Sheldon Richman: on corporatism and the semantics of "capitalism" and "free market"

[Winehole23]

MB catches the thread: Fuzzy Lumpkins catches at his coattails.

[Ignignokt]

No doubt. I think we are a poor example of pluralism as you point out there is virtually no difference but window dressing on half of a dozen social issues. When it comes down to policy, there is little difference especially fiscally for all the obstructionism of the past 3.5 years.

So what do you propose? I think that Germany with its parliamentary system and myriad of political parties is a much better model than either the US or China.

I would love to see political party affiliation removed from ballots. Voting straight along party lines is an abomination.

As long as we still have rep republic and not democracy, i'm fine with it. But ideas change society, not politicians. Politicians are always the last one to go with the flow. You want an example, look at the politicians stance on marijuana compared to the public.

[Ignignokt]

Are you drunk? I never made the comment about facism. The disagreement between Ig an myself was from the basis of objective morality. I never really talked to him about economics

Facism is political theory more than it is economic would be my position. That it has economic implications is just a sidecar.

You drink too much. Try and keep up.

U LIE!!

You completely avoid the salient point in the issue: the notion of good and bad. You can create you own ethic as can any other man. Thus the term subjective. The issue is when you apply your subjective basis of morality to others. Its bull .

Some people like being fat. Some beavers don't build dams. That does not make that person or beaver immoral. It just means they made a choice. Just becuase a bunch of people agree that its 'immoral' does not make that an inherent virtue.

There is zero basis for external rational construct that is irrefutable or absolutely certain. That should be obvious with the use of correlation coefficients. Modern physics just adds more fuel to that fire from a different frame of reference.

No one is going to argue that elite privilege in this country is a major issue. The solution is not to give them free reign. Again there is zero evidence empirically that it works.

Quite the contrary. When it comes down to it. Given free reign elites worm their way into government anyway. Thats the entire point of this article and really what history should have taught you. Look at the behavior of the food, mining, railroad, steel and banking industries of the 19th century.

I have long held that the Cons ution of the country is fundamentally flawed as it does not even consider the oh so fundamental reality of corporate culture. The solution is not to do the same that we have tried before. Neither the status quo or the 19th century.

This is patently false anyway. Before the industrial revolution you had subsistence farming where ppl would live day to day in constant threat of the elemantals and famine. But when 19th century capitalism came in, the standard of living erupted exponentially across the US and Europe that it was the largest expansion of birthrates ever, not only that, but it was the largest movement of poor to middle class that the US has ever seen. The rich to middle class shift kept rising up until the present progressive era to where it flatlined.

When evaluating the merits of capitalism, you must compare it to what came before it.

Before the industrial revolution you had the majority of the ppl live in squalor and poverty. the birthrate was abysmal, and children worked from sun up to sundown. Child labor was not an issue then because the issue was survival. It became an issue later in the capitalist era because living conditions improved, which affected ideas, and thus policy. People were making enough to support the family unit and consider sending their children to school as an investment.

But what Howard Zinn and other historians do is compare capitalism to what we have now. And that is an unfair comparison, because what we have now are direct result of the industrial revolution. The mass production, assembly line, etc, came out of the ideology of the industrial revolution. The progressive era is living off the back of the industrial revolution and is reaping of whatever is left of voluntary exchange.

You want to see what happens when you implement statism to a society which didn't experience much if any and industrial revolution? Look no further than the soviets. The soviets required capitalist financing from the west and infrastructure to implement their system. They wanted the product of capitalism, the milk of the productive cows to distribute it becuase their ideology wasn't fit to allow such an advancement to exist without outside investment.

When we had the closest thing to capitalism, we had the largest expansion of the middle class, explosive birthrate, and largest advancement of human life. Capitalism does work. The market would have solved the problem of child labor, and was already doing so.

Today, employers would have no incentive to hire children to do such things as carpentry, or assembly line work since there would be no state or economic conditions to force such a thing. Along with that you have immigrant labor which is cheaper and more durable than child labor, there would be no incentive for that in a free market where there would be no immigration law.