Capitalism (continued from How do you deal with the thought about taxes)

[ktttn]

The "determination" will be made not by an economic and political metasystem or metric, but by the fittest. This is where capitalism goes wrong, wealthiest, most able to purchase or invest or kill does certainly not equate to most skilled or fittest!

Even the most powerful capitalist is still at the mercy of his customers. Wealthiest is only wealthiest because those buying his products have decided to make him so. Money does not appear out of thin air - that wealthy capitalist had to create a lot of benefit to those buying his wares. He did so only because he was the most skilled and the most fittest for the work he could do. (Unless he acquired his wealth by brute force, forcing others to give it to him at a muzzle of a gun, in which case he is no capitalist). And if he should turn bad, he will lose his wealth to boycotts, thefts, and exorbitant security expenses to protect his property and life. Because the fittest is not a man with money and a gun, it's the huge mob of people with guns wielding their collective buying power.

Ideally, I suppose this all more or less works.
In reality, the government steps in and becomes a customer.

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[ktttn]

Mutual aid? You mean, like, I do something nice for you, you do something nice for me? Sounds like capitalism 

Sounds like an open trade to me.  Just replace one side of the barter with cash and you have a clear-cut example of capitalism.  I can think of nothing more unnatural than feeling obliged to help every single person you meet.

Strawman as a mofo, but hey..
Is the profit motive not married to capitalism?
It's not married to mutual aid.
The driving force behind mutual aid is living in a sane world, not using toilers to profit.

If everyone were living in a mutual aid society, and there was no profit in their mutual exchange, everyone would be collectively getting poorer. You are either better off from a trade, and have made a profit, or worse off, and have had a loss. You have either put a lot of your time and effort into something, and after giving that something to someone else came away better from it, or you wasted your time for no reward, and have more time and labor wasting to look forward to.

Where does the wealth go, then? How could everyone across the board possibly get poorer unless goods were being jettisoned into space?
I'm attemping to describe equalibrium, not avoidence of profit.

Oh, you know how those ghettos get.  Those people.  Litter everywhere, they breed like rabbits, and no matter how much we give them, they trash it and scream for more
Only so much a feller can give, you know what i'm saying?  They took mah taxes & spent them on hookers & blow, now there's none left for nobody!  That where da wealth go

I need to get welfare to apply for a fastfood job I need to get to pay for the credit card I need to get to qualify for the loan I need to take out to buy the ZING I need to react to this post.

[Rassah]

Mutual aid? You mean, like, I do something nice for you, you do something nice for me? Sounds like capitalism 

Sounds like an open trade to me.  Just replace one side of the barter with cash and you have a clear-cut example of capitalism.  I can think of nothing more unnatural than feeling obliged to help every single person you meet.

Strawman as a mofo, but hey..
Is the profit motive not married to capitalism?
It's not married to mutual aid.
The driving force behind mutual aid is living in a sane world, not using toilers to profit.

If everyone were living in a mutual aid society, and there was no profit in their mutual exchange, everyone would be collectively getting poorer. You are either better off from a trade, and have made a profit, or worse off, and have had a loss. You have either put a lot of your time and effort into something, and after giving that something to someone else came away better from it, or you wasted your time for no reward, and have more time and labor wasting to look forward to.

Where does the wealth go, then? How could everyone across the board possibly get poorer unless goods were being jettisoned into space?
I'm attemping to describe equalibrium, not avoidence of profit.

Wealth can be wasted. Tomatoes can rot on the vines, machines can wear out and break, capital can be put into businesses and factories that produce nothing of value. If you trade 8 hours of your hard work for a paltry sandwich, you have given up a lot of wealth (time and labor) for little reward. If your labor involved digging a hole that you turned out to have dug in the wrong place, the person who paid you a sandwich gave up what little wealth that was for a bigger expense of now having to fill that hole back in.

[Rassah]

I've lived under bridges. I have $0 to my name for over 4 years. Don't be mean, buddy, I get what you're saying. I just don't think you get where it comes from.

Are you a physicist? A biologist? A psychologist? Can I come to you for tax or car mechanic advice?

[Rassah]

The "determination" will be made not by an economic and political metasystem or metric, but by the fittest. This is where capitalism goes wrong, wealthiest, most able to purchase or invest or kill does certainly not equate to most skilled or fittest!

Even the most powerful capitalist is still at the mercy of his customers. Wealthiest is only wealthiest because those buying his products have decided to make him so. Money does not appear out of thin air - that wealthy capitalist had to create a lot of benefit to those buying his wares. He did so only because he was the most skilled and the most fittest for the work he could do. (Unless he acquired his wealth by brute force, forcing others to give it to him at a muzzle of a gun, in which case he is no capitalist). And if he should turn bad, he will lose his wealth to boycotts, thefts, and exorbitant security expenses to protect his property and life. Because the fittest is not a man with money and a gun, it's the huge mob of people with guns wielding their collective buying power.

Ideally, I suppose this all more or less works.
In reality, the government steps in and becomes a customer.

So what you're saying is capitalism is only capitalism until it becomes statism/communism/fascism.

[Anon136]

Capitalism requires both materialism (the nouns) and statism.

Uh, what does inheriting right from a mother have to do with capitalism?

Capitalism is a rather skewed, abusive and amoral margin-based value ascribing system.

You can't have something me both amoral and abusive. It's either abusive and immoral, or amoral and just is.

Mutual Aid, however is "a factor in evolution."

Mutual aid? You mean, like, I do something nice for you, you do something nice for me? Sounds like capitalism  

"I'll pay you IF you work to make me wealthy" is not mutual aid, it's coerced dependency.
Amoral is the mindset, abusive is the action. Perhaps 'unethical abuse or neglect' would have fit better, if actual abuse were not the case.
Also, 'Materialism', not 'maternalism.'

my wife works to make the shareholders of her company wealthy despite the fact that we have means which make it possible for her to quit at any time with out suffering serious negative repercussions. she works to make her company wealthy because her company helps to make us wealthy also, she works not because she has to but because both parties benefit from the arrangement.

Would you say she is a Toiler? I would imagine that this work depends on a skillset and the arrangement made between the stockholders and her is not one that neccessarily involves wage slavery, but collectivism.
Does she have employees? Are those employees wealthy, if so?
 In turn, are those employees managers themselves?

Yes she toils. Yes she has a skillset. Yes she has employees.

Her employees all have flush toilets, something that even kings did not have a few hundred years ago. They all can afford cloths with thread counts that are higher than any cloth in the world a few hundred years ago. They all earn enough to feed themselves for a whole day with like 1 hour of work, a few hundred years ago that alone would have required at least 8 hours of hard unskilled labor. They all have cars, nicer cars than ours actually, a few hundred years ago they would have taken horses to work. I could go on but i think you get the point. When taken in historical context yes her employees are wealthy, the are absurdly fucking wealthy every last one of them. The sort of poverty i am describing gripped the world for hundreds of thousands of years before we discovered capitalism which then rocketed the modern poor to the status of ancient kings in a couple of generations. If you cant understand why someone who makes 10 dollars an hour is wealthy than you are a spoiled brat who understands no historical context. So the executives at her company are more wealthy, so what, who cares if it makes some people more better off if it makes everyone better off in general.

No the employees she manages are not managers themselves. Her employees are unskilled laborers.

Ouch. Do you acknowledge the need for abject slavery, wasting of resources, and poverty way down the line in the global picture to allow for this wealth to be sustained?
Edit: History, like Imperialism? Colonialism? Fraudulent trade? The usury that sparked the Renaissance? Genocide over resources? Insane factory conditions?
I've lived under bridges. I have $0 to my name for over 4 years. Don't be mean, buddy, I get what you're saying. I just don't think you get where it comes from.

who the hell said anything about sustaining wealth. why not just continue the processes that have lead to an explosive increase in wealth so general levels of wealth can continue to increase, not stay the same. those systems that allowed wealth to increase are not slavery or wasting resources, its private property and free exchange. before we had private property and free exchange things stagnated for literally hundreds of thousands of years, as soon as we started using private property and free exchange wealth exploded in a couple of generations. In just a few generations we went from water powered stone mills and horse and buggy and hand tools to tractors the size of houses and computers that fit in your pocket and crotch rockets.

now i know correlation isnt necessarily causation but isnt it interesting that between the year 100,000 bc and 1 bc no one invented computers and tractors than as soon as adam smith published the wealth of nations BAM a couple of hundred years later and we have sky scrapers that are regularly obscured by clouds.

[MoonShadow]

I've lived under bridges. I have $0 to my name for over 4 years. Don't be mean, buddy, I get what you're saying. I just don't think you get where it comes from.

I don't think you get where any of it comes from.  You've lived under bridges?  I've done some 'urban camping' of my own in my time. Now you can argue with people from across the US and around the world in real time, and it costs you nearly nothing of consequence.  It's not quite free, but it's now cheap enough that buying an overpriced coffee can get you an hour or two of free wifi access.  The Internet itself existed for 20 years before the 'private sector' gained access to it at immense costs, and another 20 years later and more people in this world have regular access to a personal email account than have regular access to a flush toilet.  Why?

Because nearly all of the Internet is privately owned property engaging in exchanges for mutual benefits (i.e. Capitalism) whereas the vast majority of urban areas in this world are served either by water monopolies or publicly owned municipal water services.  Sure, a flush toilet is an expense, but it's value is in it's ability to deal with the human waste problem effectively and cheaply.  Even under a bridge, you benefit from our modern society in the sense that potable water is cheap.  Filling your water bottle up at a public fountain costs you nothing, but it still costs someone something, just not enough for them to bother with the costs you incur.  Less than a penny a gallon where I live, but in another part of the world wherein a gallon of drinking water might cost as much as a dime, but the average wage is $2 a day; four gallons per flush just doesn't make economic sense.  And yet, there are still people who will save for a cell phone and service to gain access to the Internet, because the efficiencies of communications make their trades more profitable.  The farmer can find a buyer for his harvest faster, without wasting time and energy traveling into town to speak to some dealer in person; as an example.

You cannot fathom the many ways that capitalism has improved your own life, even during the midst of your poverty and homelessness. 

[ktttn]

I've lived under bridges. I have $0 to my name for over 4 years. Don't be mean, buddy, I get what you're saying. I just don't think you get where it comes from.

Are you a physicist? A biologist? A psychologist? Can I come to you for tax or car mechanic advice?

I specialize in smoking cigarettes and being a useful bum.
The fine arts didn't work out for me.
I almost inherited a fortune, but these days, I'm just not dying.

[ktttn]

The "determination" will be made not by an economic and political metasystem or metric, but by the fittest. This is where capitalism goes wrong, wealthiest, most able to purchase or invest or kill does certainly not equate to most skilled or fittest!

Even the most powerful capitalist is still at the mercy of his customers. Wealthiest is only wealthiest because those buying his products have decided to make him so. Money does not appear out of thin air - that wealthy capitalist had to create a lot of benefit to those buying his wares. He did so only because he was the most skilled and the most fittest for the work he could do. (Unless he acquired his wealth by brute force, forcing others to give it to him at a muzzle of a gun, in which case he is no capitalist). And if he should turn bad, he will lose his wealth to boycotts, thefts, and exorbitant security expenses to protect his property and life. Because the fittest is not a man with money and a gun, it's the huge mob of people with guns wielding their collective buying power.

Ideally, I suppose this all more or less works.
In reality, the government steps in and becomes a customer.

So what you're saying is capitalism is only capitalism until it becomes statism/communism/fascism.

I'm saying capitalism is only possible when the state facilitates it.

[ktttn]

Capitalism requires both materialism (the nouns) and statism.

Uh, what does inheriting right from a mother have to do with capitalism?

Capitalism is a rather skewed, abusive and amoral margin-based value ascribing system.

You can't have something me both amoral and abusive. It's either abusive and immoral, or amoral and just is.

Mutual Aid, however is "a factor in evolution."

Mutual aid? You mean, like, I do something nice for you, you do something nice for me? Sounds like capitalism  

"I'll pay you IF you work to make me wealthy" is not mutual aid, it's coerced dependency.
Amoral is the mindset, abusive is the action. Perhaps 'unethical abuse or neglect' would have fit better, if actual abuse were not the case.
Also, 'Materialism', not 'maternalism.'

my wife works to make the shareholders of her company wealthy despite the fact that we have means which make it possible for her to quit at any time with out suffering serious negative repercussions. she works to make her company wealthy because her company helps to make us wealthy also, she works not because she has to but because both parties benefit from the arrangement.

Would you say she is a Toiler? I would imagine that this work depends on a skillset and the arrangement made between the stockholders and her is not one that neccessarily involves wage slavery, but collectivism.
Does she have employees? Are those employees wealthy, if so?
 In turn, are those employees managers themselves?

Yes she toils. Yes she has a skillset. Yes she has employees.

Her employees all have flush toilets, something that even kings did not have a few hundred years ago. They all can afford cloths with thread counts that are higher than any cloth in the world a few hundred years ago. They all earn enough to feed themselves for a whole day with like 1 hour of work, a few hundred years ago that alone would have required at least 8 hours of hard unskilled labor. They all have cars, nicer cars than ours actually, a few hundred years ago they would have taken horses to work. I could go on but i think you get the point. When taken in historical context yes her employees are wealthy, the are absurdly fucking wealthy every last one of them. The sort of poverty i am describing gripped the world for hundreds of thousands of years before we discovered capitalism which then rocketed the modern poor to the status of ancient kings in a couple of generations. If you cant understand why someone who makes 10 dollars an hour is wealthy than you are a spoiled brat who understands no historical context. So the executives at her company are more wealthy, so what, who cares if it makes some people more better off if it makes everyone better off in general.

No the employees she manages are not managers themselves. Her employees are unskilled laborers.

Ouch. Do you acknowledge the need for abject slavery, wasting of resources, and poverty way down the line in the global picture to allow for this wealth to be sustained?
Edit: History, like Imperialism? Colonialism? Fraudulent trade? The usury that sparked the Renaissance? Genocide over resources? Insane factory conditions?
I've lived under bridges. I have $0 to my name for over 4 years. Don't be mean, buddy, I get what you're saying. I just don't think you get where it comes from.

who the hell said anything about sustaining wealth. why not just continue the processes that have lead to an explosive increase in wealth so general levels of wealth can continue to increase, not stay the same. those systems that allowed wealth to increase are not slavery or wasting resources, its private property and free exchange. before we had private property and free exchange things stagnated for literally hundreds of thousands of years, as soon as we started using private property and free exchange wealth exploded in a couple of generations. In just a few generations we went from water powered stone mills and horse and buggy and hand tools to tractors the size of houses and computers that fit in your pocket and crotch rockets.

now i know correlation isnt necessarily causation but isnt it interesting that between the year 100,000 bc and 1 bc no one invented computers and tractors than as soon as adam smith published the wealth of nations BAM a couple of hundred years later and we have sky scrapers that are regularly obscured by clouds.

Science made those inventions possible.
Free trade is fantastic.
Historical capitalism has done more to hinder science than any force outside of religion.

[ktttn]

I've lived under bridges. I have $0 to my name for over 4 years. Don't be mean, buddy, I get what you're saying. I just don't think you get where it comes from.

I don't think you get where any of it comes from. 

Perhaps I do. Perhaps my reading of anti capitalist literature and speaking with wage slaveshas given me perspective.

You've lived under bridges?  I've done some 'urban camping' of my own in my time.

Homelessness can be fun. It can give you a taste of what its like to exist without depending on a job.

Now you can argue with people from across the US and around the world in real time, and it costs you nearly nothing of consequence.  It's not quite free, but it's now cheap enough that buying an overpriced coffee can get you an hour or two of free wifi access.  The Internet itself existed for 20 years before the 'private sector' gained access to it at immense costs, and another 20 years later and more people in this world have regular access to a personal email account than have regular access to a flush toilet.  Why?

Science.

Because nearly all of the Internet is privately owned property engaging in exchanges for mutual benefits (i.e. Capitalism) whereas the vast majority of urban areas in this world are served either by water monopolies or publicly owned municipal water services. 

The internet is a great example of how capitalism fails, illustrated in the next part.
Between pirating and CC, the internet is sort of free.

Sure, a flush toilet is an expense, but it's value is in it's ability to deal with the human waste problem effectively and cheaply.  Even under a bridge, you benefit from our modern society in the sense that potable water is cheap.  Filling your water bottle up at a public fountain costs you nothing, but it still costs someone something, just not enough for them to bother with the costs you incur. 

This is what 100%of the internet is for me. If I am a freegan, capitalists lose.

Less than a penny a gallon where I live, but in another part of the world wherein a gallon of drinking water might cost as much as a dime, but the average wage is $2 a day; four gallons per flush just doesn't make economic sense.  And yet, there are still people who will save for a cell phone and service to gain access to the Internet, because the efficiencies of communications make their trades more profitable.  The farmer can find a buyer for his harvest faster, without wasting time and energy traveling into town to speak to some dealer in person; as an example.

The internet is awesome

You cannot fathom the many ways that capitalism has improved your own life, even during the midst of your poverty and homelessness. 

I can fathom the ways that capitalism caused my poverty and homelessness.
Even bridges are owned. This is problematic if one isn't stealthy.

[MoonShadow]

I've lived under bridges. I have $0 to my name for over 4 years. Don't be mean, buddy, I get what you're saying. I just don't think you get where it comes from.

I don't think you get where any of it comes from. 

Perhaps I do. Perhaps my reading of anti capitalist literature and speaking with wage slaveshas given me perspective.

Just nonsense.  You still can't support your worldview with actual facts.

You've lived under bridges?  I've done some 'urban camping' of my own in my time.

Homelessness can be fun. It can give you a taste of what its like to exist without depending on a job.

I've never depended upon a job for my own survival.  I work because I enjoy it, I work a lot because my wife and kids live well as a consequence.  But I certainly don't require the job.  I am quite capable of doing exactly what you seem to think is a great idea for everyone, scratching a living in the woods.  Sure, it can be fun for awhile when you're young and unattached.

Now you can argue with people from across the US and around the world in real time, and it costs you nearly nothing of consequence.  It's not quite free, but it's now cheap enough that buying an overpriced coffee can get you an hour or two of free wifi access.  The Internet itself existed for 20 years before the 'private sector' gained access to it at immense costs, and another 20 years later and more people in this world have regular access to a personal email account than have regular access to a flush toilet.  Why?

Science.

Science is another tool for captialism, in this case.  Science alone produces nothing of value.  Just like that scene in The Lion King wherein the warthog theorizes that the stars were "giant balls of burning gas millions of miles away".  He was right, but what value is such knowledge to a warthog?  Or even a farmer?  The scientific knowledge concerning how to build a toilet, or how electrical impulses can be organized into a machine readable signal, is likewise useless without capitalism.  The founders of IBM believed that there was only a market for a couple dozen computers worldwide, and the first one ever built was sold to General Electric to calculate payroll.

Because nearly all of the Internet is privately owned property engaging in exchanges for mutual benefits (i.e. Capitalism) whereas the vast majority of urban areas in this world are served either by water monopolies or publicly owned municipal water services. 

The internet is a great example of how capitalism fails, illustrated in the next part.
Between pirating and CC, the internet is sort of free.

The existence of free riders does not invalidate capitalism.  And copyright law is a monopoly, not capitalism. 

Sure, a flush toilet is an expense, but it's value is in it's ability to deal with the human waste problem effectively and cheaply.  Even under a bridge, you benefit from our modern society in the sense that potable water is cheap.  Filling your water bottle up at a public fountain costs you nothing, but it still costs someone something, just not enough for them to bother with the costs you incur. 

This is what 100%of the internet is for me. If I am a freegan, capitalists lose.

You think so?  You think you're sticking it to 'the man' with you're freeriding?  You're wrong.

Less than a penny a gallon where I live, but in another part of the world wherein a gallon of drinking water might cost as much as a dime, but the average wage is $2 a day; four gallons per flush just doesn't make economic sense.  And yet, there are still people who will save for a cell phone and service to gain access to the Internet, because the efficiencies of communications make their trades more profitable.  The farmer can find a buyer for his harvest faster, without wasting time and energy traveling into town to speak to some dealer in person; as an example.

The internet is awesome

You cannot fathom the many ways that capitalism has improved your own life, even during the midst of your poverty and homelessness. 

I can fathom the ways that capitalism caused my poverty and homelessness.
Even bridges are owned. This is problematic if one isn't stealthy.

Bridges are owned by the state.  By definition, not capitalism.  How has capitalism caused you're own poverty, specificly?

[crumbs]

[...]
now i know correlation isnt necessarily causation but isnt it interesting that between the year 100,000 bc and 1 bc no one invented computers and tractors than as soon as adam smith published the wealth of nations BAM a couple of hundred years later and we have sky scrapers that are regularly obscured by clouds.

I guess that pretty much sums it up.  Endless millennia of fail & meh, then Adam Smith writes a book and BAM!  Skyscrapers & bigass tractors! Then Ayn Rand writes a book and WAMO! Moon landings and enough crunch power to pickle! (and she was hawt, too!)

[NewLiberty]

I'm saying capitalism is only possible when the state facilitates it.

How do states facilitate capitalism?  The opposite seems more common.
Government in most any its forms seem generally anti-capitalist.
The obvious exceptions being lex mercatoria and contract law.

[Anon136]

Capitalism requires both materialism (the nouns) and statism.

Uh, what does inheriting right from a mother have to do with capitalism?

Capitalism is a rather skewed, abusive and amoral margin-based value ascribing system.

You can't have something me both amoral and abusive. It's either abusive and immoral, or amoral and just is.

Mutual Aid, however is "a factor in evolution."

Mutual aid? You mean, like, I do something nice for you, you do something nice for me? Sounds like capitalism  

"I'll pay you IF you work to make me wealthy" is not mutual aid, it's coerced dependency.
Amoral is the mindset, abusive is the action. Perhaps 'unethical abuse or neglect' would have fit better, if actual abuse were not the case.
Also, 'Materialism', not 'maternalism.'

my wife works to make the shareholders of her company wealthy despite the fact that we have means which make it possible for her to quit at any time with out suffering serious negative repercussions. she works to make her company wealthy because her company helps to make us wealthy also, she works not because she has to but because both parties benefit from the arrangement.

Would you say she is a Toiler? I would imagine that this work depends on a skillset and the arrangement made between the stockholders and her is not one that neccessarily involves wage slavery, but collectivism.
Does she have employees? Are those employees wealthy, if so?
 In turn, are those employees managers themselves?

Yes she toils. Yes she has a skillset. Yes she has employees.

Her employees all have flush toilets, something that even kings did not have a few hundred years ago. They all can afford cloths with thread counts that are higher than any cloth in the world a few hundred years ago. They all earn enough to feed themselves for a whole day with like 1 hour of work, a few hundred years ago that alone would have required at least 8 hours of hard unskilled labor. They all have cars, nicer cars than ours actually, a few hundred years ago they would have taken horses to work. I could go on but i think you get the point. When taken in historical context yes her employees are wealthy, the are absurdly fucking wealthy every last one of them. The sort of poverty i am describing gripped the world for hundreds of thousands of years before we discovered capitalism which then rocketed the modern poor to the status of ancient kings in a couple of generations. If you cant understand why someone who makes 10 dollars an hour is wealthy than you are a spoiled brat who understands no historical context. So the executives at her company are more wealthy, so what, who cares if it makes some people more better off if it makes everyone better off in general.

No the employees she manages are not managers themselves. Her employees are unskilled laborers.

Ouch. Do you acknowledge the need for abject slavery, wasting of resources, and poverty way down the line in the global picture to allow for this wealth to be sustained?
Edit: History, like Imperialism? Colonialism? Fraudulent trade? The usury that sparked the Renaissance? Genocide over resources? Insane factory conditions?
I've lived under bridges. I have $0 to my name for over 4 years. Don't be mean, buddy, I get what you're saying. I just don't think you get where it comes from.

who the hell said anything about sustaining wealth. why not just continue the processes that have lead to an explosive increase in wealth so general levels of wealth can continue to increase, not stay the same. those systems that allowed wealth to increase are not slavery or wasting resources, its private property and free exchange. before we had private property and free exchange things stagnated for literally hundreds of thousands of years, as soon as we started using private property and free exchange wealth exploded in a couple of generations. In just a few generations we went from water powered stone mills and horse and buggy and hand tools to tractors the size of houses and computers that fit in your pocket and crotch rockets.

now i know correlation isnt necessarily causation but isnt it interesting that between the year 100,000 bc and 1 bc no one invented computers and tractors than as soon as adam smith published the wealth of nations BAM a couple of hundred years later and we have sky scrapers that are regularly obscured by clouds.

Science made those inventions possible.
Free trade is fantastic.
Historical capitalism has done more to hinder science than any force outside of religion.

Science was important also but it couldn't have happened with out private property and free trade (capitalism). Imagine if you were free to invent a tractor but if you did than you wouldn't be allowed to determine whether and in what capacity it was used. There would be no means for you to personally benefit from it so you wouldn't bother inventing it. Capitalism is the framework that allows people to have a reason to engage in scientific endeavors. granted with out capitalism some people will experiment for curiosities sake but not nearly as many and not nearly as often as if people are allowed to benefit from their effort.

[crumbs]

I've lived under bridges. I have $0 to my name for over 4 years. Don't be mean, buddy, I get what you're saying. I just don't think you get where it comes from.

I don't think you get where any of it comes from.  You've lived under bridges?  I've done some 'urban camping' of my own in my time. Now you can argue with people from across the US and around the world in real time, and it costs you nearly nothing of consequence.  It's not quite free, but it's now cheap enough that buying an overpriced coffee can get you an hour or two of free wifi access.  The Internet itself existed for 20 years before the 'private sector' gained access to it at immense costs, and another 20 years later and more people in this world have regular access to a personal email account than have regular access to a flush toilet.  Why?

Because nearly all of the Internet is privately owned property engaging in exchanges for mutual benefits (i.e. Capitalism) whereas the vast majority of urban areas in this world are served either by water monopolies or publicly owned municipal water services.  Sure, a flush toilet is an expense, but it's value is in it's ability to deal with the human waste problem effectively and cheaply.  Even under a bridge, you benefit from our modern society in the sense that potable water is cheap.  Filling your water bottle up at a public fountain costs you nothing, but it still costs someone something, just not enough for them to bother with the costs you incur.  Less than a penny a gallon where I live, but in another part of the world wherein a gallon of drinking water might cost as much as a dime, but the average wage is $2 a day; four gallons per flush just doesn't make economic sense.  And yet, there are still people who will save for a cell phone and service to gain access to the Internet, because the efficiencies of communications make their trades more profitable.  The farmer can find a buyer for his harvest faster, without wasting time and energy traveling into town to speak to some dealer in person; as an example.

You cannot fathom the many ways that capitalism has improved your own life, even during the midst of your poverty and homelessness. 

Let's stop trolling each other.  I'm not sure where this fixation on toilets & running water comes from, but from Roman aqueducts to Soviet Russia, water & sewage projects were typically sponsored by the state.  Capitalism simply didn't enter the picture.  But greed & profit, as always, remained major players, necessitating state regulations. This is a TL;DR of how it played out in NYC:

1800s.  NYC population is exploding -- cheap beasts of labor, the immigrants, are flooding into the city.  Living space is rented out at prices the market will bear, and it bears everything.  Pigs, cattle & horses and rats in the streets, raw sewage runs in the gutter, new social conventions are born.*  The party was just getting started.  In 1832, the Cholera Epidemic hit.  In the words of John Pintard, one of the few men of means who chose not to flee & remained in the city: “Those sickened must be cured or die off, & being chiefly of the very scum of the city, the quicker [their] dispatch the sooner the malady will cease.”  The invisible hand helped out -- people died off.  And died off some more.  And then the Invisible Hand, in all of its wisdom, beaconed for the muddleheaded regulators to join in the fun.  They did.  And still do.  All a part of this beautiful, magical web of life.

*Men walking on the street side of the sidewalk, ladies on the building side (so the men got splattered with slops poured out of upper storey windows).
 

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A first mover with the right price will always win unless prevented with force.
I'm not understanding how price discovery is strictly capitalist.

Price discovery = finding out just what a mother will pay to keep her child alive.

So about $5 if you're destitute, and $5,000,000 if you're a millionaire. Looks great in theory!

Now that you've mentioned it, it does seem a bit clumsy

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Science was important also but it couldn't have happened with out private property and free trade (capitalism).

Case in point: The stinkin' commies put a sputnik in orbit, scaring the bejesus out of God-ferain' Americans.  Followed up by a man in orbit -- all by a country which was full of starvin' illiterate dirt farmers just 50 years ago.  

Imagine if you were free to invent a tractor but if you did than you wouldn't be allowed to determine whether and in what capacity it was used. There would be no means for you to personally benefit from it so you wouldn't bother inventing it. Capitalism is the framework that allows people to have a reason to engage in scientific endeavors.

Please understand that some people are not driven by the same things you are.  Galileo didn't say the world is round the earth spun around the sun 'coz he wanted to get rich.  Einstein didn't come up with a neat formula to become fabulously wealthy.  Jesus didn't die on the cross because there was money to be made.  Some people are just ... fundamentally different from you.

granted with out capitalism some people will experiment for curiosities sake but not nearly as many and not nearly as often as if people are allowed to benefit from their effort.

If they live in a society where you can't accumulate wealth, there's just about nothing else to do  If you can't distinguish yourself with a money roll, you create.  

Edit: the crossed-out Galileo stupidity.

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Science is another tool for captialism, in this case.  Science alone produces nothing of value.  Just like that scene in The Lion King wherein the warthog theorizes that the stars were "giant balls of burning gas millions of miles away".  He was right, but what value is such knowledge to a warthog?  Or even a farmer?  The scientific knowledge concerning how to build a toilet, or how electrical impulses can be organized into a machine readable signal, is likewise useless without capitalism.  The founders of IBM believed that there was only a market for a couple dozen computers worldwide, and the first one ever built was sold to General Electric to calculate payroll.

I guess it depends in how you define "value."  I'm sure you'll meet plenty of resistance on this forum by claiming that knowledge has no value unless it's applied.  Does music have value?  If Beethoven's 9th is in public domain, is it without value?  What about the works of Shakespeare?  I think you're confusing value with price.  Or something like that.  

BTW, the first IBM (at that point going under TMC) was sold to US Census Bureau, not GE. The company was renamed IBM by Watson in 1924, and by the 1930s the company was doing brisk trade with the Nazis through its 90%-owned subsidiary Dehomag (thank you wikip), helping out with The Final Solution.  Bizniz is bizniz.

[MoonShadow]

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Science was important also but it couldn't have happened with out private property and free trade (capitalism).

Case in point: The stinkin' commies put a sputnik in orbit, scaring the bejesus out of God-ferain' Americans.  Followed up by a man in orbit -- all by a country which was full of starvin' illiterate dirt farmers just 50 years ago.  

by forcing those same dirt farmers to work to feed those who wanted to put a man in orbit.  Capitalism isn't the only way things happen, it's just the only way things happen for everyone.

Imagine if you were free to invent a tractor but if you did than you wouldn't be allowed to determine whether and in what capacity it was used. There would be no means for you to personally benefit from it so you wouldn't bother inventing it. Capitalism is the framework that allows people to have a reason to engage in scientific endeavors.

Please understand that some people are not driven by the same things you are.  Galileo didn't say the world is round the earth spun around the sun 'coz he wanted to get rich.  Einstein didn't come up with a neat formula to become fabulously wealthy.  Jesus didn't die on the cross because there was money to be made.  Some people are just ... fundamentally different from you.

Some people, sure.  Those people are statitisical aberations.  Statisitical aberations don't drive economies nor advance socities.

granted with out capitalism some people will experiment for curiosities sake but not nearly as many and not nearly as often as if people are allowed to benefit from their effort.

If they live in a society where you can't accumulate wealth, there's just about nothing else to do  If you can't distinguish yourself with a money roll, you create.  

Create what?  As you pointed out value is subjective.  American indians once entertained themselves by creating sand paintings on the ground.  They must have valued the joy of creating them, otherwise they wouldn't have done so.  They are certainly valueless to me, since they were created as an artform more temporary than sidewalk chalk art.  We can only measure value based upon those willing to create for themselves and those willing to create for others for pay.  Generally, price is what something costs, but value is what it's worth to the person paying that price.