Question for strident capitalists...

As you say:
"there must be a unbiased starting point before the actual imposition of your merit based monetary system." and you admit transition from the current system is impossible ... etc.

Why are your wasting our time and expecting anyone to take you seriously.

When you invent a time machine and can go back to the cave man era, when these impediments that make transition to your system impossible did not exist. When, with the time machine, back before property owner ships was invented and there was no exchangeable wealth (like gold, coins, salt in the Roman era used as money, etc. or rare shells serving as medium of trade) you and try to persuade the cave man to adopt your system.

But until you have that time machine, as you have acknowledged that a one time conversion to your system from the current system is impossible, all that is lacking is your admission that you are wasting everyone's time; proposing the impossible.

 

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I would argue that many cultures did adopt such a system - and then failed. What we see today are the systems (and societies) that survived the test of time.

 

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Okay, since I've boxed you in on the point of how a monetary system imposes itself upon others, you are now moving away from providing an opposing argument based on economic and social validity and turned your energies toward making your argument based on the point that the die has already been cast in favor of a monetary system? Well, to that I would say we are not discussing the difficulty in transitioning from one system to another but whether one system has a right to dictate its resource management policies upon unwilling participants.

I regret that I was a little harsh with you in my reply, as you have been kind enough to contribute to the discussion. However, there still remains the fact that the foundation of a monetary system is imposing itself upon both the willing and unwilling alike through the methods with which land is managed and distributed on the planet. Almost everywhere, without exception, I have to engage in a monetary system in order to use and employ land for the use of my existence and survival.

 

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Such is live. Of course, land is a useful resource, and to own land is important. But there are ways to obtain ownership of land without money. It is named barter. You do not pay with money, but with something else which is valuable. This would be the other capitalist way.

There is also the socialist way: Take a gun and kill the owner of the land, and declare the land is your property (or the property of your socialist community).

 

So again, you are only confirming the Capitalist land management system is being forcibly imposed upon unwilling participants. And remember, it is the Capitalist who is enforcing his system on others by the threat of force, not me. All I want is the right to practice my moneyless land management system and it is the Capitalist who is dictating to everyone what can and can't be done. It doesn't require force to practice my moneyless land management system but it does require that a monetary land management system not be imposed upon me. That means there must be accessible free land not tied down under any pre-existing capitalistic or monetary restraints.

If you want to manage whatever land you are freely allotted with a capitalistic philosophy, you are free to do so but as a human being I also have a right to land with which to practice my moneyless, gift economy philosophy.

So clearly we've now finally established without a shadow of doubt, that Capitalism and a monetary system are forcibly imposed authoritarian systems that subject a great many unwilling participants to their rules with the sanction of the government. Capitalism is just as much everything it hates in all the poorly devised socialist dictatorships we have witnessed within the last 75-100 years. This is why Capitalism had to forcibly impose itself upon the Native Americans who did not recognize a monetary based land management system. It doesn't matter if the Native Americans took their land often by violence themselves; many like the Delaware tribe did not. The point is the Capitalist system fared no better in solving the use of force in obtaining land than any other system or people. That is quite revealing as to the role force plays in upholding the Capitalist system. If you have a moneyless system of land management, Capitalism will not allow you to practice it, even if it is designed to be completely peaceful.

 

No I'm not boxed in at all. Also it is not a fact that you have the money system imposed on you. Globally there is still a lot of land you can just "squat - on" and become the owner of after some years, not much if any in the US now, except in Alaska, but to encourage western development the government gave "40 acres and a mule" of very fertile mid west land about 150 years ago and there was no rush to leave the money system.

All land that is now owned was once free for the occupation of it. Almost no one wanted to set up your "No money / all share equally" system when the money system was not imposing any requirement to have money and buy land with it. There were a few, about 1000 including the European ones too, relative small groups which did try your system and 100% of them failed.
Or to avoid collapse, first rewarded the more product members better than the "free loaders" and eventually dropped their script money they introduced to do this un-equal rewarding with, to use the currency of the surrounding folks. Most of even those who did adopt the local government's currency and survived were people with same religious beliefs, usually quite unique from their neighbors, so that helped avoid their slow assimilation and extinction.

In fact, I doubt there is even one surviving now without common religious faith. Can you name one case where even a modified version of your idea (using money and non-equal rewards) does survive? Israeli Kibitz is not one as they never held your silly, non-functional beliefs - they were setup by the state in form you find them now. Usually with some specialized job to do that the larger society needed. I. e they traded their produce for most their needs and are very far from self sufficient.

SUMMARY: History, which you are ignorant of or ignore, shows very clearly your "no- money & share equally" system is very non-functional and either is abandoned in some transformation or always fails.

 

The problem is that in a situation where the land is not sufficient to support all people with means for survival, say, a too small island with too many inhabitants, there is no system of land management which is not forcibly imposed upon unwilling participants. Because, by construction, some members of the society will have to starve to death, and, if we exclude the (quite realistic) possibility of an ideology which motivates some of them to suicide until there is enough land for all, those who have to starve to death will be forced to starve to death, by those who simply defend their own survival.

In this case, the capitalist, as well as you, are simply fighting for their own survival - which is in any case a legitimate fight - and who wins survives. This may be the capitalist, it may be you - but, in any way, he has imposed his system on the other side by force, in the example even deadly force.

On the other hand, if land is, in general, not scarce, then capitalism will not prevent you from using land which nobody else uses.

No, it is the owner of the land who is dictating the non-owner what can and can't be done on this particular peace of land.

If you want to force others to practice your moneyless (or whatever) land management system, this obviously requires force. You have to force all those who claim to own their piece of land - and need this piece of land for their survival - to give their land to your land managers (and, without land, probably to starve to death). If you leave them their land ownership, thus, their only possibility to survive, that means you have accepted their "capitalist land management system". Given that these guys will defend their only possibility to survive with all methods available to them - including, of course, also the use of force - you can, of course, whine that they have "imposed" their capitalist system on you. Ok. But the other solution is symmetrical - you win the fight, own their land, and they starve to death. In this case you have imposed your land management system on them, also with deadly force.

And Nature is obliged to provide this land. With pretenses to Nature that it does not provide sufficient land please apply to the God of your choice.

No, in the previous considerations no goverment was involved. All what is involved in the example of the overpopulated island is a situation where the resources are not sufficient for the survival of all people. In such a situation fight for survival is a necessity - modulo a "peaceful" ideology which motivates enough people to suicide in the interest of the community - and, whatever system wins, it will be imposed with force on those who die - because of starvation or direct use of force. Your system will not be different, simply because there is objectively nothing what can be done here.

This has nothing to do with capitalism. The civil war has created a powerful state with a standing army - and, once there was such a powerful machinery to grab land, why not use it to grab land? But this was simply robbery, by the state - which is the mafia which has the local monopoly of robbery. This has nothing to do with capitalism. By the way, the Native Americans would have nothing to object against selling land to the Whites. The Whites, instead, preferred to grab the land using the Army and violating, by the way, all the contracts which have been signed with the various Native Americans.

So, please don't mingle American imperialism with capitalism.

In this case, the situation was quite different. It was completely irrelevant which method of land management was used by the Native Americans - the Whites had a powerful enough army, and where able to grab the land to own it for free, instead of buying it from the Natives. In clear violation of the rules of capitalism.

Instead, if your community buys a large peace of land, your community is, after this, completely free to redistribute this land internally and to try out whatever internal land management system you want. All what capitalism (to be distinguished from American imperialism) forbids is to take, by force, land from other people outside your community, similar to the way the Whites have taken the land from the Native Americans.

 

But you are ignoring the fact that world governments are enforcing a capitalistic land management system far in excess of a moneyless land management system to the favor of one over the other. Governments are allowing the monetary system to make most of the rules regarding land management and exchange and so there are no realistic options, other than Alaska, for anyone who wants to practice a moneyless land management and exchange system.

The scale is tipped in favor of Capitalism with the threat and sanction of government.

 

No, you are drawing an incorrect conclusion. I'm not trying to deny anyone's right to land. Everyone should have some land to exist upon. I am trying to ensure that all people have land. The fact that someone is an adult human being should be the only right they need to be entitled to some land.

On the contrary, the capitalist is saying, despite being a human being, only those with money are entitled to land.

What could be more unnatural and in denial of basic human rights than that? You're basically saying only those with money are allowed to exist on Earth. That is insane on the face of it.

So unless someone attaches the same arbitrary and artificial meaning to some pieces of paper you have, they have to exist as perpetual nomads?

That's not based on any natural laws. It's just you imposing your personal preferences toward land management. There's no law saying land has to be managed and exchanged in that manner. It's completely made up and reinforced by government.

 

That probably is true IF you insist in living in the USA, but it is not the entire world. Also you are opposted to that type of government- why not leave it? I did, but for different reasons (I wanted to live with very attractive Brazilian lady professor - who seemed to like me too.)

 

Well, my circumstances aren't so dire that I need to make drastic moves. To a certain extent I try to make life easier on myself and move a little more toward self-sufficiency every day. But there's no reason why I can't propose better ways of doing things in the meantime. I don't want to give you the impression I am drastically unhappy under capitalism. I'm not. But I believe there are better ways of running things. And I like to present them on message boards and occasionally defend them.

At the worst, I think Capitalism will ultimately phase itself out with full automation.

 

A very strange assertion about a system which has a perfect track record of failure - did so usually in less than three years!

An even stranger assertion, if that is possible! Currently capital is only a multiplier of human production efforts; but when full automation is achieved then, production will be 100% by capital - not possible more capital intensive system. The owners of the factories and other production facilities, no longer needing workers may, if kind, give you a ticket on a boat to some less capital intensive countries. I doubt they will pay you to be consumers.

 

That means, in the extremal scenario I have considered, everybody would have a right to own land. How much? Certainly, these are the conditions of the example, some will have not enough to survive. In the case all have the right to the same size of all, all would not have enough to survive. So, all would die out of starvation. This, of course, would not happen, simply because people would decide to fight for their own survival and not to care about "human rights" which would be anyway insufficient for survival. But, whatever, in the extremal scenario your solution would be even worse than the capitalist one.

No. Only those who own land are entitled to own land. In the extremal scenario, hardly anybody would sell land, thus, those with money would die out of starvation - one cannot eat money.

What I'm saying is the following: In every system, there are extremal situations where society will resort to violence, even extremal violence. In this case, the result will be unjust, and simply a consequence of who has had more power to control the ressources. The system of the society is, in this case, irrelevant, because even if it forbids such violence for survival, it will be simply broken.

Away from situations with such unavoidable violence, the capitalist system creates maximal freedom. To obtain land, all you need is to find or an unused piece of land, or to find some land owner who is ready to exchange the land ownership for something else.

You introduce here something new (but, may be, this was part of your earlier conversation), namely Natural Law.

What is Natural Law? I think, what I have described in the extremal scenario is Natural Law - the unavoidability of violence if the ressources are insufficient for all people to survive.

One can try to start from this extremal case to see what follows. In the extremal scenario, the likely winners will be a group (groups are militarily more efficient than individuals). This group should have some internal non-violent conflict resolution management. Once the fight is about the resource land, participation in the group will be attractive only if this support results in land ownership. Thus, if the group succeedes to win some territory from the remaining part, this territory should be distributed among all the participants.

Now, there are other considerations. Even if I own land, and enough to survive, in principle, it does not mean that I survive. Because land grab is not the only danger, as well other people can grab the fruits of the land. Once this is my land, other people even of the group of winners wouldn't care much - so I have to care myself. This is much easier if all my land is located at one piece, where I can live and look at everything (with family members looking when I sleep). To reach such an optimal distribution, one needs a lot of exchange of land ownership. Money makes such an exchange easier. In the extremal world, money would not be paper, but some real goods. Gold, horses, cows, corn, whatever something valuable which everybody recognizes as valuable, so that even those who do not want to own it themself can accept it temporarily to exchange it for something else.

So, even quite close to the extremal world where violence appears necessarily, the winning group will likely develop a capitalist market with wage labor (soldiers paid with part of the land they have conquered), land ownership, and a market where money in the traditional sense (some in itself valuable thing accepted by almost everybody in exchange) simply because this is optimal for the survival of the whole group in the fight for survival.

 

All cultures can say that until they fail.

We see no large scale industrial setups that have survived the test of a time longer than what feudalism survived, or plunder-the-neighbor hunter/gatherer (the Northern Cheyenne horse culture dominated a fair proportion of the NA continent for longer than the US setup has lasted since its establishment in 1865) , or whatever anyone wants to call the Korean quasi-communal subsistence farmers, or even imperial military conquest done slowly enough to last a while (Roman Empire).

 

Of course! We can then look back at cultures that failed and try to learn from their mistakes. Communism is a good example.

 

Quite. The "exceptions" that we find here and there, scattered about the landscape in a capitalist economy. By which one identifies the economy as being a "capitalist" one.

The Hutterites, all members of a single organization (one may quibble about the Old vs Reformed membership, but they haven't actually split) number in the tens of thousands.

A good example of the basic principle that a communist economy works better if built up from communes of a workable size. And a reminder that communes are not self-limiting.

The matter of the best size for the individual incorporated entities in building a capitalist economy is an interesting one - General Motors and Standard Oil , Goldman Sachs and Barclays, have provided us with examples of the penalties awaiting a people less wise than Hutterite management. They are not self-limiting, either.

Communism is not a culture.

One of Marx's most persuasive lines of argument was to point at all the disastrous consequences of capitalism, the failed cultures of China and India, the horrors of North American slavery and Asian colonialism, the sequential collapse of the Venetians, Dutch, and British.

 

Individual communities, where collectivism is practiced, are much smaller (around 100.) To trade outside their communities, they either barter or use money.

GM, as in the company that gave us the first automatic transmission, airbag, catalytic converter and pluggable hybrid? The company that employs 200,000 people, and recently gave all those people a $9000 bonus because they had a good year? Those hardly describe a stiff penalty for not being Hutterite.

 

The company that has been propped up by taxpayer dollars, tariffs and tax exemptions, military contracting corruption and widespread fraud in government contracting, for forty years now?

The Company that destroyed half a dozen cities in Michigan directly, gutted public transportation and lead poisoned thousands more, was a principal cause of every foreign war involving oil the US has ever fought?

The company that stuck the entire country with the cost of airbags and catalytic converters, rather than engineering improvements, as a means of gaining market leverage against the better-engineered Japanese imports?

The Company so top=heavy with "management" it is used as a textbook example of organizational bloat?

The Corporation we allowed to get so big we couldn't let it die in its time?

Yeah, that one.

 

No, that's a construct you've created in your mind to justify your hatred of them.

 

Hatred?

Apparently you think the roles played by GM in these matters are fantasies of mine, and need a motive for someone to construct them. May I recommend a little historical research? Whether you hate General Motors or not - and never having worked for them or lived in a city dominated by them, I don't (others who have, do. See Michael Moore, John DeLorean, Ben Hamper, et al) - its roles in the leaded gas problem, the public transportation gutting (http://moderntransit.org/ctc/ctc06.html , http://www.brooklynrail.net/NationalCityLinesConspiracy.html , http://www.culturechange.org/issue10/taken-for-a-ride.htm ), the promoting and supplying (as well as commercially benefitting otherwise from) of wars (often, as in 1934 and for years afterwards, both sides), and so forth,

are none of them my inventions.

From a given society's point of view there is probably an upper bound on the size of a given type of capitalistic organization that should be permitted, and for the US it's almost certainly smaller than General Motors was in its prime. Too big to fail is too big to be subject to the market forces, law enforcement efforts, etc, that are the essential curbs on capitalism's influence and preventatives of its self destruction.