Capitalism is fundamentally Flawed(Logically?) Discussion with Rob Huesdens

Economics Political Theory
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my world has many colors, true and false is just too simple for me.

I will still stand by it, even with those words put in. True and false is too simple. Most things cannot be boiled down to that, especially amongst human interactions, and you know it.

If a man does not work he does not eat. Is that too complex?

No, it is too simple. You do not make your argument better by creating false dichotomies. As I have previously stated, if a man accumulates enough capital he can continue his existence with no labor involved at all. This is shown in fact by people who live completely off of stock dividends.

62

Well the third world is still in development and has unowned land. Surely you realize that there are tradeoffs in making choices. Opportunity costs. You may say ’ Yes there is land there but it is not good land or it is not surrounded by developed society’ such is the trade off though.

I agree. I would focus more on the means for someone to get to the 3rd world. But either way, the oppurtunity costs are much too high, meaning any meaningful land is already owned. Only the gifted entrepreneur, or somone with a decent amount of social capital, will find a way to bring these costs down

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‘I agree. I would focus more on the means for someone to get to the 3rd world.’

The only problem I would perceive is from governments, which anarchists want to get rid of in the first place.

‘But either way, the oppurtunity costs are much too high, meaning any meaningful land is already owned. Only the gifted entrepreneur, or somone with a decent amount of social capital, will find a way to bring these costs down’

According to your impressions. That may not be the case for all.

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The only problem I would perceive is from governments, which anarchists want to get rid of in the first place.

Government interventions (passports, immigration laws, etc), familial obligations, transportation, finding sustenance until you get there, previous work contracts, and i am sure there are many more...

According to your impressions. That may not be the case for all.

I said the same

Only the gifted entrepreneur, or somone with a decent amount of social capital, will find a way to bring these costs down’

Granted, the majority of people will meet these criterion. But the point still remains that not all laborers have no choice but to work for someone else.

65

That last sentence doesn’t make sense how you word it. Do you mean to say that most laborers have no choice but to work for someone else?

66

If there is unused capacity, to go back to the interest question, then why don’t marxists become monetarists who simply adjust the rate of credit expansion to soak up all the unused capacity? I’m obviously missing something.

67

'Government interventions (passports, immigration laws, etc), familial obligations, transportation, finding sustenance until you get there, previous work contracts, and i am sure there are many more...’

And all are factors in terms of consequence of choice. It would be committing a nirvana fallacy to think that we can freely move throughout the world without any consequences or familial segmentation.

‘Granted, the majority of people will meet these criterion. But the point still remains that not all laborers have no choice but to work for someone else.’

Well that is the cost of opportunity. I will never be able be a poet on the level of Homer but is that an injustice committed against me? If so, then who committed it?

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That last sentence doesn’t make sense how you word it. Do you mean to say that most laborers have no choice but to work for someone else?

Sorry, that was a double negative and really incoherent. I mean to say, many workers do not have the choice to work for themselves (at least in our current system).

And all are factors in terms of consequence of choice. It would be committing a nirvana fallacy to think that we can freely move throughout the world without any consequences or familial segmentation.

I would say that even if a young chinese lady chooses to sell herself to a jackal, in hopes it will gain her passage to America, it is still an injustice that must be resisted (assuming she later feels, and can prove, the jackal took advantage of her innocence and cheated her. If mutually beneficial, hey, you’re choice.)

Well that is the cost of opportunity. I will never be able be a poet on the level of Homer but is that an injustice committed against me? If so, then who committed it?

Forgive me to appeal to emotion but, will you starve if you cannot be a poet like homer?

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'I would say that even if a young chinese lady chooses to sell herself to a jackal, in hopes it will gain her passage to America, it is still an injustice that must be resisted (assuming she later feels, and can prove, the jackal took advantage of her innocence and cheated her. If mutually beneficial, hey, you’re choice.) ’

Well if it was mutually voluntary then how can it be an injustice after the fact? Regret I understand. People do a lot of things they regret but it isn’t an injustice.

‘Forgive me to appeal to emotion but, will you starve if you cannot be a poet like homer?’

No but that is because I have other qualities which allow me to labor in order not to starve. Besides the appeal to emotion you completely sidestepped my question of how it is an injustice. If I cannot become a genius business man and have to work for someone else, how is that an injustice? You seem to be projecting the image that if we aren’t all renaissance men capable of self-sustaining our lively hood then we are the dupes of another human.

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Well if it was mutually voluntary then how can it be an injustice after the fact? Regret I understand. People do a lot of things they regret but it isn’t an injustice.

Myabe she had never tried being beaten and raped and forced to take very addictive drugs and she thought she could handle it to secure a better life in America. But then she realised that being forcibly addicted to drugs, beaten, and raped… even if you initially chose it, really sucks. Hitler won by popular vote. That is not completely voluntary, of course, but it shows that people can choose some very messed up things if people aren’t willing to stand up for all injustices whether voluntary or not.

You seem to be projecting the image that if we aren’t all renaissance men capable of self-sustaining our lively hood then we are the dupes of another human.

I would argue that we are all renaissance people, some are just ignorant and un-guided to varying degrees. But that is not really my point. My view is that we should foster the things that create these Renaissance men; personal expression in all its forms. Would you force the chinese woman to sue the jackal to escape the contract?

This has wildly diverged from my initial assertion that it is not so clear cut that laborers have real choices in whether to work for themselves or not. It is ok, most times people, in their want to suceed don’t even realize what tactics they use.

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I don’t see why we can’t grant Epicurus the point. For many people, their only means to attain self-sufficiency is to work for a wage. A separate argument must be made as to why this is a deplorable state of affairs, and yet another as to why some other system will relieve the poor from having to work for what a producer is willing to pay him. There are many reasons to believe that the options open to the poor are not horrible in a capitalist order in which the poor participate in the division of labor, and even more reasons to believe it is better than any other conceivable system.

Though I will not grant that they ‘have no real choice.’ Constant dependency is always a choice. Starvation is always a choice. Those are real choices. Given alternatives, however, they are not very appealing choices.

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I don’t see why we can’t grant Epicurus the point. For many people, their only means to attain self-sufficiency is to work for a wage. A separate argument must be made as to why this is a deplorable state of affairs, and yet another as to why some other system will relieve the poor from having to work for what a producer is willing to pay him. There are many reasons to believe that the options open to the poor are not horrible in a capitalist order in which the poor participate in the division of labor, and even more reasons to believe it is better than any other conceivable system.

Though I will not grant that they ‘have no real choice.’ Constant dependency is always a choice. Starvation is always a choice. Those are real choices. Given alternatives, however, they are not very appealing choices.

Thank you sir, and well spoken. That is all my point was, but some will see criticism of an expression as criticism of their self. And that brings up natural defenses, it is understandable. I in no way argued that there was some utopia to solve this, but that it is a problem that exists. And let us hope the exploration of space continues and it becomes colonizable.

And I agree with your non-fear of death stance that any tyranny is a conscious acceptance, very daoist. It is also what leads me to stand against all injustices and exploitation, whether voluntary or not, as people may not know, or may kno and not want to admit, or admit but are shackled by the system into non-action against it, or are non-violently taking action against it and are being violently suppressed, or took action against it and are now violently supressing the initial tyrant.

I feel many here forget that it is government that institutionalizes exploitation, not creates it outright; i.e. colonial era slavery and the roaming bandits before the state.

Someone’s signature sums it up as “if men are good we have no need of governments, if they are bad we dare not have one.”

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Great! But none of this removes the fact that classifying men in two separate camps, capitalist and laborer, is a complete false dichotomy and fallacy. Perhaps you should consider your own advise under criticism of expression?

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But none of this removes the fact that classifying men in two separate camps, capitalist and laborer, is a complete false dichotomy and fallacy. Perhaps you should consider your own advise under criticism of expression?

ok? But I never said they were clear cut camps. I even showed that in practice some people are either laborer, laborer/capitalist, or capitalist. And that one man can be any one of these things at any given time, even going from one to the other multiple times throughout his life, should be an obvious conclusion from that.

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But is it a problem? It is a circumstance, and one which may not be ideal. The ability to exit is important. Perhaps you could call it a problem, but in a “the human body is frail” kind of way. It’s a fact of life, or at least when your life is one among six billion.

Obviously, so long as your struggle is non-violent, I don’t have any objection. But such a goal demands caution. It’s all too easy to substitute your own circumstances and values for those of another.

Well said.

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‘Myabe she had never tried being beaten and raped and forced to take very addictive drugs and she thought she could handle it to secure a better life in America’

Well its not raped or forced if it is voluntary. Now if she was threatened / coerced into such a situation then no libertarian would think there isn’t injustice.

’ But then she realised that being forcibly addicted to drugs, beaten, and raped… even if you initially chose it, really sucks.’

This is not the situation we were describing before and you seem to have change it in order to have shock value which means you are obviously losing ground in this argument. If she voluntarily agreed to use drugs and have promiscuous sex then she did so of her own accord. If she regrets it later in life then there is only regret, not injustice. It is not fraud if I sell you a pencil and then 10 days later you begin to dislike the color of pencil.

‘Hitler won by popular vote. That is not completely voluntary, of course, but it shows that people can choose some very messed up things if people aren’t willing to stand up for all injustices whether voluntary or not.’

‘I would argue that we are all renaissance people, some are just ignorant and un-guided to varying degrees. But that is not really my point’

I think this egalitarian viewpoint is nonsensical. You or I could never throw a football like Peyton Manning and that isn’t because he simply threw a football more then you or I. There are underling differences between people but that doesn’t result in a caste system of rights.

’ My view is that we should foster the things that create these Renaissance men; personal expression in all its forms. Would you force the chinese woman to sue the jackal to escape the contract?’

Firstly, I would not force anyone that has not first forced my hand in some manner ( i.e. someone coercing me or someone who sees me as an agent). Secondly, how would this woman sue? What did she give up property wise? Where was the title transfer? So far all we have discussed is sex and drugs and that was on a voluntary basis. So the woman has no case, she just made a decision she later regretted. That is of course unless you have formulated some new crime, then there is nothing to sue over.

‘This has wildly diverged from my initial assertion that it is not so clear cut that laborers have real choices in whether to work for themselves or not.’

The devil is in the details. I’m just attempting to show you that choices have consequences and opportunity costs exist in real human action. One cannot expect to have the mind of Aristotle, the heat of Shakespeare and the wit of Oscar Wilde. Such is the utopia of Charles Fourier, the madman of Socialism. Not all are capable of being employers and one shouldn’t treat that as some kind of lesser state of being.

Being happy to be a nazi isn’t an injustice. The problem with your example is that those who did not wish to be a nazi were coerced into being one because of the threat of jail or execution. If Nazism were a club in Germany during 1945, there wouldn’t be an injustice. It’s like the KKK in America. Sure they are idiotic bigots who I detest but their existence isn’t an injustice against me. They are merely a nuisance.

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Is the chimpanzee supposed to jump ten feet in the air to get the hanging bananas? Or does the universe owe him to teach him to use the long stick just laying on the ground, instead?

Are there lawns that need mowing? Shoes that need polishing? Houses/fences that need painting? Berries that need picking? Who’s responsibility is to make a person useful to someone else or to his own self?

Ultimately, it is about self-esteem – equally on the side of the “exploited” and the side that’s “concerned” about them.

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This is silly. Traveling to many 3rd world countries is cheap and easy. Living there can also be a real delight, having lived in a 3rd world country myself I know first hand. The first world tends to overstate the conditions. At any rate what’s the point of this?

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This is silly. Traveling to many 3rd world countries is cheap and easy. Living there can also be a real delight, having lived in a 3rd world country myself I know first hand. The first world tends to overstate the conditions. At any rate what’s the point of this?

I would have to argue what you consider cheap, especially considering a passport alone costs $200. But either way my point is that oppurtunity costs are too hihg for the homeless unless he is willing to steal a ride on a train or something. But that is not even the larger point. The larger point is that all meaningful capital is already owned, there is no choice for the non-capitalist (no/low pay, no friends/family, etc) to work for himself to become a capitalist.

Furthermore, much of this already owned capital is owned by people who, in reality, have no right to call it their property as it was forcibly confiscated for them in some previous era (most of the Americas, any land a nobleman holds except maybe the castle and the immediate area surrounding it. This is not an issue with capitalism in itself, it is an issue with trying to institute full-scale capitalism in the modern, real world.

Perhaps you could call it a problem, but in a “the human body is frail” kind of way.

I agree, which is why I run a Gung Fu school lol

Obviously, so long as your struggle is non-violent, I don’t have any objection. But such a goal demands caution. It’s all too easy to substitute your own circumstances and values for those of another.

I think there’s a quote from the butcher Che wherein he said something along the lines of “revolutionaries just end up instituting their own form of tyranny.” I try to stay well aware of that and keep the personal bias as far out as possible.

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Are there lawns that need mowing? Shoes that need polishing? Houses/fences that need painting? Berries that need picking? Who’s responsibility is to make a person useful to someone else or to his own self?

The world would be much better if we all took responsibility here, teach a man to fish, you know. But either way, you’re arguing semantics to throw me off my point. I am simply stating he does not have the oppurtunity to work for himself.

This is not the situation we were describing before and you seem to have change it in order to have shock value which means you are obviously losing ground in this argument.

Ugh, I’m not here to score points with the debate team captain. The more you think this is a game that someone is going to win, the more the world loses out. That is why you diverge me from my point, than try to bellittle me for diverging from my point; your tactics are as old as argumentation.

If she voluntarily agreed to use drugs and have promiscuous sex then she did so of her own accord. If she regrets it later in life then there is only regret, not injustice

I want to stop arguing this as it has nothing to do with my original point, and is just a diversionary tactic. But imo you should not be legally allowed to sell yourself into slavery, it is still slavery, and still wrong.

That is of course unless you have formulated some new crime, then there is nothing to sue over.

Again, this is all diversion. It has nothing to do with my initial assertion. But if no court was willing to see her case, I would take her in. And if you sent the police after us, I would violently resist them. Perhaps I am just not as callous as you towards people I have never met… once agian, im done arguing this as it will just lead to a fight of world-views. Stop diverging me, please.

The devil is in the details. I’m just attempting to show you that choices have consequences and opportunity costs exist in real human action.

No, you are trying to win an argument. That is what allows you to forget that I have been making this point the entire time, and that these oppurtunity costs are not economical.

Not all are capable of being employers and one shouldn’t treat that as some kind of lesser state of being

I would completely agree with that.

The problem with your example is that those who did not wish to be a nazi were coerced into being one because of the threat of jail or execution

That is patently false. You didnt have to join the Nazi party, you just couldn’t be a communist. Not every citizen of germany wore the swastika in the 30s.

If Nazism were a club in Germany during 1945, there wouldn’t be an injustice. It’s like the KKK in America. Sure they are idiotic bigots who I detest but their existence isn’t an injustice against me. They are merely a nuisance.

You do realize the KKK still lynchs black people in parts of America right? Not everything voluntary is good, I would just like you to think about that for a second. And when you’re done thinking of that, remember that this is all diversionary tactics to try to win an argument. I am trying to come to a better (mutually beneficial) understanding. We could argue all day whether government is the only power to be checked. But that is for another topic on another day.

This was about the OPs assertion that capitalism is fundamentally flawed. I don’t neccessarily agree with that. But I seen someone make the comment that a pure laborer has a choice who to work for. I asserted it is not so clear cut as that, as he has no choice to work for himself. If you want to win an arguemnt open another thread, I may not show up as I am not interested in the debate team, but hey.. maybe I will. And maybe it will be fun.