How do we pay for all this? Well, I say by raising taxes, even though that would make me a pariah with certain quarters. I would gladly pay lots of taxes in order to get free education, all health care expenses, child care, etc. paid for.

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Capitalism is the opportunity for someone to make the most of any circumstance. It is the only way humans should live.

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Do you really want to attempt improvements on perfection?

(if a tad repetitious!!)

Define 'better', Chachi.

It is important because if you believe (as I suspect you might) in Nozickian views of social justice, then your idea of better will be way different from someone who susbcribes to a Rawlsian view of social justice.

So what Doc and co. think is better, you will think is worse and vice versa...

social justice: a goal relating to the way in which resources should be distributed or shared between individuals

Nozick: state intervention is morally wrong except in very limited circumstances, others also argue that it will reduce TOTAL welfare. He argues that tax is theft, because it extracts money from people legitimately acquired, and is slavery (as people effectively spend time working for the government).

Rawls: each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. Justice is desirable for its own sake on moral grounds, but he also believes that institutions will only survive if they are perceived to be just. He believes that social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both:

* to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged

* attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity

Of course, I did ask for the quick and dirty version, so I'm no doubt missing the complexity of his arguement. But hey, why should that stop me?

His views seem to preclude the possibility that people might willingly work together to raise money for a state (through taxes) that would impose certain conditions on behaviour (as ours does in great measure) for the good of everyone. And that this might be voluntary, rather than theft or coersion.

This seems to take the usual dim view of human nature that we are all motivated primarily by selfishness. This view is wide-spread but totally wrong! I won't go into exactly why right now but I will say that the proponents of this view usually come to this conclusion merely by assessing the excess of selfishness they see around them.

This doesn't take into account the adaptive nature of humans and the way in which they conform to the system in which they are placed in order to survive. It's like the African people who were kidnapped and made into slaves and had no choice but to become submissive in order to survive. This led their captors to believe that it was the intrinsic nature of the African to be obsequious and compliant. Rather than seeing what the social system was forcing them to become, they assumed a predisposition. This is the same mistake that the "social darwinists" make.

Of course, as I've said, Apemantus, you've read Nozick and I haven't, so I'm sure you'll correct me.

But anyway, better system than capitalism. I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but democracy is the better system. Right now our government is (poorly) democratised, but our industry isn't. When businesses are democratically controlled by their members (workers) they will not really be private anymore. They will be collectives. There will be no shares or stock market because there will be no surplus labour value to trade back and forth. Everything will belong to the workers, and all profits will fall to them.

It sounds like communism but it's nothing more than people democratically controlling the institutions of which they are a part. On the one hand it still works like capitalism, where different businesses compete with each other to win customers, but on the other, there are no capitalists, as everyone has equal power in their industries. One worker, one vote. No tyrants.

The key to success, and I'm certainly not proposing any novel idea here, is less Gov't intervention. Anytime the Gov't gets involved with the ownership/mgmt of a corporation or industry - disaster ensues. I don't think I need to provide much in the way of example.

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Jacob: This seems to take the usual dim view of human nature that we are all motivated primarily by selfishness. This view is wide-spread but totally wrong! I won't go into exactly why right now but I will say that the proponents of this view usually come to this conclusion merely by assessing the excess of selfishness they see around them.

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There is nothing wrong with the basic model of capitalism. There may need to be modifications/improvments or revisions (as with any model, the paradigm is fine - but practically it does not flow as smooth). Socialism as a pure model will not function in a society that is as goal oriented (material). You will never find a collective system that functions in what is considered the most highly evolved/dynamically complicated species.

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The answer would be to change the way incentives are distributed. You need some kind of recognition of contribution and effort, although not necessarily monetary.

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I think we may have to formulate a corollary to Godwin's law especially for babble and having to do with the mention of Ayn Rand.
Now don't everybody jump on me for being a Randite (Randian? Randbot?). I don't even think she was that good a writer.

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Er... sorry. From long experience my antennae are unusually attuned to certain code-words. I dislike "objectivism" whenever I get the merest sniff of it.

I'd say "Randian" is likely the best usage; and otherwise, I agree, in spades.

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: 'lance ]

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'lance: Er... sorry...

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It was meant as a joke, and I gather it wasn't very successful.

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Democracy is a political system/idea, capitalism is a system of economic management/organisation. One can argue that we do or do not live in democracy (and that's a whole another thread!), but I think many might find it difficult to compare and contrast the two as equals, as they have different purposes, and, at least some would argue, you could have democracy and capitalism.

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My point is that they have directly opposing purposes. Democracy spreads power widely amongst the people, capitalism concentrates it into smaller and smaller hands (unless intervened in). Probably the only reason they can coexist is that they are in different spheres, as you say, but this does not prevent their constant adversarial nature, because the sphere cannot be wholely seperated and influence each other in great measure.

Expanding democracy to be a economic tenant as well as political is what creates a better system. Just as our political power is (theoretically) widely distributed, our economic power could be as well. No one disputes that capitalism has grave problems, but some obviously feel that there are no solutions to these problems or that the rememdies are worse than the problems themselves.

Democratising industry, however, solves the inherent injustice of capitalism, and produces no ill effects that I can foresee.

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The proposed system of a collective sharing all the decision making and the profits/fruits of labour sounds fine in theory, but is not practical. You will always need a climbing hierarchy within any industry, corporation, business.

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My model doesn't destroy the concept of hierarchy, exactly (although it does subvert it). There probably will, as you say, always be people to give orders and direct events (but then again, maybe not). However, the question remains, where do these people come from? In industry as it stands, they are appointed by the wealthy. In my model, they are elected by the workers and are accountable to them.

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There is no parity, no equalness. There are those who simply will lead, others who will simply follow.

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Nobody ever "simply" leads or "simply" follows. Even the worst despots must woo the people and curry their favour, because without it, they are doomed. As history progresses, however, we find people requiring more and more accountability from their leaders, which denies your claim that everyone is simply following. The question is, how much personal responsibility are people ready to take with their share of society's power? How much are you? Once people demand full responsibility of their power from the economic system, capitalism is left without a leg to stand on.

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The key to success, and I'm certainly not proposing any novel idea here, is less Gov't intervention. Anytime the Gov't gets involved with the ownership/mgmt of a corporation or industry - disaster ensues. I don't think I need to provide much in the way of example.

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I never understand this way of thinking. Not only is there no shortage of examples of disasters ensuing when the government fails to involve itself, but what you are basically argueing is that people should have no control whatsoever over the economy.

Although our control over government is not what it should be, our control over private industry is practically nil. By siding with industry against governemnt, you willfully remove yourself from the equation and leave everything up to a small number of very wealthy individuals who make all economic decisions. We've already been there (remember the 19th century?) and it wasn't a better world.

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It was meant as a joke, and I gather it wasn't very successful.

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Er... sorry II. I half-wondered (and in retrospect, it works very well), but I have dim periods when I miss things. I should say, dim periods and less-dim periods.

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In my opinion, the revolution is already underway. Co-ops work better than private industries. They provide better services for less money, since they have no shareholder class to keep fat and happy at everyone else's expense.

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I'd like to agree. My wallet's full of co-op and credit union membership cards. But the 1990s weren't very kind to the co-op movement.

Take the wheat pools on the prairies. UGG and then Sask Pool converted to limited liability companies and issued stock. Federated Co-ops struggled against competition from the big grocery chains. And here in BC the credit union movement has prospered only by amalgamating into bank-sized mega-credit unions.

But I don't mean to say it will just happen. People have to make the conscious decision to do it. It must be specifically seen as a path to a new economy and the public must use their democratic power to bring it about. This is what will make it unstoppable.