• Elizabeth Warren has a plan to save capitalism
    99 replies, posted
Hey dude, be my guest if you want to live a Luddite life because you think that will fix the issues. It won’t. Going back ti the proverbial stone ages to feel x that issue really just spreads the misery but hey, that’s what a lot of stupid ultitarian ideas are all about
Not every single invention in human history was created in the private sector of a capitalist society believe it or not. Also as stated in the other thread, the internet was invented under government supervision and funding, so this is even more false.
We can actually retain all that without the exploitation. Being a luddite is not required for owning the means of production or having an ethical mode of production.
Look, if you think you have all the answers, and capitalism is a useless relic of an age long past, awesome. I don't agree, and I haven't heard arguments from professors let alone posters here who are convincing enough in that argument. I am not defending capitalism as the end all, be all of economies. However, it is a robust and powerful system. This is true, the governments of the world did help create it. For warring purposes. The US government and CERN each developed independent projects that would later become what we know as the internet today. One was created by a military group, one by a group of scientists. Both were popularized, and driven into the hands of you, myself, and the global population at large by capitalism. Pretending that would happen in a totally non-capitalist society is unfounded in every way. I never even remotely claimed every invention WAS from the private sector. That's just plainly putting words in my mouth dude. What I would claim instead is that almost every invention that winds up in the private sector, ends up becoming going through certain beneficial, and negative changes. One of the beneficial elements of Capitalism is the creation of cheaper goods. You can say until you're blue in the face that you would have access to the internet and games to play, and a comparable life to what you have now if capitalism hadn't developed ways for those goods to be made more, and more cheaply through economies of scale. I am not against creating a more ethical supply chain. I am not against creating better economic strategies, I am not against finding new ways to bring people out of poverty. My problem is, that imagining capitalism isn't good at that, isn't true. Yes, there is economic exploitation of workers in South East Asian countries. They aren't paid much, they do the back breaking labour, and we dump too much trash on their shores for them to deal with. But there's also another side to this equation. Those people have no economic opportunities in their local communities in many situations. The factories that companies like Nike create, as horrible as they are also provide serious employeement gains for the local economies. I've seen way too many liberals get mad that this is a feature of our world, while failing to recognize the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands that this has raised out of relative poverty. It's always brushed aside, and large emotional onuses are thrown at the feet of anyone who dares disagree. It's empty and hollow emotional argumentation IMO. I do not enjoy the excesses of capitalism, I think the hoarding of wealth is ultimately of detriment to our society. But I cannot what so ever, understand this view that capitalism is wrong. It isn't, and it's helped in so many different areas of human endeavor that I genuinely don't want those swept aside as if they don't matter. They do.
I'm not a fan. This entire bill hinges on enshrining the ruling that corporations are people, and therefore requiring them pay the same dues to society that individuals do. I feel this is a huge mistake, because the supreme court ruling that declared corporations are people was a mistake. While the bill might have some interesting ideas, it's built on a fundamental miscarriage of justice that needs to be reversed as soon as we have a liberal majority in the supreme court again.
Let's not and say we did. Just let it rot like the vestige that it is and move onto better things.
but how else do you have a corporation function without rewriting and/or invalidating hundreds of years of laws and case law your ability to sue a company? that's because they're legal persons. them being taxed as one (ignoring tax dodge bullshit which is neither here nor there)? that's legal personhood too. entering into a contract? ditto also corporate personhood is not some new republican ideal that they just pushed 10 years ago, this has been defined for exactly 200 years by a SCOTUS ruling
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/112373/aa282197-b8b3-4b5a-bd90-4d323053b3ac/It May Not Be a Perfect System.JPG
I don't want to be in a country that has "rotting" capitalism, especially since it might "rot" into a fascist oligarchy and there's no guarantee that we will ever come out of that barring the collapse of civilization. I'd rather we try to fix it than think "if we let things collapse completely we'll magically get something better afterwards" when history says differently.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind a hybrid command economy. Let the government own all resources and means of production, and agree to lease those assets only to companies who provide a return (plus interest) while following all of the rules. If companies don't respond to a certain market demand, then allow government-owned corporations to fill the gap in the meantime. Mandate innovation. If companies do not contribute a given amount to the public good each year (take, for example, ISPs refusing to improve their own infrastructure), then repossess the assets they're borrowing and give the contract to someone else. Corporations should fear complacency, not strive for it. The government should not pay businesses to do things for the public, in turn funneling money away from more efficient means of implementing public services. Businesses should slave away for the right to make no more than a fair profit, while the majority of capital flows into things that actually require it. If this scares away investors, then let them know that they can either follow the rules or lose the business of three hundred million customers.
This is useless prattle dude yes there are inprovements to be made. I never disputed that. i dont think you guys even realize the full implications of eliminating capitalism and when I’m mostly met with statements about stuff I never argued it’s hard to see why I should be in your camp there will be flaws with this socialist utopia many of you want, this is the real world and things rarely work out as planned. I have actively said capitalism is flawed. I just don’t think entirely removing it is a good idea. It has value. It’s been well demonstrated.
I'm not talking about socialism, i was talking about communism, which requires in its very basic idea for farms to be state owned lmao
Only in an authoritarian branch, nominally in a true communist system the farms are managed by the same people who work them
Wouldn't the communist movement then mean they'd have to hand out food accordingly without payment, with the food they produce being rewarded with an amount depending on what they make basically becoming slaves of the state
Nominally they would distribute food as people require it, and how is that any different from how it works now, if you replace state with corporation
because the farmer directly profits from it and the corporation relies on the farmer. The farmer can fuck over anyone he wants since he's the supply. Without profit or benefit all that hard work is for nothing, its literally just to give food away. As i said, slaves to the state. Farmers are not slaves to corporations because corporations rely on them, hence why farmers nearly shut down tesco's milk supply when tesco started crying about the price. The only way to explain how a communist society would get food is to force farmers to work for minimum "pay" which goes against what farmers do what they do for. That hard work is for profit and to expand, it is not for the principle of feeding others.
again, this is all nominally, in reality such a system would never work that way because humans refuse to do altruistic things, you would definitely need some kind of compensation method in any kind of practical system
Anyone defending capitalism is completely blind to the fact that it's built currently on the exploitation of third world workers getting paid near nothing. It would instantly collapse if workers were paid fair wages. Also yeah, the whole killing the planet thing should be more of a concern.
Is there evidence to back this statement?
Better than them being pathetic little welfare queens like they are right now :~)
Third world workers achieving a living wage would result in complete global meltdown. Even if it were a very gradual increase, it would take some serious work to balance out the new increase in the price of goods, with the wages of the lower to middle classes in first world countries. Since the US is currently run by oligarchs essentially, good luck seeing wages increase substantially enough to cover that. A growing number of citizens in the USA and Canada live primarily paycheck to paycheck. Any increase in the price of goods would be catastrophic not just to those people, but to the entire global economy in turn, and third world citizens suddenly earning double or even more than double they are now, would cause prices to skyrocket; not a good mix. Europeans tend to live a bit less exorbitantly than the US and Canada, so they may be ok with an increase in the price of goods, but unfortunately just about every nation's economy is tied to the US, so if one goes down, the rest fall(as seen in 2008).
Its almost like this is proof that the US is fucked up, as opposed to capitalism as a whole.
This is a view in a vacuum. This doesn't help anyone. Capitalism has raised countless millions out of abject, and total poverty into considerably less poverty stricken situations. Ignoring that to talk about the exploitation it has created is nothing but short sighted, and intentionally skewed.
The point is that the entire world does in some fashion, rely on what essentially amounts to slave labout(and is literally slave labour in some situations). Some nations have better workers rights, and thus better wages, but regardless, paying third world workers a living wage would hit everyone in first world nations hard. The US is certainly one of the worst example of Capitalism run rampant, but it's not like it's exclusive to the US. Modern Russia is actually probably the worst example of a Capitalist hellscape ironically, although thanks to Putin it actually functions more akin to a planned economy in that the oligarchs, and thus the companies, bend to Putin's will.
Can you guys explain to me how the Western world managed to survive before globalization led to wide use of outsourced labor? Up until well into the 1970s, aside from very specific imports (eg diamonds) the overwhelming majority of the American economy was American-made products using American-sourced raw materials. Exploitation of third-world labor is why there are CEOs making thousands of times more than their employees, not implicitly why those employees are able to maintain their standards of living. Pay the workers fair wages and take the difference out of the income of the rich. It worked just fine under capitalism in the 1950s, at the most prosperous time in our history.
Well, at least in the US, we survived because we didn't expect to be able to buy tons of shit (a lot of it useless and disposable) for ridiculously affordable prices. The trade deal with China during the Clinton administration was probably the absolute worst thing that has happened to american culture in recent history, because it got us addicted to cheap Chinese goods made from slave labor, and has permanently entwined our fate with one of the most authoritarian dictatorships in history.
The middle class had more buying power in the mid-50s than they do today. We may not have had cheap Chinese goods, but we didn't need them when the average person could buy a house, buy a car, and raise a family of four on just one adult's income. And everything that we bought wasn't 'cheap but disposable', it was state-of-the-art, American-made, back when that was taken for granted rather than the status symbol it is today. This was all under capitalism, but it was capitalism with safeguards and protections. We've been getting progressively fucked over ever since, to the benefit of the richest segment of society. Those same policies that brought us prosperity in the 50s would be called socialism and treated as pure evil if they were reintroduced today. I think everyone realizes that the current system is broken, but to say on that basis that capitalism can't work flies in the face of our history. Capitalism can work, but it needs to be moderated by socialist elements in the interests of the people rather than corporations.
The median annual household wage in 1955 was around 40,000 or so(in today's money), whereas nowadays it's apparently like 58,000. During the 50's, the US saw a constant state of massive growth both population-wise, and economically, so everything was quite a lot cheaper than today. After years of massive growth and changes, as you said, the CEO's and companies in general basically took all of that extra money and either hoarded it, or put it towards political lobbying and years of propaganda to get the nation to the state it's in today. Union's are virtually non-existent, the minimum wage has pretty much flatlined, and wages in general are embarrassingly low in many occupations. Since everything costs more nowadays despite third world labour making manufacturing much cheaper, the lower and middle class in the States is fucked to put it bluntly. Housing has gone up because of the need to move to cities for better career options, making the market extremely competitive in most major cities, and the workers haven't seen their wages go up adequately to match even the fucking natural inflation of the US dollar, no less the rising cost of living in general. This is common across pretty much all advanced Capitalist economies, or at least the ones that haven't adapted aspects of Socialism into it anyhow. We're slowly working towards the European model here in Canada, regardless of government, so we may be ok, but our housing market is still absurd in basically all major metropolitan areas, and the cost of living is still unattainable in most cities. I work with people that are being faced with the prospect of having to uproot their lives because they just simply cannot afford to own a home in and around my area, with the nearest affordable cities being an hour+ away. Shit needs to change.
Everyone seems to forget our core systems of economics and more are so centralized that if we were to suffer even a minor catastrophe within the United States or China at a scale that could disrupt trade for a week everything would implode. Our system is so fucking fragile yet complicated because we've made it this way in a rampant persuit of 'progress and growth' that has completely thrown aside our own natural limitations as well as our own strengths. Half of our systems require us so heavily medicated just to function and with automation's march this is only going to get worse because its not being done with our best interest. Its being done in the CEO and Middle Manager's best interest. Its why I'm a reformed luddite, its why I will raise a hammer to servers if asked to because these machines being made are not being made to make our lives better, that is a fucking farce. They're made to consolidate us, monetize our experiences and treat as nothing more than data points that can be used for vacuous fake value. Its dehumanizing, its destructive and if used the wrong way it can be genocidal.
I wonder if the IMF will actually start really fucking around with the USA if this happens. There's also the chance that the cia will attack their own country lol.
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