If the distinction is not clear today, what is your point?
<<< f the distinction is not clear today, what is your point? ???
I might ask as well what is your point? I mentioned workers/capitalist in the early days of capitalism when both are clearly distinct. The distinction still exist today but is less distinct.
Rob, no point. Have a nice day.
It’s going to take at least a couple hundred years, but the Marxists will finally come to on the whole free market thing.
I might ask as well what is your point? I mentioned workers/capitalist in the early days of capitalism when both are clearly distinct. The distinction still exist today but is less distinct.
Im not sure the distinction between capitalists and workers in the past is as clear as you would like it to be. For example farmers are capitalists. Then and now. They own their land and equipment. They are also workers. They provide most of their own labor. In the 1800’s most people in the US made a living farming.
For some reason I think you picture the past a highly urbanized world, where everyone lived in a city and worked in a factory and lived in filth. While a few lucky ones stayed on the farms and lived a peaceful idealized life. This is not the case. For most of our history the US has been very, very rural. and most lived and worked on farms. Farm life was hard. You worked all day in the heat and cold. The work was tedious, backbreaking, dirty, just all around miserable.
This is why people left the farms to work in factories. Factories with all their short comings were better than working on the farm. Capitalism in action. People left the jobs they found distasteful and lacking (farming) and took jobs that were marginally better (factories).
<<< Im not sure the distinction between capitalists and workers in the past is as clear as you would like it to be. For example farmers are capitalists. Then and now. They own their land and equipment. They are also workers. They provide most of their own labor. In the 1800’s most people in the US made a living farming.
For some reason I think you picture the past a highly urbanized world, where everyone lived in a city and worked in a factory and lived in filth. While a few lucky ones stayed on the farms and lived a peaceful idealized life. This is not the case. For most of our history the US has been very, very rural. and most lived and worked on farms. Farm life was hard. You worked all day in the heat and cold. The work was tedious, backbreaking, dirty, just all around miserable.
This is why people left the farms to work in factories. Factories with all their short comings were better than working on the farm. Capitalism in action. People left the jobs they found distasteful and lacking (farming) and took jobs that were marginally better (factories). >>>
This is not true as there were many places were the work on the farm was done by workers who didn’t own the farm.
[EDIT: nvm, confused by the lack of quotes.]
<<< You misread my post. Since the beginning of the modern welfare state real wages for workers have decreased. As such, a decrease in real wealth is also attributable to interventionism (I wouldn’t go as far as to call it socialism). >>>
This is true for USA since the 70-ies, indeed. I would that sort of intervention not attribute as a kind of socialist measure, it clearly is a state intervention that would only benefit the capitalist system.
See this video’s by professor Wolff (Marxist economist).
http://fora.tv/2010/03/03/Richard_Wolff_Capitalism_Hits_the_Fan
Rob,
This is true for USA since the 70-ies, indeed. I would that sort of intervention not attribute as a kind of socialist measure, it clearly is a state intervention that would only benefit the capitalist system.
Err, you mean the growing social safety net? Although, I agree that there has also been a lot of corporatism (this is not the capitalist system, mind you).
I’m still waiting on an actual logical critique of the “capitalist” system as previously promised. So far I’ve only seen interpretations of events by marxists and limited by their self-induced limited understanding of economics. The biased empirical evidence provided is then easily easily countered by other empirical evidence. But this is true of all empirical evidence isn’t it.
Most notably, the video Rob provided by David Harvey. An explanation of economics coming from a position of sheer economic ignorance. Perhaps the most comical part of the whole discussion is Rob fumbling over ABCT. On an Austrian forum he couldn’t even be bothered to wiki. 
Rob at what point are you actually going to attack the logic of capitalism as promised?
filc wrote
<<< We are in a credit crises simply because our central bank created one. Many here are adherence of the ABCT, and we in general believe it is the cause of our current financial problems. >>>
You mean the FED? Isn’t that a privatized institution and despite it’s name, not controlled by the federal government?
Would perhaps Federal control of the FED be a good idea?
huhu
Maybe it is the case that the LACK of STATE INTERVENTION here was the cause of this happening???
Oh no!
Use a little common sense. Is the Federal Reserve “Private” like Microsoft or Walmart is “Private”? Or has there been a conflation in understanding somewhere. 
Does the Fed mimic the structure and behavior of a private institution of voluntary exchange/trade? Or does it mimic the coersive framework based off it’s sponsoring big brother.
You’ll find that most people here consider the Fed as being a government in and of itself, or a branch of the US Gov just with limited transparency. It doesn’t meet the definition of “private” in any way. If the Fed is “Private” then so is the military branch of the US Government.
<<< It’s going to take at least a couple hundred years, but the Marxists will finally come to on the whole free market thing. >>>
I think the exact opposite happens and is already happening.
You mean the FED? Isn’t that a privatized institution and despite it’s name, not controlled by the federal government?
Yes, the same private institution who’s monopoly on money and banking is guaranteed through Federal law. The same private institution which actively colludes with government to finance public debt. The same private institution which colludes with government to maintain inflation and employment targets.
I think the exact opposite happens and is already happening.
Mmm… NO.
“Use a little common sense. Is the Federal Reserve “Private” like Microsoft or Walmart is “Private”? Or has there been a conflation in understanding somewhere. :)”
Privatize the bureaucracy in formality only, then blame the private sector for the ills of socialism.
It’s amazing that a piece of paper that says “Private” and issued by the State is all that is required to fool nearly everybody.
Hitler made the grave mistake in not “privatizing” his death camps. We’d have historians everywhere ranting about how the free market murdered 6 million Jews.
That is a strawman. In case you haven’t noticed, I’d say nearly 100% of people who understand Austrian Economics are 100% against abolishing monopolies on money, such as the government protected federal reserve.
Instead of erecting a strawman, you could have just left it at a question.
From what I understand of Marx, he said that there would be a larger and more distinct divide between capitalists and laborers as time went on. The opposite has happened, and there is now more of a continuum than ever. Was Marx wrong or right? Did capitalism make capital available to more people, or did it not? Why didn’t this seperation and distinction intensify? Why is it that we didn’t experience a proletariat revolution? How is it that most people own some forms of capital?
What is there to Marxist analysis other than a simple “good vs. evil” G.I. Joe narrative with a focus on materialism or distinction by material ownership? Every analysis that I’ve ever seen which uses his method points out the obvious and then introduces fallacies, and comes to a conclusion that we never see materialize.
Open question: Has Marx been right on anything?
P.S. I’m a worker who owns capital… or a capitalist, maybe. No, wait. I’m an intellectual like Marx, and transcend that whole distinction because I feel like it.
Felipe wrote:
<<< Mmm… NO. >>>
It certainly is. There isn’t anywhere a form of unregulated capilism anymore, anywhere it happened, it was a big mess.
The current crisis will for sure cause more state control , not less.
‘I think the exact opposite happens and is already happening.’
What is happening today is the continuation of 20th century social democracy. The intellectual advancement of Marxism is a floundering fish especially with the death of G.A. Cohen.