Tainari88 wrote:TTP, brute force is what international capital has used all over the globe to force nations and banks and economics to bow down to certain global monopolies. That is reality.
Right. You might want to read
Superimperialism by Prof. Michael Hudson, which describes how global financial institutions have been bent to force poor countries into debt to western (especially American) banks in order to facilitate the private appropriation of their public infrastructure and natural resources. If Hudson is a bit too academic for you, John Perkins tells the concrete nuts and bolts story of how this is done in
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
If you notice my -10 rating on economics I don't believe in private capital running amok. For me the best ways one should view everything is with what is best for the WHOLE. Not what is best for a few. I only support what is best for the whole.
The neoliberals also say they support what is best for the whole; they just argue that Smith's Invisible Hand, by harnessing private self-interest in service to the general interest, provides the best way to achieve it. Moreover, it is undeniable that they have a lot of empirical evidence for that view in the general prosperity and abundance observed in market-based economies compared to sharing- or command-based economies.
In the end I am not an Egyptian Pharoah TTP. I am not taking the food, pets, spouses, furniture and so on to the afterlife. For me? Materialism should be about meeting a human need. Put limits on acquisitions.
But what kind of limits? On the
amount of money or wealth someone acquires? IMO it makes a lot more sense to put the limit on
HOW those things are acquired. If someone gets rich by making others richer, through commensurate productive contribution, why would you have a problem with that? It is when people get rich through
privilege, by making others
poorer, that I object to it. It is much more common to get rich by privilege than by production, because the profits of production tend to be competed away, whereas the profits of privilege
can't be competed away.
If it means I start consuming beyond my ability to produce? It is an exercise in excess. I would rather have all the people in the entire globe's basic needs met rather than keep thinking I need ten vacation homes and have the equivalent of 100,000 entire lifetime savings in my pocket.
For many people, consumption and acquisition of wealth and possessions are markers of status, and status is one thing there can never be enough of to go around.
And money and capital needs to circulate and to serve the society
Will people risk their purchasing power to serve society through productive investment without the prospect of profit? Why would they?
rather than have people entrapped in debt and worrying about where their next meal is coming from.
But what is the real problem? Is the cause of the problem the physical fact that someone needs to produce in order for anyone to consume? Or is the
actual problem the fact that producer and consumer alike must both pay the
landowner just for
permission to produce or consume?
That doesn't liberate me. It makes me unsafe. It perpetuates crime, it creates insecurity, and it makes dysfunction inevitable. Inequality makes dysfunctional societies.
If you think there is any possible way to make everyone equal, or eliminate inequality, you are delusional. You merely refuse to know the fact that there is a very great difference between inequality that results from justice and inequality that results from
injustice.
That is why I am a socialist.
No. You are a socialist because you refuse to know the facts that prove socialism is even worse than capitalism; and capitalism is merely the other side of the same refusal to know the same facts.
If I believed truly that profit and capital are the core of justice? I would be a capitalist. I am not.
Can you find a willingness to know what consent is?
For me profit is about control of a resource, land or labor.
But you are objectively incorrect. Profit is just revenue less expenses. Control of resources is obtained either justly, by making just compensation or a commensurate contribution to production, or unjustly, by legal privilege or illegal plunder.
And some capitalists are much greedier than others.
Can you find a willingness to know the difference between owning producer goods and thereby making a contribution to production, and owning privileges that legally entitle the owner to demand a share of production in return for
no contribution to production?
But they all share the idea that markets and capital somehow contain justice.
Consensual exchange inherently contains justice. Property in the fruits of one's labor inherently contains justice. It is property in others' rights to liberty, as embodied in, e.g., a slave deed or land deed, that offends justice.
They really don't TTP. All they do is assign value to something.
Markets
measure value.
And that is kind of fictional when you think about it. It is just we live in a human society that has to think something living and breathing like human beings, land, plants, animals, and nature are somehow controllable, can be sold, and can be objectified.
Land and nature do not live or breathe. Human beings, land, plants and animals can be controlled. Plants and animals can be sold, and so can human beings and land if the law enables it.
And trying to control something that is more powerful than yourself or your human society? Is living in absolute denial.
It's an open question what is more powerful.
You live in denial
No, you do. See above. All socialists and capitalists live in denial of the same fundamental fact of objective physical reality.
you come up with false solutions
No, my solution is the true one, as proved by the success of every attempt to implement it. Yours is the false one, as proved by the failure of every attempt to implement it.
to problems that exist because you can't let control go and accept that the idea of owning a living thing you depend on and in which you can not live without or any other human being can live without and you privatize something that belongs to ALL....is a form of insanity that only healthy sane people can get out of.
Incomprehensible gibberish.
Capitalism is a form of crazy ass insanity out of control.
Capitalism is a system of economic organization based on a mistaken view of what is rightly property -- but not as mistaken as socialism's view of what is rightly property.