OrbitalPower said:
It shouldn't need to be. One only need look at the various attempts at socialism. All have failed, horribly.
Enron certainly was an attempt at a corporate system where all the workers have investments in the company, such as in stock, yet the company failed anyway.
You make out as if, because the leaders of Enron were so corrupt, that this occurs in every attempt at such a corporation. You forget about the thousands of other very successful corporations that offer stock options and so forth and are very successful.
The corruption of Enron is an example of why capitalism works; because unlike with socialism, with one big government bureaucracy in charge in each industry, or fascism, with one big corporate bureaucracy in charge of each industry, with capitalism the corrupt companies competing in an industry eventually will get caught or go out of business.
If something was collectively owned, everybody would have input. That is why the public utilities in California managed themselves just fine, the but the privatized model failed miserably.
That makes no sense. Why do you think the United States became a representative democracy? Could you imagine trying to run the country with all 300 million Americans having to have a say in every aspect of it. You are living in a fantasy here. Corporations are large, detailed organizations, that require people with expertise in certain areaseven, such as finance, accounting, investing, management, marketing, etc...collectivization cannot work. Humans are not collective creatures.
And no, the public utilities in California did not manage themselves just fine. Public utilities rarely ever do. California's utilities were not privatized. Rather than being de-regulated, they were essentially re-regulated with price controls in certain areas, which thus caused the system to operate as one might expect with price controls, causing shortages of power for certain areas.
As the government exists in your "privatized" model, it is only beholden to the corporations, not protecting the citizens at all.
You don't understand. With a
limited government, it
can't become beholden to the corporations, UNLESS you start enlarging it to "watch" over the corporations, in which case, because the nature of a government agency is to grow larger and larger, it and the corporations become cozy with each other.
This has been proven time and time again. The old socialist claim that, if left to operate freely in a free-market, that monopolies will take over and corporations will run the government and fascism will form, has been proven to be false. We can see that easily with our own industries.
Certainly they can. In order to have access to Microsoft's APIs to certain software you must sign into ridiculous and oppressive contracts that microsoft creates, such as that you can't develop for other companies.
There are alternative APIs to use. And I was wrong, partially, Microsoft can bully certain corporations, they did that with Netscape. But they still cannot bully the software industry like a purely controlling monopoly, and as I said, they are an exception to the rule.
You must not have that much experience with programming. It's a very hierarchical method; however, I do prefer microsoft programming tools, but that doesn't mean I don't under MS tyranny is "natural" or an essential development of the market.
Microsoft's near-monopoly wasn't natural. It was because of a mistake IBM made. And yes, I do have experience with programming.
There is nothing in economics that could ever contradict history, observed, empirical reality.
That is why the "theories" of libertarians are rejected.
What does history have to do with it? We're talking about the reasons there are not numerous car manufacturers in the U.S. The empirical reason is because the market will only support three major manufacturers.
And if you say you cannot contradict history, then the fact is that capitalism has succeeded in lifting millions of people out of poverty, and is till succeeding at doing so, while socialism, or all attempts at socialism, have failed.
Here it should be noted that most economists do not support Austrian economics or laissez-faire economics; only about 10% do. Polls of economists all show them support things a mix of things like UHC, and so on.
That's because most economists are brought up under the more Leftist Keynesian theories and many got their educations during the Cold War, when socialism was still considered viable.
The fact is that the nations that utilize Austrian economics, such as Switzerland and the United States, have the world's highest standard of living and the best economies.
So, your own theories are rejected in economics as well all the other social sciences.
What I have stated are not at all "theories." Saying that creating big government agencies causes the corporations and the government to get cozy with each other and squish the litttle businesses, is a proven fact. Saying that market economies are not tyrannies, again, is a proven fact.
The reason they became out of fashion is because the lack of standards the government employed on the car companies in the 90s, whereas in Japan and so on I believe it was continued to progress.
The U.S. Big Three struggle with quality control and profit because of the unions. If you are talking about MPG, what right does the government have to regulate MPG? If people want to buy gas-guzzlers, that's they're business, not the government's.
That is why the MPG per year began to slip in the US but in Japan it continued, which, in Japan, the automotive industry is heavily regulated as well.
In Japan, they don't drive big pickup trucks and SUVs like they do in America.
It's not voluntary when you have to work to survive and the system has created a large amount of corporate tyrannies that have controlled all the resources. There is nothing "voluntary" about it; everybody should be able to have enough land and resources without having to worry about submitting themselves into slavery, which is why I support a removal of taxes on the poor, or so-called "progressive taxation."
You will drive the entire nation into poverty with that plan. You remove taxes from the people who don't produce, and start giving them hand-outs, while taxing heavily the producers, and the producers just decide to become poor, and start getting hand-outs. Why work when you can get "free" money? All incentive dies, and nothing is produced, and the people starve.
And yes, it is voluntary where you work and who you work for.
You seem to be mis-understanding one of the most fundamental aspects of economics: that is, you don't work, you don't eat. Everyone has to work, to produce something. That's how an economy works.
You believe in the something-for-nothing formula, that is, that the poor, who produce virtually nothing, should get equal amounts of what the producers create, and then you actually think that the producers are going to keep producing. They don't. They decide to join the poor, who get the same amount of stuff.
Equality of outcome is an evil formula, and a horrendous one in practice.
You also believe that you are entitled to land and resources. You aren't entitled to
anything until you start producing stuff and can afford it. That's how an economy works.
Nothing is free.
They are entitled to the profits because they do most of the work in a corporation, while the CEOs are wondering how they can run the corporation into the ground while bailing themselves out with "golden parachutes."
That is silliness. "Work" means
NOTHING You are not paid according to how hard you work, you are paid according to
what you produce
KNOWLEDGE and SKILLS are what count most, not work ethic. You are one of those types who believes that if someone is not doing any form of hard manual labor, that they don't deserve to get paid well. Labor is easy to replace.
For example, it's pretty easy to find people who can do janitorial work. Thus janitor work is not exactly high-paying, no matter how grueling or boring. But the guy who sits on his butt and programs say a brilliant piece of software and then starts a company and sells it, makes millions, because the market values
WHAT HE PRODUCED not how hard he worked.
People such as engineers or lawyers or surgeons, folks with highly technical skills, command a premium price because those skills are difficult to replace.
If we go the route you'd like, where the lawyer who works 60 hours per week has to give over most of his salary to the government, so that they can "distribute" it to the poor, the lawyer will just reason, "Forget this, I might as well just become poor. I'll get the same amount of money I'm making now, plus it will be easier. I can spend more time with my family at home and watch more of my favorite TV shows. Let other people do this."
Of course when
everybody then reasons like this, the economy goes into the ground.
And those golden parachutes only seem large because at that level of management, a slight difference in skill can mean the difference in hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars made or lost.
So corporate CEOs are paid large sums of money. They say that corporate CEOs in Europe are not paid what they are in America. But that's because American corporations have grown far larger than European ones, one average, over the last twenty years.
It certainly was. The economy continued to grow in the 50s and 60s even though the US was taxing the rich at a very high rate.
The economy was far less stable. The
financial markets were more stable. What you had was a far less flexible and more regulated economy, with only a small group of elites doing most of the investing in the financial markets. So bubbles and market crashes were a lot rarer. Now, however, it's the opposite: we have a far more flexible and resilient economy that is more stable than ever, but the financial markets seem to be far more prone to crashes than they used to be, which is because of the speed at which information is obtained (because of computers), the transfer of that information instantaneously, and millions more people who invest and play the stock market nowadays because the Internet has made it so much more accessible.
The "rich" were not taxed at a very high rate. On paper, the tax rate was high, but in reality, there were many various loopholes to get around paying those taxes. The highest tax rate for the 1950s I believe was 90%. Yet no wealthy person handed over 90% of their income to the government.
That is why the stock and bond markets were practically dead at the end of the 1970s. The rich had all their money tied up in tax-safe trusts and in commodities and so forth. When Reagan lowered taxes, they started investing in the stock market again.
FDR's New Deal, 30s and 40s, was also one of the fastest turn around in US history, and if you count the amount of people doing government jobs unemployment was down to as much as 5% at times.
FDR's New Deal, as has been describe earlier, was based off of the policies of the Nazi party and fascist Italy and both Hitler and Mussolini gave FDR praise for this. There are books specifically about this even; the Nazi Party newspaper back then even praised FDR's books.
And his New Deal was an economic disaster that only lengthened and deepened the Great Depression. The National Recovery Administration, or NRA, threw so many blacks off their land that it was dubbed the "Negro Run Around."
This "fastest turn-around in history" is incorrect. The turn-around occurred when the United States entered World War II, which was at the END of the Great Depression, and that is because when you start a massive military build-up, you can end umemployment.
How do you think Hitler ended unemployment initially in Germany so quickly? He did it because he began a massive military build-up. America did not start this until the end of the Great Depression, in which case the Depression ended almost overnight.
They also have good public education, and I believe a UHC system.
They have UHC, they also have one of the highest national debt-to-national income ratios in the world, about 200% (compared with America's 60%). UHC isn't cheap.
Also, the US controlled their oil imports until well into the 70s, to give the US "veto power" over the Japanese. So they couldn't have been a free-market economy where everything is owned by the corporations.
How do oil imports prevent a nation from being a free-market? The United States is a fully free-market economy and we import most of our oil from other countries.
But life in Sparta increased for the average citizens and there was far more freedom, leisure time, and so on than in the equivalent, gold based socities.
Free time!? In Sparta? And LEISURE!? The Spartans abhorred leisure and comfort. That's why the word "Spartan" is even applied to say a building with no creature comforts.
For some reason, you keep naming all of the most oppressive regimes and societies in history as the most humane and comfortable and free to live in.
And that they were based on warfare and militaristic intervention is just like the policies of capitalist countries.
Capitalism is
not based on policies of warfare and militaristic intervention. Switzerland, for example, is one of the most capitalist countries in the world, yet I do not see them building up any large military. The United States, historically, has always maintained a small military. It only grew very large during the twentieth century because of World War II and the Cold War to counter the Soviet Union.
By size standards, the U.S. military, even though one of the world's largest, or the largest, is still pretty small in comparison to what it really could be if America was a truly militaristic state.
There is absolutely no evidence of facts that show a monetary system is necessary to trade resources.
Explain how an economy with millions of people and millions of different products and services could trade resources without monetary exchange and a price system.
You going to have a central government bureaucracy try to centrally plan it all out? Good luck with that, the Soviets and China tried it to horrible failure.
Go to the supermarket and think about how you would "trade" services with the supermarket to obtain food. Good luck with that as well.
Socialism, where needs are distributed according to "contribution to the public good." Or communism, where resources are distributed according to need. The USSR didn't attempt this at all, preferring instead a state capitalist model where managers were assigned to run the factories, attempting to fill quotas (as all corporations must do).
That was their model for trying to distribute goods according to the public good/need. What about this do you not understand?
A collective cannot magically distribute goods according to pure need especially without a price system.
A society of contracts would be very oppressive as if you decide not to do something the punishments could be extreme or arbitrary, plus you could be forced into them if you did not have enough resources.
Wrong. Not with the rule of law. You live in a society of contracts right now. If you have a job, you made a contract between you and your employer. You still haven't explained what exactly about this "oppressive" society is so oppressive, considering the innumerable freedoms you have.
Giving people "contracts" to own land is ridiculous because it does not take into account all the people that are affected by that land ownership.
With the protection of private property rights (another thing you hate), you can't take people's land. I said one has the right to acquire as much land as they can through
legal means.
The internet; circuits; sockets, and so on. Plus, all the scientific theories that come out of Universities are what's great and allows a blueprint for the development and advancement of resources, such as in medicine.
And what else? PCs, Apple computers, Ipods, cellphones, flat-screen monitors, candies, cookies, fast-food, pre-packaged food, the myriad of shoes and clothes, the various toothbrushes, Gillette shaving products, and all the other innumerable products that make life so much easier have all come from capitalism, and were not produced by government.
Some of the good things that did come from government, like the Internet or the satellite GPS system, only were created for military purposes. In a society strictly ruled by a big government with no threat of war, not even those would have been created, except maybe as ways to oppress the citizens further.
If government can produce so well, then why didn't China and the Soviet Union have practically a paradise, where the government there ran every industry?
And what I was getting at is that every industry has been supported by the government, including the computer industry, to the tune of billions of dollars, as protection from "market risk."
"Support" from the government, in terms of money of the government buying things, is not socialism or anti-capitalist. The government is just another consumer in this instance, and companies compete for government contracts.
The government does not "protect" really any of these corporations from the market, except for perhaps a few very large ones which are essential to the national defense (like Boeing). the many smaller companies that manufacturer parts are not protected at all and fully subject to market forces.