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Figured that instead of debating Capitalism on the Socialism/Communism thread, we might as well have a whole thread dedicated to capitalism (it's only fair right?)
Note: Hoping that this thread doesn't become a argumentative debate - but rather a place to share information on this philosophy, on why it works/or doesn't work, and so that the Socialism/Communism thread doesn't diverge into a epic battle between conflicting philosophies.
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Meh, well part of debating socialism is putting forth capitalist opinions so I don't really see why we need a new thread, it serves the exact same purpose.
Obviously it would become off topic if I/or others started discussing why capitalism or free market economics is the most efficient and best allocation of resources in the Socialism/Communism thread. I mean, you have a thread to discuss your ideology - but it would become somewhat off track if it became a mega-discussion thread for both.
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1) http://creativetimereports.org/2014/04/07/does-capitalism-work-for-you/
2)
The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way."
-Milton Friedman
What a hypocrite is Friedman. When the democratically elected government of Chile was overthrown and Friedman was invited to assist, he did nothing but rely on "government bureaus" to suppress any opposition to his "free" market notions. Such bureaus were used to ram the "free" market down the throats of the workers of Chile. Opponents were slaughtered en masse. In Freidman's world, government force and coercion is ok when it is used to support ends he pursues, but evil and undesirable if it does anything to actually help the workers.
The principles of justice define an appropriate path between dogmatism and intolerance on the one side, and a reductionism which regards religion and morality as mere preferences on the other. - John Rawls
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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.
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^There can still be poverty that isn't "absolute" poverty...
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^There can still be poverty that isn't "absolute" poverty...
But you have to admit that overall for many many people their standards of living for improved. I'm sure you don't know this, since you, like many communists, are completely out of touch with reality - but all metrics that would indicate a better life for someone have been improving on average; i.e: life expectancy, GDP per capita, consumption, urbanization, auto sales, calories per person, et cetera..
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Born Again Singularitarian
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.
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I came to bring confusion
This website has a magic that makes people draw back here like moths to light.
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Here's my understanding of things, which is one reason why I can never bring myself to denounce the free market.
But I'm going to go ahead & create a new thread on it.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.
Born Again Singularitarian
On second thought, I figured I'd just say it here.
tl;dr: People pay others to do a particular job in order to reach a common endgoal. Some only sign onto the job because it pays, not because they're passionate.
I feel people who are anti-capitalist don't sometimes get the idea behind the market in the first place, and this is one reason why I've been promoting an international worker cooperative over pure collectivism. It's one thing to have a ruling class cement themselves as a sort of societal neo-caste, but the other part of it is why people get into the market in the first place.
With this and something else I'm going to talk about, it's Jim Fucking Sterling, Son that triggered me to say these things. In one video, he talked about what it takes to make a video game. It's extremely rare for one singular person to do the whole thing, and it gets exponentially harder when your idea when your project is ambitious. Take a look at indie games. One of the biggest problems afflicting the fledgling VR industry is that most of the games you can play are basically 5-minute-long mini-games. These are often made by one person or a small group of people.
Getting a proper business going means you need different workers doing different tasks, because one person can't run a business by himself. That's where the root of capitalism's problems lie, and that leads to a natural problem with those attempting to undo capitalism because most people, even if they never lived in a capitalist society, don't agree with the idea of different work being paid the same. That's been true since our days as hunter-gatherers and scavengers. That also leads to a problem where there may not be work at all times.
Imagine you've got an idea for a video game yourself. You have the story already in your head. There's just one problem— that story isn't a game in and of itself. In order to realize that game, you're going to need assets and content. You're going to need to program things. You're going to need to draw thousands of pieces of art, even if 95% of that art is trash that never sees the light of day and 4% of it, the good pieces, is only ever released as 'concept art'. You need music. You need sound effects and voices. You need to test for bugs and to see how the game plays in general. You need to market the game. All of this ultimately adds up, and you're presented with one of two choices— doing all of it yourself, or hiring others to do it for you. If you do it yourself, you're going to be severely limited. Because what if you're only good at writing story and maybe at creating MIDI files? Fat lotta luck you'll have programming the game itself. You could spend the time necessary to learn how to program— except programming is also just one part of game design. And it's much, much, much more labor intensive than most will ever know. You'd need to vastly scale back the whole project. Maybe turn it into an 8-bit retro-style game. That way, it might take a year to get everything done.
But what if you don't want to scale back the project? You didn't want to skimp on the project at all— it was always meant to have HD 3D graphics. Its soundtrack wasn't meant to be made of chiptune; it was supposed to be a sort of electric guitar symphony. If you can't do that, you might as well not make the game at all, because anything less just won't be your vision. And if you tried taking on such a project yourself, you'd be spending upwards of 10 years on a single video game.
You need to hire others to help you out.
You need to hire artists, programmers, beta testers, orchestras, marketers, etc.
Where capitalism went wrong was when your game wound up selling gangbusters, you became rich, and then you started an industry that led to you (or your classmates) bending the rules so much that you could get said artists, programmers, beta testers, etc. to work for less pay than they would otherwise earn for their time, as well as paying to make sure others couldn't get to your position in life. It's been noted many times that even in a purely meritocratic system, those who managed to succeed first always attempt to pull the ladder up behind them.
Because at the end of the day, even if you started a game development cooperative, there's no chance everyone would earn the exact same for everything. Income inequality would arise somehow, because the main developers aren't the only ones working at your studio. If everyone voted on it, more often than not, they'd vote to have a graduated income based on what one does, or based on how much work one accomplishes, or both.
I read somewhere that really made you realize why people pull the ladder up from behind them. When you refuse to consider such a perspective, or view it as purely evil, you have trouble understanding why people do things because "evil" doesn't exist in real life— just things resembling it. Imagine that you've made it as a business man, and, after overcoming the dinosaurs who tried to rub you out of the picture, you're now on cloud 9. Your name is on the front page of Forbes often, and it seems you can do no wrong. Well then an upstart begins making fabulous profits that are starting to take away from your own customer base, so you try edging them out to save your own skin. Maybe your workers start leaving to this other company for whatever reason, and you're presented with a problem— raise wages to entice your workers to come back, or lower wages to make up for your increasing costs. The third option is to do more to get the upstart out of the picture. You'll bribe the government to pass laws that benefit you and only you or those like you. If there is no government or the government's too small, you don't even need to worry about that step— you'll just go to the media companies and bribe them instead. Get a cartel going.
But then that upstart becomes the big dog itself, and you're fast falling out of business. Funny thing happens: that former upstart is now doing the same thing to newer upstarts, and you're just watching it from retirement. You slow or halt social mobility not because you hate the poor, but because you're trying to protect yourself.
To Will— imagine another future timeline forum starting growing, and it stole members and page views from this one. What would you do?
These are inherent problems that have no easy fix, because just about every solution we have right now comes with its own drawbacks. A small government doesn't mean we won't have any problems, because as I said, the big companies could just go ahead and create a cartel with specific other companies instead. If there's no government or a small government, the companies themselves will fill in the blanks— LINUX AND JAKOB. A large government also won't necessarily fix problems, because just look at what happened in America— we have an absolutely massive government... and it's now all Republican. The Republicans won't shrink the government one bit except for the areas that their corporate masters want them to shrink it in— primarily climate science, environmental regulations, and education. When you expand the size of government, you don't automatically get science and progress— MATTHEW. Especially when you have a democratic-republican mode of government. Those in power could use the big government to just as effectively enhance the power of corporations as they could to bust them.
You could circumvent these problems by doing away with democracy and just putting one party in power so they don't have to worry about re-elections. Except that's only a solution if that party is your party. It would be nice to have a futurist-technocratic dictatorship, wouldn't it? But it'd be terrible to have an ultra-right theocracy like Saudi Arabia or an ultra-left mobocracy like Khmer Rouge Cambodia. And actually, even having a dictatorship doesn't prevent corruption. If anything, it makes it even more likely than in democracies. The corporations need only conform to the government to have their say. In a more conservative-libertarian order, the government has to conform to the corporations.
Unless you got rid of the free market, this is what you'll end up with. And alas, you can't easily do that either without running into godloads of problems. Because what is a market? An exchange of goods. That describes an economy as well. If you try to pre-empt the market, you'll quickly run into problems, because you'll need to show that you know what the people want more than they know themselves. And we already know that one person can never know what everyone wants. Even if you had a government with one hundred million workers in a nation with 150 million people, you'd still never know what everyone would want. You could guarantee certain needs, but that's it. And once you meet people's needs, they begin having wants. You need to either know what they want, or tell them they have no wants.
We've tried out the latter. It hasn't ever ended well.
The only "good" option would have to be an economy where you have no workers that need to be paid— aka, a technostist economy— and where everyone else is an owner— i.e. Vyrdism. Where you can be as innovative as you want at all times without needing any real capital for funding. And we're not there yet.
Personally, I can't wait for that world. If I have a game concept idea, I could immediately have AI to create all the assets and programming and music and art and beta testing for me. But some— i.e. Jakob, Linux, and even Miyazaki— absolutely despise the concept. I don't even know why anymore, besides the whole "humanity first" argument, because having labor being automated sounds like it'd accelerate innovation up to near infinite levels. You'd never need to worry about paying workers, and the workers you do now have are so ridiculously far beyond traditional workers that productivity is also through the Burj Khalifa's roof.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.
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The video in the second post brings up an interesting idea, that I am sure people on this forum might of thought of but most people have not really considered. Which is what do we do when we have super intelligent computers? The guy in the video clearly favors capitalism but then says if you had perfect information then socialism would probably work. It doesn't work today because of the lack of information. Though in the future, as we gather more and more information, and we build more powerful computers that can process that information and make sense of it, then that opens up the possibility of a socialist forum of government, ran by advanced AI that might work.
And really, that is my idea of capitalism. I feel like capitalism is the best system we came up with, to get where we are today. However, everyone knows that is has rather large flaws and eventually we need to switch to a more modern form of economy. It is hard to predict what a more modern, or even futuristic market might look. Though one idea I can picture, is a system where there is no money but people can still 'vote' or 'voice' their opinions and wants. Perhaps a hybrid of capitalism and socialism, where everyone is given an equal amount of 'votes' or 'money' but can spend them however they see fit and the markets will react and prices will change even though we are not spending real money.
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