An intellectual's review

[wodan11]

A capitalist, representative democracy is not the best system of government. It's simply the best that humanity has discovered so far.

Wodan

[Adam Weishaupt]

Comparing Soviet communism to American capitalism is like comparing prison spaghetti to Olive Garden lasagna. In other words, the ultimate outcome had less to do with the shape of the noodles than other crucial factors. Communism as an economic paradigm is not at all incompatible with free speech, democratic elections, etc. It is a tragic quirk of history that a psychotic runt shaped the course of Soviet history from Lenin's assassination until the 1950s.

If we want to look at socialism on a practical level, then we should stop listening to the lies of modern red-baiters and look at the facts of socialist policies in practice. Though I like the original comparison I made as well. The economies of Western Europe might be comparable to Olive Garden linguini in that analogy, but that does not mean we should cease looking for further upgrades.

As wodan11 observed, the best of what we practice in our own times is still far from perfect. Yet it will improve all the more slowly if we keep our minds in the gutter of McCarthy-esque lies rather than recognizing that human beings aren't even inherently inclined toward using currency, never mind being inherently inclined toward any particular economic paradigm. Capitalism, communism, socialism, and anything else we find to fit that role are all means for us to transcend animality. None of them is an inevitable manifestation of humanity as money-using apes.

Regards,
Adam Weishaupt

[Petrus2]

Originally posted by Adam Weishaupt
None of them is an inevitable manifestation of humanity as money-using apes.

Regards,
Adam Weishaupt

Huh. Sorry. I'm not an ape. Never was, never will be.

But beyond that, any free society will be more productive than a regimented one. For cream to rise to the surface, it has to have reason to.

[Adam Weishaupt]

That may be true, but since when was personal greed the alpha and omega of human motivations? It may be true that some people are motivated chiefly by avarice. Yet it is just plain stupid to assume that all people are motivated chiefly by avarice. Likewise, a sensible economic paradigm should allow for some inequalities of wealth. However, it is a stupid economic paradigm that makes emphasizing inequalities of wealth the singular goal of all public policy.

Regards,
Adam Weishaupt

[Unimatrix11]

About the cream: the richest man in the world - the guy who owns the mexican telecommunication company (that was handed to him in one cream-making moment so typical for the rise of capitalism) of Mexico replied upon the question if he doesnt want to commit some to charity: "Do i look like Santa Clause ?"
How does he make his money ? Via a monopoly that the nation has built up and a corrupt government sold him for an apple and an egg. So much for the cream really... Initial accumulation...

[Unimatrix11]

Adam, i am with you on this... i am well aware that a totally eligatarian society is not feasable. But even Henry Morgan said that thinks that income disparity of a factor of 20 between the cheapest worker and the best manager is about the maximum he finds justable... The average in the us today is factor 414 (from a certain company size upwards that is of course)... That aint right !

[DirtyMartini]

[SIZE=1]
People suck... If the social-economic system fails to reward those who produce more with higher income, the system becomes increasingly less efficient.

QFT

I most assuredly suck -- without a profit motive, I would do as little as humanly possible. Altruism, not so much.

[Petrus2]

I'm not saying that greed and avarice are GOOD motivations. Nor that all people act on such motivations. But those motivations DO exist.

A motivated, fair minded person isn't a problem. In fact, they are probably the most desirable.
An unmotivated, fair minded person isn't a problem.
An unmotivated, greedy person has little impact.
A motivated, greedy person, however, tends to gain power and abuse it.

In a society where governmental checks exist, the greedy are limited. Even if (horrors!) it is a capitalist society.

Separately, the comment that "it is a stupid economic paradigm that makes emphasizing inequalities of wealth the singular goal of all public policy" is somewhat overblown, don't you think? Public policy is a result of many different factors, not just one thing.

Cream isn't necessarily the ONE person at the top of the heap. I really don't understand the reason so many people grab one example and hold it up as the proof of their point (or disproof of the other person's). Try to look beyond the one fact at the far end of a spectrum.

Examples:
Athletes try their best to excel for the money and fame. Take those away and they don't bother. This can readily be seen by the extreme and sometimes illegal efforts athletes in the money sports take, versus those in less lucrative sports.

Businessmen fight and claw for a small market advantage. This means product innovation, in many cases (heh, we'll ignore the deceptive advertising for now!). Take away a market benefit and we will all be using Russian toilet paper. Anybody here experienced that? I have. It ain't Charmin.

I could go on, but without a benefit for working harder and smarter, people won't. That's reality. Books be damned.

[Petrus2]

Originally posted by Unimatrix11
Adam, i am with you on this... i am well aware that a totally eligatarian society is not feasable. But even Henry Morgan said that thinks that income disparity of a factor of 20 between the cheapest worker and the best manager is about the maximum he finds justable... The average in the us today is factor 414 (from a certain company size upwards that is of course)... That aint right !

Oh, and I'd agree that current society (I'm speaking here in America, each person has his own home to speak for) has not done enough to control some of the financial elite. Golden parachutes, etc, are disgusting. But at least the pendulum is swinging back.

[Unimatrix11]

Adam, personal greed is not the alpha and omega of human motivation, but it is the alpha and will be the omega of capitalism. It is the mantra of the capitalist. A couple of months ago in Germany there was a corruption scandal (meanwhile we have a new, bigger one amounting to billions of euros, btw), and the main "protagonist" was realesed upon a "comparison" which means he pays the state to drop the charges. The sum he paid was about a tenth of the higher speculatations of his corruption benefits - the exact amount of money he shoved into his pocket could not be determined by the court - which made them go for the comparison (which by the way keeps his record clean too). This guy (Joseph Ackermann if you care) earned 1.8 million Euro a year anyways - but that wasnt enough apparently... He continues to be an "honorable man" (in a marc-antonian way i might add (Julius Ceasar - Shakespeare)). That sparked a discussion in germany about honor is business and how much a man can possibly EARN (not GET). A code of honor was suggested - of course to be followed on voluntary basis. When interviewed insiders merely sneered at that and remarked that there is some kind of a competetion between the top-manangers who would be on top of the salery list. I know what i would make that list if i was in charge, really...

If i steal a million, i am gone for a loooong time. If some top-manager does it, he has to return some of it... wow... We are all the same in front of justicia i see...

Same with drug abuse - if i get caught "getting a nose full" then well off to jail, right ? If a prominent german soccer coach, who aspired to become the national coach, was accused by a true sportsman (who wanted to avoid a situation where germany might become world champion and THEN someone points out that there coach is a coke-head) of being a coke-nose and gets tested positive, then he still has the change to flee to turkey, manage a club there and return absolutely unharmed like 3 years later and continues as if nothing happened. He is the coach of the 1st soccer club of cologne now. But yeah - the system works well...

Why do i bring this up here ? Because if materistic equality gets distorted too much, then all other equality gets distorted, too. No more "we hold this truth for self evident that every man is born with equal undeniable rights..." it becomes bogus.

In Germany we had a discussion if there should be a minimum wage. The man who brought it forth just resigned from the government (our vice-chancelor) yesterday - he could not overcome his various adversaries. Another discussion was if places in Kindergärten (you use this word, too, right - pre-school children´s schools kinda) should be suported more - that was agreed on. Background: The former would gurantee that one man could feed his family with one job. The later "frees" more mothers to get a job and thus puts more pressure on the job-market, lowering wages. With the lowered wages then, it wont take too long until she (and her husband) NEEDS to go to work in order to feed the family. The later would have been never agreed on, if the former had been accepted. Capitalism (or rather: the people who count in it) requires (or at least desires) a surplus of "free" workers and it has so far always found a way to create that surplus.

[Unimatrix11]

Originally posted by Petrus2


Oh, and I'd agree that current society (I'm speaking here in America, each person has his own home to speak for) has not done enough to control some of the financial elite. Golden parachutes, etc, are disgusting. But at least the pendulum is swinging back.

If this is a pendulum, then its axis gets ever more tilted. When companies make profits in the range of two-digit billions yearly and governments make debts of the same proportion each year, then i dont see a pendulum, i see free-fall. At some point, no court will dare to limit any salary (max or min). At some point governments get bought. At some point even elections get bought. How did it go ? "Everything is worth, what its purchaser will pay for it" - everything - when the purchaser holds almost indefinate amounts of money, then he can buy everything - he can pay the pendulum not to swing back... and he will make a good bargain with that. And what would be a political scandal of first order here, is common practice in the states - financing election runs by lobbies. Its not even a secret in the states that governments get bought even before they get to office - they wouldnt even get there if they didnt sell the legislation period and basically the whole idea on which that country was founded. A government of the people for the people ? Excuse me - but i cant see that. It is instead a government by the oil- and weapons industry for the oil- and weapons industry (or rather their tycoons). Elections in the mother of modern democracy get rigged - so what ? A war of aggression is conducted for the first time in modern history by a "democracy" - well... *shrug*. All is well. Billions and billions are spent on weapons, that do no good but to kill people for other people´s proft, when the same money could have been spent to either a) reduce national debts get take some wind out of the bank-boat´s sails or b) give the states a medical system that deserves the name and is not shame for a rich nation or, or, or.... yeah but this government, like so many before it, is serving the american people. No - it´s not even trying to ! They help noone but themselves. If one wants to be strict, one has to come to the conclusion that they broke their oath are traitors and oughta be punished accordingly. Presidents have been coming close to getting kicked out of office for private affairs - how comes, that the media reacts, when a democrating president gets a blow-job but doesnt really if a president is an outright oath-breaker and traitor to the nation. Could be money involved ? I wonder....

[Adam Weishaupt]

I agree that economic incentives have their uses. However, I also believe that other incentives can be profoundly influential. Do we really get the very best performances out of major league athletes because of the paychecks and endorsement deals? In many sports with lower levels of commercial interest, real excellence still manifests between the pursuit of recognition regardless of compensation and those purists who really do train hard simply for the satisfaction of pursuing an athletic ideal.

Personally I like a middle ground because as I see it America has gone way to far with the fear factor. Propaganda aside, nations like Switzerland and Holland have not been brought to their economic knees by epidemics of idleness. We know that even if people have the option to survive without working, work will continue to get done and economies will continue to grow. This is because the best job performances tend to come from hope of accomplishment and advancement rather than fear of starvation and homelessness. I believe we would actually see a more productive American workforce if we could de-emphasize the "you must work as a matter of survival" perspective. The end result would have less impact on quantity of employment than it would have on quality of employment. As fear gives way to hope, workplaces become less hospitable to abuses of power and more supportive of healthy collaboration.

Likewise, as Unimatrix11 pointed out, the gulf between labor and executives is uselessly huge here. I don't have trouble saying that a person who does exceptional work should earn 10x or 20x the median national income. For that matter I realize on a practical level that it isn't easy to keep people who are merely nephews or sons-in-law of powerful executives from earning 20x the median income while golfing half the day and spending the rest of it in strip joints. On the other hand, I believe going over 50% taxation on incomes that are 200x the national median is reasonable, since it is hard to imagine those individuals would really say, "screw it, I'm gonna stop trying to do my best" even with diminishing returns in the economic stratosphere.

Alas, the debate over here is all about "punishing success," as if wealth was something that came from reading Ayn Rand and sheer force of will, rather than something that comes at least as much from the support of a stable society populated by healthy educated people. If we look only to the public interest and have no tolerance for accumulations personal wealth work product may suffer as a result. Yet we certainly do not need to have unconditional support for any extreme of personal income in order to accomplish growth.

After all, for decades in America, nearly all economic gains have been concentrated in the top income quintile! Some would say that we need social change that reinvigorates labor unions and other organizations that represent the interests of working class families. Some would say that we need political change like universal health care. Personally, I say push hard in both directions lest we see another few decades pass where the wealth of the nation fails to trickle down in any meaningful way.

Incidentally, I knew Germany had been swinging conservative in recent years, but I haven't been following the media situation. I've only just started to get my head around what's been happening to France, and I was aware of the Italian situation. Of course, speaking the language I've long observed the rise of deliberately conservative "news" outlets in Australia, the U.S., England, and Canada, with dramatic damage to civic discourse following each change. Is there also an analog to Rupert Murdoch or Silvio Berlusconi in Germany, or is this a real grass roots push away from the SPD and further left organizations?

Regards,
Adam Weishaupt

[Unimatrix11]

I will give another example of corruption: After the german election of 1998 when the party that had rules for 16 years got out of office, it come to the surface the the party had been given secret donations ("only" about 5 billion Euro). Papers had been shredded, hard discs have been deleted in our "oval office" very nixon-like... It was nonetheless revealed that the whole affair had something to do with a big-scale weapons-trader. Obviously he paid the party in order to make it possible for him to sell weapons. When party members were interogated about this by a parliamentary court, the ex-chancelor and "hero" of the unifaction Dr. Kohl refused to say anything, by the reason that he "gave his word" not to say anything. The minister of the interior, who is the chief of the police, the head of the crime-fighting force has also been the treasurer of the party and thus was one of the main culprits - he got his verdict just a couple of months ago - nominal in magnitude of course. Dr. Kohl got away free. The weapons trader is in exile in canada and canada wont give him to us - it wouldnt make much of a difference anyways i suppose. During the whole affair one guy involved in it said something like "If i tell you what i know this republic is gonna tremble" - that was kind of his legitimation why he did say no more than that...

That was about 15 years after the "Flick-affair" a scandale very much like the one just described. Or remember reagan´s little iran-contra-thingie... ? Do i need to say more about how good capitalism and democracy work together ? Who is really free beyond all checks and balances in such a system ? About the benevolence of these people ?

[Unimatrix11]

Athletes carry out their competion among themselves - not on the backs of millions of people and the ecosystem of this planet.

[Unimatrix11]

Adam, actually right now in Germany we have what we call a "big coalition" of the two major parties: the christian democratic union (CDU) and the social-democratic party of germany (SPD) - there can be no doubt that the overall political climate is swinging to the left right now, with a new party having formed, by union of a split-off of the SPD with the successor party of the SED which had ruled the GDR (east germany). That party would be somewhere between 7 and 12 % if elections were to be held today. Of course it gets utterly blockaded by all other parties on a federal level and refered to as back-ass-wards commies, even tho on state level the SPD is fine having them in a coalition if thats the only way the can estabilish a parlamentary majority... In Germany people are seriously pissed at the upper class right now. It was just on the news a month ago that a study has revealed that the living standard of the common man has not improved in the last twenty years, while manager salaries have multiplied. So there is a parallel between the US and Germany here and i guess that parallel could be found worldwide. Well, the cold war is over - time to cash the cheques !