A Resource Based Economy

[Rassah]

The indigenous were merely voluntarily exchanging their physical health, environmental viability and social well being for the ability of Texaco and the US to make more money. Nobody's arguing with you there. Continuing to asset that anything I'm proposing entails killing people doesn't make it true. You can come up with a different straw man/red herring if you can think of one. I would prefer if you were being honest or at least less ignorant though.

The history of your movement is written on the hundreds of millions of corpses filling mass graves all across Europe and Asia.  All that remains is for you to see that your system will only work if you are willing to add everyone that doesn't agree with you to that body count.

GODWIN!

Goodwin implies Hitler. He is implying Stalin and Mao.

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[Rassah]

LightRider's idea of capitalism makes me think of trying to defend the idea that all sex should be banned, because while some people may be having sex for lovemaking or procreation, sex also involves rape, and rape is apparently just as much a part of lovemaking as everything else is.
In this case, making love, the voluntary exchange, is capitalism, and rape, which may have the same result (procreation, or in other sense profit), is corporatism and plunder. I and other pro-capitalists here are doing the equivalent of trying to point out that sex, and making love, has many uses and is the best way to progress forward, while Lightrider is doing the equivalent of saying that rape and making love are all the same thing, and that sex should be completely abolished.

Madness!

[herzmeister]

yeah probably no coincidence that those Venus Project cities are very reminiscent of the Logan's Run scenery with their test-tube methods of procreation  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WUUnc1M0TA

[LightRider]

LightRider's idea of capitalism makes me think of trying to defend the idea that all sex should be banned, because while some people may be having sex for lovemaking or procreation, sex also involves rape, and rape is apparently just as much a part of lovemaking as everything else is.
In this case, making love, the voluntary exchange, is capitalism, and rape, which may have the same result (procreation, or in other sense profit), is corporatism and plunder. I and other pro-capitalists here are doing the equivalent of trying to point out that sex, and making love, has many uses and is the best way to progress forward, while Lightrider is doing the equivalent of saying that rape and making love are all the same thing, and that sex should be completely abolished.

Madness!

Quoting this for posterity. One day you will look upon this and be thankful you are no longer subject to this insanity.

[justusranvier]

LightRider's idea of capitalism makes me think of trying to defend the idea that all sex should be banned, because while some people may be having sex for lovemaking or procreation, sex also involves rape, and rape is apparently just as much a part of lovemaking as everything else is.
In this case, making love, the voluntary exchange, is capitalism, and rape, which may have the same result (procreation, or in other sense profit), is corporatism and plunder. I and other pro-capitalists here are doing the equivalent of trying to point out that sex, and making love, has many uses and is the best way to progress forward, while Lightrider is doing the equivalent of saying that rape and making love are all the same thing, and that sex should be completely abolished.

Madness!

Absolutely.

I just wish there was some way to make this thread no longer appear in my "Show new replies to your posts" list.

[blablahblah]

LightRider's idea of capitalism makes me think of trying to defend the idea that all sex should be banned, because while some people may be having sex for lovemaking or procreation, sex also involves rape, and rape is apparently just as much a part of lovemaking as everything else is.
In this case, making love, the voluntary exchange, is capitalism, and rape, which may have the same result (procreation, or in other sense profit), is corporatism and plunder. I and other pro-capitalists here are doing the equivalent of trying to point out that sex, and making love, has many uses and is the best way to progress forward, while Lightrider is doing the equivalent of saying that rape and making love are all the same thing, and that sex should be completely abolished.

Madness!

Now you're just trolling. I for one, already pointed out several times that trade is mostly not voluntary.


Which reminds me, @kjj, you still haven't provided any example of voluntary trade.

You don't know the half of it.

I think you missed the part where he was showing that you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.  Capitalism is about voluntary exchange.

How about:

Alice wants an apple for 80c.
Bob wants to sell an apple in exchange for $1.20.
They meet in the middle and settle on $1.00 and the swap proceeds successfully.

Was that a voluntary exchange??

...In before a Stefan Molyneux fan says "yes, mutual gain, everyone's happy, end of story"...

Actually NO!

Alice needed the apple because she was hungry. In the language of Libertarians, "her stomach brutally coerced her and forced her hand."

What about Bob? Did he really volunteer to be selling apples? Actually, no. He'd rather be doing something else, but he needs to feed his family and they can't live solely on apples.

Even that fairytale example has hidden complexity because of the made-up accounting unit called "$". The story has surely been retold 1000 times on this forum: given that things were scarce all over the place, people needed something that was liquid, fungible, divisible, recognisable, and hard to fake, i.e.: money. In Bob's case he needed other things more than he needed the apple.

We could explore the example further, making it more realistic and trying to figure out some things like why Bob initially wanted 20c more, and why some apples are left to rot on the ground. But first we must get past this "free trade = voluntary" dogmatic nonsense.

[kjj]

Alice wants an apple for 80c.
Bob wants to sell an apple in exchange for $1.20.
They meet in the middle and settle on $1.00 and the swap proceeds successfully.

Was that a voluntary exchange??

Actually NO!

Alice needed the apple because she was hungry. In the language of Libertarians, "her stomach brutally coerced her and forced her hand."

What about Bob? Did he really volunteer to be selling apples? Actually, no. He'd rather be doing something else, but he needs to feed his family and they can't live solely on apples.

I just had a beer with Alice and Bob.  Alice isn't hungry at all, she's actually an exporter.  She's shipping the apples to the city, where fresh apples as a luxury food and she can resell them for a profit to fat people.  And Bob's family is just fine, thanks.  He runs a hobby orchard to relax and recover from the stresses of managing his factories.

But they are both thankful that you care so much about them that you are willing to enslave them to save them from petty annoyances like being responsible for their own wellbeing (and that of their families) when they'd much rather be a dance major like you.

P.S.  You are a danger to humanity.  When you start to really believe that the drive for survival is a cruel slavemaster, how many steps can you really be from seeing murder as a net gain for your victims?

[Odrec]

I also think capitalism is doomed at least in its current version. It is simply incompatible with the idea of a finite, consumable planet. We either find an alternative or we perish. But I don't think the alternative is marxism in its original conception. I appreciate a lot about the marxist ideology but the final conception is as ideological and fantastical as capitalism in theory. Both capitalism and marxism entail a linear evolution of the destiny of mankind, they are almost religious in that conception, it's an anthropocentric trap.

We need a system which bases itself on the understanding of human nature as a biological and cognitive system first and foremost. I see many people talking about history as if the history of mankind involves only the last 6-7000 years when in fact we have to be looking at the last 200000 years at least to understand what humans are about. Maybe then the alternative can become clearer.

I like bitcoin I think it has the potential to make things better but, as with anything new, it also has the potential to become a tool for oppression if it falls in the wrong kind of hands.

[kjj]

It's interesting that you're so callous and only care about profit systems, even when dealing with something as basic as food, yet I'm somehow the cruel one?

Yes, you are.

The "profit system" is the system that ensures that wants and needs are met through voluntary exchange.  Profit is how society rewards the work it wants done.

This is basic economics, grade school stuff.

Are you really unaware of how this works?  Or do you just feel that you have the right to use actual real violence* against others because you don't like the outcome?

* As opposed to the imaginary violence you pretend that your body is doing against you as a consequence of you being alive.

[LightRider]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F0AtKeExOA

[Odrec]

It's interesting that you're so callous and only care about profit systems, even when dealing with something as basic as food, yet I'm somehow the cruel one?

Yes, you are.

The "profit system" is the system that ensures that wants and needs are met through voluntary exchange.  Profit is how society rewards the work it wants done.

But that nice story is just your ideology -- it doesn't match up with reality.

Where's the voluntary exchange? It's just an oxymoron, unless you count open source sharing or some experimental "gift economy" with zero pressure to participate. You still haven't given any examples where it would make sense.

Profit is inherently exploitative and the "mutual gain" is not real. Otherwise people could trade the same item back and forth 100 times, and magically gain energy like a perpetual motion machine. Returning to the example of the apple:
After Alice gets the apple from Bob, she sells it to Cody, who sells it to Douglas, who sells it to Emily, who sells it to Fred who finally eats it.
Alice charges $1.20.
Cody charges $1.50.
Douglas charges $2.00.
Emily charges $3.00.
and then Fred "voluntarily" buys it because he's a hipster artist and the apple has $4 of spiritual significance for him, and he's not actually hungry.

So, everyone profits every step of the way? That's just silly. The profit's not even real in a Capitalist system. Each middleman is either expanding their little empire (the 'profit' is paying for the costs of expanding), or they're doing lazy accounting and not bothering to count the miscellaneous costs that they're losing money on.

And all of that is still just a naive, rosy view of free market Capitalism. Enter: the supermarket monopoly. They have exclusive supply deals with the farmers. The contract goes kind of like this: "Any farmer who goes rogue and tries to sell extra produce on the side, gets cut off", so it's all voluntary and completely legit. The supermarket gets bored with selling apples so cheaply, so they reduce the amount they buy from the farmers. The retail price goes through the roof, while half the apples rot on the ground.

But of course, any government intervention to prevent anticompetitive practices would be against the spirit of free market Capitalism, right?

I think the market definitely needs regulation but, more often than not, the government aligns itself with big corporate powers and then it becomes worse. What neoliberalists don't understand is that the free market they talk about is maintained by the political power structure. It's a fiction, there's no free market and in the capitalist world there could never be one because once this economic powers get so big they inevitably become political in nature. The free market is an utopia, I think we need more realists.

[Odrec]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F0AtKeExOA

Cool video, thanks for sharing.

[kjj]

But that nice story is just your ideology -- it doesn't match up with reality.

Where's the voluntary exchange? It's just an oxymoron, unless you count open source sharing or some experimental "gift economy" with zero pressure to participate. You still haven't given any examples where it would make sense.

Profit is inherently exploitative and the "mutual gain" is not real. Otherwise people could trade the same item back and forth 100 times, and magically gain energy like a perpetual motion machine.

I'm sorry, I was laughing so hard at this point, I just couldn't bear reading any more.  I'm a little worried that I might have missed something of merit later in the post, but given the intro, I just don't see how that would be possible.

You do a very good job of describing why Keynesianism fails*.  But Keynes is to free markets like pudding is to trees.  (Not at all.)

The gain from trade is not in the trade itself, it is in moving the system closer to a state where wants and needs are met.  If Alice has an apple and wants money, and Bob has money, but wants an apple, they can trade.  In trading, they both satisfy their wants (mutual gain).  Unless something changes about what these two people want, it would make no sense at all to trade back, since that would move the system from a state of less want to a state of more want.

Thinking that trading back and forth pointlessly can bring prosperity is typical Keynesian thinking.  They look at the world and see trade, they see that trade is good.  They then start to measure trade, and then make the fatal mistake of thinking that increasing that measurement at any and all costs is a good thing**.  This sort of confusion over the measurement and the underlying principle is where ideas like hiring crews of people to dig ditches by hand, and then hiring more crews to follow the first crew to fill the ditches in.

Along the way, many of the economic statistics took on this sort of perversion.  See for example, the formula used for GDP.  If the government spends a trillion dollars, no matter on what, the GDP is boosted by a trillion dollars, and people that don't bother to understand what the number really means just see that the number has gone up.

* And good job at that, it took Hazlitt ~450 pages to debunk it the first time.

** Sadly, they are not alone in practicing this fallacy.  See cholesterol for an example in "medicine".

[grondilu]

Owning machines that will work for you is being made a little bit easier:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/robo-stox-investing-in-the-robotics-revolution

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=robo

[kjj]

Well, you can't have it both ways. You seem pretty knowledgeable so why are you so insistent that free trade is voluntary even though that would conflict with your other opinions?

If it's voluntary, that little quirk you mentioned about Keynesianism, wins: there's no loss from changing your mind 100 times.

You are ignoring friction.  There is loss from moving things around.  Even if the things don't move, just updating computer records of ownership has non-zero costs.  Trade is beneficial when the benefit of the trade exceeds the friction cost.

But if markets are like little heat engines that only go one way because energy is taken out of the system, then there's nothing voluntary about resources pushing from the hot side to the cold side.

Your analogy doesn't really fit.  There is only one "heat", but there are many, many "resources".  When one resource is pushing from hot to cold, another resource is flowing in the exact opposite direction, but also from hot to cold, in terms of that resource.

The voluntary part comes from being able to decide for yourself which resources you have that you want to trade, which resources you want, with whom you want to trade, when you want to trade, and at the exchange rate you want.  Of course, the other sides are free to make the same determinations, so "voluntary" doesn't imply that you get everything you want for free.  Money vastly simplifies this process by abstracting away one side of nearly all of those trades.

The gains from the system come when you realize that for various reasons different people are able to provide different resources at various costs.  Some soil is excellent for growing corn, some soil is excellent for growing watermelons, some people are excellent at producing car engines, some people are excellent at producing robots, etc.  You can grow your own food and raise your own livestock, but someone out there can probably do it more efficiently, so if you are good at something else, you two can trade and both benefit.  You get your food cheaper than if you grew it yourself, and the farmer gets shoes, or tractors, or kitchen cabinets, or whatever for cheaper than if he did it himself.

You could run with the with the heat engine metaphor and argue that it's a huge chaotic system, e.g.: MtGox takes the fees they earned and pay for something else, which is part of another market with energy getting sapped by other middlemen, ad infinitum.

You see middlemen, I see enablers.  Mtgox provides a marketplace with access to more buyers and more sellers.  Without that marketplace, you'd have fewer choices for trade, meaning that you'd get less when selling, or pay more when buying.  In other words, they reduce friction.  If you feel that the fees they charge for that service are too high for the value they provide, you are free to sell elsewhere.

But the whole thing relies on the energy of the workers on the hot side being constrained as much as possible, before they get the freedom they want on the cold side.  This is probably why Capitalism seems so unstable: everyone wants to use less energy, so people start cooperating instead of competing, then they form monopolies, then those monopolies take on political characteristics, as I think Odrec suggested.

Typical Marxist nonsense.  Go read some better economics books.  Hazlitt, Mises, Friedman, Hayek, etc.  Capitalism and free trade in general do not rely on artificially hindering anyone else.

One thing that Marx was right about is that people have a natural tendency to try to use government to protect their interests*.  There are two ways to approach that problem.  One of them works quite well, but requires diligence.  The other is a complete and utter failure every time.

One approach is to limit the power of government so much that it is unable to provide anti-competitive benefits.  In this scenario, it doesn't matter that someone may attempt to use the state to protect their position, because the state is powerless to help them.  This method works well, but requires that people not give in to the temptation to allow creep.

The other approach is to make government more powerful.  This is always and everywhere a failure.  The government that you can use to tell someone else what to do is also the government that someone else is using to tell you what to do.  People don't like being told what to do, so the trick here is to either get everyone dependent on the government so that their survival appears to depend on the system growing, or fill up the mass graves until people are too scared to speak out.

*  Marx was pretty good at observation.  Less good at deduction.  Terrible at projection.  Not that it matters, no one has actually read his stuff in years, they mostly just repeat things attributed to his school.

[LightRider]

Marx noted that capitalists have to turn to governments in order to protect their systematic theft (aka profit) from the workers and the environment. Government is a result of capitalism, the monetary system and the free market mentality.

[Rassah]

LightRider's idea of capitalism makes me think of trying to defend the idea that all sex should be banned, because while some people may be having sex for lovemaking or procreation, sex also involves rape, and rape is apparently just as much a part of lovemaking as everything else is.
In this case, making love, the voluntary exchange, is capitalism, and rape, which may have the same result (procreation, or in other sense profit), is corporatism and plunder. I and other pro-capitalists here are doing the equivalent of trying to point out that sex, and making love, has many uses and is the best way to progress forward, while Lightrider is doing the equivalent of saying that rape and making love are all the same thing, and that sex should be completely abolished.

Madness!

Now you're just trolling. I for one, already pointed out several times that trade is mostly not voluntary.

Neither is sex. We either have sex, or our species dies out. So let's ban sex, along with all it's involuntary coersion and rape and stuff *trollface* 

[LightRider]

LightRider's idea of capitalism makes me think of trying to defend the idea that all sex should be banned, because while some people may be having sex for lovemaking or procreation, sex also involves rape, and rape is apparently just as much a part of lovemaking as everything else is.
In this case, making love, the voluntary exchange, is capitalism, and rape, which may have the same result (procreation, or in other sense profit), is corporatism and plunder. I and other pro-capitalists here are doing the equivalent of trying to point out that sex, and making love, has many uses and is the best way to progress forward, while Lightrider is doing the equivalent of saying that rape and making love are all the same thing, and that sex should be completely abolished.

Madness!

Now you're just trolling. I for one, already pointed out several times that trade is mostly not voluntary.

Neither is sex. We either have sex, or our species dies out. So let's ban sex, along with all it's involuntary coersion and rape and stuff *trollface* 

Capitalism will kill us sooner than sex will.

[Odrec]

Marx noted that capitalists have to turn to governments in order to protect their systematic theft (aka profit) from the workers and the environment. Government is a result of capitalism, the monetary system and the free market mentality.

I agree, true free market is an illusion. Big companies always want protection and, as money buys power, they'll always end up buying a central authority for protection. What Americans call crony capitalism is the natural and inevitable evolution of capitalism. You can say lots of bad things about Marx but he was spot on there.

[LightRider]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZYS0vKBZac