote:
Seabass wrote:
The title of this thread is correct, there are slaves in this world as we speak. But then you had to ruin it with your biased little rant. My turn, I think socialist principles have caused the bondage of more slaves then true capitalism. Especially since a true, libertarian for of capitalism has never existed. You can try to argue that, but I see no point.

I find it hilarious that market libertarians and socialists do the exact same thing. There has never been "true free-market capitalism" just like there has never been "true communism". In no way do such claims show that your more "pure" ideology will ever actually work in the real world. Come up with real arguments instead of regurgitating things you hear.


Here is a plain fact. Slavery is illegal in the United States and it is NOT illegal in Saudi Arabia. Guess where most of the slavery is?

ruveyn

It's chattel slavery that's illegal.



thomas81
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21 Nov 2012, 5:13 pm

The choice of thread title is unfortunate.

This is the phenomenon which the OP is referring to :-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

Wage slavery is very much alive, well and legal in every country. Even the ones that incessantly crow about the freedoms that come with their blessed free markets.



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21 Nov 2012, 5:23 pm

thomas81 wrote:
The choice of thread title is unfortunate.

This is the phenomenon which the OP is referring to :-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery


Yes, an ideological concept not taken seriously by current mainstream economics.

Serious economists utilize the more general concepts of monopsony and monopoly power instead. More rigour, less opinion...



Jacoby
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21 Nov 2012, 5:29 pm

marshall wrote:
Seabass wrote:
The title of this thread is correct, there are slaves in this world as we speak. But then you had to ruin it with your biased little rant. My turn, I think socialist principles have caused the bondage of more slaves then true capitalism. Especially since a true, libertarian for of capitalism has never existed. You can try to argue that, but I see no point.

I find it hilarious that market libertarians and socialists do the exact same thing. There has never been "true free-market capitalism" just like there has never been "true communism". In no way do such claims show that your more "pure" ideology will ever actually work in the real world. Come up with real arguments instead of regurgitating things you hear.


And what of your beliefs? How are they working in the real world? Do you even know what you believe?



thomas81
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21 Nov 2012, 5:32 pm

GGPViper wrote:
thomas81 wrote:
The choice of thread title is unfortunate.

This is the phenomenon which the OP is referring to :-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery


Yes, an ideological concept not taken seriously by current mainstream economics.

.


Why would they when afforementioned economists stand to benefit from the existing set up.

Wage slavery is firmly grounded in the empirical experiences of those effected by it.

The rules of concepts you subscribe to, are like the rules of a game where one team has access to the rule book and the impunity to delete and edit as they see fit.



JNathanK
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21 Nov 2012, 5:38 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
JNathanK wrote:


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)


"Experts" often live in the world of abstraction. Often times management will make decisions that overtax workers, like under-staff a facility for profit or sell off a factory for profit and max out the capacity at another. The decisions they make have less to do with how peoples lives are affected and more to do with personal profit. CEO's might not directly run factories, but they'll make major decisions that affect the lives of millions of people, like opting to close down a plant. One things for sure. In a workplace democracy, nobody is going to vote to have their own job shipped overseas, anymore than a CEO would choose to have their own 6-8 figure position outsourced to someone else. Since the CEO is so detached and they make broad decisions, they don't really care if a bunch of people are put out of work so that their company can increase its incomes by taking advantage of sweat shop labor.

A corporation, in its current form, is a totalitarian, top-down institution. Give them enough power, and we'll be living a totalitarian society.



Last edited by JNathanK on 21 Nov 2012, 5:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

JNathanK
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21 Nov 2012, 5:41 pm

marshall wrote:
That depends on your definition of anti-capitalism. If you're talking about utopian radicals, yes. If you're talking about critics of market liberalism, no. There are plenty of highly intelligent people making a strong case for there being holes in the basic assumptions and logic of a lot of mainstream economic thought. A lot of modern economists acknowledge these holes and modify their theory to account for them, but a lot of critics claim they still don't go far enough.


Yah, I really hate how some people want to conflate Keynesianism with radical leftist politics.



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21 Nov 2012, 5:52 pm

thomas81 wrote:
GGPViper wrote:
thomas81 wrote:
The choice of thread title is unfortunate.

This is the phenomenon which the OP is referring to :-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery


Yes, an ideological concept not taken seriously by current mainstream economics.

.


Why would they when afforementioned economists stand to benefit from the existing set up.

Wage slavery is firmly grounded in the empirical experiences of those effected by it.

The rules of concepts you subscribe to, are like the rules of a game where one team has access to the rule book and the impunity to delete and edit as they see fit.


No. Your approach demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of even the basics of empirical economics.

You have again and again demonstrated that you lack insight in the subjects that you focus on. Not just economics, but also Maoist China or Islam (nice one with the "no Jihadi attacks against Hindus, BTW. Don't you watch/read the news?).

You have zero scientific credibility so far. If you want to change that, then start citing actual peer-reviewed studies rather than peddling predictable Marxist pseudoscience and citing predictable partisan websites.

The frequency of fringe nonsense theories about economics being posted on WP baffles the brain...