Bitcointalk with a socialist instead of an ancap in charge.

[_Miracle]

Smith is being more spiritual, godley or humanistic than most economists or politiciations will be capable or willing to translate.
Serving our own self interest is an undeniable human trait, I don't think he was overly optimistic to think that we would look out for our fellow man during the pursuit of that on an individual level.

Again forgive my ignorance, as I'm not an expert on this topic... but if you are saying that the 'invisible hand' argument should be interpreted as meaning that capitalism does not self-regulate by itself, or through any human endeavour, but needs something external (i.e., God) to do this, then I suppose we're in agreement. I've said in many discussions in P&S that although my politics are considerably left-of-centre, I believe that the oxymoron of 'capitalist democracy' is the best system of government we can have... so long as the government works to rein in the excesses of capitalism, and the capitalism works to prevent forced absolute equality of outcome. We need two opposing forces to keep each other in check. I think this is self-evident, and extremist ideologies such as communism or, on the other side, anarcho-capitalism, are doomed to failure.

I am in favour of equality of opportunity, and the only way I see this arising is in a capitalist democracy where the government is left-leaning. A right-wing government, one which more or less is in alignment with laissez-faire capitalism, doesn't provide the required balance.

Sort of except that godliness (or our human nature) within each of us would be the unseen force: an invisible hand   ----the observable market is the externality.
Maybe to explain what it is not: it is not an ominous controlling hand above us, it is us.


While ideologically I'd like to be a Libertarian in a free market economy...

I am wholeheartedly for democratic capitalism as the functioning structure and best hope for a prosperous humanity (for now)

It's disappointing to see the "tax the rich" rhetoric going on---how about:
Stop letting corporations make their own rules and get big money interests the hell out of politics---just those 2 tweaks could go a long way
to preserving democratic capitalism but instead we are attacking (as usual) people on the individual level.
The corporate structure is one of the keystones to prosperity but it isn't a stretch to see why some people are leaning into socialism, especially those too young to have observed it in action large scale and are now observing crony capitalism in action.
And if I was younger and could give up my desire for orderly systems I would totally be up for Anarchy ;-)

I don't know what the climate is in your country between left and right.
I consider myself a centrist and am registered independent (meaning neither party).
However, others would consider me [socially] leftist in that, I wish for all of my compatriots to feel equally represented, enfranchised--- and to feel that "liberty and justice for all" means something. ----I rarely speak to those on the far right of that because I don't have a lot of patience for that perspective (I could easily behave badly ).

 

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[Cnut237]

I don't know what the climate is in your country between left and right.

It's the UK. We don't really have a viable left, since the "Labour" party have reinvented themselves once again. The Green party is probably our main left-wing party, but they only tend to gather a few percentage points of the vote. Our future prime minsters are generally drawn from a small subset of children. But I won't expand on all of this here, or it will turn into an essay.

Sort of except that godliness (or our human nature) within each of us would be the unseen force: an invisible hand   ----the observable market is the externality.
Maybe to explain what it is not: it is not an ominous controlling hand above us, it is us.

Yes, but centuries of evidence show that the invisible hand either doesn't exist or, if it does, then its effect is almost nothing.

Stop letting corporations make their own rules and get big money interests the hell out of politics---just those 2 tweaks could go a long way

Yes, agreed.

It's disappointing to see the "tax the rich" rhetoric going on [...] we are attacking (as usual) people on the individual level.

If pure capitalism leads to excess and abuse, and there needs to be some mechanism to reduce this effect, as you seem to agree in your point above, then why should we not tax the rich? If a corporation exploits the system to the detriment of others by making its own rules, then why should the CEO and directors of that company be perceived as having acquired their wealth by fair and legitimate means? If there are people who exploit the system, then why would it be disappointing if we sought to prevent this exploitation? Is it okay that Jeff Bezos has $200 billion, but his employees have to sh*t in plastic bags in their vans because they'd lose their job if they took a toilet break?

Previously I have compared these two facts:

1. This $5 billion yacht exists.

the History Supreme, owned by Robert Knok, is the most expensive, largest superyacht in the whole world. At 100 feet in length, History Supreme took three years to build, using 10,000 kilograms of solid gold and platinum, both of which adorn the dining area, deck, rails, staircases, and anchor. If that weren’t luxurious enough, the master suite features a meteorite rock wall, a statue made of Tyrannosaurus Rex bones, a 68 kg 24-carat gold Aquavista Panoramic Wall Aquarium, and a liquor bottle adorned with a rare 18.5-carat diamond.

https://www.atlasmarinesystems.com/most-expensive-yachts/

2. 1 in 3 people globally do not have access to safe drinking water.

2.2 billion people around the world do not have safely managed drinking water services, 4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation services, and 3 billion lack basic handwashing facilities.

https://www.who.int/news/item/18-06-2019-1-in-3-people-globally-do-not-have-access-to-safe-drinking-water-unicef-who

Whilst, as I say, I am in favour of equality of opportunity, and against absolute equality of outcome, I do believe in progressive taxation. And income tax alone is insufficient when the elite draw most of their wealth from returns on existing capital. (Yes, I am a fan of Thomas Piketty, and read Capital in the Twenty-First Century when it was first published.)

I believe that existing inequality of outcome is obscene. I am not talking about someone who is talented and worked hard and made themselves say $10 million. Numbers become difficult to fully comprehend once we move past the scale for which the human brain evolved. I am fond of the visualisation below. Scroll through this and tell me that existing tax on the wealthy is sufficient (there is plenty of additional information if you scroll far enough).

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

[_Miracle]

I don't know what the climate is in your country between left and right.

It's the UK. We don't really have a viable left, since the "Labour" party have reinvented themselves once again. The Green party is probably our main left-wing party, but they only tend to gather a few percentage points of the vote. Our future prime minsters are generally drawn from a small subset of children. But I won't expand on all of this here, or it will turn into an essay.

I would read that if you made a thread on bitcointalk. It would be nice to have the perspective from your view and of course inevitably someone from the other side will chime in but I feel like you'd be able to do that with civility.
If I watch news it's usually from other countries than mine and I will only watch snippets from my own to keep semi-relevant to current conversations but the political punditry in my country is off of the chain of reality, it would be difficult to convey how disgusted it makes me feel to watch without admitting my dorky hobby of
reading long, old and some would say boring books regarding the founding of my country and the age that made it possible (The constitution, the federalist papers, all the letters the founding fathers wrote to each other, obscure laws from the time, generally authors from "The Age of Enlightenment". The depth of thought that went into building the amount of liberty the world is experiencing now is mind blowing in contrast to lack of depth and forethought our world leaders display now.

Sort of except that godliness (or our human nature) within each of us would be the unseen force: an invisible hand   ----the observable market is the externality.
Maybe to explain what it is not: it is not an ominous controlling hand above us, it is us.

Yes, but centuries of evidence show that the invisible hand either doesn't exist or, if it does, then its effect is almost nothing.
I see now see why the concept get's misconstrued ---I don't think I have the skill to convey it properly so let's leave this one.
Maybe I'll run into some brilliant TedTalk of a social phycologist/economist who explains it better.

Stop letting corporations make their own rules and get big money interests the hell out of politics---just those 2 tweaks could go a long way

Yes, agreed.

It's disappointing to see the "tax the rich" rhetoric going on [...] we are attacking (as usual) people on the individual level.

If pure capitalism leads to excess and abuse, and there needs to be some mechanism to reduce this effect, as you seem to agree in your point above, then why should we not tax the rich? If a corporation exploits the system to the detriment of others by making its own rules, then why should the CEO and directors of that company be perceived as having acquired their wealth by fair and legitimate means? If there are people who exploit the system, then why would it be disappointing if we sought to prevent this exploitation? Is it okay that Jeff Bezos has $200 billion, but his employees have to sh*t in plastic bags in their vans because they'd lose their job if they took a toilet break?

Interesting that you post Amazon---I was a delivery driver for a bit when I got back  to California and it IS as tough as they say...I'm also an Amazon junkie
Amazon contracts out its drivers to avoid labor and liability laws---- again stop allowing companies to make their own laws and profit by getting around them.
As a side note to that: I delivered for Amazon contracted through a company I helped build, I left years ago disagreeing with switching workers over to contractors (and went into real estate)

I've boycotted Walmart years ago but just can't let go go of my Prime!


Previously I have compared these two facts:


2. 1 in 3 people globally do not have access to safe drinking water.

2.2 billion people around the world do not have safely managed drinking water services, 4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation services, and 3 billion lack basic handwashing facilities.

https://www.who.int/news/item/18-06-2019-1-in-3-people-globally-do-not-have-access-to-safe-drinking-water-unicef-who

Whilst, as I say, I am in favour of equality of opportunity, and against absolute equality of outcome, I do believe in progressive taxation. And income tax alone is insufficient when the elite draw most of their wealth from returns on existing capital. (Yes, I am a fan of Thomas Piketty, and read Capital in the Twenty-First Century when it was first published.)

I believe that existing inequality of outcome is obscene. I am not talking about someone who is talented and worked hard and made themselves say $10 million. Numbers become difficult to fully comprehend once we move past the scale for which the human brain evolved. I am fond of the visualisation below. Scroll through this and tell me that existing tax on the wealthy is sufficient (there is plenty of additional information if you scroll far enough).

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

We could have long conversations regarding the world water crises, I just cant type fast enough to do it here. On the small scale I've belonged to service clubs that help put in and teach communities to build/maintain their own wells. On the larger scale we have privatized some of earth resources and that's not going well for too many humans.

I think "taxing the rich" is another sound byte solution in a world where some in depth revisiting of policies could make deep meaningful changes without redistribution of wealth.

I think we need a major paradigm shift---I don't feel like it will be in my lifetime.

[Cnut237]

I think we need a major paradigm shift

We can certainly agree on that.

I don't feel like it will be in my lifetime.

Maybe not. But perhaps the climate crisis will precipitate* change. Or perhaps the inequalities and unfairness that are the natural outcome of capitalism will leave a sufficiently sizeable proportion of voters feeling disenfranchised that they'll vote for change. Coincidentally, I read this article this morning.





* pun not intentional, but left in anyway

[_Miracle]

I think we need a major paradigm shift

We can certainly agree on that.

I don't feel like it will be in my lifetime.

Maybe not. But perhaps the climate crisis will precipitate* change. Or perhaps the inequalities and unfairness that are the natural outcome of capitalism will leave a sufficiently sizeable proportion of voters feeling disenfranchised that they'll vote for change. Coincidentally, I read this article this morning.





* pun not intentional, but left in anyway

That's a good article beginning with an OG age of enlightenment thinker and throwing in contemporary (Canadian) Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now which is itself an outline of how good we have it as a result of enlightenment type thinking but I'm biased,--- I liked the book a lot (liberal capitalist that I am :-).

Those sound like the concerns young Americans have  add health care and racial tensions that may still be awhile in healing. Housing has been an issue here as well, especially in California "tent cities" exist on many off-ramps. As for Las Vegas running out of water...it was built in the middle of the desert: that's more of an "Oh us silly humans" and resource allocation issue. We've had water wars in California as far back as I can remember, we grow more agriculture than rain or runoff can support and it has always been disheartening to see big Ag win over small farms---again we allow those with the best attorneys and most money to influence the rules.


We could be encouraged that our youth are factoring the quality of life of their fellow humans as something to value. The paradigm has been shifting away from glamorising excessive wealth and that in itself is an improvement but the climate crisis continues to precipitate* ( yeah lol ) resistance to science in some of my country and it is from a side that one would have been expected to preserve our environment.
Inequality is not the "natural" out come of capitalism, it is what we are currently allowing.

[Cnut237]

Inequality is not the "natural" out come of capitalism, it is what we are currently allowing.

I'd argue that inequality is the inevitable outcome if we are considering pure capitalism. The phrase "what we are currently allowing" only has meaning when there is an opposing force present to allow or forbid certain actions.

So it is certainly not an inevitable outcome if we are considering capitalist democracy. The level of inequality in a capitalist democracy is dependent in large part on the government. Most current governments allow huge inequality.

I'd also add that whilst the people in charge (whether running a company or a government) acting mostly out of self-interest is a problem, we also need to consider that self-interest can be charted with a time axis, and short-termist thinking is a huge and pervasive issue. CEOs will act to increase the share price right now, even if it's at the expense of what happens in 5 years' time, when it could well be someone else running the company. And governments are just as bad, if not worse. The Covid lockdowns in my view were implemented far too late, which exacerbated the economic damage that governments were trying to avoid in the first place by keeping society running as normal. Similar with the "too little, too late" response to the climate crisis.

[_Miracle]

snip 'cause no one else will post a reply before I do  

I always think about Tesla and Edison and what life might look like all over the world today if Telsa had been better at capitalizing on his ideas .

It is odd for us little people to wonder at a behemoth of a publicly traded company--- lamenting on the inequity of it all when the leaders of those corporations
are fiduciary to share holders and have the rights of persons but not the responsibility.
 "Citizens United"---one of the things I (futaliy but still try to) support in overturning
https://americanpromise.net/2019/04/5-reasons-we-need-an-amendment-to-say-corporations-arent-people/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwqKuKBhCxARIsACf4XuE3aMow_W0i_YhVh8KyhPYY6E3e6KGj8nN4yZSIZYJDzlzqHJdGl7MaAglsEALw_wcB

Easier read on Citizens United
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained

So if a CEO or CFO has a fiduciary duty to maximize profits it would almost be irresponsible to pay people more than you 'have to'.
We have a federal minimum wage in America of $7.25 it's been there for over a decade and while I don't agree with having one:
since we do, it should be tethered to some livable wage based in reality. The truly galling thing about it, is that the same politicians who decided not to raise it, get to vote on their own pay, benefits and retirement plans.

Walmart is an easy example.
My (otherwise) sweet aunty who doesn't want "her taxes going to pay for her neighbors house" (and will post that everywhere), doesn't have anything to say about corporate welfare or just observing the obscene profit margins and share holder payouts while the average person working there is eligible for food stamps and government assistance--- which is another way to subsidize corporations while denigrating a hard working human.  <---one of the paradigms I'd love to see shifting (less Limbaugh rhetoric)
Maybe we can shame companies into treating its employees better? Laughing but also...serious.

If you or I launder money, we go to prison if HSBC does it, they get a fine not close to touching the profit they made doing it.
If you or I  conspires to murder we go to prison. If a corporation calculates a potential human loss of life in say...
polluting waterways (to reduce their cost in haz. waste disposal) , they may get a fine or pay settlements, if their attorneys aren't good enough to get them out of it.

Dan Price made a different choice and  I hope his company thrives as a good model.

"In 2015, Dan made headlines around the world when he announced to the entire Gravity team that he planned to raise the minimum wage for everyone to $70,000. He called the move a “moral imperative” to do the best you can for those you’re leading."


I'm not ready to scrap democratic capitalism but it needs more of us people to pay attention to the ways our individual liberties have been usurped in this top down fashion and for us to collectively reassert ourselves.
People do not have as much liberty as a corporation and I personally feel that's an affront to humanity----"the affront to humanity".

[Cnut237]

~

I agree with almost everything you've written there.

We have a federal minimum wage in America of $7.25 it's been there for over a decade and while I don't agree with having one:
since we do, it should be tethered to some livable wage based in reality.

But to me this part seems a contradiction, and I don't understand how someone could be against a minimum wage but, if there is one, then in favour of it being raised.

I'm not ready to scrap democratic capitalism but it needs more of us people to pay attention to the ways our individual liberties have been usurped in this top down fashion and for us to collectively reassert ourselves.
People do not have as much liberty as a corporation and I personally feel that's an affront to humanity

Democratic capitalism is the best system we have, but it needs to work for the people rather than for the elite. In order for this to happen, the government must not be enablers of exploitation and crony capitalism, they must instead act as an opposing force (to a carefully calibrated extent, not overwhelmingly so). A right-wing government is largely pointless in this regard.

I would say that most people have constraints on their freedom because they are in effect wage slaves. If for example you have to work say 60 hours a week in a low-paid job just to be able to support your family, then you are not able to pursue education opportunities, or move to a different part of the country where there are better jobs, and it is not surprising that people feel there is no way out. This makes them antagonistic towards the state, increases feelings of disenfranchisement, and enables the rise of populist demagogues such as Trump who prey on people's fears and prejudices in order to further their own ends (it's scarcely believable that someone who actually lives in a tower of gold can harness the support of much of the nation's poor).

The way to empower ordinary people is surely to loosen their shackles. A minimum wage is a first step here, but (and I suspect you will be against this) a UBI seems the ideal solution. The concept is often misunderstood as 'free money', when in fact it's simply a more equitable distribution. I feel that in a society with a UBI, the worst jobs would have to be at least somewhat more appealing in terms of working conditions than they are now. And the concept of a UBI might even appeal to right-wingers, as the establishment of a universal single flat rate payment would enable the removal of state bureaucracy involved in managing the complexities of existing income support.

[_Miracle]

We have a federal minimum wage in America of $7.25 it's been there for over a decade and while I don't agree with having one:
since we do, it should be tethered to some livable wage based in reality.

But to me this part seems a contradiction, and I don't understand how someone could be against a minimum wage but, if there is one, then in favour of it being raised.

And you just summed up one of the ways I don't typically fit into either political party.
That could be an entire conversation of what I think the limits and responsibilities of governments should be and how we should start utilizing technology to shape policy.

 and it's so late here that it's almost time for me to get up

Bills and measures used to be something even I could read and comprehend, now they are usually these behemoths of policy convoluted by related and unrelated policies.

A vote to raise the fed. minimum wage failed to pass the senate  earlier this year
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/05/964020654/senate-says-no-to-15-minimum-wage-for-now-but-democrats-vow-to-push-on

The way welfare programs were initially implemented had more of an impact on breaking up family units than is usually discussed--- I'll use the B word (bureaucracy) on it.

I'd really like to see UBI replace those programs. And we are entering an age where it is technology possible to implement with advances in technology almost making it an imperative.

We can circle back to Milton Friedman for that---I know I have a YouTube link for that somewhere, I'd have to sift through my 50+ links of him----that friggin guy was brilliant ! He was also an excellent communicator.

[_Miracle]

most of my Friedman saved videos are from the "free to choose" channel so they would be too long for most people to enjoy
so here are short clips from channels I don't subscribe to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7UW1umM0hM&ab_channel=football24777     less than 3mins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNffhKX4KC8&t=11s&ab_channel=zebeccopy    about 17 mins