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[breadbocks]

Right. It takes one word to utterly tear down capitalism. Monopolies.

Step one: Acquire capital.
Step two: Use capital to acquire other's capital.
Step three: IF Not ruling entire sector
 GOTO 1
ELSE
 Subjugate entire sector for minimum wage in order to lower prices in order to raise profit in order to acquire capital.
Step four: You already profited.

STOP SAYING THAT! There is no such thing as a "Communist government". There are and were such things as "Leninist Governments", but a Commune is innately anarchic.

They are governments guided by communist ideology. Marxist or Leninist government isn't an accurate catch-all, because there are all sorts of branches of ideological thought and neither is Socialist or any other nomenclature. The one thing they all had in common was their vision of a utopian communist society. Hence, communists. Since thats what they wanted, right? The people running these governments didn't want a proletarian dictatorship forever, they were communists.

That's not anything remotely approaching logic.

Let me say this again. Communism has no government. That's as clear as it gets. Communism is not a governmental ideology, it's an economic ideology.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Communist doctrines are too ideological too function in the real world. I'd almost look at it like I look at religions for the level of ideological purity they have going on. Furthermore, communism extends beyond simple economics, which is where capitalism ends. Communism concerns everything about a government, and we've seen from history that it doesn't turn out well.

There are only five Communist countries even left in the world, and even some of them are slipping.

There's Laos and Vietnam, which to the best of my knowledge are the two who have the best chance of not losing their status.

Then there's Cuba, which is still going strong for the moment, but I think there's a potential for change there when Castro finally dies of old age/is killed. I know he withdrew himself from the government of Cuba, but the guy is still a big figure in Cuba being a communist state. I certainly wouldn't be complaining if a revolution happened there.

North Korea is still listed as a communist state, but they're really more of a fascist millitary state than a communist one, the way I see it.

And finally, there's the last large communist state on the planet, the People's Republic of China. I'm all but certain things are going to boil over there soon. The PRC is good at what they do, but I don't think that it's possible for a single authoritarian regime to live much longer than they have. They're almost as old as the USSR now, actually, and I think it's possible they might go out the same way. Eventually, the PRC is going to have to make the one concession they can't afford to make: letting the Communist Party slip from it's dominance of the government. When that happens, if that happens, history will probably repeat and several nations will split off of China. That's the better solution. The second worst case scenario is that a full scale violent civil war tears China apart and leaves the region more of an authoritarian mess than it already is. All of the worst case scenarios that I can think of involve nuclear weapons, so lets not go there.


But back on topic: My position on all of this is that a government that practices well-regulated capitalism, is truly concerned with the well-being of its citizens, has a highly educated populace, and is a low-corruption multi-party democracy is the best kind of government we can hope to get before reaching a post-scarcity civilization.

[Montague]

Right. It takes one word to utterly tear down capitalism. Monopolies.

Step one: Acquire capital.
Step two: Use capital to acquire other's capital.
Step three: IF Not ruling entire sector
 GOTO 1
ELSE
 Subjugate entire sector for minimum wage in order to lower prices in order to raise profit in order to acquire capital.
Step four: You already profited.

Monopolies? They are always created by government interference, one way or another. Either because they directly supported or subsidized the monopoly or their legal framework was set up to prevent competitors from entering the market. Artificially creating barriers to entry with regulation.

The problem with your formula there is that in a free market anybody can enter that market and underbid or outperform the monopoly anytime they want. If the company cornering the market charges too much and pays crappy wages, a competitor can take their business and skilled labor from them by charging less and paying more. If you somehow had a monopoly that no other firm could possibly compete with, because their product was of such high quality, of such low price and run with perfect efficiency, then what the hell is it really hurting?

In a free market economy you should have vicious competition between firms so that every company is making razor-thin profit margins and high wages to attract the best from a limited labor market.

Name one historical example of a monopoly that was not directly or indirectly caused by government interference with the economy.

[breadbocks]

Umm... No. They're created by the gov not interfering. You also act as if competing with billion dollar companies is viable for a mom n pop shop. It isn't. You can't out produce them, and thus get driven out of the market.

And it hurts because that company has complete control over the market. Want your donk pockets? Well, you'll have to work for them at below minimum wage.

DYK: The only thing stopping monopolies is government interference; Something not allowed in pure capitalism.

The only thing stopping them in today's world are A, Governments shattering them, like what happened to AT&T a while back, and B, labor unions, both of which are Socialistic, and not capitalistic.

[scriver]

They are governments guided by communist ideology. Marxist or Leninist government isn't an accurate catch-all, because there are all sorts of branches of ideological thought and neither is Socialist or any other nomenclature. The one thing they all had in common was their vision of a utopian communist society. Hence, communists. Since thats what they wanted, right? The people running these governments didn't want a proletarian dictatorship forever, they were communists.

Noy really, no. There was nothing especially communistic about the leninist/stalinist government to begin with, what with the privileges and severe unequality it was built on. The Revolution failed, the transition to communism was stopped before it ever really began, and the "communist" regime was just like any other authorative dictatorship, hiding behind a smokescreen of ideology. It just happened to be communism this time.

Then there's Cuba, which is still going strong for the moment, but I think there's a potential for change there when Castro finally dies of old age/is killed. I know he withdrew himself from the government of Cuba, but the guy is still a big figure in Cuba being a communist state. I certainly wouldn't be complaining if a revolution happened there.

They're already changing, and has been since their economy crashed together with the rest of the world a few years ago. I can't remember many examples at the moment, but one example is that small private businesses has been allowed.

[Montague]

Umm... No. They're created by the gov not interfering. You also act as if competing with billion dollar companies is viable for a mom n pop shop. It isn't. You can't out produce them, and thus get driven out of the market.

And it hurts because that company has complete control over the market. Want your donk pockets? Well, you'll have to work for them at below minimum wage.

DYK: The only thing stopping monopolies is government interference; Something not allowed in pure capitalism.

The only thing stopping them in today's world are A, Governments shattering them, like what happened to AT&T a while back, and B, labor unions, both of which are Socialistic, and not capitalistic.

Governments cause them to form in the first place with their legal framework and regulations that stifle entry into the market by competitors, then they need to go around breaking them up with other laws and regulations, in today's world.

I don't know if I feel like teaching economics, but a huge firm isn't necessarily competitive against a smaller one, especially if they charge too much for their product or pay crappy wages like you say or any other reason to give a competitor reason to think they can make money if they take their customers by offering a better product for a better price. Any firm with enough capital to enter the market will eventually cause the larger firm to be less evil to compete or the competitor will take over their market and run them out of business. Like how the German grocery stores forced Wal-mart out of the country entirely. Wal-Mart came into a very competitive market with the local companies engaged in all sorts of price wars that Wal-mart could simply not turn a profit in. They were a large firm with lots of capital and they failed utterly.

Competition is why capitalism works.

Globalism takes away much of the arguments about monopolies as well. If domestic firms face international competition, there really is no way for even domestic monopoly in one country to form unless the government imposes trade barriers to stop it.

[breadbocks]

Will you shut up already? Capitalism doesn't work! Capitalism micksed with socialism works.

OK. I'll walk you through this reeeeal slow, so you can follow.

The first, say, frozen food company starts up, in a perfect capitalism, and is wonderfully successful. They eckspand, and grow massive production abilities, lowering the cost eckstremely. A new frozen food company is founded. However, since the first company can make everything so much cheaper, they can make better profit margins, but at a lower price than the second company. The second company can't afford to take such large losses with no hope of profit, and goes out of business. The first company snatches up the second company's capital, growing more powerful. At this stage, you've reached a monopoly. There can be no government involvement, since this is a pure Capitalism. There aren't unions either. Anyways, the monopoly can afford to lower its wages, and increase the pocket lining, since it has no competitors for the workers to go to for better pay, and this will be happening in every single market sector, possibly even by the same company. This means there is nowhere where better wages can be gotten. So, the company can lower the wages further and further.

Thus, Capitalism crumbles under it's own faults. Communism is steadfast on paper, but is shoved south when people are actually added to the micks.

[Montague]

Will you shut up already? Capitalism doesn't work! Capitalism micksed with socialism works.

OK. I'll walk you through this reeeeal slow, so you can follow.

The first, say, frozen food company starts up, in a perfect capitalism, and is wonderfully successful. They eckspand, and grow massive production abilities, lowering the cost eckstremely. A new frozen food company is founded. However, since the first company can make everything so much cheaper, they can make better profit margins, but at a lower price than the second company. The second company can't afford to take such large losses with no hope of profit, and goes out of business. The first company snatches up the second company's capital, growing more powerful. At this stage, you've reached a monopoly. There can be no government involvement, since this is a pure Capitalism. There aren't unions either. Anyways, the monopoly can afford to lower its wages, and increase the pocket lining, since it has no competitors for the workers to go to for better pay, and this will be happening in every single market sector, possibly even by the same company. This means there is nowhere where better wages can be gotten. So, the company can lower the wages further and further.

Thus, Capitalism crumbles under it's own faults. Communism is steadfast on paper, but is shoved south when people are actually added to the micks.

Why would there be no unions in pure capitalism? Only governments would have the power to limit them and there would be no government interference in such matters? Pure capitalism relies on unions to determine the price and value of labor. Like any other commodity, labor is subject to supply and demand and unions would be around to screw with the supply of labor like evil corporate oil suppliers screw with the supply of oil. Unions fit perfectly in pure capitalism.

Also, you are assuming a monopoly would always have huge scales of economy that would make their costs lower and their profits higher, but not every industry's product can be made into a commodity.

Like I mentioned earlier, if you have a natural monopoly like your frozen food company and it maintains its monopoly because it produces a quality product at a lower price then any competitor can reasonably hope to match and people are reasonably satisfied with it, then its not a malignant monopoly and its really not a problem. If people absolutely loathed the monopoly for whatever reason, they'd pay extra for the competitor's goods just because.

[RedKing]

China is a very complicated example. Up until 1980, it was a classic planned economy that had all the inefficiency problems of a planned economy, compounded by the failure of Maoism as an industrial policy. For instance, instead of building several large steel mills, Mao thought it would be better to issue tiny little blacksmith forges to all the peasants, which they could use to forge small quantities of steel when not working the fields. Kudos for trying to leverage China's biggest asset (its insanely large population) but making steel isn't like planting rice. It takes a certain amount of skill and quality of materials and the resulting output had massive quality control issues.

After Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping immediately took steps to move the country towards a more moderate economic system. The Shenzhen special economic zone was created as a laboratory of sorts to see how capitalism works. They took a tiny little fishing village just across the water from Hong Kong and said "Ok, in this zone we'll allow private investment and private ownership (but with the caveat that the government gets a partial stake in all companies)." It went gangbusters. Today, Shenzhen alone has a GDP of around $145 billion. They expanded the program to other cities (Guangzhou, Tianjin and Shanghai being the biggest ones) and in 1990 they opened the Pudong zone in Shanghai to foreign investment.

The areas of China outside the SEZ's is still more or less a command economy, and it's still majorly underdeveloped. The answer seems to be "add more SEZ's", but the rich/poor divide between the coastal cities where the bulk of the zones are located and the interior cities which are mostly lagging behind is a MAJOR (probably the major) issue in China today. It's created a huge internal migration problem, it's breeding social tension, and it's still a barrier to further growth. Eventually, I think most of the country will be in an SEZ of some form or another, and the country will essentially be state capitalist.

But here's the other thing going on. While the major industries are all state capitalist, where there's private investment but the government maintains a sizable interest stake in the company, there are an insane number of smaller businesses that the government doesn't have a stake in and which are difficult to regulate. In some ways, it's like the peasant-forged steel problem all over again. Lead-based paint on toys? Melamine in the milk? Poisoned cough syrup? Those problems aren't because the government of the PRC is corrupt, it's because it's damn near impossible for them to regulate when there might be 6,000 different toy making companies in Guangzhou alone. The free market competition between them is intense, which encourages cutting corners to lower costs and outdo the competition. Workers' rights in many of the SEZ's are almost nonexistent (a very bitter irony), and in a place like Guangzhou or Shanghai, you regularly see people who were horribly maimed in industrial accidents (in part because employers aren't providing safety gear or training, and there's no vigorous government regulation akin to OSHA) and employers regard laborers as expendable because there are a constant flow of impoverished liudong ren ("floating people", the illegal internal migrants from the non-capitalist interior) lined up to fill those jobs. So these crippled wrecks of people are left to beg in the gleaming streets and subways, while fellow Chinese in Gucci suits and driving Escalades step over them or maybe toss them a yuan or two. It's not dissimilar to say, New York at the turn of the 20th century when you had ridiculously wealthy guys like Vanderbilt and Carnegie whose wealth was built on the backs of immigrant laborers who lived in squalor and couldn't afford to even set foot in the gleaming towers that they built. Bottom line, capitalism is destroying just as many lives in modern China as Mao's poorly planned economy did in the 1960's.

As far as the government, it's Communist, but it's not (and never has been) like Russian Communism. Chinese Communism has always been distinctly Chinese. Which is to say that it's really not that different in many ways from the various Imperial bureaucracies that preceded it for the last 2000+ years. Authority is concentrated in a few individuals with a single prominent leader, but actual power is decentralized because it's damn near impossible to run a country that big from Beijing. Much of the actual power in China is at the local and provincial levels. Beijing doesn't get involved in provincial affairs unless there's a problem. There are LOTS of problems, but the local and provincial governnments do their best to hide this, because they essentially have their own pocket kingdoms and like it that way, and don't want the higher authorities to come in and investigate and possibly take their kingdom away from them. Again, this isn't a problem with Communism, it's a problem with being China. The corruption of local officials (especially the "hiding it from the Emperor/King/Prime Minister/Premier/etc" part) has been a trope in Chinese literature, art and film since before the First Emperor. It's also one of the biggest obstacles to effective regulation and reform. IMHO, Beijing is honestly trying to clean up corruption and to implement as many 'green' technologies and policies as they can. They don't need to worry about slowing down economic growth, because they WANT to slow down economic growth. The central Party economists have realized that double-digit growth rates in GDP every year is simply not sustainable, especially when it's still so geographically unbalanced. But local officials often look for every excuse to ignore orders because it would negatively impact the bribes and kickbacks they've become accustomed to.

I guess what I'm saying is that China is not a good example to judge either communism or capitalism by, because China is simultaneously both and neither.

[breadbocks]

Montague, you just aren't getting it. Stop being rabidly anti-government and think and try and close the stream of shit coming from your keyboard.

As a fact, labor unions are socialistic, not capitalistic. I'm not about to explain why, both cause I'm only fuzzy on why, and you need to understand the basic principles of what goes where on an economic spectrum.

Fact: Capitalism is, when boiled down, All for One. (And communism the reverse) If you can't get it done yourself, you're fired.

And see, for the last example, you are just as stupid as one of the legions of stupid kids who got mad when Bungie banned them all for a week on Halo Reach. "OMG I Won't buy anything else111!1!!!! " means nothing. The retailer has already paid for the product the food company is mass producing. People spiting them and buying a alternate product really has no effect. The mass producing one will always will in a fight of quantity vs. quality.

[RedKing]

In the words of Our Glorious Toad, please amplify your relaxed states. Starting to get a little out of hand in here.

[Montague]

Montague, you just aren't getting it. Stop being rabidly anti-government and think and try and close the stream of shit coming from your keyboard.

As a fact, labor unions are socialistic, not capitalistic. I'm not about to explain why, both cause I'm only fuzzy on why, and you need to understand the basic principles of what goes where on an economic spectrum.

Fact: Capitalism is, when boiled down, All for One. (And communism the reverse) If you can't get it done yourself, you're fired.

And see, for the last example, you are just as stupid as one of the legions of stupid kids who got mad when Bungie banned them all for a week on Halo Reach. "OMG I Won't buy anything else111!1!!!! " means nothing. The retailer has already paid for the product the food company is mass producing. People spiting them and buying a alternate product really has no effect. The mass producing one will always will in a fight of quantity vs. quality.

Unions don't need to be socialist or anything else, in pure capitalism there would be no restrictions against organized labor and so obviously unions would form, especially for skilled labor. The government would have no say in economic matters, to include the labor market. If socialists have trademarked the term "labor union" how about they just call them guilds or something backwards-yet-corporate instead?

Boycotts work just fine. If a retailer can't sell enough of some hated company's product they won't buy as much to keep in stock next time. They are not going to keep buying poison overpriced dog food in stock if their customers never buy the stuff.

Also, mass production doesn't equal a monopoly. Toyota makes a lot more cars then BMW or Porsche and yet Toyota still must compete with them.

[RedKing]

Montague, you just aren't getting it. Stop being rabidly anti-government and think and try and close the stream of shit coming from your keyboard.

As a fact, labor unions are socialistic, not capitalistic. I'm not about to explain why, both cause I'm only fuzzy on why, and you need to understand the basic principles of what goes where on an economic spectrum.

Fact: Capitalism is, when boiled down, All for One. (And communism the reverse) If you can't get it done yourself, you're fired.

And see, for the last example, you are just as stupid as one of the legions of stupid kids who got mad when Bungie banned them all for a week on Halo Reach. "OMG I Won't buy anything else111!1!!!! " means nothing. The retailer has already paid for the product the food company is mass producing. People spiting them and buying a alternate product really has no effect. The mass producing one will always will in a fight of quantity vs. quality.

Unions don't need to be socialist or anything else, in pure capitalism there would be no restrictions against organized labor and so obviously unions would form, especially for skilled labor. The government would have no say in economic matters, to include the labor market. If socialists have trademarked the term "labor union" how about they just call them guilds or something backwards-yet-corporate instead?

Boycotts work just fine. If a retailer can't sell enough of some hated company's product they won't buy as much to keep in stock next time. They are not going to keep buying poison overpriced dog food in stock if their customers never buy the stuff.

Also, mass production doesn't equal a monopoly. Toyota makes a lot more cars then BMW or Porsche and yet Toyota still must compete with them.

In pure laissez-faire capitalism, unions would have a right to exist, and companies would have a right (and an incentive) to do everything in their power to discourage them. We've been down that road, and it lead to companies using "private security firms" like the Pinkertons to harrass and murder labor organizers. Again, I point to China. It's truly bitter irony that in the largest remaining "Communist" country, labor organizers have been jailed, harrassed and murdered -- not by the central government, but by local officials and industry owners.

[Montague]

In pure laissez-faire capitalism, unions would have a right to exist, and companies would have a right (and an incentive) to do everything in their power to discourage them. We've been down that road, and it lead to companies using "private security firms" like the Pinkertons to harrass and murder labor organizers. Again, I point to China. It's truly bitter irony that in the largest remaining "Communist" country, labor organizers have been jailed, harrassed and murdered -- not by the central government, but by local officials and industry owners.

Certainly firms would generally resist the efforts of unions, but they could never legally use violence to settle a dispute. A government in a pure capitalist society would basically just consist of the military, police, courts and not much else. Its main purpose would be protecting people from violence and protecting property. Capitalism =/= fascism or state-sponsored corporatism. It would protect lives and property and who it belongs to is immaterial.

[anzki4]

Certainly firms would generally resist the efforts of unions, but they could never legally use violence to settle a dispute. A government in a pure capitalist society would basically just consist of the military, police, courts and not much else. Its main purpose would be protecting people from violence and protecting property. Capitalism =/= fascism or state-sponsored corporatism. It would protect lives and property and who it belongs to is immaterial.

And what stops corporations hiring enough mercenaries and buying enough weapons to beat the "official" army?
And where does the government get money to maintain own army?