Oddbean new post about login | logout Some of the profits from my labor go to global elites who barely know they own a piece of my employer. They're certainly not part of my local community. Wealth is being extracted from my region. I have no choice because my expertise requires that I work for an electric utility, which is a natural monopoly. I'm forced into having the wealth I create extracted through dividends just like I'm forced to pay taxes. Capitalism and Communism are evil twins (and both are evil).
There is no monopoly without govt protection. No one requires that you work for anyone. You choose to work for & support orgnaizations that exist at your expense because you prioritize security over your principles. There are also cheap places to live with electric cooperatives, I know because I live near one. There are 2 ways to deal with people: voluntarily or coercively trade or criminal/political authority The closer we have gotten to capitalism (severely limiting political authority), the better conditions have been for the average person & people have flocked to those places from all over the world. Every attempt at communism has produced slave camps, starvation, & conditions resembling hell on earth. As things have gone down hill in the US it has been because of the growth in political authority disrupting trade. The divide between capitalism & communism could not be larger.
The goal for the capitalist is domination. They say: "You don't like being a wage slave? Then you should start a business. If you're successful you can aquire some wage slaves of your own." Capitalism epouses freedom from government, but freedom from capitalists with dark triad traits has never been part of the deal. The goal is to climb the tiers with the help of nepotism until your and your descendants are the ruling class. The ruling classes are always basically evil. Inheritance is the one thing that breaks the neat logic of capitalsism. Capitalism without inheritance could actually have a chance of working, but sadly that can never happen because appropriating inheritance would require an unjust use of force.
So I can't build anything for my kids? I can't build tools & teach others how to use them & pay them more than they could earn on their own? And you don't see why someone would prefer to be paid more for less risk & less responsibility? It sounds a lot like the giy with the cushy job at the govt protected monopoly has no clue what is involved in running a business... imagine that. We have had enough of these conversations at this point that there is no excuse for you to continue to hold positions that are this wildly ignorant. “Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth–the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it." Only in a fiat world where some can print money at the expense of others do worthless people become rich, & that never lasts more than a generation or so. The dollar & most western govts (at least in their current forms) will likely come to an end before we do at this point. For fuck sake, read an economics book or something. Saifedean's Principles of Economics is great. Economics in One Lesson is available for free online.
You have no idea if my job is cushy so don't make judgments on things that are impossible for you to know. I happen to have just worked eight 16 hour days in a row out in the rain and mud fighting to keep lights on. So fuck off.
And your hourly rate of pay climbs to what on those days? YOU choose to work there, why? Because it's less work & responsibility & better pay than you can make working for yourself, right?
True my rate of pay climbs, but 'cushy' would not be a valid adjective. No I cannot start an electric utility. Nor can I purchase small pieces of power line. Don't even try to theorize it because the ruling class has that all locked up. The only good model of electric utility out there in use now is if local municipalities had the guts not to sell in the 50s, 60s and 70s and kept it in house like the water and sewer services.
... and your ideologically one sided texts that you like to quote chapter and verse (like religious scripture) reliably fail to account for Unpriced Externalities. Google it.
The govt is one giant negative externality. Everything they do costs more & destroys market feedback mechanisms that would otherwise correct things. They literally monopolize & destroy things so they can be the "savior of civilization" that fixes it. It's the manifestation of greedy, narcissictic & sociopathic behavior in society.
Except they never fix anything
Lol, yeah basically just a growing web of socialized problems & losses. With a politically connected few collecting the majority of the value they steal which isn't completely destroyed.
*the majority of whatever they don't destroy
Here you go talking about the government again. I agree with your view on government so save it. You're such a binary thinker you can only imagine a spectrum of two possibilities. The cold war is over, but the ruling class remains.
If it's not funded by force & coercion then it's capitalism.
ALL I am concerned about is how things are funded. Are your relationships consensual? Taxes are not consensual. If we were alone in the woods survival would require and infinitely greater amount of work. So having to work isn't anyone else's fault or the result of any sort of force. Jobs & money just give us better options & allow us to work less for greater return. Laissez-faire Capitalism (free markets) include any sort of organization or trade or coopoeration you want it to include so long as you aren't taking shit that isn't yours or otherwise forcing anything on anyone.
*an infinitely greater amount of work*
Capitalism without adjectives, maybe. In Vitro Capitalism. It cannot last in the real world for long. You come up with some LARP or idealized system on paper but it hasn't yet succeeded out in the real world. The Paretto distribution takes effect and the winners use undue advantages over others and the egalitarian ideal collapses. It always corrupts; power always corrupts.
So we shouldn't fight for freedom because freedom is going to turn into the same sort of authoritarianism we have always had... You might as well be arguing that we can't free the slaves because if we don't enslave them someone else will. The pareto distribution is a natural result of voluntary choice. 20% of the men get 80% of the sex because they are what women choose. Introducing some sort of institutionalized rape or coercive distribution of relationships isn't a solution to the problem. Those "controls" & "redistributions" are the silly plans that cannot succeed & ultimately fail over & over. Freedom is a relatively very new idea. People spend 80% of their earnings with 20% of the producers because they produce the best stuff. But that 20% changes all the time. There is far more upward mobility & turn over in a free market than in any other system. Even with all of the govt controls, most of the richest entrepenuers in the US today came from middle class families. Basically all of the largest companies 100 years ago are dead.
How am I supposed to respond to 3 different topics a paragraph each? We're all over the place. Each position is known. I'm calling it here. To be continued... In the meantime you should read things outside your ideology and challenge yourself with views adversarial to your own. I've heard capitalist arguments and propaganda ad nauseum over decades. Start with Hegel.
I literally only responded to your assertions You said before that you want all inheritance redistributed. Do you deny that requires force & govt?
I did not say before that inheritance should be redistributed. I say that nobody should have more than they can build with their own two hands, or in partnership with their neighbors. Nobody should hire anyone for a wage because wage labour is just temporary slavery. Every human being should own everything resulting from their labour and sell it if he chooses.
That's completely retarded. You might as well be saying that people can't work together & can't give things to each other. You want to magically vaporize what a parent earns so that it can't be left to their children?! If people WANT to work for someone else, what then? If you actually understood what it's like to run a business you would also understand why most people would want to work for others. Being compensated at an agreed to rate for your time & effort is just trade, it is literally selling your work directly to another person. It's not even sorta slavery. But when the govt picks and chooses economic winners then the options for employment become limited & that IS a problem.
I work for friends all the time. They employ me under the tabke to do things that no one else can do. I pick & choose the jobs I want & recommend other people when it's not something I am interested in or particularly skilled at doing. Employees with highly needed skills have all the power, they get compensated for jobs while taking on none of the risk of the business they are serving.
People can and should work together, then they should divide the output according to anegotiations before. Renting a human is as wrong as owning one. If a child offered to shovel your driveway you should negotiate the price for the whole job. You SHOULD NOT pay him according to how long it takes. That would be renting a human, which would be slavery.
But if you don't know how to price the whole job, an hourly wage is less risk! If you price a whole job wrong you could lose money, or at least end up earning less than you would at an hourly rate.
sounds like a learning experience
You can just as easliy learn what to charge by pricing things at an hourly rate & making others buy materials until you get a handle on how to predict such things. Micro managing the sort of business relationships people can enter into is ridiculous.
So? I fail to see how is the risk assessment an argument against.
So you want to control with force how people contract with one another in a way that will put the less experienced people at a disadvantage?
This is why "well intentioned" planners always make life harder for everyone. You are somehow very detatched from reality.
Thank you for at least calling me well intentioned. This is an improvement.
Lol, don't thank me too much. I think most of the worst atrocities in human history were rooted in good intentions that ultimately became a deadly effort to refuse to accept being wrong or to give up power.
Who said anything about force? I would never want to control anyone with force unless in defence. I'm an anarchist. The less experienced ones can be mentored by an individual or a group. If you wanted to be an apprentice lineman then I, as a journeyman lineman, could bring you into the fold in a 4 man crew. 2 journeymen, an equipment operator and an apprentice is a typical crew. Well we could say all income could be divided like journeymen take 30% each, equipment operator takes 20% and you the apprentice could take 20%. Or whatever is negotiated beforehand. This way everyone knows all the values and costs. The pay for the work is not secret. No secrets.
You are free to organize your own work crews however you please. Others may not be interested. Bitcoin & Lightning potentially make it possible to be paid by the minute. There are lots of reasons people might prefer that. Slavery is force & coercion & should be opposed by force. Saying that hourly wages are a form of slavery or that "renting people" is slavery would suggest you believe they should be opposed by force. If you want things to be voluntary then you advocate an anarcho-capitalist world whether you like it or not. I could see socialists making the argument that your effort to place % based valuations of people creates an inhumane sort of heirarchy too. Your distinction between what you imagine as some sort of ideal & the wage rates that people agree to is completely arbitrary.
Its not arbitrary because the wage system enables the payer to keep the financials secret. If the inputs and outputs are divided then the whole balance sheet must be transparent. Withholding and omitting knowledge is shady as well.
Anyway, I'm tired. I'm turning my phone off. Here's a parting picture of me. https://image.nostr.build/5352f7d4ed0082dd4127d9217f719bd0b766c6f6e7b5e7bc59d8c3f6f9acfa19.jpg
... And its funny but my Murray and yours knew eachother. Below is an article talking about how yours kicked mine out of his living room in the 1970s. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/bookchin-rothbard-anarcho-capitalism/
If we create an environment where anyone can start a business (or work to solve some problem in an economically sustainable fashion) without paying anyone else for permission, then we create a world were anyone who wants work has more options. Then arrangements where people are more open about all financial arrangements might out compete everything else. So long as the threat of taxation exists it might be necessary for most dealings to be private though.
You keep arguing against me like I'm making communist assertions. Its like all the capitalist propaganda you're repeating is calibrated against communism and you can't make pro capitalist arguments unless the opposition is communist. Stop repeating the shit you read by rote.
Okay, then take a fucking position & make a solid point. You keep arguing around the issues & making communist assertions against capitalism while claiming you haven't said anything at all. If you don't even know what you believe then there is nothing for us to argue about.
I'm criticising capitalism. You assume any criticism of it is communist. You're stuck. Here's a position: if owning a human being is wrong then renting a human being with a wage is wrong as well. If one of the core tenets of capitalism was the abolishment of the wage system then I could get behind it.
Are people not allowed to sell their labor in any form or fashion they choose? If someone doesn't know how long a thing will take & WANTS to be paid by the hour are you going to tell them they can't do that?
I'm not mindlessly repeating anything. Do you understand that human interactions are either voluntary or coercive?
No human system is going to be perfect, ever, because people have free will and can use that will to do good or bad. But saying Capitalism can't last long in the real world is like saying, a crime free society can't last long in the real world. That doesn't mean anything. We should still always push for that goal, push for a society where allocated by choice, and not under alternatives that usually involve deadly force. Instead of human will being treated like a threat, we need to take advantage of it exactly like capitalism does. Also, lets be careful about what we call Capitalism. For example, what part of free market Capitalism would have the state take the dollar off gold by presidential edict and impose a central bank that effectively prints up money for the elite to go into housing, stock bubbles, and govt spending while the rest of us get saddled with inflation, taxes, and debt? Not to mention all the zoning laws that enhance these housing bubbles, and screw over the homeless, not to mention all the regulations that make health care up 10x more expensive than needed. Yeah, capitalism my ass. The USA is a socialist shit-hole.
My point is true capitalism does stay pure for long. The heirs of the successful ones will either create systems of control (AKA governments) or corrupt and coopt existing governments. Feudalism was an improvement on slavery, capitalism is an improvement on feudalism. Now we need an improvement on capitalism. My contention is Anarchism Without Adjectives could be it. (NOT Anarcho-Capitalism!!) Communism had its chance and it failed because the levers of power were seized by the Stalinists, as predicted by Anarchists such as Bakunin.
“You’re a binary thinker! 🤡 This is one of my favorite NPC retorts. Yea sometimes there are binaries. Sometimes those binaries have one objective correct choice. So if I am perceiving reality accurately I act and speak accordingly. The only two ways to interact with another human is voluntarily or coercively. It is obvious which is preferable. It is obvious which institutions employ voluntarism and which impose force. One of the greatest grifts in the modern age is “I want to inject the patient with 10 pints of AIDS blood and you want to inject him with 0. So let’s compromise and inject him with 1! I’m giving you 90% of what you want!” This is the game that leftists and their moderate enablers play until we’re all bereft of Liberty and wealth. Fucking parasitic, moral relativist drivel. Take Jeff’s advise and read a book motherfucker.
Calling be an NPC is no way to discuss opposing views. This post is probably idiotic. I wouldn't know because I didn't read past the second sentence.
“NPC.exe crashed on line 2 - EXCEPTION: feelings hurt”
It really isn't helpful tho
To be clear, I didn’t originally call him an NPC I just pointed out he used a common retort used by NPCs and made a good point after that. I think it’s kinda ridiculous to moralize about saying the word NPC and completely miss the point Jeff and I think you know that. The appropriate response is: why does this person think I’m being an NPC. Which I explained.
externalities are a euphemism for legalised crimes i don't think jeff is saying in any way that crime should be allowed, you really don't get how you think of business as all crime when it's only the big connected ones that are crime mostly
https://image.nostr.build/82cd76e0ae53ea3b3b2dc396831624e2160ccefdad6c41e78718212cb1710918.jpg
And people like you keep working for & buying from those companies & just beg daddy govt to save you from yourself.
corporations are government registered and cooperate with the government in everything, usually they grow big enough to start to be part of the shadow government, which is a pattern known as fascism this is nothing to do with free market voluntary trade, it is a parasitical system of robbery and extortion and poisoning and genocide and eugenics one of the key things they do is make you think that one thing is another, this is called demoralization and there is many old psychology research experiments you can read about where they show this, the milgram one being the most famously disgusting, the rats of NIMH also, which was a book, was based on a research project that involved demoralizing rats, it can be done to all mammals at least, another one where they electrify the floor of a cage and at first these dogs are trying to climb out of the enclosure and then after a few more times of random electrocutions the dogs just sit there and take it that is what is behind the corporations and the "capitalism" and is the same shit as the communism and the fascism in the end, it's just authoritarianism, and that's what i am against and what many libertarians mean when they say capitalism is free market voluntary trade not this evil toxic shit
"Ooo let me 'dominate you' by making stuff you want & offering you better pay for less work than you would have to do on your own."
