Question for strident capitalists...

It doesn't add up. Billy T has backed himself into a corner and neither one of you can see it. It's circular logic: You get the same amount of food so stop producing enough food to sustain yourselves? How does that make sense? A milder form of that under Capitalism would be "I don't get paid enough so I'll do as little work as possible and get myself fired."

If the fear of being fired or getting less money can make a person work, how is it the fear of starvation wouldn't make the Ukrainian's under Stalin do better work? If the collective energy input is higher, the distribution output to the each of the collective will be higher. Just like if the individual energy input is higher, the individual resource allocation will be higher.

And I think it was Billy T that implied the Ukrainians didn't really want to participate? Well, certainly if you are relying on people who don't wish to participate, that is going to hurt production. I have said from the beginning, any cooperative resource management system has to be populated by only willing participants.
So you might want to look at the role of force in undermining such cooperative enterprises, rather than the lack of a merit-based monetary system.

 

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If you are the only person working the farm, then you produce the food to sustain yourself. If you don't work you don't get fed; if you do work, you do get fed. That's a good incentive to work.
If you are one of two people working the farm, then you do half the work to produce the food to sustain yourself. If you don't work you don't get fed, or only get half the food you would otherwise; if you do work, you do get fed. That's still a reasonably good incentive to work.
If you are one of ten people working the farm, then you produce a noticeable fraction of the food to sustain yourself. If you don't work (or barely work) you still get fed; if you do work you get a little more. This is not as strong an incentive, and indeed a lazy person might be tempted to sleep all day and get 90% of the food they would otherwise get. But most people will work to feed themselves, because through their efforts they get a little more.
If you are one of a thousand people working the farm, then your efforts are basically trivial compared to what you receive. If you work hard you get 100% of the food you are entitled to. If you don't work (or do the absolute minimum) you get 99.99% of the food you otherwise would; a unnoticeable amount different. Thus many people are going to look at that tradeoff and say "I can work my ass off and get fed, or not work my ass off and get fed basically the same amount." And history has shown that most people do, in fact, take that route.

That's why collectivism works on a small scale but fails on a large scale.

Again, check out the Tragedy of the Commons. In an ideal world, everyone would cooperate so the commons could carry as much livestock as possible without being ruined. In the real world, people use it up because it's easier, and then they let someone else do the work of repairing it (or suffer the loss of it.)

Exactly! They are then fired. And after not being able to buy food for a while, they're going to say "OK fine I'll get a job and work a little harder." And they then work as hard as they have to to keep the job. If they want to make more money, they have to show up on time, work overtime, impress the boss, come up with innovations etc - the kind of things that get you raises. But if they don't want that they are free to work as little as they want, as long as they are happy with receiving a commensurately smaller share of goods and services.

Because IT DOESN'T MATTER if you work hard on a farm with 10,000 other people, if you are the only person working. You still starve. You are far, far better off working on the black market, because you then keep what you earn and can use that to keep yourself alive.

It will not be a noticeable amount higher once the collective reaches a certain size.

If you have that AND you keep the groups small AND you come up with a substitute for money, then collectivism can work. Twin Oaks has been working for decades, for example, because they are small, fully voluntary and have labor credits. As a great many examples demonstrate, though, you cannot scale that up.

 

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That's also why capitalism fails on a large scale.

In an ideal world everyone would pay for all the costs of what they receive, and see to it that others receive all the benefits that they have paid for - everyone would cooperate in maintaining the game/market. In the real world, the owners of capital control the payouts: that inevitably means they receive part of what was due to the suppliers of labor, and the suppliers of labor pay for part of the costs incurred by the owners of capital, and no one pays for certain of the costs of production, and so the game/market is eventually destroyed.

Check out the Tragedy of the Commons: in an ideal world, everyone would restrain themselves from extracting a little extra short term profit by degrading a common resource. In the real world the owners of capital seize every opportunity for positive marginal return because it gives them a competitive advantage and extra profit, and then they keep their extra earnings to give them an advantage in the next investment as well, compounding their reward and hastening the disappearance of their competitors.

None of the systems created by simply expanding a smaller system will work like the smaller system, and most will not work at all. For large scale industrial economies, the Econ textbook has to be read past chapter one.

 

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Why would you be the only person working?

 

Your history lesson has done nothing more than reinforce my point that you have to use only dedicated and willing participants in cooperative resource production and management. All you have provided is a chronicle of two competing economic ideologies in a unwanted relationship.

I've been saying you can't force any economic system on anyone. They have to consciously and voluntarily choose it.

You can't have conservatives unwillingly existing within a socialist economic paradigm and then blame socialism for its inability to function with unwilling and uneducated participants.

 

No, it is not logic of any kind. - It is history that backs you into a corner because you are so armored with an idealistic idea that your ignore the lessons of history. Your "no money, all share equally" scheme has been tried at least 1000, times and always failed, except in 20 or so cases when prior to total collapse, the scheme was changed to include some form of money, (such as "community script" given more to those who produce more)* and agricultural practices were changed to have private, rather than collective, ownership of the farm land so farmer who worked harder got to keep all the extra production, instead of share it with many others.

* The incentive that working harder to produce more which will be equally shared by all is very tiny compared to the incentive of getting to keep for yourself all the extra that your harder work produces.
Billvon has even numerically illustrated this to you! but you still don't get it.

 

That is correct and private ownership is the universal free choice. Stalin (and Mau) tried to force unwilling peasants onto collective farms. In Ukraine with extreme measures (many just immediately executed as lesson to others, many still resisting forced collectivation were sent to Siberia, and many of those still in Ukraine decided to kill their cattle and burn their crops as Collective Farms are never a free choice. (Working for hundreds or thousands of others without pay, instead of your self is strongly against human nature.)

Those two leaders starved 10 million people to death with collective farms but finally to save their power, reversed and let the private farms return so not their entire populations starved. Stalin wanted to destroy Ukraine, so the little food, especially wheat, that the collective farms did produce was taken by force and sold in the export market to develop heavy industry (buy foreign machines tools etc.) for building up the USSR's military forces. Some Ukrainians ate their own children, things were so bad.

 

Because people make decisions for themselves, rather than everyone making the same decision for the group. It's what separates us from bees.

 

Although your overall point, that large scale collective agriculture has never worked well, is unarguable, the accusation that it was collectivization that starved the farmers in China and Russia is not reasonable.

Stalin starved the kulaks on purpose, by confiscating their food stores - not the private stores only, but the central collective stores as well. Collectivization just made it easier to do that - it wasn't the cause of the starvation. And Stalin did not "reverse and let private farms return" to save his power.

Mao's collectivization was immediately hit with extreme drought and weather-related crop failure - there would have been mass starvation in China regardless of Mao's policies. Some researchers are classifying it with the Dust Bowl in the US, only with a hundred times as many Okies and nowhere for them to go. And it wasn't relieved by privatization - the famine was over before then, and Mao dead before private enterprise came to rural China. Also, China never did privatize land ownership among the farmers who worked it - in the Communist revolution land ownership passed from the distant Lord to the distant State, and remains there today. Furthermore, much of China's food production has always been a community project: as the historian put it, "There is no such thing as a solitary pioneering wet rice farmer" - the irrigation and water handling systems necessary are community owned and community managed, the planting and harvest essentially group projects, draft animals and now tractors etc often owned by villages and shared out by all, etc.

Nevertheless the small scale wet rice farmer is possibly the hardest working farmer in the world - something like 3000 hours per year minimum, actual field labor. Likewise the ejido farmer in Mexico, the tribal cooperative buffalo hunter in stone age North America, and many other examples - collectives do manage to get a lot of hard work out of people, for generations.

Meanwhile the Dust Bowl - America's agricultural disaster, the would-be famine foiled by Americans having a California to flee to - was caused by capitalism and private enterprise farming.

 

exactly, externalities are both postitive and negative

 

That's an excellent point, and is why hidden externalities cause problems in capitalist systems. (Classic example - government support for oil companies makes gas cheaper.) That's a good argument to remove government as much as possible from any economic system, and preserve the power of government to prevent abuses.

You misunderstand the example. "The Commons" are free for all to use; hence their name. In an ideal world, everyone would restrain themselves from extracting a little extra short term profit by degrading a common resource. In the real world the individuals who use it make choices to provide themselves with an immediate, tangible benefit instead of taking a chance on a long term, intangible benefit.

Your system is "tragedy of the commons" on a larger scale.

 

Not in agreement with the facts.
The following is quote from near end of 2nd block quoted in post 199:
" Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who believed that the peasantry, especially the ones who owned some land and a few cows, were a huge threat to a collectivist Soviet Russia. ... With his bloodthirsty loathing for all enemies of the Revolution, he said 'Let the peasants starve', and wrote ranting notes ordering the better-off peasants to be hanged.

{Lenin and the Bolsheviks} realised the country was so poor and weak in the immediate aftermath of its revolutionary civil war that
the peasants were vital to its {USSR's} survival. So he called a New Economic Policy, in effect a temporary retreat from Marxism, that allowed the peasants to grow crops and sell them for profit. It was always planned by Lenin and his fellow radicals that this New Economic Policy should be a stopgap measure which would soon be abandoned in the Marxist cause...."

I of course can not with certainity enter into Lenin's mind and say why he reversed policy / Marxists ideals, but his power would have evaporated if the country did not survive.

- - - - - - - -
Also you don't seem to know that ALL the kulkas were Ukrainians and most all of the Ukrainians were kulkas. Quoting from the 3d quoted block of post 199:

"He expected the peasants to resist and decreed anyone who did so was a kulak - a better-off peasant who could afford to withhold grain - and who was now to be treated as a class enemy." Lenin soon afterwards died and Stalin took over and ruthlessly executed Lenin's plan:

Stalin confiscated the wheat and other non-perishable crops grown in the Ukraine and exported them to fund his military programs. (He need to import machine tools, etc.) That left those stubbornly resisting collectivation of their family farm (the "kulaks) with nothing to eat, so yes many became cannibals, and some even killing and eating their own powerless to resist children! (Why prolong the child's agony and wait for the child to starve? - Then there would be less flesh to eat.)

 

I don't want you or billvon to think my ideas are not amendable based on some of the points you've both presented. While I still maintain a lot of the problems with collective production resulted from the forced use of unwilling participants, I am willing to attempt to find some kind of balance between those who choose cooperative production and those who do not. How can we maintain both private industry and cooperative production peacefully within the same system to the satisfaction of both participants with differeng preferences?

If you are willing to grant that each citizen should be freely provided with either less (if they want less) or no more than a fixed limit of acreage as a starting point, i.e, my land management system as outlined in this thread, from there on, citizens could manage and pool their land and energies toward any economic or production efforts they personally prefer. That is, if you want to use your land to hire workers based on a system of merit based payment to produce whatever product you want and keep all the profits to yourself, you can. And if someone else wants to collaborate with people on the collective production and distribution of goods, they can as well. And if a citizen wanted to practice a combination of both, they could as well.

But the catch is a certain amount of land must be available free to each adult citizen or family to practice the production system that they want with others who share their preferences. That means, you can practice Capitalism with every resource but its policy of large land acquisition and ownership.

This way, no system is forced on anyone else and both remain permanently optional choices based on the changing preferences that any individual citizen may experience.

I don't want to force you. You don't want to force me. So let's find a solution where both remain options.

 

That is what the US, a nation of family farmers, had circa 1900. They owned the land they farmed, inefficiently compared to the growing number of large corporate farms; and they were glad to sell their lands to the more productive agri-business industy. Their 40 hour/ week urban job replaced their 80 to 100 hours weeks and provided them with much better standard of living. They don't want to go back to that circa 1900 life. It will require a ruthless force to make them collectivize and share equally the declining productivity as each does the least possible to gain his share. You don't offer freedom, but serfdom. The agriculture of the middle ages, when many worked the Lord's large farm collectively.

You never address the main reason (according to Forbe's article I quoted) why collective large farms ALWAYS fail: I. e. Management / leadership / decision authority is required and there is always disagreement as to who that should be. Recall the First reason why the collective utopian systems ALWAYS fail (from Forbe's quote in post 189):

" The internal power grabs are even more poisonous to utopian dreams than external threats. The gold standard of utopian leadership, the benevolent prince or philosopher king, is inherently unstable."

 

Well, under my system they could "sell all" or lease a portion of their land to a agri-business or come to some other arrangement where the agri-business would provide someplace else for them to reside (possibly provided by a "rental house") to make it work, but the land would still effectively be under their name as far as the system was concerned.

The corporate agri-business, of course, would just be a plan and agreement between different citizens to conduct a form of capitalism between each other. It can't be a universal policy that is enforced by government on every citizen. As long as you can get everybody that you require on board with your plan needed for an agri-business, you can manage your production and land as a capitalist enterprise between each other and those who want to participate. But it can't be something that is universally imposed upon capitalist and collectivist alike. There has to be room for people to choose their economic options, whether you agree with someone's choice or not.

 

That's a romanticized take on events. I think you may be referring to the urban environment and factory as it emerged from WWII, rather than the prospects facing the farmers who lost their land in the economic crashes of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The "inefficiency" was not in the farming per se, but in the access to capital to ride out economic depression. Meanwhile the work in the urban job circa 1900 was nearer 60 hours than 40, was obtained in competition with refugees and desperate people from the Confederacy as well as Europe, had no seasonal breaks, was done on a poorer diet and sleep schedule than the farm, and was hazardous as well as filthy - in order to get Sundays off, they had to strike in the face of coercion and government supported violence against them. They rented rather than owned, lost a higher proportion of their children, suffered from bad teeth and other effects of sunlight deprivation, and died in the gutter of alcoholism and communicable disease.

Meanwhile farmers able to reject debt and and expansion for capital intensive technology on private farms proved at least as efficient as the corporations by honest measure - e.g. the Amish and Mennonite farming populations grew and prospered all through that era and into modern times.

Capital owned and corporate managed large farms always fail as well - if one's criteria for success are reasonable. Forbes's criteria for "success" are not.

 

Iceaura I said "cerca 1900." For me that is say from 1890 until 1920. Your are discussing post WWII all the way back to 'Desperate Confederacy people." It was in those three decades (or 1895 to 1925) that the US changed "from a nation of Farmers" to mainly urban dwellers.

Yes I agree that from at least the US Civil War until the present, with very little change, the Amish and Mennonite farming populations grew and prospered all through that era and into modern times. In large part because they use the larger societies money and farm privately, but do get together to help each other out with occasional large tasks, like building a barn - every one works, the woman keep the food coming during breaks. A new barn can be made in a couple of days but it is not for communal use, nor are their fields.

They are shrew with money and excellent private farmers. I have daughter in Mavern PA - heart of the "Pennsylvania Dutch" country. We get up early on Saturday to buy their produce (about 30% more costly than in the grocery store) as they will sell out by 10AM and by noon are in the horse drawn buggy, headed back to the farm.

 

And there already is this opportunity to farm collectively, cease using money, and share the produce. Who is stopping you?

Problem is most know the historic fact that without money and rewards proportional to effort, that arrangement always fails. Most are not as ignorant as you about this. There is no laws against doing what you suggest - just no one (or very very few) who want to live that way. - Huge reduction in living standards required as the workers do the least possible to qualify for their equal share. If you ever get to be dictator, you can FORCE others to "choose" that system.

 

And you think any of that makes sense? You have a tendency to make overly broad and over generalized proclamations. By the way, Amins and Mennonite farmers have been moving into urban areas for some time now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/business/smallbusiness/08sbiz.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Further, larger farms are more efficient than smaller farms. The phenomena is called economies of scale.

"Agricultural production in the United States is a business that requires very high capital investments in land, facilities, and machines and most often produces undifferentiated products (commodities) of generally low unit value. Thin profit margins have forced producers to seek efficiencies in all aspects of production. There are efficiencies of scale that favor large producers who can make the most effective use of large, expensive machines. In crops such as corn and soybeans, and in poultry and animal production commercially viability is usually based on producing "in volume."

http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/printeconomics.html

Oh, and where is your evidence that "capital owned and corporate managed large firms always fail as well"? And what the hell does "capital owned" mean?

 

You realize most land is currently not free, right? Don't you get that yet and why that is an instance of a monetary system and Capitalism imposing itself upon unwilling participants? How does one cease using money and still have a level of existence at least equal to any prairie dog? Even a prairie dog can stake a claim.

If we are to have an unbiased economic system, you have to have a starting point where those who do not wish to participate in a monetary system can do so in a practical and realistic manner.