Topic: Capitalism (continued from How do you deal with the thought about taxes) - page 12. (Read 12620 times)

Sounds like an open trade to me.  Just replace one side of the barter with cash and you have a clear-cut example of capitalism.  I can think of nothing more unnatural than feeling obliged to help every single person you meet.

Uh, what does inheriting right from a mother have to do with capitalism?


You can't have something me both amoral and abusive. It's either abusive and immoral, or amoral and just is.


Mutual aid? You mean, like, I do something nice for you, you do something nice for me? Sounds like capitalism 

Um, sure? Why is matrilineal verifiable but the other isn't?

Capitalism requires both materialism (the nouns) and statism.
Capitalism is a rather skewed, abusive and amoral margin-based value ascribing system.
Mutual Aid, however is "a factor in evolution."

Depends on the monarchy.
Is yours matrilineal? If not, I'd dismiss it out of hand as being practically unverifyable, which is fine.
edit: Hereditary monarchies must start somewhere.

Sillier still:
"New England dairy farmers have a new product: free-range veal. The milk-fed calves spend their short lives roaming pastures instead of cooped up in pens the way traditional veal is reared. Producers hope the meat will catch on with consumers who avoid veal for moral reasons." -circa 2006 NPR

Get yours at your local Bread & Circus, which must'a been named after "Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt" -- a whiney line by some Roman poet complaining that the place was going to the dogs.

That's called a chicken tractor, and is a method that has been known and in use for several decades now on a small scall.  If you have enough chickens, you don't even have to plow.  Even still, there is a legal definition for "free range" and "organic" and neither of these terms are allowed to be used with chickens that use a chicken tractor.  If the are ever locked up, even for their own good, they are not free range.  Silly, but true.

Not at all. The "official body" can be as simple as whoever owns the land simply making up the rules, which can be specific, or as general as "don't be a dick." For example, I don't allow smoking on my property. It's not a law, but if you break it, I just kick you out of my house. Or these could be a set of rules in a community, like a privately owned gated one. Don't like the rules, don't go there. Or buy property, and negotiate to have the rules not apply to your part of the land (easier if you buy something on the edge of the community)


I specifically addressed those when I mentioned China and Southeast Asia. They all start out as sweatshops, because people will do anything for money, and working in sweatshops is better than prostitution. Then as more companies move in because of the cheap labor, the labor gets used up, leading to labor shortages (too many jobs, too few employees), and companies have to compete for workers through higher wages. That's what happened in China and India, and why those two places are not necessarily the cheapest places to outsource to any more. Sweatshops isn't a problem that can just be fixed or legislated away, because the countries where they exist are just too poor to do anything about them. There's no one to tax. But having companies come in and compete for workers, on the other hand, has been very effective. Generally, if there were no barriers to trade, such as legal or distance, all labor around the world would pay about the same. Sweatshops are just examples of areas that were left behind economically that have yet to catch up.


I think those would simply add extra, unnecessary, though minor amount of "regulation" at most. Kinda like how the Southern Baptists boycotted Disney because Disney supports gay rights, and when Disney found out, they were like, 'Wait, who?"


I understand. It's a good example. How many regulations do we have regarding making sure chickens and cows are free range? None? Yet people are more and more aware of the issue, and places like Chipotle, and other higher scale food places, actually use "free range" as an advertisement. People will pay if they are concerned enough, and companies will figure out how to make free range a cheaper alternative if it can be used to sell more products than their competitors. For example, there's an ice cream shop in Baltimore called Pitango Gellato, that worked with their egg distributor to design a large roving chicken coup on wheels. During the day, they actually wheel out the chickens onto a large grass pasture, and let them roam around free. At night, the chickens go back into the coup, and get driven home. Chickens are happy playing in the nice green grass, and the producer actually saves money because he rents the chickens out to fields that need help clearing insects, same as sheep get rented out to trim grass. In the end, Pitango doesn't pay that much more for their eggs, but their eggs taste much better, and they can advertise by bragging where their eggs come from, and the cool farming system they use.



Should we just switch to debating "free trade" instead? Or will you find some personal definitions of that, too (like you did with "not being aggressive.")

Well, no.  Vatican City is a monarchy, though Pope's dad wasn't Papa Pope.  You're thinking of hereditary rule, but even then there are caveats -- just one monarch at a time.  So before getting comfy on the throne, make sure that:
 -Papa king is dead
 -Mom doesn't weasel in, becoming queen regent
 -You're not daffy, allowing for other regents
 -You are the oldest bro, or have offed your older male siblings
I'm sure there's more, but that there's a start.

   The King Is Dead!  Long Live The King!
 

Uh, no, that's not how monarchy works. I am a monarch because I was born to a monarch family. That's it. Yes, the system is stupid that way.

Deconflate.  Technical slang?  If not, a really kludgy use of prefixes, sort-a like deconstruct -- leaves me wondering whether the guy's unsure of what he means to say.  I'll go by the context & guess "differentiate," or "separate" -- something like that.
Thus far, no one in this thread has confused the two -- one's an economic system, the other a philosophical theory more often lumped together with socialism (Marx's historical materialism -- that's the culprit).  So i think we're good here.


No.  "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production, with the goal of making a profit." -wikip
Materialism does not "ignore spiritual value."  Neither is it consumerism.  Materialism attempts to interpret the spiritual without allusion to the supernatural, pretty much what hard scientists do.  Won't argue how correct or successful it is, but it chooses to ignore nothing.


Please.  I'm not sure what you're describing, but it's not capitalism.  I've pasted a wikip quote above, and it's as good a one-sentence definition as any.  Beyond that, i can only agree with ktttn -- there's too much to sum up in a post.  But "agreeing on how we value" is not it.  


Oddly enough, the bargaining often happens under more stressful conditions*.  
*See:  Your money or your life! & Day's wages is this rotten potato, take it or starve!


Wait, wait, which those are them?  The Enemy?  Communist Infiltrators?  The Feds?*
*AFAIK, no one conflated any ideas.  There's no need to deconflate anything.


Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms!

This is a great example to use, because it is never so simple as caring/not caring and valuation.
There are a vast constellation of concerns that accompany these decisions that we casually make every day.

Just how hungry is your child and how many dimes do you have in order to buy enough eggs to make it through the day?
Or are you baking a love gift cake and want only the finest and most ethical components?

The materialist may not see any difference between the eggs, where the capitalist could place some value on the non-material elements.

To deconflate capitalism and materialism, perhaps distinguishing the two may shed light between them make communication of the ideas they relate to more smooth.

If capitalism is the system of measuring the value, and materialism is the choosing of ignore spiritual value and focus solely on the physical,
In combination they may lead to a devaluation of the human condition.

However, they are distinguishable and different.  Capitalism allows for valuing not merely physical objects, but experience and thought as well as the universe of other possibilities a person can ascribe value.  It is merely the system that allows us each to agree on how we value what we value and come to agreement with each other on how to mutually advantage each other to achieve what we each value.

If you value freedom more than another, you may choose to keep your time unconstrained by agreeing to bargain with it for anything.
A materialist may value an asset more highly than freedom, and trade away their time (but not another's) more easily. 

The word "capitalism" has been tarnished by conflating these ideas by those that would prevent the freedom to choose how we each ascribe individual values by ceding that responsibility and right to assign value to a central authority.  Continuing that conflating confusion may create unnecessary conflict with the An-Cap folks who are struggling to throw out the bathwater and hang on to the baby.

Well then, part of the discussion earlier was about whether or not 'pure' capitalism can be separated from the state. Your version obviously can't. There would need to be some kind of official body that maintains a list of what all the 'crimes' are. Otherwise the so-called stealing is just bad yet legitimate trade.

Asian sweatshops.
Granted that most of the exploitation is likely transitional -- various foreign businesses "shop around" for third-world countries whose authorities won't "get in the way" of progress. But you're doing the classic sales pitch: "ignore the bad stuff, just look at the GIANT MONUMENTS the labourers built!"

I'm not.

You fail to take into account do-gooders: those people with lots of heart but not enough brain.

-_-
Simple example: "free range" eggs that cost twice as much as the cage ones. Caring about the poor little chickens costs you financially. If you stop caring, you get financially rewarded. Admittedly it's a dead-end example because I can't really think of any long-term negative side-effects of eating cage eggs instead of free range ones, but if you actually wanted to understand, I think you would by now.

It's an ism.

By considering what type of monarchy, how far it reaches, its history, its ability to be questioned, ect.
We should all be monarchs of our own lives, amirite?

Any less than a bookshelf worth of information is insufficient to convey my understanding of capitalism. To be sure, my meaning of the word is very different than the meaning proffered by those who approve of it and engage in it.
I'm not in the buisiness of writing dictionaries, you understand. I'm criticizing the way things are done.
The best thing a piece of legislation can ever do is mitigate the insanity of an earlier law.
Similarly, when capitalism improves folks' lives, it only does so in respect to the ways capitalism previously distorted and wrecked those same lives.
Capitalism inserts a materialistic value system that is rather unhealthy in my experience.

That's not capitalism, that's crime. That'll exist regardless of whether it is a purely capitalist, purely socialist, or any other system in between.


Common claim without much factual backing. Sure, there are cases of people working for loans they can never repay, which is typically referred to as slavery and is illegal. But in practically all cases where teary eyes proclaim, "think of the exploited workers!" the worker's other only other options are starvation or prostitution on the streets. Plus as more and more labor gets absorbed by companies, the collective quality of work and pay increases (reduced supply for labor, increased demand, increased price). India started out as a bunch of really underpaid workers. Their wages have gone up drastically. China was full of exploited workers. Companies can't find workers any more, and are competing against each other with better benefits and working conditions. Ditto for every other third world country without a repressive government or criminal warlords. There are literally NO examples of a third world area with poor workers where conditions did not improve dramatically once businesses and free trade were allowed to come in and "exploit" those workers, while there are dozens of examples of the opposite (India, China, Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, Finland, East Germany, Poland, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, etc etc etc.)


Don't blame human nature on capitalism. If potential problems were a problem under communist rule, once enough people became concerned, they would ask the government to pass regulations to reduce the problem. If same thing happened under pure capitalist or anarchist "rule," once enough people became concerned, they would simply ask friends, family, and everyone else to stop supporting that problem by avoiding its products. In either case the outcome is the same: if people care, something will happen. If they don't, the government won't do anything either.


If by "morals" you mean things like not having sex before marriage, not using cursewords, only having missionary sex, and perhaps having women wear veils whenever they go outside, then those have no effect on efficiency whatsoever. If you mean things like stealing, killing, lying, etc, which are generally unethical regardless of morality, all you have to do is ask yourself if you would do business with someone who was unethical. If you won't, why do you suppose everyone else will? Besides, if you look through history, you'll find that it is much more profitable to stay ethical than to attempt to get short term gains. You don't even have to look too far back. Just the last 12 years that included the dot com, Enron, and the recession is enough.


Before we continue, ktttn and blablahblah, could you please give us your definition of what you think "capitalism" is? Because ou keep posting either gross misconceptions of capitalism, or examples that have nothing to do with capitalism, and it really looks as if we're all arguing about different things.

I do.
Perhaps these principles do not apply universally, and they are instead your belief system?

How can you be pro monarchy, and at the same time question its validity?

Yes, that's the idea, that Bitcoin (cryptography) could replace trust and state power.


Yes, in theory. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice - in practice there is.
Do you feel a deep sense of community in this forum? I don't.