[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]Kareem Said wrote:
I am very sympathetic to some libertarian principles, but the problem is, just as libertarians say socialism can not work because of human nature, the same goes for capitalism. Adam smith argued that free markets would lead to perfect liberty, but that is reliant upon people not manipulating the system, not creating monopolies and not using wealth to gain political influence to keep their monopoly.
Imperialist enterprise, such as say cocacola or Nestle, they have immense power, they can buy out competition, out price them and shut down any competition. Even if we got rid of the state there would still be a state, but one soley controlled by the ruling class with all the reforms working people have won over the years abolished.
And if you are a libertarian, you also have to be pro unrestricted immigration, pro child labour, anti LLC and anti minimum wage.
You can not choose what government intervention in the market is ok if you are a libertarian. So the reality is in the inner cities millions of children would be working. Production would come back to the first world but because immigration would be so constant global prices would level out, meaning your new wage would be around 2 dollars an hour for the highest and as little as 50 cents a day like in india and china.
With the removal of LLC’s that would mean opening a business would be extremely hard and seldom done, as you would be responsible for the debt of a failed enterprise, which means lengthy prison time and debtors jail, aswell as serfdom for the rest of your life or until you can pay off the debt.
If you couldn’t your next of kin would then owe it.
So now we have stateless prisons, where you could be locked up for as long as the people who make profit from it wish, which will be as long as possible, you will have zero real effective recourse and no state investigations or unbiased intervention, as if it is mere business from a market perspective, the people who control if you can go free and extremely biased to keep you in.
Add onto that the fact wealthy people will be able to pay judges huge amounts for bad convictions as there again will be no way to stop such corruption in an unfettered capitalist free market.
I think human nature is more of a roadblock to capitalism than any other system, because wealth creates influence and influence protects power. Power crushed competition with corruption and wealth, it has never not corrupted the markets. Not once, in any capitalist system.
[/quote]
Yes, government is a necessary evil. Like most thing in life, everything has a balance where things seem to work best.
Just because your POST has all the totalitarian leftists cheering (most don’t even realize they are totalitarian), doesn’t void the fact that you could swap out “capitalism” for “government”, change 1 or 2 details, and have this post be just as valid.
Capitalism is just a description of what people have been doing since the dawn of society. Government too. Both require small groups of people that have power over larger groups of people. People are people… Anarchy will never work, and a simple glance through human history proves this. Total government control will never work, and the same glance proves this as well. The key is the balance.
We have balance, for the most part… (Well, had balance depending on your perspective.) Again, a look through human history shows the closer to a free market a society is, the more prosperous it is, within reason, at least compared to centrally planned. We, as humans aren’t smart enough, live long enough, nor altruistic enough to centrally plan and have it work.
Totally free market is no different that totalitarian government control. [/quote]
Maybe you shouldn’t presume things, seeing as I am against statism, support prison abolition groups and don’t support the state as I believe it is inherently coercive and hierarchal.
I just don’t blindly ignore reality when it comes to unfettered capitalism inevitably leading to corruption, monopoly and then private states as opposed to one nation state.
If you would like to talk about it I would be genuinely interested and open minded to hear your views.
Also I do not mean to be rude, but capitalism is not just a description of what man has been doing since the dawn of time. Capitalism is the last epoch in history thus far, first it was barbarism stateless and we were fighting for a survival as a species. Hunter gather society was structured along semi communal lines, there was no real mode of production to speak of.
Then we had feudalism, production was done by individual workers, the guild master, the serf, constant hierarchies one upon another. No competition, peasantry worked on the rulers land. This mode of production was feudalism and lasted for a long time.
Then came capitalism and that revolutionised the productive mode. It started the division of labour, it was about competition and how much surplus value a business owner could extract from his workforce. It created the capitalist and the proletariat. It brought about private property in a realistic way, even though the workers owned nothing but hunger, it opened the possibility for what we see today, working people owning property like houses and cars.
It meant the rapid growth and industrialisation of the nation, improved conditions dramatically after only a couple of decades and it ushered in the epoch of capitalism.
Now if you didn’t know that very, very basic economic guideline, then maybe you should spent a while reading up some basic economic literature, some adam smith, some marx and bakunin etc. Because until you understand these very simple historical and contemporary economic factors you really can’t hold a realistic and honest debate.