On 4/5/2015 2:20 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 10:15 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 4/4/2015 6:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi John
On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 10:10 PM, John Mikes <jami...@gmail.com
<mailto:jami...@gmail.com>> wrote:
TELMO:
I did not expect from you to point to the 2 centuries old obsolete and
theoretical exercise of Marx-Engels (irrespective of Lenin's
intermitted LATER
speculations) as "blueprint" for a (still?) viable(?) political system.
I don't think it was ever viable, and I don't think it's relevant to the
current
times, as it is based on too many assumption from an era that is long gone
(early
Industrialism).
What I mean is, when people use the word "communism", there is a document
that
describes precisely what this word is supposed to mean. A blueprint for
communism.
I do think that Marx-Engels correctly identified social problems that
remain being
problems to this day, namely the self-reinforcing nature of wealth
inequality. The
issue is that their proposed solution seems to equalize society by throwing
the
majority of people into extreme poverty and servitude.
It never got further than a tyranny of 'leftish-sounding' slogans by
pretenders. As the original authors dreamed it up, it never (and
nowhere) did
get off from the ground.
I know, I lived in a so called "Peoples' Democracy" (Called 'commi'
system - ha
ha) which was neither "peoples'" nor democracy. Nor Marxist, nor
Leninist.
It was a Stalinist tyranny. And Maoist, Pol-Pot, plus a KimIrSen-istic
one.
I would be very interested in any story you had to share about those times.
I agree that these societies never achieved anything resembling what Marx
proposed.
The remaining communists of today tend to argue that all of past communist
movements were not sincere in their motivations. That might very well be
true, but
even then it is an important piece of information on human nature. If we
are trying
to get from A -> B and we always stumble on the same horrors along the way,
maybe
the plan is just not viable for this world. So far we have learned that
either
communism is a terrible idea or communist revolutions always end up being
hijacked
by sociopaths. To be honest, I think both are true.
Communism is not a terrible idea - it works fine for families. A lot of
political
problems come from trying to extend ethics that evolved for families and
small
tribes to nation states of millions of unrelated people.
Agreed.
Capitalism has problems from the same source. Owning a flint spearhead you
made is
unproblematic. If you own it you can prohibit its use, sell it, bequeath it, etc.
But when this idea was extended to owning land it created problems.
Also true. However, it seems, empirically, that the problems created are not of the same
magnitude. We only have History, which is famously written by the winners, so I might be
biased. However, there is one unintended large-scale social experiment that makes this
very convincing for me: the Berlin wall. The GDR was the closest thing that ever existed
to a communist utopia, because it was heavily supported by the USSR to be exactly that.
It was a totalitarian government, like within a single corporation. Nothing at all like
Marx imagined. Where Marx's idea has been realized is in the Amana colonies in the US and
the kibbutz in Israel. So why didn't they devolve into totalitarian states? Why aren't
corporations as oppressive as the GDR? I'd say it has little to do with their economics.
It's because people can stay or leave.
Still, many citizens of the GDR risked their lives to get to the other side. There were
never attempts in the opposite direction. This is an almost perfect experiment because
both groups had the same cultural background, ethnicity, language, etc.
John Locke thought owning land was an oxymoron...you could only "own" the
temporary use of land. Didn't matter for hunter-gatherers, but it was
problem that
had to be solved for agricultural society.
John Locke won, at least in Europe.
He didn't have to win in England; the land already belonged to the crown in principle.
The exceptions were called "free holds". Even today much of England is nominally the
crown's and is occupied on 100yr leases.
The property taxes are so high that you don't really feel that you own land or property.
You lease it, and the government will take it away if you are no longer willing or
capable of paying said tax.
That now a lot the world's GDP comes from capital has created the same
kinds of
questions about ownership of capital. Given that r>g in Piketty's
analysis, is it a
good idea to allow the Koch brothers to inherit a billion dollar business
(that
their father built by drilling for Stalin).
The question is if there is a better alternative. My country did exactly that in 1974 --
nationalize big factories.
Where did I say anything about nationalizing?? It think the Koch brothers inheritance
should have been taxed at a much higher marginal rate and I think property, beyond
homesteads, should be taxed whether it is investment capital or land or machinery.
After 6 months almost none were left. I grew up in front of the ruins of a previously
thriving flour mill. The currently richest guy in the country was a chemical engineer at
one of these factories. He bought it back from the government for almost nothing when it
was about to collapse and grew it back to a thriving business. Now he owns a
multinational retail chain, which no longer pays taxes in my country because we moved
the HQ elsewhere after a law was passed to increase taxes on capital gains. My point
being: wealth inequality is a real problem but I believe all attempts to fix it so far
have been worse.
At the risk of being repetitive, I believe that withdrawing the power of nations to
print money out of thin air and determine interest rates would reduce inequality.
I don't see how that would address the problem at all. The problem is that capital
(money, machinery, land,...) can be used to earn more capital. And ownership of that
capital can be passed on. So it's an unstable system. As my grandfather used to say,
"The richer get richer and the poor get poorer." There are some countervailing factors:
economic mobility of individuals, dispersion of inheritance to multiple heirs, loss of
wealth through war or mismanagement,... But on average they are overwhelmed. That's the
historical conclusion of Piketty, r>g.
Capitalism - in my view an advanced form of slavery, following
feudalism -
started to destroy the entire human experiment on this Globe - way
before the
"warming" entered the picture.
It never 'faced' a competition of any 'socialistic' challenger. It
succumbbed
to the authoritarian religious tyrannies (brutal and violent, or just
retracting and philosophical).
As with communism, there is a big gap between the theory and the
implementation.
"Advanced form of slavery" might be a way to put it, but an even more
cynical view
would be that there's always been slavery to some degree.
I believe that the big challenge that we face is how to move to a jobless
society.
Worse, I think this transition already started but there is still no
political will
to admit it. Robotics and AI are Marx's worse nightmare. In the limit, the
number
of employees required by a business will tend to zero, while the ability of
a
business to provide goods for the rest of us keeps being more and more
leveraged by
technological advance. One of the realities about the current economic
crises that
few are willing to admit: there simply are no longer jobs for everyone.
I think the best idea that we have so far is the universal flat salary.
The trouble with that is that when everyone has the same income nobody feels
rich...and people like to feel rich. It's Nietzsche's "will to power". So
people
who have $100 billion don't want to give up $99 billion to the general
welfare, even
though it would make the world better and make no discernible difference in
their
life style. So they instead use a few billion to persuade people to vote
for
politicians who won't tax them.
This is why I think it can work. Everyone gets a base salary, but anyone can still get a
job or start a business. If you want to be above average, you will have to do one of
those things.
That's almost the system in the western social-welfare democracies. It's not a base
salary, but the social safety net is good enough that one can survive without working
(just not very comfortably). But I agree that a base salary would be better.
Brent
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