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[Helgoland]

obvious cheap shot

I admit it may have seemed a bit rude, but I didn't mean it that way - his ideas seem to be more sound than most of what you hear out there, but they differ significantly from what is generally known as communism, prompting that question.

heavily affected by confirmation bias

Well, obviously

Do not misunderstand me. I am not a communist. Or an anarchist. Or even that anti-capitalist. But it is an old system. A system that is starting to fail in keeping up with the changes that humanity is inflicting upon itself and the world, no matter how well it is managed. I don't even particularly dislike capitalism. But it is doomed. And it will only get more doomed. And we need to be ready when the time comes to evolve from capitalism, as we once evolved from mercantilism, and as we once evolved from barter trade, into something better for mankind.

I believe you have to distinguish between failure of a specific capitalist system (happens all the time, we may be seeing it right now) and the failure of capitalism (i.e. free market efficiency) in general. When a specific capitalist system fails, it is usually because of the abuse of power by those who have accummulated it. Example.
Failure of capitalism itself, however, is not something I see on the horizon; simply because a more efficient alternative is not in sight. More efficient than our current form, yes: Get rid of national boundaries and trade barriers, combat corruption in the Second and Third world, and institute mechanisms that make producing externalities not worth it - for example a working carbon dioxide certificate market or a cigarette tax that finances the burden that smokers put on society in form of cancer etc. But the absolute failure of capitalism itself? I couldn't find an appropriate quote, but more than 150 years ago Marx prophesied that capitalism would fail with absolute certainty because of its inner contradictions.

Marxists all over the world are still waiting.

[scrdest]

A lot of things

So, what you're saying is that Capitalism hinders the development of things that make it obsolete, yes? (Just making sure if I understood you).

I would say that Wikipedia(s) and traditional encyclopedias are not mutually exclusive. That would be like saying that the rise of McDonalds rendered restaurants obsolete. Wikipedia and other wikis are an invaluable tool when it comes to getting reliable information quick and dirty, but you wouldn't cite Wikipedia itself as a source in any serious paper. Sure, 95% of the time it's reliable, but sometimes you want rock solid peer-reviewed data.

I'm generally more of a free market guy, but I must agree that copyright policies are often very very sketchy. Genetic ownership, in particular, strikes me as absurd. However, I can see the need for protecting your inventions, but then I cannot see why it's not the method of obtaining a result that would be copyrighted than the (chemical/DNA sequence - which is also a chemical, so I will omit it from now on). After all, you cannot INVENT a chemical, whatever it might be. You CAN invent a way how to obtain it, and usually, there will be more and less efficient methods of doing that.

But all things said, copyright is not Capitalism. You can have one without the other. Yes, it has grown out of Capitalism, but it is not an integral part of the system.

[MonkeyHead]

It could be argued that the information on Wikipedia is far more rigourously peer reveiwed and eidited updated than any other knowledge base. It is a strength as well as a weakness though due to the ease with which such edits can be done by any undesired individual. Mind you, such edits are often easily spotted and made right, again down to the ease of access to the system.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that Wikipedia provides a nice analogy for one of my percieved issues with capitalistic systems. A system where a small core of individuals (the so called 1%) have the power and gets to call the shots might be fine in a world where the interconnectivity of the system means that somewhere, there has to be a power source to make all the decisions. As MSH points out, we are outgrowing the need for such a model with our greater interconnectivity, and the 99% that prop up the 1% want greater enfranchisement than we currently have. We currently live under an old Encyclopedia Britannica model, waiting for the Wikipedia revolution.

[Frumple]

I believe you have to distinguish between failure of a specific capitalist system (happens all the time, we may be seeing it right now) and the failure of capitalism (i.e. free market efficiency) in general.

Failure of capitalism itself, however, is not something I see on the horizon; simply because a more efficient alternative is not in sight. More efficient than our current form, yes: Get rid of national boundaries and trade barriers, combat corruption in the Second and Third world, and institute mechanisms that make producing externalities not worth it - for example a working carbon dioxide certificate market or a cigarette tax that finances the burden that smokers put on society in form of cancer etc. But the absolute failure of capitalism itself? I couldn't find an appropriate quote, but more than 150 years ago Marx prophesied that capitalism would fail with absolute certainty because of its inner contradictions.

Marxists all over the world are still waiting.

... macro market failure has happened kinda' repeatedly, insofar as you could call that the failure of capitalism. I certainly would. The major depressions over the years are kinda' case one for: When Capitalism Can't Cope. It's a known economic thing that, even outside of corruption, the signals within the market just occasionally go tits up and destabilize. Sometimes (often, maybe even usually) it can get back in shape on its own. Sometimes it can't. And without those market signals being stable and clear, the efficiency involved with a capitalist system breaks down.

The capitalist system itself is inherently unstable and will collapse if left untended. S'been demonstrated time and time again. Only reason "capitalism" is still bumbling around is because it's been married to varying degrees of non-capitalist systems in order to keep it going. There's reasons there aren't really any pure capitalist economies anymore, yeah? I certainly can't recall any off the top of my head. States certainly aren't, Europe isn't, if there's anywhere in Asia that is, it's news to me (though I hear a couple are kinda' close). Same for the rest of the world.

So... more or less, Marx was kinda' right. Capitalism did fail with absolute certainty, and was replaced with things of varying degrees of greater efficiency. Usually involving bits and pieces of socialism tacked onto a capitalist framework.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

So, what you're saying is that Capitalism hinders the development of things that make it obsolete, yes? (Just making sure if I understood you).

Capitalism hinders the development of post-capital systems, yes.

I would say that Wikipedia(s) and traditional encyclopedias are not mutually exclusive. That would be like saying that the rise of McDonalds rendered restaurants obsolete. Wikipedia and other wikis are an invaluable tool when it comes to getting reliable information quick and dirty, but you wouldn't cite Wikipedia itself as a source in any serious paper. Sure, 95% of the time it's reliable, but sometimes you want rock solid peer-reviewed data.

This is not about the reliability of Wikipedia or making up accuracy figures. This is about a previously capital thing becoming a non-capital thing as a result of technological advancement, and becoming undeniably superior because of it and because it was not artificially stopped.

I'm generally more of a free market guy, but I must agree that copyright policies are often very very sketchy. Genetic ownership, in particular, strikes me as absurd. However, I can see the need for protecting your inventions, but then I cannot see why it's not the method of obtaining a result that would be copyrighted than the (chemical/DNA sequence - which is also a chemical, so I will omit it from now on). After all, you cannot INVENT a chemical, whatever it might be. You CAN invent a way how to obtain it, and usually, there will be more and less efficient methods of doing that.

But all things said, copyright is not Capitalism. You can have one without the other. Yes, it has grown out of Capitalism, but it is not an integral part of the system.

You are not understanding me. I am fully aware that copyright is not from capitalism. What I am describing to you is how the growth of non-capital systems has resulted in the extreme mutation of copyright in order to protect non-capital as if it were capital, sourced from those benefiting directly from the artificial maintenance of a capital system in all things. A few benefiting off of knowledge that should belong to the public.

[SalmonGod]

Really hard for me to believe, given how most people seem to relate, at least politically, to the very idea of laziness.  The poor are a constant target of victim blaming and hatred because of a belief that they're lazy, and that laziness is deserving of all kinds of suffering.  Then there's the very fact that this base emotional reaction to the notion that people are naturally lazy is the one of the largest factors in preventing support for any sort of system that's perceived as enabling laziness.  And then my personal experience in the workplace is that people get pretty damn hostile towards anyone who doesn't pull their weight, and they even behave this way when they're otherwise resentful towards their employer.  Everything I've witnessed indicates that it's something the majority of people are incredibly pre-occupied with.

I'd also like to hear when Capitalism is forced to sabotage itself, and how it cannot handle true prosperity.

In addition to what MSH said, I'd throw out several more things.

Capitalism assigns value according to scarcity.  When something becomes non-scarce, it completely short-circuits the system.  Those invested in the market for that product have to take steps to enforce artificial scarcity in order to prevent the collapse of that market. 

This is why we have several empty homes for every homeless person in the U.S.  This is why hunger is still a problem while somewhere from 1/2 to 2/3 of the food we produce is wasted.

This is why we have more money spent on lobbying and subsidies to support current energy technologies than we do research to advance others to a point where they can take over, even as the environment collapses around us.

The same applies to the labor market.  I like to talk about how my job could be run on a single computer with a handful of people providing human oversight of the results, and I get aggressively hushed by my co-workers.  Every time there is technological advancement, somebody's livelihood is rendered obsolete.  As such, there's always resistance.

Intellectual property is also a huge obstacle to progress in more ways that MSH didn't emphasize.  I can't imagine how much more quickly we could advance if information and productivity software were as freely available as we have the capability to make them.  This is the sort of statement Aaron Swartz was trying to make by releasing the JSTOR database to the public.

Oh... or how about the news media.  Imagine the social progress the world could make if news organizations weren't forced to shovel sensationalist crap onto the public for the sake of profit.

Ninja'd like fucking crazy because my family is being needy as fuck.

When a specific capitalist system fails, it is usually because of the abuse of power by those who have accummulated it. Example.

The way I see it, that's just the natural cycle of capitalism, though.  Wealth consolidates until the distribution reaches an unstable extreme of inequality, causing huge amounts of suffering in the process until it simply isn't bearable by the population anymore and is forced to reboot.  Are you saying that capitalism (i.e. free market efficiency) doesn't fail until the whole world suffers some cataclysmic event?  Because we're getting there, too.

[scrdest]

I believe you have to distinguish between failure of a specific capitalist system (happens all the time, we may be seeing it right now) and the failure of capitalism (i.e. free market efficiency) in general.

Failure of capitalism itself, however, is not something I see on the horizon; simply because a more efficient alternative is not in sight. More efficient than our current form, yes: Get rid of national boundaries and trade barriers, combat corruption in the Second and Third world, and institute mechanisms that make producing externalities not worth it - for example a working carbon dioxide certificate market or a cigarette tax that finances the burden that smokers put on society in form of cancer etc. But the absolute failure of capitalism itself? I couldn't find an appropriate quote, but more than 150 years ago Marx prophesied that capitalism would fail with absolute certainty because of its inner contradictions.

Marxists all over the world are still waiting.

... macro market failure has happened kinda' repeatedly, insofar as you could call that the failure of capitalism. I certainly would. The major depressions over the years are kinda' case one for: When Capitalism Can't Cope. It's a known economic thing that, even outside of corruption, the signals within the market just occasionally go tits up and destabilize. Sometimes (often, maybe even usually) it can get back in shape on its own. Sometimes it can't. And without those market signals being stable and clear, the efficiency involved with a capitalist system breaks down.

The capitalist system itself is inherently unstable and will collapse if left untended. S'been demonstrated time and time again. Only reason "capitalism" is still bumbling around is because it's been married to varying degrees of non-capitalist systems in order to keep it going. There's reasons there aren't really any pure capitalist economies anymore, yeah? I certainly can't recall any off the top of my head. States certainly aren't, Europe isn't, if there's anywhere in Asia that is, it's news to me (though I hear a couple are kinda' close). Same for the rest of the world.

So... more or less, Marx was kinda' right. Capitalism did fail with absolute certainty, and was replaced with things of varying degrees of greater efficiency. Usually involving bits and pieces of socialism tacked onto a capitalist framework.

I could say that Capitalism have failed because of being married to non-capitalist systems (for various reasons). Most likely both of us would be partially right.

Really hard for me to believe, given how most people seem to relate, at least politically, to the very idea of laziness.  The poor are a constant target of victim blaming and hatred because of a belief that they're lazy, and that laziness is deserving of all kinds of suffering.  Then there's the very fact that this base emotional reaction to the notion that people are naturally lazy is the one of the largest factors in preventing support for any sort of system that's perceived as enabling laziness.  And then my personal experience in the workplace is that people get pretty damn hostile towards anyone who doesn't pull their weight, and they even behave this way when they're otherwise resentful towards their employer.  Everything I've witnessed indicates that it's something the majority of people are incredibly pre-occupied with.

I'd also like to hear when Capitalism is forced to sabotage itself, and how it cannot handle true prosperity.

In addition to what MSH said, I'd throw out several more things.

Capitalism assigns value according to scarcity.  When something becomes non-scarce, it completely short-circuits the system.  Those invested in the market for that product have to take steps to enforce artificial scarcity in order to prevent the collapse of that market. 

This is why we have several empty homes for every homeless person in the U.S.  This is why hunger is still a problem while somewhere from 1/2 to 2/3 of the food we produce is wasted.

This is why we have more money spent on lobbying and subsidies to support current energy technologies than we do research to advance others to a point where they can take over, even as the environment collapses around us.

The same applies to the labor market.  I like to talk about how my job could be run on a single computer with a handful of people providing human oversight of the results, and I get aggressively hushed by my co-workers.  Every time there is technological advancement, somebody's livelihood is rendered obsolete.  As such, there's always resistance.

Intellectual property is also a huge obstacle to progress in more ways that MSH didn't emphasize.  I can't imagine how much more quickly we could advance if information and productivity software were as freely available as we have the capability to make them.  This is the sort of statement Aaron Swartz was trying to make by releasing the JSTOR database to the public.

Oh... or how about the news media.  Imagine the social progress the world could make if news organizations weren't forced to shovel sensationalist crap onto the public for the sake of profit.

Ninja'd like fucking crazy because my family is being needy as fuck.

When a specific capitalist system fails, it is usually because of the abuse of power by those who have accummulated it. Example.

The way I see it, that's just the natural cycle of capitalism, though.  Wealth consolidates until the distribution reaches an unstable extreme of inequality, causing huge amounts of suffering in the process until it simply isn't bearable by the population anymore and is forced to reboot.  Are you saying that capitalism (i.e. free market efficiency) doesn't fail until the whole world suffers some cataclysmic event?  Because we're getting there, too.

Laziness IS the default. In pretty much every living thing, in fact. Nothing is going to expend energy where it isn't needed.

Some of your examples are problematic, too: there is a problem with flat-out giving homes out to the homeless - homeless people often are psychically unable to start living in a home and would need professional help to help them readjust. Not to mention that a percentage of homeless people are also mentally unstable.

Lobbying is not a problem with Capitalism, it's a problem with any system in which the rulers (whatever they are) are able to influence the industry, be it in Capitalism, Socialism or Statist Communism. Not to mention that USSR and China are both responsible for pretty major ecological disasters themselves.

Luddism is, likewise, a problem with how people work, no matter the system someone is going to become obsolete and be angry about that. There is only so much education one worker can get.

News media isn't forced to shovel crap onto public, the public actively yells for having more crap shoveled at them. Sure, if you had a non-profit media, they could be good. BUT NOBODY (aside from weird people like us here) WOULD WATCH IT. Shovel-news is not profitable because it's shovel-news, it is profitable because it's popular.

You entirely ignored that in the case Helgoland brought up, it was not about wealth. It was about political power. In many systems, political power can be abused to profit those who possess it, but again, it is a feature of all systems that are politically exclusive.

[MonkeyHead]

Some of your examples are problematic, too: there is a problem with flat-out giving homes out to the homeless - homeless people often are psychically unable to start living in a home and would need professional help to help them readjust. Not to mention that a percentage of homeless people are also mentally unstable.

This is a really poor argument against trying to help them in some way though.

[SalmonGod]

Laziness IS the default. In pretty much every living thing, in fact. Nothing is going to expend energy where it isn't needed.

Not expending energy where it isn't needed isn't laziness.

Some of your examples are problematic, too: there is a problem with flat-out giving homes out to the homeless - homeless people often are psychically unable to start living in a home and would need professional help to help them readjust. Not to mention that a percentage of homeless people are also mentally unstable.

Nevermind that millions of those are people who were foreclosed on over the last few years.  They were living in homes just fine before that happened.  Literally kicked out of their homes just so they can go unused.

Lobbying is not a problem with Capitalism, it's a problem with any system in which the rulers (whatever they are) are able to influence the industry, be it in Capitalism, Socialism or Statist Communism. Not to mention that USSR and China are both responsible for pretty major ecological disasters themselves.

Yeah, I'm also not a statist.

Luddism is, likewise, a problem with how people work, no matter the system someone is going to become obsolete and be angry about that. There is only so much education one worker can get.

People only get angry about it because it robs them of their ability to live a decent quality of life, or even a life at all.  If that weren't the case, progress would be much easier.

News media isn't forced to shovel crap onto public, the public actively yells for having more crap shoveled at them. Sure, if you had a non-profit media, they could be good. BUT NOBODY (aside from weird people like us here) WOULD WATCH IT. Shovel-news is not profitable because it's shovel-news, it is profitable because it's popular.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this one.  I'm not talking about celebrity culture or anything like that, which people do literally ask for.  I'm talking about sensationalism:  presenting information that would otherwise be seen as insignificant in a way that is exaggerated and captivating through emotional manipulation.  It gets viewers and generates profit, because it's designed to cause emotional investment at a glance.  People don't ask to become emotionally invested in things that they wouldn't normally care about.  And it has a horrible effect on society, contributing to fear culture and extreme polarization.  Why does it matter if nobody would watch them otherwise?  Most news isn't very important, but news businesses have to convince people to watch it somehow anyway in order to survive.

You entirely ignored that in the case Helgoland brought up, it was not about wealth. It was about political power. In many systems, political power can be abused to profit those who possess it, but again, it is a feature of all systems that are politically exclusive.

And wealth is political power.  Any power is political power, and politics isn't just government.  If what we know today as the government ceased to exist, politics wouldn't.  The business world would form its own relationships and organizations through which they'd engage in the same politics they do now.  Those with wealth would still be powerful, and they'd use that power to fortify and advance their position.  Any centralization of resources in any form will work the same.  It's absolutely about wealth.

[Helgoland]

And wealth is political power.  Any power is political power, and politics isn't just government.  If what we know today as the government ceased to exist, politics wouldn't.  The business world would form its own relationships and organizations through which they'd engage in the same politics they do now.  Those with wealth would still be powerful, and they'd use that power to fortify and advance their position.  Any centralization of resources in any form will work the same.  It's absolutely about wealth.

That's a thought of Marx that I really like: Politics and society are merely a topping on the economic relations between the people. Wealth is (to some degree, just look at pre-revolution France for an example where that's not 100% the case) political power, no question.

But I believe we have again run into a definitions problem: Capitalism in the Randian (completely free) and in the ordoliberal (government regulations, progressive taxes), in a hundred other flavors and as the biggest common denominator of all these (which from now on I'll be calling base capitalism).

Whenever a certain capitalist system has failed, it was either because of political meddling (the Venetian example from above) or because of inherent instabilities in that particular flavor (i.e. Great Depression, Crash of '08 etc.). In all those cases, however, base capitalism lived on, merely changed innto another form. The only way it has ever been abolished to a significant degree was after a revolution that blew any previous political and economic structures to smithereens (October revolution, Mao's victory in China). And even in those cases, it has demonstrated a great skill to sneak back in.

This is a really poor argument against trying to help them in some way though.

It really is; but how would helping poor people/renting out homes that aren't gonna be sold soon for a few bucks/doing something else that Ayn Rand would not approve of be uncapitalist?

[10ebbor10]

This is a really poor argument against trying to help them in some way though.

It really is; but how would helping poor people/renting out homes that aren't gonna be sold soon for a few bucks/doing something else that Ayn Rand would not approve of be uncapitalist?

Because you make more profit by artificially reducing supply. Small scale example. You got 10 houses, and 8 humans. Each human wants to spend 2 monetary units on a house. Competition ensures that the prize remains the same. Now, if one were to artificially remove several houses out of the market. (High prizes, destroying, just not selling...) So that the total housing numbers ends at 6, prizes can rise. 6*3(new price) > 8*2

[Scoops Novel]

I thought you might like this. A "Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling", released in 2010.

The webcomic which first introduced me to the speech and video.

The speech and video itself.

[scrdest]

Laziness IS the default. In pretty much every living thing, in fact. Nothing is going to expend energy where it isn't needed.

Not expending energy where it isn't needed isn't laziness.

Some of your examples are problematic, too: there is a problem with flat-out giving homes out to the homeless - homeless people often are psychically unable to start living in a home and would need professional help to help them readjust. Not to mention that a percentage of homeless people are also mentally unstable.

Nevermind that millions of those are people who were foreclosed on over the last few years.  They were living in homes just fine before that happened.  Literally kicked out of their homes just so they can go unused.

Lobbying is not a problem with Capitalism, it's a problem with any system in which the rulers (whatever they are) are able to influence the industry, be it in Capitalism, Socialism or Statist Communism. Not to mention that USSR and China are both responsible for pretty major ecological disasters themselves.

Yeah, I'm also not a statist.

Luddism is, likewise, a problem with how people work, no matter the system someone is going to become obsolete and be angry about that. There is only so much education one worker can get.

People only get angry about it because it robs them of their ability to live a decent quality of life, or even a life at all.  If that weren't the case, progress would be much easier.

News media isn't forced to shovel crap onto public, the public actively yells for having more crap shoveled at them. Sure, if you had a non-profit media, they could be good. BUT NOBODY (aside from weird people like us here) WOULD WATCH IT. Shovel-news is not profitable because it's shovel-news, it is profitable because it's popular.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this one.  I'm not talking about celebrity culture or anything like that, which people do literally ask for.  I'm talking about sensationalism:  presenting information that would otherwise be seen as insignificant in a way that is exaggerated and captivating through emotional manipulation.  It gets viewers and generates profit, because it's designed to cause emotional investment at a glance.  People don't ask to become emotionally invested in things that they wouldn't normally care about.  And it has a horrible effect on society, contributing to fear culture and extreme polarization.  Why does it matter if nobody would watch them otherwise?  Most news isn't very important, but news businesses have to convince people to watch it somehow anyway in order to survive.

You entirely ignored that in the case Helgoland brought up, it was not about wealth. It was about political power. In many systems, political power can be abused to profit those who possess it, but again, it is a feature of all systems that are politically exclusive.

And wealth is political power.  Any power is political power, and politics isn't just government.  If what we know today as the government ceased to exist, politics wouldn't.  The business world would form its own relationships and organizations through which they'd engage in the same politics they do now.  Those with wealth would still be powerful, and they'd use that power to fortify and advance their position.  Any centralization of resources in any form will work the same.  It's absolutely about wealth.

- Then I need your definition of laziness.

- People who got foreclosed didn't get kicked out of their homes FOR TEH EVULZ. They were kicked out of their homes so that the bank could sell the house and get their money back. Since, due to the state of the economy, many people got foreclosed, the houses became worthless, but that's a whole different issue. I'd say that mindless foreclosures like that are extremely irrational on the bank's side, though.

- Nor did I accuse you of being one. What I did was pointing out that it's not exclusively an issue with Capitalism.

- I don't see how any other system could solve that in any way. Sure, communism may make the transition a bit more smooth by supporting the workers during the transition, but in that case any major advance would be a massive resource sink and it might as well result in social pressure to not innovate to avoid having to fund a whole lotta people who end up out of work, even if it's only temporary.

- I know what you were trying to say. That's exactly what I meant in my post. The people want their sensationalized news. First, they play to the confirmation bias and ingroup/outgroup conflicts, second, both sides believe their propaganda to be unbiased. Even if you aren't for-profit, you have material costs, maintenance, et cetera, and you need to get those somehow. If nobody watches the media, how would you convince anyone to provide those to you?

- Wealth can be converted to political power (and vice versa), via bribes and what have you. But political power is more complex than wealth alone - connections, friendships (the rare actual, non-faked ones), family ties... You can have wealth but lack political pull, and if all you have is wealth, you won't go very far when people who are not only relatively wealthy but also well-connected conspire to deprive you of it - see the Venice example, the noveau riche were deprived of power by more connected old money families.

And wealth is political power.  Any power is political power, and politics isn't just government.  If what we know today as the government ceased to exist, politics wouldn't.  The business world would form its own relationships and organizations through which they'd engage in the same politics they do now.  Those with wealth would still be powerful, and they'd use that power to fortify and advance their position.  Any centralization of resources in any form will work the same.  It's absolutely about wealth.

That's a thought of Marx that I really like: Politics and society are merely a topping on the economic relations between the people. Wealth is (to some degree, just look at pre-revolution France for an example where that's not 100% the case) political power, no question.

But I believe we have again run into a definitions problem: Capitalism in the Randian (completely free) and in the ordoliberal (government regulations, progressive taxes), in a hundred other flavors and as the biggest common denominator of all these (which from now on I'll be calling base capitalism).

Whenever a certain capitalist system has failed, it was either because of political meddling (the Venetian example from above) or because of inherent instabilities in that particular flavor (i.e. Great Depression, Crash of '08 etc.). In all those cases, however, base capitalism lived on, merely changed innto another form. The only way it has ever been abolished to a significant degree was after a revolution that blew any previous political and economic structures to smithereens (October revolution, Mao's victory in China). And even in those cases, it has demonstrated a great skill to sneak back in.

This is a really poor argument against trying to help them in some way though.

It really is; but how would helping poor people/renting out homes that aren't gonna be sold soon for a few bucks/doing something else that Ayn Rand would not approve of be uncapitalist?

I'm using Capitalism as a purely abstract, purely economical system. So there are two axes: political system and economical system. Neither Capitalism nor Communism are inherently Statist nor Anti-Statist, so you can have four extremes with many different systems in between: Anarcho-Communism and the like, Soviet/Chinese-pre-Deng-style Totalitarian Communism, Statist Capitalism (think zaibatsus) and Anarcho-Capitalism and the like.

Note that there would be a couple of notable systems that fall closer to the centre but are just as, if not more, dystopian - Nazi Germany was very authoritorian and obviously Statist, but self-styledly equidistant from both Capitalism and Communism, Social Democracy as imagined in Silent Hill might be a good simile, with private, but cartellized, enterprises, massive social projects and the like.

Also, do not assume I am not aware, or angered, by the problems of artificial supply manipulation or other examples of dirty tricks, I simply think that such problems might be solved within the system.

EDIT: @ebbor's link - I am a bit conflicted about the speech, because for the most part, it sounds like what people who are actually mediocre and unwilling to do anything to improve say to themselves one someone bests them (personal experience - nigh verbatim), except it is delivered by someone who, despite apparently having enough clarity to say all that still tried to earn it.

[palsch]

Completely off topic and going back quite a ways, but an article that's worth sharing.

Ex-Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens reviewed a book on the history and background of the Voting Rights Act for the New York Review of Books.

He used it as an opportunity to utterly demolish the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder.

I particularly like the passage talking about how the "fundamental principle of equal sovereignty among the States" - relied upon by the majority for that decision - is completely compromised by the history of the south using it's non-voting black population (first through slavery then through Jim Crow and intimidation) to gain greater representation. He even closes by quoting Scalia from his DOMA dissent, released the day after Shelby County, utterly gutting the reasoning used to pass the judgement.

[SalmonGod]

- Then I need your definition of laziness.

Being unwilling to spend personal energy where it is needed.

- People who got foreclosed didn't get kicked out of their homes FOR TEH EVULZ. They were kicked out of their homes so that the bank could sell the house and get their money back. Since, due to the state of the economy, many people got foreclosed, the houses became worthless, but that's a whole different issue. I'd say that mindless foreclosures like that are extremely irrational on the bank's side, though.

Never said it was done for teh evulz.  And I understand why it happened.  My point is that it was a completely inefficient and illogical misuse of resources that only took place because of capitalist imperatives.

- Nor did I accuse you of being one. What I did was pointing out that it's not exclusively an issue with Capitalism.

You're right, it's not.  That's just where the current focus of discussion is.  I think it's an issue with any system of property, which is why the core of my political ideology is the abolition of property.  I don't think a person should be able to claim ownership of anything that they don't maintain a personal relationship with (ex. you can own the house you live in, but not one that you don't).

- I don't see how any other system could solve that in any way. Sure, communism may make the transition a bit more smooth by supporting the workers during the transition, but in that case any major advance would be a massive resource sink and it might as well result in social pressure to not innovate to avoid having to fund a whole lotta people who end up out of work, even if it's only temporary.

So long as resources are scarce, sure, it will be a problem to support people who aren't working.  But the whole point of technological progress in most cases is to make resources less scarce.  So any system which supports people when their work is made obsolete is going to transition away from scarcity faster than a system which doesn't.  And essential resources are currently not scarce, yet we see huge resistance to progress for economic reasons.  Just because it's a problem that isn't going to be resolved until society reaches a thoroughly post-scarcity stage doesn't mean it couldn't be dealt with a hell of a lot better.

- I know what you were trying to say. That's exactly what I meant in my post. The people want their sensationalized news. First, they play to the confirmation bias and ingroup/outgroup conflicts, second, both sides believe their propaganda to be unbiased. Even if you aren't for-profit, you have material costs, maintenance, et cetera, and you need to get those somehow. If nobody watches the media, how would you convince anyone to provide those to you?

I'll give it to you halfway in the case of people wanting political bias in their news.  Only halfway because while people may appreciate not having to face challenges to their beliefs, that doesn't necessarily mean they want the framing of every possible new event constantly twisted into a political context when it really doesn't deserve to be.  And that's only one form of sensationalism, anyway.  Just because people pay for something doesn't mean they want it, any more than someone may have wanted to be addicted to Coca-Cola in 1887.

- Wealth can be converted to political power (and vice versa), via bribes and what have you. But political power is more complex than wealth alone - connections, friendships (the rare actual, non-faked ones), family ties... You can have wealth but lack political pull, and if all you have is wealth, you won't go very far when people who are not only relatively wealthy but also well-connected conspire to deprive you of it - see the Venice example, the noveau riche were deprived of power by more connected old money families.

I think this is splitting hairs.  Power is power and power is political.  Just because there are other kinds of power that can be used to trump wealth in the right circumstances doesn't mean that wealth isn't power and that power isn't political.  Someone with wealth has political influence even absent any corruption, because politics deals with resources, so it's impossible for someone who is wealthy not to be politically relevant.