OK, so to be clear, neither of you have anything to say? Am I supposed to be surprised?
Um, I’ll remind you that there’s a 1,284 word post up there waiting on you that refutes you point-by-point, that you have failed to respond to, you fucking idiot.
Please save some face, and bow out now. You have lost this argument too, and your mysterious digressions and obscurantism only underscores that fact. Nothing you wrote here has the first thing to do with proving socialism’s supposed superiority. I thought you had an argument? When you feel like addressing the topic, let me know. Meanwhile, this does nothing to explain anything from your perspective…
Um, I’ll remind you that there’s several posts up there waiting on you that refutes you point-by-point, that you have failed to respond to with an intelligent repsonse, you socialist . . .
[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
OK, so to be clear, neither of you have anything to say? Am I supposed to be surprised?[/quote]
My cousin had a chihuahua just like you. It was a yippy little thing that thought quite alot of himself. It would puff itself up and attack my pant leg while we all laughed. Neither of you have much real bite, but you’re both kinda amusing to watch. LOL
When you’re done, this is waiting on you:
[quote][quote]IrishSteel wrote:Where to begin? I stared at your model for some time. I examined the lack of any actual concrete “how” in your explanation.
Let’s just start with 1A. Foundational flaw = Not all resources, production or products are collectively produced.[/quote]
Wow, you wasted no time. This is obviously wrong, and you know it, and your contention to the contrary can only be an attempt to sidestep this hurdle. It is impossible not to notice that there is essentially no such thing as an independent producer anymore, and even to the extent that there is, he does not supply himself with his own materials. Inputs are commodities too, but your model treats them as if they fall from heaven. Today’s division of labor guarantees that everything is collectively produced, and in a sense must be, to maintain a high level of efficiency.
Again you demonstrate that you are unable to get past the shiny packaging and attractive marketing of capitalism to actually examine the product. On the contrary, the Marxist analysis is far ahead of yours, which does nothing but repeat idealizations and misinformation. Any inherent equality in capitalism is imagined, and begs the question of whether your eyes and ears function correctly. Look around you: bankers, who used other people’s money to speculate on risky assets, and then lost their shirts get bailed out and receive record-breaking bonuses to boot. The oil industry is responsible for one of the biggest environmental disasters in history, and they begin lobbying for more drilling. It was even worse in the 19th century, and in developing countries today, to which we have exported many of the important functions of capitalism. Do you think the workers in the “dark satanic mills” of the 19th century (which was much closer to your pined-for pure capitalism, and was commensurably fuller of flaws and contradictions for it) saw any “inherent equality” in the system that made them work 16 hours a day beside their children for meager wages that many times were not even paid in cash?
This is one of the most unequal societies on Earth, and it is also where capitalism is embraced in a “purer” form than most other places in the world. This is not a coincidence. Just look at how uneven is the growth in income over the last several years:
If you accuse me of “not getting” or “not understanding” your argument (strange, when all it is is the same old propaganda the right has spewing for years; not exactly stultifying), then you’re going to have to do better than giving me these standard lines. This is pure fantasy, and I think you know it. The average citizen has no chance of acquiring a significant stake in any endeavor. Take another look at the chart I provided, and in light of that information, please explain to me how average people are supposed to become owners of means of production with a dwindling share of society’s total wealth.
This all sounds very nice on paper, but I am not interested in what happens on paper. In reality, people under capitalism are subject to various economic forces which, though technically leave them free to choose whichever course of action they wish, in reality impel them toward certain decisions. Such as your statement: “I can sit on it and build a rose garden if I so choose.” In that case, your money is simply sitting there, going to waste and essentially inacessible, so in reality no one would do this. Funnily enough, you can only reach these conclusions by essentially ignoring economic forces. In other situations, when arguing against the feasibility of socialism, you constantly invoke these market forces, so it seems suspicious that they disappear when it is convenient for you. Furthermore, your rosy scenario, though oversimplified, only holds at all for the employers, and is totally wrong with respect to employees, or those who sell their labor-power. In other words, it is totally wrong for the vast majority of society.
If you own your gold mine, you have an obvious source of income. If I am a worker who needs a job, and we negotiate over wages, are we equal? Of course not, which is a concrete (or real-world) fact that you ignore in your propagandizing. Capitalist theorists can only arrive at these nice-sounding conclusions about capitalism by ignoring the material facts of capitalism. If I am the worker, I have no assets except my labor-power, and am not able to support myself for very long if I am out of work (and the Libertarians propose to further stack the deck against me, by eliminating social welfare programs), and thus we enter the negotiations on very uneven footing. The capitalist has a large advantage, which is evident to anyone with a brain, but which this chart and this article helps to make clear:
“It’s a big puzzle,” said Josh Bivens, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute. “If this is a knowledge economy, how come the brains aren’t being compensated? Instead, the owners of physical capital are getting the rewards.”
So now that we have established the emptiness of your objection, let’s move on to the next alleged flaw.
Sorry, again you are flat wrong:
“Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries (based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs).”
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=377#key
You attempt to get around this via a weasely definition of “profits,” i.e., you expand the definition from its traditional denotation of the returns on investment to include all sort of other things. But this doesn’t help you either, because wages in this country have been stagnant for the last 30 years. Chart:
http://www.eoionline.org/images/constantcontact/wpr/2009/fig1_ProdWages.jpg
Not surprisingly, the mistake here is again yours. I can understand why you would wish to broaden the definition of “profit,” but in addition to the fact that it doesn’t really help your case, this expansion makes the word essentially useless. Following the logic of your example, any exertion or economic activity could be classified as an investment, and thus through obfuscation you have rendered the word unintelligible. On the contrary, the traditional definition of the word is not only much more useful but, again contrary to your claims, goes much further toward explaining the “capitalist engine,” which is not wealth exchange, but profit-seeking. “Wealth-exchange” could be satisfied by any economic transaction, even a losing one. No no, actors in the capitalist system do not go to market in order to “exchange wealth,” which would result in no orderly pattern of exchange, but they go to market to maximize profits, or utility. Thus, we see that simple “wealth-exchange” can never be an adequate mechanism to explain capitalism. Profitability survives your critique intact as the regulating mechanism of a capitalist society.
Amusingly, in your attempt to sidestep criticism, you have drifted pretty close to the labor theory of value.
Danger, danger! Step back, you’re about to fall headlong into Marx’s trap!
It is evident you have learned nothing from my explanations of socialism, since apparently you imagine that we are Democrats, and that we simply wish to reform capitalism. When I say “abolish capitalism,” I really do mean it, and I do not simply propose to attach a socialist method of distribution onto the existing capitalist state and method of production. Monopolization is the antithesis of socialism (just look at the word, for Christ’s sake), which proposes that society take collective control of the resources that it has built.
Actually, you are wrong about almost every single thing you have said in this post, which I have demonstrated. I have also identified the source of your errors, which is taking an analysis of the ideals of capitalism for an analysis of the real thing, and consequently by ignoring the concrete material forces that drive society.
Fun fact: it was largely the labor unions and the socialists that pressed for public education here in the US.[/quote]
[quote]bigflamer wrote:
[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
OK, so to be clear, neither of you have anything to say? Am I supposed to be surprised?[/quote]
My cousin had a chihuahua just like you. It was a yippy little thing that thought quite alot of himself. It would puff itself up and attack my pant leg while we all laughed. Neither of you have much real bite, but you’re both kinda amusing to watch. LOL
[/quote]
So again, nothing to say?
[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
Um, I’ll remind you that there’s a 1,284 word post up there waiting on you that refutes you point-by-point, that you have failed to respond to, you fucking idiot.
[/quote]
Careful there Irish, he’s gettin’ all angry and stuff.
I know - sad, really. I had a suspicion that the only language he understood was his own, so I repeated it back to him- and guess what - he understood it perfectly . . .amazing!
gasp
You mean, neither one of you has anything to say? You mean you were full of shit this entire time?
No, little one, as soon as you post something of substance, we’ll be happy to answer you, but as long as all you can manage is to throw your pablum everywhere, we’ll just happily go on . . .
why do people in here just say that a person is wrong, without backing it up with some arguments to why a person is wrong. this is what you guys are doing to ryan now. irish I tought you were more serious than many here, but this shitkrieg against ryan is very similar to the moronic behavior thats so common here.
[quote]florelius wrote:
why do people in here just say that a person is wrong, without backing it up with some arguments to why a person is wrong. this is what you guys are doing to ryan now. irish I tought you were more serious than many here, but this shitkrieg against ryan is very similar to the moronic behavior thats so common here. [/quote]
Flo, you’ll have to understand that Ryan is the one who brings the personal accusations into the discussion. If you will look over my detalied and lengthy posts in response to his arguement - you will find no personal attacks within them. I address his points in context and with detail - his response speaks for itself.
Did I not patiently await his best argument and did I not provide him with a directly related point by point comparison of his theory and mine?
I have enjoyed our exchanges, and I think I have proven myself worthy of discussing all sorts of point-counterpoint exchanges. With Ryan, however, he resorts to nothing more than ad homen attacks and snide comments rather than rational discourse on the subject at hand.
I as mentioned in my earlier post - it’s like talking to a brick wall or someone speaking a foereign language. I can talk all I want - but what comes back is entirely unrelated to the discussion at hand.
He refuses to actually listen or exchange ideas, instead he relies on berating everyone, insulting them, making all sorts of unrelated postulations and then when we stand there scratching our heads in amazament at the poo-flinging monkey (yes that was a personal attack) - he then mistakes our amused bewilderment at his pseudo-intellectual arrogance-induced coniption fits as proof that he was right in whatever socialist babble and marxist pablum he managed to spit up during his post . . . .
I find him the intellectual equivalent of a sneeze . . . whatever happened to be in his skull at the moment of the event is what gets spewed out onto the crowd . . .
I do believe I’ve made my opinion of him quite clear.
I am more than happen to have an adult conversation with anyone of any intellectual level . . . someday maybe he will grow up . . . .
[quote]IrishSteel wrote:
[quote]florelius wrote:
why do people in here just say that a person is wrong, without backing it up with some arguments to why a person is wrong. this is what you guys are doing to ryan now. irish I tought you were more serious than many here, but this shitkrieg against ryan is very similar to the moronic behavior thats so common here. [/quote]
Flo, you’ll have to understand that Ryan is the one who brings the personal accusations into the discussion. If you will look over my detalied and lengthy posts in response to his arguement - you will find no personal attacks within them. I address his points in context and with detail - his response speaks for itself.
Did I not patiently await his best argument and did I not provide him with a directly related point by point comparison of his theory and mine?
I have enjoyed our exchanges, and I think I have proven myself worthy of discussing all sorts of point-counterpoint exchanges. With Ryan, however, he resorts to nothing more than ad homen attacks and snide comments rather than rational discourse on the subject at hand.
I as mentioned in my earlier post - it’s like talking to a brick wall or someone speaking a foereign language. I can talk all I want - but what comes back is entirely unrelated to the discussion at hand.
He refuses to actually listen or exchange ideas, instead he relies on berating everyone, insulting them, making all sorts of unrelated postulations and then when we stand there scratching our heads in amazament at the poo-flinging monkey (yes that was a personal attack) - he then mistakes our amused bewilderment at his pseudo-intellectual arrogance-induced coniption fits as proof that he was right in whatever socialist babble and marxist pablum he managed to spit up during his post . . . .
I find him the intellectual equivalent of a sneeze . . . whatever happened to be in his skull at the moment of the event is what gets spewed out onto the crowd . . .
I do believe I’ve made my opinion of him quite clear.
I am more than happen to have an adult conversation with anyone of any intellectual level . . . someday maybe he will grow up . . . .[/quote]
hm… yes you should have kudos for the detailed posts of your wiew on capitalisme and socialisme a bit back in this tread. but after what I read, ryan answered your detailed posts with detailed posts. and your answer to him was that he did not get it or something similar… without explaining why he did not get or was wrong etc. and then offcourse bigflamer jumped in and it became an official shitfest. ryan gets alot of shit on this board because hes wiews are so different from the wiews of the conservatives, libertarians and the liberals. and because he manage to back up hes wiews with intellegent arguments, that are hard to counter. He offcourse then gives shit back, because its normal on this forum. just look at all the older treads about socialisme etc and you can see for yourself have many personal attacks and irrelevant arguments that have been directed against ryan.
[quote]IrishSteel wrote:
No, little one, as soon as you post something of substance, we’ll be happy to answer you, but as long as all you can manage is to throw your pablum everywhere, we’ll just happily go on . . .[/quote]
Oh good! Then you won’t mind responding to this:
[quote][quote]IrishSteel wrote:Where to begin? I stared at your model for some time. I examined the lack of any actual concrete “how” in your explanation.
Let’s just start with 1A. Foundational flaw = Not all resources, production or products are collectively produced.[/quote]
Wow, you wasted no time. This is obviously wrong, and you know it, and your contention to the contrary can only be an attempt to sidestep this hurdle. It is impossible not to notice that there is essentially no such thing as an independent producer anymore, and even to the extent that there is, he does not supply himself with his own materials. Inputs are commodities too, but your model treats them as if they fall from heaven. Today’s division of labor guarantees that everything is collectively produced, and in a sense must be, to maintain a high level of efficiency.
Again you demonstrate that you are unable to get past the shiny packaging and attractive marketing of capitalism to actually examine the product. On the contrary, the Marxist analysis is far ahead of yours, which does nothing but repeat idealizations and misinformation. Any inherent equality in capitalism is imagined, and begs the question of whether your eyes and ears function correctly. Look around you: bankers, who used other people’s money to speculate on risky assets, and then lost their shirts get bailed out and receive record-breaking bonuses to boot. The oil industry is responsible for one of the biggest environmental disasters in history, and they begin lobbying for more drilling. It was even worse in the 19th century, and in developing countries today, to which we have exported many of the important functions of capitalism. Do you think the workers in the “dark satanic mills” of the 19th century (which was much closer to your pined-for pure capitalism, and was commensurably fuller of flaws and contradictions for it) saw any “inherent equality” in the system that made them work 16 hours a day beside their children for meager wages that many times were not even paid in cash?
This is one of the most unequal societies on Earth, and it is also where capitalism is embraced in a “purer” form than most other places in the world. This is not a coincidence. Just look at how uneven is the growth in income over the last several years:
If you accuse me of “not getting” or “not understanding” your argument (strange, when all it is is the same old propaganda the right has spewing for years; not exactly stultifying), then you’re going to have to do better than giving me these standard lines. This is pure fantasy, and I think you know it. The average citizen has no chance of acquiring a significant stake in any endeavor. Take another look at the chart I provided, and in light of that information, please explain to me how average people are supposed to become owners of means of production with a dwindling share of society’s total wealth.
This all sounds very nice on paper, but I am not interested in what happens on paper. In reality, people under capitalism are subject to various economic forces which, though technically leave them free to choose whichever course of action they wish, in reality impel them toward certain decisions. Such as your statement: “I can sit on it and build a rose garden if I so choose.” In that case, your money is simply sitting there, going to waste and essentially inacessible, so in reality no one would do this. Funnily enough, you can only reach these conclusions by essentially ignoring economic forces. In other situations, when arguing against the feasibility of socialism, you constantly invoke these market forces, so it seems suspicious that they disappear when it is convenient for you. Furthermore, your rosy scenario, though oversimplified, only holds at all for the employers, and is totally wrong with respect to employees, or those who sell their labor-power. In other words, it is totally wrong for the vast majority of society.
If you own your gold mine, you have an obvious source of income. If I am a worker who needs a job, and we negotiate over wages, are we equal? Of course not, which is a concrete (or real-world) fact that you ignore in your propagandizing. Capitalist theorists can only arrive at these nice-sounding conclusions about capitalism by ignoring the material facts of capitalism. If I am the worker, I have no assets except my labor-power, and am not able to support myself for very long if I am out of work (and the Libertarians propose to further stack the deck against me, by eliminating social welfare programs), and thus we enter the negotiations on very uneven footing. The capitalist has a large advantage, which is evident to anyone with a brain, but which this chart and this article helps to make clear:
“It’s a big puzzle,” said Josh Bivens, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute. “If this is a knowledge economy, how come the brains aren’t being compensated? Instead, the owners of physical capital are getting the rewards.”
So now that we have established the emptiness of your objection, let’s move on to the next alleged flaw.
Sorry, again you are flat wrong:
“Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries (based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs).”
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=377#key
You attempt to get around this via a weasely definition of “profits,” i.e., you expand the definition from its traditional denotation of the returns on investment to include all sort of other things. But this doesn’t help you either, because wages in this country have been stagnant for the last 30 years. Chart:
http://www.eoionline.org/images/constantcontact/wpr/2009/fig1_ProdWages.jpg
Not surprisingly, the mistake here is again yours. I can understand why you would wish to broaden the definition of “profit,” but in addition to the fact that it doesn’t really help your case, this expansion makes the word essentially useless. Following the logic of your example, any exertion or economic activity could be classified as an investment, and thus through obfuscation you have rendered the word unintelligible. On the contrary, the traditional definition of the word is not only much more useful but, again contrary to your claims, goes much further toward explaining the “capitalist engine,” which is not wealth exchange, but profit-seeking. “Wealth-exchange” could be satisfied by any economic transaction, even a losing one. No no, actors in the capitalist system do not go to market in order to “exchange wealth,” which would result in no orderly pattern of exchange, but they go to market to maximize profits, or utility. Thus, we see that simple “wealth-exchange” can never be an adequate mechanism to explain capitalism. Profitability survives your critique intact as the regulating mechanism of a capitalist society.
Amusingly, in your attempt to sidestep criticism, you have drifted pretty close to the labor theory of value.
Danger, danger! Step back, you’re about to fall headlong into Marx’s trap!
It is evident you have learned nothing from my explanations of socialism, since apparently you imagine that we are Democrats, and that we simply wish to reform capitalism. When I say “abolish capitalism,” I really do mean it, and I do not simply propose to attach a socialist method of distribution onto the existing capitalist state and method of production. Monopolization is the antithesis of socialism (just look at the word, for Christ’s sake), which proposes that society take collective control of the resources that it has built.
Actually, you are wrong about almost every single thing you have said in this post, which I have demonstrated. I have also identified the source of your errors, which is taking an analysis of the ideals of capitalism for an analysis of the real thing, and consequently by ignoring the concrete material forces that drive society.
Fun fact: it was largely the labor unions and the socialists that pressed for public education here in the US.[/quote]
Yes, you’re quite happy to have a conversation with anyone who either agrees with you or is easy to refute. However, if they prove you wrong, as I have repeatedly, you take your ball and go home.
You wanted an argument for socialism. You pitched a fit and belittled me until I gave you one. Well now you’ve got one, so quit whining and quit making excuses. Put up or shut up.
[quote]florelius wrote:
why do people in here just say that a person is wrong, without backing it up with some arguments to why a person is wrong. this is what you guys are doing to ryan now. irish I tought you were more serious than many here, but this shitkrieg against ryan is very similar to the moronic behavior thats so common here. [/quote]
Thanks Florelius. The funniest (or saddest, or most brazen, depending on your point of view) part is, he doesn’t manage to respond to one single thing that I say, while somehow insisting, at the same time, that I have said nothing. This is generally known as hypocrisy. He is too much of a coward to respond, or to admit his palpable ignorance, so he has to pretend to be right, despite all evidence to the contrary, while hoping no one notices that he has repeatedly failed to respond to my lengthy post.
[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
[quote]florelius wrote:
why do people in here just say that a person is wrong, without backing it up with some arguments to why a person is wrong. this is what you guys are doing to ryan now. irish I tought you were more serious than many here, but this shitkrieg against ryan is very similar to the moronic behavior thats so common here. [/quote]
Thanks Florelius. The funniest (or saddest, or most brazen, depending on your point of view) part is, he doesn’t manage to respond to one single thing that I say, while somehow insisting, at the same time, that I have said nothing. This is generally known as hypocrisy. He is too much of a coward to respond, or to admit his palpable ignorance, so he has to pretend to be right, despite all evidence to the contrary, while hoping no one notices that he has repeatedly failed to respond to my lengthy post.[/quote]
I did respond, you do have nothing to say - all you have is conjecture and hypothesis backed up by unproven theory . . . .
1st Paragraph - ability to gather resources does not negate independence of production, because the producer can always find new sources of raw materials. What you cal collective is an aberration of the concept.
2P - your fall back position - criticize capitalism, offer no real-world solution
3P - more attack, no substance, zero-sum concept of wealth
4P - I have no idea how you miss the obvious, but you do it very well, your concept of equality is “fairness”
5P - your answer had nothing conclusion to disprove my definition of profit . . .
6P - you response is that my definition moves the concept beyond your theory so it is invalid . . .
7P to the end - nothing but your opinions on various topics . …
Sorry, you lose again:
[quote]IrishSteel wrote:
So disappointed, but I should have known better . . .oh well.[/quote]
I understand your disappointment at constantly being intellectually “pantsed,” but you do keep asking for it.
Gee, your seven bullet points sure were convincing, but I think maybe I’ll take a crack at responding anyhow.
As for this one, what on God’s green Earth does “ability to gather resources” have to do with this? Actually, Milton Friedman uses a great example that is relevant here. To make a pencil, workers in some country chop down trees and produce the wood for it, while workers, perhaps in another country, provide the metal for the band which attaches the eraser, made from rubber, probably from a different country, provided by differend workers. This is one lousy pencil. Yet you somehow contend that not all commodities are collectively produced? Please explain to me how your response is not blatant obfuscation and hand-waving in an attempt to dismiss an argument that you have lost? I would love to hear it.
And again you demonstrate your short attention span: the solutions which socialism offers come out of the criticism of capitalism, just as the solutions of capitalism came out of the classical economists’ critique of previous economic arrangements.
This error come to us via a confusion of “wealth” and “value.” All of your posts are riddled with vague, sloppy use of terms. You’re confusing yourself.
I really have no idea what you’re trying to say here. It’s obvious you’re very confused (it happens when trying to mount a consistent defense of a contradictory system). You made the statement that “no one is coerced to do anything.” I simply noted that you could technically be correct by ignoring the economic and material forces in society. I’m sorry it angers you that I have introduced the real world into the discussion.
No, but it did outline why it is a stupid, and non-standard definition.
NOt that it is invalid, but that it is useless.
More sloppy use of terms.
I suppose I accept your surrender. If all you can manage is bullet points, and do not address any of the factual information I posted that contradicts your statement, then you are done.
Are you seriously asking me if I have nothing of substance to say, when you respond to a 1,284 word post with seven bullet points? Seriously? 178 words to 1,284, and I’m the one with nothing to say? Please explain this, as you owe an explanation for this confusing allegation. Don’t ignore this, as you did everything in my post. You must explain how your response is anything other than the desperate attempt to extricate yourself from an argument you have lost that it appears to be. Put up or shut up.