Yes, the Capitaliban Caveman ruled by grunting, howling at the moon, pounding his chest, and beating up everybody else with the weapons only he and his flunkies were allowed to use.
Read up on Ricardo. There's no debate with this. You're simply clueless over what comparative advantage entails
Grunting, howling at the moon, and pouning of chest had too high an "opportunity cost". The hunter gatherer "scientist" spent that time developing better weapons for his flunkies. Survival of the fittest wasn't 100%. There are those that still do a lot of grunting, howling at the moon, and pounding their chest on this forum.
What in the world are you talking about? The hunter gatherer scientist? In non-sedentary forms of socialization, the work was shared. They did not have one guy hanging back to make spears while everyone else hunted. Maybe they left a few guys back to guard the camp, while everyone hunted, but spear making was a shared responsibility. I have spent time with Bedouin tribes, and the only specialization exists between men, women, and children. Women have certain responsibilities, children certain responsibilities, and men the others. Individual men however, don't specialize in a way that would be identifiable to a capitalist economy. Now that I have responded to your silliness sincerely, can we now move on with this debate!! Hunter gatherers were not capitalists by any acceptable definition of capitalism. You insisting that the they were, is like having a debate about weather patterns with some one who insists rain is God's tears. It cannot be productive. We cannot have a productive discussion until you understand that capitalism is a uniquely modern form of economic arrangement. Pre-modern economies where wealth was largely tied to land, were NOT capitalist. The new form of economic arrangement where wealth was tied to capital and production(as opposed to land), where people were market dependent, where large scale production of goods was possible, etc is unique and the only thing that can be accurately called capitalism. PS. No one denies that some of the characteristics that define capitalism, existed in the past. For example, food was grown then and it is grown now. The question isn't about the similarities, it is about what is unique. Food may have been grown in the past and now, but the difference is the scale and efficiency with which food is grown. Mechanized farming done by fewer and fewer people, allowed more and more people to move into the cities and find work producing and servicing. It was THAT shift which defined something new, the fact that they still grow food isn't particularly relevant.
I don't think hunter gatherers had time to read Ricardo. More strutting and pounding your chest. You have yet to provide any credible rationale why comparative advantage is not required for capitalism.
They don't need to. Ricardo just provided us with an understanding of how trade gains work. Unfortunately, despite the fact that Ricardo has been dead for some time, you still haven't caught up with his analysis. Is it in your in-tray? Comparative advantage merely refers to opportunity costs and how specialisation can lead to consumption outside the production possibility frontier. Such specialisation allows us to understand inter-industry trade. For advanced economies it is actually intra-industry trade that tends to dominate. Thus, even if economies are identical (both in terms of the production possibility frontier and consumer demand, ensuring no comparative advantage distinction) they will still trade. Monopolistic competition, for example, informs that trade increases choice whilst reducing prices (through economies of scale). Nothing to do with comparative advantage!
These are straw man arguments. They are like the "There's never been true communism" argument. What matters most is the driving force behind economic organization. There will never be pure capitalism or communism because, a.) no one can agree on an encompassing definition, and b.) human beings being humans will act in ways outside of theorist dogma. What matters are the primary factors behind socioeconomic organization. Is property ownership and the price system the primary driver of resource allocation? If yes, it's pretty much a capitalist society. If no, then it's pretty much a communist society. Parsing it down into purist strains is just intellectual masturbation.
(2) is the key - it's just total right wing propaganda. Right wingers complain that there is too much regulation and taxes are too high but those are all right wing lies. Anybody with even the slightest common sense knows their propaganda is garbage.
Well, actually, there HAS been true communism. That Engels guy explained pretty well how primitive communism existed for a long time. The annoying thing how right wingers want to redefine societies like the soviet union as being "communist" when: 1) The workers did not control production 2) The economy was not democratically organized by any stretch of the imagination 3) Capitalist relations were never completely abolished 4) The soviet union wasn't a stateless society 5) They didn't even describe themselves as communist, they claimed to be "moving towards socialism" Property ownership is not a unique or defining characteristic of capitalism, as people owned property under feudalism and even primitive communism. I can not imagine a successful society where people don't own personal property, and communists don't aim to abolish personal property anyway - we're not Kibbutzists. People should be allowed to own their own houses or living areas and their personal items including some means of transport - nobody's really arguing against that. What we am to abolish that is at the core of capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. The only real definition of capitalism is the exploitation and extraction of surplus value from the workers by a capitalist - or in some cases a state that organizes society like a single capitalist firm - and private ownership of the means of production.
There's no such beast! The use of 'pure' is typically just about confusing the economic spectrum (from laissez faire to command) with political economy. This is also erroneous. Market socialism will typically maintain property ownership and the price system in resource allocation. You've started with a bogus notion of capitalism and crafted invalid comment about socialism from that
I'd say these two posts above are representative of what I mean. We aren't interested in ideological purity. We are interested in the primary forces of socioeconomic organization. Communism or capitalism isn't practically defined by some checklist, and if 14 of the 247 boxes aren't checked, it doesn't qualify. It's a fun argument for those in the ivory towers who don't have to work for a living, but practically, it doesn't matter. All successful economies are mixed economies, devoid of pointless tests of ideological purity. The only question is of degree. It's irrelevant today that 1000 years ago, a tribe of 300 people ran around in the bush sharing everything they killed. Same as pining for some Objectivist utopian paradise that has never and will never exist. Ideology is a trap. It limits thinking and understanding of human behavior because it will ascribe how people should act, not how they do act.
Its not about ideological purity. Its about validity. You came out with drivel, misinterpreting capitalism and also how socialism will typically refer to the use of the price mechanism to avoid problems with socialist calculation. You need to start by presenting a valid argument. Everything in your original post was wrong. "Ideology is a trap" provides no excuse for presenting erroneous comment
Just the opposite. The homo erectus King Ape bullied the homo sapiens scientist and tricked him into serving the subhuman Master by giving him a few extra bones. A modern example was when the inventor got merely a $30,000 bonus while the Corporate Apes got 300 million dollars for the patent that wouldn't have existed without the inventor.
No, there is a "pure" strain of capitalism, and it involves significant amounts of government involvement and intervention in the economy. You can talk about an idealized conception of communism, and how it is overly idealistic or if you believe in such a thing, how it is great but unfortunately it has never been tried. You cannot do that with capitalism. There never was a capitalist manifesto. There is no capitalist equivalent of Das Kapital. Capitalism sprung up organically, and is defined by it's characteristics in practice. Not by an idealized conception of how things should work. Since capitalism is defined by how it works in practice, and in practice capitalism has included significant level of state involvement in every single instance, defining capitalism without referencing state intervention is insanely stupid. As I said, there is a pure form of capitalism, it just involves significant state intervention. Free market fanatics ignore this fact, and to ignore something so fundamental to what defines capitalism, is simply ignorance.
There IS an overabundance of regulation in many instances, but rarely is it meant to constrict capital. Most regulation exists to ensure capitalist profit. Regulation creates a level of red tape and inane rules, which require a large amount of investment to comply with. Most of it is written by the companies who it is meant to regulate, or by their lackeys in the government agencies meant to regulate them. A good example of regulation meant to maintain capitalist profit, is during the mad cow scare, many small farmers sought to do comprehensive tests on all their cows to ensure they did not have mad cow, and then planned to use that to sell abroad and to market their product as free from mad cow disease. The corporate beef industry lobbied to block such a move, and were successful. That wasn't an example of overregulation undermining capital, it was an example of government regulation doing the bidding of capital, to undermine competition so as to ensure capitalist profit. This is one example among thousands. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/us/us-won-t-let-company-test-all-its-cattle-for-mad-cow.html So it is true that overregulation is a problem, it is just a problem people on the right don't understand. Big business is all in favor of regulation, just not regulation which limits their own profits.
Capitalism is just an extension of the hereditary feudal aristocracy, of birth and not worth. It has produced nothing; the revolution in science and technology since the official feudal era produced everything the Capitalists claim as their contribution. Capitalism started out as buying the ownership of other people's work. Who had the money to do that? The old feudal aristocracy had it, exactly like what happened when the Communists privatized industry and sold it to the only people who had money--the former Communist Party members!
A mixture of two poisons? You've been misled by simplistic Hegelian synthesis to come up with such a specious answer. Both these poisons were concocted by the same carcinogenic class: the Nobility with No Ability. They also created the class-biased university to Kool Aid these potions. Communism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" = parasites on the bottom. Capitalism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his greed," = parasites on the top, with a greed so great that it lives after death by insisting on the privilege of granting unearned inheritance to its spawn. How about "To each according to his ability"? That omission shows what's wrong with mixing two poisons and calling it healthy. Transfer inheritance to the talented of the next generation and you will get widespread prosperity. It's like it was in the NBA. After Larry Bird brought billions into the game from increased White interest, Michael Jordan benefited from that, not Larry Bird, Jr.
If your purpose was to get the definitions of both capitalism and socialism wrong, then you're on a blinder!
I look at the world empirically, not ideologically. Pining for some philosophical ideal is a waste of time IMHO. All successful economies are mixed economies. The primary driver of wealth creation is capitalism but the state plays an important role in education and infrastructure. Debates about how much regulation is necessary is on the margin of the model we have created. As per your suggestion, in a society of strong institutions and the rule of law, i.e., ours, all advances in living standards comes from technological innovation. Technological innovation is cumulative and builds itself over time. The wealth creation that arises from innovation is embedded in the capital accrued by society, be it financial, human, etc. Future generations build on embedded capital accrued in society to further increase living standards and wealth. In a mixed economy, how that accrued capital is distributed is open to debate. Societies impose inheritance taxes, for example.
Who or what decides that? Economic ideology is merely a perspective, a point of view, a purely theoretical construct built on perceptions of decidedly incomplete data. There is no perspective of economics that has passed the point of hypothetical validation. Economic perspectives do not need validation from complete data sets, they only need acceptance to become Theory. In fact there are some popular economic ideologies that have adopted the position that all data is inherently flawed so any and all economic measurements are irrelevant, What is missing from economics is any recognition that the various and numerous long established perspectives have become less cogent so perhaps the world and its economy would be better served if ideological perspectives were put aside for a while to deal with the practical problems of the world as it is now. The world economy will continue on with its eventual goal of everyone having a good life. Just about every single person on the planet now recognizes that as an achievable goal within the next generation. There is already far more than enough accumulated wealth on the planet to make that happen. It is up to those who control the planets wealth to decide how contentious this will be. Currently their choice appears to be to keep wealth concentrated regardless of increasing strife. This is an extremely dangerous stance since, while they can control power, they cannot own it since it is ultimately in the hands of the people.
Political Economy evolves. A socialist analysis today, for example, can tut at the idea of aping the Walrasian auctioneer. However, that evolution gives no excuse for giving obvious falsehoods. The fellow, for example, gave the most mundane error: mixing up pro-market comment with pro-capitalist comment, inappropriately suggesting 'market=capitalism'. This provides no excuse for deliberate misrepresentation.Indeed, it demands even closer study and a political economic approach where comparison & critique is key. This is nonsense. Economics has become more pluralist in nature
Capitalists, with plenty of stolen money to spend on propaganda, glorify themselves. They live in constant fear of being found out for being parasites, so they buy up all the voices we hear praising them, or protecting them by distracting us with irrelevant issues. Their Liberal agents attack them, but purposely attach unpopular ideas like Gun Control to their criticism of the rich, tricking people into supporting the Capitaliban. Capitalists only hike the ball; others do the scoring. They buy up all the rights, at cheap prices, to movers that are already there and momentum that they had nothing to do with creating. They claim credit for self-created movers such as consumers, skilled employees, and inventors. (See "Bill Gates's Revenge" at abeautifulmind.proboards.com) This can be compared to what was said about one of their favorite sons, "Born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." They are merely passengers or bystanders, but they portray themselves as God the Creator. One of the reasons they push religion is to create the mindset of some powerful Force without which we wouldn't even exist. "All comes from somewhere outside of us and greater than us," they lead us to think, "So there must be some Divine Presence of Providence on Earth too, taking human form. The rich are our Guardian Angels." Inheritance tax? No, that will still leave unearned wealth, positions, and power in the hands of no-talent conceited brats. Limit inheritance to $50,000. If we have to do it on our own, so must the heirheads. They won't get anywhere but get lost.
This is static, not dynamic. The world's wealth is being drained dry because its ownership is not put in the hand of the High IQs who created it. They must be financed up front from childhood on, borrowing from the world's future wealth, which won't exist if they are not rewarded for their raw talent. By not paying for grades, the talent pool has been turned into a puddle.
