duncan wrote:tayssir: "Planned economies can use price systems."
How can they? I think you're missing the point of the pricing mechanism.
Soviet planners even copied commodity prices out of The Wall Street Journal to use in their calculations. Lew Rockwell told a wonderful story about Gorbachev’s press secretary. When asked about his dream for mankind, the secretary replied that he hoped to see all of the world embrace socialism, except for New Zealand. “But why not New Zealand?” a reporter wondered. “Well,” the secretary responded, “we will need someone to get the prices from.”
duncan wrote:tayssir: "Planned economies can use price systems."
How can they? I think you're missing the point of the pricing mechanism.
tayssir wrote:duncan wrote:tayssir: "Planned economies can use price systems."
How can they? I think you're missing the point of the pricing mechanism.
The example I gave, Parecon, is a decentralized form of planned economy which happens to use a price mechanism, supply and demand curves, features worker self-management, etc. I already offered a link, and googling for "parecon prices" offers some readable sources.
I should note that people influenced by neoliberal doctrine tend to find this surprising. Because such lit uses the term "planned economy" with a peculiar technical meaning: a centralized state-run command economy like in the old Soviet Union. (When really, outside such narrow technical definitions, my understanding is that a mom 'n pop store is a "command economy.")
These discussions can be difficult because when it comes to societal matters, words lose their traditional meanings. Take "liberal," "conservative," "libertarian" and "anarchist." It's hard to even talk about these things, because words aren't allowed to retain their sane meanings. (Like when radical statist Republican politicians call themselves "conservative." Words don't have to mean anything anymore.)
Jasper wrote:@findinglisp: sorry if i was a little harsh at you. I am not capitalist, but i see capitalism as a tool that should be used to make society function.
The argument for free market usually goes like this: If something is desired, people can make more profit, and so make more, since more people/more is available, when there is too much, they cannot ask as much, and the production/availability of a service goes down. And that way, the supply always meets demand as much as possible.
Frankly this argument is overrated, although it is right to like a simple theory with a simple consequence, it is not right to overgeneralize it. It is not like a mathematical statement, absolutely true when you assume the axioms, and sometimes it plain doesn't apply. Frankly industries in the US abuse it's popularity because they profit from it's flaws. That is part of why i called findinglisp 'dogmatic', what you said are often handles for this sort of thing. Still i was strongly exaggerating for doing so, at that point at least, also abuse of an idea is no argument against an idea.
But the cattle holders and field demonstrates a way that it doesn't work. If there is more demand and supply and too little field, each cattle holder is still enticed to having more cattle, even though that would decrease the total production of the field, decreasing supply. Of course this particular example is solvable, there is probably a reasonably fair way to divide the land, like by divisioning it over the population and allowing the population to sell it to each other, or by doing the same over licensing a number of cows. (Both of these having their advantages.)
This, of course also needs some authority that is obligated too.
So much for stuff analogous to the cattle in this post, now for things to which the argument for free market does not apply.
For instance, if the competition is mostly over quality, the customers must actually recognize it. Sometimes, when it is really technical, this is very difficult for them/they don't do it. An example would be MS near monopoly on the desktop, people just don't compare Linux and Windows.
Although anticompetitive tactics likely also play a role, of course any (reasonable)regulation against these would also be against the liberty of some persons/organizations, and ones probably exist that most people find fair.
Mobile phones is also an example, these are often bundled with service. I am referring to the useless proliferation of power connectors. Luckily the EU is fixing this. In general, i don't think capitalism promotes compatibility, any competitor wants his product compatible with others but not vice versa.
(Aside)As an example where EU restricting something is more dubious: the efficiency of lights (Often erroneously called ban on lightbulbs, that is just an effect of lightbulbs inefficiency.) The problem is that the quality of the light really is different, non-lightbulb light might look white, but doesn't have a smooth spectrum, but such that the cones in our eyes see white. Materials, however, do absorb differently over other frequencies then our cones, so we see the object differently based on other parts of the spectrum.
Still, the regulation might be incentive for creation of more efficient lights that actually do have the quality of the lightbulb.
Another example where things can well be too complicated for consumers, is insurance, insurance companies can put all sort of stuff in small lettering for consumers to fall over. The overall sum of things for consumer to track can also be too high.
And there is the question how long it takes to settle into a place where supply and demand meet.
There is the issue whether some projects are too large to be funded by anyone in particular.
There is the problem of labor also being a part of supply and demand, and the disparity of the ones doing the work and the ones in control and getting the profit.
If there is too much labor, there is poverty in 'pure' capitalism, and there is no reason to assume that there is always more work to be invented.
Also, there is the question whether it is desirable to invent ever more work. Isn't the point to get the work done, and to work to live?
And is supply and demand really a fair way of determining what the earnings of a person should be? Only up to a point i'd say. More egreous is what education people can get from their money, as that affects their chances to change their position. (And 'commercial scholarships' are bound to come with shackles.)
Further, there might be a limited supply of educated people, and if they follow greed those will do the more profitable problems of the rich first. Still if a government wanted less-profitable problems solved, incentivising it and using capitalism is a way. However, universities working not exactly via capitalism have proven their worth in many many things.
findinglisp wrote:Only liberty and capitalism, expressed as the free trade among individuals, have demonstrated consistent results of raising the standards of living.Note the tone though, "individuals expressing themselves by freely trading" vs most of reality; people working for corporations they have no control and possibly no bargaining power over,mostly following it's orders.findinglisp wrote:Sure, there is free trading between individuals. Corporations are simply collections of individuals who come together to run a (generally larger) business. The workers (and even "management" is a "worker") are freely trading their time and energy to the corporation.
As for Einstein, i hope i didn't imply 'look here is Einstein, he must be right'. I do think is insight of the consequences of social things, and overestimate the selflessness of people. . (Well, smart people nearly always project other people as being smarter then they actually are.) Any 'system of society' shouldn't focus on changing people, in finding a way to let them interact such that resulting system is stable and desirable. But i think he was thinking about consequences of the free market applied everywhere, and seeing that it was naive to think that that would always work.
Edit: and oh, yeah current stock exchange, relative variation in month scale: Monsanto ~30%, Philips ~25%, Intel ~25% McDonalds ~10%, these numbers are ridiculous and completely not related to the actual position of the corporations. I have no clue why these fluctuate so much.
Stock exchanges grew from something useful, investing in an enterprise repaying itself if the investor was correct in thinking the idea would work, by contrast stock exchanges seem mostly for milking, while fluctuating (presumably)completely due to speculation.
I am not against investment, and even people selling their investment to other people, but something is wrong..
And it isn't investment if a company is just chugging along with no real growth, then the company didn't need external money in the first place, and is just screwing over it's customers buy having to pay the 'investment' back plus a little.
TheGZeus wrote:findinglisp wrote:Oiacoaic wrote:I have a colleague at work who has described himself as a left-libertarian who also thinks it's okay for the government to ban transfats.
It's a nutritionless poison...
TheGZeus wrote:findinglisp wrote:I don't buy the "corporations are evil" thing spouted by many people (not necessarily you). Corporations can be bad in the same way that individuals can be bad. Corporations by themselves are simply organizational and legal structures for how groups of people can work together; they are inert by themselves. They reflect the attitudes of the people that populate them. Can organizations do bad things? Yup, sure. Can individuals do bad things? Yup, sure. Neither of those facts suggests that individuals involved with a corporation are not trading freely as individuals at all levels.
Corporations can very easily do things no one within them wants, if the bylaws aren't set up strictly and it's publically traded.
tayssir wrote:By the same token, world powers like the US, Germany, Japan, etc, have mixed economies which depend crucially on massive state intervention. (As the US State Dept. explained.)
To be ontopic, Lisp is a great example; it was developed on the public dime through DARPA subsidy,
just like computing and the internet more broadly.
findinglisp wrote:TheGZeus wrote:findinglisp wrote:I don't buy the "corporations are evil" thing spouted by many people (not necessarily you). Corporations can be bad in the same way that individuals can be bad. Corporations by themselves are simply organizational and legal structures for how groups of people can work together; they are inert by themselves. They reflect the attitudes of the people that populate them. Can organizations do bad things? Yup, sure. Can individuals do bad things? Yup, sure. Neither of those facts suggests that individuals involved with a corporation are not trading freely as individuals at all levels.
Corporations can very easily do things no one within them wants, if the bylaws aren't set up strictly and it's publically traded.
Sure, but why is that a problem? Presumably they do something that somebody within them wants? If something is actively done, somebody must be actively doing it.
If you, as an employee disagree with the activities of the corporation, you are free to leave. If it's really illegal, as opposed to merely objectionable, you can report the corporation into the authorities. I see no difference in any of this between a large corporation with 100,000 employees and a small sole-proprietorship with 10 employees.
findinglisp wrote:TheGZeus wrote:[quote="findinglisp"
I think you're stretching things. It's a nutritionless poison in the same sense as tobacco, potato chips, gin, and any number of other things that we allow people to consume. That's far different from something like cyanide which I what I think of when I see "poison."
Note that I'm not arguing for transfats. I think they are bad just like you do. I'm arguing for the freedom for people to create products and to consume whatever they want, whether healthy or unhealthy. If transfats are so bad, I could see a labeling requirement, but not an outright ban.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest