Death of Capitalism

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Lorizael


Can you explain to me what those three values actually mean? I will admit my knowledge of economics is rather meager.

Labor value is the amount of work required to get or produce something. Utility value is the how much use you get out of something. Exchange value is what you can trade for it.

The thing about value is that it can mean all sorts of things. If you back up all the currency with gold then the exchange value of the currency will be equal to a constant amount of gold, but if you don't back it up with anything it doesn't mean its value is zero, because people still use it and you can still use it to buy gold or anything else.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Odin
The US Dollar is a fiat currency, which means that it does not have any material value, it is simply "stored production" of a person's labor, basically like a reusable check. The reason this is better than a gold-backed currency is that the value of fiat currency grows with the economy, not with the amount of gold a country has. My question is why do we need a supply of gold in Fort Knox if it has nothing to do with the curency?

They can use that gold as a reserve the same way we have reserves of other currencies. We can sell that gold and buy dollars if we want to strengthen the dollar. So in a way it does back up our currency, but not the way it used to.

[PLATO]

Originally posted by Sava
I also think that in order to protect "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" the government needs to provide health care and education. It should be done in a high quality, but efficient, manner.

"government needs to provide" and "high quality, but efficient manner" do not go together under any system that I know of. While Universal Health care is a great idea, I have yet to see any system proposed that would be of higher quality and efficiency than the one we have now (which is, admittedly, pretty inefficient in many ways). The "capitalist" reward given to medical professionals have caused Western health care to be far beyond anything that the world has ever known.

No... it means, the more free the society, the more likely it will tend towards the system more culturally suitable. Or are you not paying attention to Iraq? If the US simply killed Saddam and left the people to choose their own system without controls, they'd choose an Islamic system.

What difference does it make if the system is Islamic? Perhaps what you are trying to say is "Repressive"?
My contention is that the more free a society, the more it will tend toward capitalism. I don't believe that capitalism is culturally dependent. A free Islamic state is just as likely to develop capitalism as any other IMHO.