Anyone out there with leftist special interests?

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You are being flippant again, and in the process nullified your own point.

Children have impossible dreams, they want to grow up to be Doctors and perform the first brain transplant. Adults think this is impossible.

Pure and utter drivel devoid of any intellectual merit what so ever and at best intellectual masturbation.

- Every person does not have an equal amount of energy to offer.

- The concept of 2 tasks being equal regardless of the knowledge or ability required to perform each task is absurd. Rarity = Value, thus a rarer set of abilities or knowledge will be more valuable.

TM is right. This is just politically correct nonsense that promotes mediocrity.

I made an edit in that post that didn't get there in time for you to respond to the entire train, thomas81.

I find myself shocked to be agreeing with TM about this.

How do we get to a method of organizing resources that isn't about perceived merit, social gravitas and the gift of gab?

I didn't nullify my point. My point is who is better the person who chooses or the chosen. Pro-Choice or Pro-Chosen .You answer the question.

In ancient Israel, there was absolutely no separation of church and state.

Democrats are trying to push people into economic slavery through welfare programs constructed to buy votes.

Republicans are trying to legislate morality and think people are going to some eternal damnation if they don't agree with their views.

Both are trying to force their values on everyone else, while libertarians want people to have the freedom to be themselves. Libertarians are not the people that have contempt for their fellow human beings.

Evidence that getting rid of these programs is going to make people more free? What makes you think we are not economic slaves in the first place? Give a person a choice between not starving and "freedom", they will choose not starving every time. Libertarian "freedom" is a bunch of BS. It's an empty and utterly meaningless platitude to people who have to exist in the real world. The assumption that most people on welfare "choose" to be dependent on it when there simply aren't enough living-wage jobs to go around is frankly pretty insulting, almost sociopathic.

How is it murderous? Does it contain commands to kill?

Marxist bullsh*t. Marx had his mind poisoned by Kant and Hegel. Which is unfortunate. Marx was a very bright man and he had a good sense of Justice by way of his Jewish upbringing (even though he was not observant). His good impulse was lost in a Germanic philosophical quagmire.

The middle class arose because it deployed the newest technologies and organization for producing the goods and services the society needed. Even Marx conceded that the capitalists had mastered the task of production. The opening of the Communist Manifesto was a pean of praise to capitalist production excellence.

Yes. There is a problem with the capitalist system which has yet to be solved. The wages paid to the workers who do the actual acts of production (according to plans and goals formulated by the owners and their highly technical science and engineering assistants) is insufficient to clear the market of the goods and services produced. So the only way to increase the rate of return on capital invested is to start other business enterprises which produce even more goods and services which cannot be consumed or cleared. Even with recycling of the unsold goods taken into account there is a thermodynamic imbalance in the system.

I have been pondering this problem and I do not yet have a complete solution. I can tell you this, however, a socialist system of allocation of goods and services will destroy the productive ability of the almost as thoroughly as a world war or a catastrophic natural disaster.

ruveyn

Rarity itself, or more precisely artificial scarcity and it causes are precisely the problem.

We now find ourselves in a situation for the first time since the industrial revolution, or for that matter since the dawn of man where we can produce more than we can consume. This is where the price system (of which capitalism is a mere subset) starts to run into problems. Its also why we utilise human toil in lieu of automation despite our supposed technolgical prevalence, because human labour is n times less efficient.

Since the value of money is based against the amount of goods that we can actually produce, it becomes necessarilly to intentionally curtail the amount we produce by destroying it through warfare, airdrops into the sea or, as you have already noted yourself, simply by limiting the number of skilled professionals that can design and create the goods in the first place.

That is why mass numbers of people are having to go without; it is evidence of a flailing price system trying to artifically sustain and validate itself. We need a new economic system which is not based against the goods we produce but rather the collective energy we have to produce them. This in turn means over-production ceases to be an issue and that everyone can access not only the goods and services upon demand but also the jobs needed to develop them in the first place.

Last edited by thomas81 on 10 Nov 2012, 2:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I (reluctantly) agree with your point. I have made this point myself. Something other than buying with wages earned must be introduced into the system to clear out the goods produced. Unfortunately free gifts often destroy the incentive to be productive and useful. So a pure gift allocation with no conditions of productivity will do the job. It will simply destroy our ability to produce goods whether or not they can be consumed.

ruveyn

...i would further add that the 'energy crediting system' proposed by Technocracy incorporated would have the happy side effect of eradicating economically motivated crime.

Since the gift token or energy credits would be assigned to one person, who only that person can spend (rather like a pre signed cheque) it would be pointless for a theif or robber to steal it since no one else can use it. That aside from the fact that you wouldnt have the insane curtailing of goods in the first place by something so abstract as our current economic system.

A sustainable "third path" will have to be some form of market socialism. The current capitalist system is predicated on finance through self-interested investors who will not invest in a market if the prospect of making a decent return on their investment within their lifetime is too low to justify the risk involved. The level of returns on investment potential within a given economy is a function of dynamic shifts within the economy.

Historically it has been major advances in technology, technology that put natural sources of energy to efficient use and revolutionized production, that created the biggest dynamic shifts. In the latter part of the 20th century to the present age dynamic shifts in the developed world have had to do with technology that revolutionizes the sharing of information rather than the harnessing of energy for production.

The problem I see is that technology may not continue to grow by leaps and bounds. We're going to reach a point where research and development have diminishing returns. In terms of technology, more and more of the low hanging fruit has already been picked, but capitalism always needs more and more; money has to constantly be exploding in exponential fashion or investors lose interest and start hoarding their wealth at the expense of the common good. There simply is no maintainable steady state solution to the current global capitalist system.

Investment driven capitalist markets need to exist in an environment of permanent change. Without permanent growth investors stop investing and profits dry up. Right now the market can continue to expand to parts of the world that have not yet fully utilized all the changes and advances that have raised the standard of living in the developed world. That seems to be what the markets have moved to now and this is probably the main reason the west is now suffering. The problem is we don't necessarily have the raw resources for the entire world to enjoy the middle class American way of living. Peak oil may be the first major shock on the horizon.

Don't worry about peak oil. Coal can be converted into something like petroleum. And it is not necessary to burn the stuff. We can pave North America from coast to coast with safe modular breeder reactors. We should give up the filthy oil habit and use it only to create long chain polymers.

As to the third way, so far people have reverted to the traditional memes of socialism and some kind of pseudo benevilent fascism. They simply will not do because they will revert to tyranny as soon as they are installed.

ruveyn

ruveyn