87 replies to this topic

[Georgegad]

Ian Marcus Kain, on 06 May 2013 - 10:35 AM, said:

Dont look at the Clans as a nation. Look at them as a millitary force. The warrior cast acts as the combat arms branch of the millitary the Civilians are the Support. Now Look up a modern millitary force. At best only 1% to 4% are actual combat arms the rest are support. And no. Going through basic training and having a rifle dosnt make you combat arms.

Absolutely correct and exactly what i have been speaking about.

The clans are a military group and the standards we are trying to fit them to simply do not apply.
While not all of their military are active mechwarriors, all but a tiny percentage of them are members of the military and work in the many support services required for mech battle.

These people are military and get issued everything they need and have no need of money.

The only people who regularly require credits are the freebirths and it is only a method of keeping that portion of the population under control. They dont 'require' money either and could be just as easily given their daily requirements for free, but the clans like to be cost effective and keep the option to stop feeding people who are no longer useful.

[Georgegad]

Leiska, on 06 May 2013 - 08:47 AM, said:

I suppose you're experiencing a major case of cognitive dissonance.

It is quite likely one of us is, but i dont see how it could be me. Your hugely pro capitalism rant is no threat to my worldview.
I am not capitalist or socialist.

I dont disagree with you because i want you to come over to socialism, i disagree with you because capitalism is a horrible system and is designed to fail.

The current financial crash in the us is often pointed to as the failure of capitalism.
Personally I see it as simply being capitalism in action, there was a boom period and now there is a depression to set the field for the next boom period.

It is a terrible system, capitalism is the entire reason Americas economy is going through a disaster and the reason so many of the citizens are unhappy with their current situation.


------------------

A wiser form of thought would build a more stable economy with less emphasis on being ahead of the competition and scraping a fraction more profit, and more thought on long term wellbeing.

[Georgegad]

Leiska, on 06 May 2013 - 08:47 AM, said:

When the state has too much power, it becomes lucrative and various special interests will attempt to take it over. Do you think lobbying would be a multi-billion dollar business if governments had no authority to make the decisions lobbyists want them to make? Of course not.

You are aware that lobbying of government only happens in your country at all because of its capitalist leanings?
In other places giving large sums of money to politicians to influence their opinions is called bribery.


--------------
I have a little trick you might like to try if you would like to see things more from my perspective.....

When you are talking about your dislike for the government i assume you mean your democratically elected representative of the public.

If you would like to get an idea of how your position sounds to me you could go back and replace every instance of the word "Government" in your speech and replace it with the word "People"


I do certainly agree that a corporation would make more money and have an easier time if "People" did not keep getting in their way, i just dont think it is a good idea.

Without government regulation corporations become a menace.

[Georgegad]

Miragezero, on 05 May 2013 - 05:36 PM, said:

... They are even under their own eugenics program because their marriages are arranged by the state and encouraged to have children... while prohibited from having them with sexual relations outside of their marriage for that express reason.

Of course, we do have to look after the little monkeys now that we are responsible for their lives.

And since they are going to breed anyway, we can at least make sure they do it in a genetically responsible fashion. It is also good field work for our genetics team.

It doesnt mean we consider them to be equals when obviously they are not. They are only a part of the clan in the same way a farm animal might be said to be part of the clan. The clan has no need of them and is intended to function without them.

There is a reason the word freebirth is so offensive to clanners. It implies that you are a lower being.

Edited by Georgegad, 06 May 2013 - 10:42 PM.

[Kmieciu]

All I can say is that we had socialism in Poland until 1989 and my parents had to wait 12 years to buy their first telephone. Not because we didn't have money, but because you had to wait in line for one.

The shops were empty:


The only thing you could buy was the vinegar and mustard. You were allowed to buy 1 kg of oranges PER YEAR.



I remember standing in line for 4 hours with my mother trying to buy some meat.

And if you didn't like it, you could tell it to these guys:

Edited by Kmieciu, 07 May 2013 - 12:23 AM.

[CrashieJ]

Miragezero, on 06 May 2013 - 11:44 AM, said:

Yeah... you guys are being pretty tame but the new rule is you have to work clans somewhere logically into your arguments . ;-p FASA wrote back... Catalyst has the copyright on the out of print material. Hopefully if they won't allow for a fan copy they will do one.

can you send a request to catalyst to see if you can get the sourcebook?

[Lee Ving]

Kmieciu, on 07 May 2013 - 12:21 AM, said:

All I can say is that we had socialism in Poland until 1989 and my parents had to wait 12 years to buy their first telephone. Not because we didn't have money, but because you had to wait in line for one.

The shops were empty:

The only thing you could buy was the vinegar and mustard. You were allowed to buy 1 kg of oranges PER YEAR.

I remember standing in line for 4 hours with my mother trying to buy some meat.

And if you didn't like it, you could tell it to these guys:

Totalitarian communism != socialism. If you want to complain about totalitarian communism, by all means, go for it. I've seen great academic papers on the scarcity of resources and the unnecessary waste in production within that form of society. Top down bureaucratic control is never a good thing in my opinion, and I am not advocating for it.

Sorry your parents had it bad under the Eastern bloc, but you can partially blame Roosevelt/Yalta for that one.

Edited by Lee Ving, 07 May 2013 - 05:42 AM.

[Lee Ving]

Leiska, on 06 May 2013 - 03:29 PM, said:

Not sure what you're saying here.

Those who steal from the commons are not likely to give up after centuries of conditioning telling them they have a divine/legal right to steal from the community. The ruling class is unlikely to give up the results of its theft peaceably.

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Individual actors can defend their enterprises either through personal defensive force (armed guard) or by governmental law enforcement. An anarcho-capitalist would tell you private law can not only exist, but is preferable to centralized government law, however, I haven't read enough Rothbard to have come to that conclusion as of yet. What government can enforce has to be properly defined in the constitution and the people need to be prepared to protect the constitution, even with armed uprising if necessary. As Jefferson put it: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." If this fails, they will temporarily succumb to an era of tyranny.

How quaint, anarcho-capitalists are being revised to be the first to establish community based legal frameworks? Anarchism predates that notion by some time; collective societies that would not recognize the word anarchism by several millenia. I agree with the last part, but so far we're on the otherside of the picket line. You want to protect property and wealth; you simply want to deconstruct one of the last inefficient means of reducing infringements upon the natural rights of the majority of people - the state. In a stateless society those people serve as that buffer, but we do not currently have that, and you're suggesting a transition to a stateless society where the most powerful actors would be corporations. William Gibson has written a lot of dystopian fiction along those lines.

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Irrelevant. If the shop girl can afford silk stockings, she can also afford to eat and quite expensively at that, and the shop girl is in the lowest position of power.

Redherring. You're simply distracting from the theft of workers' products by providing a thin justification that "oh living standards improved," which they are naturally want to with or without the intervention of the ruling class violating the sovereign rights of man via force and intimidation in an unregulated factory setting.

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How should I know? Most likely they or their parents worked, saved and invested in a business of their own or someone else's business. Have you never held a job?

Back to the myth that wealth comes from hard work and sweat. Sorry, 9 times out of 10 it comes from previous wealth and a consolidation of the power that generated that wealth. Thanks for tacking on that ad hominem, "do you even lift work bro?" I have been working for the past decade. I will work for the rest of the decades I toil on this planet.

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Just because life sometimes sucks, it doesn't mean you can suspend laws of economics. It just isn't possible. If you're being foreclosed upon, it means you've messed up/life kicked you in the nuts and you've gone insolvent. Remember: If you're in debt, you don't actually own your property, the creditor does. If you go bankrupt, the control of the property is then transferred to its rightful owner. Otherwise it would be a simple matter to steal significant assets by taking a loan, buying something and then just declaring bankruptcy. Actually, nobody would grant a loan if he law said that.

You can actually suspend the "laws" of economics when you reorganize society into non-profit based economic systems. Hence my positions for federated syndicalism / industrial unionism (and the rest of this debate). Now you're talking about the usurious banking system and predatory lending as if it is a good thing. The banking and loan system in a non-profit oriented society would not resemble the courtesy showed to Revolutionary War veterans during Shay's Rebellion - veterans who were not paid their wages and lost farms they needed them to pay for.

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I was referring to the current world. There very much are bosses (both management and owners) now and from what I've read, anarchists carry a grudge against them even though they themselves agreed to work under them and refuse to quit. It boggles the mind.

So anarchists should embrace their bosses while they exploit the fruits of their labor? I think you missed the point somewhere along the way.

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This is actually not true. Friedman and his group never actually met the country's leaders, they simply had a series of seminars at a university.

Actually, it is.

"The Chicago Boys (c. 1970s) were a group of young Chilean economists, most of whom trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, or at its affiliate in the economics department at the Catholic University of Chile. The training was the result of a "Chile Project" organised in the 1950s by the US State Department and funded by the Ford Foundation, which aimed at influencing Chilean economic thinking. The project was uneventful until the early 1970s."

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Chicago_Boys

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The OECD consists of 34 countries, most of which are highly developed Western economies. Of course Chile is not going to compare amazingly well. Also, income inequality and relative poverty are not problems, absolute poverty is. You're probably not that poorly off if you only own two luxury yachts even though your neighbours all have seven. Chasing income equality will surely lead to greater income equality, but it will also make the poorest even poorer. This is why low economic freedom heavily correlates with low average living standards.

Now you're cherry picking what you want to look at. Many of them are indeed highly developed as you note; Turkey and Mexico aren't particularly wealthy nor fully modernized and Chile compares less favorably than all other member states in the standard of measure for the distribution of wealth (Gini measures this - the US and Turkey are right behind them, FYI). The list also includes Portugal, Slovenia, Estonia, Czech Republic, and Finland.

Part 2 follows since it didn't like my number of quotes.

Edited by Lee Ving, 07 May 2013 - 07:27 AM.

[Lee Ving]

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Chile GDP/capita vs Latin America average (notice how Pinochet's economic reforms in 1975 mark the turning point): http://en.wikipedia....ta_LA-Chile.png

Wait, so executing vast portions of your population and seizing their resources = economic prosperity now?

Also - LOL there are 2 lines on that chart, Chile, and everyone else. What is everyone else, averaged together? That really provides for an accurate analysis of disparate economies and economic methodologies.

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Chile Human Development Index: http://hdrstats.undp...ofiles/CHL.html
Chile easily beats its neighbours. Sure, rapid changes like those implemented by Pinochet are going to leave a lot of people in trouble. Humans just can't adapt instantly, so I don't think it was the correct way to go about things (not to mention the brutal ways he silenced political dissidents in), however, the Chilean economy was in a death spiral and who knows how bad it would have gotten if Allende was allowed to continue his destructive policies any further.

This isn't a comparison of its individual neighbors, its a rough averaging of all of them. These charts are essentially meaningless for your argument because they're so broad.

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You're still not presenting any solutions, only complaining about how bad some people according to your perspective have. Chinese factory workers earn more at the factory than at the family farm to which they could return at any time if they wished to. So, what are you going to do? Steal someone else's property and give to them so they can buy an education and get a nice office job? Perhaps you'll donate some of your own income? This is the question socialists can never seem to answer.
I have absolutely no idea what you're going on about in the second paragraph.

What I'm talking about in the second paragraph is a response to what you wrote:

"They are not slaves, they are poor farmers who found a new alternative in industry and they gladly take it. If you think you could waltz into a sweat shop, shut it down and expect cheers from the workers, you're deluded. They'd tear you apart for taking away the one option besides sustenance farming they had."

To which I responded:

"Now you're presenting a strawman argument in regards to unionizing factory workers? I don't think Coca-Cola assassinates organizers because they're ineffective. If they had an accurate understanding of the reason their other option was taken away from them, they'd probably organize like the Zapatistas do against "Free Trade" agreements (free trade being an oxymoron at that - doublespeak plus one)."

Not only do you ignore the obvious response to your earlier haraunging and strawman fallacy, you follow it up with more!

"So, what are you going to do? Steal someone else's property and give to them so they can buy an education and get a nice office job? Perhaps you'll donate some of your own income? This is the question socialists can never seem to answer."

Look at the distribution of wealth and resources in the U.S. Most people have not stolen to achieve their current level of wealth, but a very small section of society has indeed benefited from a great theft. Redistributing that in a better equilibrium is exactly what I'm suggesting. We lock up people for bank robberies longer than for murders, but when its white collar criminals on Wall St. or in Congress you applaud them.

I've answered your question multiple times, no war but class war is the answer.

[Leiska]

Georgegad, on 06 May 2013 - 09:28 PM, said:

The current financial crash in the us is often pointed to as the failure of capitalism.
Personally I see it as simply being capitalism in action, there was a boom period and now there is a depression to set the field for the next boom period.

It is a terrible system, capitalism is the entire reason Americas economy is going through a disaster and the reason so many of the citizens are unhappy with their current situation.

Oh, please. There is no capitalism in the US. Do you know what central banking is? It's not free market capitalism, for sure. They fix the very price of money, which is one half of all transactions. What do you think causes bubbles? It's governments and central banks, not free markets. The boom/bust cycle is always mostly caused by economic policy (governments) or monetary policy (central banks). The coming financial crash is a failure of central banking, not capitalism. You should drop the economic illiteracy before trying to debate economics.

Lee Ving, on 07 May 2013 - 07:26 AM, said:

Those who steal from the commons are not likely to give up after centuries of conditioning telling them they have a divine/legal right to steal from the community. The ruling class is unlikely to give up the results of its theft peaceably.

Steal from the commons? How does one do that? Who thinks they have a divine right to do that? It seems like you're describing the feudal system.

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How quaint, anarcho-capitalists are being revised to be the first to establish community based legal frameworks? Anarchism predates that notion by some time; collective societies that would not recognize the word anarchism by several millenia. I agree with the last part, but so far we're on the otherside of the picket line. You want to protect property and wealth; you simply want to deconstruct one of the last inefficient means of reducing infringements upon the natural rights of the majority of people - the state. In a stateless society those people serve as that buffer, but we do not currently have that, and you're suggesting a transition to a stateless society where the most powerful actors would be corporations. William Gibson has written a lot of dystopian fiction along those lines.

You know, it's very difficult to follow your train of thought here. Also, I said an anarcho-capitalis wants a stateless society, I do not. I simply want to limit the authority of the state to what I consider are it's only wanted functions: law making, law enforcement and national defense. Right now it heavily infringes upon my liberties as a sovereign individual.

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Redherring. You're simply distracting from the theft of workers' products by providing a thin justification that "oh living standards improved," which they are naturally want to with or without the intervention of the ruling class violating the sovereign rights of man via force and intimidation in an unregulated factory setting.

Back to the myth that wealth comes from hard work and sweat. Sorry, 9 times out of 10 it comes from previous wealth and a consolidation of the power that generated that wealth. Thanks for tacking on that ad hominem, "do you even lift work bro?" I have been working for the past decade. I will work for the rest of the decades I toil on this planet.

Theft of workers’ products? I'm sorry, but what? Are you referring to the Marxian theory of the capital owner taking the value that is left over after the worker's wages? That theory is flawed because it doesn't account for the subjectivity of value. The capital owner wants the worker's labour more than the wage he pays him and the worker wants the wage more than the labour he delivers. It's a trade and, like all voluntary trades, it only happens when it benefits both sides. It's a symbiosis, not exploitation.

Also, yes, capital builds up! That’s why our living standards are higher than 50 years earlier. Our living standards are not the product of only our economic activity, but also the surpluses generated by previous generations.

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You can actually suspend the "laws" of economics when you reorganize society into non-profit based economic systems. Hence my positions for federated syndicalism / industrial unionism (and the rest of this debate). Now you're talking about the usurious banking system and predatory lending as if it is a good thing. The banking and loan system in a non-profit oriented society would not resemble the courtesy showed to Revolutionary War veterans during Shay's Rebellion - veterans who were not paid their wages and lost farms they needed them to pay for.

Economics is a social science and a subcategory of praxeology, the study of human action. You cannot overcome the laws of economics without changing the very logic human reason operates by. There can never be such a thing as a non-profit economic system. A market by definition needs prices to exist and there can be no prices without individual actors with a profit motive. It is as useful for a king to order prosperity to appear as it is for him to ban gravity. It simply cannot be done because the scarcity of resources is just as much a fact as is gravity.

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So anarchists should embrace their bosses while they exploit the fruits of their labor? I think you missed the point somewhere along the way.

If you think your boss is exploiting the fruits of your labour, just quit the damn job. It's not so hard.

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Actually, it is.

"The Chicago Boys (c. 1970s) were a group of young Chilean economists, most of whom trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, or at its affiliate in the economics department at the Catholic University of Chile. The training was the result of a "Chile Project" organised in the 1950s by the US State Department and funded by the Ford Foundation, which aimed at influencing Chilean economic thinking. The project was uneventful until the early 1970s."

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Chicago_Boys

You should probably read the article. Friedman was just a university lecturer, nothing more. He's not even named in the article.

Lee Ving, on 07 May 2013 - 07:30 AM, said:

Also - LOL there are 2 lines on that chart, Chile, and everyone else. What is everyone else, averaged together? That really provides for an accurate analysis of disparate economies and economic methodologies.


This isn't a comparison of its individual neighbors, its a rough averaging of all of them. These charts are essentially meaningless for your argument because they're so broad.

I was comparing Chile to the rest of Latin America. What are you comparing it to? Mostly the richest nations in North America and Western Europe! Which do you think is more relevant? Are you going to argue against charts now?

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Now you're presenting a strawman argument in regards to unionizing factory workers? I don't think Coca-Cola assassinates organizers because they're ineffective. If they had an accurate understanding of the reason their other option was taken away from them, they'd probably organize like the Zapatistas do against "Free Trade" agreements (free trade being an oxymoron at that - doublespeak plus one)."
Not only do you ignore the obvious response to your earlier haraunging and strawman fallacy, you follow it up with more!

I never said a word about unions or assassinations (dafuq?). Why do you even bring them up? Also, no other option was taken away; it's just how the cookie crumbles. Do you think Henry Ford "took away" the option of selling horse carriages? Should we start subsidizing dead industries now? Small farms aren't cost effective and no amount of crying will change that (impossible to overcome laws of economics, remember?). It's time to move on and allow progress towards a more prosperous mankind to happen.

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Look at the distribution of wealth and resources in the U.S. Most people have not stolen to achieve their current level of wealth, but a very small section of society has indeed benefited from a great theft. Redistributing that in a better equilibrium is exactly what I'm suggesting. We lock up people for bank robberies longer than for murders, but when its white collar criminals on Wall St. or in Congress you applaud them.

I've answered your question multiple times, no war but class war is the answer.

I don't applause white collar criminals. What makes you think I do? The modern financial sector is a creature born out of central banking. What they do is at most a crude perversion of capitalism. The biggest banks are bursting with thieves and scum of the earth, no question about it. They have the government in their back pockets and unfortunately government sets the rules for all of us.

So, when is this war going to happen? Who is going to lead it and how? How do you distribute the resources once conquered "back to the commons"? I guess you'll vote a wealth distribution commissar into office and he'll then go on and share nice benefits to all his pals and other *** kissers, which is how it always goes when central planning is involved. Also, all economic activity will revert back to the Bronze Age for years to come, so three quarters of the world's population will starve to death. An excellent plan.

Edited by Leiska, 07 May 2013 - 11:37 AM.

[Lee Ving]

Leiska, on 07 May 2013 - 11:18 AM, said:

Steal from the commons? How does one do that? Who thinks they have a divine right to do that? It seems like you're describing the feudal system.

As I said before, by privatizing that which was once commons - whether it be grazing land for cattle, community meeting spaces, or water rights. You agreed earlier that the theft had occurred over a long time, and you now try to repudiate your own agreement. I did make mention of feudal systems of governance because after the Roman Empire, the feudal ideology is the opening gesture at (re)centralizing government effectively to put a price and property owner to everything.

Essentially the idea of property itself beyond personal necessities (food, clothing) is a divergence from the notion of the commons - try reading Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents sometime; he's a Nobel Prize winner for Economics (2001) and worked at the World Bank for years before becoming one of its most vocal detractors.

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Economics is a social science and a subcategory of praxeology, the study of human action. You cannot overcome the laws of economics without changing the very logic human reason operates by. There can never be such a thing as a non-profit economic system. A market by definition needs prices to exist and there can be no prices without individual actors with a profit motive. It is as useful for a king to order prosperity to appear as it is for him to ban gravity. It simply cannot be done.

Denial does not eliminate just such experiments in economic organization within multiple societies, which I've noted one specific example of, and which you continue to ignore (Republican Spain prior to reconquista by the Nationalists).

You do actually change the logic on which humanity operates as soon as you remove the motive of scarcity of resources from the equation. Theft does not occur in a society with nothing to steal. There is little to nothing worth stealing in a society which freely provides food, clothing and shelter so long as you produce for that society in the means which you are most capable. Try reading The Dispossessed by Le Guin sometime.

"You cannot overcome the laws of economics without changing the very logic human reason operates by."

This operates on the presumption that people are not inherently social, community driven creatures. We all have a propensity to want to feel "good" about our actions, and be seen as "good" within the eyes of our peers. Hording wealth in a non-profit based society would be paramount to revulsion, if not exile.

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If you think your boss is exploiting the fruits of your labour, just quit the damn job. It's not so hard.

That's the nature of all jobs where a boss does not produce labor or share equally in the work. Trading one position of exploitation for another is counterproductive in building the means of working class struggle against that exploitation.

There is also an implication that I am not actively looking for another means of employ in an economy (US) with real unemployment at ~12%+.

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You should probably read the article. Friedman was just a university lecturer, nothing more. He's not even named in the article.

Friedman lectured for the Economics program from 1943 through to the time during those students' attendance. Your conclusion is he had nothing to do with them? Brilliant. He is explicitly mentioned twice, once that I already quoted, and:

"Only some of them went later for postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago, where they enrolled in Arnold Harberger's Latin American Finance Workshop and Milton Friedman's Money and Banking Workshop. The whole group was heavily influenced by the Chicago School of Economics, and especially by the writings and public policy proposals of Milton Friedman. Their proposals were not central to Chilean political debate until 1973, where the debate focused on how best to take developmentalism forward and all three major political parties in the 1970 elections favoured nationalization of the copper mines.^[6] The first reforms were implemented in three rounds – 1974–1983, 1985, and 1990."

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I was comparing Chile to the rest of Latin America. What are you comparing it to? The mostly the richest nations in North America and Western Europe! Which do you think is more relevant? Are you going to argue against charts now?

You were comparing it to an average of all of the rest of Latin America, if you do not understand why that is an inaccurate standard, take a class in statistics. I'd like singular economies to compare to for a reasonable comparison of the effectiveness of economic policies; say Boliva, Cuba, Colombia, and Peru.

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I never said a word about unions or assassinations (dafuq?). Why do you even bring them up?

Because you said organizing sweatshops was ineffective - my response was that Coca-Cola would not pay paramilitaries to assassinate organizers if it was not. Is that so difficult to understand?

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Also, no other option was taken away; it's just how the cookie crumbles. Do you think Henry Ford "took away" the option of selling horse carriages? Should we start subsidizing dead industries now? Small farms aren't cost effective and no amount of crying will change that (impossible to overcome laws of economics, remember?). It's time to move on and allow progress towards a more prosperous mankind to happen.

Oh look, a bunch of absurdist strawman arguments again. Urban migration is a fact in all economies that undergo industrialization; I do think that industrialization took away many options of people to provide a surplus of unskilled, unemployed laborers (a key and necessary factor in any capitalist economy) to provide chattel for the factories.

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I don't applause white collar criminals. What makes you think I do? The modern financial sector is a creature born out of central banking. What they do is at most a crude perversion of capitalism. The biggest banks are bursting with thieves and scum of the earth, no question about it. They have the government in their back pockets and unfortunately government sets the rules for all of us.

At least we agree on something.

It still seems that you're advocating for a system wherein the corporations that benefit most from manipulation of financial markets (not to mention legal systems, less than legal methods, etc.) not be constrained by any governing body, thereby furthering the amount of corruption in the aforementioned system.

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So, when is this war going to happen? Who is going to lead it and how? How do you distribute the resources once conquered "back to the commons"? I guess you'll vote a wealth distribution commissar into office and he'll then go on and share nice benefits to all his pals and other *** kissers, which it how it always goes when central planning is involved. Also, all economic activity will revert back to the Bronze Age for years to come, so three quarters of the world's population will starve to death. An excellent plan.

Its happening all the time, dunkoff. It has been happening since the agricultural revolution first provided the surplus of goods to create a division of labor.

How do you distribute resources in an egalitarian society? As I said previously, you distribute as needed, you produce as capable. Distributed democratic processes, especially in something like a federated industrial union system, eliminate centralized banking alongside your fetish for communist tropes.

PS - I challenge your economic favorites on the field of combat with my economic favorites to a Trial of Annihilation (which I already lost almost a century ago when the New Deal broke the back of the militant revolutionary Left, and left pro-statist apologists in its place).

[Rex Havoc]

NERDS!!!!!!!!!!!

[Lee Ving]

Rex Havoc, on 07 May 2013 - 12:17 PM, said:

NERDS!!!!!!!!!!!

Rex Havoc, on 07 May 2013 - 12:17 PM, said:

NERDS!!!!!!!!!!!

Think you forgot your image

[Taemien]

Everyone uses Cbills. When the Clans conquered Inner Sphere worlds in the early 3050s, they didn't disturb the HPG stations. In order to use those stations they had to pay Comstar. Comstar deals in C-bills. The clans didn't bring their HPG networks with them, as well.. they didn't need to.

DocGiggles, on 03 May 2013 - 04:49 PM, said:

How do the Clans not just get swarmed over? I'd imagine the IS militaries are vastly larger.

Logistics. For example the Federated Suns alone has about 50,000 mechs. However they have 500 worlds to garrison. Move a regiment off world and things could get interesting when Pirates, Rogue Mercs, or Cultists get antsy. Jumpships are also in short supply. It takes a jumpship 2 weeks to recharge after a jump, a jump only gets them about 30 lightyears. The Inner Sphere in comparison is about 1000 light years across.

War. The Inner Sphere is always bickering. Even during the Clan Invasion there is a few skirmishes happening between the houses. Operation Scorpion is one of those. Later Operation Guerrero which caused the seperation of the Federated Commonwealth. As well as little rebellions and such in the Capellan Confederation, Lyran Alliance, ect. Its very rare that the Inner Sphere works together against the clans. Basically the only time it ever does is the Battle of Luthien, Operation Bulldog, and Operation Serpent, thats pretty much it.

Money. Its simply not cost effective to take back worlds on the border of the periphery. Those are backwater worlds to say the least. The exception is the Draconis Combine worlds, which is mostly gets back from Smoke Jaguar's annihilation and Novacat's integration to the Dracs. On the Lyran side, well their military is simply incompetent after the split from the FC, since they go back to their social general ways.

[Daneel Hazen]

So what have we learned here today if nothing else:

Capitalism - Pay to rule
Socialism - You work. You get paid. If too much we take. We rule but we love you.
Communism - Work to rule

Clans- WORK TO WIN!!!!! TILL YOU DIE!
TILL THE LIGHT DIES IN YOUR EYES!
WORK TO WIN, TAKE IT ALL, JUST KEEP FIGHTING TILL YOU FALL!!!



Seyla

[Leiska]

Lee Ving, on 07 May 2013 - 12:13 PM, said:

Essentially the idea of property itself beyond personal necessities (food, clothing) is a divergence from the notion of the commons - try reading Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents sometime; he's a Nobel Prize winner for Economics (2001) and worked at the World Bank for years before becoming one of its most vocal detractors.

Let me get this straight: you're making the point that most things should not be owned by anyone? I subscribe to the homestead principle. I find we're a few thousand years too late to debate this point, though. People have owned things for millennia and trying to revert that violates a person's fundamental freedoms. The body ought to be free from coercion and for that to be true also the fruits of the body's labour need to be free. It's not only a moral argument, it's also a practical one: private property motivates people to be prudent and industrious, common property does not. Have you been to a public toilet lately? Now compare it to your own and tell me people actually care about what they don't own.

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Denial does not eliminate just such experiments in economic organization within multiple societies, which I've noted one specific example of, and which you continue to ignore (Republican Spain prior to reconquista by the Nationalists).

That government only lasted a few years and I don't know enough about it to debate it. I do know that it wasn't stable, though. Perhaps it was not as successful as you'd like to think?

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You do actually change the logic on which humanity operates as soon as you remove the motive of scarcity of resources from the equation. Theft does not occur in a society with nothing to steal. There is little to nothing worth stealing in a society which freely provides food, clothing and shelter so long as you produce for that society in the means which you are most capable. Try reading The Dispossessed by Le Guin sometime.

First of all, resources are scarce. There are finite natural resources, finite capital goods and finite human resources. Why you'd think otherwise is a mystery. Secondly, if you are to receive according to need and are to provide according to capability, you'll very soon find people's needs mysteriously inflate and capabilities shrink. This is because a system like this encourages you to appear as helpless as possible.

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That's the nature of all jobs where a boss does not produce labor or share equally in the work. Trading one position of exploitation for another is counterproductive in building the means of working class struggle against that exploitation.

How do you know the boss isn't sharing equally in the work? It's impossible for you alone to make that judgement because it'll be a completely subjective one. The only entity fit to evaluate the value of ones efforts is the free market and it does it by putting a price on it. A market price contains all information and valuations held by the collective, which is what makes free prices so amazingly potent at resource allocation within an economy and price fixing so incredibly disruptive.

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Friedman lectured for the Economics program from 1943 through to the time during those students' attendance. Your conclusion is he had nothing to do with them? Brilliant.

No, my conclusion is that Friedman lectured at universities, some of his students went on to become influential economists in Chile and they had a profound impact on Pinochet’s administration.

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You were comparing it to an average of all of the rest of Latin America, if you do not understand why that is an inaccurate standard, take a class in statistics. I'd like singular economies to compare to for a reasonable comparison of the effectiveness of economic policies; say Boliva, Cuba, Colombia, and Peru.

Please do tell me why that is not a suitable standard. If Chile beats the average, it's going to beat most (in this case, I believe all) of the components of that average.

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Because you said organizing sweatshops was ineffective - my response was that Coca-Cola would not pay paramilitaries to assassinate organizers if it was not. Is that so difficult to understand?

I said no such thing, or at least I didn’t mean to. You must have misunderstood something.

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Oh look, a bunch of absurdist strawman arguments again. Urban migration is a fact in all economies that undergo industrialization; I do think that industrialization took away many options of people to provide a surplus of unskilled, unemployed laborers (a key and necessary factor in any capitalist economy) to provide chattel for the factories.

This is an absurd argument. You might as well argue for the abolishment of electricity, hoping it'd open jobs to replace all our automated systems.

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It still seems that you're advocating for a system wherein the corporations that benefit most from manipulation of financial markets (not to mention legal systems, less than legal methods, etc.) not be constrained by any governing body, thereby furthering the amount of corruption in the aforementioned system.

On the contrary. Government is incredibly bad at regulation because 1) the regulating bodies are easily corruptible and 2) there is no market discipline pressuring them to regulate effectively (this is why the SEC and CFTC are both utter jokes). The free market is a much better regulator because it's impossible to corrupt (too decentralized) and if consumers find your product or brand somehow poor or reprehensible, your customers turn to your competition instead, you go bust and your wasteful and/or bad deeds end there.

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Its happening all the time, dunkoff. It has been happening since the agricultural revolution first provided the surplus of goods to create a division of labor.

I don't see it. When some anarchist does come to my door to claim what little property I have back to the commons, he'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

I'm not sure I get the PS. Do you mean you want to read the economists I've read?

Edited by Leiska, 08 May 2013 - 05:35 PM.

[Georgegad]

Leiska, on 07 May 2013 - 11:18 AM, said:

Oh, please. There is no capitalism in the US.

So this whole time you have been talking about some romanticized perfect form of capitalism, and not the everyday actions we see happening in the world and being referred to as capitalistic in nature?

I dont see how anyone can have a conversation with you about that. Obviously in a perfect capitalist dream capitalism would work fine, just like if there was a perfect socialist climate socialism would work fine.

It is a waste of time us discussing fantasies though, the only capitalism i have any contact with is the real world type, and from what I have seen the real world type capitalism is a sham.

[Georgegad]

Leiska, on 08 May 2013 - 05:23 PM, said:

The free market is a much better regulator because it's impossible to corrupt

You keep speaking like corruption is a communist thing and never happens in capitalism.

The reason capitalism has no corruption is that greed, bribery and graft are all organized parts of the system.

As we spoke about before, in other systems bribing a politician is against the law, under capitalism it is called lobbying and is the common practice.

Leiska, on 08 May 2013 - 05:23 PM, said:

I don't see it. When some anarchist does come to my door to claim what little property I have back to the commons, he'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

The impression I get from anarchists is that they may just be happy to do that.

And when that happens and you offer them money or shares in your stock portfolio i get the feeling they would only laugh, because at the end of the day money is fundamentally worthless when there are no goods being bartered.

[Lee Ving]

Leiska, on 08 May 2013 - 05:23 PM, said:

Let me get this straight: you're making the point that most things should not be owned by anyone? People have owned things for millennia and trying to revert that violates a person's fundamental freedoms. The body ought to be free from coercion and for that to be true also the fruits of the body's labour need to be free. It's not only a moral argument, it's also a practical one: private property motivates people to be prudent and industrious, common property does not.

That is correct, most things should be in the realm of shared resources since you so aptly note below that they are finite in expression. As Proudhon notes, "Property is Theft." Funny thing about capitalism is it drives for an infinite profit on the assumption of infinite goods (and resources to back them).

For the thousands of years people have "owned" things, the vast majority of the population for all of that time has owned very little to the benefit of an extreme minority of ruling class. I'm not suggesting we do away with individual households, or basic goods and necessities. I am suggesting that the houses on the hills be turned into community centers, and the rich be eaten.

By the way, I work for the government, and we have a public toilet which stays quite clean despite a few hundred a day using it. Cleaning it is a job like any other, although the employee who does so receives better wages and benefits than I do at a desk.

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That government only lasted a few years and I don't know enough about it to debate it. I do know that it wasn't stable, though. Perhaps it was not as successful as you'd like to think?

sends the Condor Legion in for the first use of Blitz tactics, your lauded capitalist loves put trade blockades in regards to arms, ammunition, and volunteers on the Spanish Republicans, and you're surprised it lasted only a few years?

Blame the corporations you would have rule us all for their short tenure, not the system of governance in an era where distributed technology and democracy was much more difficult than it is today (nearly a century later).

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First of all, resources are scarce. There are finite natural resources, finite capital goods and finite human resources. Why you'd think otherwise is a mystery. Secondly, if you are to receive according to need and are to provide according to capability, you'll very soon find people's needs mysteriously inflate and capabilities shrink. This is because a system like this encourages you to appear as helpless as possible.

Open with another strawman, huzzah! You can eliminate scarcity on a practicable level by making those goods available to the general public at large. A Ferrari is a lot less sought after if you can drive one after X amount of work tokens, or similar.

"...you'll very soon find people's needs mysteriously inflate and capabilities shrink."

You don't want to interact with relevant cites and sources of economies that suggest otherwise, and you want to make no effort to engage those ideas outside of your capitalist money-driven framework. I suppose it is hard to blame you since you have been indoctrinated since you were young with the notion that this is the only means of organizing society.

Bakunin, Goldman, Makhno, Durruti, Malatesta, to name a few, did not preach for the entitled classes that seek to protect their thefts of the products of labor; perhaps you cannot hear their testament for that reason? Chomsky and Zinn are modern incarnations of writers/lecturers striving for a more equitable division of resources and labor, but I'm sure you've got convenient reasons they're all wrong/not worth reading because muh subscription to The Economist / Wall Street Journal.

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How do you know the boss isn't sharing equally in the work? It's impossible for you alone to make that judgement because it'll be a completely subjective one. The only entity fit to evaluate the value of ones efforts is the free market and it does it by putting a price on it. A market price contains all information and valuations held by the collective, which is what makes free prices so amazingly potent at resource allocation within an economy and price fixing so incredibly disruptive.

Ask a hypothetical that cannot be answered without specific circumstance, bravo! You know there are other fallacies you can use. In my own situation, I know that he does not share equally because I draft his correspondence to the county executives, run his phones, file his forms, and assist him when he doesn't know how to use the insert key.

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No, my conclusion is that Friedman lectured at universities, some of his students went on to become influential economists in Chile and they had a profound impact on Pinochet’s administration.

You denied that there was any involvement before that, glad to see you shift position when it is convenient for you.

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Please do tell me why that is not a suitable standard. If Chile beats the average, it's going to beat most (in this case, I believe all) of the components of that average.

Take a course in statistics, you stooge. Generalizations do not a data-set make.

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I said no such thing, or at least I didn’t mean to. You must have misunderstood something.

I quoted the passage where your hyperbole is clearly visible, and you're now denying your own words. I understand it can be difficult to keep a position when someone notes that it is incorrect, but don't ascribe a failing of reading comprehension to your own inaccurate assumptions.

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This is an absurd argument. You might as well argue for the abolishment of electricity, hoping it'd open jobs to replace all our automated systems.

Its an absurd argument in response to another one, conveniently quoted above. See, if you don't remember what my words are in reference to, you can go look at yours, and put that together. Beauty of persistence, huh?

"It's time to move on and allow progress towards a more prosperous mankind to happen."

Move on to your perfect capitalist dream where corporations are free to enslave who they want without the nasty encumbrances of labor law, security regulations, OSHA, or unions. Are you Scott Walker's internet persona?

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I don't see it. When some anarchist does come to my door to claim what little property I have back to the commons, he'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

You're lucky the revolution is highly unlikely to happen from within our current framework of greed, opulence, and the capital of empire. We'll sooner burn from without, a la the Vandals and Rome.

Still, if I am wrong, and it does come to pass that the workers develop the consciousness necessary to overcome class shills like you, I'd watch your tongue, lest you lose it.

Edited by Lee Ving, 09 May 2013 - 07:14 AM.

[Daneel Hazen]

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