I have power over the potato farm.

I am not controlling my workers, they are choosing to use my facilities to convert their work into currency. They can leave at any time. There is no coercion. If they don't like my rate, they can leave.

Yes, my agreement states they cannot take the potatoes off the farm and sell them to somebody else but they consented to it. Besides, I spend a good amount of effort maintaining my land. I should be paid in exchange for the use of it. I only can determine that rate. It's my land.

The capitalists on this forum are shown to be indifferent to the form of organization and relationship other than the question of voluntary/coercion. They happily form the needed association and organizations to meet the tasks at hand.

We can assimilate you and your ideas but you could never assimilate us.

Now, as this thread is about profit, I would like to state two things. First, that in the original example, the gallery owner exploited, immorally, the painter. But, that actually, if the paintings only costs the painter $100 to produce (labor, paint, etc.), it would also be immoral for the painter to sell those paintings at $5000. That's because, as I posted earlier, "cost [should be] the limit of price". I.e. it's immoral to sell something for more than what it cost to produce it.

If people don't like my terms of exchange when it comes to working on my potato farm (USD only for labor), they can work somewhere else and start their own potato farm. I am not forcing anybody to do anything. They can either utilize my services of employment or not.

I did use the dictionary. It says to lord is to treat with arrogance.

But I still dont understand what it means to "lord over someone with a potato"... You keep using subjective terms as if they were objective. How can I know if someone is "lording the potatos"? I could ask you what your feeling are about something, but that is not way to create a system. I dont understand your distinctions, they are not clear, they always use subjective terms, that basically express how you feel about something. It seems to me that the same fact could be moral and inmoral to you depending on the rethoric used.

Can you please explain to me in clear terms this:


Why someone selling a potato and obtaining a surplus is just trading and its moral, but someone else selling a potato and obtaining a surplus is "lording the potatos" and its inmoral?

When you sell a potato, you now own whatever you got in exchange for it and have no more ownership over that potato. When you lord a potato, you might take a portion of all the potatoes that anyone might ever grow from it, like how Monsanto operates. You might become that person's lord as long as they eat your potatoes.

I think what is trying to be expressed is:  To each his needs according to his wants.

Which makes absolutely no sense.


Nice potato, I want it, I must have it, I need it, How dare you want me to pay for it. Give it to me, you don't need it.

This whole argument gets summed up as: Charity with arrogance.

I don't like giving to arrogant people that expect things, I like giving to people that try and fail and try again without asking for anything.

So any surplus that I choose to give away will go to those people.

First big problem, the best fertile land for growing potatoes is halfway up the hill on the sunny side, frost-free, gentle slopes and everybody wants to use it, but you seem to be saying nobody owns this land, as that would represent capital ... how do you decide in your commie paradise who gets to grow potatoes on the best land and those that get the crap low-production, high-risk land?

FatherMcGruder: Interestingly, your solution revolves around the party with power refraining from using it, not so much around the party with less power trying to avoid being taken advantage of. Anyone who refrains from getting the greatest profit from their property on moral grounds puts themselves at a disadvantage in comparison to less scrupulous competitors. In the long run, altruism loses out, unless it is somehow supported. There are many such supports in place in society now, most of them coercive in some way.

What's your stand on coercion? Socialism (I don't use this as a pejorative BTW, your ideas sound pretty socialist in a very classical sense.) requires co-operation which very easily leads to coercion. Much like with Anarchism in general, for things to work out you have to be willing and somehow able to break society down into units small enough for small-group psychology to hold sway - in a larger society, you need guns to keep people altruistic. I'm interested in any counterexamples, of course.

I do think any remotely free society requires its residents to behave altruistically at times. There must be a willingness to make personal compromises in the interest of the society as a whole, otherwise you lose the sense of belonging that is one of the greatest protections against abuses of power. One thing I've never understood about Anarcho-Capitalism is how it wouldn't simply lead to anyone with enough wealth hiring a private army and forming a new government, probably rather less friendly than the ones we have now in some places.

As Chairman Mao said, power grows from the barrel of a gun. You can take that as an endorsement of guns or as a condemnation of power...

I think a lot is be pondered about "Authority", how about "Reliance". Some people are ready and willing to be reliant on others and succumb to their authority in exchange for something.

Are Employers exerting "Authority", or are Employee's being "Reliant".  If someone choose to be reliant on me for their well being, and I accept that responsibility, do I have any say in the matter?  If I don't, then I will never accept the responsibility of someone else being reliant on me.

For Example:

Employment: You came to me; I did not come to you. You want to work for me, so you can survive. So you are willing to accept my money but not my authority in telling you what, how, and when I want something done. Nah, I don't think I want to accept that responsibility, go look for someone else to be responsible for you. If you are willing and of your own free will want to accept my authority then come back and reapply for the job.

BTW: Sometimes and in certain positions, employers go out and seek employees. Then the Employee has the power. If you want me to work for you, this is what I want. I want a $5000 signing bonus, I want Stock Options, I want a contract, I want profit sharing, etc...  If you as an employer do not want to give me this, then go find someone else.

All employment is an agreement between parties. The need for the type of work, will determine who actually has authority.  Others are perfectly happy being reliant on others (employer, government, family, etc...)

1) He/she has no idea what he/she is talking about, or 2) deception.

Try to explain things clearly. "Lording a potato" is not a clear or self-explanatory concept.

Isnt this contradictory?

FatherMcGruder:
I don't think I really see what you're proposing. To help me understand could you:

-define "capitalism"
-give an example of how one would go about avoiding it.

For me profit and loses are important, but not mainly as a motivator, but more as a signal for resource allocation. Without a system of profit and loses there would be no economic coordination and there would be no progress. From a society point of view that is the value of profits and loses.

That would be ideal, but we already have a volunteer building the site and I don't want to throw too many specs at him at once. Once it's up we can start refining it.

But there isn't a changing difficulty for finding the private key as there is only ever 1 answer.

Good ads can take a lot of effort. Anyways, can "relative work" be objectively measured?

I'm all confused again. So the rule is Bob can do it but only if his work effort is equal to hers. 

If he spends less time it is bad, how about if he spends more time? would that be Ok or does it have to be equal time.

Not only redistribution of wealth, but redistribution of work to equal amounts. How should we measure the work? Lets stick to physics and measure it in Newtons or Joules, etc...

So rather than a 40 Hour work week, we can have a 40 Joule work week. Everyone will use the same amount of energy during work.

In that case, I will take a hard labor job. Shorter work week and more free time. I assume we are all getting paid the same for our work.

Okay, tell just how the fuck you would grow a crop of potatoes (or anything) in this delusional non-capitalistic society you are dreaming of and I'll tear every little element of your grand plan to shreds with the practicalities of growing potatoes.

You want to starve? Now tell me how to grow potatoes.

Another question that popped in to my head earlier today.

Let's say you're sitting at home when an individual enters without permission. You ask them to leave, but they decline, explaining that they don't see that you have any special claim to this plot of land, on which sits this pile of wood and stone. So they rummage through your cupboards, eating your extra food, sleep in your spare bedroom, and deny you the ability to enjoy your home as you otherwise would. Do you at some point use force, or the threat thereof, to remove this person from your home?

What would happen if everyone stopped making debt payments, quit their job and stopped paying taxes all at once?  Can we destroy every government and central bank at the same time?  Is this an idea we can take viral? 

I'm not sure I see the difference between "start trying to avoid capitalism" and "start behaving smarter in their business dealings".

Self employed....mostly I work on my numerous electric vehicle projects and sell one occasionally to keep the cycle going.  Sometimes I'll buy large lots of parts wholesale, use some and sell the others on ebay/forums.  Buy other failed projects cheaply, etc, etc

Plus I intend to roll my numerous hobbies into at least one legitimate buisness in the near term. Probably something to do with electric vehicles But I've got other ideas sloshing around too.

There's room to disagree about that, but let's agree, for the sake of argument, that this is "wrong". Now what?

There's no point in talking about the rights and wrongs of something if you don't talk about what you propose to do to discourage behaviour deemed wrong. I think trying to force people to behave more fairly in free market situations is likely to lead to much more harm than just accepting that sometimes people get screwed.

Alright, McGruder, riddle me this:

Jill is an excellent lollipop maker. Oh, and how wonderful they are, so flavorful and precious in their design. In fact, no two are the same. Since her product is completely handmade, she rather spend most of her time making them rather than selling them. So, she makes a deal with Bob. She sells her lollipops to Bob and he sells them retail with extensive marketing. For Bob's time and marketing he keeps the 30% profit or so from the sales.

What was so exploitative about this?

I personally wonder about the difficulty of discovering someone's private key in their wallet.dat by brute force attack. I think this would require 2²⁵⁶ hashes to guarantee finding the private key with an average crack time of 2²⁵⁵ hashes. Can anybody familiar with cryptography answer that question and/or elaborate?

If that is true, and we assume that in 2011 a very wealthy attacker can bring 1 THash/second to bear on the problem, and the attacker works constantly on the problem starting now, purchasing new hardware which keeps up with Moore's law over the following years (processing power doubling every two years), his descendants will steal your private key and all your descendants bitcoins somewhere around 2390 (unless they get unbelievably lucky before then). A hundred years later in 2490, anyone with the equivalent of a PC will be able to crack a wallet.dat private key in about a second. Can anyone check my math on that?

If that is true, then bitcoins won't ever truly be "lost" because in a few hundred years, they will turn up again when in becomes feasible to crack a wallet.dat private key. Hopefully whoever manages to dig up those lost coins will be able to exchange them into whatever the equivalent form of bitcoins is at that time (with much stronger cryptography).

So....what am I missing?

I would expect that would cost them way more than debit cards, both initially and as the time goes by.

Your right to call out people's moral contradiction is tempered by your inability to explain why. Your explanation are unsatisfactory since I still don't know what you're talking about.

It's a voluntary interaction. I see nothing wrong with it.

I had explained to you very clearly that profit is economic surplus being acquired for any given action or work.

I have no attachment to ruling or lording over others.

I can respect that, especially if it is used to come to a consensus through logical thinking. I have often found the solution to problems by taking the counter point to an argument. It is good science, I think that is why Evolutionists bother me so much in the science field. They won't even entertain a thought of a counter point. Which ends up with corrupt science being produced. They almost died over the Carbon Dating Debacle. OMG, our data is all wrong.

I was curious from a sense of hypocrisy. I tend to find the more extreme positions people take the more hypocrisy there is. Everyone exhibits a level of hypocrisy. It is that the further one gets from a "norm" the greater the hypocrisy is.

I call it the hypocrisy ratio, others call it the BS pile.

FatherMcGruder,

I think the exact opposite of what you propose will happen if there is not a correction to our system. People will give into authority for survival. Imagine millions of people that are now collecting Unemployment checks and food stamps. If that system is stopped, they would eventually become homeless and broke.

But then they realize that if they break the law in some fashion (it doesn't have to be violent), they can get shelter, food, health care, clothing, etc... They will just have to give up their freedom.  Any logical homeless guy living in a cardboard box in New York should go to the nearest Cop and steal something in front of him. Maybe be good for at least a Month of food and shelter. If he finds himself liking "prison", just create problem in prison to prevent your release.  Non-viloents get sent to a much easier system of prisons.

If you want to up your station to a High Class Prison, just adjust your crime. Commit a high value "white collar" crime that breaks Federal Law. You might get one of the Country Club Prisons. 

Need a major operation, you can't afford. Get arrested and have the State pay for it. Just exchange a year of your life for the operation. It would be cheaper than giving up 10 years of income for the operation. *Not in Mississippi - they just release a prisoner rather than pay for a kidney transplant.  Of course, that would create a market for a Terminally ill organized crime.  Need a transplant, Rob a bank. If you get away, you win. If you get caught, you win.