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[McTraveller]

Labor is more important that capital, and the people who provide the labor should thus have the primary voice for determining who makes high-level decisions and who owns the company. The average person certainly wouldn't put their own workplace through that song and dance, they have no reason to.

I'm basically with you except for the statement "labor is more important than capital".  Not because I think that capital is more important than labor, but because I think that it's a statement based on sentiment rather than any kind of rigor.  I think the interaction between labor and capital is the most important*.  Also, at the very least you have to define important for what.

I mean all this talk of economic and other policy related to politics is interesting, but even after pontificating and rambling on about it, I feel like, what's the thing for which we're really hunting here?  Talk about "humanity will get past this if only..." - get past it to what? Reduced crime rate? Some kind of health outcome metric? An assessment of contentment?  Some kind of measure of the impact of a choice is on life expectancy? Survey results that say 100% of the population thinks things are OK?

*Spoiler for what I mean by this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Labor creates capital, capital enhances labor to create more capital, and eventually (soon!) capital can even create more capital without the intervention of human labor.  So how can one be more important than the other? Without any capital at all, labor has nothing on which to work.  Without labor, capital is a waste of material goods.

As an aside: the Trump tweet is great and terrible, because it's basically how most of the world views the threats from NK, but only Trump has the gall and lack of diplomacy to actually say it.  I can't tell if it's good or bad that we have a President that doesn't play the diplomacy game but instead is like "This game is dumb. Yes, we both can blow up lots of stuff and it won't really be good for anyone.  Let's just cut the BS."

At least I hope it's that - if the Trump administration and/or NK and/or any other nuclear power leadership is really just the madmen like in the Dark Knight, who just want to see the world burn and don't even (gasp!) care about money, that's the unnerving option.

[Frumple]

Uh. Things being hunted for: Food (preferably that won't effectively or explicitly kill you), clean water, housing, decent life (e.g. not being worked to death or misery, having at least some luxuries, highly unlikely for there to be knife or gun fights nearby with any regularity, etc.), little to no chance of it all going straight to fucking hell over the course of a few days (and guarantee of support if it does), some degree of share of the ~effing miracles~ science is producing, probably a few things I'm forgetting. Pretty sure this shit ain't really that complicated or vague, at least so far as baselines go. I think I'm warming up to the rough summation of "please fucking stop trying to fucking kill us", personally. Catches the ethos pretty succinctly.

Pfft, that's a completely BS reason to fire someone. Might as well fire someone for having a cold, it's that BS of a reason.

For what it's worth, I'm fairly sure that's somewhat illegal in some places in the states... conceptually. Most HR schlubs aren't actually stupid enough to outright say they're firing you for being pregnant... though that assumes you're somewhere that can't just fire you because it's a day of the week ending in y.

Though, that said? From an employer's stupid/short term/greedy perspective, it's a hella' good reason to fire someone. You can work through a cold, but you probably ain't going to be working through your water breaking (and if you do, jesus toad licking christ OSHA or something is probably not going to be happy with the biohazard issues resulting). Not only are they going to be variably invalid for weeks or months in the short term, they're afterwards going to be working less capably for years, possibly decades.

If you're really hardcore cost optimizing your workers you want sod all to do with parents or prospective parents, because they're pretty literally incapable of matching the performance of someone otherwise equally capable but without kids. Children are a bloody incredible drain on a person, especially early on but regularly effectively for the rest of the worker's life, and even if the worker effectively ditches the sprog it's pretty damn likely that, too, will screw with them. Not that you probably don't have greater concerns if it doesn't, because that'd be a reeeeeaaaallll good sign whoever it is is pretty heavily bugnuts. _{though you probably don't want to put the screws to a worker too hard on the subject, as hardcore cost optimizing acknowledges this thing called morale and whatnot and are aware other workers have eyes and mouths do note this statement applies far less if your prospective employee market is sufficiently saturated, poor, and desperate :V}

---

... any case, too lazy to get link, but us down here in florida are apparently >85% of the way (with a month to go) to getting a bill on the 2018 ballot to fix florida's bugfuck stupid bullshit that disenfranchises felons entirely, even after serving time. Actually gave my signature to it a bit ago, so it was good news to hear it's fairly close to getting a chance to get voted on. Shit's been on the books way too long (i.e. at all, for any length of time).

[nenjin]

"This game is dumb. Yes, we both can blow up lots of stuff and it won't really be good for anyone.  Let's just cut the BS."

I think you're generously ascribing sentiment to what he said that he didn't intend. What I read his tweet as saying was "My dick is bigger than your's. Fuck you." And that's basically the essence of diplomacy.

[SalmonGod]

Then the Karl Marxes, Voltaires, etc of our era better start philosophisizing because there isn't really a good alternative to capitalism*. Full force socialism of the likes of communism doesn't work for various reasons and capitalism is capitalism. Sure, some hybrid of socialism and capitalism seems the best option, but the flaws of capitalism are still there.

*At least while we're still an almost completely planet-bound species.

I have my own ideas.  I've written a wall of text about it on this forum before, I believe, but it would be some work to dig that up or reproduce it.  The best hope I see is to facilitate the informal economy that has been naturally springing up through the internet, and grow it to be something more.  Allow it to develop as a separate economy and naturally supplant the existing one over time.

The reason for this is I don't think ideology can accomplish shit.  I've settled on the idea that real change comes from people naturally adapting to changing circumstances.  Not from a large or powerful enough group of people deciding they want to change things to work a certain way.  People aren't going to walk in a straight line through the forest, because you tell them there's a clear path in spite of what their eyes see.  Try to lead people that way and you just have a mess.  Create the path, and people will lead themselves down it.

I like to use the example of file sharing.  I don't think it's appreciated enough for how profound it is.  It is an existing model for a large chunk of economic activity springing up out of nowhere according to a mutualist paradigm, in a direct antagonistic relationship with pre-existing capitalist establishment, with the vast majority of people participating not doing so for any ideological reason.  Just because it's too goddamn natural.  It's a path of least resistance right there in front of everyone.  There's a small core of hardcore ideologues in the file sharing world,  but the people who refuse to participate in file sharing are much more likely to be ideological about it than the people who do participate.  They're the ones choosing to walk through the bushes right next to the paved sidewalk.  And that's exactly why file sharing has thrived in spite of a great deal of capitalist power being thrown at shutting it down.

Whatever paradigm we move on to will happen the same way, I think.  The best way to be involved in creating that change is to create the infrastructure that will facilitate it.  I'd like to see more informal/sharing economy stuff spring up that has people working together in more powerful ways.  Because for most economic activity, money is right now the path of least resistance.  It's what everyone understands and agrees to.  But as that system abandons everyone, we have the opportunity to present a different path of least resistance.  If convincing someone to give you money in whatever fashion so you can turn around and give it to someone else for something you want becomes too difficult, then maybe we can design ways for it to be even easier to connect with someone who has the resources or skills you're looking for, and is willing barter or pitch in to a mutualistic/social capital based system.

One of the problems is the myopic view of what capitalism is. Right now its mostly neoliberal capitalism is the only capitalism and pretend nothing else exists.

For my part, I think that's because neoliberal capitalism is what all forms of capitalism will eventually cycle back towards.  There is no form of capitalism I'm aware of that isn't based on accumulation of wealth through competition.  As soon as someone does better than someone else, they have a disproportionate ability to leverage resources over others.  Society will bend over time towards those who use that leverage to accelerate towards further accumulation and further leverage.  You can set up rules to limit accumulation or passing on wealth between generations or whatever, but as long as those with the inclination to accumulate and leverage their wealth gain disproportionate influence in society, those rules will never be able to last.  This is why I'm not a reformist.  May feel great in the short term, but it will always be a cycle.

I'm basically with you except for the statement "labor is more important than capital".  Not because I think that capital is more important than labor, but because I think that it's a statement based on sentiment rather than any kind of rigor.  I think the interaction between labor and capital is the most important*.  Also, at the very least you have to define important for what.

I'm going to venture that his meaning was labor is more important, because labor is people.  And if we're not doing whatever we're doing to improve quality of life for people, then why are we doing it.  Sentiment has to play a part somewhere.  There's no specific "for what" that everyone will ever agree on.  But if we can't agree that whatever socioeconomic thing we do should be for the sake of enabling the people to live the lives they want to live without oppressing one another, because it's a sentiment not based on rigor or whatever... then I'm not sure what we could ever possibly agree on.

[redwallzyl]

-

Of course if everyone thinks like a greedy boss society will collapse.

[Frumple]

If... that was talking about the hardcore optimization? I mean, yeah, particularly if they're not going hardcore enough and including "this will lead to the collapse of society" in their number crunching. Don't think I'd call it good for society, just pointing out a few of the ways firing (or not hiring) someone that's pregnant (or has kids) is way less of a bullshit reason than your average cold.

Employer's perspective, a worker (and particularly a pregnant one) with kids as a concern is probably going to be a lot more trouble (and for questionably acceptable returns) than one without. Plenty have enough worry for the law or just aren't a raging jackass and can let some margin slip to keep a parent hired, but it (pregnancy/kids) has pretty good odds of being a net negative, particularly in a way a cold isn't

... now, that said, colds are in fact one of the larger human resource costs companies face (particularly folks trying to work with one, cheerfully getting other workers sick). You even occasionally have a company not sufficiently blinded by profit motive's schlong jammed in their eyes that recognizes that and has decent SOP for making sure their workers can get and stay healthy.

[wierd]

One of the biggest contributors to having that "member" in their face all the time demanding fellatio, is the impetus to sell public stock.  Shareholders dont really care about the actual running of a company, because they want to buy a share low, and sell it high, and pocket the difference. (then rinse and repeat).

Stringent reform of the investment systems of the world would fix a great deal of this short-sighted asshatness;  For instance, set a minimum term for length of holding on a certificate of stock at say-- one year, with better options for stocks issued for 5, 10, or 20 year terms. (EG, better dividend returns, to promote long-term investments over the short term ones.)  Give penalties for early sale. That sort of thing.

This would destroy day trading (but not necessarily high speed trading, since the technology exists to have actual stock anniversaries instead of fixed dates for trading), and would change the way shareholders approach corporations as a means of personally enriching themselves, and forcing said corporations to see further into the future than "Next quarter".

But money talks and all that shit, and giving workers the shaft with absurdly impossible deadlines, hours, laughable pay, and treating them like disposable office stationary is so much more lucrative in the short term. Short of a massive systemic collapse FORCING systemic changes in the system (Like the 1929 crash), I very much doubt that it would get any traction whatsoever.

Even then, much like the rhetoric we had in the 90s, where Clinton eagerly signed onto the bill killing Glass-Stegal, there will be ever-present rhetoric about "How much better it could be if ONLY those old, draconian restrictions were removed!!" or how "Those protections are obsolete, the factors they aimed to inhibit are not a thing anymore! (Honest!)" and people will have been born into times of plenty, will have never known the harsh gnawing of the grindstone on their flesh as the market presses them for every last drop of vitality before disposing of them-- and so, will foolishly agree with those voices. That was the swan-song of the past 60 years in the US, as protections and safety nets were systematically removed for being too restrictive, costly, or outdated-- and nothing new was implemented to replace them or keep the abuses from happening. 

Really, if there is going to be a collapse and reset, we need to be DAMNED FUCKING VOCAL that policies that will be mad-scramble implemented to stop the destruction of human civilization in the aftermath NEED TO NOT BE FUCKING TOUCHED, (Or, if they are, NEED IMMEDIATE REPLACEMENTS, Not empty promises) or the cycle will repeat *AGAIN*.

This is again, because avarice is totally a human failing, every generation suffers from it, and every generation thinks they are the smart, savvy ones and the older ones were just incomprehensibly dumb--- THIS time the schemes will be PERFECT with NO DOWNSIDES! (Honest!)

The truly strange thing would be for this generation to assert and demand the changes BEFORE the ensuing collapse. But I dont have high hopes for that.

[JoshuaFH]

I read a book just a few months ago, "The End of Economic Man" by Peter Drucker, written in 1939, at the height of Nazism, about how Nazi Fascism managed to succeed despite being a totally negative ideology, and also about how it was destined to fail despite any perceived successes, but most importantly, the book then goes to explore the idea of "How can any system of government or economic system work? What allows them to exist at all?" and while I simply thought it was an interesting read, reading this thread really brings up a lot of what I read there.

To capture the gist of it, it doesn't what kind of system you have, fascism or democracy, myopic assholes are going to fuck it up. Fascism and Communism fail because they rail against human nature, and democracy and capitalism because they enable it too strongly, which then leads to inevitable class stratification and inequality. Trying to engineer the 'perfect' form of government or financial system is therefore a pointless exercise in futility. What was going on in the late 1930's when the book was written was that the philosophical underpinnings that defined society were coming undone due to damage from the first world war and from the Great Depression. Basically, that the spirit and identity of the people at large were threatened because it was now clear that a person's status and self-worth as an 'economic man', or their success in business and as a breadwinner, was no longer true, and that in order to 'cure' the issue of fascism and the issue of the increasing cynicism towards capitalism was a new social creed, a different perspective that will enable people to have the self-worth, purpose, and hope for the future that society and government actually need to have long term sustainability. In Peter Drucker's next book, "The Future of Industrial Man", he speculates that the only functioning and valid form of democracy is a kind of "Responsible Democracy" that tries to not rely on elected officials, or if we do, then not nearly as much, and instead ordinary citizens are encouraged to have responsible voluntary involvement in their government, so that the emergent qualities of society and policies have the maximum consent of the people that they apply to.

I'm definitely misremembering it a bit, so I'm definitely not doing Mr. Drucker the justice he deserves. 

[McTraveller]

I'm going to venture that his meaning was labor is more important, because labor is people.  And if we're not doing whatever we're doing to improve quality of life for people, then why are we doing it.  Sentiment has to play a part somewhere.  There's no specific "for what" that everyone will ever agree on.  But if we can't agree that whatever socioeconomic thing we do should be for the sake of enabling the people to live the lives they want to live without oppressing one another, because it's a sentiment not based on rigor or whatever... then I'm not sure what we could ever possibly agree on.

Well yeah that was kind of my point - and I even woke this morning thinking "it's people that are important, not labor..."

As for actual changes society might pursue to address some of the issues with unfettered capitalism, I had some thoughts last night that are a bit different than the collective ownership one - because I think that is too easily gamed.  The best I can come up with:

1. Wages are exempt from income tax (although we might want to keep FICA and medicare in there)
2. Eliminate sales tax.  But see below in #4 - most sales will still be taxed, but on the seller, not the buyer, because almost all sales are for more than the seller paid.
3. Corporate profits are taxed at some fixed rate regardless of who keeps them.  I would fix the 'double taxation' complaint by saying that money used to pay dividends is not counted as profit.  But I would tax dividends at the same rate as corporate income tax.
4. Tax rental income, interest income, licensing income, and gains from buying low and selling high at some fixed rate, higher than the general corporate tax rate.  This will help keep the accountants employed, because a company would have to separate out its "normal" earnings from this type of earning.  It would also mean tracking taxes on dividends separately from gains from selling shares.  No grace thresholds on appreciating assets either - this will help tame the ridiculous housing price increases.
5. No tax deduction for selling an asset at a price lower than that for which it was purchased.
6. Eliminate depreciation as a tax deduction (it can stay on a balance sheet, but depreciation should not be counted as a loss. After all, general consumables like food aren't counted as a "loss", and there is no difference between food being consumed and a machine being 'consumed' other than time period).
7. I would make the tax rates in 3 and 4 progressive, but based on the total wealth of the entity being taxed, not just the income amount.

The idea is that you don't tax production of goods and services at all, you tax indirect ownership moderately, and you tax "passive income" and "luck income" (where an asset you hold is magically worth more than you paid ) highly.  The progressive scheme imposes massive diminishing returns on additional wealth held - you can earn as much as you want, but as you gain more wealth you can keep less and less of any additional wealth you try to accrue.  A simple tax rate might be something like (1 - k/max(1,wealth)^a).  So you do indeed always keep some of your income.  If k is 0.95 and a is 0.1, for instance, your tax rate on new income would be 5% (1 - 0.95 / 1) if you had 0 net wealth.  But if you have $1M, your tax rate on any new income would be  about 76%.

[Frumple]

Hol' up. #6. Using food and general consumables are totally counted as a credit/expenditure, same as depreciation (i.e. loss). The bookkeeping is actually more or less identical, with some fairly mild differences in accounts referenced and some fiddly bits related to depreciation due to some of the junk regarding how it's calculated. But fundamentally they're both counted as losses (one versus the consumable supply or general fund if that's not explicitly involved, which is an asset, one versus the building/vehicle/machine/etc., which is also an asset), and more or less the same sort of losses to boot. Quite literally accounting 101, heh. Or 102. Somewhere in there.

Depreciation can have net loss involved much more easily due to shifting market prices and whatnot than general consumables, but that's largely just because the latter is fairly rarely kept around long enough to be particularly effected by the related concerns.

Could swear there are (or at least was) some tax deductions involved with a few sorts of general consumables, too, for that matter. Food generally isn't because it generally isn't taxed to begin with in the US, but most depreciable assets totally are.

[McTraveller]

Hol' up. #6. Using food and general consumables are totally counted as a credit/expenditure, same as depreciation (i.e. loss). The bookkeeping is actually more or less identical, with some fairly mild differences in accounts referenced and some fiddly bits related to depreciation due to some of the junk regarding how it's calculated. But fundamentally they're both counted as losses (one versus the consumable supply or general fund if that's not explicitly involved, which is an asset, one versus the building/vehicle/machine/etc., which is also an asset), and more or less the same sort of losses to boot. Quite literally accounting 101, heh. Or 102. Somewhere in there.

Depreciation can have net loss involved much more easily due to shifting market prices and whatnot than general consumables, but that's largely just because the latter is fairly rarely kept around long enough to be particularly effected by the related concerns.

Could swear there are (or at least was) some tax deductions involved with a few sorts of general consumables, too, for that matter. Food generally isn't because it generally isn't taxed to begin with in the US, but most depreciable assets totally are.

Wait what? Where in the US is food expense tax deductible?  Is it theoretically part of the personal exemptions or standard deduction or something?  Food is often exempt from sales tax, but you don't get any kind of deduction for it that I've ever heard.

I would also love to go on a discussion about depreciation, which I think is a very messed up mechanism - it conflates reasonable accounting like remaining useful life of a durable asset with profits and losses.  I need more time to collect my thoughts on that though, and I don't have that time at the moment...

[Frumple]

Can't recall food explicitly, but I'd swear other stuff (toilet paper?) has been. Hell, unless they changed it near the end, the tax scam pretty explicitly killed a deduction aimed at teachers that spent personal money on things for their students, things that were more often than not consumables of one sort or another.

Like said, food isn't usually involved due to not being taxed at all (the "deduction" is basically wrote in ahead of time by exempting the stuff from sales taxes), but other stuff definitely is.

[Puzzlemaker]

I read a book just a few months ago, "The End of Economic Man" by Peter Drucker, written in 1939, at the height of Nazism, about how Nazi Fascism managed to succeed despite being a totally negative ideology, and also about how it was destined to fail despite any perceived successes, but most importantly, the book then goes to explore the idea of "How can any system of government or economic system work? What allows them to exist at all?" and while I simply thought it was an interesting read, reading this thread really brings up a lot of what I read there.

To capture the gist of it, it doesn't what kind of system you have, fascism or democracy, myopic assholes are going to fuck it up. Fascism and Communism fail because they rail against human nature, and democracy and capitalism because they enable it too strongly, which then leads to inevitable class stratification and inequality. Trying to engineer the 'perfect' form of government or financial system is therefore a pointless exercise in futility. What was going on in the late 1930's when the book was written was that the philosophical underpinnings that defined society were coming undone due to damage from the first world war and from the Great Depression. Basically, that the spirit and identity of the people at large were threatened because it was now clear that a person's status and self-worth as an 'economic man', or their success in business and as a breadwinner, was no longer true, and that in order to 'cure' the issue of fascism and the issue of the increasing cynicism towards capitalism was a new social creed, a different perspective that will enable people to have the self-worth, purpose, and hope for the future that society and government actually need to have long term sustainability. In Peter Drucker's next book, "The Future of Industrial Man", he speculates that the only functioning and valid form of democracy is a kind of "Responsible Democracy" that tries to not rely on elected officials, or if we do, then not nearly as much, and instead ordinary citizens are encouraged to have responsible voluntary involvement in their government, so that the emergent qualities of society and policies have the maximum consent of the people that they apply to.

I'm definitely misremembering it a bit, so I'm definitely not doing Mr. Drucker the justice he deserves.

That's actually a cool philosophy.  I'll have to check that book out, if I can remember.

[McTraveller]

This seems extraordinarily relevant and is really really good, but I've not seen it posted here yet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtxuy-GJwCo

It's entitled "5 Inequality Myths" by a group calling themselves Learn Liberty.

Some of the data does seem cherry picked, but it's an interesting aggregate view, and it is also has an interesting take on how media filters tend to show us the most rare events, not the most common.

EDIT: Another one by the same group - check out the sequence starting at 7'30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPjrFjAxwlw

[wierd]

Definite on the cherry picking.

Re: malthus
Malthus' prediction was based on production and distribution systems of his period. A thing called "the green revolution" happened afterward, and with the help of mechanized farming and nitrogen fertilizers, our ability to grow crops efficiently greatly increased, and our ability to rapidly distribute produce also increased, but we traded one problem for several others. Specifically, heavy dependence on fossil fuel, degrading cropland, and climate change, any one of which means the end is still coming, and malthus was not exactly wrong, just did not have enough data for an accurate top value. Now, because we dodged the bullet once through technical innovation, many believe (wrongly) that we can always do so.  That complacency leads to people foofooing the very real dangers we currently face as a species, while continuing to act irresponsibly.

Re growing wealthy classes:
He bases this in households, per capita, but does not define how they determine 'household'. Does this include renters, people sharing living accommodation (housemates), or even the homeless? If not, how has the percentage of total population shifted compared to household status? What is the average aggregated debt compared to historic levels? Oh, he did not say? Fancy that...

Profit/plunder:
The example of jobs, a CEO who pioneered the "double Irish" tax avoidance scheme and who shamelessly abused government protections (including seeking the barring of competing products in the market (cough, Samsung) via the ftc, is a very poor choice as much of that profit very much is plunder by the presenters own definition. Also, jobs did not invent the Macintosh, nor the iPhone. His role was entirely managerial. Remember that.