The Capitalist Style

[usefulinfo]

[Warm Worm]

I'm inclined to agree with a lot of this (despite the Google ad-creep surrounding it.) Are you Zack? I contacted Zack by email some time ago regarding shipping container dimensions for 3D modeling.

[creative1986]

First, what you are stumbling around with is NOT capitalism. If you had a basic understanding of the subject you would know this. Second, the numbers are always skewed (think about that for awhile) thus what is, is not what it was meant to be.

The world around you, now, is the culmination of *Slothism* taken to the highest level. Slothism is borne in laziness, greed and stupidity.

[Warm Worm]

Sounds like slothism and capitalism have much in common. ;)

[creative1986]

Slothism is inherent to laziness. Capitalism is not related.

[Warm Worm]

On some levels, laziness seems efficient; "workism", inefficient. I'm highly skeptical that you have to work 7.5 hours a day to live comfortably. I'd wager a hand-knit 3.

...And then there's "In Praise of Idleness", by Bertrand Russell; "Hello Laziness" by Corinne Maier; Wage Slavery; money as debt; land/resource-waste; and sweatshops, to name a few.

BTW, don't derogate the kindly sloth. It's not making a mess of the planet in the name of profit.

[creative1986]

You should kick that worn out misnomer to the curb. There are faults everywhere and most of them derive from you know where. From entities that are not held accountable, thats where. People have been trained to believe big business lobbiests bribe politicians to disregard their oath to the benefit of business and the derailment of the environment and people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Politicians and their army of aides canvas businesses big and small and offer all kinds of incentives knowing full well the controlled media will cover their tracks. The programmed slaves are eager to attack the businesses yet have no problem crowding their parking lots.

If a business causes harm to people or envirnoments they are held accountable but when a politician does the same how is he punished?

Profit is a bad thing when YOU aren't making any. The mantra of the perpetual failures.

[Warm Worm]

Nature's the ultimate benevolent dictator. True profit comes when nature profits. You profit by default. I'm almost tempted to say that false profit is capitalism.

[Kris Krieger]

" [e-mail]" wrote in news:26949536- [e-mail]:

How have hedge funds been held accountable? AIG? The "Big 3"? The larger any corporation is allowed to become, the less accountable it is also allowed to become.

The US was founded upon small businesses; it was suring the Industrial Revolution tht monopolies formed, and the word "Capitalism" was coined to describe their activities. Anti-monopoly regulations were not merely designed to maintain competition; they were also intended to keep any coporation to becoem so large, and so integral to the US economy, that it posed a threat to both the national economy, and the national security. At the same time, the larger an enterprise becomes, the higher becomes the rate at which the growth of that enterprise's bureaucracy, and the slower the growth of its actual productive functions, with the result that no small number of corporations "cut costs" by stripping away production while permitting admin/management (bureaucracy) to continue increasing.

Anti-monopoly regulations have been ignored, and we are now seeing the results.

All in all, your interpretations seem to be no more accurate than you claim Warm Worm's to be.

And that in itself is the mantra of those who beleive that their own profit outweighs not only the common good, but the good of the nation itself.

[Warm Worm]

"Wealth is an amount, while income is a rate. They are connected by durability. (See Herman Daly, 'Steady-state Economics') One example: cars produced at 100 per year ( a rate) that last 5 years would finally create and maintain a fleet of 500 cars (an amount). That same fleet could be supported by producing only 10 cars per year that last 50 years. As the life span of the cars approaches zero years the cars on the road would also approach zero. Life span, or durability, must be considered to know the value of what we produce.

The blur of meaning between use and consumption has surely retarded understanding of the importance of durability. Extended durability and population stability (decline) will make inheritance the main source of wealth, someday. This kind of system would have a very high efficiency as defined below.

Surplus labor combined with wage dependence means that we must increase consumption, beyond just filling real needs, to make jobs. It seems on the TV news that the goal of the economy is to make jobs, but the proper goal of any economy it to increase wealth. Making the most wealth requires making the least consumption, and that will cut the need for labor.

We consider any unused labor to be a waste, but when we produce too much to stay busy we are wasting resources and pushing global warming. Since a small part of the human workforce can provide all the needed labor we need some way to make unemployment acceptable, even desirable. Maybe we should call it leisure.

We should match the labor we use to the needed jobs, instead of matching the jobs to the maximum available labor, as we do now. How do we match the labor to the needed jobs? Since the labor we have available can not be reduced, the only answer is to not use it all. Just as a high-powered car needs a throttle to avoid going too fast, the economy needs a way to adjust the amount produced to the amount really needed, rather than producing as much as possible all the time. One way to do that is to provide a basic guaranteed income, which is adjusted down or up to keep wages from rising or falling.

In a robot-run economy the total of all wages would be zero. All income would go to the owners of the robots and the resources they process for us. Unearned income reflects that we are parasites on the planet. While there is plenty of unpaid work, and the work ethic is important; earning a living is a delusion.

We can't begin serious conservation so long as people are dependent on wages. Giving people a 'free ride' may be unpopular, but if dividends are good why is welfare bad?

The best, and defining, feature of capitalism is unearned income. We can't do or respect important unpaid work so long as work is just about money. By taking so much of people's time 'full' employment competes with, and often prevents, work in family care, stewardship activities, education, and the leisure needed for a good life.

Economic efficiency should be defined as use-value/required-consumption, but we seem to define it as actual-consumption/possible-consumption. The consumer economy is very efficient in its ability to waste and pollute. Where is the adult supervision?

It seems to me that consideration of these ideas might be important. One can find implied solutions to 'impossible' problems in these considerations."

- Barry Brooks,

Well said Barry (and Kris)

[creative1986]

They haven't which proves my point. Look, nobody today can practice capitalism because of the inherent manipulation of government. So currently you have to deal with the mixed economy the way it is until people get tired of getting ripped and tell the gov't to get bent. Even the black market is not free of government coercion. Suffice to say, that as long as government exists capitalism will not. The media is constantly pointing at, and lying about capitalism and its current faults. But it has been government coercion that has caused the economic disaster you are now witnessing. Interestingly, the very entity that caused the disaster is also the one that claims it will fix said disaster, by doing more of the same. By next summer things will be getting really interesting as the dollar tumbles worldwide. You can only pump so much (hot) air into a buck before it explodes.

[Warm Worm]

Of course not everyone can be "relied on" to do business OR government. Much of it seems to boil down to differing individual responsibility, values, capabilities, perceptions, etc., and how it all seems to somehow emerge from the chaos.

Cripes, I just took a look at the currency. WTF? Perhaps steady-state economics is the answer?