It does not promote greed per se, it promotes voluntary exchange and cooperation. As for your “starve to death” argument, it all depends upon your definition of “just” however if you look in modern capitalistic countries I would be amazed if you found anyone starving. In the argument presented however, there are some who are say, provding valuable services to millions and others who cannot or will not provide valuable services to anyone. In the case of somone starving though I don’t understand under what condition they would be allowed by people to starve if you understand me. Also, in the end everyone is just enjoying their property rights.
If he doesn’t want to starve and can work then he will just accept a v. low wage where he would be immensly valuable to any firm that hired him. If he can’t work then he will have such sympathy that I would be astounded that he would be starving and not recieving charity money. As for the people who are really starving in the world they are the results often of states utterly f***ing up or not receiving much/as much charity due to the existence of a state and the artificial barriers in both the real and percieved things that this causes.
You also wish to solve the problem by involuntary interaction and waving guns around in other people’s faces. How is this just?
Forgive me if I am incorrect here but so far your argument seems badly put together, badly spelled (there is a spell check option in the forum tools), and entirly reliant upon toy morality and the whole communist idea about human nature which I don’t even challenge for the most part. I consider that people are just people, people will do the job that’s in front of them for the most part, 95% of the population will live how they are born, raised, and told by society to be raised. I still don’t beleive that communism is possible or is moral.
If I were you and I actually wanted to argue/learn somthing/get a point across I’d try to have a 1 on 1 conversation with somone here, and I’d be all for that.
TLAR makes a solid point. If the capitalists incentive is to make a profit he’s undermining his goal by allowing his consumers to starve. Everyone is productive under the division of labor. The level of the productivity changes but the law of comparative advantage shows us that even the retarded can be a great economic benefit to society if they are allowed to, we all benefit in that case.
ow my life ive got a few replys to do… righteo then… ok i have nothing against profits, buying something and selling it for more is perefectly exceptable, however when profits are made by paying people stupidly low wages in sweat shops then that crosses the line does it not?
Never the less selling to make a profit is fine as long as you take into consideration the postion your customers are in e.g working class men and women with little money
Please don’t confuse ethics/morality for economics as that’s the biggest error of many pro-communist/communitarian thinkers. From an economics standpoint, socialism and communism will never work for precisely the fact that each person can only know so much about themselves and of that amount very little can be objectively transmitted or defined. As such, to assume that some collectivization of ends, in terms of economics, is impossible as it would throw away many vital pieces of data necessary to make equitable exchange possible; chiefly, the price mechanism. Without at least the price mechanism being free of any cartel’s/State’s control all economics would devolve into small communities of farmsteads. Meaning no industrialization, no information technology, no modern medicine, and so forth.
An economy to uplift a population in a relatively equal fashion can only be done with a free market, not only in goods and labor, but in ideas. If you cannot accept this basic condition, then your wishes for the poor and unfortunate will never come to pass. Mutual aide in the 19th century came about because of a relatively free market, not because of labor laws. Prices fell sharply not because of State intervention, but because the State was impotent to interfere in the first place.
Wealth will never be evenly distributed as some are better than others are figuring out the economy from time to time, but their success will not be inborn or inherent to their wealth. That wealth could be easily squandered in a generation’s time and that is often the case. Very few families ever dominate an economy, and those that do either are good at what they do or they have some how subverted the market processes.
So, please before assuming that communism will ever work ask yourself how the economy works first. After you understand economics, then consider the assumptions made for communism a step at a time, you’ll find the flaws in communism very easily this way.
I apologize as I got caught up with something that needed done. So where were we…
Free market means voluntary exchange of economic goods. Are you ok with that?
ok good. If it is here, then could you define it please.
No. That’s not capitalism. Capitalism is basically the free market, but even more precisely to provide more of an explanation, capital=savings. Anything that is saved. Anything at all. If I save food for winter the food is saved, it is now capital. Capitalism is the economic system of saving.
Would you rather have t hose economically growing people back on the dirt disease ridden streets dieing of starvation? The sweat shop argument can only be made from ignorance. I’ll grant you that you know very little about what your saying over that topic. Also no one points a gun at their head and forces them to work at a sweat shop. They do so becuase of the economic advantage they gain from it.
Whats funny is your resolution to the supposed sweatshops is to put a gun to everyone’s head and force all men to work for a universally low wage, impovershing an entire nation. If your against sweatshops how can you be pro-communism? Which does nothing more then create one huge nation wide sweatshop backed by violence.
At least in real sweatshops people work there voluntarily, and they are economically better off doing so.
ok guys im gona be honest with you, i really cant keep up with all the questions and highly structured questions and ideolgys your throwing at me, i am a communist, i believe in communist ideolgy, i believe the world we live in a screwed up little planet full of evil exploiting people that need to be stoped… if you have any specific questions then go ahead and ask… plus im currently doing a British politics essay on the modernisation of Parliament and the power of the executive…
Then it is a matter of value. I don’t know if you have ever noticed the similarities in the words value and evaluate, but they have such a similarity for a reason. value is not inherent in an object or a service. It can not be said that something is bought and sold under value, because every item is always sold at the exact value at which the buyer is willing to pay for, and the seller willing to receive for the item. If there is nothing wrong (in the moral sense) with buying or selling anything (including one’s own labor) for any price, since to do so is, as I’ve pointed out above, profitable for both parties.
no no and more no… it is not “what the buyer is willing to pay for it” it is how much they pay for it work sense, if a man is giving up all his wages to keep is family alive on a bair minimum then that is un exceptable, the seller should be selling products at such a price that will give him a steady income instead of trying to make as much money as possible, in that sense prices should be as low as possible to allow the working man to buy things without being exploited to the last penny and only “willing to buy it” because he has no other choice to survive… that my dear friend is sick and wrong…
Who decides which wage level is “just right” for people? If the sweat shops are really so bad then why do people voluntarily offer their labour to them? What is a “stupidly low wage”? For people in the third world a few US dollars is a lot more money than the returns of joblessness or subsistence farming.
ok right you say that a few dollars are ok and yet, no, no they are not, that money does not offer nearly enough for that person to live a comfortable life like they deserve, the wages are low because big capitalist companies want a big profit, and what better when thean forcing people with nothing to work for nothing because they have no other choice… the honourble thing to do would be to respect the worker and give them a better wage so they can live a good life, just like everyone is intitled to.
when you say use the state to complete my goals what do you meen exactly? my carrer goals? my communism goals? or communism on a whole? (sorry its been a long day)
They are not working for nothing, mate. They are getting paid, as you have admitted. If the capitalist companies raised their wages they wouldn’t be able to sell their goods at competitive prices in the first place. Remember, businesses need to serve their customers first otherwise they’d go bankrupt very quickly. Then all the workers who now have some income would have no work and no income. They wouldn’t be able to develop their skills and productivity which is the key to gaining increased wages.
I mean your goals of an egalitarian communist society. Although quite frankly I’d like to know what you consider your goals are upon the assumption that they do not allign absolutly perfectly with those of the traditional communist.
So basically what are your “worldwide” goals for the alteration of society, and why to you propose the use of the state to achieve them?
in saying that are you telling me honestly that people in africa making nike trainers for absolutely nothing are NOT being exploited? and are you telling me that companys cant afford to raise those wages at all? when you can admit this to me then we will continue with your theory, yes there getting paid but they are pritty much unable to live off it let alone keep a family alive… ow and the reason most of these countrys are in this state is because of us e.g capitalism and exploitation of people for resources,
Read this, and get back with us in about 3 months. Also I’d like to apologize on behalf of some of the people in here if they come across as belitting towards you. Old habbits die hard, and it is still difficult for some of us to act cordially when others suggest that we should not be free.
That’s an ethical question and not an economic question. We can focus on the economic side of capitalism and communism.
No. In a free market the consumer has the power of who fails and who doesn’t fail (profit/loss). The current western democracies are not capitalism as they are political systems that initiate physical aggression upon the free market and redistribute the wealth gained in the economy. These are two distinct entities where a governmental system exists. One is free market were all the workers are out trying to make a buck to just get by. Whereas the political system preys upon the hard work of people and redistributes the wealth. It is destructive to have coercion upon the free market. It destroys wealth and the poor people are usually the people that are effected first by government policies. The special interest groups that go to the gov’t for legislation and handouts stifle competition and therefore the price system is distorted by all the socialistic measures that have been taken, ie. social security, minimum wage (which creates unemployment), all the other gov’t laws that come out of the Dept. of Labor, Environmental Protection Agency, etc… The price system is key because it creates malinvestments in supply and demand. As gov’ts distort the market with interest rates, monetary policies, etc… thereby devaluing the purchasing power of the dollar (for instance), then as more wealth or regulations are redistributed around in the economy it is NOT clear what the consumer is demanding. If that is not seen, then it creates unemployment and poverty.
In a free market businesses have to make the effort to NOT be greedy because if consumers don’t like their product then the businesses go bankrupt. Businesses therefore have to give, not be greedy, they have to give what consumers want or else the business fails.
Liberty doesn’t undermine morals. Liberty semantically means absence of initiated physical aggression, ie. peace. So liberty can’t be immoral or undermine morals. It is violence and coercion that undermines morals.
Money is simply a medium of exchange. It is how complex economic systems above barter work. It is how I can go to the store and get a lamp from the lamp owner when I don’t have anything the lamp owner wants to barter (outside of currency). Yet the lamp owner will take the currency I have because he/she can use that currency to buy what he/she wants that I didn’t have to offer other than the currency. It makes exchange in higher order good system, ie. capitalism work. Money is like any other economic good in society. Money is the same as a watch, door, TV, food, etc… It is valued so much though that people will trade money more than in the market than all other economic goods.