Moderator: Peak Moderation
The tyrant will always find his ideology, it hardly matters what the ideology is.Bandidoz wrote:Is it not the case that the teachings of Marx in French universities lead to spirited leaders such as Pol Pot?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
biffvernon wrote:Arghh, Godwin's law.
True and that's why we have laws to restrict the way the system works. Unrestrained anything is not good: there have to be rules within which to work to protect everyone in the system. Without laws there would in the end, be just one company for which everyone worked and from which everyone bought. Not a good idea from anyone's point of view, unless you were the MD of the one company.stevecook172001 wrote:According to Marx, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. What he was essentially getting at is that the endless competition between industrialist bosses would inevitably lead to a collapse of their customer base. This, in turn, would lead to civil unrest and, eventually, revolution.
An economic transaction is an agreement between two parties to purchase and sell an item at an agreed price. If you think that the person selling is asking too much you don't purchase. If the person selling doesn't make a profit he has no money to pay his taxes, he has no money for research, he has no money to invest in future products and he has no money to buy more raw materials to make the next widget that he sells.The reason for the above is the need for profit. In its most essential form, profit may be defined as a situation whereby you exit an economic transaction with more resources than when you went in.
British Leyland made a loss on every Mini they ever produced. Was that good business? Was that the way we should do our business in the future because that is what you are implying. BL didn't go out of business because the loss was picked up by taxpayer subsidies. The result of this wonderful business practice that you seem to be lauding, Steve, was that every taxpayer in the UK made a loss on every sale of a Mini. On that basis everyone who bought a Mini was guilty of robbing the British taxpayer and should be jailed.In order for anyone to extract a profit, a loss must be incurred by someone, or some thing, somewhere else. Either the supplier of the raw materials makes a loss, or the manufacturer makes a loss, or the retailer makes a loss, or the customer makes a loss, or the workers all the way up the production chain makes a loss. Someone or something has to make a loss.
The above leads to the paradox of a situation where the ideal for any capitalist would be to do away with all workers and automate all production since this would prove to be the most profitable arrangement.
However, those workers are also their customers. Thus, in doing away with them, they have destroyed their customer base's capacity to spend money on buying their products.
.............This is not to say that any system of human organisation would not have run up against the same resource buffers. It's just that capitalism has proved to be very efficient at getting us here. In this sense, whilst resources are available to enable growth to occur, the "loss" is incurred by the Earth itself. [\quote]
True.
................. In a static or contracting economy all profits must be balanced with losses.
True, but not a bad thing. If a new product comes along that displaces another less resource efficient product the company making the new product will displace the old company. A more efficient use of scarce resources will be better for the earth. The resources of the defunct company will be reused/recycled elsewhere and, as long as the profits of the new company are spent, the money will continue to circulate.
Or, to put all of the above more succinctly: Capitalism does not work in a static or contracting economy unless one is prepared to accept considerable levels of bankruptcies/social unrest etc.
That is not true. There is no reason why capitalism should not work in a static economy as long as there is a mechanism to take out businesses that have not improved their products and replace them with businesses that are supplying a similar but more resource efficient product.
Fractional reserve banking (FRB) stimulates and amplifies economic growth by borrowing from the future and so avoids, for a time, the inherent flaw in capitalism. The earth has finite amounts of easily accessible industrial resources eventually resulting in a situation where growth has stopped. Capitalism's inherent flaw is exposed.
You are confusing capitalism with the current system of banking and its requirement for growth. Capitalism existed long before FRB.
... FRB has been yet another weapon in the armoury of capitalism whereby the losses incurred today can be papered over. In FRB's case, by drawing down profits from the future. Thus, economic growth is accelerated under an FRB system of money creation.
You are confusing yourself here because above you were arguing that there should not be profits, now or in the future. And if there are no profits there will be losses, now and in the future.
However, there is a fundamental truth we all know in our guts and which science has merely formalised. Namely, that there is no such thing as free lunch. As long as there are a large amount of resources, we can pretend, for a while, that there is. Once we hit the limits of those resources, though, FRB stops working as a consequence of the future failing to honour the FRB promises of today. At that point, we get economic collapse (the current crisis is the beginning of that collapse). From now on in, in order for profits to be maintained, someone has to lose for someone else to gain.
And so we will all lose because if there is no profit there will be a loss at some time. As long as people add their efforts to the available physical resources they add value to those resources.
Capitalism is not over but the paying and receiving of interest must be over because growth is over. The accumulation of money must be stopped and making money from money, usury, must once again be a crime. In order for any system to work money must circulate continuously. If it doesn't the system will eventually stop working as it is now.Perpetual economic growth is over. A money supply that is increased over time via FRB credit is over. Capitalism is over. The future will be either some form of socialism or a return to serfdom for the majority
The accumulation of large amounts of money in a few hands and its use to make more money from money rather than from the production of capital goods or works is one of the factors breaking the system. The accumulation of large amounts of money in a few hands has necessitated the creation of money from debt in an effort to keep the system going.
That's not to say that, in the future, some people will not be richer than others in that they will have more stuff than others. The only way to stop that would be to make it illegal for one person to work harder than another!
Paying somebody for something is not a loss to the person who pays the money because they receive something in return that has a value. In the future everything will have value because it will consist of scarce physical/material resources which will have to be continuously reused or recycled. The loss of value in the purchase will come when the purchase ceases to be useful to the purchaser, just as happens now. That loss in value will be the loss of the energy put into making the product and the loss of the input labour. The value of the materials it is made from will be retained, unlike now as it would now be considered rubbish. That total value will be reinstated once someone has put some more physical effort and energy into remaking/remodelling the material resource. There will be no rubbish collections because what is not wanted by one person will have to be reused by another.
I don't mind my views being contradicted at all. I am unsure as to where I have indicated otherwise. Your critical response, to my post, by the way, was a very comprehensive and thougthful one and one I intend to reply to fully.kenneal wrote:He was castigated in writing because some people believe that what he said, or the inferences that he drew, were wrong. This forum is for discussion of issues not just a place to come and get your back patted for having the right, or should I say left, views. So if you don't like your views contradicted, and can't justify them, don't put them up.
One of the reasons that I didn't want RGR banned was this tendency for groups of people to reject any criticism of what is seen as the correct view. RGR banned first, then The Inspector, then Dom, then Snowhope, me to follow. It would end up with a left wing, PO causes everything, CC can't be argued against, anti Thatcher, anti Tory, Grauniad reading, ego stroking bag of wind with no other sensible content.
May?"There are reasons to think", Chang says, "that economists may be positively harmful for the economy" and "for most people".
Thanks E. I'll take a look.emordnilap wrote:+1 to what Biff said.
Indeed, Kenneal's responses, even though he's on another side of an ideological fence, are always worth reading; it shows what is possible. Others take note.
Steve, you might be interested in this:
http://www.socialistparty.net/theory/75 ... -uncovered
a review of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. Fascinating.
May?"There are reasons to think", Chang says, "that economists may be positively harmful for the economy" and "for most people".
