I used to be a total laissez faire conservative. In recent months, though, my long-standing hatred of the patricians and the wealthy and my naturally-occuring humility and compassion for my fellow man have been sliding the notch of my political spectrometer to the left a little.
I know well the difference between capitalism and communism, and IMO the latter cannot practically be employed in society. Even if it could, it should not be, because it allows no room for the hard-working individual to succeed in society. I liked capitalism because, in theory, it allows the hard-working person to get ahead, and leaves the loafers in the dust. But, I don't know anymore. More and more, I see that it leaves everyone but the evil in the dust. To get ahead, you really do just have to be shamefully greedy and self-oriented.
Thoughts?
Communism is an entirely impossible philosophy to implement successfully because it makes several, fatally incorrect, assumptions about human nature. It could only work if applied to a human race that lost all competitive drive. Forget humanity, life itself operates on competitive principle. The argument in favor of communism is always "it wouldn't fail if someone did it right", but it's not possible to 'do right'. Human beings would have to become mindless robots. People aren't equal, and this is not only a fact but an asset. Too much symmetry would destroy us.
Marx and Engels were smart men, no doubt, but they were awful philosophers. Capitalism isn't friendly and fuzzy, but it's the best system we have until such time as we create a post-shortage existence.
Your words are wise, Weltall. I wonder, though, if there couldn't be some way of organizing a democratic society that didn't have 99% of wealth held by 1% of the population.
Make obsolete the concept of wealth?
Darunia Wrote:Your words are wise, Weltall. I wonder, though, if there couldn't be some way of organizing a democratic society that didn't have 99% of wealth held by 1% of the population.
Something tells me you just saw "Michael Moore's capitalism a love story"
I think one of the problems with capitalism, and there are problems, is that it assumes that every participant is acting in self-interest and is motivated to compete. And I just don't think that's entirely true.
1. There's a lack of motivation from a large portion of the populace. People that don't care about their social position and have no desire to change it.
2. Capitalism assumes that the workers act in their own self-interest and cannot be "tricked" into acting against their self-interest. This happens all the time it seems, where big companies throw their considerable capital around to convince the workers, and the politicians [who in turn will also convince the workers] that something which actually hurts the workers continued to remain in place or gets put into place instead of something which helps the workers.
There are other issues as well, but I think those two are among the most important. There's no perfect system, only one that works better than the others.
Weltall Wrote:Make obsolete the concept of wealth?
That Idea worked awesome for the Federation in StarTrek. To bad humanity has a long way to go before that will happen, it's a shame though, it would solve just about all the worlds problems.
Explain how 'wealth' could be gotten rid of, and not create a communist society?
Darunia Wrote:I used to be a total laissez faire conservative. In recent months, though, my long-standing hatred of the patricians and the wealthy and my naturally-occuring humility and compassion for my fellow man have been sliding the notch of my political spectrometer to the left a little.
I know well the difference between capitalism and communism, and IMO the latter cannot practically be employed in society. Even if it could, it should not be, because it allows no room for the hard-working individual to succeed in society. I liked capitalism because, in theory, it allows the hard-working person to get ahead, and leaves the loafers in the dust. But, I don't know anymore. More and more, I see that it leaves everyone but the evil in the dust. To get ahead, you really do just have to be shamefully greedy and self-oriented.
Thoughts?
Socialism is the answer. More government, like they do in Europe. That's the only way to keep the excesses of capitalism under control. I do think that something in between is best. Capitalism when it goes too far, as it has in America at times, is cruel and heartless... but communism is impossible and relies on human nature being completely different from the way it is, as you said.
I mean, really... how does Marx's original concept of communism really go?
1. Revolution
2. Dictatorship "of the people"
3. ???
4. The government withers away
5. Perfect anarchy
... Yeah, I can't imagine why in reality nobody ever got past step 2.
.
Of course, as with everything, when you go too far on either end you end up with somewhat similar results. Look at how Nazis and Communists are theoretically polar opposite groups, but sure do look pretty similar in practice... similarly doesn't absolute capitalism also have a withered state, except there it's corporations running everything I guess instead of everyone just living without the need for a government or something?
... Yeah, I can't think of any way to make communism's supposed goal sound possible in any kind of human society. In practice what happens is you get a giant state that owns everything. In contrast, capitalism's goal is possible. It has almost no state but all-powerful corporations. I think most people would agree that that's not exactly a good thing either...
It is hard to create the right balance between government and private enterprise, but unless we somehow go the way of the Federation (if that society is plausible, I've never studied it in depth really), it's really the only way.
etoven Wrote:That Idea worked awesome for the Federation in StarTrek. To bad humanity has a long way to go before that will happen, it's a shame though, it would solve just about all the worlds problems.
The concept, as seen in Star Trek, is even more ridiculous than Marxist Communism--and, given the multitude of conflicts, internal and external, it didn't seem to solve anything for the Federation. The Federation is, essentially, communism in a mostly-idealized (read: incompatible with human nature) form.
Quote:Explain how 'wealth' could be gotten rid of, and not create a communist society?
A post-scarcity scenario involves material goods being so easy to manufacture that they incur no cost and require no manual labor to create. A scenario in which everyone can have everything they could possibly want, as far as physical objects go. This is one of the loftier goals of nanotechnology. At such a point, the only currency of any value would be ideas.
Quote:That's the only way to keep the excesses of capitalism under control.
Who is to keep the excess of government under control?
Weltall Wrote:The concept, as seen in Star Trek, is even more ridiculous than Marxist Communism--and, given the multitude of conflicts, internal and external, it didn't seem to solve anything for the Federation. The Federation is, essentially, communism in a mostly-idealized (read: incompatible with human nature) form.
The federation system in trek is allot like warp drive , We dont know how it works just that it does.
I know exactly how the Federation works: It operates on the assumption that nobody cares anything for personal or material gain. You do whatever it is you do for the challenge and thrill of it. Which is wonderful until you realize that there are a lot of people in Star Trek who have shitty jobs to do, which they do usually without complaint. Note also how civilians dress in Star Trek: plain, dull clothing. Can't tell anyone apart. No one wants to be an individual. Nobody reads anything but what we today, 400 years in the past, consider dusty old classics. Riker listens to jazz, which makes him something of a rebel because how often does anyone else listen to anything but classical music? Nobody is creative. There is never any depiction of modernity whatsoever in Star Trek except for technology. It's as if humanity ceased creative development in the mid-1960s.
Even the technological gap seems less and less amazing. When you take away the stuff that is based clearly on nonsense or wild theory, we really haven't advanced very much in 400 years, and almost everything that is plausible is already on the drawing board somewhere in the world. 400 years from now, we should be millennia ahead, technologically, from what we see in Star Trek's 24th century.
For all these reasons, I've come to strongly dislike Star Trek. It's been perpetuated, for decades, by people with awfully stunted visions of the future. The real future is going to be vastly more compelling.
It's been perpetuated, for decades, by people with awfully stunted visions of the future. The real future is going to be vastly more compelling.
If you think Trek is guilty of this, consider Star Wars' timeline.
Star Wars Chronology
It spans tens of thousands of years and as far as I can tell, nothing has much developed. They have huge galactic wars with hyperspace-capable capital ships, they have lightsabers and androids all throughout the whole thing... and yet technological development seems to be totally arrested.
Yeah, I know, but Star Wars has never held any pretensions about being an accurate reflection of a future scenario as Star Trek has, so Star Wars doesn't bother me in that regard.
Also Star Wars is as much fantasy as it is sci-fi, and societies that never advance technologically for very long periods of time for no apparent reason are the rule in fantasy worlds. Actually, in fantasy, it's the ones that DO advance over time that are the exceptions, really... once you hit the late middle ages, you're stuck there forever! :D
The idea of laissez faire economics was fine during the time of the Founding Fathers when commerce consisted mainly of small, locally-owned family businesses, but with the introduction of big business during the Industrial Revolution, it has become easier for greedy and corrupt corporations to take advantage of its workers, and even in some cases, its customers, violating basic human rights and paying the workers squat for doing all the work. Calvin Coolidge's attitude of indifference towards big business matters certainly is not the way to go (he's more to blame for the Great Depression than Herbert Hoover, really, though Hoover was still a failure of a president). Not to be an advocate of big government, but the purpose of government is to protect the rights of the people, and in this day and age, corrupt business practices are something the people need to be protected from. The government has intervened on business matters from time to time: setting a minimum wage, creating the 40-hour work day, etc.
Small businesses, for the most part, can get by without much regulation. There should be virtually no government intervention on, say, an eBay transaction or a yard sale. However, when a business grows to a certain size, government regulation should be heavier to ensure that employees and customers are treated fairly and are not cheated by greedy CEOs. The government shouldn't control businesses as in a Marxist society, but it should monitor the larger corporations closely. While government should stay out of people's personal lives, big business is not a personal matter; it's a matter in which government should fulfill its purpose of protecting the rights of the people. That is why laissez-faire economics is now obsolete.
Quote:Calvin Coolidge's attitude of indifference towards big business matters certainly is not the way to go (he's more to blame for the Great Depression than Herbert Hoover, really, though Hoover was still a failure of a president)
Laissez-faire economics haven't really existed in over a hundred years. The Sherman Anti-Trust act clubbed most of that to death. It was long-dead by the 20s, though we have this illusion that 'big business' caused it for some reason. It's ridiculous. The Great Depression was caused by stock being traded on a massive scale on a foundation that was entirely unsupportable. It was the stock traders and banks who caused it. It was the banks loaning out nearly unlimited amounts of credit under the assumption that they could print all the money they wanted without consequence, and people who didn't understand that buying a volatile commodity almost entirely on credit is an extremely awful idea when your plan to pay the bill for the commodity is by assuming your commodity will explode in value and you can sell it at a profit. It's gambling, plain and simple. Corporate business had almost nothing to do with it then besides issuing the stock (which was, in itself, not a problem), just as it has, in general, very little to do with the current recession. Our ills are basically the same as our grandparents': The volatile commodity is now real estate instead of stocks, but everyone was still buying most of it on credit they couldn't hope to repay under normal circumstances. They were gambling their futures on property because property was, for awhile, a bull market and too many people made the stupid assumption that the market couldn't possibly collapse under its own weight before
they made their profit and got out. Also to blame, again, are the banks for lacking the long-term vision to see that giving mortgages to everyone could ever cause significant problems, and the Federal Reserve for letting the banks do this.
But, that's the bitch about regulation: Most of the time, the horse has already bolted the proverbial stall. The greater bitch about government regulation is that the government is engaged in the exact same game. That National Debt thing you keep hearing about? That's our government mortgaging the economic future of our nation on credit that, presently, we don't seem able to repay, while coming out with ever more elaborate and expensive spending programs and nobody is at all concerned with accounting for what is being spent or how much is being spent. It's rapidly getting to the point where taxes are going to have to be raised to crushing levels just to keep the United States solvent against our Chinese creditors. But, no one wants to pay more taxes and it seems as though everyone wants the government to give us everything.
We're on the road to financial catastrophe--the whole world, not just the U.S.--if we don't have a lot of people in charge suddenly wise up.
Free-market economics has failed to exist in this country for nearly a century. Anyone that tells you otherwise has not been paying attention to the economic philosophy of this country. The American have had to strive through three pseudo principles of economics: corporatism, crony capitalism (see corporatism), and government regulated socialism. The basic free-market actions between consumer and business have always gone interrupted. For the most part, this has led to disaster. Just look at the shit hole that we ended up in 2008.