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Capitalism versus Socialism


Jamie_B

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Guest bengalrick

[quote name='steggyD' date='Aug 11 2005, 12:24 PM']I wasn't even allowed to get my license. My parents didn't want to put me on their insurance.. :(
[right][post="128791"][/post][/right][/quote]

:lol:

my parents paid the price, for allowing me to get mine... i had 2 tickets in the first 3 months...

(i bought a beat up 65 mustang, w/ a 289 in it... trust me, it sounds better than it was :) ... though i wish i still had it, b/c fixing it up would have been sweet... :wub: )

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Guest BlackJesus
[i][b]I always love how when you bring it up to Married Darwinists that .... So Shaquille Oneal being much larger and stronger than you should be able to walk in your house, beat your ass, and then fuck your wife, they say .... "well not exactly" [/b][/i]
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[quote name='steggyD' date='Aug 11 2005, 01:24 PM']I wasn't even allowed to get my license. My parents didn't want to put me on their insurance.. :(
[right][post="128791"][/post][/right][/quote]


I wasnt allowed till 18, but thats because I was a pain in the a** that liked to challage their authority...... so nothings changed in 12 years. :D

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Guest steggyD

[quote name='BlackJesus' date='Aug 11 2005, 01:26 PM'][i][b]I always love how when you bring it up to Married Darwinists that .... So Shaquille Oneal being much larger and stronger than you should be able to walk in your house, beat your ass, and then fuck your wife, they say .... "well not exactly" [/b][/i]
[right][post="128795"][/post][/right][/quote]
Well, before we switch over to anarchism, I'm gonna go out and buy some guns and ammunition. Then I'll fend off as much as I can. I will also more than likely move up to the in-laws farms so that I have fewer people to fend off. Survival of the fittest can also mean the smartest. :whistle:

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Guest bengalrick

[quote name='steggyD' date='Aug 11 2005, 12:31 PM']Well, before we switch over to anarchism, I'm gonna go out and buy some guns and ammunition. Then I'll fend off as much as I can. I will also more than likely move up to the in-laws farms so that I have fewer people to fend off. Survival of the fittest can also mean the smartest.  :whistle:
[right][post="128800"][/post][/right][/quote]

smarts beats muscle anyday :)

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Guest steggyD

[quote name='Jamie_B' date='Aug 11 2005, 01:29 PM']I wasnt allowed till 18, but thats because I was a pain in the a** that liked to challage their authority...... so nothings changed in 12 years.  :D
[right][post="128796"][/post][/right][/quote]
That was part of the reason also. My parents were ultra conservative religious. I was a pot-smokin', beer drinkin', skank lovin' punk. :headbang:

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[quote name='steggyD' date='Aug 11 2005, 01:33 PM']That was part of the reason also. My parents were ultra conservative religious. I was a pot-smokin', beer drinkin', skank lovin' punk.    :headbang:
[right][post="128804"][/post][/right][/quote]


Mine too, but I wasnt the latter (well not till my 20's and moved out)... I just liked to push my moms buttons, because I was a twisted little monkey.

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Guest BlackJesus

[quote]Survival of the fittest can also mean the smartest. [/quote]

[i][b]Obviously spoken by a guy who must not think he can take Shaq ^_^


The anaology could always be changed up to say that how bout we have Aptitude tests and anyone smarter then gets to fuck your wife....

the point being.... those advocating survival of the fittest are never the "fittest" in any category they wish to define that by [/b][/i]

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Guest steggyD

[quote name='BlackJesus' date='Aug 11 2005, 02:11 PM'][i][b]Obviously spoken by a guy who must not think he can take Shaq  ^_^
The anaology could always be changed up to say that how bout we have Aptitude tests and anyone smarter then gets to fuck your wife....

the point being.... those advocating survival of the fittest are never the "fittest" in any category they wish to define that by [/b][/i]
[right][post="128825"][/post][/right][/quote]
Hey man, if you my wife, just tell me. I'm not getting any, someone might as well enjoy it. You don't even have to pass a test, just try and persuade her that sex is good, and you can have it. That's the test right there.

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Guest bengalrick

[quote name='steggyD' date='Aug 11 2005, 01:18 PM']Hey man, if you my wife, just tell me. I'm not getting any, someone might as well enjoy it. You don't even have to pass a test, just try and persuade her that sex is good, and you can have it. That's the test right there.
[right][post="128831"][/post][/right][/quote]

[img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons//24.gif[/img] ... :lol: ... :mellow: ... is that really what it will get like :o










marriage sucks :(

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I think I get what you are driving at, Rick. I don't want to feed a stereotype, but a friend of mine who is a history professor in the mountains of eastern Kentucky occasionally riffs on just the problem you raised. In his judgement, too many folks are willing to go on the dole, and he thinks that as a part of their cultural outlook, too many think of it as an entitlement. I repeat, I do not want to reinforce a stereotype, but this is as my friend describes it. He's a liberal and it worries him. He's also active politically and I know he has mulled over various ways to try to break what he perceives as a vicious cycle.

Imo, in any healthy society there will still be a small portion of the population that is a little off-kilter, for whatever reason. The healthier the economy is such societies, the smaller actual burden of providing support for those folks will be. My argument at this point is that we make sure they don't starve, have a roof over their heads, etc, because we are healthy and charitable people. Even if some of these folks are FUBAR, it's still the right thing to do.

The key is to have a healthy, dynamic economy in a politically stable environment. For that you need, minimally:

1) a means of arbitrating disagreements lawfully and without violence;
2) a means of transferring power peacefully;
3) a commitment to invest in areas which "raise the level of the ocean" for everyone.
4) a commitment to a cultural environment which encourages scientific breakthroughs and the transfer of that knowledge into technology for use in society.
5) a system which both nutures and encourages individual creativity and innovation, especially in areas which tend to eventually improve the economy as a whole, but not excluding the arts, either.

Consider, for example, innovation and introduction of new technologies in basic infrastructure. By this I mean not only obvious stuff like transportation, water and electricity, but also investment in people, generally, as in education and health care. Now, there are different levels of this kind of activity and different approaches. Some things are too big for one company, or even a consortium of companies to handle on their own. That's where government comes in, in the form of establishing political direction and legitimacy. Also perhaps in creating sufficient credit dedicated to such tasks to handle the capital side of things. Some tasks are small enough to be managed by individual companies or market segments. Here it is useful to have some healthy competition as various companies strive to improve their means of delivering those products or services.

How do you know if you have a healthy economy? A couple of trends or vectors must be happening simultaneously. You need prices, in general, to be stable or even decreasing in certain commodities. For this, you need qualitatively advanced technology over previous periods introduced into practice. The market basket of goods required to support your hypothetical typical family needs to improve also, in the form of better living standards. This can be a result of the application of technology which commoditizes certain goods and brings the price down, or it can be non-inflationary wage improvements or better said, improved buying power by that family (perhaps at prevailing wage levels.)

There's nothing wrong with striving for a future in which health care is virtually free, provided the economy is healthy enough and can sustain the cost. Likewise education and other necessaries of life. Likewise programs designed to ensure that our elderly are taken take of, too.

This is not impossible to achieve with the right kinds of policies. Our revolution designed a pretty good instrument for hashing out this kind of thing; there will always be debate about how best to get there. Compare these ideas to the bleak vision which permeates society today. I mean, really, take a while to think about it.

Life need not be a zero-sum game in which the only way to improve your own standing is by taking stuff away from other people. The pie can be, and should be, constantly increasing. From time to time there should be an exponential leap of improvement. These generally come from key scientific breakthroughs translated into social economic practice. Horses-->steam locomotion; fire-->electricity; typewriters-->computing. You get the basic idea.

Marx's notion of expanded social reproduction draws a pretty good circle around the goal, but entrepreneurial activity along the lines one finds in a free enterprise system is the engine which moves society towards that set of goals. As I suggested yesterday, a couple of centuries from now, this'll be seen as a tempest in a teapot. (Unless we have gone back into "caves" by virtue of our stupidity. And that is historically possible, too.)
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I find this discussion interesting because you definitely can see peoples background in it.

BJ and Homer with their having seen poverty in not just the US but the world.
Rick with his only have seeing the US point of view (No offence Rick)
Me living next to East Germany during the fall of the wall, I'm kind of wavering back and forth with the specifics of things, because Germany is a bit more rich than Africa or the Middle east so I've only seen so much.
Steggy I'm still trying to see where he fits in with his background and world view. I do see some of his Marine days influencing some of it.

This is the case I find with political discussion too, not just economics. Completely natural, but interesting none the less.
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Guest steggyD
I would say that the government it the least likely to succeed in providing for others. Look at welfare right now, and go look at most of the people on it. I'm not saying everyone, because some people really do try. Government is overlegislated, it's hard to get anything done. I feel that private sectors can run things much better. I think that there would be enough willing and caring people to make sure everyone has food. We may have fewer that give anything to charity right now because they feel that the government is doing that right now with their money anyways. Take away those taxes and I bet you that you will find many more charitable people.

I came from a poor family, I lived in a poor neighborhood. I've seen what no money does to people. Now I live in a comfortable situation and I see wealthier people who work just as hard as many of those poor people do. I see that some poor people work little, if any at all though, but not all. I now understand that some people work very hard just to put food on the table for their families, and sacrifice a lot, a whole lot. But then I see other poor people who put forth no effort at all, but are able to beat the system and actually live a better life than the other poor person who puts forth so much effort.

This creates a problem, it creates a hostile situation between people. You have one person working his ass off, on a hot roof, or a hot warehouse, whatever. He is trying to cheat his way through his taxes so that he can clothe his children for the new school year. He has no health insurance, and his children are sick on a somewhat regular basis. Then you have the woman who has a live in boyfriend. They are not married because that will hurt their welfare situation. The boyfriend makes some illegal money on the side, drives a much nicer car than the former person. They have the latest electronics, video games, etc. Meanwhile they are using foodstamps/WIC, and whatever other government handouts they can get, even if it means making another child that will live the same exact lifestyle. Then finally, you have the wealthier person, not rich, but upper middle income. They work hard, own businesses that take every minute of their life from them. They have other incomes that they earned honestly. And their money is taken to help support the second family I spoke of, which has no ending. The situation is taken advantage of. The wealthy family is charitable, for causes they believe in. They are actually very environmentally friendly, being farmers and all. They cannot stand the "gang-banging" lifestyle, having never witnessed it first hand, but they feel that something is wrong, they just don't know what it is.

I also know that there are people who work, very hard, and still use certain types of welfare, they just cannot feed their children without it. And they cannot get ahead. I'll tell you one thing that is the biggest cause of this... divorce. Or just having children outside of marriage and one person runs off. I don't know how to fix this because some people just won't get along. I'd say be a little more careful in your decisions, because they can affect your life later on.

So, in conclusion... While the welfare may be feeding the hard working person who is trying to get ahead, it's also helping the group who takes advantage of the situation and does not care to do anything else with their lives. Then you have the group who works hard, but tries not to use government handouts, whether it be from pride, or just principles, and finally the group who pays for it all. It needs to be fixed.. but how? I'm not sure, but even though pure communism sounds like the perfect way to feed everyone, we would have to live a very different lifestyle. And I doubt that you can tell everyone to give up what they have to go to communism. I probably would not even be allowed to have the number of computers I have in my home. And technology would probably not advance at the same rate, because you are taking away the drive, because like it or not, people are driven by material "earthly" gains.
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Guest bengalrick
[quote name='Jamie_B' date='Aug 11 2005, 02:45 PM']I find this discussion interesting because you definitely can see peoples background in it.

BJ and Homer with their having seen poverty in not just the US but the world.
Rick with his only have seeing the US point of view (No offence Rick)
Me living next to East Germany during the fall of the wall, I'm kind of wavering back and forth with the specifics of things, because Germany is a bit more rich than Africa or the Middle east so I've only seen so much.
Steggy I'm still trying to see where he fits in with his background and world view. I do see some of his Marine days influencing some of it.

This is the case I find with political discussion too, not just economics. Completely natural, but interesting none the less.
[right][post="128877"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post][/right][/quote]

no offense taken... i realize that i have only a "limited" view of the world, b/c i have only been out of the country three times(niagra falls, bahamas, and mexico... but the bahamas and mexico i was limited to the tourist areas b/c that is what i was) i can only relate to things the united states for the most part...

natural selection and topics along that line are extremely interesting... most of us believe it, whether you admit it or not... but we can all have different points of view... unfortinately, until i experience the "dark parts" of the world (or whatever you want to call them) i will not truely understand places like that... i will still strive to get a good feeling though... not sure if i'll ever visit places like africa, but if i am well off in life, and have similar feelings that i do now, i'm sure i will eventually go...

homer, man you hit my point w/ a sledge hammer... i agree that investing in people and love that example... we need to invest in better education... for instance, i look back on my life and think that i could have benefitted greatly if i was pushed much, much harder in like first and second grade... i mean, by fourth grade or so, i think i should have been learning algebra (for instance)... and in science, we should quit "reviewing" things over, and over and over again until college when i started actually learning something... education is the key to solving most of the problems...

i do have one comment though about the "free health care" thing... if we were to do that, how could we afford to make better prescriptions? i mean, the main thing that pays for these, are the same thing that pisses people off (profit turned totechnology)...
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Steggy;

Points well taken. Let me be concrete now to suggest where I think government can do things that private interests cannot, and sadly, will not do.

We're in a housing bubble. It's going to burst at some point and if the trigger is big enough, it'll burst in a way that puts a lot of people in jeopardy of losing their homes. (Rather than get into analysis about the bubble itself, if you do not agree with me, make the assumption for the purposes of this discussion.)

So, what do we do? Do we toss thousands of families out of their homes and put them on the streets or do we use the government to take measures to ensure that they can keep a roof over their heads until we sort the mess out? Do we declare a moratorium of sorts, along the lines of Roosevelt's Bank Holiday in 1933?

Most regular folk do not pay much attention to policy wonks and government operatives who determine the axioms and environments in which we all live. It wouldn't be their fault, in other words, that the house of cards came tumbling down. (As it will, just as the internet bubble burst in 2000.)

So, if the problem is severe enough, what do we do? Because [i]we people are the government[/i], and if government is, in many respects, nothing more than the levers of power which we the people manipulate in order to achieve desired outcomes for society, which levers do we use?

This is an area in which government, and only government, can address properly.
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Guest steggyD
Yeah, let the government take charge in such a situation, but only for that situation at the time. Don't make legislation that is in effect for the rest of eternity, it ends up biting us in the ass later on. Look at social security. It would take a crystal ball to know that things are going to be different in the future. It sounds great at the time, the working young are able to make enough money for the old people. Suddenly, introduce smaller families, and medicine that keeps everyone living forever, and the scale is tipped in the wrong direction.

Now, if people need housing, come up with some solutions that are temporary, just enough to get the country back on its feet. Then cut the program, it may be a killer later on in life.

While we're on housing, I think government housing has been a problem already. They keep people in government housing, and they're all kept together, not mixed into the rest of society. It's almost like a prison, which is another poorly ran governmental institution. More people come out of prison worse off than when they go in, they have new connections, new ideas of how to make more money, etc. I can go on with horribly ran public systems, but I'll let it be.

On another note, I hope that bubble doesn't pop in the next year or two. I plan on selling my house while they're still hot. I'm just not ready for it yet.
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[quote name='bengalrick' date='Aug 11 2005, 03:09 PM']i do have one comment though about the "free health care" thing... if we were to do that, how could we afford to make better prescriptions? i mean, the main thing that pays for these, are the same thing that pisses people off (profit turned totechnology)...
[right][post="128891"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post][/right][/quote]

I should have said this better earlier. The goal is, in my mind, to create such abundance that services like these become, in a sense, commodities. The creation of surplus/profit is one way to fund to research and development, but not the only way.

Look at it this way: If the society as a whole made a commitment to eradicate [i]x[/i] disease or [i]y[/i] deficiency, then all kinds of pressures would be brought to bear to solve the problem. Consider the rural electrification of America, outside of heath care. Look at that history in order to get a sense of how we can muster and efort for the common good.

In health care, the most recent stark example of this is with AIDS. Brazil, notably, has said that it would disregard international patents and go into production to create generic, and therefore cheaper, versions of the cocktail which helps to fend off the transition from HIV infection to full-blown AIDS. What's wrong with that, if anything? At what moment do property rights become subsumed by human rights? It's a tough question and the answers are not always satisfying to all parties.

The point is this, as I suggested earlier, in a healthy economy:

1) profit/surplus increases,
2) prices stabilize or decrease,
3) living standards improve.

There is really only one way to achieve all these simultaneously on a relatively consistent basis. Here's the pathway: education-->new knowledge-->translated into technological apparati or processes-->introduced into broad social practice.

I know, easier said than done, and this schema begs a lot of questions, but that is the general outline of how a society reproduces itself an qualitatively higher levels over generations.
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[quote name='steggyD' date='Aug 11 2005, 08:20 PM']While we're on housing, I think government housing has been a problem already. They keep people in government housing, and they're all kept together, not mixed into the rest of society. It's almost like a prison, which is another poorly ran governmental institution. More people come out of prison worse off than when they go in, they have new connections, new ideas of how to make more money, etc. I can go on with horribly ran public systems, but I'll let it be.
[right][post="129046"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post][/right][/quote]

I might have more to say on this later, but I am in hurry right now, so I'll remark on this because I also find it interesting: down here in Lexington, there have been attempts, with mixed success, to spread out Section 8 housing instead of creating large complexes like those in NYC and many other really big cities. One thing is for sure, they aren't big eyesores and I think the conditions are in many respects better for folks.
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Guest steggyD
[quote name='Homer_Rice' date='Aug 11 2005, 09:34 PM']I might have more to say on this later, but I am in hurry right now, so I'll remark on this because I also find it interesting: down here in Lexington, there have been attempts, with mixed success, to spread out Section 8 housing instead of creating large complexes like those in NYC and many other really big cities. One thing is for sure, they aren't big eyesores and I think the conditions are in many respects better for folks.
[right][post="129053"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post][/right][/quote]
Yes, I lived in Lexington for a spell. Very nice area, and I appreciated many of the things that they did there. It did seem to be a very experimental city. I find their educational experiments pretty scary though. They would send children all over the place, constantly remapping the districts. And uniforms in public schools, in my opinion, is the worst idea one can ever come up with.
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