Maintain Capitalism and Free Market

Web communism now!

I will not weigh in on the political stuff because I'm not familiar enough with the theories. I live in Canada and I *like* the health-care system.

What I *am* familiar with, however, is software. And to claim that content creators would not create without incentive is to claim that things like GNU/Linux, Apache, FireFox, PHP, MySQL and the roughly 4 gazillion other free software packages don't exist.

The fact is people *do* create things, whether compensated financially for them or not. I wholeheartedly believe that this particular aspect of socialism can - and does - work.

J

This thread gets my vote as one of the funniest I've read on these forums.

If Jamie, Nicholas, and Horatio (Alger?) get to talk about "pure" capitalism, then certainly others get to talk about "pure" socialism. Niether has ever existed, of course, but a "fairly pure" variant of socialism - that "insidious evil" - has existed for hundreds of thousands of years. It's called "the extended family community", and it has been the economic basis for hunter-gatherer bands, pastoral societies, and village societies for a long, long time. It's also been the economic foundation for growth in places like the United States, Britain, and Japan, as well as Russia and China.... And it's given Americans, for example, such holidays as Thanksgiving, and Christians such holidays as Christmas.

So - being against socialism, and for that insidious aberrant, capitalism - is being against family, God, religion, and humanity. And we all know what we do to people who are against family, God, religion, and capitalism, right?

RIGHT???!!!

Wrong. Well, half wrong.

There is a theory that the origin of government lies in prehistoric protection rackets that sprung from the roots of agriculture. When people started to plant food and tend it, neighboring hunter gatherers didn't respect their property rights. What do you mean "your tree"?. Its a tree, it has fruit on it, we gather it. So the farmers employ "warriers" to protect the crop. This was the origin of the concept of "property rights".

"The extended family society" is not an economic system. It may be so in primative cultures that have little sense of property rights. But you can't use a similarity between "extended families" in different economies to make a leap of logic that says that because B doesn't exsit in one place where there is A, therefore B never co-exists with A. That's flawed logic.

Buster

A way-too-serious response to a dry-tongue-in-a-wet-cheek post... pointing out that that's the problem with this thread - way-too-serious, and way-too-wet.

There's a thousand theories among anthropologists about the origins of government. My favorites, not necessarily because they make sense but just for the whimsy, are the cyclical matriarchal commune hypothesis, the big animals are dead and now we must build canals and cities save ourselves hypothesis, and the one you mention - let's hire the thugs who are stealing our apples to protect us from the thugs who are stealing our apples - oh! didn't we just hire them? - hypothesis.

The answer, you know, is: We don't know but we can speculate in a half-informed manner.

An extended family community (my original word) is primarily an economic system. In fact, it's been the basic economic unit for most of human existence. It's a contract, a shared arrangement based on blood ties and "marriage", or kinship. Any economy - even ours today - is really a complex mix of reason, faith, community ties, social relationships, cultural ideas and assumptions, along with harvesting and/or exploiting, production, and distribution, besides. And there's nothing primitive about it - the extended family economic community didn't stop being the basic economic unit until the latter part of the Industrial Revolution - and since the majority of people today live in societies that are either industrializing or haven't started, it's still a fundamental unit. And will be for awhile longer.

In all seriousness, capitalism attempts to separate out an economic system from other societal factors, for operational, moral, and political reasons. Socialism deals with economic issues more holistically - as part of a greater cultural, social, and political system of human relations. And that's one of the principle differences between the two.

I couldn't disagree more.

The difference is that capitalism assumes that the community is better of if everyone acts in their own best interest, while socialism assumes that everyone should put the interests of the community ahead of their self interest. Its as simple as that. No further assumptions or rationalizations are needed.

Buster

We're mixing our terminology here. What you're talking is rational self interest. Rational self interest and capitalism are not necessarily the same thing.

Capitalism is about owning the physical (note the word physical) means of production. Whether or not this is rational or to the self interest of anyone except those who owns the means of production is a completely different question.

Really, what we want to discuss here is a "free market system". However, in the words of lou dobbs, that is faith based economics. Free market is a god to people who follow it slavishly because it's so often correct.

However, sometimes it is not correct, and when it isn't it can be quite scary - note our current problem with energy, greenhouse gases, etc.

Basically, the free market system does not protect the commons, and it is the commons which allows us to have a market at all.

I didn't say capitalism and self interest were the same thing. I said capitalism depends on self interest, that doesn't mean it "is" self interest. Capitalists are willing to protecte the commons to the extent it is in their own best interest to do so.

My source is Adam Smith, not Lou Dobbs. Lou Dobbs isn't much of a capitalist -- he's constantly blasting companies for moving jobs to India. But if companies can save money by moving jobs to India, then that's what they should do, according to capitalism.

Buster

That's one of the differences, but not the only one, and not - arguably - even the most important one. However, your description is too simplistic. Those who defined capitalism in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries have always recognized that capitalism owes a debt to the culture which forms its context. The nature of that debt is in debate, not the debt itself. And those who have defined socialism have always staged their explanation of the "common good" in terms of "what's best for all of us is best for each of us" - therefore attempting to recognizing the dynamic of self-interest and negotiation in the community and economic equation.



Nice one! That's what I mean by tongue in cheek: saying something so incredibly stupid so seriously that no one could possibly mistake it for anything but satire. You do have a sense of humor, don't you?

I'm afraid blaze is right: "capitalism" and a "free market system", while closely associated, are really two different concepts. For example, Adam Smith (your source, Buster), pointed that out when he compared model free markets with the mixed investment capitalism practiced in European monarchies with heavily Protestant populations.