Topic: Capitalism (continued from How do you deal with the thought about taxes) - page 11. (Read 12620 times)

Price discovery = finding out just what a mother will pay to keep her child alive.

Oh, you know how those ghettos get.  Those people.  Litter everywhere, they breed like rabbits, and no matter how much we give them, they trash it and scream for more
Only so much a feller can give, you know what i'm saying?  They took mah taxes & spent them on hookers & blow, now there's none left for nobody!  That where da wealth go

A first mover with the right price will always win unless prevented with force.
I'm not understanding how price discovery is strictly capitalist.

Where does the wealth go, then? How could everyone across the board possibly get poorer unless goods were being jettisoned into space?
I'm attemping to describe equalibrium, not avoidence of profit.

Yes she toils. Yes she has a skillset. Yes she has employees.

Her employees all have flush toilets, something that even kings did not have a few hundred years ago. They all can afford cloths with thread counts that are higher than any cloth in the world a few hundred years ago. They all earn enough to feed themselves for a whole day with like 1 hour of work, a few hundred years ago that alone would have required at least 8 hours of hard unskilled labor. They all have cars, nicer cars than ours actually, a few hundred years ago they would have taken horses to work. I could go on but i think you get the point. When taken in historical context yes her employees are wealthy, the are absurdly fucking wealthy every last one of them. The sort of poverty i am describing gripped the world for hundreds of thousands of years before we discovered capitalism which then rocketed the modern poor to the status of ancient kings in a couple of generations. If you cant understand why someone who makes 10 dollars an hour is wealthy than you are a spoiled brat who understands no historical context. So the executives at her company are more wealthy, so what, who cares if it makes some people more better off if it makes everyone better off in general.

No the employees she manages are not managers themselves. Her employees are unskilled laborers.

Even the most powerful capitalist is still at the mercy of his customers. Wealthiest is only wealthiest because those buying his products have decided to make him so. Money does not appear out of thin air - that wealthy capitalist had to create a lot of benefit to those buying his wares. He did so only because he was the most skilled and the most fittest for the work he could do. (Unless he acquired his wealth by brute force, forcing others to give it to him at a muzzle of a gun, in which case he is no capitalist). And if he should turn bad, he will lose his wealth to boycotts, thefts, and exorbitant security expenses to protect his property and life. Because the fittest is not a man with money and a gun, it's the huge mob of people with guns wielding their collective buying power.

The only other option is to have someone pay you just because they feel they have to "mutually aid" you. That's just plain dependency. A mutual dependency means you have to pay me for my work, because you need me, and I have to work for you, because I need your payment. Otherwise, with the mutual aid you describe, you have to depend on someone to grow a garden and cook the food for you, but they have no obligations to you, and can just stop supporting you at any time, and then you just starve.

Correct.  Being wealthier doesn't provide the incentive to buy something, but having the best use for something does provide that incentive.
If there is a piece of very fine wood, suitable for crafting into a violin, but I only know how to make chairs, even if it is good enough to make a chair I won't want to pay as much as the violin craftsman would pay for that piece of wood.  Even if I am 1000x wealthier, the wood will be bought by the violin craftsman because they can make money with their craft at a higher price for the wood than I would be able to do.  I can make a very fine chair with the second tier of wood, and still make a profit.  This best use determination is the mechanism of capitalist price-discovery.  People pay what something is worth to them, and not more, based on their assessment of what their best use is for the thing.

This can best be achieved through price-discovery, and that metric is lost in the creative commons.  We end up with the first-mover (amoral) or the forceful (immoral) getting the choice piece of wood, rather than the person with the best use.  Or worse, decisions through the guild politics.

Most all trades are win-win (moral).  This is so when the price paid is less than what the payer values it, and more than the seller's cost.  When both have a choice in the trade, either can say no if this is not true.  This is the essence of mutual-aid, and it is why capitalism is moral, and why communism isn't.

If everyone were living in a mutual aid society, and there was no profit in their mutual exchange, everyone would be collectively getting poorer. You are either better off from a trade, and have made a profit, or worse off, and have had a loss. You have either put a lot of your time and effort into something, and after giving that something to someone else came away better from it, or you wasted your time for no reward, and have more time and labor wasting to look forward to.

Would you say she is a Toiler? I would imagine that this work depends on a skillset and the arrangement made between the stockholders and her is not one that neccessarily involves wage slavery, but collectivism.
Does she have employees? Are those employees wealthy, if so?
 In turn, are those employees managers themselves?

"Is that without the state, capitalists cannot withhold their capital from the creative commons"

i wonder if you could explain what this means. as i understand it creative commons is a type of license that people apply to intellectual property. capital is real property not intellectual property so i'm not understanding the connection.

Reductionism? Not entirely sure about that.
Since the beginning of this, I've been attempting to show how anarchocapitalism is an oxymoron.
The core reason that this is so, is that without the state, capitalists cannot withhold their capital from the creative commons.
Rather than the "highest use," those in the know ie. guilds, can have the only possible use.
The "determination" will be made not by an economic and political metasystem or metric, but by the fittest. This is where capitalism goes wrong, wealthiest, most able to purchase or invest or kill does certainly not equate to most skilled or fittest!

I suppose we should clarify whether we're talking about a theory of capitalism, or some practical activities which we label capitalism. In programming terms, the former would be a class, and the latter an object of that class. Edit*: And for that matter, maybe those ought to be classes and objects of trade, whereas capitalism would be a container class or object that houses all of the individual trades? [/edit] To me it seems that whenever someone performs a trade, a calculation -- or simulation -- is done to try and predict the possible outcomes and to choose the best one. Doing these simulations in our heads was obviously beneficial to us humans, and that was probably a factor in why we evolved to have such big brains.

And I wonder if our individual neurons sometimes think the 'brain' they're stuck with is a coercive idiot. If only those individuals could be left alone to mind their own business, homesteading the lipid-lands, and collecting the glucose and oxygen provided by nature.

my wife works to make the shareholders of her company wealthy despite the fact that we have means which make it possible for her to quit at any time with out suffering serious negative repercussions. she works to make her company wealthy because her company helps to make us wealthy also, she works not because she has to but because both parties benefit from the arrangement.

OK, that surprised me. That would be the Materialist philosophy (that only matter and energy exist), which is distinct from economic materialism (excessive desire to acquire and consume).
Pure Materialists philosophy has become fairly rare since Kant and Hegel.  Mary Midgley, who seems like she might have been a strong philosophical ally of much of what you have written, would probably have argued that Materialist philosophy is a source of either immorality, or amorality. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Midgley

Like you, I favor reduction-ism.  But my skepticism won't let me find my way to pure Materialism.

Agreed.  That is very likely why the Anarcho-capitalists call themselves anarcho-capitalist rather than simply capitalist, in order to distinguish the two.

YES!  In an efficient capitalism (such as the anarcho-capitalists suggest), those that know how to use that-of-which-the-stockpile-consists will have the highest use of that stockpile.  The stockpile will be of higher value to those that know, and they will easily gain it by trade due to those capabilities.  Capitalism is the mechanism by which that superior-knowledge-and-use can be determined.  Without the metrics of capitalism, there is not a way to easily measure that best use, other than force or first-movers.

The an-caps would additionally assert that state interference can have the effect of degrading the efficiency of capitalism.
And that typically once those inefficiencies are discovered, folks tend to attempt to patch it with an additional layer of state interference.
This is often followed by frustrated face-palming and highly energetic communications.

This makes sense to me as well.

"I'll pay you IF you work to make me wealthy" is not mutual aid, it's coerced dependency.
Amoral is the mindset, abusive is the action. Perhaps 'unethical abuse or neglect' would have fit better, if actual abuse were not the case.
Also, 'Materialism', not 'maternalism.'

I'd argue, in a behaviorist sense, that knowledge is as material as braincells or transistors are.
I cannot imagine properly calling trade free of state protection of the means of production from the toilers, Capitalism.
Capital itself is nothing more than a stockpile of material.
Capitalism, however, attempts to utterly privatize that stockpile, which as part of all, must belong to all and be used by those who know how to use that of which the stockpile consists.
Competition and mutual aid stand opposed to one another in a sense, but in another sense, competition of types, work well together.

Strawman as a mofo, but hey..
Is the profit motive not married to capitalism?
It's not married to mutual aid.
The driving force behind mutual aid is living in a sane world, not using toilers to profit.

I might defer to Zarathustra for a more in depth answer than this:

I am not convinced yet by that proposition.
It appears that Materialism and Statism exist world-wide.

But I think that it may be possible for people to engage in trade without either, and that capitalism is not innately dependent upon them, even in realms where they exist. 
It occurs to me that we may  be doing so just now, exchanging without either.
We are engaged in the free-trade... of ideas.
We are trading our time, or labor or toil with each other by focusing on the effort of the other and crafting responses, each to the other.  The product of this is non-material, but it is the capital created by our efforts, which we trade with each other, and also freely give to the watchers.  My hoped for gain in this exchange is entirely non-material.  I seek only a better understanding.

If either of us were to stop, the exchange between us would cease.
So long as we consider it equitable, we continue.  And yet we have exchanged nothing material, and there has been no intervening state (notwithstanding PRISM, *hi guys*)