Capitalism and laissez-faire

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What is your view of capitalism and laissez faire?

Is capitalism a powerful force for creativity, improvement, and human betterment?

Is it a degrading system of oppression, exploitation of class privilege?

How should we understand international trade and free trade issues? Are those jobs being shipped away or is this international division of labor?

What are we to think of labor markets? Places where wages slaves sell themselves for daily bread? Or simply a means for individuals and industrialists to work together?

Should this beast be free? Does capitalism need fetters and controls, and what type does it need? Should capitalism be replaced?

How should we understand capitalism? Is it individualism? Is it domination? Is it amoral, immoral, or moral? An oppressor or a liberator?

I am just curious what people think about capitalism since it is a prominant economic idea and the basis of most economic systems in the 1st world.

Like democracy, it's a hugely flawed system that is only used because every other system known to man is even worse.

it's both a powerful force for creativity, improvement, and human betterment and a degrading system of oppression, exploitation of class privilege


that's why we as the people and consumers should be more aware of our products and what our money/their profits are going towards and what kind of ethics.


if you don't buy it, you take the money away from them. that's the beauty of capitalism: if you don't want to buy this product from these jerks, someone else is willing to sell you a similar product without the baggage.

Capitalism is one of the chief glories of mankind.

Civilisation is the process of setting man free from man. Capitalism is it's pinnacle. The only moral social system, and everything else flows from that. It isn't important that it delivers unprecedented improvements in the standard of living. That it allows the production of technologies undreamed of before its discovery.

What is most important is that it bans force from human interaction. Except in retaliation to those who seek to initiate it. THAT is the only important thing that it has going for it. Everything else is just gravy.

If you dont buy it, someone else probably will. There are always going to be people who don't care if their ipod was made in China, or their chickens were battery-farmed. There are always going to be people who go for the cheap option, despite their beliefs, even though the cheap option is morally reprehensible because its made by ten-year olds etc.

you're right though.. if nothing, the system gives us choice. Perhaps not always the choices we want to make, but at least it is there.

Not only that but the gravy is better in capitalism.

A man named Karl Marx said more about Capitalism then I ever could
and he was right
its a poison, that will be the end of us until we change our ways
not relying on money or invisible man in the sky

Idealogy is irrelevant, I learned this over the years because ultimately there are bugs in the system.

1) Money.

Money as a universal store of value has 'bugs', i.e. if you have a popular product you get rich NOT off your skill but off POPULATION SIZE! You can be the most skilled person in the world but if there is no population to support you, you won't see much $$. In this way money hides and masks slavery abuses in the exchange system.

As society evolves (builds technology etc), the system changes slowly and constantly to resemble something it didn't resemble before. I'm for a scientific approach to trade and exposing abuses and inherent flaws in the system.

Just saying "captialism" or "socialism" is not enough, since there are problems even if you had NO particular idealogy...
i.e. certain technologies critical to survival need to be maintained and staffed, and whatnot.

People are naturally creative with or without capitalism, in capitalism because most people do not have a truly independent resource base (food, shelter, etc), they must rely on others, which leaves them open to be abused. Since money is the sole source of power and resource control in society, all economic transactions are political transactions.

One cannot escape this when looking at how the US government has been effected by lobbyists, the market has made government corruption certain, since commerce and money become the sole determinant of worth/status, etc. Governments were put into place to stop the abuse of others through commercial and other means.

Capitalism is only as good as its incentives.
If it's in businesses' best interest to go against the consumers' best interest....they will.
Capitalism is capable of as great of good as it is evil...it just depends on what cards are on the table at any given time.

For Kilroy: heh, karl marx is dead. the 20th century killed him. No one believes seriously that communism is anything but poison.

For ZakFiend:
Money is a means of trade. Your reward for your productive ability in whatever field of endeavor you chose to pursue. It stores this value so that you can late exchange it for the production of others. The so called discrepancies you see is not in money, but in the socioeconomic environment you find yourself in. Even in pure laissez-faire you might find that 50cent will still make more money than Einstein... even though Einstein made the best contribution. They are still both rewarded in scale to the endeavors they undertook. And I don't think Einstein could have stood to produce anything less than he did produce.


For Cyanide:
I wonder in what instance (and for how long) a producer could go AGAINST the interests of it's consumer and still survive. THAT is the check and balance on Capitalism. That, and the introduction of force or fraud into a relationship is a criminal act. So a producer could not long last (hopefully) without being exposed and punished under the due process of the law. It is only in a mixed economy where a politician has power to coerce that a business could get along buy buying sanctions and permissions that are not it's proper due.

And Capitalism is not guarantee that people will get rich with any endeavor they chose to undertake. All Capitalism guarantees is that they are free to pursue it. Same for evil. The laws are there to punish those who do evil, not to prevent anyone from doing it in the first place. Which can be said of every possible conceivable political system for now and forever where free will remains. All Capitalism guarantees is that the government is not granted arbitrary powers to interfere in the lives of its citizens.

or arbitrarily jack up gas prices?
$5 a gallon = revolt in the streets

can I get a countdown?

$5 a gallon = revolt on the streets? Makes me wonder how much that tea tax actually was if you'll revolt for fuel that cheap. You could make a killing selling it by the litre on ebay.

Have a look at say.. british fuel prices some time. Wonderful perspective it provides when you realise we pay nigh $10 a gallon.

Then try looking up how much it costs to get from one end of the UK to the other on a train, and consider that our whole country could fall into texas and never be seen again.

THAT is a transport nightmare.

The rising price of gas is hardly arbitrary. There is an increasing demand of oil for one, inflation (especially if you wish to compare since the 1970s where they paid about what we pay for gas) for two, and higher costs for three. Also, it is important to remember the role of oil speculators in all this is in fact a good thing. Speculators speculate on what the future supply and demand of oil will be, which is one of the reasons we see slowly increasing prices. Slowly increasing prices is preferable to big oil shocks like in the 70s, is it not?

justify $5 a gallon any way you like
wont make any difference.

if 3 was unreasonable and 4 was ridiculous
5 is mayhem. When the typical American cant
afford to drive to either one of their minimum
wage jobs, pandemonium will ensue

I have no problem with a market economy. What I do have a problem with is the lack of say employees have the the running of companies. Capital without Labor is useless, both are necessary, and thus employees have just as much right to have a say on a company's board of directors as investors do.

I don't understand your reasoning. You claim that those paid to do a service by the owners have as much ownership as the actual owners? I do understand that capital and labor are both necessary for a company, but labor is merely a product sold to capital, just as pre-requisite parts for production would be. So, to me, to give labor the power to run the company is the same as making labor = labor +.5capital, thus making capital = .5 capital, which does not make sense to me.

Can you make your idea and reasoning clearer? I mean, I think I have explained sufficiently why the current logic makes more sense to me.