By extension, one owns any product of one's life. Be it an idea, materials harvested through our own efforts, refining of such a material or assembly of components to make a whole. This is all good. At any stage in the process, value is added.
The root problem is what we call "commerce".
Let's say that there is a small farming town. One person grows wheat and sells it to another who mills the wheat who in turn sells it to a baker who in turn sells the bread to everyone.
Now, if someone with a lot of money came to town and decided to buy all the wheat and just hold on to it. Eventually, the second person will have nothing left to mill. The baker will have no flour with which to make bread. Everyone runs out of food. Starving, they BEG the man who bought all the wheat to sell it back to them. He agrees, but the price is much higher than it ever was. He takes their money and goes off to the next town.
That is commerce.
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Anonymous2009-10-06 15:35
>>2
What a good post. You make a very good point with this. And to top it off, government gets involved (Department of Agriculture, ect.) and more often than not makes things even worse.
It basically shows when you tamper with the free market, it ends up creating these small monopolies and in turn breeds and encourages greed.
It's perfectly acceptable on all continents, actually.
And communism isn't great, either.
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Anonymous2009-10-06 23:26
>>2 >>3 >>4
With price controls, if someone with a lot of money came to town (obviously someone with connections to the politburo/king as that would be the only way he could obtain such enormous sums) and decided to buy all the wheat and just hold on to it he'd have a monopoly.
In a free market the wheat sellers would never sell all their wheat at once and raise the price depending on how much they have left in stock. If this someone with lots of money intends to buy all the wheat he would have to start buying the moment the bell tolls and the trading day begins to prevent the millers from buying enough wheat to feed the town, at this moment most wheat sellers will only have a token quantity on sale to probe the market, when this someone buys up every token wheat bail on offer the price is going to rise sharply and farmers will offer another probing sale and if the price rises sharply again we will be looking at an exponential increase in price. If this someone intends to buy all the wheat he will end up turning all the wheat farmers in the town into millionaires.
Pretty poor analogies and descriptions. Not to boast, but I'm a Pol. Sci. Major, and I found the following analogy to be useful in explaining the system, and this was taught to me by one of the top 10 Pol. Sci. Professors in this country.
Imagine you have a stable of about 10 horses, all of them belonging to one farmer. Across the other side of town, there is another farmer who owns 10 horses. The town consists of 100 people, all of whom would find it desirable to own a horse. One of each set of 10 horses have shorter legs than the other horses who are all exactly the same. The horses with shorter legs are less desirable and therefore they are worth less. However, only 20 people in the town want a horse with short legs. The following week, a goose arrives in town. The goose is wearing a hat.
Not the most simple analogy, granted, but it has stood up to a fair amount of scrutiny in our lectures and even national academic debate.
I heard someone say "greed promotes development". No it doesn't, all greed advances is how to trick the public with crappy advertisements.
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Anonymous2009-10-13 23:35
well, it's innate in human nature, and this nation's crowning achievement was one of the first nations to have such a free market in the developed world during its golden age. The thing about capitalism is it tends to be successful under a wide range of conditions because humans all do tend to be selfish under all conditions, so it utilizes this selfishness and turns it into productivity, which takes away the difficulty of always having to be altruistic for the good of the nation. At the same time now we are too comfortable with being greedy which is bad for other reasons.
>>18
That's not all it does, that's just one part of what it does and it only works because we're so rich and prosperous.
If you're a 3rd world laborer you are better off if your masters give you a job at a sweatshop for slightly higher pay than as a yam farmer then channel most of their earnings back into the business to increase productivity so that in 20 years you can afford to send your kids to school and they can become middle class accountants who spend their money on stupid shit they saw on crappy advertisements, as opposed to feudal lords or communist thugs who force you to spend your life on a collective farm. >>19
Greed motivates people.
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Anonymous2009-10-14 19:25
>>21
Greed motivates greedy people.
Greed is a character flaw. Excessive greed is a serious character flaw.
The current economic system favors people with serious character flaws.
It's simple. If you give more than you take, you're a good person. If you take more than you give, you're a bad person.
>>22
Greed isn't a character flaw. Greed is simply the motivation to obtain material wealth, it can motivate people to commit acts of good or evil but it isn't inherantly either. If someone is merely altruistic they may give 50% of their wealth to starving orphans but the substance of that 50% is going to be far less than someone who is both greedy and altruistic since this individual will be far better at accumulating wealth and thus have more to give.
This is why we need to tax lazy proles so we can give tax cuts to the top 5% and also have a totally unfettered laissez faire system. Basically anything that is diametrically opposed to marxism and all the offshoots like national socialism, social democracy and stalinism.
If by "taxing the lazy people" you mean "stop giving them money for nothing", then yes.
My eyes are so hypersensitive to light that I need to wear prescription sunglasses with clip-on shades just to look at my computer monitor (with the brightness set to minimum). For all intents and purposes, I am blind. I *refuse* to go on welfare. Unless you're a fucking quadriplegic or something, you shouldn't be getting a monthly cheque.
Also, there *DO* need to be some limits on the economy, or you end up with another form of oligarchy.
I'm a libertarian, but anarcho-capitalism is just asking for trouble.
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Anonymous2009-10-15 16:10
>>26
Greed is not "simply the motivation to obtain material wealth...", it is an excessive and ethically inappropriate desire to obtain material wealth. And it is foul. It's similar to pride, which is usually a disproportionate and self indulgent appreciation for ones own worth, in that they both interfere with ones ability to make fair and reasonable judgments in matters where their own interests are concerned. Gordon Gekko was not a philosopher, he was a character in a movie who ended up in jail. Unfortunately the only "meme" that seems to have survived that second rate movie (Greed is good) has been absorbed out of context and is now regurgitated by capitalists who believe, in their ignorance, that capiitalism is a philosophy, and a way of life. It's not. It's just another system that facilitates the exchange and distribution of resources, and it's a pretty inefficient one at that. What's worse is that it plays to common human weaknesses.
"both greedy and altruistic"? "tax lazy proles"? "diametrically opposed to marxism"? Our most important technology is language. Words. Manipulating their meanings either out of a desire to deceive, or just plain ignorance, is lying, and should be considered criminal in an information society. I understand your ideas, and the points you are trying to make. They are old ones. What they tell me, and any other knowledgeable person reading them, is that while you may be respected for your enthusiasm and intellect, you still have much to learn, and must realize that your pride is endangering your character and integrity.
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Anonymous2009-10-15 16:22
>>28
I agree on much of your points. See, the definition of capitalism has been transmogrified into something completely different today, than what it used to be. It was never intended to be some blood sucking dry, big corporatism machine.
The first word is "capitial". Capitial is the wealth you have when you save. But that was all well and good when we had dollars backed by gold and silver. Now, we have a system in where the ones who save are hurt, and the ones who live beyond their means get bailed out and helped.
I could go on, but right now my time is limited.
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Anonymous2009-10-16 16:14
All the greatest inventions were created from altruism, virtue, art, and other great ideas. The motivation for all the great inventions was never to become rich. If you look at all the rich people, they're not inventors, just marketers. Greedy selfish lazy middle-men.
>>30
Correct. And a free market was also instrumental in achieving that as well.
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Anonymous2009-10-16 20:16
>>31
You could say that air was instrumental. The only contribution the "free market" had was to provide a way to distribute these ideas and technologies, and its primary and overriding motivation has been greed. Face it, it's a system that abets our tendency to be less than what we are capable of.
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Anonymous2009-10-16 21:16
>>32
I never said that it was perfect. And I'm sure there was greed back then too. People generally had more morals and values and displayed more integrity at that time as well.
Government intervention does contribute to breeding and encouraging more greed though. And when you have a big government married to big business — it's a recipe for disaster. Socialism, communism, or any other "-ism" hasn't exactly proven themselves to be any better either. So no solution is perfect.
Though, I don't have a defeatist personality, and I believe that change can happen. All I can do is tell people to turn off the TV, go to a library, get on the Internet, read and educate yourselves.
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Anonymous2009-10-17 0:44
>>33
Though I believe your impression of the past is idealized, and that we actually grow more ethical with every generation, I agree.
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Anonymous2009-10-17 12:00
>>34 Abortion, pornography, teen pregnancy, divorce, and homosexuality weren't problems in the middle ages.
>>35
The Roman Catholic church was certainly doing it's best to torture and burn up everyone who didn't subscribe to their perverse view of sexuality,(Yes, perverse. The entire ordained membership of the church is so terrified of sexuality that it takes vows of celibacy, though they've never had much integrity in maintaining them.) but the idea that these issues and practices are not historically ubiquitous is naive.
Except, of course, for "teen pregnancy". That very concept is a modern invention.
>>37
I don't think there was really a market for pornography in Europe, except perhaps in the larger cities and among the wealthy who had more leisure time. There was, however, still prostitution.
I'm not sure when the catholic church actually tortured and burned people just for doing those things. They usually reserved that for "heretics"
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Anonymous2009-10-20 13:47
What else wasn't a problem in the Middle Ages? Unemployment. Sure a lot of serfs had crappy conditions but at least they had work and food.
What else did we have in the Middle Ages? Geocentrism, young Earth creationism, flat earth theory, hollow earth theory, and phlogiston theory.
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Anonymous2009-10-20 23:52
>>45 What's wrong with those things? All the word science means is the "branch of systematic study especially of the physical world." What makes the left wing study more valid than the right wing or any other study that confesses the truth about God?
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Anonymous2009-10-21 1:02
The truth that god was invented by humans to allay fear of the unknown, and was later co-opted by the unscrupulous to control people.
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Anonymous2009-10-21 9:30
>>47
>HURF DURF PPL FEARZ TEH UNKNOWN
Cool cliche, tool. How about coming up with a realistic world view and actual reasons?
What system do you propose that could work better than the free market? Socialism perhaps? Got news for you: it's what we currently have and it's failing us, miserably. We haven't been a true capitalist nation in a very long time.
>>39
Altruism is neither good nor evil. However many of the greatest evils of human history were only possible because of altruism.
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Anonymous2009-10-22 0:40
>>52 Pure laissez-faire capitalism is what caused the Great Depression.
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Anonymous2009-10-22 0:40
>>53 Government intervention is what caused inflation in the Weimar Republic.
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Anonymous2009-10-22 4:24
>>53
An erroneous oversimplification. The current market, relative to the early 20th c., is highly regulated yet an economic depression as serious remains a possibility. This is the kind of shit people are programmed to say by our greedy oligarchs. It makes the people saying it feel like they're educated. The irony, of course, is that the people who say it usually believe that they are "liberal", when the truth is they're still wedded to the massive and frighteningly unstable fiction we call the Free Market. It's a system who's time should have come to an end 40 years ago, but our technologies have been twisted into a propaganda machine that few have the power to understand or resist. Back in the 60's Neil Postman argued that we should be teaching media ecology instead of english because as modern technological humans our primary, bla bla bla... If you don't know who Postman was, or Marshall Mcluhan, look 'em up. Anyway, we've been sold a bill of goods. Literally. And until we can break out of our intellectual conditioning, the next step forward will continue to elude us. Which brings me to... >>52
The simple answer. An end to the ridiculous, idea that they can't co-exist. Forcing an entire group of people(a Nation) to employ only one is the source of the trouble. It's clear that in today's political paradigm people choose the conservative "fuck off and leave me alone" side, or the liberal "let's all work together", and together attempt to create systems that are a balance between the two. This not only doesn't work, leaving us all sitting on the proverbial fence, but it breeds hypocrisy, the true hallmark of contemporary America(USA). The simple answer? End the hypocrisy. If you want to be left alone, so be it. It is a new age. You will be provided with land, and connectivity. The rest is on you and whatever relationship you develop with your neighbors, Bubba. And as for you socialists, come on along. We're gonna do some science, support ourselves, and protect the free people. And you're gonna do what you're told. You can't have it both ways.
This is obviously not a constitution. It's a starting point. Constituting the system described will be a bit more tricky, but we could do it, if we had the balls. If we had the integrity. Which brings me to >>48 and >>50
There's your realism and reasons, you ignorant little troll'y' cunt.
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Anonymous2009-10-22 13:25
>>54
It was more like if they had actually paid the reparations they would finish somewhere in the 1980s
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Anonymous2009-10-22 15:13
pure free market capitalism is just as stupid an economic ideology to try to use as communism
both make ridiculous assumptions about the nature of humans and thus have enormous holes that get exploited by the greedy or the immoral
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Anonymous2009-10-22 16:24
The same rednecks who overly support free trade are poor and unemployed because of it. Way to go!
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Anonymous2009-10-22 16:26
I finished reading a book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism by Austrian school economist Robert P. Murphy and it's full of crap.
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Anonymous2009-10-22 16:29
Economics has been subject to criticism that it relies on unrealistic, unverifiable, or highly simplified assumptions, in some cases because these assumptions lend themselves to elegant mathematics. Examples include perfect information, profit maximization and rational choices. Some contemporary economic theory has focused on addressing these problems through the emerging subdisciplines of information economics, behavioral economics, and complexity economics, with Geoffrey Hodgson forecasting a major shift in the mainstream approach to economics. Nevertheless, prominent mainstream economists such as Keynes and Joskow, along with heterodox economists, have observed that much of economics is conceptual rather than quantitative, and difficult to model and formalize quantitatively. In a discussion on oligopoly research, Paul Joskow pointed out in 1975 that in practice, serious students of actual economies tended to use "informal models" based upon qualitative factors specific to particular industries. Joskow had a strong feeling that the important work in oligopoly was done through informal observations while formal models were "trotted out ex post". He argued that formal models were largely not important in the empirical work, either, and that the fundamental factor behind the theory of the firm, behavior, was neglected.
Despite these concerns, mainstream graduate programs have become increasingly technical and mathematical. Although much of the most groundbreaking economic research in history involved concepts rather than math, today it is nearly impossible to publish a non-mathematical paper in top economic journals. Disillusionment on the part of some students with the abstract and technical focus of economics led to the post-autistic economics movement, which began in France in 2000.
David Colander, an advocate of complexity economics, has also commented critically on the mathematical methods of economics, which he associates with the MIT approach to economics, as opposed to the Chicago approach (although he also states that the Chicago school can no longer be called intuitive). He believes that the policy recommendations following from Chicago's intuitive approach had something to do with the decline of intuitive economics. He notes that he has encountered colleagues who have outright refused to discuss interesting economics without a formal model, and he believes that the models can sometimes restrict intuition. More recently, however, he has written that heterodox economics, which generally takes a more intuitive approach, needs to ally with mathematicians and become more mathematical. "Mainstream economics is a formal modeling field", he writes, and what is needed is not less math but higher levels of math. He notes that some of the topics highlighted by heterodox economists, such as the importance of institutions or uncertainty, are now being studied in the mainstream through mathematical models without mention of the work done by the heterodox economists. New institutional economics, for example, examines institutions mathematically without much relation to the largely heterodox field of institutional economics.
In his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture, Friedrich Hayek, known for his close association to the heterodox school of Austrian economics, attributed policy failures in economic advising to an uncritical and unscientific propensity to imitate mathematical procedures used in the physical sciences. He argued that even much-studied economic phenomena, such as labor-market unemployment, are inherently more complex than their counterparts in the physical sciences where such methods were earlier formed. Similarly, theory and data are often very imprecise and lend themselves only to the direction of a change needed, not its size. In part because of criticism, economics has undergone a thorough cumulative formalization and elaboration of concepts and methods since the 1940s, some of which have been toward application of the hypothetico-deductive method to explain real-world phenomena.
Witches all, and we all know what should be done with witches.
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Anonymous2009-10-24 15:23
>>52 However many of the greatest evils of human history were only possible because of altruism.
What? Name some for me.
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Anonymous2009-10-25 6:06
>>66
Communism. Thugs like Stalin could only have risen to power on a wave of good intentioned fanatical utopian idealism.
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Anonymous2009-10-25 8:42
>>67 Thugs like Stalin could only have risen to power on a wave of good intentioned fanatical utopian idealism
Yeah but Trotsky was a generous man
I mean... a SHELFISH man (sorry) http://www.mailstar.net/stalin-purges.html
"By extension, one owns any product of one's life. Be it an idea, materials harvested through our own efforts, refining of such a material or assembly of components to make a whole. This is all good. At any stage in the process, value is added."
this would include the children. Do you OWN your children? Can you as a human being OWN a other human? Can a Potato OWN a other potato?
>>78
Or a mathematician. Actually all scientists deal in absolutes. If it cannot be defined in absolutes, it unscientific and suspect.
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Anonymous2009-10-31 14:36
>>78>>79 good luck defining ethics using the scientific method. At best it's a philosophical argument like Descartes' one that god exists because it can be described.
At worst it's Objectivism, which ethics consist of whatever Miss Rand says this week.
You believe in global warming and the Bush administration ceases funding. You believe in gravity and it turns upside down. The only way is to accept Jesus in your heart.
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Anonymous2009-11-24 10:43
I support the editing of inappropriate content in anime for American distribution.
I like some cartoons, some older ones that happen to originate from Japan so I guess that they're "anime". Anime in general and especially its disrespectful and inconsiderate fans (or otakus) though are starting to annoy me. I've seen enough anime over the years from television, video rental stores, and clubs to determine that most of it is nothing but sex, violence, profanity, among other things that are contrary to family values.
Most of the stuff aired on Adult Swim isn't too bad, then again most of it is not in its uncut Japanese form. Anything rated TV-MA regardless of being anime or not is blocked on my television. I no longer like "anime" as a whole, in fact I dislike most of it.
Aside from the actual animes having questionable content, I've seen too many otakus who have no problem doing drugs, stealing, lying, violating the law of chastity, listening to Satanic music, and worshipping Satan.
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Anonymous2009-11-24 10:54
The same trailer trash rednecks who overly support free trade are poor and unemployed because of it. Way to go!
All the word science means is "the branch of systematic study especially of the physical world." What makes the liberal study more valid than the any other one?
I heard someone say, "Greed is good and motivates people to develop new technologies." No it doesn't, all greed develops is how to legally withhold wages, how to exploit workers, and how to trick the public with crappy advertisements.
It's simple. If you give more than you take, you're a good person. If you take more than you give, you're a bad person. Why are wealthy people exempt from this rule?
All the greatest inventions were created from altruism, virtue, art, science, passion, and other factors. The motivation for all the great inventions was never to become rich. If you look at all the rich people throughout history like the robber barons, they weren't inventors or discoverers, just "marketers" and "entrepreneurs". Greedy selfish lazy unnecessary middle-men.
>>85
It is not now and never was "trailer trash rednecks" who support free trade and globalization. This was always pushed by an unholy alliance of country-club Republican plutocrats and the worst extremist elements of the Democratic Party. The working class in the US has always, always had very strong protectionist leanings, for the simple reason of self-preservation.
The Republicans saw an opportunity to throw their factory workers under the bus and make themselves wealthier than gods, and get rid of those damned pesky labor unions once and for all.
The environmentalist-wacko, rootless-cosmopolitan leftists always wanted to see all those nasty nasty evil factories go away, preferably cease to exist altogether, but if that isn't politically realistic just yet, at least go to China and Mexico, where they can employ poor deserving Third Worlders who have been denied a shot at these jobs by the subhuman redneck union members in Flyover Country, and maybe when China gets rich, it'll increase its nuclear arsenal enough to deter those evil neocons from evil evil evil foreign wars against poor misunderstood Saddam and Osama. Those "buy American" stickers with the little American flags on them always made the anti-American bicoastal leftist crowd want to vomit anyway. Stupid flagwaving white-nigger hicks, what do they know anyway?