Ever heard of the Bilderberg Group? I'm not saying free market will always lead to this situation, but without mechanizms specifically designed to prevent it, nothing will prevent it and what we see today is an example
That's like saying that since people could theoretically swallow razor blades and since there is no mechanism specifically designed to prevent them from swallowing razor blades so nothing will prevent them from swallowing razor blades.
No, there is a big difference.
There is no incentive for you to swallow razor blades whatsoever, your survival doesn't depend on your swallowing of blades, quite the opposite actually - you are more likely to survive if you don't swallow them
Why might we expect capitalists to collude in a free market? Do you expect that capitalists would benefit from colluding with other capitalists? to what end? They couldnt collude to hold down workers wages because then those workers would be bid away by other capitalists. They couldnt collude to artificially raise their prices because even if they had every existing widget maker in the economy religiously adherent to the scheme new widget makers would enter the market since it would be easy for them to undercut the artificially inflated prices.
I have explained the mechanizm several times already. It's called physics.
You probably know that charged particles are attracted to each other to form neutral ensembles.
The same way specialized companies on the market would tend to form unions (or sign special trade agreements) so that together they become more self-sustainable. Being self-sustainable is a more stable state than being specialized and depend on market conditions and demand for your services to survive.
So there is an incentive to collude, because it improves your chances of survival. People participating in a self-sustainable clusters can relax their fears of not surviving and express themselves more creatively, contributing to science, technology and entertainment. The same way self-sustainable clusters of gravity called stars give off light and heat to those who decided to stay outside, so that they don't freeze to death fighting in the dark alone.
Thus forming of self-sustainable clusters is a natural and life-supporting phenomenon and everybody should strive to achieve this status. But until individuals themselves become self-sustainable, these clusters would consist of multiple individuals or even multiple sub-clusters. And the way these clusters operate doesn't depend on how you call them, but rather on how they are structured, hence the topic of this thread.
I can start with simple example - there is a need to patch the road shared by 10 families in the neighborhood, nobody else uses that road (so they don't really care) and there is no central authority to call for. How would those families achieve consensus of who does what and who pays what.
It could be that one good guy just goes ahead and fixes it for everybody to benefit from it, but if that doesn't happen there needs to be a reliable mechanism to achieve consensus.
One guy decides to fix the road, and asks everyone to pay towards it. (say, in a neighborhood meeting) Using Bitcoin, it would be easy to track how much has been set aside for the road repairs. When enough has been gathered, he fixes the road. It doesn't matter who pays how much, just that the job gets done, and paid for.
This works quite well for Kickstarter projects.
Probably workable with some sizable portion of the population have decent financial situations... I think the issue is that it wouldn't work on the macro scale. There would simply be too many people who weren't able or inclined to contribute. It's called socialism. Works well in the micro where everyone's equally invested (like blood related) but fails miserably in the macro.
I think the issue is that it wouldn't work on the macro scale. There would simply be too many people who weren't able or inclined to contribute.
Then it would be done on lots of little micro levels, or not done at all. If there aren't enough people who want to contribute to a project, then "society" doesn't want that project done.
Yes exactly, I firmly believe that consensus groups would work best if they start small, with family being the smallest example. But they can be formed along different lines of specialization as well, think of a consensus group of core architects in the company. This way it will be a consensus sub-group within a larger consensus group. Also, if people in the group don't seem to contribute much, they can be voted out by the rest of the group.
Ever heard of the Bilderberg Group? I'm not saying free market will always lead to this situation, but without mechanizms specifically designed to prevent it, nothing will prevent it and what we see today is an example
That's like saying that since people could theoretically swallow razor blades and since there is no mechanism specifically designed to prevent them from swallowing razor blades so nothing will prevent them from swallowing razor blades. Some things just dont require mechanisms to prevent them from happening. you first need to demonstrate why we might expect that this WOULD naturally occur before it can be assumed that we need systems to prevent it.
Why might we expect capitalists to collude in a free market? Do you expect that capitalists would benefit from colluding with other capitalists? to what end? They couldnt collude to hold down workers wages because then those workers would be bid away by other capitalists. They couldnt collude to artificially raise their prices because even if they had every existing widget maker in the economy religiously adherent to the scheme new widget makers would enter the market since it would be easy for them to undercut the artificially inflated prices.
Exactly. This whole "capitalists collude" is just a made-up victim complex fantasy that losers use to explain away the fact that they can't contribute much value to society, thus they get shitty wages. Whenever there's collusion to depress wages in our modern world, it's
always, without exception collusion
involving the government.
I have already explained how "capitalists collude" mechanizm works and the fact that it works today only supports the point. Also please understand that small company on the market, small state, bigger state or multinational mega-corporation are all examples of evolution of the same centrally-managed cluster of power. Yes you can blame governments for being an easy target for capitalists to take over and thus contributing to the situation at hand, but remember that we haven't had a government "by the book" for almost a hundred years now. So you're really barking at the wrong tree. If you watched Man In Black first movie, the situation can be best described as "we have a Bug in town and it's wearing an Edgar... err Government suit"
I'm not defending the idea of government here, because it failed long ago and it is one of the examples of a centrally-managed cluster and those beasts are known to mutate rapidly and grow out of proportion. You can continue putting different labels on these monsters, but the way they work only depends on how they are structured, so let's concentrate on that part more. I'm open to discuss other structures as well, but I'm more sympathetic to an idea of voluntary consensus groups because now they can be supported with technology and may prove to be more stable than previously thought.
PS:
By the way, I will be traveling soon and won't have access to the Internet for quite some time (about 3 weeks). So you guys may continue to keep this thread alive on your own if there is still anything to discuss.
