[Bytesmiths]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', 'T')he SEC should enact a regulation whereby the compensation scale in any publicly-traded corporation is limited to a maximum of 50 to 1.

[Guest]

Its simple

Once the economy contracts significantly capitalism won't work anymore
It will be like the depression but ten times worse

If its not this bad.. then maybe a Roosevelt style economy will scrape by, but all the people I see here think it will be much worse

Secondly the depression was temporary - peak oil will force the world into conservation mode for the long term. There will be no more consumptionist capitalism

Some of the theories of Marx then begin to look a little more attractive
His great failing was in having a powerful state that HAD to be obeyed
He wasn't a democrat

Democracy is the best thing about the western systems
It seems to be that Bush is heading down the road of changing this ... and the worst combination would be CHINA!. A capitalist dictatorship

Capitalism as-we-know-it is dead

I call it greedy, but all agree it works by continual GROWTH and EXPANSION so an ever increasing population will always have a higher standard of living

A more efficient workforce drives prices down, meaning more things will be produced and consumed with fewer workers

All this relies on ONE thing. Never ending raw materials and energy
Now at least one of those will be taken away

So we have TOO many workers
Too much production capacity and too many useless products
What alternative is there but feed and house them?
Give them jobs that don't contribute much to the economy
Communist countries used to pay people to sweep the streets

The US wastes as much energy as the USSR ever did
It just wastes it more efficiently!

I don' mean not communism OR capitalism
Something different

Perhaps democratic sustainability... ?!?

The alternative is the rich build a walled city and leave the poor majority to exit planet earth somehow, till theres few enough people to support capitalism again
Maybe that walled city is 'America'

Martin

[Bytesmiths]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Anonymous', 'D')emocracy is the best thing about the western systems
It seems to be that Bush is heading down the road of changing this ...

[Chicagoan]

I think the best post-peak government in the United States would be loose federation, like it was originally. To achieve that we first should simplify the byzantine governmental beauracracy and find all instances of waste. Welfare, including the corporate variety, has to go, as should pork barral projects. Most of the governing should be left to the states or local communities. This would bring the government closer to the people and should relieve the tax burden.

Unfortunately that is wishful thinking.

[Bytesmiths]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Chicagoan', 'I') think the best post-peak government in the United States would be loose federation, like it was originally... Most of the governing should be left to the states or local communities.

[goldfishbowl42]

I guess the whole issue is. Do you want to live, and if you do, do think think we should try to help everyone live.

If you want to leave it up to market forces then 4 billion or more will die. The Free Market is a system based stongly around the the simple rules of evolution. Hence why we humans at our current primitive social stage cannot lift ourselves from the basic system of survival of the fitest that is capitalism. If you argue freedom or market forces will solve this, you are correct. It will kill enough of the population for the planet to settle back into a balanced equalibrium that can continue without oil to give us all the food needed for 6 billion. Needless to say with such a huge drop in population we would lose a lot of our technological knowledge in all the chaos that ensues and we would truely be back to at least the dark ages.

If you want to try and hold on to some of this technological gift that oil has given us then we need to quickly implement some form of controlling social system rather than the free market system. Call it Fascism or Communism, they only differ in their belief about money when it comes to the practical implementation. But you need some way of forcing people to do much more basic and manual work than they were brought up to believe they would be doing. they will need to be forced to do this to feed themselves and to feed as many as physically possible.

Your new social system would have to quickly organise people into farming, mass transit and a huge renewable energy push. After a time the new economy would evolve and the dust would begin to settle and some of the more complex section may hopefully make it through the mess. We will hopefully still have some engineers and some builders and some factories making certain useful non-plastic things.

Ideally communism is very different so do not think I am making the mistake of using marx's dreams here, I am talking about a much more forces social system for an interim period, It would just happen to resemble examples we have seen before on this planet of attemps at communism or certain fascist control systems.


Ideally, eventually we will end up with a stable population on this planet and a knowledge based ecconomy rather than a production and possesion based one.

If we fall to far we might never learn the lesson of controlling natures inevitable growth and collapse. We might not make it above stupid creatures.

[Pix]

If you live in a goldfish bowl you may not have noticed the tradgedy that controlled economies are. Perhaps you misunderstand free markets since they were long ago subverted by government control (in the US, UK and almost everywhere else) to the benefit of the minority at the expense of the majority. Controlled economies do not produce what the majority want, but rather produce what the rulers and their friends want. This is abundantly clear in countries like Cuba and the former USSR.

To suggest that you or some government knows what is best for me and that you can deliver that effectiently is the height of arrogance on your part.

If we are entering a period of economic destruction based on less available energy, then does it make sense to pick the most efficient (freedom) or most inefficient (communism, i.e. slavery) economic system.

The fundamental problem is that current population levels only exist because we are eating energy. When energy declines there will be less food. There must be a balance between food and population so it is logical to conclude that population must be reduced. To suggest that communism is the way to go during this upheaval is to increase the number of deaths and maximize the human suffering.

[Bytesmiths]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('goldfishbowl42', 'T')he Free Market is a system based stongly around the the simple rules of evolution. Hence why we humans at our current primitive social stage cannot lift ourselves from the basic system of survival of the fitest that is capitalism.

[gg3]

"Survival of the fittest" is a fallacy of the "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" type (after the fact, therefore because of the fact). Today animals with long legs survive because they can out-run their predators; tomorrow, animals with long arms, because they can out-climb; it all seems so simple and sensible until you get to the fact that large-scale changes in habitat and environment are not ordered, and therefore have an effect that, superimposed over time, is basically random.

In other words, a more accurate rendition would be "survival of the luckiest." And, as anyone of skeptical mindset here knows, "luck" is an unscientific concept that exists purely out of the human emotional need to personalize the impact of random events.

By the way, "fittEST" is an example of the "-ER" fallacy taken to its logical extreme: big, biggER, biggEST; fit, fittER, fittEST, etc. I've covered the topic of the "-ER" fallacy sufficiently elsewhere that it's not useful to repeat here.

In any case, Social Darwinism is neither social nor Darwinian; it is a post-hoc cover story attempting to justify the actions of whoever ends up holding power; it has neither logical consistency nor uniform moral principle.


Re. "consensus." By the way, speaking as someone who has been intimately familiar with it, both in theory and in practice.

The factor that dooms consensus processes above a threshold size limit is the unalterable fact of combinatorial math (this works the same way for the distribution of keys in symmetric-key encryption systems). The number of possible interactions increases combinatorially with respect to the number of participants.

For three participants there are three potential channels of interaction, for four participants there are six channels, for five participants there are ten channels, for six participants there are fifteen, etc. Each new participant adds an interaction with each other participant.

As the number of participants grows, also grows the lag-time for communications to propagate through the network. This is a practical effect of the bandwidth limitations of speaking and listening, writing and reading, so it is not inherent in the math, "merely" inherent in the empirical facts.

The practical result is, consensus systems bog down rapidly. There is no way around this. It is also a problem, though less so, with any direct democracy where there is real participation rather than only voting upon limited ranges of proposals. And this, folks, is why we are, strictly speaking, a *republic.* That is to say, a representative democracy. With all of its faults, true, but none the less.


I'm also intimately familiar with the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC). In fact at the outset, the income spread was limited to 3:1 from top to bottom; and then amended to 4:1; and then it increased from there. But keep in mind that 12:1 and 20:1 are a far cry from the bloated 400:1 or 1000:1 spread that characterizes the US economy in the era of industrial emasculation and the ascendance of the Mickey Mouse "amuse ourselves to death" economy.

Some years ago -heck, a decade ago if memory serves- I developed an adaptation of the Mondragon system for USA conditions. In essence it was something that, in present-day terms, would be called a micro-enterprise incubator. There were apparently a number of attempts to adapt Mondragon to USA conditions, but mine got rave reviews and was considered by many to be the best and most likely to succeed.

The great promise of the Mondragon system is that it combines the very best of both free enterprise and representative democracy, in a practical system that also has the side-effect of inherently encouraging sustainability (local employee-owners of industrial enterprises do not willingly foul their own nests).

It should also be kept in mind that one of the key foundation points of Mondragon was the Christian social doctrine: of the dignity and worth of each person, and the equality of all persons in God's creation. (Here is a form of Christian social & political activism that is long overdue for a return.)

[Bytesmiths]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', 'T')he factor that dooms consensus processes above a threshold size limit is the unalterable fact of combinatorial math...

[Guest]

goldfish you are essentially right
Its NOT arrogant to talk about government's knowing best

Mr Capitalist does your government enforce capitalism on people, does it tell everyone its THE system?
Yes of course they do

And they let their big business cronies have power and become a unelected dictatorship


>If you live in a goldfish bowl you may not have noticed the tradgedy that controlled economies are.

Don't you understand peak oil?
We will be forced to control our economies - when we can't continually expand we will have to conserve resoures and ... gasp... share

>
Perhaps you misunderstand free markets since they were long ago subverted by government control (in the US, UK and almost everywhere else) to the benefit of the minority at the expense of the majority.

I believe in free markets in a sense
I truly do, but its like this:

Your on an island with lots of food, everyone just eats what they want
Then there is a drought and hardly any food is left
Now, you must ration and it must be controlled centrally

BUT, it MUST be democratic
A dictatorship is evil regardless of the economic system
Look at China - capitalist dictatorship
Look at USSR - communist dictatorship
Look at US - capitalism democracy
What we need - communist democracy - nearest we have, look at Europe

>Controlled economies do not produce what the majority want, but rather produce what the rulers and their friends want. This is abundantly clear in countries like Cuba and the former USSR

Captialist economies produce what we want because we are democratic
But look at the politics, the richer classes benefit, the poor lose out

Its state control, give the people good things and we control them

Yes, we want good things but we don't want to be controlled, and we would rather live in a free society with less good things than capitalist fascism

Strong words... but exactly who got us into this mess?
Who uses most of the oil, who is screwing up the environment?

Non-democratic capitalists thats who
Look at Bush pulling out of Kyoto, his policy of grabbing oil
He's the same as China and Russia
Only Europe has any sense, and they are a socialist democracy

Let me ask one thing
If politicians of the right wing, who created an energy sucking global economy that is now going to wreck the world helped create this mess
Why to God should we trust them to get us out of it?

They have FAILED. Time for a change, we'll keep whats good, keep the mobile phones and the internet, change whats bad, and protect democracy with our lives

Martin