Why Capitalism is Worth Defending

[orange]

I can't stay away from this thread help meeeeee
I'm so exhausted I can't think straight, back to arguing later.

 

[RockofStrength]

I clearly have not studied this stuff sufficiently to make an intelligent point that others have not already made and better: this has been a most informative thread! Keep it up folks: you're educating me better than a college professor who gets paid the big bucks

 

[Fletch]

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptEWTTUTMgk[/ame]

 

[orange]

Doubtful anybody'll convince anybody else of much - but damnit I like this thread. Fletch, Dross, thanks for making me reconsider my positions.

THAT is capitalism, not the bailouts. And this is what I mean when I say you're confusing the term.

Sorry, not convinced I'm confusing anything at all. If it's not capitalist then it's a perfectly natural consequence of capitalism. Really seems the thing is geared to destroy itself - by eventual merger of its interests with those of government or other authority, by open corruption as we have here and now, or in some other ways... monopolization comes to mind, natural in either hypothetical pure capitalism or the close-enough-for-horseshoes American system. Monsanto is attempting this nowadays, various pharmaceutical companies do it with their individual drugs, once upon a time a guy controlled ~95% of the American oil production and distribution - and how free a market is that? Doesn't trust-busting suggest government controls sometimes actually promote freedom in the market?

These are people who need something closer to pure oxygen, but you're saying "hey, there's air all around you, quit complaining". Atmospheric air only seems sufficient -- if you hadn't noticed, our economy is looking like an old man with emphysema. It needs oxygen to recover, and the purer the better.

Well, from my viewpoint a more apt analogy would be an aerobic bacterium in a sealed jar - reproduces exponentially until it consumes all available oxygen and dies in its own waste.

Or lobbies for oxygen bailouts.

 

[Taylorz71]

Atlas Shrugged anyone? If someone works hard and makes more than us we should be encouraged to do the same, not expect the government to take it away from them and redistribute it to us. Thanks for the post.

 

[buford t justice]

I've read all the posts as carefully as can and considered all the view points and there were
many good ones.But I still come to the same conclusion I had before reading any of them,pure capitalism can only exist in theory minus the human element.

 

[orange]

That's always been a lie of the left in an attempt to assign a totalitarian belief system to the freedom side of the equation as communism is to the slave side of the equation.

Mussolini equated the two, not exactly leftist. I consider him a bit of an authority on the subject.

Fraud and violence can destroy anything if they're allowed too much free reign. The fact that capitalism can be destroyed by fraud and violence isn't an argument against capitalism, it's an argument against force and violence.

True, I'm just arguing capitalism via its profit motive provides a strong incentive to fraud and violence, which should be acknowledged and controlled for rather than allowed to fester until we have...exactly what we have.

Limiting the number of work hours for 16 year olds might scare you, but it doesn't scare me. The culture and forces that led to child labor excesses are long gone in this country.

Thanks for at least admitting it is an excess!
The culture at present has people working for free in desperate hope of someday landing a paid position. And I see only two forces that led to those Gilded Age excesses - the willingness to use people in such a manner to maximize profit, and desperation on part of the used. Why wouldn't it happen again? Remove labor laws and it'll be Gilded Age II: Gild Harder. Those that don't learn from history are, something something.

We can't afford Medicare. It's as simple as that. Look at the numbers and tell me we can.

Oh I know. Then I looked at the numbers and thought about why!

I think we should. Welfare should be there, medicare, disability. Since you brought up moral and noble and wondrous, I'll point out I see none of that in a homeless guy sleeping outside a foreclosed home standing empty or getting bulldozed for a bank's profit. Someone brings up welfare queens and I agree readily there is abuse, and it is disgusting, I recall seeing a rate of 23% disability fraud in some city...but rather than scrap the program I say, take steps to minimize the fraud and keep in mind the 77% of claims that are legitimate. This should be basic, cheap food-clothing-shelter not luxuries like free cell phones, but it should be there.... Socialist? Man if this is socialism, then proletarians of the world unite!

There's no denying there need to be deep spending cuts. How many wars are we fighting now? I lost count. Anyway, in addition to spending I think the United States has a revenue problem. I hear talk about corporate taxation crushing the economy and I laugh! Google had an effective tax rate of 2.4% last year. Apple is sitting on billions in cash reserves - wait a second everyone says if corporations made profit they would create jobs - how is this possible? General Electric in 2010 paid no tax, but received 3.2 billion in tax benefits after 14.2 billion in profits.
Romney has made a tax repatriation holiday part of his platform, I hear. It will create millions of permanent and stable jobs, he said. This thing has been done before, and as a job creation device didn't work out so well. So what do we have here on Romney's part? Ignorance? Or Cisco and others bribing, I mean lobbying, him to play ignorant?
About the argument that then they'll leave America, well, already happening.

The responsibility for hiring lay with businesses. The truth is we all need... BRB, cutting 39000 jobs and moving 25000 others to China....where was I? Oh right! We all need to be part of the solution.

By the way, I also like protectionist policies.

He gives himself away when he blames the government involvement he doesn't like on capitalism - freedom - rather than on the oppressive nature of government.

See, it's exactly this sort of thing that makes me think we will not communicate. Makes me wonder if you're arguing theory while I argue what's on the news. There was recently an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Immediately after a senator from Oklahoma, whose campaign donations came mostly from the oil and gas industry, introduced a bill to limit oil company liability for such accidents... immediately after!

Yeeees. See how the government tyrannically oppresses a poor beleaguered oil company. My heart weeps.

I respect your opinions and will rep you for arguing them well but you haven't convinced me of anything, and I won't convince you. Cheers!

 

[orange]

Also, because I laughed

 

[Riskeh]

It is not, except in the most superficial way. One seeks to serve his fellow man, the other seeks to oppress him. I don't believe they are even following the same thought process.

Fine - call the commonality superficial. But let's recognize the common aspect is there all the same. Both are driven by a motive for profit.

See, I read this...

The other says, "I have built the best product I can build, but I am afraid that the competition will build something better. Therefore I will attempt to compete with violence, by forcing the competition to jump through hoops to satisfy my own design parameters and prevent them from improving on my idea. I will choose to hurt my customers by removing or limiting their choices because I cannot build a better product than the competition."

...And again I don't see capitalism. I see a capitalist system plus a moral/ethical system. Defensible on its own terms, I'm sure. But it's not exactly what I'm talking about.

I asked: If a person defends the right of individuals to own their own businesses and run them to make a profit, but they don't think 'honor' or 'nobility' has anything to do with it - are they defending capitalism? Or is capitalism intrinsically tied to moral judgments?

How is serving your fellow man and having him serve you and creating an exchange where both people walk away better than they were before not noble and honorable?

If that's not noble and honorable, then please, tell me what method of getting the things I need for myself and my family to live is more honorable? All the alternatives I can see require force, dishonesty, and make one person a winner and another a loser.

I'd ask the same question of you that I just did of Fletch.

If your definition of capitalism is an idiosyncratic one, that's fine. I don't doubt you can define a version of capitalism that is tied up with a moral and ethical system intrinsically. But in that case I'll simply grant that your particular version of capitalism comes with built-in moral and ethical requirements, and continue to argue about what the drive for profit - unfettered by those requirements - leads to. I'll make my point there, and I think it's a point orange is trying to make.

But really, I'll throw a hypothetical situation at you. A man decides, "Hey, porn is a good seller. And I have a 19 year old daughter. I know - I'll get my little girl into porn if she's willing!" And hey, she turns out to be willing. Daddy-daughter porn business, and it seems like everyone is winning. No force required. No dishonesty.

Is it noble and honorable? Is this an example of capitalism in action?

 

[Lex Concord]

I don't understand what you're saying.

How can someone "subvert" capitalism?

By being elected.

 

[Lex Concord]

Redacted. After reading more posts I realized that Fletch and others are making the free market case far more eloquently and effectively than I am able.

Carry on

 

[Fletch]

...And again I don't see capitalism. I see a capitalist system plus a moral/ethical system. Defensible on its own terms, I'm sure. But it's not exactly what I'm talking about.

That's the essential problem we're having here. There is a specific morality to property rights, and property rights are the foundation of capitalism. If you remove that morality, or the system of property rights, you destroy capitalism. Capitalism is not merely "the profit motive, full stop", which is what you and orange are making it out to be. It is not just naked greed.

I'm fairly certain that Rothbard did the most extensive work in this area, though I may be wrong. Mises.org certainly has an extensive collection of articles from his treatise, The Ethics of Liberty.

As I stated upthread, capitalism is not a designed system. It is what emerges from the recognition and protection of property rights. It has its own rules as a result of the foundation of property rights, and the rules can be broken -- as government breaks them all time. When government breaks the rules, no matter the reason, the way to fix things is not to punish those on whose behalf government acts, but to reverse the government action that broke the rules.

Like so:

See, it's exactly this sort of thing that makes me think we will not communicate. Makes me wonder if you're arguing theory while I argue what's on the news. There was recently an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Immediately after a senator from Oklahoma, whose campaign donations came mostly from the oil and gas industry, introduced a bill to limit oil company liability for such accidents... immediately after!

Yeeees. See how the government tyrannically oppresses a poor beleaguered oil company. My heart weeps.

Here government has "picked a winner" in the oil industry vs. the other industries that also use the resources in the gulf. Rather than identify the government as being the problem, orange wants us to see the oil industry as the villain. If government did not have the power to limit the liability of the oil industry, the courts would sort out the compensation necessary to make the victims (in this case, the fishing/tourism/etc. industries) whole again. The price of oil would rise, to be certain, and it's possible that BP might have gone out of business. Cry me a river.

Instead, the government, a perpetual violator of the rules of capitalism, has violated them once again, and we're supposed to believe that it's capitalism's fault.

 

[orange]

That's the essential problem we're having here. There is a specific morality to property rights, and property rights are the foundation of capitalism. If you remove that morality, or the system of property rights, you destroy capitalism. Capitalism is not merely "the profit motive, full stop", which is what you and orange are making it out to be. It is not just naked greed.

Sorry but all too often profit does indeed seem to trump all.
During the early 1980s Bayer sold blood plasma contaminated with HIV on the Asian market. Internal documents show the company was aware of the contamination. Just found it more profitable to sell the material than destroy it, and there's morality for you.

If government did not have the power to limit the liability of the oil industry, the courts would sort out the compensation necessary to make the victims (in this case, the fishing/tourism/etc. industries) whole again.

Between 2002 and 2007 two judges in Lucerne County, PA wrongly sentenced over five thousand people to stays in juvenile detention camps. They were paid over 2600000 dollars for this by Pennsylvania Child Care and Western Pennsylvania Child Care, which realized tens of millions of profit from the scheme. Again morality, with a side dish of if BP could buy themselves a senator why wouldn't they buy themselves a judge.

Obvious counterargument is obvious, so: that the framework exploited was put in place by a government does not make that exploitation moral. Says more about the business doing the exploiting rather than the government, not to say the justice system isn't kinda crap as well...
Ascribing the faults of the capitalist system to government interference reads like, government was asking for it, what was it thinking wearing that little skirt in that dark alley.

Corporate personhood puts a nice face on the problem - the corporation is a mindless revenant driven only by profit. Perhaps diffused responsibility makes it so, I really don't know the causes. I don't have a problem with corporate personhood, otherwise who would one contract with. Certainly don't have a problem with profit. Don't wish to destroy capitalism because all alternatives seem worse. However the drive toward maximization of profit by fraud and violence must be acknowledged and compensated for. To assume it will disappear in absence of regulation is not realistic.

After all haven't we already had periods with lax regulation, like the robber baron era? Aren't there still areas of the world that are basically in anarchy? Look to DeBeers' diamond mines: unregulated capitalist morality at work.

 

[Fletch]

I could go through each of your examples AGAIN, and demonstrate AGAIN how they are examples of anticapitalism rather than capitalism, but all you're going to do is handwave your own imprecise, bastardized definition of capitalism AGAIN and claim AGAIN that it's a suffiicient definition to continue your indictment. You don't seem to want to understand the State's role in all this, which is critical to understanding why these things have gone awry. There is a discussion to be had on the topic of what the State could do to fix things, but at this point I've concluded that you're uninterested in anything which requires the sinless, immaculate State to have its reputation or present policies tarnished.

 

[Riskeh]

That's the essential problem we're having here. There is a specific morality to property rights, and property rights are the foundation of capitalism. If you remove that morality, or the system of property rights, you destroy capitalism. Capitalism is not merely "the profit motive, full stop", which is what you and orange are making it out to be. It is not just naked greed.

I've pointed out that capitalism relies on the motive to make a profit, and that if you or anyone else is defining capitalism to be 'profit desires + moral commitments', I'll roll with that happily. It sounds kind of odd to me, but I'll manage.

Can we agree, then, that the unfettered desire to make a profit can encourage a variety of acts, some good, some bad, and some even socialist? Again, I'm more than willing to grant that said unfettered desire is not 'Capitalism'.

It sounds to me like you'd agree, and of course repeat that no system is perfect - probably just about any system we could ever develop is subject to moral failure, so we do what we can. And honestly, for any horror story anyone could ever develop about businesses and the free market at work, there's a hundred stories of government power run amok that make it pale in comparison.

As I stated upthread, capitalism is not a designed system. It is what emerges from the recognition and protection of property rights. It has its own rules as a result of the foundation of property rights, and the rules can be broken -- as government breaks them all time. When government breaks the rules, no matter the reason, the way to fix things is not to punish those on whose behalf government acts, but to reverse the government action that broke the rules.

I think when your system emerges from laws passed by men, you're dealing with a 'designed system' whether you like it or not. I'm guessing you mean that you don't need to micromanage the system and that said system in essence 'happens naturally' once you pass these particular laws and so on. On the other hand, you pass the laws you pass for a reason - and knowledge of what will 'happen naturally' is just another reason, even if it's general knowledge.

Minor quibble, but hey, nitpicking is fun.

 

[orange]

There is a discussion to be had on the topic of what the State could do to fix things, but at this point I've concluded that you're uninterested in anything which requires the sinless, immaculate State to have its reputation or present policies tarnished.

No. Blame for the mess we're in rests on that sinless immaculate State being in bed with that sinless immaculate Business which would totally, completely, without a doubt be honest and moral if only someone got these law things out of the way.

Thanks for the discussion, man. No more arguing from me.

 

[Fletch]

No. Blame for the mess we're in rests on that sinless immaculate State being in bed with that sinless immaculate Business which would totally, completely, without a doubt be honest and moral if only someone got these law things out of the way.

I'm sorry I got snippy. I was tired and frustrated, and you keep repeating the same argument over and over, just with different examples.

It may surprise you to learn that I don't believe in a sinless, immaculate Business. It may also surprise you to learn that capitalism does not support corporate personhood. I'm frustrated because we are going round and round in a fashion not unlike a very similar argument I've had on the subject of gun rights:

Me: 2nd Amendment rights are important and should be protected
Opponent: Yeah, well this guy just exercised his 2nd Amendment rights all over his girlfriend and her family.
Me: That's not what the 2nd Amendment is about
Opponent: It's about having guns and doing whatever you want with them. Here's a guy who 2nd Amendmented a cop.
Me: Again, not the purpose of the 2nd Amendment. It's about freedom, not murder.
Opponent: Yeah, that's the freedom that allowed this 3-year-old to 2nd Amendment himself... wonderful freedom you're supporting there.

Can you see how that would get tiresome?

 

[Fletch]

Can we agree, then, that the unfettered desire to make a profit can encourage a variety of acts, some good, some bad, and some even socialist? Again, I'm more than willing to grant that said unfettered desire is not 'Capitalism'.

Absolutely! The fetters in question are absolutely necessary. The problem we are having is in defining their source and reasoning. Under capitalism, the limits arise from property rights -- not just the property rights of business, but the property rights of all human beings involved in the various transactions. And the point that I've been making is that AS SOON AS somebody's property rights are violated, we are no longer talking about capitalist activities, in the same way that an activity becomes illegal as soon as it breaks a law.

Not a single one of the examples offered in this discussion involves respect for property rights. In every case it can be shown how government colluded with business to stomp property rights or simply ignored its duty to enforce property rights. Find me an example where property rights have been respected on all sides, but where someone has become oppressed as a result, and maybe we'll have something to talk about with regard to capitalism's flaws.

 

[jsgolfman]

Did you just say the property rights of business?

 

[Riskeh]

Absolutely! The fetters in question are absolutely necessary.

Great, then we're on the same page at least as far as that goes.

Not a single one of the examples offered in this discussion involves respect for property rights. In every case it can be shown how government colluded with business to stomp property rights or simply ignored its duty to enforce property rights. Find me an example where property rights have been respected on all sides, but where someone has become oppressed as a result, and maybe we'll have something to talk about with regard to capitalism's flaws.

What about the 'tainted AIDS blood' situation? Actually, what about fraud in general - I imagine you're not going to just say 'caveat emptor, maybe the blood the doctor is giving you has AIDS, maybe it doesn't', but I'd like to see how you'd categorize fraud cases with regards to 'property rights'. I also suppose you'd support some amount of regulation there, or if not regulation you'd be defining capitalism such that it's morally obligatory to communicate a certain amount of information accurately in a given transaction?