Neeek at [unixtime wrote:1170746475[/unixtime]]
Endovior at [unixtime wrote:1170742870[/unixtime]]
Your 'externalities' and 'free riders' are irrelevant. You can whine and complain all you want about me being a 'free rider', but if I don't agree to your healthcare proposal, and refuse to fund it, if you try to take my money to fund it, I'll treat you like any other robber. Similarly, if I decide to clearcut and pollute and generally fvck up MY OWN LAND which I bought with MY OWN MONEY, there's not a damned thing you can do about it. It's MY LAND. You aren't even in the picture. You have no right whatsoever to complain unless what I'm doing gets into your property (say, I poison the water, and it gets into your well). When that happens, then you can can sue me. But not before.
Guess what? Under a true free market economy, I get to kill you to take your stuff. So don't complain when I shoot you in the head to take what you have. Further, your discourse shows a complete lack of understanding of what "externalities" are. If you pollute the air, that's an externality. If you over-fish the rivers, that's an externality.
See, the thing free market capitalists forget is they want government intervention as much as the next person. They just want it to protect property over people. That's a completely untenable position as far as most people are concerned. That the well-being of people is more important IN ALL CASES than the well-being of property is both obvious, and strongly recognized by both law and equity doctrines. I am legally allow to steal your food if I'm starving. I'm legally allowed to break into your house if I'm freezing. Hospitals are legally required to take care of me in an emergency, whether or not I can pay. The first two are under the necessity doctrine, the third because waiting to find out if the guy who got hit with the car can pay you means the guy who got hit with the car dies.
Anyone who advocates a free market economy is an idiot (and all you have to do is look at history to see why,. Oh, and economists are by and large morons who come up with grand theories that have no basis in reality. Really. You want good economical advice? Talk to a historian, their ideas have actually been tried at some point.), and has no idea what the consequences of their actions are. People say I'm liberal. They are wrong. I'm a pragmatist. I just want to live my life without having the economy crash. Free market economics will insure a crash ever other decade. I love my family, friends, and even total strangers enough to wish that never happen to them.
Firstly, you're confusing the free market with anarchy. Free market means the government doesn't interfere with business (no taxes, no regulations, nothing); anarchy means there is no government whatsoever. The two are very different. In a truly free market, the government will be fairly limited, as it is prohibited from taxation; ideally, it will only perform the functions of police, courts, and military. Going back to your externalities... so what? If I own a river, and I kill and eat absolutely every single fish in the river... so what? It's my river, I can do what I want with it. So far as air pollution, capitalist theories typically deal with it as a matter of 'who was there first'... if I have my factory pumping junk into the air for 5 years, and then you move in right next door, you have no right to complain about the air, because it was that way before you arrived. On the other hand, if you were living on land you own for 5 years, then I move in next door and set up a factory, THEN you can sue me for polluting your air (more likely, we'll come to an agreement whereby I pay you money and you don't sue me).
Note carefully the difference between enforcement of laws and imposition of controls. The proper function of government is to enforce the law, not to run the economy. Also, you must not be living in the US... here, if someone is robbing your store, it doesn't matter how hungry he is; you can subdue him and hand him over to the cops, no problem. If someone breaks into your house, it doesn't matter if it's freezing out... you have a legal right to evict him... and if he resists, to put a bullet in his head. Here, hospitals won't treat people without insurance; if you can't pay, then you don't get treatment (although individual hospital policy may be more lenient then what the letter of the law requires).
Also, you are an idiot if you think the free market is responsible for crashes. Look at history more closely, not just the bits you want to see. Prior to a depression, look for a government expansion of money and credit. You will find them every time; economists have already proven them to be directly responsible. If you hate economic chaos, don't hate the free market... hate the fiscally irresponsible government that causes the problem.
OrionAnderson at [unixtime wrote:1170790794[/unixtime]]In my last post, when I mentioned "Ideal" quantities to produce, I was using the term in a very specific sense.
If oyu believe in the free market, than you presumeably belive in the "invisible hand," that is, the tendency of market forces to cause the ideal amount of a good to be produced. The typicla argument is that in na unregulated society, a good gets produced only if its benefits to the consumer are greater than it's costs ot the producer.
Most economic theory assumes that there is an idela amount of each good to produce, and that the free market will produce that amount of it. UNDER CERTAIN CONDITIONS, which is the part that people forget.
According to my textbook, the free market produces the ideal quantities under the following conditions:
No externalities
Many buyers and sellers
Clearly defined property rights
I feel like I'm forgetting one, but that isn't the point. The point is, if any of those is mising, the so-called "invisible hand" doens't work, at least not perfectly. I hope this is self-explanatory to someone who has studied economics, but I'm happy to explain further if need be.
Do note that this is a tendency, not an exactitude: people are human, after all, and make mistakes. However, that tendency exists because it is the line of maximum profits; and businessmen will try their utmost to reach it. That being said, I haven't heard of the 'no externalities' bit before, and tend to doubt it has much effect... a far more important thing to consider is 'no government interference'. When the government imposes confiscatory taxation, inane regulations, labor quotas, and mandatory cooperation with profiteering unions... then the invisible hand is fettered, and cannot work as effectively. The more hindrance, the less effectively it works.
Cielingcat at [unixtime wrote:1170797982[/unixtime]]Geniuses want perks? What about people like Nicola Tesla, who actually decided NOT to become a billionairre because he didn't want to deal with the paperwork?
No, Tesla didn't become a billionaire because he got fvcked by Westinghouse.
Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1170801640[/unixtime]]
Do note that there are a hell of a lot more janitors then executives; there aren't enough high-paid executives to fund all the low-paid nobodies, not by a long shot. Also, I note that another result of your plan is that all the competent executives go somewhere else, leaving your economy to be run into the ground by incompetent fools.
That's so not true.
In 2000, you could hire
525 janitors at union wages for what one guy at the top makes. Note that there's
more than one guy at the top making these incredibly unfair wages (usually a dozen per thousand low pay workers), and the site I'm linking to only tracks union shops. Go Google for more if you want.
Cuba did some awesome things while under blockade, but how many inventions did it put out? How many innovations?
Innovation is a direct result of money invested. Capitalism has nothing to do with innovation. It stifles innovation. Innovation has a direct (and you've linked to nothing so far) response to investment. Capitalism
makes no investment.
Don't lie to support your argument, please, especially if there's facts available.
-Crissa
You misunderstand; what I said was that the guy at the top isn't making enough money that, if his salary was reduced, it could pay all the janitors $50k. By my calculations, the $2mil CEO could fund 59 janitor's raises if reduced to $100k; the sub-executives under him make much less, with much smaller effects.
Regarding innovation... what are you smoking? Under Capitalism, the rule is innovate or die. Companies spend vast sums on research continually in an effort to surpass their competition; and if they fail to match their competitors' efforts, they lose money... and if they can't catch up from there, they fail completely. Capitalism depends on vast investment in research... your denial of this is patently ridiculous. You are the one who should stop lying.
OrionAnderson at [unixtime wrote:1170825541[/unixtime]]Plenty of janitors are smart enough to do something better, just lacking the opportunity.
But your argument that only the middle class and above are capable of contributing to society raises some itneresting quesitons. For instance: what counts as contributing to society? Improving the life of the "common(wo)man," or the working class, would seem to be a big one.
Seriously, I cna't imagine what legitimate goal the peosperous would have other than working to extend thier prosperity to others. That's practically the definition of contributing to society, as far as I'm concerned.
In the end though, if you're really, truly okay with anyone starving to death, I doubt we have much to discuss. I suspect that even in that case, self-interest should motivate you to embrace socialism, but we really just don't live in the same universe.
I'm not concerned with what people have to 'offer to society'... I'm concerned with what they have to offer to me. Productive geniuses offer new inventions and ways of doing things which save me money on the products I buy, and save me time on the things that I do; so they're worth whatever royalties they charge; $2mil a year is peanuts compared to the impact such things can have.
As for me, I really don't care about people starving to death. If they do, then under my value system, it's their own fault. I'm an Individualist; I believe that everyone has a responsibility only to themselves, and anyone failing in that responsibility deserves nothing from anyone else. It's okay to choose to help someone else, for reasons of your own, but it is morally abhorrent to force someone to help another. Self-interest drives me towards Capitalism, because my self-confidence leads me to believe that I am worth more then the lowest common denominator; and therefore have more to gain when I succeed or fail on my own efforts, rather then as an interchangeable part of a vast collective of mindless pawns, rising and falling in the Stygian tide. If I fail, so be it, I'll have no one to blame but myself.
PhoneLobster at [unixtime wrote:1170827608[/unixtime]]
wrote:I mean, it may sound callous, but for the most part we don't need most of the poor. Capitalism has really proven that.
What the hell?
Thats some seriously zany stuff right there.
We need 1000 poor sports shoe makers WAY more than we need that one billionare sports shoe CEO.
Really, those poor dudes produce more than he ever does.
We could send the CEO to the gas chamber tomorrow and no one would notice, gas the poor shoe slaves and we start running out of sports shoes.
Bill Gates does NOT build millions of computers or print and package millions of software bundles, infact he doesn't even make ANY.
Capitalism not only MAKES poor people it NEEDS poor people, it uses and exploits them to produce wealth and effectively steals it right out from under them.
Beause its all about transfer of the wealth from the majority who actually produce it to the minority who "own" it.
Marx had a few truely insightful moments and identifying where the real wealth creation in society occurs is one of the more undeniable and important points he made.
Seriously someone mentioned Anne Rand a while ago and really, Atlas Shrugged is a total wank job.
Not so. The 1000 poor shoemakers are essentially interchangeable, you could kill them all and replace them with beggarly children, and beyond a brief training period, it wouldn't matter a bit. The CEO, on the other hand, is the guy paying for the factory, and the supplies, and the shipping. Without him, you have 1000 poor shoemakers making crappy shoes in their hovels, and none of the shoes will be exported for sale abroad.
Bill Gates doesn't produce computers, no... he produces ideas. Without his ideas, we would not be having this discussion, because there would be no home computers; they would be the exclusive province of research institutions, major corporations, and the government.
Your 'poor' people wouldn't actually produce much at all were it not for the riches of Capitalism giving them factories to work in and machines to run. Indeed, they'd be hard-pressed just to survive (refer to basically any time prior to the Industrial Revolution). But under Capitalism, they have access to means of production they could never get on their own, multiplying their efforts a thousandfold, and the rewards of those efforts similarly.
Marx was a deluded fool who didn't understand Capitalism at all. Ayn Rand was a genius, although you foolish socialists don't appreciate it.
Neeek at [unixtime wrote:1170829183[/unixtime]]
RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1170828170[/unixtime]]
as I really can't think of way to eliminate CEOs without totally screwing the economy.
Of course, there will always be CEOs. You can flat off every existing CEO, and you'd have almost the same number immediately afterwards. Whomever is in charge is definitionally the CEO, so removing the top guy makes the next guy in line the new CEO.
Replacing every CEO making over a million dollars a year with one who makes exactly a million dollars would cause a massive boom, however.
Not so. Do that, and you get... $300 million extra? $500 million? Let's be generous and call it a billion. Compare this to our $12 Trillion+ economy, and you'll see that any reduction in CEO salaries is just an extra cupfull of water in the ocean.
