News Capitalism & Statism: Man-Made Institutions

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The discussion centers around the nature of capitalism and its relationship with the state. Participants debate whether capitalism is inherently a man-made institution or if it can exist independently of state regulation. Key points include the assertion that capitalism relies on state enforcement of property rights and contracts, suggesting that without a governing body, markets would struggle to function effectively. Some argue that anti-statist capitalists exist, advocating for minimal state intervention, while others counter that any form of market requires some level of regulation to prevent exploitation and ensure fairness. The conversation also touches on the potential for corporations to assume state-like powers in the absence of government, leading to concerns about oligarchy and the concentration of economic power. Ultimately, the dialogue reflects a tension between the ideals of free markets and the practical need for governance to maintain order and protect rights within capitalist systems.
  • #31
A state must be defined...
 
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  • #32
After the abolition of the state, businesses would no longer be considered legal entities. The rich will be forced to live in gated communities and have their own security organizations.
 
  • #33
The dark force of US capital is the decision by a Supreme Court in the
19th century that corporations are legal persons. This is what has led to the totally out of control system of today, the inability of law to get a handle on corporate excess, and the system will not be reformed until this evil misjudgement is undone.
 
  • #34
X-43D said:
After the abolition of the state, businesses would no longer be considered legal entities. The rich will be forced to live in gated communities and have their own security organizations.
The state is simply a commonly held fiction. The same is true of the law, legality, and "legal entities". The belief in these systems and the willingness of people to uphold them are the only reason they are of any consequence. Considering this the legitimacy of any entity in reality has nothing to do with the existence of a fiction called "state" but the willingness of persons to believe in it and uphold it.
 
  • #35
TheStatutoryApe said:
The state is simply a commonly held fiction. The same is true of the law, legality, and "legal entities".
To an absurd degree of precision (considering the resiliency of their complementing structure and the popular tendency towards such organization), the state and law are as real and tangible as physical energy and momentum. That's why its not necessary and borderline solipsistic to dwell on the point, and why you don't find many actually practicing law spending much thought on how fictional the object of their profession is.
 
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  • #36
phcatlantis said:
To an absurd degree of precision (considering the resiliency of their complementing structure and the popular tendency towards such organization), the state and law are as real and tangible as physical energy and momentum. That's why its not necessary and borderline solipsistic to dwell on the point, and why you don't find many actually practicing law spending much thought on how fictional the object of their profession is.
Actually, whether they consciously acknowledge it or not, most people who deal with such things professionally take quite a bit of advantage over the fictional nature of these things. A good lawyer or politician knows that it's what the people believe that really matters. There is no demiurge waiting to smite those who step out of line. It's all belief, perception, and what people are willing to accept that really shapes what is and is not legitimate. The actions and reactions based on the fiction are the real tangible elements, not the fiction itself. It's important to distinguish these from one another, even for a lawyer or similarly concerned person.
 
  • #37
International capitalism is an unfair game. It's obvious that big northern countries will be economically superior thanks to vast amounts of natural wealth and minerals.
 
  • #38
X-43D said:
International capitalism is an unfair game. It's obvious that big northern countries will be economically superior thanks to vast amounts of natural wealth and minerals.
That isn't really true. If resources were the key, then the USSR would still be around and the Middle East would be better developed than Europe.
 
  • #39
It is usually a combination of climate, resources, motivation and skill but there are exceptions. Russia and China are growing only now despite their vast potential wealth.
 
  • #40
The world is insane while others drink champagne!
 
  • #41
russ_watters said:
That isn't really true. If resources were the key, then the USSR would still be around and the Middle East would be better developed than Europe.
In case you didn't notice a great deal of effort has and is still being extended to make sure that didn't happen.
 
  • #42
X-43D said:
International capitalism is an unfair game. It's obvious that big northern countries will be economically superior thanks to vast amounts of natural wealth and minerals.
Access to resources (their own as well as others') through the focused use of military might is the deciding factor. That is why the current and impending conflicts in the Middle East are so crucial to the power elite - no withdrawal from Iraq because that would threaten US capital's dominance...
 
  • #43
alexandra said:
Access to resources (their own as well as others') through the focused use of military might is the deciding factor. That is why the current and impending conflicts in the Middle East are so crucial to the power elite - no withdrawal from Iraq because that would threaten US capital's dominance...

Taking economic advantange through the use of force is militarism and fascism. Right now the US is abusing its military powers to take resources from other countries, resources which it doesn't really need.
 
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  • #44
X-43D said:
Taking economic advantange through the use of force is militarism and fascism. Right now the US is abusing its military powers to take resources from other countries, resources which it doesn't really need.
"Take resources from other countries"? You mean without paying? Who are we taking resources from? (and needeless to say, provide evidence).
 
  • #45
Art said:
In case you didn't notice a great deal of effort has and is still being extended to make sure that didn't happen.
I don't know what you mean by that. Please explain.
 
  • #46
russ_watters said:
"Take resources from other countries"? You mean without paying? Who are we taking resources from? (and needeless to say, provide evidence).
No, Russ - not 'take without paying' - but YES, 'take cheaply/take and make HUGE PROFITS':
Iraq has the world’s second largest proven oil reserves. According to oil industry experts, new exploration will probably raise Iraq’s reserves to 200+ billion barrels of high-grade crude, extraordinarily cheap to produce. The four giant firms located in the US and the UK have been keen to get back into Iraq, from which they were excluded with the nationalization of 1972. During the final years of the Saddam era, they envied companies from France, Russia, China, and elsewhere, who had obtained major contracts. But UN sanctions (kept in place by the US and the UK) kept those contracts inoperable. Since the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, everything has changed. In the new setting, with Washington running the show, "friendly" companies expect to gain most of the lucrative oil deals that will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in profits in the coming decades. The new Iraqi constitution of 2005, greatly influenced by US advisors, contains language that guarantees a major role for foreign companies. Negotiators hope soon to complete deals on Production Sharing Agreements that will give the companies control over dozens of fields, including the fabled super-giant Majnoon, but no contracts can be signed until after elections, when a new government takes office.
Reference: http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/irqindx.htm
And by the way, it is not 'we' (it is not ALL US citizens who benefit - only the top capitalists who invest in oil companies). The word 'we' is misleading. The Bush Administration does not act in the interest of most Americans, so there is no "we".
 
  • #47
TheStatutoryApe said:
Actually, whether they consciously acknowledge it or not, most people who deal with such things professionally take quite a bit of advantage over the fictional nature of these things. A good lawyer or politician knows that it's what the people believe that really matters.

There is no evidence, sociological or psychological, to support such "insight" into the minds of lawyers and politicians. On the other hand, the established disciplines of law and political science that treat the total structure and behavior of their subjects as tangibly as physics treats mechanics macroscopically

There is no demiurge waiting to smite those who step out of line. It's all belief, perception, and what people are willing to accept that really shapes what is and is not legitimate.

It is principle turned law that group psychology underlies politics and law, just as it is law that mechanics, electrostatics and electrodynamics aggregates the Standard Model's behavior and structure in the classical limit. This is no profound discovery; the constituent particles in social sciences are individual human beings.
 
  • #48
phcatlantis said:
It is principle turned law that group psychology underlies politics and law, just as it is law that mechanics, electrostatics and electrodynamics aggregates the Standard Model's behavior and structure in the classical limit. This is no profound discovery; the constituent particles in social sciences are individual human beings.

With respect, I don't think this can be supported. Both political science and law are more like philosophy, needing to assume their principles before they can argue from them, and this is always a contingent business leading to schools (pro and anti-- Rawls, pro and anti Original constructionism, etc.).

There is no pro and anti EM or standard model where experimental evidence is available, and the disgraceful squabble over string theory just illustrates the point made by many that it has left the area of verifiable science and entered the realm of philosophy.
 
  • #49
selfAdjoint said:
With respect, I don't think this can be supported. Both political science and law are more like philosophy, needing to assume their principles before they can argue from them, and this is always a contingent business leading to schools (pro and anti-- Rawls, pro and anti Original constructionism, etc.).

I'm not sure what you're objection is. The natural and applied sciences, as well as engineering, rest on a common principle--empiricism; that's your basis buy in. There is no difference between science and any other rational system of belief in this regard.

Political science *is* an empirical discipline, as are the other social sciences. Law is not overarchingly a scientific discipline nor does it claim to be, it is however a structured one that is studied within the context of social science as a tangible phenomona.

There is no pro and anti EM or standard model where experimental evidence is available...

This isn't so much an objection. It's like saying there is no pro or anti state model in political science insofar as the question of whether nation-states exist is concerned. That there are more settled issues in the natural sciences is not the issue, but there remain competing theories for observed phenomona in both natural and social sciences that may be invalidated one or all together or modified to find a model parsimoniously collecting their strengths and eschewing their weaknesses. This is ultimately science.
 
  • #50
Phcatlantis said:
Political science *is* an empirical discipline, as are the other social sciences. Law is not overarchingly a scientific discipline nor does it claim to be, it is however a structured one that is studied within the context of social science as a tangible phenomona.
I'm not stating that Law and PoliSci are not valid disciplines, and I doubt that selfAdjoint would consider this the case either.
The difference between these and regular sciences is that regular sciences study phenomena that are unchanging in an attempt to better understand them. Social sciences study something that is ever ebbing, flowing, and changing. It all has to do with trends, the effects that these people and environmental conditions have on their fictions, and the effects that their fictions have on them. The people and their actions, as I have already stated, are the tangible phenomena. The fictions such as law and state are the product of those persons actions and beliefs. They are not tangible phenomena themselves. One only has to look to the US Constitution or any similar document and the manner in which it has changed and the changes in it's interpretation to see that there are no tangible mechanical law like processes inherant in it.
 
  • #51
Wasn't your statement, but...
alexandra said:
No, Russ - not 'take without paying' - but YES, 'take cheaply/take and make HUGE PROFITS'.
Ie, "buy". Fine, great - nothing wrong with that.
And by the way, it is not 'we' (it is not ALL US citizens who benefit - only the top capitalists who invest in oil companies). The word 'we' is misleading.
Do you have any idea what percentage of American households own stock in oil companies? Half. (via mutual funds) And that doesn't even include people who have a stake in pension funds that invest in the stock market - that's just households that own them directly.

http://www.ici.org/shareholders/us/index.html#TopOfPage

So I guess your "top capitalists" is most of the people in the country. No, not all - just most. :rolleyes:
 
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  • #52
Alexandra said:
No, Russ - not 'take without paying' - but YES, 'take cheaply/take and make HUGE PROFITS':
The article that you source is referring to the uproar over the sort of contract (a PSA) that certain oil companies are looking to make with Iraq which have been projected as possibly making several billions of dollars for the oil companies though there still have not been any official negotiations. Ofcourse the part of these projections that is not mentioned in most of these news articles and is even glossed over in the report that they come from is that fact that the Iraqi Oil ministry is advocating these sorts of contracts themselves and the these projected profits are only approximately ten percent of the total projected profits with the rest going to Iraq.
There are specific reasons why PSAs are supposedly bad outlined in two reports written by Greg Muttitt, one on PSAs in general and one on PSAs in regards to the current situation with Iraq. There is one particular benefit that the Iraqi Oil Ministry wants to take advantage of, the fact that a PSA should bring them a large revenue quickly. It is already one of their stated goals to get their economy up to full potential as quickly as possible and the PSA should enable them to accomplish this.
Let me get you some links because I think you would be interested in reading Muttitt's reports...
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2005/crudedesigns.htm
This is "Crude Designs" which is the Iraq specific report and should contain most of the information from the other report I mentioned. As you can tell it's a wee bit slanted:wink: but I don't think you'll mind much.
 
  • #53
russ_watters said:
I don't know what you mean by that. Please explain.
Unfortunately my explanation with accompanying sources was deleted though given the current war in Iraq I imagine you have at least an inkling as to what I was referring to.
 
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  • #54
TheStatutoryApe said:
The article that you source is referring to the uproar over the sort of contract (a PSA) that certain oil companies are looking to make with Iraq which have been projected as possibly making several billions of dollars for the oil companies though there still have not been any official negotiations. Ofcourse the part of these projections that is not mentioned in most of these news articles and is even glossed over in the report that they come from is that fact that the Iraqi Oil ministry is advocating these sorts of contracts themselves and the these projected profits are only approximately ten percent of the total projected profits with the rest going to Iraq.
There are specific reasons why PSAs are supposedly bad outlined in two reports written by Greg Muttitt, one on PSAs in general and one on PSAs in regards to the current situation with Iraq. There is one particular benefit that the Iraqi Oil Ministry wants to take advantage of, the fact that a PSA should bring them a large revenue quickly. It is already one of their stated goals to get their economy up to full potential as quickly as possible and the PSA should enable them to accomplish this.
Let me get you some links because I think you would be interested in reading Muttitt's reports...
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2005/crudedesigns.htm
This is "Crude Designs" which is the Iraq specific report and should contain most of the information from the other report I mentioned. As you can tell it's a wee bit slanted:wink: but I don't think you'll mind much.
The problem with the Iraqi Oil ministry agreeing PSA's is that they will agree to anything that lines their own pockets as has been amply demonstrated in recent times with the disappearence of $100s millions of funds in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam.
As with the right wing juntas the U.S. and others have supported in the past the corrupt officials know the best way to ensure they are not removed from power is to make sure the U.S. gov't and their friends are happy with their performance such as in Venezuela where prior to the nationalisation of the oil industry by Chavez the oil companies were given a 60 year PSA whereby they paid 1% of the profits made from the sale of Venezuela's oil to the Venezuelan people and kept the other 99% for themselves.
One of the sick elements of the high debt burden in many countries is that having finally ousted western backed despotic governments they now find themselves crippled trying to pay back the debts their previous masters accumulated through loans borrowed from the 'civilised' western world to buy the arms which suppressed them. :rolleyes:
 
  • #55
TheStatutoryApe said:
Ofcourse the part of these projections that is not mentioned in most of these news articles and is even glossed over in the report that they come from is that fact that the Iraqi Oil ministry is advocating these sorts of contracts themselves...
The Iraqi Oil ministry was established by the US administration - of course its members would advocate these sorts of contracts "themselves": they are only in the powerful positions they hold because their masters put them there and one must lick the hand that feeds one! The Iraqi people, who are not consulted and whose interests the Iraqi Oil Ministry does not represent, are against these contracts because they understand that they are being robbed:
Iraqi public opinion is strongly opposed to handing control over oil development to foreign companies. But with the active involvement of the US and British governments a group of powerful Iraqi politicians and technocrats is pushing for a system of long term contracts with foreign oil companies which will be beyond the reach of Iraqi courts, public scrutiny or democratic control.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2005/crudedesigns.htm#A1

TheStatutoryApe said:
There are specific reasons why PSAs are supposedly bad outlined in two reports written by Greg Muttitt, one on PSAs in general and one on PSAs in regards to the current situation with Iraq. There is one particular benefit that the Iraqi Oil Ministry wants to take advantage of, the fact that a PSA should bring them a large revenue quickly. It is already one of their stated goals to get their economy up to full potential as quickly as possible and the PSA should enable them to accomplish this.
Let me get you some links because I think you would be interested in reading Muttitt's reports...
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2005/crudedesigns.htm
This is "Crude Designs" which is the Iraq specific report and should contain most of the information from the other report I mentioned. As you can tell it's a wee bit slanted:wink: but I don't think you'll mind much.
All reports are 'slanted' one way or the other - I challenge anyone to find me a truly objective report on any of the matters we discuss in this forum. The only objective information we could find would involve lists of numbers such as oil production statistics (and even then, we all know how statistics can be manipulated): the minute one starts interpreting the world, a perspective comes into the interpretation. As mentioned earlier in this thread, this happens in the natural sciences as well as in the social sciences. In any case, I am not ashamed of the political perspective I adopt - I see no other honourable or human option than to be on the side of ordinary people rather than of big business: it is a well-considered choice that I have made as a result of my specific life experiences and after much reading and thought.
 
  • #56
Art said:
Unfortunately my explanation with accompanying sources was deleted though given the current war in Iraq I imagine you have at least an inkling as to what I was referring to.
Here is the only reference that was deleted, because the rest of the post it was contained in did not meet our guidelines; next time I'll leave it for you to find it again on your own if the discourse here does not remain respectful. http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-159.html
 
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  • #57
Art said:
The problem with the Iraqi Oil ministry agreeing PSA's is that they will agree to anything that lines their own pockets as has been amply demonstrated in recent times with the disappearence of $100s millions of funds in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam.
As with the right wing juntas the U.S. and others have supported in the past the corrupt officials know the best way to ensure they are not removed from power is to make sure the U.S. gov't and their friends are happy with their performance such as in Venezuela where prior to the nationalisation of the oil industry by Chavez the oil companies were given a 60 year PSA whereby they paid 1% of the profits made from the sale of Venezuela's oil to the Venezuelan people and kept the other 99% for themselves.
One of the sick elements of the high debt burden in many countries is that having finally ousted western backed despotic governments they now find themselves crippled trying to pay back the debts their previous masters accumulated through loans borrowed from the 'civilised' western world to buy the arms which suppressed them.
I was only pointing out the parts that seem to be left out rather often when this issue is reported on. The major point being that the amount of money the oil companies will be "robbing" from the Iraqi people according to these reports is only approximately one tenth of the profits. It just doesn't sound as shocking I guess when you say "The oil companies will possibly be taking one tenth of the profits that the oil economy the companies will be setting up will bring to the Iraqi people according to projections based on historical analysis". So much more colourful when you say "Oil companies to rob Iraqi people of billions of dollars according to the report 'Crude Designs: The rip off of the Iraqi people'".

Alexandra said:
The Iraqi Oil ministry was established by the US administration - of course its members would advocate these sorts of contracts "themselves": they are only in the powerful positions they hold because their masters put them there and one must lick the hand that feeds one! The Iraqi people, who are not consulted and whose interests the Iraqi Oil Ministry does not represent, are against these contracts because they understand that they are being robbed:
Official negotiations and decision making won't take place until after the permanent government elected by the Iraqi people is in place and running. They could surprise every one and not give into the strong push for PSAs. Either way it will be their own elected officials who will be making these decisions.
And please see above for my response on whether or not they are being "robbed".
 
  • #58
Iraqi Soldier on Patrol said:
We can patrol on our own but we would certainly like US army presence for the next few years

This is a quote from a large range of the AP and is symtamatic of the will of the people (Iraqi) and the logistics of establishing a state.

To clarify as my post my appear - from first hand experience and hearsay and interviews I and others have conducted, the people of Iraq despise US prolonged presence, they see a clear and irrefutable link between (the exodus of Iraqi proffesionals and aintellectuals and in an influx in the number of criminals) and (the US and allied presence in the country and indeed the invasion). However, logisticaly, if US and allied troops pull out there will emerge a power vacuum which insergants may fill, or neighbouring states.

(oh and a huge PS - I write insurgents as insurgents are not terrorists perse - and I appreciate the distinction!)

And this links to this post as one could categorise the people's will as Capitalism whereas the logistics are statist. (and yes that is a tedious link!)

-NS
 
  • #59
Could you source the quote from the Iraqi Soldier please?
 
  • #60
ha! I've been gone for like a month but my thread is still alive.
 

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