The Axis of Socialism?

Discussion in 'Business & Economics' started by Carcano, Apr 28, 2012.

  1. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    In celebration of May Day I was going to call this thread 'What you REALLY dont like about Capitalism'.

    I think this is a worthwhile question because most socialists have only vague ideas about why they believe capitalism is EVIL.

    They think it might have something to do with GREED...but they cant really define what greed is.

    They think it might have something to do with PRIVATE enterprise...but which kinds? Is it evil to buy an ice cream cone from a private street vendor? Do you want the government to make your shoes?

    I'm here to suggest that the real AXIS of the problem is the ownership of bank deposits.

    More on this later...

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  3. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

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    I'd think the problem is that the average person allows themselves to be taken advantage of by people in government jobs. People use to pay taxes for streets, police, parks, schools, libraries, pools, fire protection and other things that were needed but not supplied by the commercial businesses. But it seems that today many new things are added to that like baseball stadiums, football stadiums, basketball stadiums, public shopping malls and a host of other businesses that should be in the private sector but aren't.

    Salaries are also out of control with some government employees making 200,000.00 a year with the overtime they get in certain jobs. Then other government officials just get raises anytime they want to plus more benefits than any average taxpayer can ever have. So if you want to see the real problem, it is you and I, for we have all let them take over without ever trying to stop them and we will be paying for this forever I'm afraid for there's no stopping them. They will just keep putting the same people up for election everytime there is one so nothing will change.
     
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  5. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    I thought you said you lived in Canada and you love your socialist benefits. Two, why does it have to be all or nothing? The best systems are blended. Certainly all of the richest countries have blended economic system.
     
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  7. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    I do Joe...I love how the infrastructure is owned by various levels of state. I love my healthcare system. And above all, I love the government's stranglehold on the banks...some of the safest in the world. There has only ever been ONE bank failure in Canadian history since 1932...compared to the hundreds of failures every year in the US.

    This thread is not a critique of socialism...but rather an investigation into its core principles.
     
  8. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    This is an outstanding point...I'm horrified every time I see my tax dollars going into the construction of yet another professional sports arena.

    Most of which are architecturally UGLY.

    Even worse is the creeping commercialization of high schools and universities with corporate advertising showing up on campus and even inside dorms.
     
  9. The Esotericist Getting the message to Garcia Valued Senior Member

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    Why is there no delineation between economic systems and social-political systems? Why do we assume that we must naturally integrate the two?

    The problem with Socialism? It requires Government. The problem with Government? It requires a bureaucracy. The Government cares about one thing, itself. Helping people is just its service. Let no one fool themselves into believing that modern governments exist first to help people. They exist first to perpetuate and grow themselves. They only help people insofar as it keeps them in power and enables them grow.

    If people become to unhappy with the government and blame the government, it will shrink or become dictatorial. The best way to grow government is to evoke external or internal threats, or promise new services. However, for the bureaucrats, it is all about growing the size and the complexity of the system. More ministries, more departments, more bureaus. This is only ever bad for the citizenry.

    So does Socialism encourage this? I would say so. Unless you can engineer Socialism on a community based level w/o the centralized or federal level control. But then, it is usually more of a communitarian or Co-operative approach to community governance dispensing with the bureaucracy all together.
     
  10. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Are you talking about elected politicians or government labour unions?
     
  11. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Worse even sometimes: When GWB was just governor of Texas, the Texas Rangers wanted a stadium. The site was selected but two owners of parts did not want to sell. GWB misused the state´s power of eminent domain, to force the two to sell and received free of cost to him 12%, as I recall owner ship of the Texas Rangers.

    He later bought about 5% at half or less of the market price from Tom Hix, whom GWB had given the management of the Un. of Texas endowment fund to. GWB also changed the disclosure rules - no longer did the Un. of Texas trustees tell how the endowment found was invested annually. (Hix was effectively very well paid for the shares he sold GWB at deep discount.)

    After a few years GWB sold his near zero cost ownership and the Texas Rangers either died or moved away (I´m not much of a sports fan and this is all from memory, which I did not search to reconfirm.) Anyway the poor exploited citizens of the town with empty stadium were still stuck with taxes on the construction bonds, for years.

    GWB needed the money as he had done the “impossible” I.e. had in two years bankrupted a profitable small oil company, which the Saudi Royal family had bought for him.

    GWB was just practicing up for the bigger job ahead – bankrupt the entire USA. He quickly went about this task, when elected POTUS, converting Clinton´s budget surpluses into ever growing deficits, dropping Joe American purchasing power, (2/3 of the economy) giving huge tax breaks to the already very rich, starting needless expensive wars with invented justifications instead of telling that Cheney thought it would be good idea to get Iraq´s oil contracts away from France´s Total, etc.
     
  12. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    An important distinction should be made here between Socialism and Keynesianism.

    I am a Socialist...and most western governments are Keynesian.

    A Socialist believes that a large sector of the economy should be publically owned and operated...whether its through government or cooperatives.

    This is the most common arrangement throughout human history, with the macro sectors being public and the micro sectors being private.

    Even a hardcore communist economy will never be entirely public as there will always be a black market.

    Keynesianism is different...it is the belief that government should over-step its own territory and start interfering with the private sector in a quantitative fashion...trying to tweak the numbers, stimulate it, cool it down when over-heated, and so on. It does this primarily by central bank interest rate and reserve ratio adjustments.
     
  13. elte Valued Senior Member

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    The aspect of the economic system, capitalism, that I don't like is the underlying ethically problematic practice that it naturally tends to involve, which is predation, specifically competition against other people.
     
  14. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Competition is the only reason you are not the private sector's slave.

    The alternative is Monopoly...which is only appropriate to the public sector.
     
  15. elte Valued Senior Member

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    I mean competition like how a cougar kills and eats a rabbit.
     
  16. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    How about when YOU kill and eat a rabbit...or hire someone to do it for you?
     
  17. elte Valued Senior Member

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    It's an often hard-to-avoid bad to do that to a thinking animal like a rabbit, yet I hold it is quite unacceptable for people to prey on other people like capitalism encourages by it basic nature.

    These are my views that have formed over the years, partly from having experienced both sides of win-lose. I haven't seen any other system work the way I would eventually like to see things work, though. So, I'm not proposing going back to Soviet style socialism or anything like that.
     
  18. The Esotericist Getting the message to Garcia Valued Senior Member

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    Monopolies are only made possibly by government protections. People often confuse capitalism and corporatism. A common but quite understandable mistake.

    For instance, the FDA makes sure the pharmaceutical industry and medical industry has a monopoly on treating cancer.

    The FCC makes regulations and enables the monopolies in the media and broadcasting industry.

    It's important to remember, that all the members of these agencies are appointed by the administrative branch and they come directly out of the most powerful companies of the very industries that they represent and are supposedly chosen to regulate. Can you say conflict of interest? So whose interests do they really care about, theirs or the public's?

    An introductory course into interest group politics and even a simple understanding of iron triangles and revolving door politics would enlighten people that government enables monopolies rather than regulating them out of existence. The more regulations and attempts to disband them? The more concentrated these industries become.
     
  19. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    I dont think it matters much if its a rabbit, a chicken, or a cheeseburger.

    Even if you want to be a vegetarian there's the issue of all the animals that die as a result of plowing fields.

    Capitalism simply refers to private exchanges...which are not necessarily exploitive.

    The ABUSE of a thing does not define the USE of a thing.

    Its the same with Socialism...governments very often prey on their citizens, but this abuse does not define it.
     
  20. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Theres no such thing as an INDUSTRY having a monopoly on its production...because there are many competitors within any industry.

    There are many competing firms within the pharmaceutical industry and many competing firms within the nutraceutical industry.

    And technically...they are all in competition with faith healing.

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    I agree with you however that the FDA leadership should be drawn from academia...and from nowhere else.
     
  21. Believe Happy medium Valued Senior Member

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    A monopoly on treating cancer LOL :crazy:

    As soon as you show me a scientifically conducted double blind study on homepathic cancer remidies then FDA may stand up and take notice. Until then I think the medical community will stick to science.
     
  22. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Necessary Suffering

    Capitalism requires a large and growing class of working poor.

    Socialism works to eliminate poverty.

    The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism—are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

    They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

    But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.


    (Oscar Wilde)
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Wilde, Oscar. "The Soul of Man Under Socialism". 1891. Marxists.org. April 29, 2012. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/index.htm
     
  23. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    No, just the opposite is usually true. Monopolies come into existence mainly due to economies of scale. For example if European government had not interfered with financial support then the world´s only maker of large passenger planes would be Boeing, but they did and Airbus exist, preventing that monopoly.

    The only time that governments aid / support creation of monopolies is for a brief duration via the patent system. Especially now that most inventions are made by corporate research groups, allowing them to exclusively benefit from their discoveries has been judged to a net benefit to society. For example most of the drugs on the market cost many 10 of millions of dollars to create and would not exist if their maker were not allowed a period to recover the cost.

    No again, just the opposite is true. Without some standards of safety and effectiveness, there would be dozens of "snake oil salesmen" as there were before the FDA was created. The FDA and the patent system have prevented that and made a strong very competitive industry with at least 20 major producers of "large pipelines" of drugs in development PLUS a dozen of so "Generic drug companies" just waiting for the new 100 million dollars in sales new drug to go "off patent" so they can make it and sell it typically at half the cost. Competition between the generic drug companies keeps the price such that there is only enough profit to make them stay in business instead of deploy their capital otherwise, say making and selling candy, etc.

    Again you have it just backwards. The EM spectrum is valuable ONLY because it is exclusively granted in small sections to one user. For example 6 MHz per TV station. Airplanes can safely fly because the FCC carefully monitors radio transmission to make sure no one is operating in the frequency bands of the command and control system, etc. If not for this control by the FCC you would have the "disaster of the commons."

    (Skip this paragraph if you know about the disaster of the commons.) Years ago most local governments had some public pasture land, "the commons" and anyone could put their cow(s) in this common pasture. It was individually to each cow owner´s advantage to do so. - Let his cow eat the free grass and use his own land for growing a crop, not feeding his cows. The disaster of the commons was that the grass of the commons was so over grazed that it fattened no cows. - That pasture benefited no one as there was no one like the FCC limiting the over use of a limited resource (like RF frequencies). Without an FCC planes would be crashing and your only choice of what to listen to on your radio would be the stations near you with the highest broadcast power at your location. (If they were 10 times closer to your home they would make it impossible for you to enjoy a station broadcasting with 100 times more power.)

    My first job after the paper route was as an FCC qualified by exams holder of a first class commercial broad cast engineer´s license. (I think I was the youngest to ever hold one.) The Chief Engineer of Radio WCHS was a patient of my MD father and knew I was smart, had an amateur broadcast license with transmitter I had built, etc. He had a problem, only four engineers, which could man the station OK 24/7 but not when their two or three weeks of vacation time came. Then with 7x24/3 = 56 hours (16 more than 40) for each to work they got by law double and then triple pay rates. He said if I could pass the exam, I would get the same salary the adults did for at least {(3x3+2)weeks x 16hours/ week} hours plus more hours when one of the regular engineers was sick etc. (Three of the engineers got 3 weeks and one only two weeks vacation.) I.e. at least 200 hours of pay at 22 times what I was earning on my paper route. (Being a 13 year old budding capitalist, I sold my paper route to the highest bidder and then introduced him to the distributor.)

    Reason I tell this is WCHS was a 50,000W station, (Highest power the FCC allowed and only one for at least 300miles) and had to use three towers (to make two "notches" in the radiation pattern to avoid interfering with two other very distant stations in the US operating on the same frequency.) Without the FCC WCHS would have had one tower and not be receivable in 90% of its local broadcast area, as for <$100 many people with simple wire antenna to tall tree would be the stronger signal for many blocks from their home.*

    I.e. instead of a useful EM wave spectrum we have with the FCC, we would have the disaster of the commons. Many young people would be "disk jockeys” playing their records and gabbing away into the either (a huge ego trip even if no one is listening) making the broadcast industry not exist.

    * They would not bother with the cost of crystal controlled frequency nor occupy only a small range of frequencies. - Cheapest way to power is a Class C amplifier (which is putting out power only about 20% or less of each RF cycle. Its frequency spread could include more than half the radio band. - Fourier analysis show this.) They would be happy that their listener(s) could pick up their signal almost anywhere in the band.
     
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