Capitalism at its worst

Thanks Doug. I've never really studied much political philosophy, certainly haven't read many primary sources. I have to admit that I probably have an overly strong association with the term communism and the governments more or less founded by Stalin and Mao. Socialism I used to more or less associate with Western European democracies. US polarized use of the term socialist/socialism seems to me to be an attempt to rekindle the spirit of the cold war era. It's complicated stuff and it's been awhile since I've been on a forum - it just appeared there for a moment you were following the modus operandi of so many people that seemingly really are here just to play Angry Birds - nice analogy that btw. Probably a wise decision to let the eye doc go on about Tony Blair.

 

Pure nonsense.

 

Excellent. You're like my wife, who ran a very successful catering business for twenty years, with twenty-five staff, and never lost a one. They worked on weekends, had to stay up to 5am sometimes, deal with collapsing tents and violent rock bands offended by not being invited to eat with the guests, etc. Sometimes there were five weddings over the weekend. And the guests -- it's a posh area -- were sometimes difficult people. But she had a happy, dedicated team.
Man does not live by bread alone. It's not just money, it's the idea that your boss cares for you ... as soppy as that might sound. She took the staff to plays in London, and took an interest in their personal lives in various ways.... not as a conscious policy, she's just that kind of person.

There is no reason that a free market system has to escape from the normal social conventions that have allowed us to evolve from being bands of intelligent chimpanzees, to the most successful species on the planet, now getting ready to leave it. The rightwingers here who act like heartless characters out of Dickens are actually probably quite nice people in their personal lives and would never charge a dying man for a glass of water ... but they enjoy prodding what they see as the delicate sensibilities of liberals.

However, not all capitalists are like that. So of course we need labor legislation of various sorts to make capitalists behave better. Plus legislation to make the workers behave more intelligently -- no 21 year old thinks he'll ever be 70, so he won't save up. So we have to make him. Much welfare legisation is like this: making people act rationally. (Just as no one would voluntarily pay for the police and military. They have to be forced to do that.)

Among the first social welfare schemes was that initiated by old Bismarck, a ferocious anti-socialist and an intelligent man. (If he had not been dismissed by the new idiot-Kaiser we would have avoided World Wars I and II and would already have a colony on Mars and cancer would be a thing of the past.) The whole Wiki article on him is worth reading, but here's the relevant point:

[Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck ]

Even autistic conservatives who lack empathy for others should understand that, in order to preserve capitalism, we have to rub off its sharp edges, otherwise we'll find ourselves under the guillotine.

 

American popular political discourse is among the most primitive on the planet, because America has never had a mass socialist party, unlike every other advanced capitalist country on the planet. (It's a classic question about which many PhD theses have been written, first addressed over a hundred years ago by Werner Sombart. (See here: https://prospect.org/economy/one-big-question/ ).
When most young people say they are 'socialists', they mean they want Norweigan health care and university fee payment policies, not that they want to nationalize all industry and run it according to a central plan. Bernie is just an old fashioned New Dealer. No one believes in genuine socialism any more. I've had arguments with people who claim to, but they cannot answer the Soclalist Calculation Question... so they end up proposing some form of 'market socialism', or co-operatives like that one in Spain, Mondragon (which seems to work pretty well : [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation ], or some form of 'popular capitalism' (eg 'Parecon' [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics ]. All of these are attempts to retain the market, with its essential price signals. Well, it's the beginning of wisdom.

I've probably recommended it before, but, along with The Republican Workers Party by FH Buckley, I highly recommend Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, which is a brilliant novel about trying to make the planned economy work in the Soviet Union, as improbable as that may sound as the basis for a good read.

Anyway, it's fun to debate the market vs the state, but right now, sensible people on both the Left and Right should be screaming our heads off at any of our leaders who show hesitation about withdrawing from the overseas snake pits where we have wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of live trying to bring liberal democracy to warring tribes -- a fool's errand.

Then we should have a serious argument about the Russian bogeyman, and China. The former is not a threat to us, and the latter need not be.

 

You mistake the market for society. If I'm running a business, the market will limit my ability to be 'charitable'. My wife had a team of 25 in her catering business, and always included one handicapped adult. But no more than that. But outside of the imperatives of the market, most people engage in social relations in which they act as if they 'owe' each other various behaviors: respect, empathy, concern for the effect of their behavior on the other. People who don't do this exist, and are almost universally disliked, and with good reason. Our species has evolved this sort of social behavior because it works. When we raid another village, we look out for each other, we co operate, we try to rescue a mate who's in trouble ... if he's killed we'll take care of his women and children. Human groups where it was everyone for himself didn't reproduce as well.

So if I see you injured by the side of the road, I will stop and help you. Not because I'm a nice guy, but because those of my ancestors who walked on past, were themselves walked on past by others later. The helpers had more babies, and I'm a descendant of them, as are most of us.

If you would not do the same for someone else, then you are suffering from a neural deficiency... probably related to that pathology, apparently fairly common, that makes for psychopaths, one of whose qualities is an inability, probably biological, to empathyze with others. This doesn't seem to square with natural selection, but then neither does homosexuality. We still don't know everything.

Psychopaths are a real phenomenon, but we don't really understand the causes yet.

This is not an insult, just an observation. But I'll bet that in real life you are as empathetic as everyone else, and just enjoy (as I do sometimes) winding up the bleeding-heart liberals, who would, if they could, have us all dependent on the Mother-State.

 

Pure Venezuela.
I worked there for a month in their previous round of attempts at full social control, managing the renovations of a 100 yacht for an American client. I flew in, just as riots had killed 500 people in Caracas over price controls that were destroying the economy. Martial law had just been declared; a 6-6 overnight curfew with it. That was 30 years ago, and they failed to learn, failed to change course. Now a pound of toilet paper is worth more than a pound of cash bills, and people are starving- over 90% in poverty.


That's what socialism does. That and promise fools free money in exchange for their freedom.

 

Oppenheimer and Grove's success is probably the greatest threat. Ike more or less bookended his Presidency with a couple of very important speeches about the dire straits of funding the military-industrial complex. The discussions about socialism and capitalism as of today are quaint at best and possibly irrelevant; since we may now live firmly in the age of corporatism, whose most perfect collaborative model with government is probably China rather than the US. And imagine which of the two types of government, the US or China, is more suited to benefit from and thrive when, not if, AI becomes quite likely something beyond anything even science fiction has speculated. https://www.top500.org

 

Cute story. Means nothing in regards to anything

 

Exactly.

But but but...that would be .....SOCIALISM!!!!

 

Means nothing to anyone who desperately wants to make the world work for them, so they don't have work or think for themselves, or because they believe they cant.
It's like they have a severe panic attack in slow motion- in that rational judgment and logic are totally discarded in favor of a mental aberration. Total disassociation and rejection of anything that doesn't match the state of mind- total inability to control themselves in any other way. Self-destructive trajectory, and no power in their mind to abort it and come back to balance and reality. Very dangerous place for a person to be; and all self-inflicted which means nobody else can make them quit.

 

Look, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

When I spent a month in Cuba, I noticed that in Santiago there was no soap for sale. Or at least I couldn't find any, and such shortages are very common under socialism. (I'll tell you a joke or two about that at the end.)

Now ... under a free society, someone would quickly start a little soap factory. Soap's not hard to make. He would hire a few people, and start production, and start selling it. Others would imitate him. Their competition would keep prices reasonable... and they would compete to make nicer soap. ABC.

But in Cuba .. if you tried something like that ... you would go to prison.

Every Cuban, including the Central Committee of the Party, knows this is crazy. The rulers of Cuba are itching to go to Chinese-style capitalism. The stupid American government could speed this up by simply dropping the embargo, flooding Cuba with American tourists ... socialism would melt like butter in the sun. Many Cubans are Cuban patriots, nationalists, and good for them. But they're not stupid.

Joke: During the Brezhnev reign, a group of British school teachers visit Moscow on a 'cultural exchange'. They go to one of the special language schools, where the children are taught in English. The headmistress there is very proud of her school, and says to them, "Go ahead. Walk into any classroom and question the children in English." They head down the corridor, and pass a mathematics class... and ask if they can observe it. The teacher welcomes them in, and says, "Go ahead ...ask the children a math problem in English." So one of British teachers says, "Now boys and girls ... if I bought twenty apples for three kopecks each, and then sold twelve of them for six kopecks each ... what would I get?" A young boy's hand shoots up, and she calls on him. He says, "Comrade teacher ... five years, minimum!"

And another one:
An old man in Moscow, a veteran of WWII, wearing his medals on his civvies as you are allowed to there, had been standing in a queue for a butcher's shop for three hours... finally manager came out and said, "Sorry comrades .. there are no deliveries of meat today ... you'll have to come back tomorrow." The people in the queue began to glumly disperse ... but our man just snapped. "No Meat??? No Meat???? What in the hell did I risk my life for, fighting the Nazis??? So I could eat potatoes??? I'll bet those Mother-f*****rs in the Kremlin have meat tonight!!! .... "

The crowd began to nervously back away from him, when ... what they all feared happened... A heavy-set man in a camelhair overcoat appeared, flashed his KGB badge, and said, "Comrade!!! Come with Me!" and clapped an arm over the old man's shoulders and walked/pushed him into a nearby alley.

"Now, comrade!" he said sternly..."What you just said was TREASON!! We all know there are problems .. but you just aided the Imperialist Enemy!!!! ... Now ... I see you are a veteran of the Great Patriotic War ... so .. just this once ... I'm going to let you off ... you go home, and never do this again? All right??? And comrade! .. Consider yourself lucky! You know what would have happened to you in the old days, under Comrade Stalin? " And he made a pistol out of his hand and said "POW!"

Shaking, the old man made his way home. He opened the door of his flat, and his wife called out, "Did you get the meat?"
"No," he said. "They were out of meat again?" she asked.
"It's worse than that," he said. "Worse?" she said..."How can it be worse???" [Scroll down]
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."They're out of bullets!!!"

 

Right .. GROUPS. Always predicated upon social relationships.

It doesn't apply to the State, or even broader society. Doesn't even apply to the community - since they are almost solely predicated on geography in the First World, not social relationship.