[jaws]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ohanian', 'J')aws,

I would like to give a proof that when the cost of a product goes down the selling price may not go down.

Take Nike's shoes. Nike's shoe cost $2 to make but they sell for $70.

Now at one time in the past, Nike's shoe cost $10 to make but now they only cost $2 to make.

According to you, as the cost of a product drops, the selling price of the product drops as well to maximize the profit (quantity sold * (selling price - cost) ).

Now why didn't the price of Nike's shoes drop?

I bet you cannot explain that with your silly economic dogma.

[jaws]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rogerhb', 'J')aws, another one.

The Vic 20 and the Commodore 64, both successful machines, the 64 was successor to the 20. The 64 cost half the price of the 20 to make but sold at twice the price. No, no, no, profit had nothing to do with this.

[jaws]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Raxozanne', '
')I was wondering if this is the governments 'socialism' wrong doing and you say that socialism is *bad* and free market is *good* if I understand correctly. I was wondering what would happen if there was no government or no national army? Would there be a police force and a law? If armies were privatised and any company could buy an army what would stop the companies from commiting actrocities if they could afford it? Who would police it? Would there be a law to enforce?

[jaws]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Macsporan', 'S')carcity can be significantly alleviated with money and redistributive taxation and social programs. Inequality ditto.

[cheRand]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')t's one thing to say that you want to make labour unions stronger, but you must explain how making labor unions stronger improves the lives of everyone. That you cannot do without economics so you must simply do it by blind faith, because economics concludes that labor unions are only a redistributive scheme taking from one group of poor workers and giving to another priviledged group of poor workers.

[jaws]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cheRand', 'A')nd it is the same with private property. Just as labor unions are a special interest group, so are property owners. Economics concludes that private property are only a redistributive scheme taking from one group of hunter-gatherers and giving to another privileged group of feudalists. Is the role of government to institutionalize the relationship between the favored Special Interest (property owners) and the disfavored Special Interest (landless persons)?

[cheRand]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')t's ridiculous to claim that the landless are not property owners. Very few people are actually interested in owning land other than those who believe they are best served by being productive farmers. If you think there is a conflict between land owners and non-land owners, then there must also be a conflict between car owners and non-car owners, house owners and renters, gold-owners and debtors, etc. There is no such conflict because one's property is determined by choice and the general consensus in society is that we respect the property of others because we desire that they respect our property in return. Those who don't respect property, aka thieves, are jailed. Or elected.

[Macsporan]

While I enjoy refuting your nonsense, do you have to make it so easy for me?

(There lies the problem. Scarcity has not at all been alleviated in this scenario. There are no more goods available than can be produced by the most productive men. Redistribution does not alter scarcity; it simply takes by force from one group of people and gives to another more privileged group. In this process scarcity actually INCREASES since the more productive groups will see no point in laboring to produce goods that will be taken from them anyway.)

This is the chief area where Capitalist economics is in error. Poverty is not caused by scarcity but by mal-distribution, which is in turn caused by the greedy taking from the needy. Thus the idea that it increases poverty is nonsense, both in theory, and most importantly in practice. Poverty and desperation decrease under redistributive Social Democracy and increase under laissez-faire Capitalism.

Once again you did not read or failed to note my post. It does not matter how much so-called “wealth” has been created, if it is not in the hands of the people who work for it, it might as well be on the moon. And who ever heard of a Capitalist “labouring”? What a comical concept. They skim the cream off the labour of others. It is funny too how Capitalists, and their economist toadies, don’t seem to mind wealth being taken from them to fund armies and fleets that enforce their corrupt dominion on others, but get serious attacks of the vapours, and go on whiny ‘capital strikes’ when Social Democratic governments take ‘their’ wealth from them for necessary social purposes.

(It's one thing to say that you want to make labour unions stronger, but you must explain how making labour unions stronger improves the lives of everyone.)

I’ll leave you to work that out for yourself but I’ll give you a clue: redistribution, social welfare, public infrastructure.

(That you cannot do without economics so you must simply do it by blind faith, because economics concludes that labor unions are only a redistributive scheme taking from one group of poor workers and giving to another privileged group of poor workers.)

I do not know whether you are being deliberately obtuse or whether you really are as stupid as you appear. At the moment I’m inclining towards the latter. It must be obvious by now that nobody here believes in your fatuous Capitalist economics. That it would have some bizarre theoretical construct, in defiance of history and reason, why Unions make everyone poorer, does not astonish me in the least. Since Capitalism is based on exploitation of Labour (and just about everyone and everything else) or course Economics, Capitalism’s toad-eating lackey, opposes Unions, which are all about the protection of Labour.

Economists are the bought priesthood of the Capitalist System as you so readily and ably confirm with every keystroke you type, so I really don’t care what Economists say. They are corrupt liars, especially when they have the hide to talk about anyone other than their Capitalist overlords taking from the poor and giving to the privileged.

As for ‘blind faith’ take a look in the mirror.

Reality is vastly different. Where Unions thrive there is general prosperity and Social Justice. Where they are suppressed inequality and poverty reign, yes and that includes communist countries too, which is the chief reason why Capitalist corporations are falling all over each other to get a bit of Chinese action.

(Human rights, environmental regulations and labour rights are all foundations of the capitalist system.)

Where do you keep your flying saucer? Once more, with typical Rightwing arrogance you are claiming the victories of the Left. The Capitalist system did not concede these things out of benevolence, but fought them tooth and nail on the way in and is trying to get rid of them as fast as it can now. Capitalist hate Human Rights because they limit exploitation and the arbitrary power over their underlings they so corruptly desire; they hate environmental regulations because they diminish profits; they hate Labour Rights for the same reason they hate Human Rights. Whatever sentimental guff they teach people at economist boot camp, this is the way capitalists behave in practice. The evidence for this is overwhelming. If you gainsay it you are in the same boat as the Holocaust Deniers.

The only foundations of the Capitalist system are profitability and wealth and power for Capitalists. The rest of us they look upon as human cattle, as is represented by the Slave Trade, the Caribbean Sugar Gulags, the Conquest of India, the Opium Wars and other historical episodes of a more modern nature, such as the factories and coal-mines of the pre-Union Industrial Revolution, Imperialism, Wars of Conquest, Globalisation, the Race to the Bottom you can never bring yourself to face up to.

(The problem is that you are not satisfied with their structure from your position of achieving a privilege for one group of people over another group.)

No, I leave that sort of behaviour to Capitalists. I actually wish to see it limited, or even eventually abolished.

(But that's exactly what happened. The first colonial expansions of Europe were global trade enterprises.)

But no it isn’t. The first colonial expansions were plundering and slaving expeditions by the Spanish and Portuguese operating out of Cadiz and Lisbon, not Venice and Antwerp.

(Holland, a tiny country with no resources by any standard, achieved vast colonial holdings because it had a pre-capitalist society.)

That’s really strange, because exactly the same thing could be said of Spain and Portugal.

(At one point they were even able to invade England and overthrow the monarchy.)

This is an insolent oversimplification of the Glorious Revolution of 1688; the Dutch monarchs were invited by the English ruling elite who found the Stuart Kings pro-Catholic antics tiresome and dangerous.

(Other countries began to imitate Holland's social institutions to achieve a power as great as theirs. That's how the British Empire came into being. That's what gave Adam Smith the inspiration to study the issue and formulate the principles in a book.)

That is true so far as it goes. The Dutch invented the joint stock company and the stock exchange, but what really gave the British the edge was not Capitalism as such but sound public finances via the Bank of England a State Institution, and the British Navy and army, also State institutions. However they were run on very nasty capitalist lines: of penny-pinching parsimony and enslavement by Press Gang on one hand, and ‘conscription by hunger’ on the other.

Be that as it may this is not what you said earlier. You claimed that Europe expanded because they discovered the secret of wealth creation. European expansion, as I have said, and as the historical record clearly shows, was caused by no such thing. It was made possible by superior technology. It was motivated by a Renaissance curiosity about the world, religious fanaticism, unscrupulous brutality and pure greed.

The later Anglo-Dutch system, which came later, was simply a more efficient predator, with a different religion which we call ‘Economics’, but it rested on the same brutality and the same greed. Viewed from the toffy-nosed London coffee-houses of the 18th century where Adam Smith and his patrons hung out it seems very glorious and wonderful; viewed from the perspective of virtually anyone else it was utterly horrific.

It is this horror that reformers and Social Democrats and Trade Union activists have fought for centuries and will fight until Laissez-Faire Capitalism moulders in the dust with the Nazi Holocaust and the Roman Colosseums in the sad museum of man’s inhumanity to man.

I think it is an absolute disgrace that this defunct and cruel system, so comprehensively refuted in the 19th and 20th Centuries, should have risen undead from its foul grave once more to trouble the days and suck the blood of the living.

I suggest you find somewhere else to peddle your noxious, sickly-sweet capitalist pap. In case you haven’t noticed, no one’s listening.

[jaws]

Capitalism is security. It is the security of knowing that no one will interfere with your private property. From this security men embark on a project of improving their stock of property through work and enterprise, confident that they will get to enjoy the product of their labor.

Once this is understood there is no such thing as the underclass or the disenfranchised. Everyone has property and the opportunity to aquire more property. A high-school dropout may have difficulty finding work but it is still possible for him to find work at a comparatively lower wage than his peers. He will seek this work knowing that the wage he earns he will keep to himself. It is his property. If he knew that the wage will be expropriated then he would not seek work and instead resort to other means for his survival, most likely crime.

The presence of the comparatively poor does not signify the existence of an underclass. In a system where there is no legal discrimination and where different opportunities and different outcomes exist then there must be some people who succeed relatively more than others. That doesn't mean that the people who are relatively at the bottom are not improving their lives in the absolute sense.

[jaws]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Macsporan', 'T')his is the chief area where Capitalist economics is in error. Poverty is not caused by scarcity but by mal-distribution, which is in turn caused by the greedy taking from the needy. Thus the idea that it increases poverty is nonsense, both in theory, and most importantly in practice. Poverty and desperation decrease under redistributive Social Democracy and increase under laissez-faire Capitalism.

[cheRand]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')apitalism is security. It is the security of knowing that no one will interfere with your private property. From this security men embark on a project of improving their stock of property through work and enterprise, confident that they will get to enjoy the product of their labor.

[Concerned]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jaws', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Macsporan', 'S')carcity can be significantly alleviated with money and redistributive taxation and social programs. Inequality ditto.

[jaws]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Concerned', 'S')carcity can indeed be mitigated say workers earning $4 per day are mandated by law to be given $8 per day or even $12 per day. Certainly the marketing budget may have to be cut by half a percent I'm sure Tiger Woods or Advertising executive can live without his second yacht or Lear Jet.

[jaws]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Concerned', 'W')ell Indian tribes in North America held land in collective trust, no one owned it and they prospered. Similarly indigenous peoples of Australia held land in common community with no private ownership and they prospered for 40,000 years.

[jaws]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Concerned', 'J')aws you are confused, it's your ideoligical foaming against communism/socialism thats your achilles heel. Soviet style land collectivisation is not re distribution, it's ursupation of land from every single individual. No land is re distributed to anyone else it is all taken for the state.

If there were 30 slaves working a 200 acre farm and the slave owner was ordered by law to peacefully distribute 5 acres per slave (150 acres) and keep 50 for himself then thats a redistribution. Now you would also have 31 private land owners instead of just the one.

[cheRand]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')ative American tribes certainly did not prosper. This is historical revisionism plain and simple. They lived precarious lives at the mercy of nature. They could not support a high population. They did not have metal tools or any sophisticated tools. They were a stone age culture, not even worthy of being called a civilization. Making a reference to them as some sort of example to follow is ludicrous.

[Z]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jaws', 'T')hat's what advertising is, providing information to the consumer so that he can make a better-informed choice in his purchasing decision.

[Macsporan]

(If you take away the goods that someone has created through a coercive redistribution scheme, the amount of goods that will be created falls because the person creating them cannot enjoy its benefits. Redistribution increases scarcity of goods.)

According to your inane dogma, this might be so but not in reality. So if Bill Gates is taxed anything by anyone he’ll go on strike and not produce anymore software and we’ll all starve? What a ludicrous concept. In fact this has never been the case. In fact during the Social Democrat era 1945-80 growth rates in the Capitalist economy were twice what they have been subsequently, largely because workers, thanks to redistributive policies, had enough money to buy things as never before. By every test of practical success Social Democracy is the only possible system.

(Capitalist labour is the foundation of any economy. Capitalists are some of the hardest working people in the economy. They create the products that the consumers want to enjoy and organize the production system to bring them these products. Some capitalists spend their entire lives working. A small shop or restaurant owner must spend nearly every waking hour he has working in his business to earn a living.)

Labour, not merely capitalist labour, is the foundation of any economy. I am not referring to such people, as you well know. I am referring to large corporations and banks. I have no objection to private enterprise just the parasitism of the ignominious moneylender and the unassailable, remote private tyranny. It is for this reason that I am in favour of high taxation for companies and the wealthy and tax breaks for small business and workers.

(That you demonize and slander these people exposes the evil behind your policies. You don't want equality or a fair society, you simply want to steal from those who laboured hard and won the respect and loyalty of their clientele so as to reward those who have failed at achieving the same.)

Yes I do want equality and free society, which is why I espouse the policies mentioned above. You use the metaphor of the small businessman knowing full well that in this day and age the economy is dominated by big business and large corporations. In an oligopoly all these cute little Adam-Smithisms you are so fond of citing break down.

On the other hand I do not sentimentalise small business either. They are just as capable of exploitation and abuse as those they hope to emulate. Only strong Unions can protect ordinary people from such abuse. If some businesses go down because they can’t afford proper pay and conditions for their staff then let them go down. We don’t need sweatshops or sweated labour in our world.

(There is prosperity where union thrives because unions are a parasitic institution and require prosperity before they can be successfully established. Where there is poverty unions cannot succeed, because the poor would rebel against those who have taken their fair share.)

You are often extremely unclear, which is what you’d expect from someone quoting of dogma out of context. What do you refer to here; scab labour? Whose poverty do you refer to? Capitalist’s poverty? All those 19th century mill owners who died every day in the streets from sheer hunger because the Unions took their money? I believe there were millions of such unfortunates.

(Regardless union membership is decreasing in the first-world yet prosperity is increasing.)

Whose prosperity is increasing? Capitalist prosperity is increasing whereas real wages for workers have actually declined. It’s all about distribution you see.

(Unions have crippled the industries to which they attached themselves and slowly killed them, while non-union industries have taken their place and increased wages.)

Give examples of this. Tell me where wages, conditions and job security have increased as they did every year under Social Democracy. No don’t bother, you can’t.

(I think it is an absolute disgrace that some people can still be foolish enough to believe all the fallacies of socialism, so visibly refuted by the failed experiments of the 20th century as well as the reasoning of earlier economists.)

I think it’s an absolute disgrace that you are so full of drivel that you can’t of won’t acknowledge that I’m not advocating Socialism. I am advocating Social Democracy which has the benefits of both Socialism and Capitalism. You are pretending not to notice the difference. If this is what an education in economics does for you I’m glad I don’t have one. Extremists like you think everyone else is an extremist.

I am an example of that rare bird, the Hard Moderate. You probably haven’t met one before. Well here I am. Get used to it.

(All that remains of the socialist fallacies are its slanderous attacks on economics and capitalism, which have absolutely no foundation on reality and all people of reason see this as obvious.)

You react with all the distress of a religious fanatic who can’t cope with the heresy of unbelief.

(Half of your posts are completely pointless personal attacks against me instead of reasonable arguments.)

I will continue to call you those things while you continue to uphold an inhuman system. The history you have advanced is actually a bunch of lies, as I have demonstrated. Mine however not. I note that you have conceded all my historical points. This is what I expected. History cannot be easily falsified as it is reality-based and the truth will out. Economics is 90% dogma and you can say whatever you like as long as you’ve got a pretty graph, some fake equations and a quote from Adam Smith, and a sincere and pious desire to flatter capitalists and capitalism.

(You can call me a dimwit, a priest, a fundamentalist, an apologist, a lapdog, a vampire, you can demonize whoever you want with or without discriminating, you can complain about inequity and poverty, you can pretend that history is a bunch of lies, in the end you still don't have a reasonable economic system to favour.)

I didn’t actually call you any of those things. I wish I had as some of them are most appropriate. I do have a most reasonable system to favour. I have named it many times and described its operations. It represents the middle ground between two extremes and it is based on reason and experience, not dogma. The problem is that unlike me, you are a blinkered extremist, and consequently refuse to acknowledge its existence, let alone its virtues.

That’s your problem, but until you solve it you should find somewhere else to debate. No one’s listening to you here, especially since you dismiss everyone and their arguments with the patronising dogmatic ignorance and impatience of a medieval bishop.


If I might return for a moment to the topic we are supposed to be discussing here. After PO hits exponential economic growth and the system it sustains will vanish at once, forever.

Globalisation will disappear too as it will no longer be viable to manufacture things half a world away to take advantage of cheap labour. Economies will re-localise. Deprived of the whip-hand, Capitalists will no longer be able to treat their own people with contempt.

How this will pan out is anyone’s guess. We might get Social Democracy, but one thing is for sure: Laissez-faire capitalism will be finished, unless the jackboots come out of the cupboard and the ruling class resort of fascism to maintain their power.

If faced with a choice between Social Democracy and Fascism: whose side will you be on, Jaws?

I think we’d all like to know.

[Concerned]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jaws', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Concerned', 'W')ell Indian tribes in North America held land in collective trust, no one owned it and they prospered. Similarly indigenous peoples of Australia held land in common community with no private ownership and they prospered for 40,000 years.

[Concerned]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jaws', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Concerned', 'S')carcity can indeed be mitigated say workers earning $4 per day are mandated by law to be given $8 per day or even $12 per day. Certainly the marketing budget may have to be cut by half a percent I'm sure Tiger Woods or Advertising executive can live without his second yacht or Lear Jet.