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I did not win the Powerball again!


"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
--Jonathan Swift

Follow the light out of your "dream" world that is actually a nightmare to all freedom lovers. The "valid arguments" are multitudinous and easily understandable as just basic "human nature" that causes communism to fail EVERY time it is tried. But then some people just refuse to learn.

Why Reject Socialism?: Collectivism vs. Individualism (part 1) Appeal To Heaven
Why Reject Socialism?: Private Property, and Economic Freedom vs. Economic Equality (part 2) Appeal To Heaven

Free To Choose – Milton Friedman on Economic Freedom Appeal To Heaven

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"Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively and without self delusion---In the long run these are the only people that count." ***** Robert Heinlein

The way to eliminate those "inequalities" is to LOWER everybody to a level that ALL may attain.
The other way is to "assist" those that do not do as well. This disincentivizes both the under and over achievers.
That's the incentives you claim are created?

Worst of ALL. Somehow the "decisions" have to be made and human nature being what it is the "politics" (corruption) alone of picking winners and losers...............

Could you perhaps tell of just one example of this "socialist utopia" of which you write?
You may even make one up and explain why you think it might work and it will take but a few seconds of actual human nature in action to prove that it WON'T WORK.

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"Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively and without self delusion---In the long run these are the only people that count." ***** Robert Heinlein

Saltwn

I like your new "mainstream" quote

Someday I'll find myself a new signature quote ........someday........someday.....one day.....
Darn I still don't have an Avatar

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"Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively and without self delusion---In the long run these are the only people that count." ***** Robert Heinlein

I didn't get it from here, but I did get it from a poet on the Internet (can't remember the name)
But there are many of these around just keep clicking it will eventually make you laugh or weep Random Quote Generator - Quotes from Firefly, Futurama, Buffy, Calvin and Hobbes, Simpsons, Star Wars, and more.

As for avatars: http://photobucket.com/ I don't know why but gifs won't work in the avatar (for me anyway) but you can use them in sig. The regular flat photos do well though.

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I did not win the Powerball again!


"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
--Jonathan Swift

I've focused on the effects of market power in creating barriers to firm entry; since it inhibits the equality of opportunity and ability of entrepreneurs to rise and fall based on their own merits rather than on predetermined outcomes outside of their control, most of us conclude that excessive market power is unjust, and there are certainly also substantial grounds for concluding that it is an inherent inefficiency of capitalism.

There seems to be a larger problem with an underlying belief of yours in moral relativism or some approximation of it, the view that all moral views are equally valid or that one cannot be proven better than another. The study of ethics teaches us that this is untrue for a variety of reasons. For one thing, we all have somewhat instinctual meta-ethical precepts that we cling to; we all have a realization that the avoidance of suffering is desirable, for example, so we've implemented moral guidelines that seek to reduce it. Much of this is related to mere survival purposes; any social order that permitted the unrestricted killing of any members of society, for instance, would eventually collapse.

That would be a criticism better applied to "laissez-faire" capitalism, which has no record of practical existence. Its advocates usually lack an understanding of the economic psychology of the labor market. Conversely, I've never come across any criticisms of socialism that hold based on "human nature" claims, because they're usually too vague to even stick. I mean, what does your comment even mean? Why is it so ambiguous?

At the moment, there is someone "at the top" taking "advantage of the worker bees," so I don't see that re-organization efforts would cost us much anyway. But I'm confused as to why you'd expect a horizontal democratic organizational structure to facilitate dictatorship by the ambitious more than the de jure and de facto rigidly hierarchical internal structure that characterizes the orthodox capitalist firm would. For the purpose of comparison, I've never heard anyone express fears that the establishment of political democracy in replacement of dictatorship would create a potential for authoritarianism.

Have they enacted a system of horizontal democratic management by labor cooperatives? Or has there been some partial ownership scheme enacted that has no significant effect on actual workers' control of the productive resources that UAW specializes in managing?

Considering the constrictions on social mobility that render equality of opportunity under capitalism a pipe dream, that's mere utopian sentiment. The reality is far different.

Freedom and capitalism are incompatible, as the capitalist labor market is an authoritarian cesspool that epitomizes slaver in its worst forms. To examine this authoritarian nature, we first have to analyze the conditions of potentially liberty-restricting power that surround its existence. I typically refer to the spectrum of influence terms that the political scientist Robert Dahl uses, which ranges from rational persuasion to manipulative persuasion to inducement to power to coercion to physical force. We know that physical force is not the only negative influence term, and even propertarians (rightist "libertarians") would likely admit that aside from inducement, all others aside from rational persuasion are morally problematic. Their support for laws against fraud, for example, would be indicative of their opposition to "consensual" yet manipulative persuasion.

Yet we do not see a consistent opposition to manipulative persuasion in the capitalist labor market emerging, nor a consistent opposition to conditions of power and coercion occurring. Those conditions are manifested in this way described by David Ellerman:

Hence, robbery committed via means of a gun is condemned as coercion because though the victim "consents" to being robbed and can theoretically not do so, the consequence of this is likely to be an injurious and possibly fatal gunshot wound. Similarly, though the wage laborer "consents" to enter into a contract with his or her employer and can theoretically not do so, the consequence of this is unemployment and subjection to the conditions of indigence and destitution, which may include homelessness, perpetual hunger and thirst, malnourishment, poor health, and in some third-world and even first-world countries, death. This is perhaps not typically as grave as an injurious and potentially fatal gunshot wound, but propertarians would certainly condemn a robber who threatens to beat instead of shoot his victim just as swiftly.

This problem is augmented further when we consider the fact that "labor is often sold under special disadvantages arising from the closely connected group of facts that labor power is 'perishable', that the sellers of it are commonly poor and have no reserve fund, and that they cannot easily withhold it from the market," as noted by Alfred Marshall. This further complicates the negative conditions of power and coercion that mark entry into the capitalist labor market.

It is capitalism rather than socialism that is reliant on central control in all of its manifestations, as the government is an integral agent of stabilization in the capitalist economy. Conversely, only state socialism is reliant on central control, with decentrally planned socialism and market socialism being in sharp conflict with that.

Socialism is the ultimate ideology of liberty and freedom, in contrast to the authoritarian ideology of capitalism. Socialism is reliant on the logical extension of democracy into the economic realm rather than the supremacy of hierarchical control so pervasive under capitalism.

Socialism eliminates the rigidly hierarchical and authoritarian internal structure of the capitalist labor market and replaces it with economic democracy, thereby maximizing freedom.

Socialism, as mentioned, is reliant on the measurement of actual labor to determine remuneration, as opposed to the product of the labor/capital combination that permits an idle "owning class" to exist in the capitalist economy.

Socialism relies on the protection of the property rights of workers and producers from the theft currently engaged in by the financial class. It protects possessive property, and eliminates the authoritarian monopoly that an elite few have over productive resources to establish collective democratic control.

Libertarianism originated in Europe as an explicitly anarchist movement. For example, the term "libertarian" was first used in print in an 1857 letter by the French anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque, who later published Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement social from 1858 to 1861. The later French anarchists Sebastian Faure and Louise Michel then founded Le Libertaire in 1895, which ought to illustrate the term's early usage by anarchists, largely in an attempt to circumvent anti-anarchist laws. Conversely, the U.S. "Libertarian" Party has only existed since 1971, which means that socialist usage of the term predates its misappropriation by American capitalists by more than a century. As noted by Murray Bookchin, the current American definition of "libertarianism" is merely "the specious identification of an anti-authoritarian ideology with a straggling movement for 'pure capitalism' and 'free trade.' This movement never created the word: it appropriated it from the anarchist movement of the [nineteenth] century. And it should be recovered by those anti-authoritarians . . . who try to speak for dominated people as a whole, not for personal egotists who identify freedom with entrepreneurship and profit."

However, even apart from the historical definition of the term, we can make an even more dramatic claim that capital and libertarianism are actually incompatible and that "libertarian socialism" is really the only variety of libertarianism that can exist. For example, most libertarian socialists would posit that capitalism is necessarily inimical to the maximization of liberty because of the authoritarian elements inherent in wage labor, which include the hierarchical conditions of the workplace and the effectively oligopolistic seizure of the financial class over the means of production which serves as the basis for the nature of wage labor in capitalism. Such a state of affairs wherein a tiny elite control such expansive resources would rightfully be condemned as authoritarian in nature were it manifested through the vessel of a state.

You seem to be unfamiliar with the concept of market power. Do you deny its existence?

I'm glad you mentioned Nineteen Eighty-Four; I never tire of mentioning its author's socialism and support of the anarchist social revolution in Spain.

There's no question that most of us agree that excessive market power is unjust (I'll get back to that word "excessive" in a bit), and also that capitalism is inherently inefficient. Most of us would also disagree on when that power has become excessive to the point of requiring intervention, and would disagree on the level of inefficiency of capitalism, which, I suppose, is the catalyst for the present discussion.

No, I'm not a moral relativist even close to the degree you seem to think, and I agree completely with your general statements regarding moral relativism. I was attempting to make the point that advocating socialism through it's moral superiority is kinda like advocating some religious belief through it's moral superiority - the facts of socialism should be sufficient to support it without resorting to emotional appeal.

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Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
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Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind

The reason that market power is nonexistent in theoretical models of perfect competition is because of the inherent conflicts between concentration and competition; any ability of an established firm or firms to exert undue influence through manipulation of existing monopolies/monopsonies/oligopolies/oligopsonies (sounds like a Dr. Seuss book), constitutes a barrier to firm entry. The grim acknowledgment that suck market failure requires correction is reflected through general support for anti-trust legislation, but if the sentiments in favor of fair competititon with a balanced starting ground and equal opportunity for all potential competitors were to be extended to their logical conclusions, a demand for the radical destruction of capitalist property establishments would be made.

A claim of moral or ethical superiority does not necessarily constitute "emotional appeal"; ethics is founded on the basis that logical moral reasoning can yield sound precepts. My particular claim here is that equality of opportunity is desirable to ensure a fairly equitable potentiality for happiness among the largest number of people possible, and that socialism can deliver equality of opportunity far more effectively than capitalism. Consequently, socialism is more desirable on that particular basis.

Lots of theory. On paper socialism sound nice doesn't it? Plaes point out an example in real life where these socialist models exist and function as you have pointed out.