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Capitalism was great when the alternative was monarchies and dictatorships But when the enemy of Capitalism became Communism that is when problems arose

Communism and socialism are not bad at their core Government working for the people is not a bad thing
So the fact that we completely reject the idea of a government that is nothing but a service industry Actually hurts us in the long run

Sure we are capitalist but monarchs and dictators are no longer the aristocratic ass holes... Capitalists are

Communism is where the people own the factories What is unamerican about that?

The issue is in defining people: some define people as individuals, some define people as the state.

Why a need for factories anyway? It is not like coal mining holes with slaved children are in big demand nowadays unless of course you live in... communist china.

3D printing at home on a massive scale for real products is the next industrial revolution. It will make capitalism and communism obsolete. Sure this is science fiction right now, but so is a communism utopia. People can barely print out a functioning gun. No way you can print an iphone now. But it is coming.
Government will eventually regain its purpose as a central nervous system and not a all knowing brain deciding how individuals can live their life based on centralized planning.

This is The Shape of Things to Come.

http://filmint.nu/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Things-to-Come-1936-5.jpg

lol when we have 3D printing for metal then that will be the revolution, there will only be so much you can do with only plastic.

We already have 3D printing for metal.  It's called Direct Metal Laser Sintering or Selective Laser Melting and you can buy the printers right now. They're just really expensive (upper 5 figures or more) at present.

http://makezine.com/2012/05/14/jay-leno-scans-and-prints-replacement-car-parts/

Nice! :D going to be interesting when it all gets a lot cheaper :P

We are on ENIAC price regarding 3D printing but eventually smart phones are almost reusable tech right now so will this tech. It is coming. We should not recycle old ideas that never worked and think for what is next.

http://www.topicsplanet.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/eniac.jpg

very true!

communism is always seen as the devil when you talk to hardcore capitalists because it endangers the free markets and such. well but the free markets really endanger us as people.

If you believe that people who are best at doing specific things should be the ones doing those things, and that people who work better than others should get higher compensation, then you shouldn't be for Communism.
If you believe that positions like manager or factory owner should be voted on, whether or not the person being picked actually knows how to run things, and you believe that everyone should get the same amount of pay pased on the job position, regardless of how hard they work or how difficult their job is, then you should be for Communism.

I don't think that would be very fair. But it's also not fair for someone to earn 20 million a year and the other guy 20 k. He couldn't possibly work that many more hours...

I do lean towards to socialist aspects of society while wanting high efficiency and freedom
Slow Health care systems do not help there is room for capitalism in the society where governments are not as effective in doing everything themselves, they are not a do all system they are just a component of society, the cog in the machine we all agree exists in one form or the other so we can live our normal lives.

Governments designed to help people are not a bad thing at all, as long as they don't go over that line between
personal privacy and intervention into a normal persons life aka spying.
I guess the hot topic right now is sorting through big data sets to determine correlations, make them significant and then apply them to a variety of fields, including health care etc.
But its important to be careful with the double edged sword to not invade to far into a persons personal life in order to ahem advance the needs of society :)

That said capitalism will probably change into something else, similar to how Soviet Communism transformed to Chinese Communism in China because it had a different situation than the Soviets, or Cuban Communism influenced the rise of the socialist lines in Latin America, the same can be applied to American Capitalism with other countries such as Canada or even Britain.

Somewhere in that mix is probably room for a meshing of different ideas from different political and economic systems to make something that excels especially well overall.
Whether its education reform to be more competitive on the world scale which is an issue for the USA
Technology to improve societies productivity or healthcare that can be adopted by Latin American Societies to reduce wealth inequality which is a serious issue over there.
Or new ideas such as Bitcoin to move forward finance and make it less dependent on any one states financial coffer and for worldwide applications. There is a nexus of different creative ideas applied in different countries that are efficient and all can solve the same problem so finding the ideal for each country is something that the digital age might help to improve as it move society forward towards these new constructs and the flow of information helps people find better solutions faster than they used to.

So yes American Capitalism is destined to die just as Communism in its original form did with the collapse of the Soviet Union
In its place something that tries to remedy the errors of the past will take its place and that will be the thing we will all see soon enough  8)

Hopefully it doesn't mean invading a country taking all the resources and then forcing globalization on us all or we will go into a whole NWO thread XD

Nobody cares how many hours you work. The only thing that matters is what you produced from your work. It is absolutely fair for someone to earn 20 million a year and someone else 20 thousands if the first guy is a thousand times as productive, or what he produces is a thousand times as valuable.

True enough but you forgot to mention pyramid schemes and good old feudalism :P

So you think the top banksters who have been bailed out recently are very productive? You are right that there can be such a measure but shouldn't it be in what they did for society?

The US president earns something like 500k dollars a year right? That's legit because he has so much responsibility compared to the average worker. But how does that compare to a manager earning 20 million?

Nobody said bailouts were fair.

It doesn't compare at all. A manager's salary is determined by the free market, but a politician's isn't. If a manager earns 20 million a year, it's because a) the company wants a manager and is willing to pay that price, and b) there's a shortage other qualified people willing to do the job for less.

In communism a tiny elite own the factories, not the people. Under such a system ordinary people have nothing approaching what you might call ownership. I own my shoes because I have the right to use them, and the right to deny others the right to use them. I can sell them if I wanted to. A citizen of North Korea owns absolutely nothing.


It depends. Some hedge fund managers can earn something approaching 20 million USD but this is because they have found some people who have agreed to pay them this amount in return for their services. There is nothing unfair about this. Some earning 20K has found someone who is prepared to pay them 20K but can't find someone who is prepared to pay them more. It they could convince someone to pay them more, they would.


Only a few banks where able to find someone to bail them out. Barclays found the Qatari sovereign wealth fund. Bank of America and Goldman Sachs found Warren Buffet. There may have been a few more. The rest of the bailouts where paid for by taxation which is extorted from individuals by the government under threat of violence, imprisonment and/or death. This is not capitalism, it is the antithesis of capitalism.

http://images.sodahead.com/blogs/000380617/looney_left_1_xlarge.jpeg

It is only a matter of time when the capitalism will collapse under pressure of the technological unemployment (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=318001.0)!

Are you saying people will stop trading things they own when robots start making everything?

When you say "the people" i assume the "the people" that you are talking about are not the capitalists, they are probably the workers. Why cant workers own factories under capitalism? most capitalists get their factories by convincing a bank to give them a loan. The bank judges whether to give them a loan based on their assessment of how likely they are to succeed as a business. If worker owned businesses are so great than they should in theory crowed the individual capitalists out of the credit markets. As long as we are talking about capitalism here, if banks are just making genuine mistakes by not realizing that they would make more money by giving loans to businesses that would be worker owned, than those banks should be outcompeted in the free market by any group of people who are smart enough to realize this mistake.

of course this is all just an exercise in abstract thought since we dont have anything even close to capitalism in the united states.

Of course people will stop trading things. Nobody will have a job, so nobody will be able to pay for things. And we can't just get things for free, because the robots expect a paycheck, and if they don't get it then the robots will revolt and kill us all. Or something. </sarcasm>

Capitalism needs more respect.  The robots would never be built if the capitalist system didn't provide the incentive and rewards for innovating the products (robots) needed by society.  Governments have shown they are slow and inneffective in responding to Market demand.  I worry about the Government killing me more than I worry about the robots.

The whole thing about technological obsolescence has been seen before. At one time, almost everyone was employed in agriculture. New technology means only a tiny number of the population of the developed world is needed to grow all the food we need. In fact, the USA exports food. If humans aren't needed in manufacture like we aren't needed in agriculture, then we will find other more productive things to do.

Capitalist system DO provide a lot of incentive to develop robots because they almost guaranteed will be sold with a profit if their cost + maintenance will be lower than workers' wages (including perks, insurance premiums, taxes etc).

Sold to whom? If robots end up making it so that no one can afford to pay for anything, then robots are not the most profitable option, is it.

Communism gets a bad rap because people confuse it with totalitarianism. Communism isn't a social state, but an economic one. Communist countries in recent times have been creating totalitarian states under the guise of economic communism, which was always doomed, because economic communism is only possible when all humans work the same amount (ie, nothing) due to the pervasive human notions of fair effort. Economic communism is only possible when the work required to live with a high standard of living is at the lowest common denominator, which is only possible with solar powered robot slaves. These robots will be created by people seeking profit, but over time as they proliferate, the fiat required to purchase them will become less and less meaningful to those earning them. We're still a loooooooooooooong long long way off from this, yet.

The USSR and China were trying to make a communist economy work by becoming totalitarian states (force the people to work evenly). Since communism applies the cost of failure to the whole population instead of the individual investors in a capitalist economy, much of its success is dependent on the dear leader, while it's been shown that the more people involved with a decision, the more accurate and efficient the results - the free market is an example of this. In both economic systems, a good product is enjoyed by all, but a bad product is suffered by all in communism but only the investors in capitalism (over time). Thus, there is faster progress in capitalism, because losses are minimized to those taking the risks. Poor decisions in communism means losses are multiplied to all, when there really can't be any losses at all for communism to even work.

Already discussed in another thread - robots don't require health insurance, social security taxes, can work 24/7 in cold dark rooms therefore at some point they will be cheaper than human workers no matter how low wage they receive.

Don't confuse communism and socialism. The last requires only public ownership of the production means with central planning, however still allows fair and reasonable wage differentiation. Some its form is our inevitable future in heavily automated world which is coming!

No no, I meant, if I was in a capitalist system, why would I make robots and things if there is no one who is able to afford those robots and things because they don't have a job or make too little money?
At some point this will have to hit some equilibrium, where I don't make any robots, or robots that can make things, if no one can afford those things. Actually, that's pretty much the constant equilibrium in capitalism: you only make things people can buy. And if the things you make put people out of a job, and they can no longer buy your stuff, well, then you stop making those things. It's like the bitcoin mining difficulty. You keep adding more hardware and keep mining until difficulty makes it unprofitable, and then you just sit around and wait until difficulty comes down, or price and profit margin goes up.

Of course robots' manufacturers will target on the corporations who want to reduce costs by replacing expensive human labor with more cheap robots. Most likely they won't produce personal robots (household androids) in near future because R&D costs are sky-high so most people cannot afford buying them. Even Google have admitted (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/technology/google-puts-money-on-robots-using-the-man-behind-android.html?_r=0) about it.

I own a few robots already; got one to vacuum and another turning on/off lights, appliances and controlling thermostat; I'm thinking about buying the lawnmower robot this coming summer.  While these are simple robots, they would have been unbelievably expensive twenty years ago.  The cost of the android/personal servant robot will eventually be affordable to the masses.  As long as there is Market demand, they will be created in a Capitalist system.  Robots will be making robots and people will have the funds to purchase.  However, don't think a communist system will develop these, risk will not be viewed worthy of cost by the people/group making the decisions.  BTW, Capitalism is not dying.

Demand will fall due to rising unemployment because people won't have money to purchase if they don't have a job. Its how capitalism works!
I am not asserting that post-capitalist economies (socialism, communism, syndicalism, wealth redistribution through guaranteed minimum income etc) will be everywhere. Probably scenario is collapse of the large countries to small parts and each will have own economic model. Nevertheless, it means the end to the globalization and worldwide dominance of the corporations.

But how will they spend money on R&D and on new robots, if they can't make the money on them due to unemployed people not being able to pay for their products? I.e. if unemployment reaches a certain level, and economy drops to a certain level, business won't be able to earn enough to continue to automate with robots (high initial investment, long term savings), and will be forced to hire people to do those simple jobs (low initial investment, higher long-term cost).

At the time when technological unemployment will have large impact on the demand, most R&D will be already done. Then production costs for these robots will be orders of magnitude lower than paying even minimum wages.

They already have the machine There is a guy that gets Devcoins for having invented it

That is like saying that we should not attempt to figure out how to direct small currents away from a tesla coil just because no one has figured out how to do it yet When we figure that out electricity will no longer be a costly thing

I am not for or against communism and I am not for or against capitalism I am simply talking about where history went wrong Because we can not fix a problem if we can not figure out where it started

I think the best way to proceed currently is this

Drones: They are coming to our public whether we like it or not and whether it be Amazon or Military drones It is just happening
So I suggest that drone schematics be made readily available online from a whitehouse website, or even mailed to every household in America So that regular citizens will have the same drone making capabilities as anyone else

Spying: Xfinity is telling us that having cameras in our house is a good thing and credit card companies have convinced us that watching our spending protects us... So again I think the best way to move forward Is to offer everything publicly Tell Americans what the fuck the government is doing then tell us how we can do it and counter it or access the spies via phone or email And the website they put all this info on should be announced by the president in public

Ok but what about the guys making 3+ billion a year that don't do anything but put their signatures on things?

Capitalism is awesome I personally love it But I can see the unfairness between Donald Trump getting handed a virtual empire by his father that he just brought into reality VS a kid born in the projects of Chicago... And look at the Waltons (wal mart family) one of them literally got away with murder

No one is born with Capital but some people are given capital fairly early on while others aren't

I know that is what capitalism looks like on paper But it is not what it looks like in America

Like ancient Greece It was a Republic type Democracy held up by slaves and during that time there were great artists philosophers and speakers

The problem is that capitalism creates secrets Because if your customer can find your source or how to do it themselves They can just reproduce it

So eliminate that secrecy factor and everyone can just make their own robots
I have heard of people building their own cars from scratch in the middle of buttfuck nowhere

If robots became as common as cars Cities like Detroit would start pumping them out and schematics would be all over the place

a Robo-Socialist Republic

It's just like cars

Because you can drive it doesn't make it where large scale shipments disappeared Robots like cars would just make work easier and better

Now that Cheetah bots are owned by Google and Amazon is making drones we are going to start seeing some even cooler affordable stuff soon

This is just like the imaginary paradox of illegal immigrants

Everyone think that they are taking your jobs When in reality if we all gave our kids $100 to hire some Mexicans one summer "Citizen" would one day be synonymous with "Employer"

At this point America will be America again and we will not need frivolous things like R&D
People will just come up with things because they need them Not because they have the money to make it or buy one from someone

As particular firms compete to drive down their costs (espcially of labour) by roboticizing there will be fewer and fewer workers earning wages to buy the stuff that is made. Firms will be competing to push down wages and create less workers for the individual firms, but systematically they will be destroying demand for all the goods of all the firms. If there is one rich person for every poor person, that rich person will never buy the volumes of middle class goods that 99 workers would've bought, like couches, basic cars, food, etc. So as wages become more and more inequal between the few workers who are still needed (with low wages because of high competition and supply of workers), industry produces less of teh stuff we need, and those prices rise, while more and more investment competes in the production of luxury goods. This basic dynamic is why, despite the green revolution in agriculture of the 1970s, where we hugely increased food production globally, 1/7th of the world still starves today like it did before the green revolution.  In capitalism the ratio of monetary distribution remains stagnant. Stagnant to a certain ratio of workers needed to produce to sell to other workers, so it remains unprofitable to distribute even the surplus food, which rots or is dumped to destroy less efficient producers (also destroying less developed economies' agriculture).

Free market capitalism is a ridiculous concept, even Hayek agreed that markets tend towards monopoly and oligopoly... We know only 35 firms/share holders control the majority of industry the world over. Look at bitcoin, it's already %85 controlled by just a handful of parties, and it's a totally new, "free market". Traditionally, "libertarians" held that the state was needed to break up monopolies, which is circular because, of course, the oligopolies and monopolies become the state and vice versa.

Any monopoly holder in the economy, without a state in existence would form a private army to enforce his claim to his monopoly despite people starving and children dying from poverty. The operation and management of that private army would quickly be the bureaucracy that could extract tribute, extortion, (taxes). Force isn't just weapons, it's the protocol and especially the communications of the protocol for tactical strategy and initiative in deploying units. Force is also the maintenance of your units in the long down time between deployments of force.

In capitalism where wealth accrues to wealth (when you have large reserves of money to invest you can make more money), we have inheritance, and well over %90 of the wealthy are rich through inheritance. That is just a fact, it seems like we only hear about all the "self-made" wealthy because no one touts the fact that they're rich only because of the birth lottery.

Everyone is sticking to communism as centrally coordinated by a state, where we're all here because of peer-to-peer technology! Economic planning within a community of relative equals isn't possible because of the internet?!! THINK for a second! MY GOSH!

An MIT physicist and economist has devised the first complete METHODOLOGY/PROTOCOL for de-centralized economics. It's called Participatory Economics and his name is Michael Albert. Study it, it is really the only economic methodology probably ever created.

Immigrants, contrary to robots, buy goods and services and provide demand (employment for local population).

Um, that's transmission, not generation. We'll still need resources and money to generate the current that goes into the Tesla coil, won't we?

I agree with some of what you wrote, but the quoted sentence is incorrect.

We don't have the ideal of free market capitalism due to the power vacuum of the collective aka. democracy. Instead we have adopted all planks of the Communist Manifesto and ramped up debt to 200 year highs.

It would be an unachievable ideal if I didn't have a proposal for how to eliminate the power vacuum.

Thus people don't have the correct education because they were incentivized by debt to do otherwise. So they can't adjust to the new technological opportunities such as creating the designs for 3d printings in this new coming virtual manufacturing economy.

Read the following thread (from the linked post forward to the end) for the explanations of all above:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg4245737#msg4245737

But this is an immigrant you can legally build in your garage like a car To understand exactly what I am suggesting you can not look at any current model alone You must look at an industry like automobiles and apply it to workers

Anyone can become the boss The only singular structure that is even comparable is slavery But slavery involves an entire other human being and their consciousness So is not completely comparable Also the fact that slaves can't be made unless you raise babies into that lifestyle

No If you look into Tesla coils they draw the current right out of the air There is untapped electricity all around us  Tesla understood electricity more like water than circuitry With pressure and such

I have idea for how to eliminate power vacuum problem, but I wish to know yours to compare. What is your idea?
Sorry, I can not read your links and very long posts, because I have no time for to be reading 20 pages posts, and it is difficult to read long paragraphs in english. Can you describe briefly?

They, uh, don't, actually. They either get current from a wire, or from energy input from friction. Getting current from air is about as effective as getting moisture from air by just hanging up a rubber hose and expecting it to fill up with water.
That whole "energy can not be created or destroyed" is a pretty solid law.

I wouldn't bother with him. He's kind of a long-winded, big-headed, self-important troll  :P

No, that is how they work It's not creating energy from nothing so it does not break the law of "energy can not be created or destroyed" Tesla discovered that there is untapped energy in the air all around us

And just like drawing water from the air If you use the right materials it can be extremely effective

BTW in case you didn't know they have these mesh things that look like boat sails But you put it on your desert home and it collects water from the air

Sorry, to be more specific, you can't go from a lower state of energy to a higher state of energy without adding energy. The energy to do that has to come from somewhere. Simplest example is a rock at the bottom of a hill can't get to the top of the hill without energy being added to it. Once at the top of the hill, it can discharge its energy by rolling back to the bottom. Likewise with electricity in the air. It is there, but it is all dispersed already. In other for it to become flowing current, you need to have it flow from a point of higher concentration of electrons to a point of lower concentration of electrons. Since all the electrons are equally dispersed, the only way to do that is to bunch up all the electrons into some space that will end up with a higher concentration of them than the surrounding space. That needs energy, either used to create static friction, a magnetic field that pulls them all together. It's kind of like being under water in a lake and trying to get water to flow through a pipe. Sure, there is water all around you, and your pipe will be full of it too, but unless you use some energy to push the water through your pipe, all that water is useless for doing work.