Why government should always have more power than private business.

[nayjevin]

What about folks who are extremely skilled and talented but have near zero ability to sell themselves or type up resumes or conduct powerful interviews?

Perhaps the system is biased?

 

[EcoWarrier]

The were all better off than the Taiwanese who had their villages seized under the LVT Reforms of the KMT invaders.

You must stop making things up. Please focus. Read Engles on the poverty of the people of Manchester. Which was similar to all industrialized countries at the time.

 

[tod evans]

Yes, unearned income from land rents and increased values of land. They get rich in their sleep for doing nothing.

No.......Pay attention;

"They" earn dividends from land ownership, land "They" invested in with money "They" earned...

"They" must practice good stewardship in order to see returns on "Their" investment..

You too could own land.........Or not, it's up to you.

 

[idiom]

You must stop making things up. Please focus. Read Engles on the poverty of the people of Manchester. Which was similar to all industrialized countries at the time.

Read your own Geonomists on the consequences of LVT reforms. Proponents of Geonomics list these things but consider them good because Tribal people are not fully utilising their land, so it is good when they lose out to people who can use the land better.

Besides its not like the Tribal people owned the land they were living for centuries or millennia. You can't 'own' land right. That's why you say it can't be seized.

It just gets re-allocated to more efficient users or people with more efficient ties to the government.

 

[idiom]

Yes, unearned income from land rents and increased values of land. They get rich in their sleep for doing nothing.

The rich get poor in their sleep if they do nothing.

Just like Marx. He never bothered to earn one single penny. Just watched his children die.

That's what happens when you do nothing.

You know what happens the moment of a BIG stock market crash? The rich start killing themselves. The lose everything. They jump from buildings.

The poor barely feel the crash unless the government intervenes and makes it last for years instead of weeks. Speculation should only hurt the rich, but bad economic intervention makes it hurt the poor.

 

[jmdrake]

When you say "more government," what you're really saying is "more community." You believe that businessmen and investors should be allowed to just do whatever they want, regardless of what the community says (even if they say, "Hey! We don't abuse our workers in this country!"

Maybe if the businessmen don't want the community telling them what to do, maybe THEY should go somewhere else! Hahahaha!

I'm sure in this extremely long thread somebody has already said this, but the businesses do go somewhere else under your scenario which drives unemployment up even hire giving you less options. Oh yeah, and as that happens the businesses that are left inevitably have more power. That can extract more and more concessions from the community that thought it was in "control". It happens all the time. Unions push one manufacturer out, unemployment skyrockets, then city/state leaders bend over backwards to offer "incentives" for some new manufacturer to come it. The workers end up being "slaves" (since you put it that way) to the unions, the city and the employers.

 

[EcoWarrier]

The rich get poor in their sleep if they do nothing.

Just like Marx.

Stop banging on about Marx you half-wit! An obsessive. David Harvey gave a lecture on how we ended up in the financial situation we are in. Nothing to do with Marx. It was factual observation by Harvey.

 

[EcoWarrier]

You can't 'own' land right. That's why you say it can't be seized.

Land is seized. It was seized by many means - for private gain.

 

[EcoWarrier]

No.......Pay attention;

"They" earn dividends from land ownership, land "They" invested in with money "They" earned...

You invest in productive activities that hopefully give returns. I see no production in appropriating into private pockets commonly created wealth that soaked into the land crystallizing as values. That is "unearned income". If you didn't know now you do. I never made it up.

Find out the difference between speculation and investment.

 

[Revolution9]

What about folks who are extremely skilled and talented but have near zero ability to sell themselves or type up resumes or conduct powerful interviews?

Perhaps the system is biased?

I had to learn how to sell my skill and talent. This gave me further skills.

Rev9

 

[Revolution9]

Stop banging on about Marx you half-wit! An obsessive. David Harvey gave a lecture on how we ended up in the financial situation we are in. Nothing to do with Marx. It was factual observation by Harvey.

Stop defending his sorry, lay about, couch potato, armchair philosopher's ass you quarter wit and folks won't bring up his utter failings as a human being, father and theorist.. Probably made a shitty spouse too.

Rev9

 

[tod evans]

Let's see if I can follow your theory here;

You consider land to be "commonly created wealth".....right?

Before I even ask about "soaking or crystallization" how about explaining your view of land?

You invest in productive activities that hopefully give returns. I see no production in appropriating into private pockets commonly created wealth that soaked into the land crystallizing as values. That is "unearned income". If you didn't know now you do. I never made it up.

Find out the difference between speculation and investment.

 

[silverhandorder]

Let's see if I can follow your theory here;

You consider land to be "commonly created wealth".....right?

Before I even ask about "soaking or crystallization" how about explaining your view of land?

Don't bother. He thinks that we need taxes and tries to rationalize justification for them. I think in the other thread he claimed we should spend on welfare just as much as we do today. He thinks civilization can not exist unless government pays for infrastructure.

As far as his view on land he thinks that just because you live near a community you owe it for them not looting and pillaging you. He does not understand that every member of the community while benefiting from other working and living nearby brings the same benefit by doing the same thing.

 

[tod evans]

I'm hoping he'll see the foolishness of his positions.........then again.......

Don't bother. He thinks that we need taxes and tries to rationalize justification for them. I think in the other thread he claimed we should spend on welfare just as much as we do today. He thinks civilization can not exist unless government pays for infrastructure.

As far as his view on land he thinks that just because you live near a community you owe it for them not looting and pillaging you. He does not understand that every member of the community while benefiting from other working and living nearby brings the same benefit by doing the same thing.

 

[EcoWarrier]

Let's see if I can follow your theory here; You consider land to be "commonly created wealth".....right?

Land is given by nature NOT by man. Land is NOT commonly created. Land and its resources are Commonwealth. Simple. Make a washing machine (CAPITAL made by man) and man owns it. Land ownership is "title", a set of rights. You do not actually "own" the land. You need title of keep others off the land while you use it. The values in the land are created by community economic actity, not the landower. That is economic fact. That is how the land values came about, they never came from the sky. Your house does not improve in value. The house (CAPITAL) is the wood and bricks and depreciates over time. The land appreciates.

You need to learn more about basic economics.

 

[EcoWarrier]

Don't bother. He thinks that we need taxes

He does? He wants Income, Sales and property taxes removed. All taxes on production and trade.

In your Utopia of zero taxes, how are common services going to be funded?

 

[silverhandorder]

He does? He wants Income, Sales and property taxes removed. All taxes on production and trade.

In your Utopia of zero taxes, how are common services going to be funded?

Use fees like any other common service.

 

[EcoWarrier]

Use fees like any other common service.

So every street has a coin machine and turnstyle as you can walk down it? The army? Door to door collections? You pay the police for each call out?

Get out of La-La land!!!!!

 

[Len Larson]

I would appreciate it if Doug or someone else would define what "Market Society" is and enumerate the points of contact it has with "Free Market".

In the meantime here is an article that seems appropriate:

Mistaken Identity
By Art Carden

It is always the fashion among many intellectuals to blame society’s ills on the free market. One college newspaper recently argued that the market is "The God That Sucked." The course summaries in my university’s catalog, the themes of the lecture series, and the editorial content of the student newspapers suggest that many students and faculty would agree.

Popular contempt for the market is distressing. Few institutions are so universally reviled, and perhaps fewer institutions are so universally misunderstood. This misunderstanding can be dangerous: the radicals who protest so vehemently against the workings of the free market rarely understand that they advocate strangling the goose that lays the golden eggs.

To borrow from Robert Frost, we should consider how the heavens go before we try to change the world. In other words, we must consider what is before we talk about what ought to be.

Many disagreements have their genesis in misunderstanding and equivocation. So let’s define the term "free market." Dictionary.com defines a "market" as "an opportunity to buy or sell" and a "free market" as "an economic market in which supply and demand are not regulated or are regulated with only minor restrictions." "Free markets" and "capitalism" are practically synonymous, and George Reisman defines capitalism eloquently:

"Capitalism is a social system based on private ownership of the means of production. It is characterized by the pursuit of material self-interest under freedom and it rests on a foundation of the cultural influence of reason. Based on its foundations and essential nature, capitalism is further characterized by saving and capital accumulation, exchange and money, financial self-interest and the profit motive, the freedoms of economic competition and economic inequality, the price system, economic progress, and a harmony of the material self-interests of all the individuals who participate in it."

Thus, we can define a "free market" as a social system based on the voluntary exchange of property rights. And yet the "free market" is almost universally reviled within the academy.

Many popular criticisms of the market are so common as to warrant the charge of cliché (critics of capitalism might say "axiom"). They can be distilled into a few broad propositions, which we consider here. They are: the market is antisocial; the market tramples human rights; the market is the enemy of the environment; and the market is the weapon of the rich against the poor. Let’s consider each in turn.

One of the more popular myths about the market economy is that it necessarily entails a Hobbesian "war of all against all," a man-eat-man world in which we all compete in a zero-sum scramble for resources. A recent op-ed in the Washington University Student Life posited that the "apocryphal idea of [the market’s] reality . . . may lead the entire species to self destruction." That’s scary stuff. It follows, then, that the market must be warlike: if resources are finite and everyone lives to consume, conflict—and war—must be the natural result.

But conflict and war are the very antithesis of free-market principles. The essence of market exchange is cooperation: two parties exchange goods and services, and both are enriched as a result. You pay Wal-Mart for a necktie. Wal-Mart buys the necktie from the manufacturer. The manufacturer pays for the labor and capital necessary to produce the necktie. Everybody wins.

The reader should also note that people never start wars of subjugation to extend the voluntary exchange of goods and services. In fact, many wars occur for fundamentally anticapitalist reasons: namely, trade disputes. We would do well to consider the wisdom of Frédéric Bastiat, who noted that when goods don’t cross borders, armies will.

Another popular criticism of the free market is that it tramples human rights. Slavery, racism, sexism, and "sweatshops" are the children of capitalism; therefore, the market economy should be overthrown post haste.

First, slavery is anti-market by definition: free markets are guided by the principle of voluntarism. Second, racism and sexism are difficult to sustain in competitive markets: no matter how much a certain employer hates blacks, women, Jews, homosexuals, etc., consumers are rarely willing to pay the price premium that would be necessary to allow them to indulge their taste for discrimination. The market has been profoundly benevolent to even the most oppressed minorities. In his masterful Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy 1865–1914, Robert Higgs chronicled the spectacular gains the sons and daughters of slaves made when they were allowed to participate in the market economy.

Third, we have to ask two questions when we consider the plight of "sweatshop" laborers. First, why are working conditions so wretched? Second, what are these workers’ next best alternatives? Working conditions in the third world are wretched precisely because many third-world countries have only recently begun to adopt the institutions that characterize the market economies of the west. Workers’ next best alternatives are often appalling: many children leave lives of crime, prostitution, and starvation to work in sweatshops.

If we close the sweatshops, they will likely return to crime, prostitution, and starvation.

It is also popular to charge that the market is the enemy of the environment. This is also untrue; environmental degradation occurs when property rights are poorly specified or enforced. If anyone or anything has failed in this respect, it is the state. There is ample evidence for this in former communist countries: many lakes and streams in the former Soviet Union are so polluted as to be unusable.

The market economy is also accused of being the ultimate weapon of rich against poor. Capitalist "meritocracy" is responsible for widespread poverty, rampant inequality, and Big Business’ choke-hold on the world. While these challenges to capitalist institutions make for intriguing rhetoric, they are also false.

Today’s poor countries were poor long before modern liberal market economies developed in Europe and North America; therefore, we cannot blame capitalism for poverty. Many critics also point to the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States as evidence of capitalism’s evils, but this overlooks two crucial points.

The first is income mobility: someone born into poverty in the US stands a very good chance of moving up in the world. Second, while the distribution of money incomes is relatively unequal, the distribution of access to goods of similar technological composition has narrowed considerably. For most of world history, the difference between rich and poor was the difference between who ate and who starved. In today’s market econ-omies, the difference between the super-rich and the poor is the difference between who drives a Dodge Viper and who drives an ‘87 Chevy Cavalier.

The reader should note that the power of "big business" is overstated. A unique feature of capitalism is that the greatest rewards go to those who cater to the common man. Consider Wal-Mart, a favorite whipping boy among left-wing intellectuals: Wal-Mart’s clientele consists almost exclusively of the middle- and lower-class. Capitalism generates fantastic wealth, and the benefits accrue almost entirely to the least of these among us.

Ludwig von Mises put it succinctly in a series of lectures which were published posthumously as Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow. He notes that "this is the fundamental principle of capitalism as it exists today in all those countries in which there is a highly developed system of mass production: Big business . . . produces almost exclusively to satisfy the wants of the masses." The "power relationship" of which Marxists are so fond is precisely the opposite of that which is most often supposed: consumers, not producers, are the masters of the dance.

Nonetheless, enemies of the market argue that the only reason people put up with market economies is because they are forced to. The evidence of twentieth-century immigration doesn’t support the hypothesis. Thousands died trying to cross into free West Germany and South Korea, and there was very little traffic in the opposite direction. Similarly, thousands of Cubans have risked life and limb to come to America. Few—if any—have braved the ocean on a homemade raft to seek a better way of life in Cuba.

Finally, it is deficient scholarship to merely point out the litany of crimes that the market (supposedly) commits and suggest that it has "failed" in any meaningful way. One must propose a superior alternative. In this case, both theory and history are firmly on the side of the free market. Mises and Hayek demonstrated that rational calculation is impossible without private ownership of the means of production. This isn’t to say that a "socialist economy" is inefficient—it is quite literally an oxymoron. Our experience with radical revolutions and planned economies in the twentieth century is hardly encouraging: in the name of "the people," Che Guevara killed thousands, Hitler millions, Stalin and Mao tens of millions.

It may be fashionable to blame the market economy for all of society’s ills, but this blame is undeserved and many scholars’ faith in alternatives to the market is misplaced. No socialist regime has ever held a free election, and no free market has ever produced a death camp. Popular academic opinions to the contrary, the market works. And we can take that to the bank.

Art Carden is a graduate student in economics at Washington University in St. Louis

 

[Elwar]

I, lacking any way to provide for myself otherwise

This is where you chose to be a slave.