Nanny Free for Thee and Me?

@ Michael

Did you get a chance to read over the article I posted in #31 by Muhammad Yunus? What are your thoughts on his idea?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Again, you are misunderstand the language.

Socialism requires a State. Put another way, Socialism requires the threat of force against the individual 'for the Good of *insert abstraction*'. Socialism is the rape. As for capitalism. Replace the word with 'savings' if it helps. You work, you save some money, you invest those savings.

This just means you can not imagine a society that would organize itself to provide medical care and eduction without the threat of force against the very people in the society you're trying to provide the service to.

You understand this of course makes no sense at all.


I think the problem you're having is with 'money'. Our society is based on fiat currency. In a free society people would use sound money and thus the services (education and health) would be equitably available.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

As far as I can tell, there's no difference between what he is advocating and liberal free markets.

Because of the way the orthodoxy of economics has given shape to the existing world, all the investment money now is locked up in only one category of investment: investment for making personal profit. This has happened because people have not been offered any choice. There is only one type of competition: competition to amass more personal wealth. The moment we open the door for making a social impact through investments, investors will start putting their investment dollars through this door, too.

Anybody who is offering his or her time and energy to address any social or economic problem of a group or community is a social entrepreneur. The problem addressed may be a small local problem or a big global problem.

Firstly, it really doesn't matter what a person's personal motivation is or is not. It doesn't matter if a person is attempting to make profit or simply want to serve the community - either way the only way he/she will be making any profit is by serving the community. Also, profit is good, it's signal to other's that there is a desire for this service or good by people in the community and more people will provide it.

Secondly, it really doesn't matter if you call someone a 'social entrepreneur' or just an 'entrepreneur' or even 'profit driven entrepreneur'. ALL entrepreneur's are trying to solve a problem to serve the community. At least in a liberal free-market.


So, in summary, while I disagree with the distinctions, I agree with the liberal free market entrepreneurship he seems to be exposing. I'd argue that the more free the market, the better it will be at allowing those poor individuals to create wealth. But, as soon as one does, I'm fairly certain the State they work within will be circling like a vulture looking for any potential 'profit' to steal.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

See your problem is that not all entrepreneurs have our best interests at heart and many create products that exploit and then encourages our most base natures. What kind of oversight and regulations would you put on predatory entrepreneurs while maintaining everyone's so called civil liberties and keeping our environment from becoming a shit hole? Oh and another thing, what price my labor?

Here is another vision for your perusal. Thoughts?


http://www.ied.info/articles/my-eur...-of-eliminating-poverty-and-war-will-stun-you

 

Firstly, why does it matter what the internal motivations of the entrepreneur is? Suppose the entrepreneur is a greedy SOB who hates little children and sees her opportunity (lots of those little children she hates die of cancer) and like a predator she uses her evil genius to create a medicine which she sells at market price into the market saving millions of children's lives.

What's the difference between a predatory entrepreneur and a entrepreneur? Can you give me an example of a predatory entrepreneur?

Secondly, the environment. So, let's imagine you own some property along a river. A company opens shop upstream and dumps pollutants into the river. In present model, the company secures regulations allowing for that level of pollution - and that's that. In a free market, the company would have to deal with the people who live on the river directly. What that company does NOT want to have happen is they get sued. What will they do? It's impossible to say, we don't live in that world.

 

I agree that our fiat currency is theft. I do not agree that we eliminate private property rights as I'm rather partial to my kidney (which I own). The solution IMO is currency competition and sound money (and elimination of Income Tax).

 

The price of your labor is determined just as the price of coffee - whatever the market is willing to pay. Singapore doesn't have a minimum wage.

In the present unfree market, the educational system is designed to mass produce workers - thus there are too many workers and the prices of workers is low. In a free market, private education would ensure the proportion of workers to entrepreneurs were in a stable equitable equilibrium instead of skewed towards all workers and a few lucky who access captive professional markets. THAT is the who point in having a free market - even in labor.

 

George Bernard Shaw

Interestingly, Shaw suggested those individuals who were not adding value "to society" should be kindly disposed of (peacefully killed off). I only mention this as you'll find most "Progressives" are, at some point in their intellectual pursuit of creating the 'workers paradise' willing to violate your privacy and cut out your kidney - for the good of collective.

If a person were really interested in doing 'social good', then why resort to using the State (force) to achieve this so called 'collective good' (public) instead of free markets (voluntarism) amongst individuals (private)?

 

RE: Means of Production

Just imagine, once the sem-free market economies Microfactories, everyone can be their own means of production. Bye Bye most of what makes Walmart useful (it's an efficient distribution machine). No need to go to the mall shopping for clothing, or shoes - maybe there'll be no need to shop for a PC or phone. All those factory jobs - gone with the flick of a switch. Hell, this thing can probably produce itself. All those service jobs - gone. Together with somewhat efficient AI like IBM's Watson to replace professions such as lawyers, or advice from GPs, and maybe along with MOOC - even teachers will be gone.

Interesting world we're creating. I personally think we may want to figure out the currency competition a bit quicker than we are.

I would think, the last think you'd want to be in the coming decade is a mass produced worker popping out of the arse end of the public school system. There's going to be even LESS job opportunities for manufacturing and service employment.

 

Predator = someone that creates a cure for cancer! Nonsensical, but okay, unless she denied the cancer cure to those who could not afford it and being greedy she probably would I would consider this predatory.. Again you are going to need oversight and regulations to make sure this does not happen. Unless it is more important that your vision of the free market come to fruition and to hell with the losers this may create.

Sex trade entrepreneurs, worthless for profit universities (snake-oil salespeople), doctors and counselors who defraud medicare, doctors that prescribe unneeded medications ( legal drug dealers), predatory lending, etc... I could go on and on and on

The truth is we did and do live in the world where entrepreneurs were and are poisoning people with chemicals. So you would need lawyers and laws. Who would make these laws Michael?

How are people going to magically become virtuous, logical and have high IQ's with all this predation?

 

Lmao, who knows will doctors and researchers be next or are they too indispensable? What is your problem with the worker, ahh workers = unions. When is too much consumerism enough? When we are covered in waste? Are you proposing that machines will one day take over all professions and we can just create all the day long? Here can you buy my little doodliewonk because you really really want this, not that it has any value and in fact it may hurt you in the long term but you really really must have this!

 

I am interested in eliminating poverty and I am willing to sacrifice my time and my stuff to achieve this goal but I am not willing to throw anyone away. Even economic sociopaths and greedy doctors who are in it for the money and not for the patient can be useful.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

I find it interesting you that consistently point out the contradictions of socialism but not of laissez faire capitalism. Are you really so blinded by your own belief that you really do not think there are contradictions?

 

That's happening now. A lot of jobs are being replaced by automation. A robotic garbage truck picks up my garbage, and our meter readers have been replaced by wireless communications. The army of accountants once needed by companies have been replaced by one guy with a PC and an Intuit package. That's one of the reasons that even though employment is up, more and more jobs are part time. There's just not as much work any more,

 

Skilled labor is still very much needed and what we should have been doing( educationally speaking)is what Germany did and does. America's private and public sectors should have been implementing the German model of education at least a decade ago.

http://www.germany.info/Vertretung/...ce/02__Bus__w__Germany/skills-initiative.html

Wouldn't it be great to have this problem? I mean I am sure the Germans are just as mechanized as we are?


Germany struggles with skilled labor shortage, shrinking population

By James Wilson | Financial Times,May 06, 2013
MUNICH — For six months, Heinrich Traublinger did not manage to fill a vacancy at his bakery near Munich. For about the same length of time, Daniel Henares was looking for work after being laid off from the tire factory where he worked near Barcelona.

Now Henares has begun a new life as a German baker in what amounts to a small step toward solving one of the continent’s most glaring imbalances. While Spain’s unemployment rate is one of the highest in the Western world, in Germany the problem is the opposite: a dearth of labor in one of the wealthiest and most economically successful parts of Europe.

“It is getting very difficult to find qualified people,” says Traublinger, whose family company employs 150 people besides Henares. “Unemployment is so low. There just aren’t the qualified people on the market. Everyone wants to hold on to the people they have.”

Even amid the euro-zone debt crisis, German employers say their “Fachkraeftemangel” — the shortage of skilled labor — is one of their biggest problems as they grapple with the changes that an aging and shrinking population is bringing to the workforce.

A recent study from the Robert Bosch foundation suggested the workforce could shrink by about 6 million, or some 12 percent, by 2030 without remedial action. In Munich, advertisements proliferate for training schemes in fields such as engineering, with employers seeking the next generation of workers to keep the German economy humming.

Bringing workers from outside Germany is only a small part of what politicians say must be a range of solutions to the labor shortage, including getting more women into the workforce and keeping older employees in work for longer. But migration is also a solution that chimes with the grim employment situation in other parts of Europe.

Latest figures from Germany’s labor office show that almost 500,000 workers from Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece are working in Germany — an increase of 8 percent over the previous 12 months.

With labor shortages so acute, Germany must do even more to attract skilled workers, says Dirk Palige, managing director of the ZDH, a national organization representing skilled trades.

 

Michael, have you always been a laizze faire capitalist? If not, what convinced you? Who are your economic and philosophical heroes for lack of a better term?

 

Sounds like the biggest problem Germany is having is a shrinking population. We have the opposite problem.

(However I agree that education is important.)

 

Who does the word 'our' refer to? And is there any group of people, anywhere, that can be trusted to always have another person's best interests at heart?

My own answer would generally be no. So one way around that difficulty is to give people lots of choices, along with the freedom to decide for themselves where their own interests are best met.

Who decides what part of our natures is base? The advantage of a market economy is that individuals can decide for themselves what they want, and what they are willing to exchange their money for. Obviously some of us might not place a great deal of value on some of the things that other people want. I certainly don't. But that's life I guess. I don't think that I should have the power to dictate to those people what they can have.

I definitely support laws against fraud. I support peoples' right to sue for things like breach of contract. The basic business law stuff.

"So-called"?

In a market system, that will depend on how much other people value whatever it is that you do, and on how much somebody else is willing to offer you to do it for them.

That's the thing. In a market economy, people get to decide for themselves what they value. Money is an abstract token of value and people spend money to acquire goods and services that they desire for any number of reasons. And in turn, the amount of money that people get is proportional to the value that their labor represents to others.

Individually, people are often rather self-centered. Everyone has desires of his or her own. But often-times, we aren't in the position to satisfy our desires by ourselves. We need the assistance of others.

But why should another person labor to satisfy our desires, when that person has unmet desires of his or her own? In the market system, when a person labors to fulfill somebody else's desires, they are typically doing it in order to acquire the money they need to entice yet another person down the line to help them satisfy their own desires.

Far from being the root of all evil, money is a social glue that draws a multiplicity of strangers together into reciprocal relationships. That's what's happening every day when you go to work, or go to the store.

 

Our refers to society as a whole. We hope that our elected officials do and I believe some really do have that altruistic nature.

Narcissism is base, sexual deviancy is base, greed is base, violence is base and just because you may not think you should have the power to dictate what is sold in the marketplace we the people already do to some degree and I am thankful for at least that. Otherwise people would be selling children's asses on every street corner if limits were not placed on the free market.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

I would include exploitation laws.

I could care less if an adult wants to kill themselves with drugs or food or whatever x right now, I care about eliminating poverty. If you want to drink a coke the size of your car it is not my concern but it is my concern that Coke and McDonald type food was in our schools and contributing to obesity in our children. I am so tired of the damned civil liberties cry when what would be in society's self interest to do, we do not because some fool screams civil liberties foul. We need a Civil Liberty vs Common Sense smell test!

If you mean by their own desires like paying rent, or paying for medicine, or paying electric bills, buying cheap processed foods because they cannot afford the good stuff, then yeah, they are really looking hard to entice another person down the line to help them satisfy their own desires.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

More like basic needs than desires!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Yes, money is only a tool but that tool has become very concentrated at the top, how do we solve this? Because as you say and think, that often individuals are self-centered and it looks like they do not want to throw the ball back. It is in the marketplace's self interest to have a thriving middle class so it must needs throw the ball back. How do we control the booms and busts of the marketplace? When will the marketplace eliminate poverty in America, it has had a century? Why do you not address the waste and destructive nature of the marketplace and only extol the creative aspect of the marketplace?


Are you really trying to explain money and the marketplace to an American whose whole family are right wing Repubs, or libertarians and Randians and has been sold this bill of goods all of her life. Why I have been groomed to be a good consumer all my life. She says in her best southern accent.:bugeye:

 

It's not a Ponzi Scheme, and it's tiresome correcting you every time you post that bullshit.

As far as paying for it, that's what taxing the increasingly wealthy who borrowed the SS funds and the productivity gains of the increasingly mechanized economy covers - that alone would do, and coupled with a more sane disbursal of the welfare checks (don't pay SS to rich people, don't pay more to people who earned more, etc) paying for SS simply vanishes as an issue - with or without immigration. It's one of the cheapest ways of taking care of old people ever invented.

As far as Michael's juvenile fantasy of a world without adult social responsibilities, we will achieve a society run on "voluntarism" when we have a society invulnerable to Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, set up so that wealth could not be gained by swindle or piracy, and populated only with fully informed rational beings willing to sacrifice even great wealth and luxury in the interest of upholding principle and maintaining the public good.

Utopias are all inherently abusive, because they deny human nature and real conflicts of interest - that pretension opens the door to power, and once again the unarmed find themselves subject to slavery at any time.