Radical politics?

[Lxndr]

Ron's making money off his books, not off the art that's included in it.  The artists made money for producing the art.  Where's the issue there?

I am a card-carrying supporter of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.  I've wanted a vasectomy since I was 14, have tried to get one since I was 18, and finally got one when I was 21.  I hear the age-based discrimination for infertility surgery is even worse for women, and that just sucks.  Some people say "stop at two."  I say "stop at zero."

Prostition, gambling, drugs, should all be legal and taxed.  Huge fines for doing anything with them that'd hurt others (drug use with a child in the womb should be considered child abuse).  Not a big fan of smoking, because it's the only way of "ingesting" a drug that can directly infect/affect others, and might consider illegalizing smoking-stuff as a method of ingesting product, at least in public places.

NO TAX BREAKS FOR HAVING A DEPENDENT.  I've backed down from the stance I had when I was younger ("tax 'em more!") but I'm entirely and totally against people with dependents (usually children) getting more money for it.  It's not healthy.

I'm a full supporter of the fairtax (www.fairtax.org), a system which removes the income tax in favor of a sales tax on new (not used) products, with a proposal to reduce/remove the "punishing the lower class" (basically, tax refunds equal to the COLA).  The only place where I break with fairtax is the "more money for more people" philosophy.  The tax break should be entirely based on the # of people working, not on the # of people being supported - again, this is the "no tax breaks for having a dependent" concept.  Income tax is thuggery; sales tax is a choice, and this form of sales tax, where there's a rebate, is, well, fair.

I believe in school vouchers.  I believe the concept should be extended to both social security and medicare - I should be allowed to take my social security money-voucher and move it to another reitrement account at any time, and medicare would work better if there were multiple places competing for your business.  

In the United States, I am a supporter of States Rights.

I believe the House of Representatives should not conform to state lines.  That's the job of the Senate.  The House should be allowed to cross state lines if it would better represent the populace.  Every state should have at least two Representatives within their borders.

I believe that presidents winning "the whole state" in the electoral college is unconstitutional.  If 3 electors vote for candidate X, and 2 for candidate Y, candidate X shouldn't get all 5 votes.  I also have a proposal for changing the presidential electoral process:

1.  Each person in the populace has 3 votes for president, equating to their Representative vote, and the two Senate votes (just like electoral votes are now).  They may place these votes where they like, giving one candidate 3 votes, one candidate 2 and another candidate 1, or splitting 1 vote apiece amongst 3 candidates.  Two of these votes are "senatorial" and one is "representative."

2.  All votes are combined to form the "Electoral vote" for each reason.  The two senatorial electoral votes for each state are always given to the highest, and second-highest, winner of the senatorial votes cast by the populace.  Each representative vote is resolved separately, and given to the winner.  All electoral votes are equal for the next step, however.

3.  The person with the most electoral votes becomes president.  The person with the second most becomes vice president.  All electoral votes are counted separately, not bunched up per state.  With three votes per person, the fiasco of "oh my god, two people have exactly the same # of votes!" becomes much smaller.  Still possible, just smaller.

This sounds somewhat complicated, but I truly don't believe it is.  Unless you're from Florida.

[Valamir]

Let me amend that: I believe in a mostly free market, not an entirely free market. At the local, small business level, I believe the market should be free. As in, imagine a farmer's market, in which all the farmers own their produce & sell it to consumers. No one controls the market--it's all based on free enterprise. But the farmers work the farm & sell what they grow.

Its a nice happy theory...but once you start talking about things that can't be produced at a cottage level its completely impossible.  

There has to be a way to organize labor towards a common end and that must include some sort of authority to make it happen, otherwise you end up with the old prisoners dillema of everyone doing whats best for just them and missing the best overall outcome entirely.


And why is it that bashing "capitalism" is so popular, without ever bringing up the huge benefit in terms of volume of available goods and cheapness of those that capitalism provides.  Do you have any idea how expensive and hard to get goods are without capitalism?  Probably not, because you've not lived in a world without capitalism.

Some family friends of ours are from Moscow, working as professors here in the states (for the last 10+ yrs).  The first time the wife set foot in a Supermarket she broke down and cried.  She had never seen so much food or other products available in one place for anyone to just walk in and buy without waiting.

THATs what Capitalism gives you people.  No centralised economy has ever or could ever deliver the volume and pricing that capitalism can.

[Matt Wilson]

And why is it that bashing "capitalism" is so popular, without ever bringing up the huge benefit in terms of volume of available goods and cheapness of those that capitalism provides.

Capitalism is probably the best solution tried so far. It incorporates some really good ideas, and provides some decent benefits. But it's still not the best we can do. There's way too many crappy effects of capitalism for me to ever think, "okay, that's good, we're done."

On the other hand, there's never really been any such thing as "pure" capitalism. It's always been regulated, and for good reason.

[quozl]

Hey Ralph, we might actually agree on capitalism.  I totally agree with what Adam Smith said in The Wealth of Nations.

[Valamir]

Adam Smith should be required reading in all high schools.

It was one of the few books I was assigned to read in college that a) I actually did, and b) I didn't promptly sell back for cash.

Its truly astonishing how visionary his words are when you consider they were written in 1776 at the height of Mercantilism.

[GreatWolf]

Radical politics?

Hmm.

<Seth looks around>

Well, since it's a party and all....

I think that the Tories were right (although the English taxation was an abomination).

I think that the South was within its rights to secede (although the slavery was an abomination).

I think that the original Monroe Doctrine was the way to go.

I think that the medieval popes may have had a clue when it came to their understanding of the place of kings.  (Okay, so that's a slight exaggeration.)

I think that the public school system is evil.

I think that the separation of church and state (as currently stated) is impossible.

I think that gun control violates the Second Amendment.

I think that most social workers and housing inspections violate the Fourth Amendment.

I believe that even the Constitution must be bound by the Bible.

I believe....that I will stop rambling now.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[joshua neff]

Some family friends of ours are from Moscow, working as professors here in the states (for the last 10+ yrs).  The first time the wife set foot in a Supermarket she broke down and cried.  She had never seen so much food or other products available in one place for anyone to just walk in and buy without waiting.

I really don't think my quality of life is significantly improved by having 58 different varieties of soup available to me at the supermarket. I've lived in countries where my choices were much more limited. Know what? I wasn't unhappy.

Now, that's a superficial argument to a superficial point. But 58 different varieties of soup is not an intrinsic component of capitalism. Again, if RPGs can be creator-owned & -controlled, I don't see why other things can't be.

[Matt Wilson]

I guess I haven't posted mine yet...

Ah Hell, it's already been said better than I can say it:

People who believe in a better way of life know that the way we live now is criminal. Denial of freedoms, death by starvation and exploitation, denigration of people's capabilities everywhere. If you see that these outcomes are socially produced, then you understand that every person who dies as a result was effectively murdered. Once you accept the possibility of attaining a humanist alternative, you have to be a terrible hypocrite, coward or cynic to live passively with the contrast between what is and what could be.

[GreatWolf]

Again, if RPGs can be creator-owned & -controlled, I don't see why other things can't be.

Are you talking about agrarianism?  My sympathies have been leaning in this direction recently, especially the aspect of local control, which tends to fit quite well with indie values (creator-owned, creator-controlled) and should produce similar effects.  However, I don't think that an agrarian approach to economics clashes with capitalism.  In fact, I would say that the one supports the other.  What doesn't work about a laissez-faire economy that is primarily local?

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[joshua neff]

Before we all get hip-deep in an argument about the evils of capitalism, I should make it clear that this isn't something I feel extraordinarily strongly about. I'm not set on destroying the capitalist state & replacing it with a Worker's Paradise or anything like that.

However, I think it's sheer idiocy to pay someone $7.50 an hour, give them no say in how the workplace is run, & yet expect them to work as hard as they can & care that the company they work for succeeds. (For example, I work at Borders. I am, in fact, paid $7.50 an hour. We employees are regularly pushed to do our best, sell as much as we can, promote the store while at work. Why? We don't get anything out of it. If the store doesn't make enough money & closes--& there hasn't been a Borders yet that has closed because of bad sales, because the corporation has enough money to keep its stores open, despite not having enough money to pay its employees better than $7.50 an hour--I can just get a different low-paying retail job. What's my incentive to work hard? I get paid the same regardless. It's really in my best interest to slack as much as possible, since I get the $7.50 an hour whether I work hard or not.)

[Valamir]

Because local economies do not have the capital to build $58 million processing plants that make goods cheap enough for the masses to buy.

They need that capital to come from somewhere outside of the community in order for it to get built.  

For that you have to have some means of raising, collecting, and organizing that capital.

That takes either central control forcibly reallocating capital, or capitalists.

Capitalists are not evil.  Capitalists are people who are willing to take risks that others won't.

[Christopher Weeks]

Do you have any idea how expensive and hard to get goods are without capitalism?

No centralised economy has ever or could ever deliver the volume and pricing that capitalism can.

Ralph, I trust that you know more about money and economy than I.  So can you demonstrate this?  Or even support it a little?  How can we know that "no centralised economy...could ever...?"

I mean, the typical hacks would cite the pseudo-communist nations that have existed as proof positive that that's the best socialism can deliver.  It's a stupid argument on many levels and I presume you won't go there.  Are there actual genuine solid reasons to believe what you're saying?  If so, why don't economists all agree?

Chris

[GreatWolf]

However, I think it's sheer idiocy to pay someone $7.50 an hour, give them no say in how the workplace is run, & yet expect them to work as hard as they can & care that the company they work for succeeds.

Well, I can agree with this.  Completely.

Workers are motivated by good leaders.  That means more than motivational posters on the wall.  That means that employees need to be cared for and served by their superiors.  Only when an employee is being loved (which includes feeling loved) will he be willing to love their company back.

That's not anti-capitalist, and it demonstrates the folly of many of the current corporations that this seems like a radical principle.

BTW, //www.despair.com has some great farces on the motivational poster.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[GreatWolf]

Because local economies do not have the capital to build $58 million processing plants that make goods cheap enough for the masses to buy.

They need that capital to come from somewhere outside of the community in order for it to get built.  

For that you have to have some means of raising, collecting, and organizing that capital.

That takes either central control forcibly reallocating capital, or capitalists.

Capitalists are not evil.  Capitalists are people who are willing to take risks that others won't.

Oh, I don't think that capitalists are evil.  And all the points that you make above are true.  I also think that, if I had to choose between centralized control and capitalists, I'd take capitalists every day of the week.

At the same time, I might question the necessity and wisdom of $58 million processing plants, though.  But again, that's not a "capitalism vs. centralized control" debate.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[Valamir]

Ralph, I trust that you know more about money and economy than I. So can you demonstrate this? Or even support it a little? How can we know that "no centralised economy...could ever...?"

First of all capitalism is nothing more than a system that takes capital* and distributes it to where it is most efficiently put to use.  Capital includes materials, resources, and labor but is most often today quoted in terms of money since money can be converted into these things.

If a businessman wants to expand his business, He's going to need capital.  Where is that capital going to come from?

Its going to come from people who currently have it.  All of the various -isms then are simply means of getting that capital from the people who have it to the people who want it.

Contrary to certain accusations of Capitalism being "theivery" it is in fact the opposite.  

In a Socialist system, the government simply takes the capital you have away from you and gives it to some one else that they deem more worthy of having it than you by whatever standards of worth they care to use.

In a Capitalist system, YOU the current owner of the capital decide how that capital gets used.  If you put that money in a bank, you are giving the bank permission to lend it to the businessman to expand his business.  The bank pays you a fee, interest, for your willingess to lend them your money.  The bank charges a larger fee to the business man and profits on the difference.  Why does the bank profit on the difference.  Because the bank is the one doing the work to evaluate whether the businessman is a good risk and because if the business goes under, the bank loses the money it loaned, but you still expect to get your money back.  Therefor the bank is the entity assuming the greater risk and is compensated for the risk they are willing to accept.

Perhaps you decide to cut out the middle man.  You lend the money to the business directly.  Now you are doing your own evaluation and taking the risk of the business man not paying you back.  For that you charge higher interest than you got at the bank.

To make it easier for you to lend the businessman money, the businessman might issue bonds, which are nothing more than standardized loan arrangements that can be bought and sold.

All of this, and the entire financial system of banks, brokerages, and underwriters that exist around it is nothing more than the mechanism by which capital gets transfered from those who have it to those who want it.

(I'll ignore the other main source of capital...that of issueing equity, often in the form of stock for now).


Now, here's the next feature of capitalism.

What if there are two businessmen who both want to expand, but you only have enough capital to support one of them.  Well you could do your own homework.  Research the business of both businesses carefully and intimately and decide which one you'd rather support.  This is great and viable and is pretty much what Venture Capitalists do all the time.  It is their job.

But its a long drawn out process to do, and theres a limit to how much capital is able to be distributed this way.  So how to attract capital from other people who have the capital, but don't have the time, talant, or desire to do the research themself.  Simple.  The businesses compete for the capital.  The one that offers more profit to you is the one that you give your money to.

What this means is that if one business has a plan that generates only a small benefit then it isn't going to be able to offer you as much as the business who's plan will generate a large benefit.  Therefor you are going to provide your capital to the business which will offer you the most profit and that business will be the one which has the best opportunity for generating wealth.

What this means is there is now more capital in the society at the end of this deal, then there is at the beginning.  Society as a whole is wealthier.  That's the efficiency of capitalism.  By uplifting the total wealth available to a society, you uplift more members of that society, which is why the standard of living for the average person in the devoloped world has risen steadily over the last several centuries.  Because the total wealth in the society increases faster than the population of that society.

This is in direct contrast to Mercantilism which was largely a zero sum game based primarily on using trade to acquire and control reserves of precious metals.


As soon as you put in limitations on the free flow of capital, you automatically by definition MUST wind up with a less efficient system.

Lets say now you decide "wait a minute that first business man is a nice guy, or he's doing good work, or he tries really hard, or he's got more kids to feed (or whatever) he deserves to have some of this capital too.  Its not fair that the second guy gets it just because the second guys plan is better.  Lets give some to the first guy too"

Society is no automatically worse off.  There is now less wealth in the system then there could have been because you (i.e. some government agency) interfered with where that money is going and routed it to a less efficient use.


Here's the problem.  Its REALLY easy to say on an individual case by case basis that helping out the first guy was the "right" thing to do, or the "moral" thing to do.  And so you might think that doing this sort of thing will make for a better more equitable society.  Its a really tempting thought, and a really persuasive arguement.

Thing is, it doesn't work that way.  YES in the short term you did just help out that 1 individual business and his family and employees more than if you'd let money flow freely.  But that act, repeated often and consistantly over and over means that a generation down the road the standard of living for the average person is going to be lower than it could have been.

You are basically dooming all of society to a lower standard of living in order to selectively help certain individuals have a higher standard of living.

The only possible way that this is not the case, is if the centralized control made all of the same decisions as the free market would have.  But in that case you might as well have had a free market.


The struggle in American Economic politics today is this:
Its generally accepted (except by Libertarians and the like) that sometimes its a good idea to interfer with the free flow of capital because the particular individual cause you want to serve is more important.  This is where government regulations on the environment and equal opportunity and the like come in.  

The  issue then is where is the line between not doing enough to help these individual causes and doing so much to help these individual causes that you torpedo the whole economy and doom succeeding generations to a lower standard of living then they could have had (including the people you were trying to help).

High taxes and high government expenditure basically is a huge barrier to the free flow of capital.  Taxes suck away capital that otherwise would get distributed by the free market and then redistrubute that capital based on government programs which by definition are going to be less efficient choices than letting the markets do it.


The final really great feature about capitalism is that you do not have to be a billionairre financier to participate.  Every time you make a purchase at the store you are redistributing capital.  From you to the store, from the store to the wholesaler, from the wholesaler to the manufacturer, from the manufacturer to employees, from employees back to stores when they spend their paycheck.

This is a perpetual on going process that actually GENERATES wealth.  Every single person at every single step of the way, can come out farther ahead from the transaction.  Its not a zero sum game.


Yes there are costs associated with free market capitalism.  Those costs generally center around individual causes that didn't get "helped", because they weren't efficient enough to attract capital on their own, this is where charitable giving and volunteer work have to pick up the slack.

BUT, before you start to think "wouldn't it be nice if the government just took care of these things so that charity wouldn't be necessary" its important to not that when the government does that the overall level of prosperity for the whole society declines.  

Contrary to what nay sayers will try to paint it as, capitalism really is a system where the needs of the many are placed ahead of the needs of the few.  That is both its greatest strength (maximizing the most prosperity for the most people) and its greatest weakness ("for the most people" is not "for all people").

No other system in history has been able to do a better job than this, and its not for want of trying.  There's been numerous different ways of distributing capital in the past and none of them have been as reliable at raising the standard of living of the average person.

I suppose I must concede that there may possibly be a way to develop something better.  But the beauty of capitalism is that it doesn't require relying on anything other than individual people acting in their own self interest...which is pretty much the most reliable human response you can find.  A system that increases wealth for society as a whole that requires only that people do what they think is best for themself* is going to be hard to beat.

*and the system is flexible enough that "best for themself" also can include items of concious.  If enough people agree with you, the economy will respond decisions made for non selfish reasons, too.