[quote]harduser wrote:
[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Hmmm… so now socialism is supposedly a mix of socialism and capitalism, with capitalism being okay if it’s small enough and the socialists deem that I earned my capital with my work. (Do business management or other intellectual inputs count as work, or only hand labor?)
So in this new version I can own the means of production unless the socialists think it has grown too much, and then I cannot own the bakery anymore, correct? Instead the folk that have been doing the routine hand work there are supposed to own it, or socialists as a whole.
But what if I don’t want to give it over when it is “too big” and employs “too many” people? How will they take it from me if not by government force backed by guns? Perhaps mob rule using fists and clubs?
Precisely how can socialism work except as theft, by those who did not create wealth, from those who do, by violence or threat of violence?
Explain, please. I started the bakery myself, using money I’d earned at other jobs. I did all the work: I earned enough money to expand and hire a worker. This process continued and now my bakery is the size that Marx had in mind. I don’t want to and don’t agree to lose ownership.
Explain how it comes to belong to “the people” or “the workers” save by force and theft.
Also, if there is this threshold between having the bakery that you think it’s okay for me to own, versus achieving more success – providing more goods and services that people find valuable and choose to pay for, as well as providing more jobs for more workers – and thereby having it taken from me, why would I want to produce such an amount of valuable goods and services? Would I not be better off keeping the total value I produce, via my bakery, to something mediocre?[/quote]
I think what he is trying to say is that once you are not baking the goods yourself, but you are the owner of a commune producing bakery, there is a certain “cap” as to how much profit you can put in your pocket, presumably something near the level that the workers get. So this would mean more money for the workers, less for the owners.
I guess you could compare it somewhat to taxes. What happens when you avoid taxes? When you get caught, you have to pay it and you might to jail. So there will probably be a limit how much money the owners and people who don’t produce something can get. If you take more profit and get caught, you probably will have to pay it back and you might go to jail. There must be some sort of a force, eg police, who does the forcing.
I guess you could call taxes theft too, on some level. As for the motivation to own a bakery, perhaps you might get slightly more money and you probably wont have to do so much hard work as the baker.[/quote]
Whatever happened to the definition of socialism as being a system wherein the means of production are not owned by an individual but by the state or social groups?
But let’s grant that the socialists here are talking about a system where supposedly the businesses of people that build them will not be taken away from them regardless of being major means of production – they will continue to own them – but the socialists deem how much income they can keep from the operation, even down to being only a small fraction of the total income earned. How does this differ from fascism? (Private ownership of means of production, but government control.)
If those of you who are socialists, because you are breathing human beings and are therefore entitled, take as much of the income from my bakery as you see fit, you control my bakery, at least so far as I am concerned. When you control what I, the owner and the person who created and built it, can keep from it and decide that I should receive little more than the manual laborers who created nothing except donuts – for which labor they were fully paid for per mutual agreement – that to the owner’s perspective is the biggest control you could have over it. You control the money: you control the business. Because you’re entitled, of course, without having created the business or paid your own money or made any decisions that helped build it, whereas I am not, despite having done all these things.
And why would we be incorrect to call various programs and plans of some politicians “socialist,” which the socialists here always object to and claim that the definition is not met, if their own definition of socialism is private ownership of business with government capping income or taking all but a fraction of income earned?
Lastly, precisely how does the previous claim work that government is not needed when these socialists have it that the business owner should not keep all his income? How are you socialists expecting to take it from him if he doesn’t want to give it, except by force or threat of force?
If not by government, how do those of you who are socialists plan to exert this force?
Or are you all just dreamers who don’t have a clue about the real world…