Forum Post: A Simple, Feasible Plan To Abolish Capitalism
Posted 12 years ago on Aug. 22, 2012, 8:20 p.m. EST by DemandTheGoodLifeDotCom
(3360)
from New York, NY
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
SUMMARY
In this post I will outline what I think is a realistic plan to abolish capitalism.
In summary, I believe we should replace capitalism with Democratic Market Socialism (DMS). DMS has been rigorously peer reviewed in mainstream economics journals for the past 100 years and every component is already proven to work in the real world.
DMS would enable us to, among other things, guarantee everyone a job with a minimum wage of $115k per year, reduce the week to 20 hours and give everyone a 100% mortgage at 0% interest. It would make everyone wealthy and when everyone is wealthy, you eliminate nearly every problem in society.
That is a significantly better deal than what the vast majority of workers are currently getting, so it will have a lot of appeal. The plan is to simply use that appeal to recruit workers into a single union. Once that union gets large enough, it can do 1 of 2 things.
1) It can simply carry out the original socialist plan and demand, through a general strike if necessary, that we change economic systems immediately.
2) Or it can begin a gradual transition to DMS by electing politicians into office that enact two politically feasible policies: raising the tax rate on investment income and making the govt the employer of last resort. I will show how these policies will enable us to actually begin building a DMS economy right within our current economy that we can quickly grow over time.
Once the DMS sector reaches a large enough scale (roughly 30% of the economy), so that it no longer has to deal much with outside capitalist companies, it will then have the ability to offer benefits closer to the minimum wage of $115k and work week of 20 hours that full DMS would deliver. It is the end of capitalism once it reaches that point because nobody will want to work for a capitalist company.
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HOW DMS WORKS
In order to understand how this transition plan works, it's necessary to first understand how DMS works.
DMS works largely the same way as the current economy works now where we have individually run firms that compete for customers in the market. The difference is in how income is allocated in the economy.
In DMS, 100% of the economy's income is paid to workers (instead of half going to workers and half going to investors) and workers are paid based on how hard they work (instead of based on how much bargaining power you have) which you do by limiting differences in income by law to only what's necessary to get people to do undesirable jobs and give their maximum performance in performance based jobs.
In other words, workers are paid the full value of what they produce because we are eliminating the payment of unearned income to investors who do no work and eliminating exploitation. According to American anarchist Benjamin Tucker, this is what makes an economy socialist. It's an economic system summed up in the original, pre-Marxist, socialist slogan, "To each according to their contribution."
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PAY WORKERS 100% OF THE INCOME THEY PRODUCE
Paying 100% of the economy's total income to the workers means no income is paid to investors. Half the income workers produce is actually paid to investors who do no work! This alone is cutting worker in income in half.
Of course, you need investment money to run an economy. But just like we don't need to pay people to print their own money in order to make sure there's a supply of money in the economy, we don't need to pay people to invest in order to make sure there's a supply of investment money in the economy.
Just like the central bank can provide the economy with the necessary supply of money, it can provide the economy with the necessary supply of investment money. We don't need private investors.
In DMS, all businesses and loans will be funded with public investment funds as explained here.
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ALLOCATE INCOME BASED ON HARD WORK
And the second thing we need to do to make the economy DMS is to allocate that income based on how hard you work.
In capitalism, income is allocated based on bargaining power. It allows a tiny wealthy ruling class to use their power to exploit 97% of the labor force.
97% of all workers are currently getting exploited because they are getting paid less than what they deserve. What they deserve is the amount of income they would receive if we allocated income based on how hard you work, which you do by limiting differences in income by law to only what is necessary to get people to do undesirable jobs and to give their maximum performance in performance based jobs.
Paying workers 100% of the income and paying them based on how hard they work is the only fair economic system. Allocating income this way will enable us to pay every worker from $115k to $460k per year for working just 20 hours per week. And that is more than what 97% of workers are currently getting paid.
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UNIONIZE WORKERS
This will obviously have a lot of appeal with workers since the vast majority of them are currently getting paid far less than that. So the plan is to use that appeal to build a single worker union and then use that union to demand a change to the economy.
You, me and everyone else who is interested in this idea just approaches your friends, family and co-workers and asks them to join a worker union that guarantees them a job so they are never unemployed, gets them a minimum income of at least $115k or $230k per year, depending on their job, reduces their work week to 20 hours, guarantees them a 100% mortgage with 0% interest, pays them a pension at retirement and pays them and their kids an actual income to go to school.
When asked how this is possible, you simply say by demanding that workers get paid fairly: by paying them 100% of the income, since they do 100% of the work, and by paying them based on how hard they work.
Getting paid far more money and allocating income fairly is an idea that will appeal to nearly everyone you talk to.
Once this union gets large enough, we can carry out the original socialist plan: Simply demand, through a general strike if necessary, that we change economic systems immediately.
However, demanding a new economic system is a revolution. Although workers would significantly benefit from that revolution, they may be unwilling to take such drastic measures to secure those benefits.
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POLITICAL ALTERNATIVE
So an alternative plan is to instead have them elect politicians into office that enact two specific policies that enable us to gradually build a DMS economy right within our existing capitalist economy: The two policies are maximizing the tax rate rate on investor income and making the govt the employer of last resort.
Raising the tax rate on investment income (investors actually only pay a maximum rate of 15% on their income, less than half what workers pay on their income!) will result in less private investing since investing will now be less profitable. The less private investing we have in private capitalist companies, the more public investing the govt can then make in public socialist companies.
Making the govt the employer of last resort will give it the authority to start making those investments in new companies in order to meet its new legal obligation to fully employ everyone who is underemployed.
These companies would be run like socialist companies which pay 100% of its revenue to its workers without paying anyone a profit and allocating that income based on how hard you work.
These companies would create a socialist sector within our economy.
Keep in mind that these public companies would not be tax funded govt agencies. They would be companies that would have to become financially viable by generating enough revenue to cover its expenses and they would compete in the market against privately owned companies.
These pioneering companies would be proof that DMS works. It would be a live, working example that companies can be efficient, innovative and responsive to customer demand even though nobody is getting paid a profit and nobody is getting paid 50,000 times more than others.
It would enable us to recruit even more people to the DMS cause. It may even give enough workers the confidence to go ahead with the revolution and just demand that every company operate that way.
But we won't need a revolution.
As these companies grow and as the govt launches more businesses, the socialist sector will grow. At first, the sector will be small. So it will have no choice but to trade with capitalist companies. That will prevent the socialist sector from having full control over how income is allocated because some income is still being allocated by capitalist companies.
So at first, since it doesn't have full control over the allocation of income, the socialist sector will not be able to provide the full benefits to workers that a full DMS economy can.
But as the sector grows larger, it will have to do less and less business with capitalist companies which means it gets closer and closer to having full control over the allocation of 100% of the income. It will get closer to the point where it becomes a completely independent economy where everything everyone needs is produced within the DMS sector and you do not have to buy anything from any capitalist company.
Once the DMS sector becomes fully independent (which it can likely do by growing to less than 30% of the total economy), it will have full control over the allocation of all income. That is when it can offer the full worker benefits listed above. And since 18% of workers are currently underemployed, just employing them will get us half way there.
Once the socialist sector gets large enough, so that it can offer benefits closer to the minimum wage of $115k and 20 hour week, that a full DMS economy would deliver, it is the end of capitalism because nobody will want to work for a capitalist company anymore.
this is never going to happen////
They said the same thing about democracy, ending slavery, universal education, universal healthcare, the 40-hour workweek, women voting, I could go on.
Getting the Fed to spend their QE money on launching public companies to directly employ the underemployed instead of spending it on bailing out private investors and private banks seems far easier.
i mostly agree with you but if you think you will get the american middle class on board with this idea anytime soon, i want what you are smoking. we need to make small steps in this direction and see what happens - this is ok for an ows site but if you are trying to reach the bulk of the population you are off target seems to me.
The average worker is struggling mightily. The median wage income is $26k. So half of all wage earners make less than that.
You don't think they will be interested in a system that pays them fairly, that pays them at least $115k?
And in order to get those benefits, you don't think they would be willing to raise the tax rate that investors pay to at least the rate that workers are pay and make the government the employer of last resort so that the average worker can get the same benefits that all the capitalists got with their multi-trillion dollar bailout?
I disagree with you, I think they will get on board with it.
The middle class is having most of the wealth they create robbed. They would support putting an end to that theft.
The people outside of OWS don't care about politics, capitalism, socialism, msnbc or fox. They only care about their bottom line: how much income they are making. They will support economic policies that make them wealthy over ones that make them poor, regardless of what they are called.
lots of those people will vote for romney - good luck with your idea
Many of those people voting for Romney think the only alternative to Romney is a government that runs your life and takes most of your income so that it can give it to lazy people.
They were never given the choice of genuine socialism.
Most, if not all, of those people don't know socialism is simply a system where workers are paid the full value of what they produce. It is a system where 100% of the income is paid to workers, since they do 100% of the work, and those workers are paid based on how hard they work.
People have been brainwashed their whole lives by right wing, capitalist propaganda. So certainly we will not be able to get through to all of them. But it is possible to get through to enough people.
i do not disagree but whati said before stands - i think it is a mistake to go that route - good luck
What do you think a better route would be?
we need to speak to people in a language they can understand - seems to me that right now people have to realize that we have plenty of money to save the economy and create jobs. no time for details now but richard gates and razor are nuts - completely - i would bother with them if i were you. and wtf - alpine nj - you are living the good llife!
Hello there, just wanted to add a link to pdf. debate on socialism between Barnhill and Tichenor 1914, funny how relevant their arguments still seem http://debs.indstate.edu/b262b3_1914.pdf.
So long as there is capitalism, and all the exploitation, poverty, misery and conflict that comes with it, the socialist alternative will always be relevant!
Great stuff!
Go for it.
Unfortunately it is going to require more than just me going for it. It is going to also need you and most workers.
But all you have to do when talking to anyone about the economy is say that the only fair system is one where workers are paid 100% of the income, since they do 100% of the work, and that income is allocated based on how hard you work.
If we did that, we would be able to raise the minimum income to $115k or $230k, depending on your job, and reduce the work week to 20 hours.
In order to give workers the choice of working in that kind of system, the government should fund a system that works that way.
If private companies are unwilling to hire everyone who wants a job, and currently 18% of all workers are underemployed and cannot get a full-time job, then government should fund public companies that are capable of hiring them.
And the mission statement of those public companies should be to grow their sector large enough so that it becomes an independent economy with full control over the allocation of income and the ability to pay workers 100% of the income based on how hard they work.
Its goal should be to give workers an alternative to working for a private, capitalist company.
Workers should have the choice to work at a capitalist firm where they receive a fraction of what they produce or to work at a public firm where they receive the full value of what they produce.
There is a lot to debate, but I will start here: you state that income should be based on how hard one works. give me your definition of hard work. Then tell me how it is decided and who would do that.
It is in the post:
Allocating income based on how hard you work is done by limiting differences in income by law to only what is necessary to get people to do undesirable jobs and to give their maximum performance in performance based jobs.
I am not asking about allocating income. I would like you to answer in a short paragraph how you define and differentiate hard work or how hard one works. You are proposing to legislate maybe tens of thousands of work tasks or jobs. Not all jobs are measurable by hourly, daily or weekly performance. And Human nature does not allow for maximum effort every day. If there are not enough people to perform undesirable jobs, then what? So please respond here so all can see a simple explanation to the question posed.
" I would like you to answer in a short paragraph how you define and differentiate hard work or how hard one works."
The purpose of income is to get people to work. The purpose of paying one person more than another is to get them to work hard or do undesirable jobs.
So the first reason why we need to pay some workers more than others is to get them to do undesirable jobs.
As a general rule of thumb, physically difficult, mentally difficult and dangerous jobs are going to be less desirable than easy and safe jobs.
If all jobs paid the same, you may have a shortage of iron workers (physically difficult) or engineers (mentally difficult) or coal miners (dangerous).
You have to work harder to be an engineer or a construction worker or a doctor than you do working as a night watchman. So they should get more money for that extra effort.
In computing how income is allocated, I made the assumption that jobs in science, computers, engineering, medicine, construction, mining, and farming were considered difficult or undesirable and we needed to pay them twice as much as other jobs (see below).
The second reason why we need to pay some workers more than others is to get them to perform in performance based jobs. Most jobs will not be performance based. In most jobs, people will be paid a flat salary. But some jobs will be paid based on performance. The most important example is executive level management and inventor/entrepreneur. Most of their income would be determined by how well their company performs against the competition.
The way that would work is each industry would be regulated by a democratically elected body. They would have a compensation committee that allocates the performance based pay. This would be the socialist version of the board of directors and trade association.
In computing how income is allocated, I made the assumption that paying the top performers 4 times more income was enough incentive and that 2.5% of the total jobs got paid that amount (see next).
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Here is what is written in the post that explains compensation in more detail:
So the only way to have a society that is democratic and the only way to also have an economy that works well, is to limit differences in income by law to just what is necessary to get people to do difficult work and to get people to give their maximum effort.
We would use the political process to filter out reasonable, national compensation proposals where differences in income are legally required to be limited to just what our best scientific evidence says is necessary to be an effective incentive and then the worker population votes directly on its approval in a national vote.
We can't predict what the exact final plan will be. But what we can predict is that you will not come up with any valid scientific study that says we need to pay people much more than twice the amount as everyone else in order to get them to do difficult work or that we need to pay people much more than four times the amount as everyone else in order to get them to give their maximum effort.
You do not have to pay someone 50,000 times more income in order to get them to build a social networking website or a cell phone. In fact, we know you don't even have to pay people anything at all when you see all the free open source software and maker faire inventions.
We also know that studies show the general public wants equality, not inequality. So they will never vote to lower their own income in order to give movie actors or Kim Kardashian or athletes or bankers or anyone else the ability to earn, say, 50 times what they make, let alone 50,000 times.
So for the sake of example, if we determined that paying the top performers four times more is enough incentive and paying the people who do difficult jobs two times more is enough incentive and this income distribution plan was democratically approved, that would enable us to pay $460,000 per year to the top 2.5% of all workers; $230,000 per year to the 12.3 million workers who do the mentally or physically difficult work of science, computers, engineering, medicine, construction, mining, and farming; and $115,000 to everyone else.
If, for example, we voted on a plan to pay the top performers 10 times more, they would get paid $1 million per year and the bottom earners would drop to $100,000 per year.
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If you want to see the actual calculations in arriving at those income numbers, you can read the comment here.
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"You are proposing to legislate maybe tens of thousands of work tasks or jobs."
We do not do tens of thousands of different jobs. And we do not have to set the salary for each individual job. All we need to do is set them for job categories of which there are only a few hundred.
We already do this for analysis of the labor market. You can see how jobs are categorized here:
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
We just need to set the pay for computer programmers, not the pay for each programming language like C#, C++, Java, Python, PHP, SQL, etc.
And there will be three important checks on whatever compensation plan we come up with.
The first check is results. If there is a shortage of workers for a particular job and the reason why is because it does not pay enough, the pay for that job will be raised.
The second check is the democratic process. Workers must approve the compensation plan.
The third is the legal process where you can bring a lawsuit for a judge to rule on.
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"Not all jobs are measurable by hourly, daily or weekly performance."
Correct. Only a small percentage of jobs will be paid based on performance. Most jobs will be salaried.
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"If there are not enough people to perform undesirable jobs, then what?"
You raise the amount of additional income you would get paid for working an undesirable job.
How can you make such an assumption of undesirable jobs? Mentally difficult jobs are undesirable? Undesirable jobs would be washing toilets or digging ditches in the hot sun all day. People do not choose some of the assumed undesirable jobs you described because they are undesirable, they choose them because they want to do them and are compensated accordingly. And if you are still short of workers, then what? Would you use force to make someone do it?
Your assumed difficult jobs are not necessarily undesirable.
Higher wage is not to get the person to work harder, it is because they are valued by the company to be paid that rate to perform the mutually agreed tasks. Bonus or incentives can get additional effort.
You still did not answer the question about what is hard work and how is it defined. You are trying to describe physical effort vs mental effort and not including the ability of the individual. How do you measure mental effort? Some people are smarter than others. For instance, suppose I can solve complex problems with less effort as compared to other engineers I know. so should I be paid the same as all other engineers, or less because of less effort required, or more because of my added value to the company. From the companies point of view, they would value me more because I solve problems faster, which leads to cost savings faster, etc. you are making people to be equal in their jobs and they are not.
now then you say you would raise the wage of the undesirable job to get more to perform them, but then you would end up paying them at a rate that a highly technical or dangerous job would be paid at? And that is your definition of "equality"?
So all computer programmers are the same. Pay is "x" rate. So now we are robots, no individualism allowed. Wow! No, not ever, not in my life time or in my children's life time will this ever occur. What is so wrong with having individual talent and the rewarding of that talent. You want to remove that through this so called socialistic solution. You penalize talent and ability. Interesting that in all your posts, there is no discussion of individual skill or talent, just a description of collective groups or worker classifications.
You seem to believe that all would work to the level of maximum effort, when human nature will have most revert to the level of the least effort worker. Give a me a good reason why if 2 people are paid same wage, if the worker A in the next office only can solve two problems in one day, why should worker B solve any more in same day? Enventually worker B would not as there is no incentive to.
You state that there are maybe only a few hundred classifications for jobs. Do you even have any idea how many different types of engineers there are, and the associated grade levels within? You are adding more government bureaucracies just to keep track of all of this. (I guess that is how we get the government as the job of last resort).
If you take a poll to ask about equality, likely the lower income half would surely vote to have some of what they do not have (but certainly did not earn). So that type of poll can be very misleading.
Why is it so wrong that someone is allowed to make whatever income they can. Why does it matter to you. You give the example of a cell phone. You are suggesting to limit income for the inventor of the cell phone? Why limit his income? Suppose he receives 10 cents per phone sale, makes 100 million dollars. Is that a problem for you? It is his invention, he owns it, and can do whatever he wants with it. If he wanted to, he could put it in a drawer and no one could ever use them. Are you also suggesting to do away with the patent system? Would you also include copyrights?
"How can you make such an assumption of undesirable jobs? Mentally difficult jobs are undesirable? Undesirable jobs would be washing toilets or digging ditches in the hot sun all day"
The whole purpose of income is to be an incentive to get people to work and work hard. So the only economic reason why you need to pay one worker more than another is to get them to do undesirable jobs or to give their maximum effort in performance based jobs.
If people did not need to get paid more to become a doctor instead of a toilet cleaner, then we wouldn't pay doctors more than toilet cleaners.
I agree with you that not all difficult work is undesirable. And many socialists who want a system where everyone is paid equally agrees with you.
However, you are not going to convince many people that a doctor should get paid the same as someone who cleans toilets or that we should pay people who clean toilets more than doctors because otherwise we will have a shortage of toilet cleaners.
Most people think that if a difficult job like being a doctor paid the same as an easy job like being a night watchman, nearly everyone would choose to be a night watchman instead of a doctor. We would then have a shortage of doctors. So in order to get people to do the difficult work of being a doctor, we need to pay them more.
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"they choose them because they want to do them and are compensated accordingly. And if you are still short of workers, then what? Would you use force to make someone do it?"
You are not understanding what is being proposed.
If every job paid the same, people would not do undesirable jobs. Sure people like being a doctor, but would we have enough doctors if they were paid the same as every other job? Probably not. It is a difficult job.
If all jobs paid the same, people would generally choose the easy jobs over the difficult jobs.
So in order to get people to do difficult jobs we have to pay them more. We don't use force. We just increase the pay for that job.
But if we don't need to pay difficult jobs any additional money in order to get people to do them, then we won't.
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"Higher wage is not to get the person to work harder, it is because they are valued by the company to be paid that rate to perform the mutually agreed tasks"
That is how it works in capitalism. You negotiate your pay with an employer. The amount of pay you get is based on bargaining power.
The whole purpose of socialism is to stop allocating income based on bargaining power because it is unfair. Bargaining power means your pay is based on how much exploitation you can get away with and not based on how hard you work or how much you produce.
It allows a tiny wealthy ruling class to use their power to exploit 97% of the labor force. Even though the bottom 97% of workers do nearly all of the work in this country, the top 3% are taking nearly all of the income. That is because of exploitation.
Exploitation is using another person's labor without paying them an adequate compensation.
An adequate compensation is the amount of income they would receive if we allocated income fairly. Since the whole purpose of income is to get people to work, the only fair way to allocate income is to pay 100% of our income to workers since they do 100% of the work (instead of half going to workers and half going to investors) and to limit differences in income between workers to only what is necessary to get workers to do undesirable jobs and to give their maximum performance in performance based jobs.
Allocating income this way will enable us to pay every worker from $115k to $460k per year for working just 20 hours per week. And that is more than what 97% of workers are currently getting paid. So 97% are being exploited.
The top 3% are using their bargaining power to exploit nearly the entire workforce, to pay them a fraction of what they should be getting paid, so that they can get paid 50 to 150,000 times more than everyone else and this is undeserved because:
1) They don't work 50 to 150,000 times harder than everyone else. 2) They didn't earn this money from willing consumers in the market. 3) They do not provide 50 to 150,000 times more value than everyone else. 4) There is no economic justification that requires us to pay them this amount in order for the economy to work well. 5) They shouldn't have the power to force the rest of society into poverty or financial struggle. 6) It makes society undemocratic.
For an explanation of these 6 claims, read this post.
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"You still did not answer the question about what is hard work and how is it defined."
I did explain it.
Doing hard work means doing an undesirable job or performing better in a performance based job. Those are the only 2 ways you can get paid more money in a socialist system.
And as a general rule of thumb, difficult or dangerous jobs will be more undesirable than easy and safe jobs. So those are the jobs that will pay more.
However, if there is a difficult job that is desirable and does not need to get paid additional money in order to get people to fill it, it will not have a higher pay.
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"So now we are robots, no individualism allowed. Wow!"
Pay has nothing to do with individualism or being a robot. You can still be an individual.
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" What is so wrong with having individual talent and the rewarding of that talent. You want to remove that through this so called socialistic solution. You penalize talent and ability."
You have it backwards. Capitalism penalizes talent and ability, not socialism. You will get paid far more in a socialist system than in a capitalist system.
Kim Kardashian doesn't get paid hundreds of times more money than brain surgeons because she is hundreds of times more talented than them.
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"You seem to believe that all would work to the level of maximum effort"
I don't assume that. That is why people will be paid more if they give their maximum effort in a performance based job. We need to give people a financial incentive in order to get their maximum effort out of them.
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*" Give a me a good reason why if 2 people are paid same wage, if the worker A in the next office only can solve two problems in one day, why should worker B solve any more in same day? Enventually worker B would not as there is no incentive to."
I don't think engineers are paid based on the amount of problems they can solve per day.
But if that is what is necessary to get engineers to solve problems, we will make that a performance based job and pay them based on the amount of problems they solve. However, I don't think we need to do that.
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" Do you even have any idea how many different types of engineers there are, and the associated grade levels within? You are adding more government bureaucracies just to keep track of all of this."
If you don't think capitalist companies have a bureaucracy that manages how people get paid, you don't understand how companies work.
In socialism that bureaucracy is reduced. Instead of having a bureaucracy at every individual company, there will be a single bureaucracy at the industry and regional level.
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"Why is it so wrong that someone is allowed to make whatever income they can. Why does it matter to you."
They are getting that money through exploitation and creating poverty and misery in the process.
When you pay a billion dollars to a website programmer, that is a billion dollars less the rest of the workers can get paid. The reason why there is poverty, struggle, misery and conflict in this world is because a small ruling class unfairly takes most of the income workers produce and leaves them all broke.
They do not deserve to get paid 50 to 150,000 times more than others because:
1) They don't work 50 to 150,000 times harder than everyone else. 2) They didn't earn this money from willing consumers in the market. 3) They do not provide 50 to 150,000 times more value than everyone else. 4) There is no economic justification that requires us to pay them this amount in order for the economy to work well. 5) They shouldn't have the power to force the rest of society into poverty or financial struggle. 6) It makes society undemocratic.
For an explanation of these 6 claims, read this post.
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" Are you also suggesting to do away with the patent system? Would you also include copyrights?"
Yes, there are no patents or copyrights. You will get credit for your inventions and writings but you cannot get paid any unearned income like rent, interest, profit, dividends or capital gains.
The replies are getting too splintered to continue on all of this. I have so many more questions and comments and you have so many contradictions I am not even sure where to start. But I will give some comment anyway. You still have failed to define what hard is, rather use desirable and undesirable as answers. You would pay toilet cleaners whatever it takes to to get enough workers. Either All the toilet cleaners would just strike and refuse until their pay would be as high as everyone else or you would end up paying unskilled positions more than skilled positions. You completely missed the point on the engineer A and B example. Individual skills have everything to do with compensation. An inventor does not make money through exploitation, he make money because he has come up with an idea that is good, will become a desirable product or service. How is that exploitation? So all inventions, writings, thought, or whatever is to become property of the masses, not the individual? You have just removed all incentive to do anything. Who pays the artist for his painting? Who pays the writer for his story. These people do not work for anyone but them selves. Credit does not put food on the table. You left out the part about the cell phone. I think I would keep that in the drawer. Would someone government official just come in and just take my invention from me? As for exploitation, do you believe that public service unions in cities are exploiting the taxpayers? Then you state that no unearned income allowed. So I rent you a room. How much and Who do you pay? I take the risk, paid for this structure, maintain it, pay taxes on it. So you just pay enough to cover that? Why would I invest in a building for ZERO return. Why would anyone invest in anything without incentive. You remove reward from risk. I can only lose, I can not gain since I can not sell for profit. I would only have incentive to spend, not save or invest. What happens if i have no renters? Who pays my expenses when I have no renters? Where is the incentive to invest in a company? I have nothing but risk, I receive no reward. No one would do this, and you know what would be the result! Again I will state: your system has no respect for the individual, no respect or reward for risk taking, the state would own everything i invented or produced, there are no incentives, therefore there is no reason to pursue this. You have so many holes in this post. You know it, I know it and many others who have commented here and elsewhere on this forum know it. And you know there is absolutely no possiblity that this could even partially occur. No one would want this. In your system the state and collective exploit the individual. Peddle it to some other country.
"Then you state that no unearned income allowed. So I rent you a room. How much and Who do you pay?"
You can charge whatever you want to allow someone to live in your house. But it won't be rent. It will be ownership that they are paying for. They will own a part of the house equal to the amount they paid you for it. If they are paying half of your house's cost, they will own half the house.
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"I take the risk, paid for this structure, maintain it, pay taxes on it. So you just pay enough to cover that?"
What risk is there in buying a house that you want to live in?
You are not the one who is paying for the house and maintaining it. The "renter" is also paying for it. And if they contribute half, they will own half. If they contribute 25%, they will own 25%.
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" Why would I invest in a building for ZERO return. Why would anyone invest in anything without incentive."
You wouldn't invest in it. We don't need you to risk your personal money.
Of course, you need investment money to run an economy. But just like we don't need to pay people to print their own money in order to make sure there's a supply of money in the economy, we don't need to pay people to invest in order to make sure there's a supply of investment money in the economy.
Just like the central bank can provide the economy with the necessary supply of money, it can supply the economy with the necessary supply of investment money. We don't need private investors.
In DMS, all businesses and loans will be funded with public investment funds as explained here.
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"I would only have incentive to spend, not save or invest."
As explained in the link above, investment funds will come from whatever the natural savings rate is. Not everyone spends 100% of their income as soon as they get it. The money that they do not spend is the natural savings rate.
If the natural savings rate is not enough to meet our investment needs, an investment tax would be levied on the gross sales of companies and the revenue collected would be added to the total investment funds available.
If there was no savings (which is impossible) and everyone spent every dime as soon as they got it, we would levy a 12% tax since we spend roughly 12% of our income on investment.
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" Again I will state: your system has no respect for the individual"
Only socialism has respect for the individual. It gives EVERY INDIVIDUAL a job as a right WHICH PAYS YOU THE FULL PRODUCT OF YOUR LABOR. It guarantees that you are wealthy and minimizes involuntary labor so that you have the income and time to freely do whatever you want with your life and live the highest standard of living possible.
In socialism, 100% of individuals have the highest quality of life possible.
Capitalism has no respect for the individual. Just look around and see how people are faring in capitalism.
Nearly the entire world is capitalist and nearly the entire world lives in abject poverty.
Half the world lives on less than $2.50 per day and 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day.
In the US, after 200+ years of industrializing, thanks to capitalism, it still has 50% of the population living in or near poverty, and 97% of all workers earning a below average income, and 50% of wage earners making less than $26k, and 18% of all available workers who cannot find a full-time job, and 55% of the people who do work being wasted by having them do pointless jobs that machines can already do.
It can't even do the simple task of housing all our kids. 1800 kids, from just one Florida county alone, are living in cars.
Nearly everyone in the US is broke.
But they are not broke because there is not enough income or resources to go around. They are broke because capitalism is a system that lets a tiny ruling class use their power to unfairly take so much of the available income - income that they have not earned and don't deserve - that there is simply not enough income left over to pay everyone else.
Everyone in the US in 2012 should be wealthy. We produce $15.4 trillion in goods and services every year.
That is just under $50,000 per year for every man, woman and child. That is $200,000 per year for a family of 4. That is $65 per hour for each hour every worker works. That is $135,000 per year for every full-time worker.
No matter how you slice it, that is clearly enough income to make everyone in this country wealthy.
So what individual does capitalism care about?
Capitalism is working hard to concentrate the wealth that the workers of the world produce into the hands of a tiny, wealthy, ruling class. So it cares about those individuals in power only.
Capitalism just swapped one ruling monarchy for another.
Capitalism is a system that is based on theft, exploitation and welfare for the rich. The result of that process is an enormous concentration of income in the hands of the few, leaving everyone else broke, who then use their wealth to rule over the world.
It is based entirely on privatizing the Earth and its resources which can only be done through theft and murder. It pays half the income the workers produce to investors who do zero work in producing anything. Investment income is just welfare for the rich; it allows guys like Mitt Romney to get paid $20 million per year every year without working a single day. And it allocates the remaining income based on bargaining power which allows a tiny ruling class of wealthy people to use their power to exploit 97% of the workers by paying them just a fraction of what they produce so the ruling class can keep the difference for themselves.
If you don't understand how privatization is theft, investor income is welfare for the rich and income is allocated based on exploitation, you can read a detailed explanation of these claims here.
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"no respect or reward for risk taking"
We don't need your money in order to invest. If you want to gamble your money, go to a casino. The economy should not be a casino.
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"You have so many holes in this post"
All you do is make up things that I do not advocate and then claim it is a hole in the idea.
Democratic Market Socialism has been rigorously peer reviewed in mainstream economics journals for the past 100 years and every aspect of it is already proven to work in the real world. Oskar Lange demonstrated nearly 100 years ago that a socialist market is more efficient than a capitalist market.
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" No one would want this."
50% of wage earners would get an increase of pay of at least 400%. So most of them will want it. Roughly 95% of workers would get a pay increase, so most of them will want it.
However, there are many people such as yourself who are brainwashed beyond reach and who are too gullible to understand that they are being used by a class of rich people who are exploiting them.
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" In your system the state and collective exploit the individual"
Exploitation is paying workers less than they deserve.
If a socialist system pays you MORE income, you are not being exploited.
" You still have failed to define what hard is, rather use desirable and undesirable as answers."
You may not like the answer. But I have answered it.
Working hard is doing difficult jobs and giving your maximum performance in performance based jobs.
The only legitimate economic reason for paying one worker more than another is to get them to do undesirable jobs and to give their maximum performance in performance based jobs. So that is how income will be allocated in socialism.
Easy jobs will be more desirable to do than hard jobs for most people. Unless you pay people more money to do difficult jobs, most will just choose to do easy jobs instead. However, I agree with you that not all difficult jobs are undesirable.
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"Either All the toilet cleaners would just strike and refuse until their pay would be as high as everyone else or you would end up paying unskilled positions more than skilled positions."
I doubt people who clean toilets will strike because they think it is unfair that they are getting paid less than brain surgeons.
If you don't want to work as a toilet cleaner, you don't have to strike. You can do any job you want. Just do another job. If you want to get paid the highest amount, do one of those jobs.
Unlike in capitalism, in socialism you will be paid to train for your job. So students will be paid to go to school.
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" An inventor does not make money through exploitation, he make money because he has come up with an idea that is good, will become a desirable product or service. How is that exploitation?"
In socialism, inventors will also get paid to invent. The difference is that you cannot get paid 50 to 150,000 times more than others because that is unfair. It is unfair because:
1) They don't work 50 to 150,000 times harder than everyone else. 2) They didn't earn this money from willing consumers in the market. 3) They do not provide 50 to 150,000 times more value than everyone else. 4) There is no economic justification that requires us to pay them this amount in order for the economy to work well. 5) They shouldn't have the power to force the rest of society into poverty or financial struggle. 6) It makes society undemocratic.
And it is exploitation because in order to pay someone $1 billion more than they deserve, you have to pay someone else $1 billion less than they deserve. When you pay someone less than they deserve, you are exploiting them.
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" So all inventions, writings, thought, or whatever is to become property of the masses, not the individual?"
Property is any physical item that you purchase or create with resources that you purchased.
An invention, writing or thought is not physical and is not the property of anyone.
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"You have just removed all incentive to do anything."
I have not removed any incentives.
People will have an incentive to work because they love what they do and they are getting paid to do it.
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"Who pays the artist for his painting?"
The customers who buy the paintings.
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" Who pays the writer for his story."
The customers who buy the books.
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"These people do not work for anyone but them selves"
I don't know what that means.
People work because they enjoy the work they are doing and because they are getting paid to do it.
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"Credit does not put food on the table."
I never said it does. Working a job that pays you money puts food on your table. In socialism you are guaranteed a job that pays at least $115k which is a FAR, FAR, FAR better deal than you are getting in capitalism.
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" You left out the part about the cell phone. I think I would keep that in the drawer."
I highly doubt you would refuse to work building your own cell phone in exchange for getting paid at least $115k and possibly up to $460k if the idea works.
But if you did, that is fine. There are plenty of people who would not only do it for $115k to $460k per year, but who would also do it for free. Go to a maker faire and you will see tons of people who are building devices for free simply because they enjoy doing it.
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"Would someone government official just come in and just take my invention from me?"
No. You are way too paranoid. You have been brainwashed by right wing media.
Socialism will make you wealthier and will give you more freedom. You are free to be as selfish as you want.
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"As for exploitation, do you believe that public service unions in cities are exploiting the taxpayers?"
Exploitation is using another person's labor without paying them an adequate compensation.
So a union worker cannot exploit a taxpayer since a union worker is not using a taxpayer's labor.
However, union workers are being exploited in our capitalist system because they are getting paid far less than they should. They are getting paid far less than what they would get if we allocated income fairly.
Since the whole purpose of income is to get people to work, the only fair way to allocate income is to pay 100% of our income to workers since they do 100% of the work (instead of half going to workers and half going to investors) and to limit differences in income between workers to only what is necessary to get workers to do undesirable jobs and to give their maximum performance in performance based jobs.
Allocating income this way will enable us to pay every worker from $115k to $460k per year for working just 20 hours per week. And that is more than what union workers are getting paid. So union workers are being exploited.
Yeah, I can see using a fantasy for your end goal working out in say.....never. Way to spin your wheels.
Have you heard, the FED is about to go ahead with QE3. Another handout to Wall Street that will further devalue the dollar. They have been doing this in order to fight off deflation. The economy needs to allow some deflation because right now the current level of demand has dropped significantly. Normally when this happens, prices fall and the dollar increases in value. This would lead to more demand, which would spur more hiring. The FED is fighting this natural flow of the market by propping up artificial inflation to protect shareholder profits. Did you know all of that?
"Yeah, I can see using a fantasy for your end goal working out in say.....never"
I don't know what that means.
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"Have you heard, the FED is..."
That is because capitalism does not work. That is why we should replace capitalism with socialism. There is no inflation/deflation, Wall Street, recessions, or QE3s in a socialist economy. All of that is a product of capitalism.
Capitalism does not work. It never has worked. It needs constant bailing out by government.
Even socialist countries engage in capitalist practices. The US is still the number 1 economy in the world. It isn't a case of capitalism being a bad platform because any and every economic platform can be abused.
Root Problems With US Capitalism:
Interest on printed money.
Inflation policy is directed by non-elected persons.
Leverage is wildly out of control and in some parts of the market, completely unregulated.
Under EO12333(1981) the economic policy is dictated by national security interest which is a conflict of interest as the government is to serve the people, not the military or pentagon.
There is less than 100% transparency in the banking industry.
Banks are not required to get permission in order to use your deposit bank account for their own investment purposes and there is no offer of shared profit when the banks do engage in this practice.
Now you can change economic systems all you like, you will have to go thrue the same refinement process in any system, you will have to fight greed in every system.
The problem with socialism is that it removes the ability of families to pass down the family home from generation to generation. The gov can come and take what they want, when they want. If I am not working to build a better future for my family, what the fuck am I working for at all? Mere survival? That is slavery bud.
"Even socialist countries engage in capitalist practices"
If a country engages in capitalist practices, it is not socialist, it is a mixed economy.
Nearly the entire planet is a mixed economy and nearly the entire world lives in abject poverty.
Half the world lives on less than $2.50 per day and 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day.
In the US, after 200+ years of industrializing, thanks to capitalism, it still has 50% of the population living in or near poverty, and 97% of all workers earning a below average income, and 50% of wage earners making less than $26k, and 18% of all available workers who cannot find a full-time job, and 55% of the people who do work being wasted by having them do pointless jobs that machines can already do.
Where is it working?
It is working by concentrating the wealth that the workers of the world produce into the hands of tiny, wealthy, ruling class.
Capitalism just swapped one ruling monarchy for another.
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"Root Problems With US Capitalism:"
The root problems of capitalism is that it is based on theft, exploitation and welfare for the rich. The result of that process is an enormous concentration of income in the hands of the few, leaving everyone else broke, who then use their wealth to rule over the world.
It is based entirely on privatizing the Earth and its resources which can only be done through theft and murder. It pays half the income the workers produce to investors who do zero work in producing anything. Investment income is just welfare for the rich; it allows guys like Mitt Romney to get paid $20 million per year every year without working a single day. And it allocates the remaining income based on bargaining power which allows a tiny ruling class of wealthy people to use their power to exploit 97% of the workers by paying them just a fraction of what they produce so the ruling class can keep the difference for themselves.
If you don't understand how privatization is theft, investor income is welfare for the rich and income is allocated based on exploitation, you can read a detailed explanation of these claims here.
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"you will have to fight greed in every system"
Greed only matters in capitalism because it allows the greedy to take as much as they want. Like Al Capone said, it is a thug system where you take everything you can get and to hell with everyone else.
In socialism, greed does not matter because everyone is paid based on a national compensation plan, enforced by law, that pays workers fairly regardless of how greedy anyone is.
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"The problem with socialism is that it removes the ability of families to pass down the family home from generation to generation"
Is that really the problem we need to worry about in the world? Kids no longer getting free houses from their parents!?!?!
I socialism, unlike in capitalism, kids are PAID to go to school since that is work. They don't have to pay for the privilege of getting trained to work for some company.
And those kids are guaranteed a job when they graduate that will pay them a high enough income so that they can afford any house they want on their own.
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"The gov can come and take what they want, when they want"
That simply is not true. Socialism simply means workers get paid the full product of what they produce. It has nothing to do with governments taking anything from anyone.
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" what the fuck am I working for at all? Mere survival? That is slavery bud."
You got it backwards.
You are going to get paid a lot more in socialism than you will in capitalism for working. Half of all wage earners in capitalism make less than $26k. The minimum wage in socialism is $115k for working 20 hours.
Whoever is teaching you about socialism is lying to you.
Dude your entire platform is nothing but personal assumption. You have zero corroborating evidence to back any of your bullshit. Don't bother posting any either, I'm not going to spend hours digging thrue your links just to explain why you're full of shit. Keep on with your fantasy, you'll get there. You like socialism, pick one and move there. I'm not sharing my property with the state, it doesn't belong to them.
"Dude your entire platform is nothing but personal assumption"
You are terribly misinformed. Democratic market socialism has been rigorously peer reviewed over the last century, most notably by Oskar Lange. He was able to demonstrate that a socialist market economy would perform better than a capitalist market economy.
Today, every aspect of market socialism is already proven in practice.
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"You have zero corroborating evidence to back any of your bullshit"
Every single one of my claims contain a link that brings you directly to the credible sources they are based on. All the numbers I use are based on official government economic data.
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" I'm not sharing my property with the state"
If it wasn't for the state, you wouldn't have property!
Would you be willing to murder the Native Americans that once occupied the land you are living on? Probably not. The US government did that for you.
If you were willing, know that I would be rooting for the Native American.
So what is stopping you from moving to North Korea? If socialism is the key, they are the key masters. But just moving to a socialist system doesn't actually fix anything, does it? The truth is that the problems are more complicated than you are willing to be with your solution. The Germans have democratic socialism, mixed with capitalism and the Greeks have an interesting blend as well. THEY ALL HAVE PROBLEMS. Your simple minded solutions are great, for an 8th grader. Get serious homie.
North Korea is not a DEMOCRATIC MARKET SOCIALIST society!!
It is a corrupt, totalitarian dictatorship. No economic system can work under those conditions.
Like I said, you are terribly misinformed.
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"The Germans have democratic socialism, mixed with capitalism and the Greeks have an interesting blend as well. THEY ALL HAVE PROBLEMS."
They all have problems because THEY ALL ARE CAPITALIST COUNTRIES.
Socialism is not welfare capitalism.
Socialism is a system where workers are paid 100% of the income (zero income is paid to investors who do not work) and that income is allocated based on how hard you work (not based on how much bargaining power you have). You can only do that if 100% of the means of production are publicly owned.
Like I said, you are terribly misinformed.
Ok, so who loans you the money to open large scale manufacturing?
It is explained in the post.
Paying 100% of the economy's total income to the workers means no income is paid to investors. Currently, we pay roughly half our income to investors.
Of course, you need investment money to run an economy. But just like we don't need to pay people to print their own money in order to make sure there is a supply of money in the economy, we don't need to pay people to invest in order to make sure there is a supply of investment money in the economy.
The central bank can provide the economy with the necessary supply of money and investment money. We don't need private investors.
To learn how the central bank provides investment money, read this:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/1-replace-capitalism-with-democracy/#comment-742780
The answer is, the government. We both know why you won't give the answer, because you don't understand the material you present.
An investor free "central" bank would need to be backed by the government. When you default, taxes must be raised to cover that. Thus the people suffer from failed industry. I think... yes, yes, the recent crash was also a case of the public taking the hit for failed industry. So nothing changes there in your socialist utopia.
NEXT<
Dude you won't even argue your own case when you see you are being pinned down to the details, you instead point me to a website to argue with. Get bent.
It doesn't surprise me that the only argument you can come up with is that I gave you a link to the comment instead of copying and pasting that comment here.
You have no rational arguments to make.
And like I said, you are terribly misinformed about capitalism and socialism.
A recession, like the one we are experiencing today, where 18% are underemployed and half of the wage earners lucky enough to get a job are making less than $26k because they are so desperate to take anything, cannot happen in a socialist economy.
There is always full employment because everyone is guaranteed a job. And you are paid the full value of your labor, nobody can exploit you and pay you $26k because you are desperate.
We will likely build more than twice as many new homes as we were during the height of the housing boom because people want new, large homes. And since you are guaranteed a job at a fair wage and since you cannot collect a capital gain on your house if you sell it and since you do not have a mortgage with an interest rate, it is impossible to have a housing crash.
I didn't even read your link, I said I wouldn't. Maybe there is a reason for the reoccurring argument.
For this to be true, you would have to be isolated from the global market, or you would experience runaway inflation because you would have to print money perpetually to keep up with that guaranteed work and population growth. This is an economics fact homie.
We already have more housing in this country than is needed to house the entire population of the US. Build more houses for the sake of having more houses? Now who is making no rational arguments.
Look man, I know I'm an ass and that it's hard to back down from your guns when you're passionate about something. This time, just be glad your real name isn't attached to it and learn more before you go backing someone else's nonsense. What you offer comes in two other flavors. The Zeitgeist folks, and The Venus Project. They have never held their own in any debate, ever. They're just a loud retro-socialist bunch with a retread of the communist movement from the 60's, now they have youtube videos. Keep looking.
"You cannot have free products and high wages. I was being sarcastic. Stop prompting me to bump your thread. I am demanding the good life, everyday. You obviously already have the good life. Your blatant contradiction of yourself then backtracking, as if you want me to know the argument isn't about being right or wrong, but that you have the ability to continue amusement at someone else's expense, is a very familiar attitude, one I found distasteful in my youth and one that rich punks seldom outgrow because they're spoiled and never forced to grow as a person. TC"
So now you are saying that you really don't believe in the points that you were trying to make, you were just being sarcastic? Your comments do not make any sense.
And again you have resorted to personal attacks. You do that because you have no rational arguments to make.
"So you want to offer high wages and free products. Interesting concept. You're right, I don't understand."
You do not understand, so why are you so confident in the things you write? It is bizarre.
I said if you make everything free, people would take far more than what we produce. I said that in order to disprove your point that we will produce more than people will demand.
Your claim that "@100% full time employment, you would certainly outpace demand" is not true.
If it were true then we could just make everything free and everyone could take everything they want and we would have no problem fulfilling everyone's order for whatever they want.
But we are unable to do that, so your claim is not true.
People want more new large homes, new kitchens, new bathrooms, new luxury cars, new sports cars, new schools, new stadiums, new restaurants, new laboratories, new offices, new furniture, ad infinitum, than we have the ability to produce.
The bottom line is that the only fair economic system is one where workers have a right to a job and a right to get paid the full value of what they produce as explained in this post. Capitalism is not a fair system and is the root cause of nearly every problem in this world.
You cannot have free products and high wages. I was being sarcastic. Stop prompting me to bump your thread. I am demanding the good life, everyday. You obviously already have the good life. Your blatant contradiction of yourself then backtracking, as if you want me to know the argument isn't about being right or wrong, but that you have the ability to continue amusement at someone else's expense, is a very familiar attitude, one I found distasteful in my youth and one that rich punks seldom outgrow because they're spoiled and never forced to grow as a person. TC
"Look at the current rates of worker productivity. @100% full time employment, you would certainly outpace demand. "
We will never run out of work to do. People will come up with more projects to pursue than we will ever be able to fulfill.
And we certainly don't produce more than what people want. If we made everything free, demand would far, far, far outpace supply.
Your understanding of economics is wrong.
From the OP
From the comment I am replying to
So you want to offer high wages and free products. Interesting concept.
You're right, I don't understand.
"Which means your idea of pumping out products weather you need them or not would lead to an oversupply of goods, leaving a very low price value of said goods and and abundant supply of money that would not be circulating fast enough to stave off inflation."
We don't produce things whether people want them or not. We produce what people buy. Now you are just making things up.
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"You cannot pick and chose what factors effect your proto-economy, unless you isolate your proto-economy from the global market. Please give me a chance to say the same thing in different words, I love repeating myself."
You can repeat yourself all you want, that sentence is still not going to make sense or have anything to do with anything that I advocate.
The whole world doesn't need to be socialist in order for the US to be socialist. 85% of our economy is based on domestic production. So imports make up a small fraction of our economy.
Look at the current rates of worker productivity. @100% full time employment, you would certainly outpace demand.
We haven't even begun import export, you are nowhere near ready for that part.
"For this to be true, you would have to be isolated from the global market, or you would experience runaway inflation because you would have to print money perpetually to keep up with that guaranteed work and population growth. This is an economics fact homie."
Not surprisingly, you don't understand economics. What you said makes no sense.
When your workforce grows, and you have more people working, you produce more. It doesn't cause inflation.
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"We already have more housing in this country than is needed to house the entire population of the US."
Many of which are dives and need to be replaced. Have you heard of a ghetto or a run-down neighborhood or blight?
Half the people in this country are in or near poverty. They cannot afford their dream house. In a socialist system, when they are paid a fair income of at least $115k, they will likely want to live in a nicer home.
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"learn more before you go backing someone else's nonsense. What you offer comes in two other flavors. The Zeitgeist folks, and The Venus Project."
What I advocate, democratic market socialism, is rigorously peer reviewed in mainstream economic journals by some of the brightest minds in economics. You are completely clueless.
It has nothing to do with TZM or TVP. They advocate eliminating money which is not possible and has nothing to do with what I advocate. No serious socialist economist advocates eliminating money or TZM or TVP.
Economists generally agree that high rates of inflation and hyperinflation are caused by an excessive growth of the money supply. Views on which factors determine low to moderate rates of inflation are more varied. Low or moderate inflation may be attributed to fluctuations in real demand for goods and services, or changes in available supplies such as during scarcities, as well as to growth in the money supply. However, the consensus view is that a long sustained period of inflation is caused by money supply growing faster than the rate of economic growth. w
Which means your idea of pumping out products weather you need them or not would lead to an oversupply of goods, leaving a very low price value of said goods and and abundant supply of money that would not be circulating fast enough to stave off inflation.
You cannot pick and chose what factors effect your proto-economy, unless you isolate your proto-economy from the global market. Please give me a chance to say the same thing in different words, I love repeating myself.
North Korea?
Did I miss something?
That is not socialism.
That is a dictatorship - a military dictatorship.
Dictatorship is a description of their government. Socialism is an economic platform.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
And you're intentionally taking it out of context, so allow me to restate the context.
"The Germans have democratic socialism, mixed with capitalism and the Greeks have an interesting blend as well. THEY ALL HAVE PROBLEMS."
We also have socialism in this country. I am an advocate of social security, food security, and would like to see a single payer healthcare system.
See, it's a lot more complicated than cheerleading for a socialist overhaul of the entire system. That sir, is simply mental masturbation.
wow - i didn't realize you were so twisted - what the hell are you doing on a ows site? north korea socialist - you are very uneducated - a shill for the ruling class - what would malcolm say?
It actually doesn't matter if your idea is workable or not. I doubt you can gather together more then a handful of people that truly believe in it.
Way to go out on a limb!
Yes, changing a country's economic system is difficult. That is why it happens so infrequently.
But it will never happen by people complaining about how difficult it is!
However, I do believe we can get more than a few people to want to increase the tax rate on unearned income. They currently get taxed at a maximum rate of just 15%, less than half the rate workers are paying on their earned income.
And I bet every single one of the 27 million+ people who are underemployed, plus many democrats, would support a bill to make the govt the employer of last resort.
DMS solves one problem, creates many more problems. How about ecological crisis?
What specific problems does it create?
The purpose of DMS is to make the economy fair. It has nothing to do with ecology.
You are trapped by the economy.
I don't know what that means! Maybe re-phrase.
We face not only political and economical problems, at the beginning of the new millennium, faces a multi-dimensional crisis (economic, ecological, social, cultural and political), which is shown to be caused by the concentration of power in the hands of various elites. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_Democracy
The most significant problem in this world is economic by a very wide margin. It is the reason for nearly all of the world's misery. This solves our economic problems.
But certainly there still will be other problems.
Capitalism, since it is a system that concentrates wealth, will always end in a plutocracy. It will never produce a democracy. Only socialism can produce democracy because income in socialism is allocated in an egalitarian way (and therefore power is allocated in an egalitarian way).
Plus any group of workers can do this easily right now. Just buythe company and transform it ala your idea.
That would only be fair if every worker invested and everyone they hired did the same.
That is certainly possible but a lot more difficult. Launching a new business is very risky. If it fails, all the workers are out of luck and out their investment. And can you get enough people to be willing to invest enough money to build an entire economy? I think that is less likely.
There are 27 million people who are underemployed. If the government was the employer of last resort, it would launch enough new businesses to employ them. It would be well on its way to becoming a self sufficient economy.
I think it would be far more difficult to get 27 million investors. But I could be wrong.
I also read your example f the $5000 loan. Shortening the payoff time does not ake the loan more expensive. You are incorrect. It might make it arder to borrow but that just kills the velocity of money, which stops the economy and creates depression.
Your plan will either cause a devastating depression r uncontrolled inflation. If you lend money without interedt, everyone will borrow money since there is no penalty for borrowing. If you create a penalty by making the payoff time shoryer, you kill the economy. You refuse to understand that investment income and passive capital investment income are the checks and balances to depression or hyperinflation.
"Shortening the payoff time does not ake the loan more expensive"
The loan isn't more expensive. The loan is free. It has no interest. What it does is make your monthly loan payment more expensive which will decrease demand in order to make sure demand matches supply.
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"Your plan will either cause a devastating depression "
You cannot have a depression in socialism. There are no business cycles in a socialist economy. That only happens in a capitalist economy.
In a socialist economy everyone is guaranteed a job. So you will never have a recession or a depression. You are always at full employment and full production.
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"uncontrolled inflation"
And the rate of inflation will always be zero in a socialist economy.
The final price of all goods and services will be the total labor time it took to produce. And the total price of all goods and services will be paid out as income.
So the total price of everything we produce always equals the total income people have to spend which means it is impossible to have inflation.
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"If you lend money without interedt, everyone will borrow money since there is no penalty for borrowing"
People don't borrow just for the sake of borrowing. They still have to pay back the principle. But the amount available for borrowing will be dictated largely by the amount people save.
For example, if there is little saving and everyone wants to borrow, the loan term to buy a boat may be 4 months. That will force people to save who want to buy a boat because the loan payments will be too big. As people save, more lending becomes available and the loan term is increased.
Socialist economies have inflation. You just seem to make stuff up.
How does more lending become available if people are forced to save if you dont pay interst on savings?
The amount of lending you can do depends on the amount of savings there is.
If you want to get a loan for a $20k boat and there are so many people who want loans that the term for that loan is 4 months, the monthly payment would be $5k per month. If you don't have an extra $5k in income per month, you will have to save just afford the loan payments on that boat.
So as loan terms get shorter, it forces people who want to purchase large items to save more.
Wow, just wow. You think it would be easier to get 30% of voters, or about 30 milion people to agree than it would be to get 100,000 Walmart workers to agree. Thats crazy.
You contradict yourself markedly. You on one hand confirm that creating a business involves great risk, but then dismiss the risk by refusing to offer an investment reward for investors who passively invest. You completely misunderstand capital and risk. Invextment money will totally dry up if you dont offer passive investment income. even your public bank wont survive if it cant generate passive income thru investment. Mortgages cant be free. There is a cost to time/payback.
Please try to read and understand. No one can lend money without a return. No one. Inorder to lend money, they would need a source of funds. They would need to pay interest to acquire those funds. If they paid interedt to savers, they would need a return on principle lent or tey would istantly go bust. Can you understand this? Even your propsed public bank needs a source of funds. If it just printed money inflation would be astronomical.
You simply dont understand money very well, or risk, or transaction, or opportunity costs.
"You think it would be easier to get 30% of voters, or about 30 milion people to agree than it would be to get 100,000 Walmart workers to agree."
That's not what I said. I said it would be easier to get people to vote for the government to become the employer of last resort and fund enough businesses to employ 27 million people than it would be to get 27 million investors to agree to invest in building a socialist economy.
I don't know what 100,000 wal mart workers have to do with anything.
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" You on one hand confirm that creating a business involves great risk, but then dismiss the risk by refusing to offer an investment reward for investors who passively invest."
I also don't say we should get people to invest their private money and not pay them a return.
What I say is that we should use public investment money instead of private investment money. Then we would not have to pay anyone a return since nobody is investing their private savings.
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"even your public bank wont survive if it cant generate passive income thru investment."
The people who work at the banks who are investing and lending are going to get paid an income just like every other worker in the economy. Their incomes can be paid by the bank charging a fee or it can come out of the budget of the federal reserve.
The difference is that we would no longer be paying an interest or return to anyone for giving their money to the bank.
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"Inorder to lend money, they would need a source of funds. They would need to pay interest to acquire those funds"
You need to read the post and link I gave you again.
The money for investment does not come from people giving their savings to a bank for them to invest.
It comes from the central bank, the federal reserve. They will simply look at the economic data to determine how much of our economy's income is being spent and how much is being saved. The amount that is being saved will be the amount they give to banks to invest.
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"You simply dont understand money very well, or risk, or transaction, or opportunity costs."
I went to business school, worked for the fed, worked as an investment banker and owned several businesses. I know as much about economics and business as anyone.
No private person will give money to a bank w/o getting interest.
How will this bank know whats eing saved when no one will put money in a bank for no interest? Just guess? Print it?
Why would workers in a bank " invest" money for no return?
What private savings? if people have private savings that by your definiton cant be invested for avreturn, why would they have any savings? And you STILL havent answered where this public bank gets money to invest other than say it would get it from the reserve bank, but the reserve bank can only get money by printing it. The reserve has NO source of funds by your own definition.
Why do you avoid these very important quextions?
"No private person will give money to a bank w/o getting interest."
The central bank just needs to know how much income people are saving. It does not actually need the physical money to make the loan.
If you save $100 by putting it under your mattress, the only thing that matters is that the $100 is not being spent. So the central bank can loan someone $100 by simply making a computer entry on the borrower's bank account and have them spend that $100 worth of income instead of you.
But in a socialist system, we will have a fully digital banking system. So it will be much easier to manage and much easier to automate most banking tasks. Working with paper and metal is archaic.
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"How will this bank know whats eing saved when no one will put money in a bank for no interest? Just guess? Print it?"
We currently have government agencies (like the BEA) that are responsible for measuring and reporting all economic activity. We know exactly what is going on in the economy. How do you think they produced that chart I linked to which gives the data on saving and investing?
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"Why would workers in a bank " invest" money for no return?"
The same reason why cooks in a restaurant would cook for no return: They are getting paid to do it. That is their job!
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"why would they have any savings"
People do not spend every penny they get as soon as they get it. The amount they do not spend is saved.
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" And you STILL havent answered where this public bank gets money to invest other than say it would get it from the reserve bank"
It is explained in the link that explains investing and I did answer this several times for you already.
If you get paid an income of $10,000 for the month and you only spend $8,000 of it, the central bank will know this and it will make that $2,000 you did not spend available for lending and investing.
How would the central bank know how much is being saved? and secondly if they didnt have the money in hand, you just said in another post that they would levy a tax. that means if i were the saver and pulled a $1000 out of the economy, and the bank lebyed a $1000 tax, the economy has $2000 less dollars to invest. Thats depressionary.
also what happens if people dont pay back their loans? Say ths bank lends me a $1 million and i justwaste it?
"How would the central bank know how much is being saved?"
If we had an all digital monetary system, you could simply look it up on the computer.
Today, we currently do not have an all digital system. But the central bank is able to today get data on how much is being saved. They get it from the BEA which is a government agency responsible for reporting what is known as the National Accounts.
The National Accounts represents all the most important economic data about a country's economy such as GDP, consumption, investment, and saving. Every developed country has agreed to report this data in a standardized way.
The way the BEA gets its data is every large and medium sized business is required by law to report its financials to the BEA. That represents most of our economic activity. And then it takes a sample of small businesses.
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"if they didnt have the money in hand, you just said in another post that they would levy a tax"
That is not what I said.
I said they don't need to the money in hand to lend the money you are saving.
If you hide $2k in your mattress, the central bank will know this (because it knows that $2k less has been spent in the economy) and will make $2k available for lending. It does not need to levy a tax to lend that $2k.
It will only levy a tax if everyone saves less than the amount we need to invest.
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"also what happens if people dont pay back their loans? Say ths bank lends me a $1 million and i justwaste it?"
The same thing that happens today. You will be forced to pay back that money. Your assets may be seized and your income may be garnished. Plus you will pay penalties.
"if they didnt have the money in hand, you just said in another post that they would levy a tax" That is not what I said. I said they don't need to the money in hand to lend the money you are saving. If you hide $2k in your mattress, the central bank will know this (because it knows that $2k less has been spent in the economy) and will make $2k available for lending. It does not need to levy a tax to lend that $2k. It will only levy a tax if everyone saves less than the amount we need to invest. . Yes you did. If you are going to lie to defend your position, then you lose. You need to explain HOW the central bank acquires the $2000 it says it can lend if i put $2000 under my mattress. It sounds like you are forcibly taking it from me. To avoid inflation this has to be a zero sum game. If i keep my $2000 for myself and dont want it to be lent, cause I am saving for the boat you exampled earlier, there is NO money for investment at all.
"You need to explain HOW the central bank acquires the $2000 it says it can lend if i put $2000 under my mattress. It sounds like you are forcibly taking it from me."
The central bank does not forcibly take your money from under your mattress.
If you put $2000 under your mattress for 6 months, you have taken $2000 out of the economy for 6 months.
So the central bank will replace that money by printing $2000 in new money and lending it out for 6 months.
And thats the textbook definition of inflation. You said it wasnt inflationary and now you have defined it as inflationary.
Lets see you weasel out of this trap.
That is not the textbook definition of inflation. Inflation is a general rise in overall prices.
Taking $2000 out of the economy for 6 months would theoretically cause deflation. That $2000 needs to be replaced.
Loaning people money that is saved does not cause inflation. When you loan your $2k to someone for 6 months because you are saving it, that does not cause inflation! And there is no difference between the borrower actually using your physical dollars from under the mattress for 6 months or just keeping those dollars under your mattress for 6 months and the central bank giving the borrower new money to use for 6 months.
You know when I first read your post, I thought "Let them eat Cake."
This is truly wacko. If banks lent money at 0%, they couldnt pay savings interest so no one would save money. The only way to lend money hen would be to prnt it, creating huge inflation. Plus no one would pay back a loan, because there would be no penalty for slow paying.
This is an RX for destructive inflation.
This post links to the comment where investment is explained. You can read it here:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/1-replace-capitalism-with-democracy/#comment-742780
The natural savings rate,whatever that is, is negative in America. We borrow more than we earn, thats why we have staggering debt. Sorry, you are badly in error.
"Buying less and onsuming less is the textbook definition of depression. If you are going to lie about that, you lose, i win."
A depression is less total production. It does not mean some of your production is going towards investment instead of consumption.
If all your production goes towards consumption and none goes towards investment, the economy will collapse.
Do you have any interest in looking up the definition of terms before you publicly commit to defending them?
Nope i know what a depression is and how it is defined. A depression is a decline in economic activity in the prescence of the ability to produce at a normal rate.
I defined a depression as "less total production." And you defined it as a "decline in economic activity."
You do realize they mean the same thing don't you?
And shifting some of your production from consumption to investment does not mean you have less total production. So it has nothing to do with a depression.
Just curious, how old are you?
Your understanding of the economy is not accurate. The savings rate was not negative. We saved 12% of our income in 2011.
http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTableHtml.cfm?reqid=9&step=3&isuri=1&910=X&911=0&903=137&904=2011&905=2011&906=A
Your own link: Net saving: minus 99.3.
please read your own links more accurately. Now, answer my truths with truths or delete your posts.
You claimed that the savings rate was negative, that Americans saved less than 0% of their income.
That is wrong. They saved 12% of their income.
A negative net savings amount means that we borrowed more than we saved. It does not mean we did not save.
And it also does not mean we "borrow more than we earn." We borrow less than 13% of what we earn.
If we borrow more than we save, we are net borrowers, we are not savers. Savings means we actually have money in the bank. We dont. Sorry please dont snswer this with more semantics. You are wrong.
You are changing your story.
You didn't originally claim that we are net borrowers (which means we borrow more than we save). You claimed that the savings rate is negative (which means we don't save any money and which is factually not true).
There is nothing wrong with not being an expert in economics. If you think I am wrong about something, point it out and ask questions. But proclaiming things about a subject you are not an expert in is just going to make you look foolish.
No I didnt. You said there is a natural savings rate, which of course semantically is true, but it ignores outflow thru borrwing. Your NSR is simply like saying " I got my paycheck Friday, so I have saved $500," ignoring that Saturday its all gone. Your entire premise is based on there being a surplus pod of money to lend thru a public bank, and since there isnt, the entire idea of getting money to fund investment without interest charges goes away, and with it, your entire premise is null and void.
You need to answer where you will get money to fund your ideas. There is no True savings surplus, so you would have to print money which is inflationary, which YOU said wont happen. Your idea is inflationary, terribly inflationary, and you refuse to tell us how these public banks will get funds without offering interedt. ANSWER THAT, please.
"Your entire premise is based on there being a surplus pod of money to lend thru a public bank, and since there isnt"
You are not understanding what that chart says. There is surplus money to lend.
It says we saved $2.8 trillion. It says we had a "surplus pod of money to lend" in the amount of $2.8 trillion. It also says that we invested a little more than that $2.8 trillion.
All it is saying is that we invested more than we saved. It does not say we did not save.
So if we were a socialist economy in 2011, we would have $2.8 trillion to use for lending and investing.
Since we are no longer paying interest, that will certainly lower the savings rate. But not by much. The interest rate today is already close to zero.
But let's say the savings rate went to zero. Everyone spent 100% of their income as soon as they got it. If that happened, the central bank would just levy a tax on gross sales. We spend roughly 12% of our economy on investment. So the central bank would levy a 12% tax on gross sales and use that money as our investment money.
If you levy a 12% tax, yoy just created inflation. the cost of a good became 12% more expensive.
That 12% tax lowers the amount of income you get paid by exactly 12%.
Thats depressionary.
It does not cause inflation or deflation. And it does not cause a depression.
It just means people are going to consume less. It means we will produce less consumption goods and services and produce more investment goods and services.
It may mean you will have to buy less clothes. But the clothes are still going to be the same price. They won't go up in price and they won't go down in price.
And it won't cause a depression. It does not mean we are producing less overall. It just means the makeup of what we produce will be different. It means we will produce more investment goods and less consumption goods. But total GDP will not go down.
Every economy needs to invest in order to continue functioning. If it does not invest, the economy will eventually crash.
All of our production can be divided into 2 categories: Investment goods and services and Consumption goods and services.
Investment are things like tractors and factories.
Consumption are the things we actually want like food and cars.
Without investment in tractors and factories, we will be unable to produce things like food and cars.
So if not enough people are working on investment, and working on building tractors and factories, then we levy a tax which just means we will move more workers and materials from the production of final goods (like food and cars) to the production of investment goods (like tractors and factories).
Plus most of your market direction is done by taxation, not peronal choice. Thats insane. You steal individual freedom and replace it with heavy handed, centralized taxation.
Welcome to the Soviet Union. A known utter failure. You lose again.
Now you are just making up lies. Buying less and onsuming less is the textbook definition of depression. If you are going to lie about that, you lose, i win.
You just made your economy depressionary, by law. LOSER.
So let me ask - where will the banks get the money to give to people to invest? Will that money come from other people who will put their money in the bank or will the bank have the power to print its own money.
Also, if people do put their money in the bank will they get a return on their investment and will the bank get a return on its investment to people who want to start a business?
This post links to the comment where investment is explained. You can read it here:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/1-replace-capitalism-with-democracy/#comment-742780
What would you do with a $115K-400K per year if you couldn't invest it?
And wouldn't the initial layout of capital from the government have to be paid back, thus not allowing 100% of revenues to be paid out to workers? If it wasn't and unlimited money was issued to any start up company that wanted it, wouldn't the rampant inflation negate the $115K salary?
And finally, are there any politicians that you know of that actually support such a system?
It is a very interesting concept, to say the least.
"What would you do with a $115K-400K per year if you couldn't invest it?"
The purpose of production is consumption, not investment. You are paid $115k so that you can consume $115k worth of goods and services. But obviously nobody will force you to consume that much. You can save as much as you want or donate it or even invest it (you just would not be able to earn a return on that investment, see below).
You can read the details of how investment would work here:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/1-replace-capitalism-with-democracy/#comment-742780
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"And wouldn't the initial layout of capital from the government have to be paid back, thus not allowing 100% of revenues to be paid out to workers?"
Yes, the money would need to be paid back and yes initially we would not be able to deliver the full benefits of a socialist economy since we are still mostly operating with capitalist companies.
At first, the socialist sector will be small. So it will have no choice but to trade with capitalist companies. That will prevent the socialist sector from having full control over how income is allocated. Obviously the capitalist companies it is spending money with will continue to allocate its revenue the way it is currently by paying unearned income like rent, profit, interest, dividends, capital gains, etc.
So at first, the socialist sector will not be able to provide the full benefits to workers that a full socialist economy can.
But as the sector grows larger, it will have to do less and less business with capitalist companies which means it will get closer and closer to the point where it becomes a completely independent economy where everything everyone needs is produced within the socialist sector and you do not have to buy anything from any capitalist company.
Once the socialist sector becomes fully independent (which it can likely do by growing to less than 30% of the total economy), it will have full control over the allocation of all income. That is when it can offer the full worker benefits listed above.
But once the socialist sector gets large enough, so that it can offer benefits closer to the minimum wage of $115k, work week of 20 hours, and 100% mortgage at 0% interest, that a full Democratic Market Socialist economy would deliver, that is when capitalism comes to an end since nobody will want to work for a capitalist company anymore.
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"And finally, are there any politicians that you know of that actually support such a system?"
The only elected politicians that I know of that support socialism are Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich.
But I believe there would be plenty who support raising the tax rate on unearned income. Investment income only gets taxed at a maximum rate of just 15%, less than half the rate workers are paying on their earned income.
And I bet every single one of the 27 million+ people who are underemployed, plus many democrats, would support a bill to make the govt the employer of last resort. However, that will be the biggest challenge.
So say I am an investor. i can invest in a capitalistic company that pays a return, or in a socialist company that does not. Where will investment money flow?
It will flow to capitalism.
That is why the transition plan to socialism relies on passing a law to increase the tax rate on investment income which will lower the amount of investing since it will be less profitable and a law to make the government the employer of last resort which will give it the authority to use public funds to invest in socialist enterprises.
Your type of socialism would require a strong centralized punishing army to make people toe the line. People who lack discipline would have to be beaten or whipped or tortured.
No Thank you.
You are describing capitalism, not socialism.
You are being gullible. You are defending a system that is robbing you of most of your income.
How will you make people pay back debt that has no interest?
You deduct it from their bank account. We would make people pay their loans the same way we make them pay every other bill.
Eliminating interest has nothing to do with paying your bills.
It certainly does appear almost Utopian on paper. But one thing you said in your original post struck me as very interesting:
"Once the DMS sector reaches a large enough scale (roughly 30% of the economy) so that it can offer benefits closer to the minimum wage of $115k, work week of 20 hours, and 100% mortgage at 0% interest, that a full DMS economy would deliver, it is the end of capitalism. Nobody will want to work for a capitalist company."
Socialism has been around as a theory for awhile, and even tried out to various extents since those theories were developed. If the last line of the above paragraph is indeed true, how come we have not seen successful long-term socialist economies?
I do agree though that investment income should be taxed as regular income. Income is income.
There is a lot to say about that, but I'll keep it short.
Socialism has only been tried in poor, undeveloped countries. Marx, for example, believed a country had to go through a capitalist phase first. He did not write about socialist revolutions in Russia or China. They were still feudal countries. He wrote about socialist revolutions in developed countries like France and England.
But it wasn't socialism that failed in those countries, it was their political system that failed. Nobody wants to live in a totalitarian, undemocratic, oppressive country regardless of its economic system.
And you can't have an effective economic system if you have no transparency, no accountability and you are shot if you disagree with leadership.
If we had a socialist revolution in a democratic, fully developed country with a mature justice system like the US or Western Europe, like Marx envisioned, it would not turn out anything like the socialist revolutions of the past.
Just like capitalism works much better in the US than it does in Russia because of its development, socialism would work much better.
However just making the means of production public does not mean your economy is going to work. There has been a lot of scholarship on what works and what does not. Although a centrally planned economy, like what was attempted in the Soviet Union, will work much better in the West because we are democratic, transparent, accountable and have a mature justice system, it will still be an inefficient economic system.
What the scholarship says is you need markets and that a socialist market will outperform a capitalist market (read Oskar Lange and the rest of the Socialist Calculation Debate). That is why I advocate Democratic Market Socialism.
I have never been a big believer in socialism but you seem to articulate and explain it better than anyone else I have heard, on here or otherwise.
Thanks.
It really is shocking how there no longer exists any organizations that explain what socialism is and how it specifically benefits people in a simple and compelling way.
Imagine what the world would be like if the merits of socialism were advertised as much as the merits of capitalism.
Unfortunately all the media is owned by capitalists and they will never, obviously, use their company to promote the merits of replacing capitalism with socialism.
How would the above system deal with people who are essentially lazy? And I don't mean that in a right wing all unemployed people and minorities are lazy way. But there are certainly a lot of people among us who are perfectly content to just live off of the system their whole lives, even if it means they are basically in poverty.
There is no welfare in socialism (outside of disability) because you do not need it. Everyone is guaranteed a job at full pay.
Socialism maximizes your freedom. People who are lazy should have the freedom to be lazy. If the minimum wage is $115k, you could easily live off of half that. So you could just work part time.
Lange also admitted that arbitrary investment would come at the expense of consumer welfare.
He admits his ideas come at e expense of consumer welfare.
You lose again.
That is not what he said.
He said investment is largely arbitrary, no matter who does it. It is arbitrary in capitalism and in socialism.
And all investment, whether it is being done is capitalism or socialism, comes at the expense of consumption. When you spend resources on building a machine for a factory those are resources that can no longer be used in cars. That is true in both capitalism and socialism.
I read Oskar Lange theorems. Its depends on a heavy handed central planning commision making all financial decisions and simply guessing the direction of the economy. IT, not free competition, would decide economic winners and losers. The decision for example to favor beta over VHS would have bern made by committee. All real estate would have to be priced equally by a central board, so I might get a house by the beach that costs the same as yours in Nebraska or West Texas. That cant work.
His work had been soundly utterly destroyed, and he had no rebuttal. And since he is your basis, you are soundly, utterly destroyed.
"I read Oskar Lange theorems"
No you didn't. At best, you read snippets of a wikipedia article which is heavily distorted by the libertarians who are far more active online.
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"Its depends on a heavy handed central planning commision making all financial decisions and simply guessing the direction of the economy"
No it doesn't.
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" IT, not free competition, would decide economic winners and losers."
That is also not true. Consumers decide winners and losers based on how they spend their money.
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"All real estate would have to be priced equally by a central board"
The price of houses, like everything else produced, will be based on its cost to build.
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"His work had been soundly utterly destroyed, and he had no rebuttal"
Mises was the one whose paper had been destroyed by Lange. And Mises was the one that had no rebuttal. Even Hayek admitted it. It was Hayek that tried to respond to Lange, not Mises. And Hayek tried to attack socialism from a completely different angle.
So i want the house on the California coast, near La Jolla or Malibu.
Yes it does depend on a strong omnipotent central planning board.
What is great about socialism is that since you are getting paid the full value you of what you produce, everyone is wealthy. Workers are no longer exploited. So everyone can afford a quality house.
Most people in capitalism, since 50% of wage earners make less than $26k, cannot afford a quality home.
You can live anywhere you want, even on the California coast.
Again, there is no central planning board. It is a market economy, not a centrally planned economy. It is called MARKET socialism, not centrally planned socialism.
No you cant live anywhere you want, because there is only so much beachfront, its a limited supply.
And since you said you read Oskar Lange, then you understand that in order to clear markets you would just hold a walrasian auction.
In other words, if there was more people than houses available, the people who get the house are the ones who are willing to pay the most for it.
Keep in mind that the seller of the house cannot take from that sale price any more money than they put into the house. If they buy the house for $400k and sell it for $500k, they cannot collect that $100k surplus since that would be unearned income.
You just dont get it. You never will. You completely contradicted yourself.
If I own a house overlooking the bluffs in Malibu, I am going to sell it to the highest bidder, no matter what the feds say. As more people will want that house than a house in the Mojave desert, I CAN sell it for more. And human nature being what it is, if I am a buyer, I am going to sell as many widgets as the market will bear, so I can have a house at the beach. And if the feds try to restrict my ability to sell widgets, I will sell them black market. Your system kills ingenuity and ambition, dead in its tracks.
"You just dont get it. You never will"
I understand why billionaires defend this system. But I don't get why people like you, who will never be a billionaire, defend it.
You will never be a billionaire from selling widgets. So I will never get why people like you are such cheerleaders for a system that is exploiting them and paying them a fraction of what they should be getting paid.
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"You completely contradicted yourself"
No I didn't. Copy and paste the statements that I made that are contradictions.
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"If I own a house overlooking the bluffs in Malibu, I am going to sell it to the highest bidder, no matter what the feds say"
The feds are going to tell you to sell it to the highest bidder. Do you even read my comments?
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" I am going to sell as many widgets as the market will bear, so I can have a house at the beach. And if the feds try to restrict my ability to sell widgets, I will sell them black market."
You are free to sell as many widgets as you want and you can get paid up to $460k for doing it which is enough to get you any house you want that is for sale, including a house on a beach.
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"Your system kills ingenuity and ambition, dead in its tracks."
No it doesn't. The only thing it does is kill exploitation and the payment of unearned income to people who do not work. You don't need any of those two things to incentivize people to be ambitious and produce ingenuity.
You might as well be talking about the Middle Ages. What you're saying is pure ideology, love of an idea, not connected with the real world.
Leaving aside your 'human nature' nonsense, let me address the issue of incentives and ambition. For 200 years the number of capitalists has been shrinking without seeming to destroy growth. Almost no one is a capitalist. We all work in big organizations, both government and corporate which control us through a complex system of carrots and sticks. Incentives are a matter of engineering organizations, not opening markets. Managing organizations has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism vs socialism, an archaic Cold War debate for dinosaurs like you.
Capitalists shrinking over the last 200 years? Baloney. The carrots are money. Thats capitalism. Why would any sane person think that an employee is not a capitalist? What sticks are you talking about?
So, capitalism is not capitalism now. It's greed. Even anti-capitalists like myself would allow that capitalism could flourish without greed, one of the 7 deadly sins. You are not advocating capitalism , just motivating people with carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments. And why are you here?
What you mean is that professionals are not working for the general good so much as for personal gain. Agreed. But professionals are not capitalists. They are not interested in buying low and selling high. You might as well call cavemen capitalists for selfishly hunting woolly mammoths so they can eat. Capitalism involves going into business to sell a good or service on the market. Capitalism is not an inner psychological condition.
Remnants of capitalism linger, just like remnants of feudalism can be found. What's happening in the US is a debate about capitalism, a debate that is irrelevant to the present conditions of productive work.
Cavemen WERE capitalsts. Its no secret that the most powerful men garnered the most property and WOMEN in prehistric times. Thats capitalsm, thats greed. We are a greedy lot, us humans. Why didvwe invent the bow, armor, gunpowder?
To kill and take from other humans.
The subtle gradations of hierarchy have nothing in common with the free market. Allow yourself to admit that.
Your grades, resume building, prestigious school, the 5 million tests you take to qualify in your profession, your corner office, and opportunity to take continuing ed at the conference in Hawaii. This stuff isn't Adam Smith. Professionals are rarely capitalists, less today than ever. The problem of the modern economy is how to get more effective work out of people who are working for salaries, not profits. I'm amazed at my patience with your classic blind right wing stupidity. Why are you here?
You are nuts. Professionasl are by their very nature capitalists. All those things you mentioned have as their driving force higher income. Case closed.
Sounds great, but does not address the current debt, which is in the (how many?) trillions.
Those debt payments are capitalism's problem, not socialism's.
In a socialist system, you don't make debt payments to private investors. If the capitalist economy was replaced with socialism, those investors would be out all that money. People like Romney would no longer be able to get paid $20 million per year for not working. He will now have to get a job.
And legalize crack 'cause you must be smoking' ' it...
how would the CIA make unmonitered money ?
You still avoid answering several questions.
1) you say people will have to save inorder to buy something if the payback is too severe. That means they are removing money from the economy and holding it. It isnt available for lending. But you say the central bank will know that i am saving money and lend a like amount for investment. However, when i DO buy that boat, I will put my saved money back into the economy, an economy that already has been infused with the other money the bank lent. Thats highly inflatiinary.
2) Most of your economies checks and balances relies on onerous taxation. To discourage behavior, you place a stiff tax on it. You also contradicted yourself by saying if there wasnt enough money to lend, you would increase taxes. Your system ( And Oskar Langes) relies heavily on a central planning board to make decisions and not citizens free choice. The Soviet Union tried this and failed. You have utterly removed the competition of free exchange of ideas. The Soviet Union had shitty cars because there was zero incentive to make nice cars because there wasnt competition between auto makers. Everything in the Soviet Union was crap, even the Mig 21 was made of steel, not lightweight metals, and the avionics was shit. Not one product made by a strict socialist country survives today because they were centrally planned and crappily built. Your system has no way to insure quailty at all. Everyoe has a job, there is reason to improve products, because there is no pressure to improve designs.
"1) you say people will have to save inorder to buy something if the payback is too severe. That means they are removing money from the economy and holding it. It isnt available for lending. But you say the central bank will know that i am saving money and lend a like amount for investment. However, when i DO buy that boat, I will put my saved money back into the economy, an economy that already has been infused with the other money the bank lent. Thats highly inflatiinary."
The central bank will know how much is not being spent AND how long it is not being spent for.
If you saved $20k over the course of 6 months, the bank will be able lend $20k for 6 months. When the $20k is paid back to the central bank, that money is taken back out of the economy.
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"Your system ( And Oskar Langes) relies heavily on a central planning board to make decisions and not citizens free choice"
There is no central planning board that makes decisions on what to produce. The market determines what to produce. Consumers dictate production decisions based on how they spend their money, not some central planning board.
There is also no board the restricts anyone's freedom. Your freedom depends on your income. Since this system will increase the average worker's pays more than 4 times, the average worker will get 4 times more freedom.
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"The Soviet Union tried this and failed."
This is not how the SU worked.
The SU had no democracy, was centrally planned, did not have a market, had no transparency, had little accountability and murdered anyone who disagreed with leadership.
I advocate the opposite of what the SU did.
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"You have utterly removed the competition of free exchange of ideas"
No I have not. Point to a statement I wrote that says I advocate doing that.
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"The Soviet Union had shitty cars because there was zero incentive to make nice cars because there wasnt competition between auto makers."
I am confident you have zero understanding of how the SU economy operated.
But in Democratic Market Socialism, there is competition between companies. There are no monopolies. That is what the "Market" means in Democratic Market Socialism.
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"Everything in the Soviet Union was crap, even the Mig 21 was made of steel, not lightweight metals"
The SU was a peasant, feudal society that had a couple decades of development. You cannot compare a poor, undeveloped country like the ones that made up the SU to the West which have already been developing for a few hundred years.
You're wack. How is the central bank going to take money out of the economy? If I buy. boat, the boat maker has the $20000. The bank is going to strong arm the boat builder? You CLEARLY have no idea as to avoid inflation. I save $20000, howevrr the bank needs $20000 to lend (which in another post you said the Bank prints $20000) I now spend the $20000 for a boat, the boat builder has the $20000, and you lent $20000 the anothrr person, that you simply printed, so now there is $40000 in circulation, and to avoid hyperinflation, the bank has to remove $20000, but from whom? Tell me exactly whom will the bank take the $20000 from. Be clear.
You are not following along.
When you save $20k for 6 months by putting it under your mattress, you are taking $20k out of the economy for 6 months.
The central bank will then print $20k in new money to REPLACE that money in your mattress. It will then loan that money out FOR 6 MONTHS. SO it is only replacing the money for the length of time that you have it under your mattress.
When the borrower pays back that $20k loan, he is paying it back to the central bank who then deletes the money. After 6 months, that $20k in new money that the central bank lent out will now be completely taken out of the economy and deleted because the borrower paid all $20k back to the central bank.
Let's say there is $100 in circulation every month in an economy.
And you decide to put $20 under your mattress for a month. That means now there will only be $80 in circulation for that month.
So the Fed prints $20 and lends it to Bob for a month. Now the economy is back up to $100.
The following month you take your $20 out of the mattress and spend it. Now the economy would be up to $120. However, that same month Bob has to pay back his $20 loan to the bank. When the Fed gets that $20, it destroys it. So Bob lowered the money by $20. So the total amount of money in circulation in month 2 is $100 again ($120 - $20 = $100).
In month 1 when you saved and Bob borrowed, we had $100 in circulation.
In month 2 when you used the money under your mattress and Bob paid back his loan, we had $100 in circulation.
Lending money that is saved does not cause inflation. It does not change the total amount of money that is being spent.
Plus you haent taken into account the cost of running the bank. The bank has to charge interest or how will it pay its employees?
Interest is paid to the person who provided the money.
The bank will charge a fee. But just so you understand the difference, when you buy a $400k house with a 4.5% interest rate, you are paying $400k in interest payments plus $400k for the house. Half your monthly mortgage payment is going towards interest.
We don't need to pay a bank $400k to process a mortgage.
I know what i am paying, i own 10 houses, 2 commercial buildings, and a couple condos.
Huh? You just said, about 20 times, NO INTEREST, NO UNEARNED INCOME. But now you say you will pay interest. Compete doublespeak. You cited exampes where i woud save money but you would not pay interest.
Ughh.
Interest is paid to the person who provided the money. It is not paid to the bank to process a loan. Since nobody is collecting interest income, you no longer have to pay an interest fee.
The bank will cover its cost by charging a fee.
Huh? So how can the bank pay interedt to someone who gives them money but then cant lend that money at interest? Thats a clear contradiction.
You are not following along.
The bank is not going to pay anyone interest. And the bank is not going to charge anyone interest. There is no interest in a socialist system.
The bank will incur some expense in managing payments and loans. Those expenses will be covered by charging a fee. It does not cover it by charging interest.
Yes i am. You just said, in black and white
UGHH.
INTEREST IS PAID TO THE PERSON WHO PROVIDED THE MONEY. INTEREST!!!
I have your post just above. Is that not your writing?!
And since you did not properly understand what I was saying in that comment, I clarified it for you with:
Interest is paid to the person who provided the money. It is not paid to the bank to process a loan. Since nobody is collecting interest income, you no longer have to pay an interest fee.
The very easy to understand point that was being made is that interest is something that is paid to someone who lends their money. It is not something that is paid to a bank for processing loans.
Since we are no longer paying anyone interest to borrow their savings, no banks will be charging interest to their customers. In order to cover their expenses, they will be charging customers fees, not interest.
a computer program can handle it for less than a penny
You are absolutely correct. We don't need enormous, opulent buildings with tons of tellers to process payments and lend money. It can be mostly automated in a completely digital monetary system.
Oh yeah? Then how did we get a banking crisis. How would a house be appraised? How would income be verified? Who would provide title searches?
Since you cannot collect unearned income, which means you cannot get paid a profit for selling a house for more than what you paid for it, there will be no speculating on houses. So the entire housing market will be completely different.
You won't have a housing bubble if you can't make money on selling your house for more money. And if there was a bubble, it won't burst because you don't have adjustable rate mortgages that force people into foreclosure because they can't afford their payments and you don't have unemployment.
There is no business cycle in a socialist economy. That absurdity only happens in capitalism.
Appraisals can be done by a computer looking up similar home prices, just like what a human would do. And since our banking system is all digital, income is a simple data lookup.
More hogwash. Socialst countries have business cycles. They are inescapable. Oil will cause that. As oil spikes in price, since we import oil, money will be drained from the US and transferred to the Saudis. You cant stop that. And we will then have recession.
Your system will have inflation. You left out what would happen when loans arent repaid. Even in a socialist system, there will be winners and failures. And there will be more failures in your system than in capitalism, because in a global economy, you wont be able to stop cheap imports from destroying huge segments of the economy. There wont be any risk taking, because there isnt any reason to take risk. People take risk to create their own wealth. Your magic number of $460000 is bullshit, a fiction you made up. No one will take risk just to make $300000 more than they could by working at minimum wage, $115k. There wont be innovation, creativity, energy, because you cap wealth. Your poo poohing the Soviet Union is bullshit too. You forget, it wasnt just a peasant Russia that lost energy under socialism, it was also Poland, Hungary, the Balkans, Czechoslovakia and the most glaring,telling , utterly convincing proof that socialism NEVER works, East Germany. You cant use your foolish nonsense that Russia was backward and rural about Germany. Germany was modern, industrial, advanced and when separated into a socialist East and capitalist West, people risked death to escape to the West. Your experiment was tried and failed, failed miserably in Germany and we have clear documented proof.
"Society works fine now. Why change it?"
Society does not work fine.
The US has 50% of the population living in or near poverty, and 97% of all workers earning a below average income, and 50% of wage earners making less than $26k, and 18% of all available workers unable to find a full-time job, and 55% of the people who do work being wasted by having them do pointless jobs that machines can already do.
It can't even do the simple task of housing all our kids. 1800 kids, from just one Florida county alone, are living in cars. 3 million are homeless and nearly 50 million go hungry.
Nearly everyone in the US is broke.
Perhaps you haven't picked up a newspaper.
And your solution wont work. gauranteeing people $115k wage will insure a slew of high school drop outs.
"I am a 2%er. Life is good."
There is a 98% chance you are lying. But I am interested in building a society that works well for 100%, not 2%.
Society works fine now. Why change it?
"Nope. You are wrong. anyways, your system is a joke. its never going to happen. Goodbye"
Yes, get back to your measly job. There are people who need to get rich off of you. You don't want to let down your capitalist rulers.
I am a 2%er. Life is good.
"Socialst countries have business cycles. They are inescapable. Oil will cause that"
It is impossible to have a recession in a socialist economy because you always have full employment. Oil does not cause recessions, unemployment does.
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"Your system will have inflation"
Since the total income paid out will always equal the total price of everything that is produced, it is impossible to have inflation.
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"You left out what would happen when loans arent repaid"
Loan defaults will be paid back with the assets used as collateral for the loan. Anything above that will be part of the bank's cost that borrowers have to pay.
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"And there will be more failures in your system than in capitalism, because in a global economy, you wont be able to stop cheap imports from destroying huge segments of the economy."
Imports make up just a small percentage of the economy, not huge segments. And countries can sell us goods made with slave labor only if we allow it.
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" There wont be any risk taking, because there isnt any reason to take risk"
You need to read the actual post or any of the numerous comments I wrote to you that explains that the economy is not a casino for you to gamble your money with. If you want to gamble, go to a casino.
Investment in socialism comes from public funds, not someone's private savings. 18% are underemployed, relying on the benevolence of the wealthy to invest their private savings doesn't work.
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"Your magic number of $460000 is bullshit, a fiction you made up."
It is based on simple math that even you, with your lack of economics understanding, can verify here.
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"You forget, it wasnt just a peasant Russia that lost energy under socialism, it was also Poland, Hungary, the Balkans, Czechoslovakia and the most glaring,telling , utterly convincing proof that socialism NEVER works, East Germany"
I don't advocate what the SU did. They did not have socialism. They had a corrupt, totalitarian, undemocratic dictatorship and a centrally planned economy.
But even that performed better than capitalism did. It took 20 years of capitalism for those countries to get back to where they were economically under the soviet system in 1991 when they switched to capitalism.
Capitalism has been a failure everywhere it has been tried.
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"people risked death to escape to the West"
They risked death to escape from a brutal, tyrannical political system, they didn't do it to escape from socialism. Poverty and misery soared after 1991. All those countries went right back to the third world.
Nope. You are wrong. anyways, your system is a joke. its never going to happen. Goodbye
with socialism, everyone is equally miserable. EXCEPT those that rule.
How about the ersn and e money Bob spent it with? He has $20, too.
Plus there is no growth in your economy. There is no value added production. For example, i make widgets that everyone wants. they all give me a dollar for my widget. Someone ese makes a vidget, but only a few people want his vidget. I get rich, he doesnt. how do you even that out?
"How about the ersn and e money Bob spent it with? He has $20, too."
I can't decipher that sentence.
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"Plus there is no growth in your economy"
If you automate a job, that frees up that worker to produce some additional good or service.
If you develop a more efficient production method that uses less resources, that frees up those resources to be used in some additional goods and services.
That is how you grow your economy. There is nothing in this post that says we will not do that.
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"For example, i make widgets that everyone wants. they all give me a dollar for my widget. Someone ese makes a vidget, but only a few people want his vidget. I get rich, he doesnt. how do you even that out?"
Everyone, including entrepreneurs, are paid according to the national compensation plan. If you build a widget better than your competition, you would get paid the highest amount in the compensation plan which is $460k.
You only get paid for working. You do not get paid unearned income (income from investing) such as profit, rent, interest, dividends or capital gains.
Everyone who works gets rich since the lowest pay is $115k.
Who s goingn to enforce this National Compensation Plan?
How is the bank going to pay salaries when it cant earn income from interest?
How will it pay utilities? Benefits? Pension?
How do you prevent real estate appreciation AND real estate losses? How wouod you stop oil from wild price fluctuations?
Where would any pension come from?
"Who s goingn to enforce this National Compensation Plan?"
The police enforce all laws.
"How is the bank going to pay salaries when it cant earn income from interest? "
They charge fees. See my other comment to you where I answer this question.
"How will it pay utilities? Benefits? Pension? "
You pay your utility bills with the income you get from working.
The pension will be paid for out of a tax. A 10% tax would be able to fund a $40k per year pension to everyone who is retired.
"How do you prevent real estate appreciation AND real estate losses"
You can't.
But since there is a maximum income, there is only so much any person can pay for a home. And since nobody can get paid unearned income, there will be no real estate speculation.
"How wouod you stop oil from wild price fluctuations? "
Since nobody can get paid unearned income, there will be no oil speculation. So that would limit fluctuation. But since demand and supply is not constant, prices will fluctuate.
How would you stop a European from buying all the oil futures and forcing Americans to spend every cent to get a scarce item like oil? Right now if he did that, other investors might sell him short but since in your America, we cant invest for a profit, he would destroy us.
Today markets are very efficient. They are efficient because every trade has a buyer and seller. In your system we would be helpless.
There would be no speculation in American oil.
And since America is the largest market, we will carry more clout in foreign markets than some European speculator on futures.
Foreign countries who produce oil will be more interested in making American consumers happy, not some European speculator.
Now you are simply guessing. We would totally be at the mercy of foreign speculators. We arent self sufficient. And oil producing countries are onlyntoo happy to gouge Americans, have you been in a coma these last years?
Oil producing countries dont give 2 shits about America, they all simply want the highest price. A speculator will give them the highest price.
Speculators can do that today. But they don't because they will wind up with overpriced oil that they cannot sell.
What will actually happen is a huge black market will arise, as it did in the Soviet Union. Prices rise with scarcity. You cant prevent scarcity.
There will be no black market since no good or service will be banned. If you have something that people want, you can just sell it in the white market.
Of course, some people will break the law and try to get paid more money than they are entitled to just like some people do today. Socialism does not put an end to crime and make people perfect. It just significantly reduces it.
And if Bob cant pay back his loan, there is a loss to the bank. The bank cant pull that money from the system, becase it doesnt have the money.
You just contradicted yourself, again. I can only sell it till I earn $460000. Then you are forcing me to stop. However I am going to keep selling them underground, because I want a house in Aspen too, and a loft in NYC. I want a few nice sports cars, too. You cant stop me from wanting. Its basic human nature.
"You just contradicted yourself, again"
I don't contradict myself.
You keep on saying I contradict myself without pointing out the statements that contradict each other.
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"I can only sell it till I earn $460000"
If you want to start a business, you will apply for funding and that funding will include enough to pay you an income according to the national compensation plan.
You could also use your own money to start your own business. The revenue it generates you can use to pay back your investment and pay you an income according to the national compensation plan.
If you take more money than that amount, you will be breaking the law and will go to jail.
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"I want a house in Aspen too, and a loft in NYC. I want a few nice sports cars, too."
If you make $460k for working 20 hours per week, you will have enough money and time to live in a home in Aspen and in NYC.
So you pumish success with prison. Good social plan.
Hilarious.
We reward success with paying you a higher income.
We punish people who steal money from workers by taking unearned income they did not work for like profit.
Just because your revenue exceeded your expenses does not mean you worked more hours or harder than any other worker, so you are not entitled to any more income.
you're trying to have a rational conversation with irrational people who want to destroy capitalism and replace it with..............?
price rise if we are willing to pay higher prices
And people will pay higher prices to live in Paris, France instead of Buffalo, NY.
If you sprain your ankle, do you amputate your leg ?
Of course not. You amputate it when the leg is mauled and infected beyond repair.
Capitalism is mauled and infected beyond repair. It needs to be amputated.
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Nearly the entire world is capitalist and nearly the entire world lives in abject poverty.
Half the world lives on less than $2.50 per day and 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day.
In the US, after 200+ years of industrializing, thanks to capitalism, it still has 50% of the population living in or near poverty, and 97% of all workers earning a below average income, and 50% of wage earners making less than $26k, and 18% of all available workers who cannot find a full-time job, and 55% of the people who do work being wasted by having them do pointless jobs that machines can already do.
It can't even do the simple task of housing all our kids. 1800 kids, from just one Florida county alone, are living in cars.
Nearly everyone in the US is broke.
But they are not broke because there is not enough income or resources to go around. They are broke because capitalism is a system that lets a tiny ruling class use their power to unfairly take so much of the available income - income that they have not earned and don't deserve - that there is simply not enough income left over to pay everyone else.
Everyone in the US in 2012 should be wealthy. We produce $15.4 trillion in goods and services every year.
That is just under $50,000 per year for every man, woman and child. That is $200,000 per year for a family of 4. That is $65 per hour for each hour every worker works. That is $135,000 per year for every full-time worker.
No matter how you slice it, that is clearly enough income to make everyone in this country wealthy.
So where is capitalism working?
It is working by concentrating the wealth that the workers of the world produce into the hands of a tiny, wealthy, ruling class.
Capitalism just swapped one ruling monarchy for another.
Capitalism is a system that is based on theft, exploitation and welfare for the rich. The result of that process is an enormous concentration of income in the hands of the few, leaving everyone else broke, who then use their wealth to rule over the world.
It is based entirely on privatizing the Earth and its resources which can only be done through theft and murder. It pays half the income the workers produce to investors who do zero work in producing anything. Investment income is just welfare for the rich; it allows guys like Mitt Romney to get paid $20 million per year every year without working a single day. And it allocates the remaining income based on bargaining power which allows a tiny ruling class of wealthy people to use their power to exploit 97% of the workers by paying them just a fraction of what they produce so the ruling class can keep the difference for themselves.
If you don't understand how privatization is theft, investor income is welfare for the rich and income is allocated based on exploitation, you can read a detailed explanation of these claims here.
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socialism doesnt work. capitalism does.
You must be blind.
Nah he's just a brainwashed republican troll harassing us.
shmule, you're the blind one.
Obviously, you can not even see the correct spelling of my name.
i know what is typed in shmule.
What? capitalism works to drive the major portion of the population into the dirt while it also destroys the environment and starts wars?
capitalism has lifted up more people than any other economic system. it does not destory the environment ( you fell for that?) more wars have been started by NON capitalistic countries. do some reading.
Capitalism works!?!
Nearly the entire world is capitalist and nearly the entire world lives in abject poverty.
Half the world lives on less than $2.50 per day and 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day.
In the US, after 200+ years of industrializing, thanks to capitalism, it still has 50% of the population living in or near poverty, and 97% of all workers earning a below average income, and 50% of wage earners making less than $26k, and 18% of all available workers that cannot find a full-time job, and 55% of the people who do work being wasted by having them do pointless jobs that machines can already do.
Where is it working?
It is working by concentrating the wealth that the workers of the world produce into the hands of tiny, wealthy, ruling class.
Capitalism just swapped one ruling monarchy for another.
capitalism has lifted up more people ( economically ) than any other system. for the last 42 months the unemployment rate , under obama has been over 8%. obama, his owners, his adminstration ,is/are purposely killling this country.
All our wealth and progress has come from science and technology, not capitalism.
The incentive to do science and produce technology is a love of science and getting paid to do it, not capitalism.
Capitalism is just a way to unfairly concentrate all the wealth science has produced into the hands of tiny ruling class. It enables a tiny minority to live off the backs of the majority.
inventors and innovators, able to do what they want because of capitalism. wealth, the amount of money , is not a fixed amount. invent, discover, start up a business and you can make money. wealth is not a fixed pie chart.
You need to read my comment again.
The problem with capitalism isn't that it doesn't let people invent or do science. The problem is that it unfairly takes the vast majority of the wealth produced and concentrates it in the hands of a tiny ruling class.