Lee Ving, on 09 May 2013 - 07:02 AM, said:
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.
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For the majority of that time resource distribution was not done in a free market but by force of arms. That's why human development was largely stagnant for thousands of years until capitalism changed everything for the better.
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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.
I dunno man, every time I got the movies the toilet floors there are covered in urine and there is garbage all over the place. People clearly don't clean up after themselves.
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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 display a shocking lack of understanding of economics. You
can't make Ferraris available to the public at large. If you have your communist commissar order a set number of luxury cars to be made, it means something more urgently needed, like food, is not produced in large enough quantities. That's precisely why Soviet Russia had a surplus of things people didn't want and a shortage of things they did want. Government decree simply does not make goods appear out of thin air! I already tried to make this point when I compared economic law to natural law, but clearly you haven't read enough economics to understand this.
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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.
The Wikipedia article about the second Republic of Spain does not contain any economic information from that period, so clearly it's kind of hard to find this information (if it can even be considered relevant since the time period is so short). Anyway, it's not too dissimilar from the Soviet Union and there productivity plummeted as people simply tried to game the system all the time. Heck, I wouldn't lift a finger if it didn't clearly help me or a person close to me.
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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.
1) I don't read either of those publications as they are bastions of Keynesianism. I read and listen to Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Peter Schiff, Marc Faber and Jim Rogers.
2) Chomsky is insane. He actually thinks that if people are in control of their work (essentially entrepreneurs), they'll love it so much they'll volunteer to work for 80h/week without pay as long as their basic needs are provided for. A typical ivory tower intellectual with no understanding of how the world below works.
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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.
Well, duh! You work for the government! It doesn't give a rat's *** what your boss does! If it was a corporation you could pass your experiences to the board of directors (who represent/are the owners in case you're unfamiliar with corporate structure) and they'd evaluate the situation and possibly fire his ***. You keep making my point for me here.
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You denied that there was any involvement before that, glad to see you shift position when it is convenient for you.
No, I said Friedman never met Chile's leaders. There was no direct involvement. Just because you like Chomsky's ideas, I'm not going to blame him for personally trying to plant them into the MWO forums.
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Take a course in statistics, you stooge. Generalizations do not a data-set make.
Sure, if there was a country with so abysmal numbers that it drags the whole average into the mud, you have a point.
Here is the GDP/capita ranking according to a few different agencies. In all of them, in 2010 Chile was #2-3 on the continent. I think that's quite solid considering they were pretty much dead last only some 35 years ago.
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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.
You quoted it but it said nothing about unions, organized labour in general, assassinations or Coca-Cola, so I really don't know what you're smoking here. I'm not against organized labour as long as you're allowed to not be a part of a union, btw.
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"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?
Like I've said before, you can only enslave a man with force. Corporations bow down to the consumer who dictates what the corporation should do. Are you a slave of Apple? Does Apple put a gun to your head and tell you to buy an iPhone? Of course not! You hold the gun and Apple goes against your will at its own peril. This whole idea of corporate slave masters is ridiculous.
Edited by Leiska, 11 May 2013 - 08:10 AM.
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