On 4/8/2015 5:42 PM, LizR wrote:
Brent:
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.
Thanks Brent, I keep saying this but seem to get reactions along the lines of Stalin was
evil therefore communism can't work for anyone, ever. It not only works for tribes,
families and villages, it can even work to a reasonable extent in societies where people
are closely related. There appears to be a rough correlation between the degree of
interrelatedness of people in a socity and the degree to which social welfare programmes
and so on are implemented, in my admittedly limited experience.
You forgot to mention that it works very well for the upper class, too, who tend to look
after themselves with old boys' networks etc. Hence the slogan of the West should really
be - "capitalism for the masses, communism for the rich!"
And within a corporation there is no "free market", assets are not allocated according to
earnings, but according to projections of possible earnings or market capture (Darwinian
defeat of other corporations).
However, I think we should also recognize that a free-market is also one of the concepts
that works well on the small local scale, such as Adam Smith observed, and is the right
social economics on that scale. It is only in scaling up that we need anti-monopoly,
anti-trust, etc. And the "free-market" does not extend well at all to assets like land,
oil, and money where the profit is mainly in rent rather than production.
Brent
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