Forum Post: You guys are kidding yourselves if you think capitalism will change
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 5, 2011, 11:12 p.m. EST by DemandTheGoodLifeDotCom
(3360)
from New York, NY
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Capitalism is a system of inequality. I'm not sure why you expect anything but inequality.
Capitalism is a system of greed. I'm not sure why you expect anything but greed.
Capitalism is a system of concentration of power. I'm not sure why you expect anything but concentration of power.
If you are against these things, the only solution is to end capitalism.
But the only thing you currently stand for is not liking inequality, power, and greed and you also stand for not being specific about what to do about it.
It makes no sense.
Be bold. Demand actual solutions. Demand that we replace capitalism with democracy, a system where power rests with everyone equally: equal votes, equal treatment under the law and EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL EFFORT.
If income was allocated democratically, and people were no longer treated like heads of cattle where your entire standard of living and quality life is dictated by your ability to sell yourself in the market, everyone would be wealthy. There would be no poverty or middle class or homeless or uneducated. And there would be little crime.
If income was allocated equally, everyone would get paid $127,000 per year.
Or if you wanted to pay the people who did the difficult jobs that required greater mental or physical effort twice as much as the rest of the jobs, everyone would get paid $115,000 per year and everyone who worked in science, computers, engineering, medicine, construction, mining, or farming would get paid $230,000 per year.
When every citizen has access to a job with those incomes as a right, there would be no social problems.
But instead, you guys go on tv proudly declaring your lack of a plan or goals or demands or solutions.
you have some fine points, but your too negative. we can change. the system we have now is corporate oligarchy, not capitalism. Capitalism is a con scam fiction and mythology which we have been told to make us think we have economic freedom when in fact the corporate oligarchy holds us all captive in a hotel california remix casino.
I disagree. I think you cannot change anything if you deliberately organize a movement around the idea of not having a clear goal.
If you want to change, you need a goal to change to and a plan to get there. Complaining alone is not going to change anything.
"If you want to change, you need a goal to change to and a plan to get there. Complaining alone is not going to change anything." Our goal is clear. To garner enough attention to the problems people are facing so maybe we may engage in a more informed dialogue as to how we address these problems. So far, we have succeeded.
Your point about having a goal not withstanding, it is worth noting that there is more going on at the moment than complaining. We wouldn't be having this exchange if that was all that was happening.
Our exchange on forums and elsewhere has been going on since humans gained the ability to speak. What we need is not more exchanging of ideas. What we need is real action, real change.
The tea party has a simple demand: get government out of the economy so we can have pure capitalism.
It would be nice if OWS had a similarly simple but opposite demand: get capitalism out of the economy so we can have pure democracy.
I think the trick will be finding the core that an optimal number of people can agree on so that we can act based on that core.
I think it is in the majority's best interest to move away from capitalism. However, I don't think this is the core that the optimal number of people will agree on.
I think the core will have to do with a less corrupt political system and a more reasonable distribution of resources based on productivity.
Any form of government is limited by the quality of those who rule. This is true of a democracy and the ruling body--we the people--need to improve our ability to (self) rule.
Improving our critical thinking is a crucial first step to this.
So if you think the majority's best interest is to move away from capitalism, then the task at hand is to show people that moving away from capitalism is the solution.
That is what needs to be promoted at the rallies and in the media and that is what should be demanded in society.
We shouldn't be promoting thinking about the problems.
I agree that one of the tasks at hand is to show that people that moving away from capitalism is part of the solution.
I think that improving our ability to think about problems is a way to accomplish this.
I'm not sure what you mean by we need to improve our ability to think.
I think we need to show people that you would earn $115k or $230k which will likely triple your income.
You would not pay interest which would cut your mortgage in half.
Instead of paying hundreds of thousands to go to school, you would get paid a reasonable salary to attend school instead.
We would use our existing automation to eliminate half the jobs we do so that the only work you have to do is the kind of work you would do even if you weren't getting paid.
Without anyone relying on oil for their livelihood, we can begin a transition to a green, renewable economy.
That is how you convince people to demand change. You tell them how it effects their bottom line.
The point is that there are many people who act against there own interests.
For example, a lot of people who aren't rich support the right of the rich to exploit them. This may be because they see themselves as being among the rich some day.
I'm guessing you see why this is bad and do not support that "right". However, there are many reasons why telling people how something affects their bottom line may not be enough. Keith Stanovich tells us that "lack of intellectual engagement, cognitive inflexibility, need for closure, belief perseverance, confirmation bias, over-confidence, ad insensitivity to inconsistency" are reasons for why people act and believe poorly despite evidence and reasons to act and believe otherwise.
Does Keith have a better way to convince people to change than, for example, showing them that their salary will triple? I'm open to anything.
shouldnt that read; get capitalism out of the government so we can have pure democracy.
No, read my original post. I think capitalism should be replaced with democracy.
How do you replace an economic system with a political system? That's like saying, "I'm morally opposed to fossil fuels, so now i'm going to fill my car with cars." And capitalism is not a system of inequality. It is a system of equal opportunity. Outcomes may not be equal, but i don't think you deserve as much as me.
"capitalism is not a system of inequality. It is a system of equal opportunity."
lol
You think everyone has the same opportunity as Donald Trump who was given $50 million from his father? Or Donald's kids who are born into his billionaire family?
"i don't think you deserve as much as me."
I think I do if I work the same amount of hours and work a job of similar difficulty. And if we paid everyone based on effort, everyone would be wealthy. You would earn $115k or $230k per year which is more than what 97% of workers make.
Capitalism is as much a political system as democracy. Economics is short for the term political economy.
Democracy is a Greek word for people power. It is a system where power rests with everyone equally. It can be used to run a government, an economy, a single business, a family or it can be used in deciding what to cook for dinner.
Capitalism is a system of inequality. It is the exact opposite of democracy. It is a system where the goal is to accumulate as much personal wealth as possible.
We should replace capitalism, a system of inequality, with democracy, a system of equality because we are civilized and humane and all humans deserve the dignity of being treated equally.
i like the idea of clear goals. and clear etc. which isn't happening. so far.
Capitalism is component of every economic system. It is either practiced illegally by thugs, distorted by politicians who are in bed with corporations or it operates under the umbrella of a free market. It is under the umbrella of a free market that we are best protected from the evils of capitalism.
sorry, no, capitalism is a specific system and that system does not exist, has never existed, and has always been a fiction used to hide the actual form of government which has drifted from feudalism to corporate oligarchy through merchantilism- oligarchy in every case. After making this point over and over its amazing that people still think that they know better when they are in fact duped and ignorant and spouting the lies they have been programmed with. there has never been capitalism. there is no such creature. We are not fighing against unicorns or other things that don't exist and have never existed nor should we fight for them to exist when the meaningful option and direction is a free market democracy. Everyone stop arguing stupid nonsense from ignorant opinion and pick up a political science textbook.
You say capitalism has never existed? Why? Because we haven't witnessed its pure form? Then I can argue that democracy has never existed, and we have never seen democracy before. You are brainwashed and duped to believe that democracy exists. Stop arguing stupid nonsense from ignorant opinion and pick up a political science textbook. (By the way, just because you are working on your B.S. in polisci, doesn't make your political beliefs superior or infallible. Your logic is just as fallacious as every other douchebag with a feeling of self-importance)
no, because what has existed is assorted forms of oligarchy and feudalism. Democracy has never existed. I'm not brainwashed quite the reverse. you are brainwahsed. i am talking absolute factual science truths over here.
whats really comical is you say i think democracy exists. your not paying attention. i think its your turn o pick up a political science textbook and.. its quite ironic that you would take that particular tack against me since that MY line. My logic is absolutely impeccable. Capitalism does not exist and has never existed. neither does democracy.
http://occupywallst.org/forum/thetruth-socialismcapitalismcommunismmarxism/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/capitalism-versus-corporatism/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/help-me-understand/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/capitalism-a-love-story/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/sociology/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/energy-101-solution/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/ethics/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/break-your-left-right-conditioning/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/nader-kucinich-and-paul/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/5-facts-you-should-know-about-the-wealthiest-one-p/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/i-am-homeless-joe-jp-morgan-chase-accidentally-for/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/can-we-end-the-fed/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/why-end-the-federal-reserve-and-what-do-you-replac/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/teaching-the-occupation/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/this-forum-needs-structure/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/ows-is-not-your-personal-billboard-for-your-politi/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/systems-theory-primer/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/organize-inform-take-action-effect-change/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/better-website-needed/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/stop-playing-the-devils-games/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/nonviolence-the-only-path/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/ows-not-against-capitalism/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/this-is-not-about-political-stripe-it-is-about-bas/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/national-initiative-for-democracy/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/a-third-political-party-the-movement-of-the-middle/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/300-fema-camps/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/ows-is-a-false-flag-operation/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/why-this-will-not-work/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/paradigm-shift-now/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/a-proposal-for-focus/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/stop-the-bullshit-posts-and-get-organized/
Agreed. This title post is just SO helpful. (Not)
http://xxxbunker.com/#!/1320594890418V4383424
You are idealist too in thinking that there would be no social problems. I am all for equal pay for equal effort but the truth is we are not all equal and we don't all put in equal effort. If I've spent more time developing my skills then I deserve at least a little bit for putting in more effort than someone who has settled for the easiest route. Capitalism should be about rewarding people for what they do. Being able to work and live at a reasonable wage should be a right, but we should have the opportunity to live better than our neighbor if we want and work hard. You want the opportunity to shape life as you see fit and trying to smash us all down to the same level is equivalent of denying someone else that choice. Having to work in a system where you get nothing for working twice as hard as the person next to you breeds resentment.
I don't advocate equal pay. I advocate equal pay for equal effort.
If you work a harder job than someone else, you would get twice the pay.
Paying everyone equally based on effort will not squash everyone down. It would do the exact opposite. It would raise the incomes of 97% of all workers. 50% of all workers would see their pay at least triple.
Unions try to do this. I am not well studied on the subject though I often find myself wondering why it is that toyota can put out a product of significant quality, while GM(with unions and this more 'equal' pay) find themselves impotent to compete with them.
Keep in mind that while the toyota workers don't get paid as much, they do have a good paycheck.
I think the answer to this quandary will see how we might be able to better provide equal pay without sacrificing quality and workmanship.
Boots
Business is not perfect and never will be. Markets change. One day Toyota will be on top, the next day GM.
I started a new thread with more detail about this idea of replacing capitalism with democracy here:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/are-you-rebels-or-revolutionaries-choose-revolutio/
Then lets end capitolism. It has been no good for the 99%
I agree. It has only enriched the 400 and screwed the rest of us and the Planet.
So right. I can't even breath from the pollution the 1% put out. Just a lil humor,but its the truth.
That's BO
And how about the fracking that's causing earthquakes and screwing up our drinking water.
Idiot jnr
LMAO again
I reckon before you overthrow something you should learn how to spell it
I reckon jnr
Idiot
it can't work if one can't spell it.
Capitalism doesn't need to change. It just needs to play inside the boxing ring.
This protest will not end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt9d2iwSBMc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePoKwgL6NUM
Capitalism will never stay within a ring and provide the best for everyone in society. The only way to fix capitalism is to get rid of capitalism. So long as you have capitalism, you will have vast inequality in income. And with vast inequality in income, you will have vast inequality in power. And the ones with the power will have the means to shape society to benefit them. The people with little power will never get a fair deal in life.
You need to eliminate the system of inequality. You need to eliminate capitalism. There is absolutely no benefit to capitalism whatsoever.
It needs to be replaced with the humane system of democracy.
Capitalism has already changed many times since it started. When we had the purest form of capitalism, we also had sweat shops, child labor, and monopolies. We have improved a lot by changing the laws, but we have a long way to go.
Correct, Capitalism is the problem, but the solution is, believe it or not, government. What we need in this country is a government that will protect its citizens from the Capitalist greedbots. Taxes and regulations could and should be used to force a more fair distribution of wealth. The goal should be to have a self-sufficient country where we actually build and create everything we need here, by and for each other. We need profit and wealth caps, force the money to be distributed fairly. In other words, in my opinion what we need is to become a well-governed,centralized Capitalist Democracy.
Capitalism will never get out of your government unless you get rid of capitalism. So long as you have capitalism, you will have vast inequality in income. And with vast inequality in income, you will have vast inequality in power. And the ones with the power will have the means to shape society to benefit them. The people with little power will never get a fair deal in life.
You need to eliminate the system of inequality. You need to eliminate capitalism. There is absolutely no benefit to capitalism whatsoever.
The only fair system is equal pay for equal effort. Your pay should be based on the amount of time you work and the difficulty of your job. If you and I both work hard for 40 hours doing a job of similar difficulty, we should get paid the same.
Under a democratic system, with no capitalism, everyone will be wealthy.
say we both make wooden bowls we both work 40 hours but you make 7 bowls and i make 4(i screwed up turning one of my bowls and it set me back), all of the same perfect quality do i deserve the same pay as you
Yes we do both deserve the same pay.
But if you continue to make half the bowls I do, your bowls will be twice the price. If people were not willing to pay that price, your business will become unprofitable and be shut down and you will be making nothing. You would then have to get a new job or improve your bowl making skill.
Do you know what sodium is?? You think maybe its that salt on your table. That's almost right. Sodium is in table salt, but so is chlorine. Now taken on its own, a few grams of sodium will make contact with the moisture in your mouth and act a lot like plastic explosives. Well I'm sure you can imagine what will happen. Chlorine isn't exactly a similar situation, but I'm sure if you've ever been around it you know its quite deadly in its pure gaseous form. Put the two together and you have nice friendly taste enhancing table salt.
We can think of our Government in much the same way. On its own pure capitalism is quite deadly to the populous, but mitigated with a little social responsibility it is a nice friendly life enhancing Government. Mix in a whole lot of freedom and its a perfect mix. In our interactions just as in nature purity is a terrible thing.
Boots
I disagree with your analogy.
Capitalism will never get out of your government unless you get rid of capitalism. So long as you have capitalism, you will have vast inequality in income. And with vast inequality in income, you will have vast inequality in power. And the ones with the power will have the means to shape society to benefit them. The people with little power will never get a fair deal in life.
You need to eliminate the system of inequality. You need to eliminate capitalism. There is absolutely no benefit to capitalism whatsoever.
Capitalism is the driving force behind production. It provides a man in his innate selfishness a sense of satisfaction in life. It gives us a measuring stick by which we can see the result of our toil. Without capitalism our society as we know it would stagnate and fail. The only ones left standing will be those in power. That power will be solely government. I know in my heart that those in government would take everything as the corporations are taking everything now.
I agree about inequity, but you must admit that there is inequity in this world whether you're talking about money, intelligence, good, evil, responsibility, selfishness, or any other number of human attributes. Money is only one of the symbolic representations of inequity in our value systems.
I would wager to say that you sir work hard in life. You study and know what you are speaking about. You know how society can work if only there were enough participants. I hope you find those in this country of ours who share your beliefs, but don't get your hopes up. It is some amazing faith in the human animal that I see in your statement. One day maybe the human race will be able to achieve this, but that day is not today. We need our comforting capitalism balanced with social responsibility, but above all we must have our freedom.
Boots
Capitalism is not the driving force behind society, science is. Capitalism just allocates the wealth produced by science as unequally as possible.
Democracy is a Greek word for people power. It is a management system where power rests with everyone equally. It can be used to run a government, an economy, a single business, a family, or it can be used to decide what to cook for dinner.
Capitalism is a management system too. But the difference is that power in capitalism is allocated unequally. So democracy, in essence, is the exact opposite of capitalism.
For the most part, the democratic economy would run largely as it does now. Consumers will decide what is produced based on how they spend their money. Entrepreneurs with new ideas will go to banks for funding. Companies will be individually run and managed. Companies must generate enough revenue to cover expenses in order to stay in business. Managers will be responsible for hiring, firing and company performance. And companies will still compete for your business.
However, there will be three primary differences that make it democratic: 1) Income will be allocated equally based on effort so that everyone is guaranteed a very high income. 2) Investment will no longer come from personal savings. 3) A group of managers will be elected to ensure that the general direction of the economy is also accountable to the public.
I started a new thread with more detail about this idea of replacing capitalism with democracy here:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/are-you-rebels-or-revolutionaries-choose-revolutio/
Capitalism is the only true free market, but we have also entered a social contract with government to protect our interests. Think John Locke and Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy believed he had an obligation as a well born wealthy American to do a service to the country, both in the military, police, and as a politician. He checked the power of unregulated big business and established a square deal for both the common people and encouraged economic prosperity. Obviously wealth redistribution is stupid, we all need to earn our daily bread. But we cannot afford to allow politician actively in league with big business. They get financed by businesses which expect favors when the person gets elected. We need a 3rd party!
"Capitalism is the only true free market"
There is no freedom for people who lack money. The lack of money exists for the 46 million poor people in US and limited freedom exists for the 97% who make less than the $127k average US income.
Freedom exists for the independently wealthy only.
"Obviously wealth redistribution is stupid"
Every time you spend a dollar you are redistributing wealth.
"we all need to earn our daily bread"
And unlike in capitalism, in a democracy your earnings are fair. You are guaranteed to get the same income as everyone else who works as hard as you.
Democracy is not an economic philosophy. People make things or provide services and get paid for it. That is how trade has been working for thousands of years. The price for a certain product or service depends on the value the consumer places on it. There will always be rich and not so rich people. Enforcing prices and wages will not work. Blaming capitalism is a common ruse used by communists to gain state control in the form of various price and supply controls. That is a dangerous path. Russia tried it and it only led to more corruption. There is nothing wrong in making money or being wealthy if it was done by fair means. It is not the fault of a rich person that someone who is poor cannot afford the same things the rich can. This gets philosophical. What we can ask for is fairness in the system. People can then get what they deserve in proportion to the value they add to the society. Unlike these bankers now who do nothing of value and get paid in billions of tax layers money.
"What we can ask for is fairness in the system"
I don't know how anything but equality can be fair. How is it fair for a kid to be born in a ghetto with nothing and a kid to be born a Trump and have access to everything?
How is it fair for someone to make 100,000 times more income than another person?
The only fair system is equal pay for equal effort. Your pay should be based on the amount of time you work and the difficulty of your job. If you and I both work hard for 40 hours doing a job of similar difficulty, we should get paid the same.
If you are better at the job than me, then you will have the ability to work on any job you want, the personal satisfaction of achieving mastery in your field and the respect of your peers. If I am merely incompetent, then I should be fired.
That is the only system that is fair.
People make millions of dollars based on luck or family heritage. There are millions of people who work just as hard as they do that will never make millions. People don't have a crystal ball to predict what works in the market. There is no secret step-by-step formula that guarantees you business success. It is all luck.
And that is not fair. Casinos should be based on luck. The economy should be based on effort.
"There is nothing wrong in making money or being wealthy if it was done by fair means."
There absolutely is something wrong with it. There is only so much income to go around. If the rich consume most of it, everyone else gets poorer.
That system of allowing people to get rich has left 46 million in poverty, 16% underemployed, 1 in every 5 kids in poverty, 25% of all blacks in poverty, 97% of all workers earning a below average income, 52 million without health insurance, and 50% of all workers doing pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology.
There is something terribly, terribly wrong with that.
"Russia tried it and it only led to more corruption."
Russia was a poor, backwards, undeveloped country run by a brutal dictatorship with no transparency, no accountability and above all, no democracy. It was also a command economy, not a market economy. Bureaucrats decided what you can and cannot have, not consumers.
I don't advocate anything like the soviet system.
"The price for a certain product or service depends on the value the consumer places on it."
Prices will no longer be some randomly negotiated number based on differential negotiating power.
Prices in a democratic economy will now become a genuine, technical, science-based number. The price of everything will be the number of total labor hours it took to make times whatever the hourly rate of the employees are.
So a reduction in price will represent real efficiency because you need to reduce labor in order to reduce price. You can't just find cheaper labor and pretend that you are more efficient.
Of course, consumers are the ultimate arbiter of value, so if they do not value a good or service at a certain price, they will not buy it. Managers will then either become more efficient so they can lower the price. Or they will stop producing it.
"Democracy is not an economic philosophy"
Democracy is a Greek word for people power. It is a system where power rests with everyone equally. It can be used to run a government, an economy, a single business, a family or it can be used in deciding what to cook for dinner.
Capitalism is a system of inequality. It is the exact opposite of democracy. It is a system where the goal is to accumulate as much personal wealth as possible.
We should replace capitalism, a system of inequality, with democracy, a system of equality because we are civilized and humane and all humans deserve the dignity of being treated equally.
you have every opportunity to make more money, but you have to earn it. that is freedom.
That is not freedom. Freedom is the ability to act without coercion or restraint. People who have no money have no freedom. And the ability of a kid in the ghetto to earn money is vastly different than the ability of a kid in the Trump family to earn money.
A ghetto kid has little chance at freedom. A trump kid is given unlimited freedom at birth.
Is that Trumps fault? Your anger is justified but misdirected. We need a society that takes care of the under privileged. Not by penalizing the rich but by providing support for everyone that wishes to work hard and come up in life. Basic things like education, healthcare etc should be affordable by all. Beyond that, opportunities exist and those who work hard can make it big. That used to be the American dream. These expenses are handled by tax. We can't call for taking away someone's money just because they make more money. That is just plain old theft! Well, unless you are taking it from Goldman sachs :)
No, it is not Trumps fault. It is the system's fault.
I don't want to change Trump. I want to change the system.
"We need a society that takes care of the under privileged. Not by penalizing the rich"
There is absolutely no way to provide support for anybody without taxing the rich. But having rich and poor is inhumane, barbaric and uncivilized. We should have rich only. And democracy makes that possible.
under your democratic economy, you are indeed penalizing Trump by saying he should be paid the same amount as someone else who works as hard as him, even though he is the capital investor.
Even if this is a good idea, you can not reasonably enforce it.
Yes, Trump would fare much worse in a democratic system. What I meant was I don't want to just change Trump, I want to change the system.
In a democratic system, capital will not come from Trump or any other private investor. It will not come from savings.
A portion of GDP will be set aside each year for investment. That money will be allocated to banks for them to manage.
Just like we can enforce capitalism, we can enforce democracy.
Why should I trust other people with my capital if i made it myself through my own hard work?
capitalism does not require enforcement.
any laws and regulations associated with the economy, further distance us from capitalism and a free-market. what we actually have right now is mercantilism.
If there was no government, the poor, who outnumber the rich 50-1, would never tolerate the raw deal they were getting. Workers would band together in unions like they have done in the past and take over the businesses they worked at. At some point, the random, erratic nature of business takeovers would be replaced with a more stable, institutionalized economic system of equality so that every worker can enjoy the same rights. We would then have democracy, and no capitalism.
Taxing is fine. We should all contribute to the common good. I'm just against portraying all rich people as evil. It's just the corrupt ones.
I don't think rich people are evil. I am not for prosecuting the people who caused the financial collapse. They are just trying to do their best within the system.
It is the system that is evil. It is the system that needs to go.
Well they didnt do anything illegal. Most of what they did was deemed legal by our system that they cleverly managed to fix to their advantage! I agree the system needs to change.
Agree with what u are saying, 'but that is the way it is", is no longer acceptable, demand change and accountability, Break out the guillotine if necessary. bring down the 1% and those who protect them for a few extra crumbs. Only then will the power structure change. Bring down those who say we are trampling on their freedom, when ours has already been taken.
Most of the members of the Occupy Wall Street movement have an inadequate grasp of what capitalism actually is, and why it can't ever be fully "reformed."
http://wp.me/pgGDG-K4
The tea party had a simple message: eliminate government from the economy.
It would be nice if occupy wall street can be the opposite of that: eliminate capitalism from the economy.
It is very simple to show how people would fare significantly better with real, tangible numbers (like a $115k or $230k income and zero interest loans) in a democratic economy compared to a capitalist economy (where the average worker earns just $33k and interest doubles your mortgage payment).
Its not capitalism causing this pain it is corporatism.
You think inequality, poverty and unemployment would end if government was completely hands off? You are wrong. Those are all central features that make capitalism work.
Without inequality there would be no incentive to invest. And there has never been a single period where capitalism had full employment or no poverty.
I don't need an incentive to invest/contribute to my society
I need time
poverty does not need to be connected to unemployment
ronnie and georgie and dicky have lied us into a capitalist swamp full of leeches. and we let them. remember TR - he broke the trusts by force of his own will. unfortunately, today we have no TR. but we can attack the monster where it feeds ( no - i dont mean with with holy water and garlic -
We need to pick an issue that is simple - that is popular - how about an issue
that 83% of Americans agree on -
that 56% of TP agree on -
that will bring together the people in OWS with the people outside of OWS
Our only goal should be to pass a constitutional amendment to counter Supreme Court decisions Citizens United (2010) & Buckley v. Valeo (1976), that enable unlimited amounts of anonymous money to flood into our political system.
It will be as short and concise as possible, a legally constructed
“corporations and other organizations are not a persons and have no personhood rights”
and
“money is not free speech”.
We don’t have to explain or persuade people to accept our position – we have to persuade them to ACT based on their own position. Pursuing this goal will prove to the world that we, at OWS, are a serious realistic Movement, with serious realistic goals. Achieving this goal will make virtually every other goal – from jobs, to taxes, to infrastructure , to Medicare – much easier to achieve –
by disarming our greatest enemy – GREED.
THE SUCCESS STORY OF THE AMENDING PROCESS The Prohibition movement started as a disjointed effort by conservative teetotalers who thought the consumption of alcohol was immoral. They ransacked saloons and garnered press coverage here and there for a few years. Then they began to gain support from the liberals because many considered alcohol partially responsible for spousal and child abuse, among other social ills. This odd alliance, decided to concentrate on one issue nationally—a constitutional amendment. They pressured all politicians on every level to sign a pledge to support the amendment. Any who did not, they defeated easily at the ballot box. By being a single-issue constituency attacking from all sides of the political spectrum, they very quickly amassed enough votes (2/3) to pass the amendment in Congress. And, using the same tactics, within just 17 months they were successful in getting ¾ of the state legislatures to ratify the constitutional amendment into law. (Other amendments were ratified even faster: Eight—the 7th, 12th, 13th, 15th, 17th, 20th, 21st and 26th—took less than a year. The 26th, granting 18-year-olds the right to vote, took just three months and eight days.)
If they could tie the left and right into a success -
WHY CAN'T WE??????????
I feel that we should stay with this simple text to overturn CU:
”corporations are not people” and “money is not free speech”
for four simple reasons and one – not so simple:
1
83% of Americans have already opposed CU in the ABC/Washington post poll and the above
IS THEIR POSITION ALREADY.
2
We don’t have to work to convince people on the validity of our position.
3
Simple is almost always better.
4
This simple Amendment is REQUIRED to overturn CU.
And all other electoral reform can be passed through the normal legislative process.
5
OWS and these pages are chock full of ( mostly ) excellent ideas to improve our country.
All of them have strong advocates – and some have strong opposition.
None of them has been “pre-approved” by 83% of Americans !
Pursuing this goal – without additional specifics is exactly what Americans want.
What do we want? Look at that almost endless list of demands – goals - aims.
Tax the rich. End the Fed. Jobs for all, Medicare for all. So easy to state! Can you imagine how hard it would be to formulate a “sales pitch” for any of these to convince your Republican friends to vote for any of them?
83% of Americans have ALREADY “voted” against CU. And 76% of the Rs did too.
All we have to do ask Americans is to pressure their representatives – by letters - emails – petitions.
Wanna take your family on vacation?
Convince the 7 year old and the 10 year old to go to Mt Rushmore.
Then try to convince them to go to Disneyland.
Prioritizing this goal will introduce us to the world – not as a bunch of hippie radical anarchist socialist commie rabblerousers – but as a responsible, mature movement that is fighting for what America wants.
I feel that using the tactics of the NRA, the AARP an the TP – who all represent a minority – who have successfully used their voting power to achieve their minority goals - plus the Prohibition Amendment tactics – bringing all sides together - is a straight path for us to success that cannot fail to enable us to create and complete one MAJORITY task.
After you have eliminated the ability for corps to anonymously donate, you are still left with every single problem that exists: 97% of all workers making a below average income, enormous income inequality, 16% underemployment, 46 million in poverty and 55% of all workers doing pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology.
yes i agree - i put forth the amendment idea not as the terminus - but as the origin. A first step - that most Americans ALREADY agree with - will solidify our reputation as not crazy - and enable us to draw in many people from the middle to these other causes.
Although most might agree, most do not care.
Nobody sits up at night worrying about political donations. But plenty sit up at night worrying about whether they can pay the bills.
If you advocated an idea that would increase the income of the average worker by 400%, not only would you have an issue most people agree with, it is also something that most deeply care about.
Half of all workers make just 20% of what the average income is and struggle. 46 million are in poverty. They need more income, not reform of political donations.
And if you advocate a plan that will get them more income, that is what they will get excited and motivated about.
are you trying to tell me that greed motivates! ? if i was smart enough, i would come up with a plan to feed millions or educate millions - that cost nothing and had the support of the vast majority. We dont need to "motivate" againt CU - they already "voted" 83% to get rid of it.
"if i was smart enough, i would come up with a plan to feed millions or educate millions - that cost nothing and had the support of the vast majority"
We produce $15 trillion in income each year which is enough to make every worker wealthy.
We just need to allocate that income fairly. We need to allocate it democratically.
In a democracy, not only should you get a right to equal votes, you should also get a right to equal income for equal work.
Equal income for equal work means that the only legitimate, justifiable reason for paying one person more than another is to get them to do difficult work and to get them to give their maximum effort.
How much more you need to pay people in order to be an effective incentive can be determined scientifically. And you will not find any scientific study that says you need to pay people much more than 2 to 4 times their pay in order to be an effective incentive.
If income was allocated democratically, the political process would filter out reasonable compensation proposals that are supported by objective, scientific evidence and the worker population will vote directly on its approval.
But when differences in income are limited to just what is necessary to be an effective incentive, there is enough income to pay everyone between $115k and $460k, enough to make every citizen wealthy which would put an end to nearly all our social problems.
http://occupytogether.com/forum/discussion/901/solution-replace-capitalism-with-democracy/p1
Can Social Threefolding be the answer to our problems?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_threefolding
The solution is to make our economy democratic.
Just like you get a right to equal votes, you should get a right to equal income for equal work.
Equal income for equal work means that the only legitimate, justifiable reason for paying one person more than another is to get them to do difficult work and to get them to give their maximum effort.
How much more you need to pay people in order to be an effective incentive can be determined scientifically. And you will not find any scientific study that says you need to pay people much more than 2 to 4 times their pay in order to be an effective incentive.
In a democratic economy, the political process will filter out reasonable compensation proposals that are supported by objective, scientific evidence and the worker population will vote directly on its approval.
When differences in income are limited to just what is necessary to be an effective incentive, there is enough income to pay everyone between $115k and $460k, enough to make every citizen wealthy which would put an end to nearly all our social problems.
I'm sure that minorities of all types are thankful the US is a republic. We do not decide by the majority how to treat people (theoretically), we decide how a citizen should be treated then apply that to all citizens.
If you have to ask our demands you just don't get it, intentional or otherwise.
I'm sure black minorities are thankful that this republic enslaved them. I'm sure they are thankful that 150 years after their emancipation, 25% still live in poverty, 3 times the rate of whites.
Our country was founded on the enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality which is the modern interpretation of a liberal democracy. And those democratic principles of freedom and equality can be applied to more than just the law.
It can be applied to government and the economy. And that was what scared some of the Founders because an equal say in government and equal treatment in the economy would undermine their privileged positions within government and the economy.
That's why many Founders wanted a republic and not a democracy.
The Founders were comprised of rich, white, slave owners. Of course they were scared of democracy and equality. Madison, in particular, wanted an oligarchy and was scared that democracy might put an end to the privileged lifestyle him and the rest of the opulent enjoyed.
Madison wanted a society where only rich, white property owners could vote.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWvIWxh2yRs&feature=player_detailpage#t=511s
Um ok, my point is that had the minority, by definition, did not hold a majority position to allow themselves.... You know what never mind. Your reactionary belief that my comment had rascist connotations is way off base.
My comment doesn't say your comment was racist. It says this country was founded on a system that does not treat minorities equally.
Sorry, sleep deprivation. Midterms.
So sad and powerless sounding.
The PEOPLE have enormous power to change the way our corporations behave. They just need to USE it and start reflecting their VALUES in their day to day interactions with business. See http://occupywallst.org/forum/the-power-of-the-people/
97% of all workers make a below average income. The average income in 2010 was $135k. A fair wage for workers would be something close to that.
If I followed your advice by shopping only at the places that pay a fair wage, the only place I would be able to shop at would be at Goldman Sachs.
Consumers have no power over how income is allocated among wage earners.
The only way to eliminate income inequality and workers not getting paid a fair wage is to eliminate capitalism and replace it with a democratic system.
The current allocation of income is completely unjustified.
The purpose of income is to motivate people to work. If you limited differences in income to just what was necessary to motivate people to do hard work and give their maximum effort, you would be able to pay every worker between $115k and $460k, which is enough to make everyone wealthy and would put an end to all the problems OWS was protesting.
Income should be allocated democratically.
You'll have to deal with capitalism the same way you deal with any sociopathic syndrome...You keep it alive but in a locked room wearing a tightly fitted straight jacket. Feed it every once in a while, but don't get to carried away...
Capitalism is not a sociopathic syndrome. It is an economic system that works really well for a small amount of people. It needs to be replaced with a system that works really well for everyone.
Capitalism, in it's current form, is sociopathic..because it depends on others suffering greatly for the profit of the few..Which is exactly what you said..and it must be replaced.
Oh man.....we DO NOT have Capitalism. We have Corporatism. Get back to me if you want me to go over it!
Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. No matter what form of capitalism you have, it will lead to inequality of income because the goal is to maximize your wealth and the more wealth you have, the easier it is to earn more income.
Capitalism is a system of inequality. And inequality is the problem that needs to be fixed.
But Capitalism has REQUIREMENTS. And those requirements have to be in place!
1) Sound monetary policy ( which we do NOT have today and 2) Sound legal system ( we do NOT have either) We have a Two Tier Justice system that does NOT protect imminent domain in many cases.
Under Capitalism the markets constantly correct themselves without creating the Monopolies that exist today with the help of our Congress/Govt. TOO BIG TOO FAIL would not exist.
What you are demonstrating today are the monopolies created BY and WITH the help of GOVERNMENT! NOT free markets.
It does not matter what monetary policy or legal system you have, capitalism leads to greater and greater degrees of income inequality.
The more money you have, the easier it is to earn even more money.
For example, it is far easier for me to earn $1 million when I have $50 million in the bank than some guy who works a regular job to earn $1 million.
That's not fair.
So the rich get richer. And since they are getting richer, less and less money is left over for everyone else. So the poor get poorer.
That's not fair.
That is the problem with capitalism. Its inequality. You will never have a fair economic system that works well for everyone so long as you have capitalism.
Every and each economic system has to have accountability measures. Capitalism requires and cannot function without it. Neither can Keynesian economics. What you have witnessed is the breakdown of Keynesian safeguards by our government under a Keneysian model of economics.
You are missing my point. Capitalism is a system of inequality. Inequality is the problem. There is no version of capitalism that can work because there is no version of capitalism that doesn't have inequality.
97% of all workers make a below average income. The average income in the US in 2010 was $135k.
The wealthy in this country only have their wealth because they convinced 97% of the workforce to accept a below-average income.
The current allocation of income is completely unjustified.
The purpose of income is to motivate people to work. If you limited differences in income to just what was necessary to motivate people to do hard work and give their maximum effort, you would be able to pay every worker between $115k and $460k, which is enough to make everyone wealthy and would put an end to all the problems OWS was protesting.
Income should be allocated democratically.
You are missing the point.
It is NOT Capitalism that is failing.
It is Corporatism that is because of Keynesian economics with heavily involvement from our government in monetary policies and economic planning.
Again, you are missing my point.
Your non-corporatist brand of capitalism will still have inequality. And because of that inequality, you will still have the majority of workers making too little income.
Income will still be allocated based on how much wealth you have.
So it will still be an unfair, poorly performing system.
-]DemandTheGoodLifeDotCom1 points 2 hours ago
Permalink is just a way for you to link directly to a comment.
The reason why you cannot reply is because this site limits the amount of nesting allowed for replies. You just have to reply to the comment above it.
Hayek's ideology of liberal free markets is the source of all the inequality and problems in this world.
Liberal free markets work well for rich people who want to rule the world. They do not work well for you. By advocating it, you are just being one of their useful idiots.
Sorry but this site does allow for comments to be in order.
And FYI ...it is NOT Nobel Peace prize winner Friedrich Hayeks free markets that are failing.
It is the COLLECTIVIST idea of Corporatism ( Fascism) tha tis failing the people and the ROAD to this Corporatism happened through the COLLECTIVIST institution of the Federal Reserve and the breakdowns of the protections it required.
I am so sorry you are so oblivious and cannot help you.
The rich and powerful who run the world have got you hook line and sinker.
You will do far better in an economy that guarantees you a fair wage of at least $115k then in an unregulated, dog eat dog, sink or swim economic system.
Do you honestly think that what is preventing you from earning close to the $135k average income is government interference in the economy?
You are being incredibly gullible.
Actually I am not...I posted several times on infiltration and here is a professional vid on how 'revolutions' are staged in order to get 'desired' results..
If you study history, intelligence operations and U.S history of toppling democratically elected regimes world wide, propaganda techniques...etc etc.....
The Revolution Business - World
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXbA6yZY-8&feature=channel_video_title
Corporatism is when Corporations and Banks BUY UP legislation ( like what is happening today with our Congress being bought up. The Congress being the Government).
As for inequality...we have that today, under a very legal system that is supposed to treat.............all men equally under the law!
Thats why the founders of this nation who where very aware of the issue of inequality...made this nation a Nation of Laws..........and NOT of men.
I am currently reading " With Liberty and Justice for some' on how our governments judicial system has been co-opted by corporations......
"the founders of this nation who where very aware of the issue of inequality"
lol
Are you talking about the founders who owned slaves and who wanted a republic and not a democracy because they only wanted white rich people to vote and were scared that voters would put an end to their opulent lifestyle?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWvIWxh2yRs&feature=player_detailpage#t=511s
There is no such thing as equality in capitalism. A small minority will always control most of the wealth.
BtW....
CAPITALISM is an ECONOMIC system
DEMOCRACY is a GOVERNMENT system.
Any Government system can go hand in hand with a variety of economic approaches.
while some Government systems dictate economic platforms.
Corporatism ( what we have today with Big Banks/Corp in bed with corrupt govt) is a collectivist ideology.
Capitalism is the opposite of collectivism.
Thats what the Nobel Peace prize winner Friedrich Hayek explains in detain in his book "Road to Serfdom'
Time to pick up a book maybe?
↧dislikereplyeditdeletepermalink [-]DemandTheGoodLifeDotCom No it is not. A congress that is not bought will not eliminate poverty or inequality or the fact that 97% of workers make a below average income or the fact that 55% of workers do pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology or the 52 million without health insurance.
The only thing that will fix those problems is if we replace capitalism with democracy so that income is allocated fairly and democratically. Allocating income democratically would make the minimum income $115,000 per year, which is enough income to fix every problem OWS is protesting.
I cannot reply to your messages because they are permalinked!
I cannot help you. I find your views rather simplistic. Fact is, it is human nature that is at the core of all ideologies failing.
Maybe google...monkey sphere?
Nobel Peace prize economic winner Friedrich Hayek talked about it as well in his book.
Permalink is just a way for you to link directly to a comment.
The reason why you cannot reply is because this site limits the amount of nesting allowed for replies. You just have to reply to the comment above it.
Hayek's ideology of liberal free markets is the source of all the inequality and problems in this world.
Liberal free markets work well for rich people who want to rule the world. They do not work well for you. By advocating it, you are just being one of their useful idiots.
and it has nothing to do with Capitalism. To the contrary, it has to do with collectivism called Corporatism. And Capitalism is anything but Collectivist!
DemandTheGoodLifeDotCom1 points 3 hours agoI agree that the constitution and most men did not treat everyone equally.
But the solution is not some form of capitalism. Capitalism (even your non-corporatist brand of capitalism) perpetuates the unequal treatment of people.
The solution is democracy where everyone is given equality as a right - regardless of your family, race, gender or physical traits.
Democracy means you get equal power in government by getting an equal amount of votes and you get equal power in the economy by getting an equal income for equal work.
Again...permalink does not represent input ( or anything Democratic) which is what you are advocating..
Today...this country is supposed to be a Constitutional Republic with Democratically elected r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s.
The way your government is set up is that A PURE MAJORITY should not be able to OVERPOWER a pure MINORITY. It is supposed to be a system of checks and balances.
PURE DEMOCRACY does not work because any time there is a minority, the majority can overpower a minority forcing their will onto others.
Checks and balance is the way to go however today's problem lays somewhere else. Those Representatives ( Our Congress) have been bought up by Big Corp/Banks who in echange write our laws. This is the CORE issue
"permalink does not represent input ( or anything Democratic) which is what you are advocating"
I have no idea what that means.
.
"The way your government is set up is that A PURE MAJORITY should not be able to OVERPOWER a pure MINORITY"
Correct. The founders instead wanted the wealthy minority to overpower the impoverished majority.
.
"PURE DEMOCRACY does not work"
It certainly does not when you are a rich white minority who owns slaves and want to rule over the impoverished minority.
.
"Our Congress have been bought up by Big Corp/Banks...This is the CORE issue"
No it is not. A congress that is not bought will not eliminate poverty or inequality or the fact that 97% of workers make a below average income or the fact that 55% of workers do pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology or the 52 million without health insurance.
The only thing that will fix those problems is if we replace capitalism with democracy so that income is allocated fairly and democratically. Allocating income democratically would make the minimum income $115,000 per year, which is enough income to fix every problem OWS is protesting.
DemandTheGoodLifeDotCom1 points 26 minutes ago
What makes us civilized and not barbaric is the fact that we treat people equally.
Are you advocating only smart people vote? Only the good looking can run companies? Only the strongest survive? Let the sick die because they are just not good enough? Continue to enslave blacks because they are thought not to be equal to whites?
Unlike Thomas Jefferson, I never owned slaves and think it is abominable that he did. Owning slaves and recommending that slavery should be abolished is hypocritical.
First, I always chuckle when a post has a permalink. It is used by those who cannot accept that there are other viewpoints out there.
As for the 'WE treat people equally'...Man oh man...Time to read Constitutional scholar , attorney and Civil liberties advocate Glenn Greenwalds book " With Liberty and Justice for some' on the TWO tier justice system and how the elite and upper govt has gotten off for committing high cirmes with the Nixon presidency setting a permanent trend.
As for history..every bloody male at that time OWNED a woman. Women did not have rights....
Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence condemned slavery
Resources are given in the link!
http://www.de-fact-o.com/fact_read.php?id=11
I agree that the constitution and most men did not treat everyone equally.
But the solution is not some form of capitalism. Capitalism (even your non-corporatist brand of capitalism) perpetuates the unequal treatment of people.
The solution is democracy where everyone is given equality as a right - regardless of your family, race, gender or physical traits.
Democracy means you get equal power in government by getting an equal amount of votes and you get equal power in the economy by getting an equal income for equal work.
There is no such thing as equality in human nature period!
For the record...Abe Lincoln did not 'save' the slaves. He would have kept it on the books if that would have 'saved the union' as is historically documented. What public school does NOT teach you is that Thomas Jefferson, although a slave owner...had put in his DRAFT of the Declaration of Independence to ABOLISH the institution of slavery. He was met with horrendous resistance.
So much for public education in this country. As an immigrant and parent I find the indoctrination process horrendous.
What makes us civilized and not barbaric is the fact that we treat people equally.
Are you advocating only smart people vote? Only the good looking can run companies? Only the strongest survive? Let the sick die because they are just not good enough? Continue to enslave blacks because they are thought not to be equal to whites?
Unlike Thomas Jefferson, I never owned slaves and think it is abominable that he did. Owning slaves and recommending that slavery should be abolished is hypocritical.
You're kidding yourself if you think Capitalism cannot change.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/DONT-VOTE/154101658021122
You're kidding yourself if you think Capitalism cannot change.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/DONT-VOTE/154101658021122
Capitalism is not a system of greed. It is a system that punishes the greedy. However, it only punishes the greedy when their level of greed reaches personally catastrophic proportions. That is why we seek to balance capitalism with regulation in order to keep those catastrophic conditions from developing. Unfortunately, we unbridled it.
When Capitalism sought to bring about the natural correction within the system, the capitalists ran from it and sought socialism. They sought to socialize the full cost of their errors:
http://thegreatrecession.info/blog/2011/10/saving-capitalists-from-capitalism-sustainable-economics/
Capitalism is good because it allows people to be rewarded for meaningful and useful contributions to their society. It allows them the freedom to make their own choices. Like all free societies, however, we still need regulation to avoid abuses. Capitalism does not have ALL the answers. So, we regulate it to prevent the abuses. The problem was that the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, The George H.W. Bush administration, and the Reagan administration ALL sought to deregulate it:
http://thegreatrecession.info/blog/2011/10/the-great-ponzi-scheme/
Capitalism is a powerful economic engine. Like all powerful engines, it needed a regulator to keep it from overrevving and destroying itself. The capitalists of our day got greedy, and they wanted more and more speed out of it, so they sought to have politicians remove the regulators and remove the pollution-control equipment so it could go faster and faster with no inhibitions. Finally, the economy blew up ... like any great engine will if you take off the governors that regulate its maximum speed to something the engine can sustain longterm.
Then, when the thing blew up on them, the capitalists sought to socialize the costs to the entire nation.
--David Haggith http://TheGreatRecession.info/blog
Capitalism doesn't work and never has worked.
It has left 46 million in poverty, 16% underemployed, 1 in every 5 kids in poverty, 25% of all blacks in poverty, 97% of all workers earning a below average income, 52 million without health insurance, and 55% of all workers doing pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology.
Just in case you missed it, 97% of all workers make a below average income.
That is not because everyone in society is a loser.
This system is designed to only work for a very, very small percentage of the hard-working, responsible, effective workers.
And this system is designed to work 100% of the time for all the people born into one of the families of those lucky few, regardless of how hard-working, responsible or effective they are.
It is an incredibly unfair system. It simply does not work.
It doesn't work for me. It doesn't work for you. It doesn't work for 97% of all workers.
The people who say it does work or can work are in complete denial because it never worked for them either.
The claim that capitalism gives you freedom is also a complete myth.
Freedom is the ability to act without coercion or restraint. People who have little or no money have little or no freedom to act or do anything.
The ability of a kid in the ghetto to earn money is vastly different than the ability of a kid in the Trump family to earn money. A ghetto kid has little chance at freedom. A trump kid is given unlimited freedom at birth.
A poor girl in a capitalist country who cannot afford tuition has the same lack of freedom to an education as a girl in a Taliban ruled Afghanistan village where education for girls is banned.
Your income dictates how much freedom you have. And in capitalism, most of the income and freedom goes into the hands of a very, very small minority.
Only democracy gives you true freedom, because it guarantees you enough income so that lack of income is not a restraint on your life.
I started a new thread with more detail about this idea of replacing capitalism with democracy here:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/are-you-rebels-or-revolutionaries-choose-revolutio/
I started a new thread with more detail about this idea of replacing capitalism with democracy here:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/are-you-rebels-or-revolutionaries-choose-revolutio/
Point anyone and everyone you can to here:
http://www.whatisoccupywallstreetabout.com/
It's about (excessive) greed. Don't complicate that singular message. It confused the idiots.
I started a new thread with more detail about this idea of replacing capitalism with democracy here:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/are-you-rebels-or-revolutionaries-choose-revolutio/
I hope OWS can become a revolutionary movement instead of a rebel movement.
You sir (or madam) take a catastrophic all-or-nothing attitude on life. No -ism works in real life if left unchecked. Capitalism is this particularly country's heritage, and it used to work for us in the past. All we have to do is go back in time and change the unfair laws back to what they were, when capitalism was fairer. I'm not saying its going to be easy. But doing nothing will be much much harder on us in the long run. Corporations are not people, paying money to politicians is not a form of free speech, and yes, corporations beyond a certain behemoth size, should be charged tax on 90 some percent of their earnings. Infinite economic growth is an insane impossible economic THEORY, which has no basis in reality. This is where the reality checks on the system, have to come in, to keep it from getting insane, like it is now.
Every worker should be guaranteed a job.
Every worker, who does the job they were hired to perform, should be wealthy. They should all get paid either a $115,000 per year or $230,000 per year income. They should all get paid equally because they are all equally performing the job they were hired to do.
The reason why one group makes $230k and the other group makes $115k is because some jobs are difficult, they require more physical or mental effort, and those jobs should get paid more than the jobs that are not difficult.
The reason why incomes are paid out in those amounts is because that is what the incomes amount to when you allocate the country's total income equally among all workers and you want to pay difficult jobs twice as much as jobs that are not difficult.
If you do not do the job you were hired to perform because of incompetency or laziness, you will be fired.
If people do not buy the good or service you are working on, it will stop being produced and you will stop being paid. You will then be forced to find a new job working on something people are buying.
That is the only rational, fair system of compensation.
That is the only system that works.
Capitalism has never worked and never will.
blah, are you done trolling now? the real world need real solutions, not dogma...
Right, the solution to the 46 million in poverty is not a job that pays a decent wage.
Right, the solution to the fact that 97% of all workers make a below average income is not a fairer allocation of income.
Right, better pay is just the dogma of a troll.
It takes two to screw us! Politicians to hold us down, so then the Corporations can do the screwing!!! Politicians need better rules to follow to prevent lobbying! We tax payers should also fund important elections, so the best person wins and not the one with the most money!!! Top 2 demands in my book! Write it down!
"Capitalism is a system of inequality. I'm not sure why you expect anything but inequality."
Define 'capitalism'. Capitalism is the worst ever described word in the book. It has do defenite meaning. It's not a system. It is another word for free trade and private ownership at best. It is not, nor has it ever been an economic model or system. Capitalism coems from 'capita' meaning head and most probably your capital would be traditionaly mean the amount of heads of livestock for instance. BUt it is not even clear where that came from. Capitalism is than a very blurry idea, called an ideology, but than a hardly defined one.
We live in a society, in communities, towns, villages and cities, placed in forrests, along rivers and shorelines. We come from families to form families. There is nothing concrete about capitalism. It's nothing real, it has no value, weight or meaning other than an abstract notion.
On a human level it's just the devil's way to promote greed, division and causes the peril of human kind.
So quit it already! It is not even a financial or economical model. We have an economy, the sum of all ourt actions we do not have capitalism. We're not attacking capitalism. It does not exist. We just want our house rid of the crooks stealing our money.
And on the other deal: it's really too oversimplified and there's nothing wrong with the market in itself. Or being able to choose between products or suppliers. A dynamic economy needs these things. I want the freedom to choose. It is great! There's absolutely nothing wrong with it, and we can handle a lot of difference in income and wealth before any state has to come in to give us 'even shares'. It's just that some people have managed ho hijack the financial markets system with profit models, taking out and destroying so much capital from the market that it stops working. We need to fix the leak, not abandon ship! Giving all the same income is exactly what would not work - take a look at China. You can have a social security net, sure, you can even give people a guaranteed base income, to make sure their basic needs are at least guaranteed. But if you go for your total equalitarian state that reeks of old school communism, and nobody is waiting for that to arrive. Like iun China, you will still have a corruptable privilegded ruling class and the injustice that comes with it, they would just wear another mask, hide behind another ideology. And worse, nobody would remain free.
What you propose would only cattle us in more.
"And worse, nobody would remain free"
Freedom is the ability to act without coercion or restraint. People who have little or no money have little or no freedom to act or do anything.
The ability of a kid in the ghetto to earn money is vastly different than the ability of a kid in the Trump family to earn money. A ghetto kid has little chance at freedom. A trump kid is given unlimited freedom at birth.
A poor girl in a capitalist country who cannot afford tuition has the same lack of freedom to an education as a girl in a Taliban ruled Afghanistan village where education for girls is banned.
Your income dictates how much freedom you have. And in capitalism most of the income goes into the hands of a very, very small minority. Only democracy gives you true freedom because it guarantees you enough income so that lack of income is not a restraint on your life.
Capitalism is an economic system. Democracy is a political system. The two are not in conflict.
Read through my comments if interested.
Democracy is a Greek word for people power. It is a system where power rests with everyone equally. It can be used to run a government, an economy, a single business, a family or it can be used in deciding what to cook for dinner.
Capitalism is a system of inequality. It is the exact opposite of democracy. It is a system where the goal is to accumulate as much personal wealth as possible.
We should replace capitalism, a system of inequality, with democracy, a system of equality because we are civilized and humane and all humans deserve the dignity of being treated equally.
No, capitalism is an economic system whereby the factors of production are privately owned. Democracy as you define it is a political system that is nothing but mob rule; in democracy, a majority of the population can strip away civil liberties from a minority of the population.
You cannot replace an economic system with a political system.
"No, capitalism is an economic system whereby the factors of production are privately owned."
It is the private ownership of the means of production for profit. The goal in capitalism is to accumulate as much personal wealth as possible. Your responsibility is to maximize wealth. In fact, it is a legal obligation.
It is a system designed to produce unequal outcomes.
The richer you are, the easier it is for you to accumulate even more wealth, so the degree of inequality continually grows. Capitalism is just a system of concentrating income, wealth, and power, nothing more.
The problem with that, of course, is that the more wealth the rich consume, the more poor everyone else becomes.
So long as you have capitalism, you will have vast inequality in income. And with vast inequality in income, you will have vast inequality in power. And the few with the power will have the means to shape society to benefit them. And the people with little power will never get a fair deal in life.
You don't need capitalism to have markets for goods and services or innovation or wealth or growth or incentives.
Capitalism is not a fair system. It is a system of inequality.
There's no real "goal" in capitalism; whether one wants to accumulate as much personal wealth as possible is one's choice, not obligation or responsibility. The goal of a corporation, however, is indeed to maximize the wealth of the shareholders.
"You don't need capitalism to have markets for goods and services or innovation or wealth or growth or incentives."
Do you have any examples of nations that do not practice capitalism yet still have innovation, wealth, and growth?
Companies that don't want to maximize their wealth would be the exception not the rule.
No country has ever had a purely democratic system. They have degrees of it. And the democratic parts work.
NASA works, the National Science Foundation works, schools work, public universities work, Veterans Hospitals work, police departments work, fire departments work, the FBI works, the CIA works, the military works, the post office works, garbage collection works. And the Nordic countries, which have the most democratic ownership of the economy of all the developed countries, have the highest standard of living in the world, the highest quality of life in the world and the citizens with the most happiness in the world directly because they have the most democracy in the developed world.
You confuse capitalism, an economic system, with corporation, a way of organizing a business, and democracy, a political system. There is no goal in capitalism, but the goal of a corporation is indeed the maximization of shareholder wealth.
It's controversial whether all of the groups you listed "work," and I would hardly consider police departments and the military "democratic," unless the word has no meaning. Those two institutions are heavily hierarchical and live and die by "chain of command."
The Nordic countries all have mixed economies and allow private ownership of factors of production. They're also much smaller and much more ethnically homogenous than we are, raising questions about the generalizability of their model to other countries that are larger and less ethnically homogenous.
I said "the goal in capitalism is..." I could have said "the goal of companies in capitalism is..." to make it clearer for you but they mean the same thing.
Democracy is as much a political system as capitalism is a political system. Economics is just a shortened word for political economy.
Democracy is a system of equality. In a democratic economy we would own the means of production equally in the same way we own the police or fire departments. I don't mean that the police run their organization democratically.
Certainly not every public organization is a success. But the same goes for private, capitalist organizations. The point, though, is that it works.
Capitalism is not a political system; it says nothing about the relationship between a citizenry and its government.
Democracy is mob rule; with equal votes, a majority can strip away the civil liberties of a minority. The economy you describe is socialist, and "we" would not own the factors of production; the government would. And what the government giveth, it can taketh.
"Capitalism is not a political system"
Political scientists would dispute that.
"The economy you describe is socialist"
It is if you define socialism in the narrow sense that it is public ownership of the means of production.
"and "we" would not own the factors of production; the government would"
Not in the democratic system that I advocate. Government will remain separate from the economy. They will be responsible for creating rules and regulating businesses just like they do now. Senators will not be running companies.
Companies will be independently run and managed.
"Democracy is mob rule"
Democracy is also not mob rule or rule of the majority. It is equal power.
It means every citizen gets an equal freedom to act, speak, and think; equal treatment under the law; equal votes; and equal income for equal effort.
Two wolves and a sheep cannot vote to eat the sheep for dinner because that would violate the sheep's equal right to treatment under the law. The law protects the rights of the minority to the same degree as the majority.
"there's nothing wrong with the market in itself. Or being able to choose between products or suppliers"
I agree. Democracy does not eliminate the market or competition. You still determine what gets produced by how you spend your money. Companies still compete for your business. You still have choice.
Democracy just allocates income democratically, fairly. It pays equal income for equal effort so that everyone is wealthy.
With an income of $115k or $230k, likely 3 times greater than what you have now, you will have 3 times the power in the market.
"Giving all the same income is exactly what would not work - take a look at China"
China is not a democracy. China does not pay equal incomes. China has some of the most inequality on the planet. I want the exact opposite of China.
"We just want our house rid of the crooks stealing our money."
There are no crooks. Nobody is stealing your money. This is how capitalism works. You consume as much of the available income as you can.
Bankers are selling goods and services to willing buyers and trying to make as much money as possible just like your doctor and local butcher and everyone else.
"Define 'capitalism'...It has do defenite meaning...It's nothing real, it has no value, weight or meaning other than an abstract notion."
That is not true. It is very real with a very specific meaning.
It is the private ownership of the means of production for profit. The goal in capitalism is to accumulate as much personal wealth as possible. In fact, it is a legal obligation.
And that very specific system has very real consequences.
The problem in society is that people don't have enough income because most of the income goes to the rich.
And the richer you are, the easier it is for you to accumulate even more wealth, so the problem is continually exacerbated. Capitalism is just a system of concentrating income, wealth, and power, nothing more.
And the more wealth the rich consume, the more poor everyone else becomes.
So long as you have capitalism, you will have vast inequality in income. And with vast inequality in income, you will have vast inequality in power. And the ones with the power have the means to shape society to benefit them. The people with little power will never get a fair deal in life.
Capitalism is not a fair system.
In a democratic economic system, where income is allocated equally, every citizen has access to a job with enough income to make you wealthy as a right. So there would be no social problems.
Sorry, I really have to disagree. Where you say it's a model promoting private ownership that´s true, but there is nothing wrong with that. It is a fairly subjective value system, not a precise model, or even tecnocratic system of law. It is a value dominant system, put to practice in our economy and our society, and within this economy it is anchored by law. It is not capitalism which exists, it is the laws that exist, and it is the developement of specificaly our financial markets and banking system which are flawed and deregulated to a point where. It is also the lack of legislation with by now fully dominant corporate influence in the political arena. Add these together and you can see how the capitalist valuesystem has encouraged false values and groce injustice and terible inequity, we have subjected our society to the terror of greed. We have, not this abstract value system, a political doctrine, this economic base model, this theory. We, the people, have fucked up, put the wrong values first, and we have let ourselves down. We did not go out to vote. Our representation has betrayed us. But ´capitailsm´? 'Capitalism' could not care less. Nothing wrong with commerce. With trade. Capitalism is nothing real, so stop chasing ghosts. If you want to fight something, make it something real. Call for legislative protection of our money. Get investment banks away form the citizens incomes, savings and pensions. Start a new banking systems. Change banks! Empty your account with the greed banks and start putting in the local banks that are not investing in Wall Street, but in your local community. Call for the extraction of corporate money supporting campaigns and politicians, root to stop Big Buck from influencing policy and prevent the lobbyists form taking over political power. All this again has nothing to do with ´capitalism´. Yes, there should be a division of market and government, clearly, as we have seen a division of state and religion too, when that turned out to be a problem in Europe some centuries ago. Take your lessons from history. It really way too much credit to call it the ´the system´, capitalism is nowhere in the constitution. It's not a legislation.
Replace Capitalism with Love.
This movement is about democracy balancing out capitalism, I agree.
Can you tell me your sources for these numbers?
I hope this movement becomes about replacing capitalism with democracy.
My source for the $115k and $230k and $127k incomes?
We have 95 million full time workers and 35 million part time workers.
Of those workers, 12.3 million do difficult work, jobs in science, computers, engineering, medicine, construction, mining, or farming.
Multiply the number of difficult workers by the $230k salary they would get paid. And multiply the remaining workers by the $115k salary they would get paid.
The total would come out to $13.7 trillion which is the total consumption income available in the US in 2010.
Consumption portion of GDP is reported by bea.gov as well as total hours worked. Workers employed in what I call difficult jobs is reported at bls.gov
I don't have the direct URLs in hand.
Look at the name of this troll proclaiming richness through Wall Street. That’s despicable!
I don't know what you mean by "proclaiming richness." I am not against being rich. I advocate a society where EVERYONE is rich.
And are you referring to the content at DemandTheGoodLife.com?
It is part of a game.
But all the solutions it advocates are real. And it is something I think would be a great transition to a fully democratic economy.
Here is what that site advocates:
CITIZEN DIVIDEND: Make income tax a flat 50% on all income, no deductions. After you pay for govt expenses, use the remaining to pay every adult a $40,000 per year dividend as their share of the planet nature gave to humanity. That will reduce inequality, permanently end poverty and solve nearly every social problem we have.
FREE CREDIT: Give every citizen access as a right to the Federal Reserve discount window so that they can get a zero interest mortgage for a home or car regardless of credit. This will cut your mortgage in half.
SALARIED EDUCATION: Not only should education be free, students should be paid an income while they get educated. Education is an investment, not a consumption item, so students should be paid a salary to get trained.
FULL TRANSPARENCY: Make society fully transparent by requiring full disclosure of all private and public sector information and data in a central database so you have the same level of access to an organization's data as its CEO gets.
Capitalism does not need to change. What needs to happen is for the financial industry, in all forms, Wall Street firms, banks, hedge funds, derivative traders, sellers of credit default swaps, all of them to be taxed on those transactions. The tax proceeds must be used to create jobs and re-structure mortgages. People need good jobs and they need to be able to keep their homes. It's about spreading the wealth.
Yes, we need to spread the wealth so that people are paid fairly, so that people are paid equally for equal effort, so that everyone in society is wealthy. But that is only happening when we replace capitalism with democracy.
Capitalism requires high returns on private investment. Otherwise people won't invest and the economy stagnates. The more you tax, the more it will stagnate. The amount of taxing you need to do to ensure every worker does well will grind our economy to a halt.
You can't make equality work with capitalism. It is a system of inequality. If you want equality, you need to get rid of capitalism.
Just an idea about equality and law. The minute a law is imposed it is an exception to freedom thus eliminating the idea. There's no equality where there are laws. It sounds outrageous but the freedom of speech has exceptions and the concept of freedom is without limitations.
Secondly, if a law is violated, someone has to enforce those laws thus creating inequality at that point. This is how we got to this stage in the first place.
I do not advocate absolute freedom. I advocate equal freedom.
Everyone has a birth right to the equal freedom to act - to pursue their happiness however they define it - without coercion or restraint so long as they do not reasonably violate that same right in others. Every citizen gets an equal freedom to act, speak, and think; equal treatment under the law; equal votes; and equal income for equal effort.
Enforcing that law does not create inequality.
You have the freedom to swing your fist. But your freedom to swing your fist ends at the front of my face since it would violate my freedom not to get punched.
Enforcing that rule not to punch me in the face will not lead us to capitalism.
The concept of equitable income has been tried before. Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the now defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republic. As their experiment adequately showed, the concept of income equality takes away the incentive to do more, to work harder, to achieve more. Why would you go to college if you can get paid $115K to pick up garbage? Who would pay for all of this? Would you want to pay $100 for a gallon of milk to feed your family? That's what it would cost. So your $115K wouldn't be worth too much. Capitalism, though not without faults, continues to be the best economic system known to man. More people have benefited from capitalism than any other. Look at the updates on this website that were done on their iPhone, Blackberry, etc. That technology is HERE because of CAPITALISM. Hopefully, these protests can bring some light to some of the faults that are present.
"Look at the updates on this website that were done on their iPhone, Blackberry, etc. That technology is HERE because of CAPITALISM."
No it is not. NASA developed the integrated circuit which makes all electronics possible and the miniaturization of electronics required for cell phones possible.
Private business did not do that research because there is no immediate profits in it. NASA founded silicon valley where all those high tech companies come from.
The National Science Foundation does all the basic physics research that makes cell phones possible. Private business did not do that research because there is no immediate profits in it.
If they can do all the hard work, they can certainly do the easy work of building on that research so you can put it in a cell phone and sell it to the public.
Actually, the integrated circuit was produced by Texas Instruments in 1958 (not a government organization) and the first transistor was produced by AT&T in 1926. A transistor, by the way, is the building block to every IC chip. Private business did this research because there would be a profit involved after the investment.
TI was hired by NASA to produce it under the direction of NASA engineers. If NASA was in charge of manufacturing electronics and not just space, they would have the facilities to build it in house.
The point is that you don't need capitalism to develop innovation and NASA and the NSF is real world proof of that.
"Why would you go to college if you can get paid $115K to pick up garbage"
We can automate 50% of all the jobs we do. Garbage men is one of those jobs.
In a democracy, unlike in capitalism, the system will be accountable to us. It will be responsible for providing the highest quality of life possible. So we will take deliberate steps to fulfill that goal. One of those steps would be to fully deploy our existing automation so that we can liberate people from the 50% of pointless jobs people currently do.
Not everyone wants to spend their working life as a garbage man. I enjoy learning and would never choose to spend my time dumping people's garbage instead of studying a subject I enjoy in college.
"Who would pay for all of this?"
The US produces $15 trillion in GDP per year. That is enough to pay workers the salaries quoted.
"Would you want to pay $100 for a gallon of milk to feed your family? That's what it would cost."
Prices on average will stay the same. We would not be increasing the total income we pay out. All we would be doing is allocating the existing income more evenly. So prices will remain generally the same.
"Capitalism, though not without faults, continues to be the best economic system known to man."
Capitalism doesn't work and never has worked.
It has left 46 million in poverty, 16% underemployed, 1 in every 5 kids in poverty, 25% of all blacks in poverty, 97% of all workers earning a below average income, 52 million without health insurance, and 50% of all workers doing pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology.
The public ownership you get in democracy, on the other hand, does work. NASA works, the National Science Foundation works, schools work, public universities work, Veterans Hospitals work, police departments work, fire departments work, the FBI works, the CIA works, the military works, the post office works, garbage collection works. And the Nordic countries, which have the most public ownership and democratic control of the economy of all the developed countries, have the highest standard of living in the world, the highest quality of life in the world and the citizens with the most happiness in the world directly because of it.
You can't replace capitalism with democracy, by the way. Democracy is a form of government, capitalism is an economic system. Compare apples to apples.
Read through my comments.
Democracy is a Greek word for people power. It is a system where power rests with everyone equally. It can be used to run a government, an economy, a single business, a family or it can be used in deciding what to cook for dinner.
Capitalism is a system of inequality. It is the exact opposite of democracy. It is a system where the goal is to accumulate as much personal wealth as possible.
We should replace capitalism, a system of inequality, with democracy, a system of equality because we are civilized and humane and all humans deserve the dignity of being treated equally.
"the concept of income equality takes away the incentive to do more, to work harder, to achieve more"
If you are a slacker and refuse to work as hard as everyone else, you would be fired just like you would today. So if you want at least $115k, you must work hard. $115k is plenty incentive.
We have decades of research on what motivates people. The best way to compensate workers is to pay them well and to pay them a flat salary so that the issue of money is off the table and they can just focus on doing great work.
Then to get workers to take pride in their work and give their best effort, the job should give them autonomy which treats them like responsible adults, an opportunity to master the tasks they are performing and a transcendent purpose to work towards.
Trying to manipulate people with monetary rewards actually hurts performance in the majority of work we do.
This is backed by studies done in many different fields including research done by the Federal Reserve.
The overwhelming majority of people already get paid this way. Most get paid a flat salary in today's system with little opportunity for advancement within their job. Nearly every union job, for example, tops out in pay after 4 years.
View this quick TED Talk on compensation incentives which provides the evidence that the compensation model based on equality will not only work, it will work better than our current system:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
Plus there are a ton of ways to motivate people other than monetary rewards. Google the emerging field of gamification which is applying game mechanics (such as completing set tasks for points to level up and acquire medals and outscore the competition and reach the top of the leaderboard) to all real world activities like work, exercising, dieting, learning, etc.
It makes otherwise boring tasks fun. Advocates believe gamification will transform society and will be a part of everything we do. They think game designers will eventually be in charge of developing sophisticated systems that will turn everything we do in our lives into a fun and engaging experience.
Belts in karate or rank and medals in the military are crude examples of gamification.
View this video for gamification's potential: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NzFCfZMBkU
The USSR did not have equal incomes. And they were a poor, backwards, undeveloped country run by a brutal dictatorship with no transparency, no accountability and above all, no democracy. It was also a command economy, not a market economy. Bureaucrats decided what you can and cannot have, not consumers.
I don't advocate anything like the soviet system.
True, "be bold and demand actual solutions", and although I'm all in favor of taking down today's ineffective and inefficient Top 10% Management Group of Business & Government, there's only one way to do it – by fighting bankers as bankers ourselves. Consequently, I have posted the Strategic Legal Policies, Organizational Operating Structures, and Tactical Investment Procedures necessary to do this at:
http://getsatisfaction.com/americanselect/topics/on_strategic_legal_policy_organizational_operational_structures_tactical_investment_procedures
Join
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/StrategicInternationalSystems/
if you want to support a Presidential Candidate Committee at AmericansElect.org in support of the above bank-focused platform.
Watch this while standing up... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI_P3pxze5w&feature=player_embedded
Blaming political donations and not capitalism for all of society's problems is like saying the problem with stabbing other people is that those stab wounds usually get infected.
To me, that video is no different than a video of Dylan Radigan going on tv in a rant against a serial stabber and saying we all have to stand up and make sure our hospitals are able to make sure the stab wounds don't get infected.
Rich people controlling society is an inherent feature of capitalism. That is what happens when you employ a system of inequality. You get inequality of income and inequality of power.
The idea that you could get rid of the power of the rich by regulating political donations is absurd.
Capitalism will never get out of your government unless you get rid of capitalism. So long as you have capitalism, you will have vast inequality in income. And with vast inequality in income, you will have vast inequality in power. And the ones with the power will have the means to shape society to benefit them whether they do it through political donations or through other means. The people with little power will never get a fair deal in life.
You need to eliminate the system of inequality. You need to eliminate capitalism. There is absolutely no benefit to capitalism whatsoever.
I agree with you DemandThe GoodLifeDotCom about replacing Capitalism, my suggestion is with Love. :)
"When every citizen has access to a job with those incomes as a right, there would be no social problems."
Wow. I admire your idealism and passion but, with all due respect, this is a spectacularly naive statement.
That statement is based on 150 years of thinking on the subject from some of the most brilliant and informed people in the world. It is not naive.
Read through the comments to see exactly how it will work in practice. Or just ask a question and I will give you an informed answer.
http://occupywallst.org/forum/friends-romans-countrymen-lend-me-your-ears/#comment-43691
This sounds so Utopian. hahaha
It is based on real numbers and real math. If total income was allocated equally, the $115k and $230k incomes is what people would be paid. It is not hypothetical.
oh, the numbers might be correct. But, it will never be implemented in our great country. I am not a fan of constraining motivation.
Motivation will not be constrained.
We have decades of research on what motivates people. The best way to compensate workers is to pay them well and to pay them a flat salary so that the issue of money is off the table and they can just focus on doing great work.
If you are a slacker and refuse to work as hard as everyone else, you would be fired just like you would today.
But to get workers to take pride in their work and give their best effort, the job should give them autonomy which treats them like responsible adults, an opportunity to master the tasks they are performing and a transcendent purpose to work towards.
Trying to manipulate people with monetary rewards actually hurts performance in the majority of work we do.
This is backed by studies done in many different fields including research done by the Federal Reserve.
The overwhelming majority of people already get paid this way. Most get paid a flat salary in today's system with little opportunity for advancement within your job. Nearly every union job, for example, tops out in pay after 4 years.
And this is also how doctors are paid at the Mayo Clinic, one of the best hospitals in the world.
View this quick TED Talk on compensation incentives which provides the evidence that the compensation model based on equality will not only work, it will work better than our current system:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
Plus there are a ton of ways to motivate people other than monetary rewards. Google the emerging field of gamification which is applying game mechanics (such as completing set tasks for points to level up and acquire medals and outscore the competition and reach the top of the leaderboard) to all real world activities like work, exercising, dieting, learning, etc.
It makes otherwise boring tasks fun. Advocates believe gamification will transform society and will be a part of everything we do. They think game designers will eventually be in charge of developing sophisticated systems that will turn everything we do in our lives into a fun and engaging experience.
Belts in karate or rank and medals in the military are crude examples of gamification.
View this video for gamification's potential: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NzFCfZMBkU
Nassim Taleb - 'The Banks Have Hijacked the Government'
youtu.be/WkT8dFA1xNE
A, if not the, Goal should be that ... The constitution should be amended to state that no individual or segment of the population has greater access and influence in the governmental process than any other individual and it must take a majority (50% + 1) for anyone to hold office. Thus, all elections should be publicly funded and lobbyists should have no more access to a public officials than any other citizen. If this were to be the case then many of the reforms would be enacted because the majority would once again be the majority. This is positive and achievable and addresses the basis for the corporate rule.
I disagree we will prevail the system will change we the people will change it.
You call this capitalism? Ha thats a joke, if you think we live in capitalism take econ 101!
Capitalism is a system where the means of production are predominantly privately owned for a profit. That is the economy that exists. It is capitalism.
like I said, take econ 101 and you'll learn how wrong you are. our gov. interferes in almost EVERYTHING!
Capitalism is not an economic system with no government interference. Your definition is wrong.
this isn't capitalism.
The OWS is not against capitalism, which by the way, is not properly defined. Free market that is fair is good. People blame capitalism to divert attention away from whatever corrupt system we have. Blaming the rich is a popular method of shifting blame. A lot of people fall for that. Everyone gets the same pay? That is not practical. That is not what OWS should be about. If we go about making such demands no one will take us seriously.
It is not practical to increase the pay of 97% of all workers!? Or to more than triple the pay of 50% of all workers?
Capitalism doesn't work and never has worked.
It has left 46 million in poverty, 16% underemployed, 1 in every 5 kids in poverty, 25% of all blacks in poverty, 97% of all workers earning a below average income, 40 million without health insurance, and 50% of all workers doing pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology.
It is possible to do that. Pay is however decided by the value placed on the work done. That is why a doctor gets paid more than a waiter. There is also the supply equation. China has cheaper labor because they have more people to do the same thing. What part of capitalism do you disagree with? Instead of saying it's not working, you could point out the flaws. In more detail than just blaming the system.
"Pay is however decided by the value placed on the work done. That is why a doctor gets paid more than a waiter. There is also the supply equation"
It is inhumane to treat people like commodities, like heads of cattle or bushels of wheat, where your entire standard of living and means of survival depends on your ability to sell yourself in an open market.
The labor market is not like the market for apples. Every exchange does not make everyone better off. So the cruel and uncivilized labor market will be replaced with the more humane and civilized system where if you and I put in the same effort, we both get the same pay.
But supply and demand will determine what jobs you will do. Consumer spending mostly determines what jobs are available.
If you are skilled in making cement shoes and nobody is buying cement shoes, you will not find a job. If you do a job where there is a surplus, you will not find a job and will be forced to learn a skill where there is a shortage in order to get hired.
"What part of capitalism do you disagree with?"
The inequality and the fact that it only works for a very small percentage of people.
It has left 46 million in poverty, 16% underemployed, 1 in every 5 kids in poverty, 25% of all blacks in poverty, 97% of all workers earning a below average income, 52 million without health insurance, and 50% of all workers doing pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology.
There is nothing about it that is working.
You said it yourself - same effort. That's the key. Things tha require more effort will get more pay. So all doctors get paid the same if they do th same work. All waiters get paid the same. However doctors and waiters will not get the same pay because th effort I different. The doctor spends years learning a skill. His reward should be more to be fair to him. I understand it is not a nice thing. I wish everyone had everything. However that cannot happen. Maybe if the whole world became a co op... It is just too utopian.
Also, there will be no waiters in a democratic economy. People only become waiters out of desperation.
Wasting a human life, the most sophisticated piece of machinery in the universe, on moving a plate of food from one end of the room to another is a criminal waste of the most valuable resource we have.
Waiters along with 50% of all the jobs we do will be immediately automated with existing technology.
That will take years. You are talking about star trek like society :)
It would be star trek compared to the backwards system we have now.
But it is all based on existing working technology. It just needs to be deployed.
There are about 135 million people who work. Here is a list of Jobs that can be automated with existing technology and the number of people who are employed in them:
Office and Admin support (19.2 million) These are low level employees who do routine tasks. Most can be automated today. But the process will be much easier in a democratic system where companies share an integrated infrastructure. If we had standards for sharing all data and documents as well as easy access to all business data in a central location you would not need armies of employees to shuffle paper.
Sales (16.2 million) Most sales can be done over the internet.
Management (15.8 million) Most of these management jobs are actually sales managers which are no longer necessary since we no longer have sales people.
Transportation (8.8 million) We already have the tech for driverless cars and trucks. All that is needed is a government effort to create the infrastructure that makes driverless cars work on our roads.
Food prep and related (7.8 million) These are mostly people who work in restaurants. Industrial robots can automate any chef. There are already companies that developed robots that can cook hundreds of chinese dishes for an automatd chinese food restaurant. And moving a plate of food from the kitchen to a table does not require a human being.
Business and Financial Operations (6.2 million) These are accountants (which will no longer be needed because in an integrated, democratic economy, banking will be fully digital which will enable you to categorize sales and expenses digitally as they happen), loan officers (extending credit in a completely digital environment can be fully automated), and retail purchasers (retail is largely obsolete with the internet).
Buildings and Ground Maintenance (5.4 million) We already have automated mowers, blowers, rakers, window cleaners, vacuum cleaners, etc. so most of these jobs can be automated.
They amount to about 75 million jobs that people currently do that can be automated today. It makes up about 55% of the total work we do.
Will there be enough jobs for those now freed up? We will also have to come up with new job functions that actually add value to the society.
We will never, ever run out of work to do. So we will always have full employment.
Jobs will become more skilled. It is far more productive to get 10 people to program an automated lawn mower than to employ 1 million people mowing lawns.
Education will become a lifelong pursuit.
You are over estimating the goodness and capability of human beings :)
By saying education will become lifelong?
I only say that because people will get paid to attend school and it will be necessary to get a job.
Read my original post. I do not say doctors will get paid the same as waiters.
Total income of the economy would be divided up equally among all workers based on effort. Income would no longer be based on privilege, who you know, what family you were born into or how lucky you are in the market.
Effort is determined by the amount of time you work and whether the job is mentally or physically difficult. People who worked twice the hours would obviously get paid twice the income. And people who worked the difficult jobs, the jobs in science, computers, engineering, medicine, construction, mining, or farming, would get paid more than the jobs that were not difficult.
The final compensation plan would be directly voted on by the population, but if you paid difficult jobs twice the amount as jobs that are not difficult, since that is likely enough of an incentive to get people to do more difficult work, based on the American economy in 2010, that system would pay an income of $230,000 per year for the difficult jobs and $115,000 per year for the rest of the jobs.
I agree with that part. Arent we already supposed to have that? Everyone who works gets paid more or less the same for the same kind of work. What is bad is some manipulating the system. If we fix that, things will be better. I dont see that as anti capitalism.
We have a minimum wage of $17k. 95% make less than $115k. 50% make less than $33k.
How do you think capitalism will ever reach a point where the minimum income is $115k? It will never happen. Capitalism is a system of inequality.
If things are affordable, then even 17k may be enough for a decent life. I think we will have a problem with coming up with enough jobs for everyone. What if we just have too many people and not enough jobs?
We will never, ever run out of work to do. So we will always have full employment.
$17k is never going to get you a decent life.
"We Need Love" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WBHic2Ea_8
Capitalism does not need to change. It's a fine system, as long as it is separated from direct power. It should be allowed to grow, succeed, or fail on its own merits. It should NOT be allowed to directly control itself through legislation.
Agreed. That is the difference most fail to see. They end up blaming capitalism.
Capitalism is an economic system. Democracy is a political system. Two different animals. Greed is a given. EXCESSIVE greed doesn't and shouldn't be tolerated though. It is demoralizing and threatens the viability of the system for all.
Democracy is a Greek word for people power. It is a system where power rests with everyone equally. It can be used to run a government, an economy, a single business, a family or it can be used in deciding what to cook for dinner.
Capitalism is a system of inequality. It is the exact opposite of democracy. It is a system where the goal is to accumulate as much personal wealth as possible.
We should replace capitalism, a system of inequality, with democracy, a system of equality because we are civilized and humane and all humans deserve the dignity of being treated equally.
Disagree. Capitalism is economic Democracy in which the people get to VOTE for the product and companies they wish to see succeed. If people would think about their VALUES in selecting what products to buy from whom, they can change the system quite rapidly. See http://occupywallst.org/forum/the-power-of-the-people/
Democracy is not a Greek word for "voting" or "mob rule", it is a Greek word for "people power". It means power rests with everyone EQUALLY.
Voting in a system where 1 person has 10,000 times more votes than another person is not democratic.
There is nothing a consumer can do with their purchasing that can enable all workers to get an income close to the $135,000 per year average.
The only solution is to change the system.
Democracies only work in places like Ancient Greece where EVERYONE is highly educated. That is CLEARLY not the case here. Do you want the American Idol crowd or the World Wrestling Federation crowd running your life?
Democracy is also not mob rule or rule of the majority. It is equal power.
It means every citizen gets an equal freedom to act, speak, and think; equal treatment under the law; equal votes; and equal income for equal effort.
Democracy does not mean anyone will be running your life. It just means you have the same power to run your life as people who watch Idol have to run theirs.
In economic terms, equal power means equal income for equal effort. Nobody is going to tell you how to spend your money. You can spend it any way you want.
Nobody tells you how to spend your money now. The problem you have is that you probably don't have too much to spend! ; ) And with democracy you will still have a government telling you what to do.
Right, that is the problem. Workers do not have equality. So they do not have enough income which means they do not have enough freedom.
If everyone was paid equally based on effort, you could pay the difficult jobs which require greater mental or physical effort $230k and all the rest of the jobs $115k.
That is more than what 97% of all workers make. It is more than triple what 50% of all workers make. You would have a society where everyone was wealthy as a right, where everyone had the genuine freedom (because they had enough income) to live whatever kind of lifestyle they want.
Do you want Paris Hilton running your life? Is she highly educated? I do tend to agree with you that Democracy, to some extent is unworkable; but this is largely due to mal-socialization. When Americans think of psychology, they tend to think of Sigmond Frued, but the American psychology movement is not based on Psychodynamic Theory, it is based on Social Learning Theory. American psychology is geared toward finding ways to motivate Americans to behave in particular ways or to not behave in particular ways.
I know this very well, as I was classically trained to be a technician of Social Learning theory, as an M.B.A. Even if we had a democracy, Americans would still be controlled, though the means of socialization and the mal-use of Social Learning Theory; in schools, through the media and what not. Most Americans would laugh, if I suggested that compliance tactics, used in Chinese Pow camps, during the Korean War, are used on American school children, but it is true.
I will give you an example:
Lets say, I am a teacher and I ask the class a question. I ask, "Is the Untied States a perfect society?" A perfectly rational initial response might be, "Uh, no." From there I would just incrementally build up their commitment to increasingly anti- American views, rewarding compliance and ignoring defiance, until they were utterly brain washed, self hating, lunatics, like many Americans are, in point of fact. If Americans don't even control their own social conditioning, what do they control, at all, even if they had a direct democracy? [grin]
The big shots really wouldn't fear a self hating, a-hole American, babbling about racism and how we have a long way to go and how the White middle class is dominant and privileged and all that jazz, after all, the elite wanted Americans to think that way, so Americans would not focus on the fact that the ultra rich and the political elite run the show. The middle class, White or otherwise, are hardly in a position of privilege or dominance, that is just f-ing silly, unless you are utterly brainwashed and conditioned to accept what is utterly silly, as is the case with many Americans.
If OWS wants to make change, then put guys, like me in central positions, because my personality type makes me highly resistant to mal-socialization. While I do have a high emotional intelligence and IQ, I I am detested by authority types, because of my innate ability to publicly commit to a socialization that is contrary to their best interests and complimentary to my own. In other words, I think like the elite. They cannot bs me, like they bs many of you. I know this for a fact, because I was raised around the political elite. They could care less if a bunch of delusional left wing idiots do drugs in a park and bang a drum. They fear me, because if I get power, I will think like a Great White Shark and not like a big White Liberal dope.
I will actually advance my own best interest, without regard to the silly p-ssy sh-t Liberal sissy crap, most American kids prattle about. I need no further justification to advance my interests, than advancing my interest, advances my interest. I don't need a romantic moral code or a Civil rights preacher or to feel badly, because I am White, I just need my animal instincts and to advance my best interests; I need a family and resources, the more resources the better. The more resources I command, the prettier and smarter my wife will be, as I will refuse to marry an average idiot and the more I can take advantage of my animal instincts. My children will be pretty and think like Great White Sharks; this is a good thing. Helping the middle class will advance my best interests and so I do. The elite would fear me more, than any White Liberal a-hole or Neo Con Reagan apologist, because I think the way I do, because I will it that I think the way I do. They did not place my thoughts in my head, I did.
How o u define Excessive GreeD?
CEOs getting pay raises when their companies are taking big losses. Multimillion dollar "bonuses".
You are right. We should be equal in front of the law. We should not really have all the same amount of money. So OWS should target laws that could improve the situation. For example, they can watch their representatives more closely, in real time. They can take some power for them directly.
greed is in every system
Demand, Well said, but this must begin somewhere. This movement needs people like yourself that can see the problems and have solutions. Don't be negative, ideas are powerful. This country began with the idea of freedom and that spirit is alive today. Perhaps it is better to begin with the end in mind, but at least it has begun.
It doesn't have to change. We'll change. See the plan given below:
Many people have expressed their opinion about the way forward in this movement.
There are 3 common flaws in the proposals 1)"demands" have to be approved within the existing political structure, 2)physical theft or violence would require interference from the government, 3)current political entities would absorb this movement, when the feeling in the air is that something absolutely new is required.
Here is my proposal: create a new national capitol. Only that move will be seen as satisfying when we look back on these events in the decades to come.
But how can this small movement break free from the current oligarchy that controls us? We are doctors, lawyers, and farmers just the same as our founding fathers. Yet, the principles they created have been distorted to serve the oligarchy. These principles should be renewed.
In creating a new and better seat of government, we have the most powerful tool ever created - the internet.
I suggest Kansas City, Kansas as a location for this new seat of government. A new and faster internet is being created there. An open and more benign canvas exists at this site, without the stifling history and "baggage" found on either coast.
We don't need to hate "them", we'll just focus on creating a better "us". The energy to do this, exists right now in New York.
CarryTheGrips
I don't understand how moving the capitol from Washington to Kansas is going to change anything other than the address.
Our capitol. Our rules.
So a civil war? And how would a capitol in Kansas be any more mine than one in Washington?
I hate to burst your bubble, but capitalism is a process that has constantly been refined and changed. Try reviewing a little history before making statement such as this... I think a guy, his name was Marx, suggested that Capitalism be overthrown by revolution. It is OK to allow 10 year-olds to work long hours in dangerous factories? Unrestrained capitalism says it is. But, things have evolved and will continue to evolve. This movement is also evolving and it not a political platform to get elected to any position. It is an internet-era movement that has never before been seen and that is why is doesn't make sense to you. Citizens need acceptable access to basic rights such as food, water, clothing, and shelter. They need to be allowed and encouraged to be independent rather than dependent on a government or corporations to survive. The ability to discuss these ideas freely is what defines this country - an not everyone can.
Of course capitalism says it is ok for 10 year olds to work in a factory. It is an inhumane system. That is why it needs to be replaced with democracy, a humane, civilized system.
There is not a single benefit to capitalism.
Once you are done reforming all the problems with capitalism (like having 10 year olds work in a factory), what you are left with is democracy and no capitalism.
So we can pretend capitalism is good as we eliminate every last bit of it or we can just face reality and replace it all at once.
If you are suggesting that Capitalism can not exist then you are re-iterating what Marx said and the proletariat will rise up against the bourgeoisie and socialism would arise and then communism will take its place. This is a dangerous line to walk. Capitalism can not be replaced with democracy as democracy is a political ideology and capitalism is socio-economic ideology. I believe our current political system has evolved and continues to evolve, unless we act, into a something that resembles a corporate-oligarchy. Regardless, I think we are asking for some transparency; not just to listen to the booming voice behind the curtain and that is a start.
I could care less what Marx, from 150 years ago, said. People have real problems today that need real solutions.
Democracy is a system where power is held by everyone equally. It can be used to manage government or an economy or a single business or your family or what to have for dinner.
And if we replace capitalism with democracy, it will solve nearly every social problem we have.
i am reading your comments like you said. you just continue to insult people and disregard real philosophies that people have studied throughout the course of history. You appear to be entirely uneducated on the subject matter you speak of.
I only insult people who insult me.
And I am pretty sure I am as informed about history, economics, politics, capitalism, democracy, socialism, and communism as anyone.
I never insulted you, I criticized your ideas, but not yourself as a person. You called me names and and told me to leave.
I don't recall. Where?
the only thing that matters right now is CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM, unless you get the big money out of politics, no change whatsoever will occur, this should be the focus of the protests, we need to have honest politicians that work for the public before any thing else can get done, campaign finance reform (ending corporate personhood, kicking the lobbyists out of the Washington) is the perfect starting point. It really is a no brainer that this should be the one thing we can all agree on. Because unless we do this, all those other demands that people have will never be addressed, not in a millions years.
You can't elect people to change the system. But you can elect people to end private campaign financing and lobbyists? That is a logical fallacy.
change starts within ourselves
i see many people who are against capitalism but keep eating at McDonald, burger king, eat Hershey's chocolate bar, drink coca-cola, buy at Starbucks, wear Nike. guess what? you are actually helping capitalism, you are being part of the unfair, unequal, and greed corporate system.. you are helping them to abuse, oppress, and slave people in poor countries including CHILDREN (Nestle) to spoil your unnecessary needs.
if you wan to fight capitalism; stop consuming their products, stop drinking coca-cola, stop eating fake food at McDonald, shop at farmers market instead, and limit yourself to the use of plastic bags, bring your own bags, help local business and help our environment. educate your children, they are not just the future but our present...
How is buying from McDonald's helping capitalism but buying from a local business not helping capitalism?
Since every business operates within capitalism, it is impossible not to buy from a capitalist company. The best way to change the system is to show people specifically using real numbers how their life would improve without capitalism. And then to get all those people to vote for democracy to replace capitalism as our economic system.
How will this democratic economic system work? Who decides wages? Who decides where money is spent? Who decides prices?
Democracy is a system of equality. So you will get equal pay for equal effort.
Effort is determined by the amount of time you work and whether the job is mentally or physically difficult. People who worked twice the hours would obviously get paid twice the income. And people who worked the difficult jobs, the jobs in science, computers, engineering, medicine, construction, mining, or farming, would get paid more than the jobs that were not difficult.
The final compensation plan would be directly voted on by the population, but if you paid difficult jobs twice the amount as jobs that are not difficult, since that is likely enough of an incentive to get people to do more difficult work, based on the American economy in 2010, that system would pay an income of $230,000 per year for the difficult jobs and $115,000 per year for the rest of the jobs.
You decide where money is spent by how you spend your income. You decide what is produced and what is not produced by how you spend your money.
Prices will now become a genuine, technical, science-based number. The price of everything will be the number of total labor hours it took to make times whatever the hourly rate of the employees are.
So a reduction in price will represent real efficiency because you need to reduce labor in order to reduce price. You can't just find cheaper labor and pretend that you are more efficient.
I agree with equal pay for the same kind of labor. I don't see that as not capitalism though. It is just fair labor laws. Like any system we need checks and balances and what you are proposing is one of those. What do we do when countries we have no control over don't have these laws and make cheaper goods? We would lose to them on exports in th world market. We already see that happening with china.
The whole world is capitalist because we impose that system on them. If you want access to the most advanced technology that the US has developed over the last 250 years, you need to be capitalist. Otherwise, you will need to spend a century developing it on your own.
So every country has to be capitalist if it wants to develop.
If we became democratic, capitalism would end throughout the world in short order.
But if it doesn't that does not mean trade between countries won't work. It will work the same as it does now.
oh wow, the first true thing youve said. maybe you arent as dumb as i thought
told ya
my point is that you have not addressed small business' role here.
I don't know what question you are asking.
sorry, just getting back on here, though i am not going to stay long tonight, i've got work to do.
The affect on your system is more detrimental to small businesses than major corporations. You have not addressed what happens, financially, to business owners, since they do not receive a wage, just the profits of their business.
Also, what of employees who want to take less pay to work for a better company. The company will be forced to pay them an equal wage so they may not be able to hire all people who are enthusiastic about working for them.
There are just so many problems with this democratic economic system that to work them all out would be a waste of time if it ended up not working. I think there are enough situations where it doesn't function that you should consider something else.
If, for example, the population democratically approved a compensation system where easy jobs get paid $115k and difficult jobs get paid $230k, current business owners would get paid either $115k or $230k, depending on whether their job was considered difficult.
Nobody's pay would be based on profit.
The only effect profit has is if your company is unprofitable, it will be shut down so you will be out of a job earning nothing and will need to get a new job.
The system will be responsible for full employment. We will never run out of work to do. So people will never run out of opportunities to find employment.
You will not be able to negotiate salary. If a business cannot afford to hire you, you will have to work elsewhere.
I guess you could work there part time, get paid part time, but give them full time anyway. So it would be like hiring you at half pay. That obviously will be unusual.
"I think there are enough situations where it doesn't function that you should consider something else."
Name one.
also, as a frequent freelancer, who would by my equal salary....
their might be an idea here though that maybe you would like. What if we were all freelancers, paid by a government agency, and could move from company from company freely. Like a giant temp agency.
Your income would be $115k if you did easy work or $230k if you did physically or mentally difficult work (science, computers, engineering, medicine, construction, mining, or farming).
In capitalism, the system is not accountable to anyone. Democracy is accountable. So not only will we take measures to deliberately provide full employment, we will also create a work environment that is accountable to workers.
If workers like having a temp role, where they get to work with a lot of different companies, the system will have to provide those opportunities.
In capitalism, you are forced to submit to the system. In a democracy, the system is forced to submit to you.
So the work environment would be completely different.
The 20th century, authoritarian, wage-slave, rat-race work environment that fascism was modeled after would be replaced with one where you were actually treated like an adult and treated like an equal owner. It would be an environment where you had the power to autonomously direct your work-life, where you still maintained full control over your schedule, and where you had the ability to contribute in important ways doing something that served a higher purpose.
Work would cater to your interests in being productive just like a 5-star hotel caters to your traveling interests or an upscale, award-winning restaurant caters to your dining interests.
Google ROWE (Results Oriented Work Environment) or watch the TED talk I linked to where ROWE is mentioned.
Every vote counted is not the same as every vote counting. When our government can be bought by the richest 1%, we have a right a duty to try to change it. I don't expect anything different from capitalism. Which is why I want capitalism out of my government.
"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." - Thomas Jefferson, (The declaration of independence).
"'The establishment is invincible', 'protesting is useless', 'you'll never change anything', if everyone in the world believed that, then every single country in the world would still be kept in poverty by a ruling monarchy." - Anonymous
Capitalism will never get out of your government unless you get rid of capitalism. So long as you have capitalism, you will have vast inequality in income. And with vast inequality in income, you will have vast inequality in power. And the ones with the power will have the means to shape society to benefit them. The people with little power will never get a fair deal in life.
You need to eliminate the system of inequality. You need to eliminate capitalism. There is absolutely no benefit to capitalism whatsoever.
You guys just don't quite get it. For all of you saying "we don't have capitalism, it's corporatism," or "we just need to make capitalism more just," it doesn't work like that. Capitalism naturally pursues profit, defeats competition, and ultimately drives wealth into the hands of the few. No matter how much you try to reform it, there will always be a few haves and far more have-nots, and politicians will always defect to the former group.
Long story short, the inevitable outcome of capitalism is corporatism.
The most logical answer we have is making the economy a democratic organ decentrally planned by workers. I.e. socialism. I don't get why that's considered so radical and evil.
How will that be different from capitalism? What aspects will be different?
Basically what I advocate is Libertarian Socialism (real word, look it up). Firms would be owned not privately or by the workers, but by whole communities or regions. They would be managed by workers, and would be part of federations that would cooperate instead of compete. Economic planning would be made at the local, regional, national levels by industry- and interindustry-wide councils of workers. Economic plans could be voted on by workers and communities for approval. If firms failed to answer to their consumers needs, restrictions could be placed on them by the economic councils.
That's the idea in a nutshell. It's never been tried on a wide scale, but there have been several historic experiments, most notably Anarchist Catalonia and the Paris Commune. I guess the system of Communal Councils in Venezuela is also kind of doing what I describe, although I haven't looked into that much.
I'm pretty much for any system that puts the economy in the hands of the workers, as opposed to private owners of corporations or centralized, unaccountable government buerocracies. This is not what happened in the Soviet countries. They were authoritarian, centralized, and unaccountable from the beginning, so I don't buy into the idea that that is what socialism always leads to.
You mean like a co op? That's an interesting idea. It requires a lot of people to be unselfish to some extent. Is it practical?
Yeah, basically public co ops. As for the selfish thing, if a firm became too competitive/disruptive to the point that it was hurting the federation, it could be kicked out, which would cut it off from resources, spelling disaster for it. So ultimately that wouldn't be in anyones interest. Also, I don't see this idea as totally against self-interest. If a worker was truly more valuable than the others in his/her firm, that would give them the power to demand higher wage, so people would still strive to be the best at what they do.
If you want to learn more about this proposal, you should look at this; http://infoshop.org/page/AnAnarchistFAQ. The Anarchist FAQ. Now don't get me wrong, this is NOT strictly an anarchist idea, but they give a good overview of how such a system might work (although their description is a bit utopian, if you know what I mean). It could be applied in a more moderate society.
Right on.
Unfortunately, people have been brainwashed because the people with all the money control all the media and control the agenda. And they have no interest and no incentive in promoting anything other than capitalism.
People need to realize they are being duped and are getting a raw deal.
People need to be shown with real numbers that their income would triple, that their mortgage would be cut in half, that you should get paid to go to school not the other way around, that we would use automation to eliminate the need to do jobs nobody wants to do.
The plan was to stimulate ideas....and since you posted some ideas you were stimulated....It really is working...people are waking up and starting to think...ask questions.....challenge OWS.....but do continue to speak up and THINK!
My idea has been around for hundreds of years. The problem is not that people aren't thinking. The problem is that people aren't doing. Now that OWS has the spotlight, they should be demanding specific changes, not getting people to think for another few hundred more years about changes.
I think what you are asking for is a fair system. Not necessarily socialism.
If you define socialism as Mao's China, the soviet union or Cuba, I am not asking for socialism.
But if you define socialism as public ownership of the means of production, I am asking for socialism. Socialism works.
NASA works, the National Science Foundation works, schools work, public universities work, Veterans Hospitals work, police departments work, fire departments work, the FBI works, the CIA works, the military works, the post office works, garbage collection works. And the Nordic countries, which have the most socialism of all the developed countries, have the highest standard of living in the world, the highest quality of life in the world and the citizens with the most happiness in the world directly because they have the most socialism in the developed world.
It sounds good in theory. I dont know how much support this idea will get.
Everything evolves...well if you believe in evolution.
Demand number one should be Stop the WAR. Spend those trillions on american people .
You assume everyone who is wealthy got to be wealthy legitimately. Why reward theft?
I don't advocate a system that rewards theft. I advocate a system that pays everyone equally based on effort.
expectations: one I would add is "our Presidents do not have the power to do the things we think we've elected them to do, and then we are disappointed when our Presidents do not do what we think we've elected them to do!"
Here's my plan, an actual solution: http://www.JeffBlock2012.com
People need to work the kind of jobs that they would be willing to do for free and need to get paid enough money to make them wealthy. I'm not sure how 2 extra presidents and more senators is going to help people.
and 435 less Representatives... the point is to create an organizational structure that is a cooperative form government, not an adversarial form of government. I just started this and what you read is my layperson's attempt at creating a system of government. If our founders started today with a blank piece of paper they certainly would not devise the system in place today - it was good in the 18th century for 13 loosely organized States... but for this to go to fruition I'd first have to have on board a few Constitutional scholars as well as a few organizational behaviorist.
I agree that it is ridiculous that we have to live by a constitution written by a bunch of people in the 1700s.
Not only is it anachronistic, it was written by men who were all white, mostly wealthy and slaveholders.
If the republicans wrote a new constitution, it would be vastly different than if it were written by democrats or greens or socialists or anarchists.
If I wrote the constitution, it would be simple and would enshrine into law the sentiment of the Enlightenment Era and the sentiment of the Declaration of Independence:
"Everyone has a birth right to the equal freedom to act - to pursue their happiness however they define it - without coercion or restraint so long as you do not reasonably violate that same right in others. Every citizen gets an equal freedom to act, speak, and think; equal treatment under the law; equal votes; and equal income for equal effort."
That would be the whole constitution. That would be the supreme law of the land. It would not say how a government should run.
Running any organization, including government, is a technical matter and should evolve and improve over time as we get better at managing things. The running of the government should be subjected to science, peer review and democratic vote. It shouldn't be run by the unscientific scripture written in some founding bible several hundred years ago.
here's Iceland's citizen written proposed (it's in Parliament approval process right now) Constitution: http://stjornlagarad.is/other_files/stjornlagarad/Frumvarp-enska.pdf
It has a lot of pretty, non-specific, meaningless language that our current constitution has. Everything that exists in our current society can be justified based on that constitution.
All those words should all be replaced by the sentence that they are guaranteed an equal income for equal effort so that people have the income and the very real means to do all the nice things promised in that constitution.
a Constitutional right to a specific level of income?
Absolutely. A constitutional right to equal pay for equal effort. You should get paid based on the time you work and the difficulty of your job. What that specifically amounts to depends on GDP.
If the consumption income of the 2010 American GDP was allocated equally based on effort like I propose, you would get paid $230k for working a physically or mentally difficult job in science, computers, engineering, medicine, construction, mining, or farming. And you would get paid $115k for working any of the remaining jobs.
I'd rather have the freedom that comes from a guaranteed $230k as a construction worker than a lot of flowery language about freedom in a constitution.
To keep propping up failing US corporations w/ bailouts & tax cuts is socialism, not capitalism.
We in Olancho are already setting an example that can be replicated everywhere. This new nation is a work in progress [just like our website]. The people of Olancho wanted to be independent and prosperous and thus embraced joining forces with outsiders who brought a diverse set of ideas and skills.
Olancho was founded by an alliance of rugged individualists who succeeded in ridding irrational and dangerous industrial society precepts to create a resilient nation based on equitable prosperity, small-scale production and an economy limited by the efficiencies of nature.
Olancho seceded from Honduras in 2011 to become the first energy-independent constitutional republic that integrates liberty, self-reliance and free-enterprise with permaculture, agro-ecology, soil husbandry, food security and natural resource conservation.
The people of Olancho have reasserted the legitimate jurisdiction of private rights and environmental stewardship against unsustainable living, rampant consumerism, economic shocks, oppressive oligarchies and engorging bureaucracies in Latin America, the United Sates and Europe.
Olancho is the idea that human prosperity and thriving ecosystems are achievable through the application of renewable energy and appropriate technologies, sustainable agricultural practices and good government.
The economy of Olancho is heavily weighted to the primary sector. Small private enterprises intensively manage highly productive farms and related industries. Each community maximizes its ability to sustain itself with food, water, energy and other resources necessary for human health, well being and prosperity. Surpluses are traded between communities within Olancho and imports and exports are traded with other nations.
Economic growth is strengthened by a unified market, a supportive political-legal system, vast natural resources, a culture that values entrepreneurship and a commitment to investing in material and human capital.
www.republicofolancho.com
At no other time are the masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of new political, economic and social orders as at a time of revolution.
¡Viva la Revolución! ¡VIVA OLANCHO!
The ultimate goal is to get rid of all currency worldwide. that is the boldess most ambitious solution that will crash capitalism then we the people can have a resource based democratic world. This is the what everyone wants but nobody has the balls to stand up for it because we have been forced to fall in love with money. so the choice is ours people of the world. Freedom or Money? cant have both. Power to the people
Right now, the 1% control the resources through use of money. If you take away all money, someone will get direct control of the resources. If you do this on a global scale, you will have someone--some group--controlling all resources globally. You may propose a system that will ensure 'fairness' in distribution, but ALL systems are susceptible to corruption. In all of human history, there has never existed a system free of and immune form corruption. This is the biggest problem I see with TZM/TVP/Resource Based Economy theory. When such a system becomes corrupt, how do the 99% regain control when the corrupt control all the food, water, and energy resources of the entire planet?
You need money so that people do not demand more than what you produce. Goods and services need to be rationed. You also need money as an incentive to get people to work. We do not have the automation to rely solely on volunteers.
wrong my friend. if you control the quality of the products that are produced and make products that last for hundreds of years then your demand for more will be fruitless because you already have a variety of the best things we can develop. see all these useless products and terrible food that we buy would dissapear without money because companies would not have reason to make sub-standard products for profit, instead the people will manufacture only the highest quality foods and products for everyone which will destroy the consumeristic thoughts of social inequality. Goods and service dont need to be rationed, if we can create products that last for lifetimes then less has to be produced and less "volunteers" are needed. but thats just economics. people wouldnt need to volunteer there will be people fighting to work to build a better world without money. we would have to many people wanting to help their fellow man.
what would you do? sit on your ass til your dead? then your death is necessary for the good of humanity. only the strong of will shall survive and if you are unwilling to contribute to your familiy and your community and your world then you my good sir are obsolete. and good ridence.
Unfortunately for your plan, nobody wants a 200 year old car, or a 200 year old kitchen, or a 200 year old phone, or a 200 year old tv, or a 200 year old computer, ad infinitum.
So it won't work. Nobody wants to live like it was 1699.
Also, allowing people who lay on the beach all day and party all night to consume the same as someone who works all day is not fair. And you have no proof that there would be enough people "fighting" to volunteer to produce things for all the lazy/party people.
once again your picking at semantics i was giving examples. im sure every so often when the technology gets better then we will be able to simply return our cars for newer models recycling the hardware of the old cars to help build the generation of new. and in the mean time you could use the world public transportation system which will me much more energy efficient and get people around alot faster.
You have no proof that people would not be fighting to help out. It is in our nature as people. have you ever done anything in your life for someone else that did not pay you or give you something in return? ill bet you have. why? because thats our nature. MONEY IS NOT! MONEY IS AN UNNATURAL PERVERSION OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT. and when it is gone we will become real people again.
if you want to lay on the beach all day go right ahead but i can assure you that you wont make it in this world. in any system. people do that now.... whats your point? you think the whole planet will just die after money is gone? just lay on the beach til we kill off the human race of earth. you really think that? you dont understand human nature then and you sure dont know anything about the will to live, survive, and create.
yes people will die. but it will be alot less then the lives that Money, War, Religion, Poverty and disease have take.
what was bad about all the fat lazy good for nothing people dying?
would you rather abort the future generations for the sake of this small minority of people who ultimately will refuse to contribute to their families, or communities. they will all migrate to some tropical island and die happy. what more could they want. let them. if that is how they choose to spend their existence then who are you or I to say that it is wrong.
You claimed that people will want 200 year old things. I said they won't, that is not semantics.
When everything is free, the amount of new homes, remodels, kitchens, bathrooms, landscaping, pools, cars, phones, computers, tvs, furniture, clothes, etc. demanded will far exceed your ability to supply.
If money was no object, people would consume the equivalent of people who earn several hundred thousand or millions per year.
To meet that demand we would need to grow the economy several hundred percent which would take a century or more.
I have done things free for people I know and for charity. But I never did it full time, wouldn't do it full time and wouldn't donate any of my time to someone I didn't know and was lazy and not contributing something to society in return.
If everything was free, why wouldn't I make it in the world laying on the beach all day?
I don't think the human race would end if we didn't have money. It would go to shit and so people would demand that we return money so that we can better manage the economy.
p.s. you wouldnt make it on the beach because nobody will spoon feed you like the government. people will be forced to become more independant and self-sufficient creating hugh technology booms til someday in the very near future we would be able to just live in space or in the oceans or inside the planet or on other planets. perhaps even manufacture artificial planets. money is stopping all of that from happening.
i never claimed that what are you talking about.i said, "if you control the quality of the products that are produced and make products that last for hundreds of years" nowhere in there did I say anything about people wanting anything for 200 years. your reading and comprehension skills are severly lacking. the point i was making was that we need to get rid of this materialistic mass consumeristic disposable crap on every shelf worldwide, and manufacture more effiecent longer lasting more sustainable products.
lets be honest here you have no clue how people will react to a world that is so obviously done with the monetary control systems of micro-management. because you cant picture it, you never thought about it as being the only plausible solution to empower the people. if millions of crappy products arent produced by anybody then there would be nothing to massivley consume or hoard unless you want to stock up on food or something. you think every house will be built using the same in efficient building materials and people would all want mansions and 25 cars, 50 tvs, 100 phones, but what you dont understand is that will not be an option unless you build your own mansion and make your own products to mass consume. it would be nothing like our system now so stop trying to compare because you cant. its apples and oranges. people would not act like mass consumers in a world that doenst offer the means to mass consume.
everything would not be "free" because free assumes that it is something that should be paid for.
do you want to pay for clean water? do you want to pay to live in a house? do you want to pay for unlimited energy? do you want to pay for food?
these things should come standard and available to everyone. these are the things we need to survive in the modern world. not money.
and as for the things you want to consume or YOU THINK people will want to consume like you said, "new homes, remodels, kitchens, bathrooms, landscaping, pools, cars, phones, computers, tvs, furniture, clothes, etc..." would all be taken care of by the new system, we will start to tear down all the inefficient out dated communities, homes, etc and people will get to choose from thousands of easily manufactured fully sustainable modern housing with built in high standard of living. nobody will come and remodel your kitchen. we will tear down your house and build you a better one as a community, all for one, and one for all. some towns will do it themselves but there will be large groups of people that move from town to town deconstructing and re-building the most modern, efficient and advanced housing systems and city plans voted on by the people of those areas. masions are not efficient unless they are communal living so nobody will be able to have personal giant houses or elaboroately usless shit.
as for larger urban development obviously it would take time to re-build cities more efficiently so people will have to spread out more.
the only reason people think the world is overpopulated is because the current systems makes it easier to live in large cities while even most of central America is unihabited. if we are born into a world that you could have everything you need and more from birth regardless of where you live,
what more do you think people would want? then even the idea of enormous cities will be abandoned. who wants to live on the 120th floor of skyscrapers or in ghettos if you can have your own space free of the insanity of the unnecessary highly inefficient metropolis? cities will fall and be able to be recycled and rebuilt in high efficiency part urban/part rural developments. people can still live in community based structures but instead of skyscrapers we have high effeciency multi-plexes because people are still going to want to live close to eachother so communal living is essential.
unless you would rather live in the chicken coups they are building now, the model of inefficiency and break your back a job where you are spinning in circles accomplishing nothing for nobody to get in return worthless paper to give back to the government just so you can be able to go home and cook dinner, take a shower, take a shit..whatever.
If thats what you want then why change the system at all? you are already home.
btw: Skyscrapers are COOL! If I could afford it, I would LOVE to live on the 120th floor of a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan. I LOVE Manhattan!
well we would eventually have cities that would make new york city look like a trash dump.. with more unique building supplies most of the structures will be unique and custom. not so much block and squares. personally i cant wait to live under the ocean. and i want my hover board already geez.
This is a charming ideal, but it would never work.
Equal pay for equal effort? So we would reward the services of someone who helped 50 people a day identically to another who only helped 20 people, provided that they both looked just as sweaty and worn-out at the end of the day? Our incomes are a direct indicator of our effectiveness at making other people's lives better.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that founded the United States, Americans are entitled to "life, liberty and the PURSUIT of happiness". This may come as a shock, but assuring the happiness of 100% of the people is utterly impossible. What makes you think that these incomes would make everyone satisfied? Those unsatisfied would steal voraciously, conveniently from those who wouldn't have used all of their allocated money to begin with, and suddenly the system is unequal again.
Life is inherently unequal, but true democracies do as much as possible to assure that we as human beings can live, be free from unwarranted encroachments on our lives, and reach for our dreams. Income can NEVER be a guaranteed right because one has to EARN it in life by helping others.
You choose your words carefully, but you are a communist. I respect the hell out of you for it. But Communism has, and never will work, because it ironically requires an absolute legislation (historically in the form of dictators) to enforce such intense income equality, not to mention it removes the means of production out of the hands of the PEOPLE and into the hands of the government.
You accuse the people of lacking plans, demands, or solutions for positive change in the current capitalist democracy of the United States of America. You are probably correct, given that many people believe a complete revolution is needed in the system. The system at its core is as good as it gets, but there is always room for improvement. Everyone, from the lowest of the 99%, to the top of the 1% need to understand this: the well-being of other people is your number 1 concern in the market. Anytime you spend or make money, the exchange of money for a good/service makes all of the people involved better off.
You wish everyone to have the good life; it might be nice if there was a real way of achieving this. But I, given those three most important rights, will do my utmost to help as many people as I possibly can and achieve something even better: the great life, the true American Dream.
FIRST: Very, very few people get paid in today's system directly based on the amount of work they do. They are paid a salary and are expected to complete a certain amount of work during that time.
The claim that people are paid today directly based on how effective they are at making other people's lives better is simply not true.
Since this is a system based on science and if we determine through a peer review process that some jobs should be paid directly based on output, some jobs will be paid that way so that you earn the $115k or $230k only if you do the required amount of work. But only a very small number of jobs meet that criteria and need to be paid that way. View this video on incentives which talks about this in detail: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
SECOND: I also believe in the pursuit of happiness as a right. I never said people should be guaranteed happiness. Democracy is based on Freedom, Equality and Science.
Freedom means you should be given as a birth right the Equal Freedom to act - to pursue your happiness - without coercion or restraint so long as it does not reasonably violate that same right in others.
The lack of money is an enormous restraint on people's freedom to act, to pursue their happiness, in today's system. So if you want to guarantee people freedom as a right, you also have to guarantee them enough income.
But it is up to you whether you derive happiness out of the opportunity you are given.
Since people are not perfect, some people will continue to steal. However, since everyone has enough income to live a wealthy lifestyle and there is no longer any poverty, the overwhelming majority of thefts will disappear. Your claim that a society of wealthy people will increase theft is absurd.
THIRD: What I propose is a system where you do have to earn your money. If you work 40 hours, you will get paid twice the amount as someone who works 20 hours. And if you work a job that requires greater physical or mental effort, you will get paid twice the amount as those who work jobs that do not.
If you put in the effort, you have earned the income, so your income is guaranteed.
FOURTH: I am not advocating communism and judging by what you wrote, you do not understand what communism is. Communism is the hypothetical end stage of society with no classes, no property, no money, and no government. Technology enables you to reach such an abundance that you no longer need goods and services to be rationed with money, people can take all they want, and automation is so advanced, all the jobs nobody wants to do is done by machines so you don't need to pay people to work.
No society has ever achieved communism. We do not have the technology to do it. I advocate the use of money, prices, markets for goods and services and working for an income. So I do not advocate communism.
FIFTH: I still want the production decisions of what we produce to be determined by the market. You decide what is produced based on how you spend your money. But it is inhumane to treat people like commodities, like heads of cattle or bushels of wheat, where your entire standard of living and means of survival depends on your ability to sell yourself in an open market.
The labor market is not like the market for apples. Every exchange does not make everyone better off. So the cruel and uncivilized labor market will be replaced with the more humane and civilized system where if you work as hard as everyone else, you get the same pay as everyone else.
SIXTH: There is a way to give everyone the good life and give everyone the American dream: guarantee them a $115k or $230k income doing work that would do for free. That is what a democratic economic system would accomplish.
I love that channel, and that is an excellent video. And thanks for the response.
The intrinsic value system he proposes to enact for employees is absolutely correct. Money, perhaps surprisingly to some, is a terrible incentive for worker improvement. This is because work is all about helping other people; every offered job on the planet helps others in one way or another, directly or indirectly. When one’s incentive is only to make money, you are doing it absolutely wrong. A proper arrangement of priorities leads to this: Help people, and then the money will follow for how much you helped. The current system is certainly flawed in that these priorities have been skewed to some people, but an embrace of socialism would just have the same effect. You want everyone to have $115,000 or $230,000 a year based on simply what KIND work is done (or based on output), then the application of Daniel Pink’s 3 principles fails utterly. The rigidness of having to work an exact amount of time or an exact amount of work for your yearly stash o’cash would certainly reduce autonomy; the inability to progress beyond $230,000 would certainly discourage an improvement of skills/ mastery beyond this point; and the sole indicated meaning of getting up out of bed in the morning just to earn your allocated money, instead of getting up to help others and do what you enjoy or even love, is preposterous, a destruction of true purpose, and an exacerbating force upon the flaws in the system you are wishing to change. “They are paid a salary and are expected to complete a certain amount of work during that time”: this principle applies in both systems, but far, far more so in the system that socialism proposes. The reality is that a great worker works for others, and that works for himself in the form of income. We need a system where autonomy, mastery, and purpose can guide our efforts; in other words, a system where we can do our work the way we want, improve on our skills, and embrace the true purpose of work: helping others.
Like I said, the world in itself is naturally unequal. This is an incorruptible fact. But this is what gives us strength, and individuality, and the possibility to rise up as human beings and reach our potential. We are not “heads of cattle or bushels of wheat” when every single person has a unique set of attitudes and abilities; our individual abilities are displayed when we put our resumes on the market. Of course we sell ourselves on the market; this is how we indicate to other people that we are great helpers. But unless one is a prostitute, you don’t literally sell yourself, and you especially aren’t a simple good to be traded. We are all humans, and democracy ensures all of the rights that being human permits. Income is not a right; it is earned through helping others, just as we earn so many other things in this life, from relationships, to skills, to knowledge, out of hard work and dedication. Democracy can only be assured to the nature of being human itself, not to the amount of money in your bank account.
I reject the “democratic economic” (socialist) system for these reasons. Human nobility for equality can clearly be skewed. But I do support an appropriate wake-up-call in the priorities of everyone involved in the market. All must, from now on, use the 3 principles, and especially focus on the true purpose of doing work: helping others. It is unfortunate that many people believe only in their paycheck, but ideal disparity is a natural part of the natural inequality in the world. We just need more people to realize the truth.
I think you misunderstood what Pink what saying. He said you shouldn't use compensation schemes to try to manipulate people. You should just pay people well so that the discussion of money is permanently off the table.
That is exactly what I propose. Everyone just gets paid well. Your income is not tied to performance for all the important, creative, innovation jobs.
He says instead of using money to motivate people, you should make the job so that the worker has autonomy, mastery and purpose.
I also believe in that. We should use automation to eliminate all the menial jobs (all the jobs that require the carrot and stick approach). And we should completely changethe work environment. We should treat workers like adults. Work should be a ROWE environment. And the work environment should have intrinsic rewards. Every worker should have autonomy, be given a way to attain mastery and have a transcendent purpose.
You do sell yourself like a prostitute in our current system. The only difference is the service you sell.
Income is not currently a right. In a democracy, that cruel practice would end. People will get a right to equal income for equal effort so everyone can live the good life as a right.
Democracy comes by law and a police force that will uphold that law. It doesn't come from "the nature of being human".
Thanks again for a reply.
I understand exactly what Pink is saying, and expressed that clearly in my previous response. I said it, and I’ll say it again: Pink is correct. The 3 principles are amazing and practical ideals. And here is my biggest point: the discussion of money will always be there in the market, but the biggest priority for everyone should be to help others. There is no way to avoid the discussion of something that is real and important. We all just need to realize that the income that comes from helping others is less important than the actual action of helping others.
Don’t accuse people of prostituting themselves off when they are pursuing something that they truly enjoy. Don’t embrace the stereotypical attitude of “us vs. the man” and the new “we are the 99%”. Your assertations of “We are work whores, we are cattle, we are wheat” may or may not be the beliefs of some of the people in the “1%”; but what is certain is that you yourself are insulting your own humanity with such bizarre perceptions. Our individuality and our desires make us human. If reaching for our dreams isn’t wholesome, then what is?
I think you misunderstood what I was saying at the end. I said “Democracy can only be assured TO the nature of being human itself, not to the amount of money in your bank account.” Of course democracy comes from law. I’m saying that democracy can only be applied to our inherent human rights.
Income can never be a right, because one has to do something beneficial in society in order to achieve it. You don’t reward someone for doing nothing. And income must be leveled to proven ability and performance; a ceiling of $230,000 would stagnate mastery. The jobs of our future must have all 3 of Pink’s principles: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Most importantly, no one can forget that the true purpose is to help others.
The fact that people get treated like cattle is the truth whether the1% believe it or not. We have a labor market. You have to sell yourself in that labor market or you will get no income and die. And yes, it is insulting to humanity.
That is why I want to replace the labor market with a system where you are guaranteed an equal income for equal effort, you are guaranteed a high standard of living and a high quality of life. None of it is dependent on your ability to sell yourself.
A ceiling of $230k would not stagnate mastery. That was the point Pink was making in his video. The opportunity to achieve mastery instead of money is a better incentive to do a good job.
Why do you insist on devaluing the people in the system? We are not cattle. We are humans. We are a part of a world where if you do nothing for others (and by extension yourself) you will die. Of course you will die if you do nothing! It is not insulting to humanity; this is a simple truth of our existence. You keep calling it "selling yourself" in a foul sense, drawing the negative connotation to prostitution. We "sell ourselves" all the time; we display our worth and ideas to people anytime we meet others, or get into an argument. We are both selling our ideals (and therefore ourselves) to each other as we type these responses right now, attempting to convince the other that our beliefs (and therefore ourselves) are true! In addition, selling yourself is the way you assert how much income you are deserving of, directly coinciding with how many people you help. How could we possibly determine who gets what if people weren’t allowed to sell themselves? How would you determine in your system which people got the standard yearly rate, or the double rate? They would have to sell themselves to your system with college degrees, experience, and the record of the amount of people they help in order to get the pay upgrade. Selling yourself is an inseparable part of not only the market, but our daily lives. And let me make this point again: The most important incentive of all is the fact that our work helps other people.
Prostitution is selling sex for money. Convincing others of your point of view is not selling yourself for money. They are not the same.
In the system I advocate, if your labor is needed, you will get paid the same income as everyone else who works doing similar work. You don't have to sell yourself by negotiating a price. The market does not dictate how much you can earn. It does not dictate what your standard of living will be. Everyone lives a high standard of living as a right. Your standard of living is not dependent on your ability to sell yourself for the highest price.
We decide who gets what by paying everyone an income and producing what they buy.
Pay is based on effort. If you work 40 hours, you get paid twice as much as someone who works 20 hours. If you work a job that requires more physical or mental effort, you will get paid more.
Clearly being a doctor requires great mental effort whereas working as a secretary does not. And doing construction requires great physical effort whereas being an interior decorator does not.
Ultimately, people will vote on the compensation plan.
Getting a college degree has nothing in common to a labor market where you sell yourself to the highest taker and your ability to sell yourself determines your standard of living.
You don't know what a connotation is: it is an association of a word or phrase to things that it is not specifically associated with. You don't seem to understand that my connotation of "selling yourself" is completely different than your own. In my examples, money is not involved whatsoever; just because the phrase has the word “sell” in it doesn't mean the phrase is only relevant to fiscal transactions. We sell ourselves solely as people in those everyday situations, displaying our strengths and thoughts to acquire relationships. Can you grasp this concept, or is money blinding you? And let's think here: if the people were to vote on a reward system, how on earth would we choose who is truly worthy? You really want every single person who works a "tough" job to automatically get paid more? The system and its people have evolved organically to appropriately reward people not simply on how many hours they work, BUT HOW MANY PEOPLE THEY HELP. Effort is absolutely irrelevant: Like I said earlier, in the real world we don’t reward the services of someone who helped 50 people a day identically to another who only helped 20 people, simply because they both looked just as sweaty and worn-out at the end of the day. The real world is not elementary school. It is hard, scary, and it is unequal. Only the people who truly work for the well-being of others survive. Do not be afraid to embrace the world’s realities because you feel guilty about those who struggle; especially don’t espouse a socialist plan that punishes those who truly help others in our system, and rewards those who really don’t. But once again: the most important thing we need to learn here that <OUR TRUE PRIMARY PEROGATIVE IN LIFE IS TO HELP OTHER PEOPLE>.
I have a problem with an economic system that forces you to sell yourself in a labor market in order to survive. I do not have a problem with people who try to sell their viewpoint in a debate. They are two completely different things.
You are fine with a system where tens of millions of people struggle and suffer. I am not.
A system where zero suffer is far superior to a system where tens of millions do.
You advocate an idiotic system where you are paid based on how many people you help. I do not. I advocate equal pay for equal effort. You get paid for the time and effort your work.
Under your system, a kid who serves coffee to 100 different people per day, 25,000 people for the year, will get paid 25,000 times more than a construction worker who spent the entire year building a house for a single individual. That is idiotic.
They are not two different things when they operate under the same basic principle of selling yourself, which we all practice every day.
It is noble of you to wish good upon everyone in the world, and a wish I share. I am not a bad person who is fine with suffering. We have all worked hard to assure our human rights. But unfortunately there is no operable system that can achieve equality of income, because income must be earned. These socialist systems have never worked, and never will work. Of course a system where no one suffers is superior to a system where people suffer. But we live in a world where suffering and inequality naturally exist, and we can't just engineer out such inherent flaws with a switch to a socialist economic model. If life's problems were really that simple, there probably wouldn't be any money at all to begin with, would there?
You've assumed upon my system an absurd equation, so let me rephrase: you are rewarded for how effectively you help people. The amount of helpfulness given from the kid in the coffee shop to 25,000 people a year may or may not warrant a similar reward to the helpfulness of a woman who spends an entire year building a house for one person. The market has evolved on its own to value these services appropriately, based on the quality of the good or service.
"But unfortunately there is no operable system that can achieve equality of income, because income must be earned"
There is a system. It is called democracy. You get equal pay for equal effort. Every aspect of it is proven in theory and practice.
"These socialist systems have never worked, and never will work"
Getting paid a flat salary works. It is for example, how every union works. You top out after ~4 years.
Socialism also works. NASA works, National Science Foundation works, schools work, universities work, Veterans Hospitals work, police departments work, fire departments work, FBI works, CIA works, the military works, the post office works, garbage collection works.
"we can't just engineer out such inherent flaws"
It worked with making the work week 40 hours, setting a minimum wage, social security, putting every kid through school, giving everyone access to the hospital, medicaid, guaranteeing seniors medical care, making the workplace safe, cleaning the air, eliminating racism, providing access to the handicap, etc. And in the nordic countries where you have the highest standard of living in the world,they have even more socialism.
The idea that we can't do better than animals in the wild is absurd.
"The market has evolved on its own to"
To leave 46 million in poverty, 16% underemployed, 1 in every 5 kids in poverty, 25% of all blacks in poverty, 97% of all workers earning a below average income, 40 million without health insurance, and 50% of all workers doing pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology.
Equal pay for equal EFFORT is not proven in theory or practice. Once again, we don't reward someone who is overall more effective at helping people the same as someone who is overall less effective at helping people just because they both look just as tired at the end of the day, and because our skewed morality makes us feel obliged to do so. Democracy is proven in theory and practice for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but not for income.
I wasn’t talking about socialism in the micro scale, i.e. in the bureaucracies and unions. Of course socialism has its successful applications. Those organizations adhere to Pink’s 3 principles fairly admirably. But “these socialist systems” like the one you propose on the macro scale, for every single person, simply cannot work. The success of the Nordic countries relies upon a mix of the systems; almost absolute socialism (or democratic economics as you call it) like you propose just doesn’t make practical sense.
Of course we have solved some of the world’s inherent flaws with human engineering, but you misquoted me. I said “We can't just engineer out such inherent flaws with a SWITCH TO a socialist economic model.” You make your solution sound almost perfect, even easy and obvious. But the world is not so simple. Millions of people create solutions to problems everyday; fortunately most of these are balanced and actually applicable to reality.
“The idea that we can’t do better than animals in the wild is absurd.” Didn’t I just say we as humans have “all worked hard to assure our human rights”? Haven’t I asserted our humanity against your accusations of us being market whores, cattle, and wheat? Haven’t I maintained that the true purpose of humanity is to help other humans? Of course we are doing better than the animals, dingus! Take a look around you and see all of the wonders of our human ingenuity. Unfortunately, “democratic economics” is not one of them.
The market has evolved on its own- and the market is made of people. There are definitely problems in the world that need solving. Sometimes we absolutely need human engineering. Like I said, I am not a bad person who is fine with suffering; I sincerely doubt many people are. But there are real solutions out there that good people like you and me all need to work harder to find.
"Equal pay for equal EFFORT is not proven in theory or practice"
The vast majority of jobs are paid that way. There is very little mobility within jobs. All public sectors jobs and all union jobs top out in pay after just a few years. So it is proven in practice.
It is also proven in decades of research like Dan Pink's TED talk video explains.
"The success of the Nordic countries relies upon a mix of the systems"
And the degree to which nordic countries work is because of socialism and the degree to which it doesn't is because of capitalism.
If socialism works well in 1 company, it will work in 2. If it works well in 2, it will work well in 2000. If it works well in 2000 it will work well in every company.
There is absolutely no benefit whatsoever to capitalism.
"Take a look around you and see all of the wonders of our human ingenuity"
If you look harder, you will see 46 million in poverty, 16% underemployed, 1 in every 5 kids in poverty, 25% of all blacks in poverty, 97% of all workers earning a below average income, 52 million without health insurance, and 50% of all workers doing pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology.
That is unacceptable. And that is in the richest country on the planet. But that is what you get with capitalism. It is a system of inequality. It is barbaric, inhumane and uncivilized.
"But there are real solutions out there that good people like you and me all need to work harder to find."
Democracy will guarantee a wealthy lifestyle to 100% of society. What system will produce better results than that? I'm all ears.
It is about time you were open to reason.
But first let me clear up some more of you absurd misinterpretations of my quotes, with you seem to using quite profusely.
"Equal pay for equal EFFORT is not proven in theory or practice". Do you know what proven means? Not just proven to exist, but proven to be effective. Equal pay for simply equal effort is not effective. The 3 principles are effective. You don't understand the difference between effectiveness and effort. Here it is again: we don't reward someone who is overall more effective at helping people the same as someone who is overall less effective at helping people just because they both look just as tired at the end of the day. Effort is the exertion one makes when doing work; effectiveness is the ability to successfully do work. E for effort for everyone in society is cute, but utterly ineffective.
“There is absolutely no benefit whatsoever to capitalism.” Words cannot express how much this made my day. Definition, straight from good old Wikipedia: Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit, usually in competitive markets. I’m sorry; this is what made you so sour, isn’t it? The bane of socialists: profit! Someone is getting richer at another’s expense! This is why the world is so rotten! No benefit whatsoever to the billions of people in all history who have used it to live and even to thrive? None at all? I’m starting to get this feeling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-_nDTv8XlM, second 10. And if you don’t have a sense of humor, then all I can say is wow. Just wow.
“Take a look around you and see all of the wonders of our human ingenuity.” Apparently you missed one important part in my last response where I said “There are definitely problems in the world that need solving.” Are you really completely ignoring humanity’s glories in your spite of humanity’s follies? Now, more than ever, we need our human strength as people. Human ingenuity focused on the problems of society instead of on the thinking of solutions for the problems of society is wasteful. And you are clearly guilty of it because it has made you embrace and purvey an impossible ideology.
“But there are real solutions out there that good people like you and me all need to work harder to find.” Here is your greatest folly: you truly think a complete change in the system is necessary. “I am all ears”; you wrongly assume I am like you: a person with a perceived solution to basically all of life’s problems. Do you have any idea how fucking arrogant that is? With all of the pain and suffering in the world, and after thousands of years of civilization supported by the knowledge of people far more intelligent than either of us who attempted to design better systems, you really think YOU hold the solution? Then why the fuck are you on a forum on the internet, riding the coattails of a more moderate movement with meaningful demands? If you or your ideals had true merit, you’d be in the White House, or the people would have embraced them before. And in your mind, you believe time will tell that the people will now embrace this “democratic economic” system. Fortunately, this will not be the case. And time will very soon show you this.
I, being only one fairly educated person, can say this: A major part of the solution must be a rearrangement of everyone on Earth’s priorities. Helping others must become the number 1 priority of people in an ideal society; greed and selfishness, not profits, turn people wrong. “Cupiditatem pecuniae gloriasque fugite.” Cicero, “Escape the desire of money and glories.” Embrace the desire to help others, and the world will become a better place.
"A major part of the solution must be a rearrangement of everyone on Earth’s priorities"
You can work on telling people how they should run their lives. I just want democracy.
"Embrace the desire to help others, and the world will become a better place."
Sounds like a great line for a movie. But in the real world, people need a fair income.
"With all of the pain and suffering in the world, and after thousands of years of civilization supported by the knowledge of people far more intelligent than either of us who attempted to design better systems, you really think YOU hold the solution?"
What I advocate has been advocated by some of the brightest thinkers over the past 200+ years. I didn't come up with this system. It is even discussed today in peer reviewed, mainstream, economics journals (google Paul Cockshott).
"If you or your ideals had true merit, you’d be in the White House, or the people would have embraced them before"
Ideas like this only get traction in severe economic downturns. During the great depression, talk of ending capitalism was mainstream. What I advocate was called democratic socialism. It was advocated by mainstream press, intellectuals and celebrities. Even Albert Einstein was a big advocate.
Groups like Technocracy had millions of members and would fill arenas at their rallies.
Then the war happened which ended the depression and any talk about a new economic system. After the war, the government cracked down on any movement against capitalism culminating with McCarthyism. The FBI went after Martin Luther King because he advocated it.
Even today, you cannot become a citizen of the US if you were a member of the US Socialist Party because it says that means you don't have good moral character.
"Are you really completely ignoring humanity’s glories in your spite of humanity’s follies?"
In order to to have humanity's glories, we don't need 46 million in poverty, 16% underemployed, 1 in every 5 kids in poverty, 25% of all blacks in poverty, 97% of all workers earning a below average income, 52 million without health insurance, and 50% of all workers doing pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology.
"No benefit whatsoever to the billions of people in all history who have used [capitalism] to live and even to thrive?"
No, there was no benefit to capitalism at all because all of those same benefits could have been produced in a democratic system without the need for a large portion of society to struggle in poverty.
We have the technology and resources to make everyone wealthy if wealth was allocated democratically. Capitalism prevents that. It allocates wealth unequally which leaves 46 million in poverty. There is absolutely no benefit to having 46 million in poverty.
"Equal pay for simply equal effort is not effective"
It works for the millions of union workers who have built practically everything.
It works for the Mayo Clinic who pay their doctors a flat salary. And they may be the best hospital in the world.
I obviously do not mean you should get paid merely for effort alone. You can't just dig holes and fill them back up all day and expect to get a paycheck. If your effort is not effective, you will get fired.
If the company you work at becomes unprofitable, everyone gets fired.
"I obviously do not mean you should get paid merely for effort alone. You can't just dig holes and fill them back up all day and expect to get a paycheck. If your effort is not EFFECTIVE, you will get fired."
Now you are starting to see that effectiveness, not effort, is the way to measure work. Most excellent! But it is not obvious at all to anyone who reads your original post that you now feel this way. It definitely wasn’t obvious to me when I first read it, not to mention it certainly wasn’t obvious every time I mentioned it in the last posts and you said nothing about it. Even though it took 8 posts, I’m glad you are waking up to a reality. It seems that the at least one truth is now staring you in the face.
It is heartening to see how suddenly you are using the word “effective” and the phrase “real world.” It is also pleasant to see you admitting to exploiting the current situation. The socialists, communists, and “democratic economists” sure are coming out of the woodwork. But support based on the “weather” doesn’t stick around, especially when the “weather” has an all-but-guaranteed up swing. I’m sure you don’t need a definition of the business cycle to know what I am talking about.
""A major part of the solution must be a rearrangement of everyone on Earth’s priorities" You can work on telling people how they should run their lives. I just want democracy. "Embrace the desire to help others, and the world will become a better place." Sounds like a great line for a movie. But in the real world, people need a fair income."
Did you forget your original post has an entire plan of how people should run their lives AND run their money? And I am sincerely sorry that our society forces you socialists into the darkness; but please stop calling it democracy out of fear of persecution. A system where proportionally the laziest get the most benefit and the hardest working get the least benefit is no fairer than the unfairness in the system we have now. You are going to punish the current rich, and reward the current poor. In other words, you are going to punish the more effective people in society, and reward the less effective people in society. The rich scare you socialists, and you have skewed your perception of these people, making them out to be blasphemers against humanity and deliberate purveyors of poverty. You believe they, the 1%, need to be punished. You are going to punish them by taking away what they have worked to achieve, and that is stealing. Your system will constantly steal from the effective, hard-working people who deserve more than $230,000 a year. How is this action and its enforcement fairer and more moral than a real, truly fair solution that can be applied to the system we have now? It is not; especially when we all must work together to find real solutions.
“Sounds like a great line for a movie.” Read your original post again, friend, and see if your plan doesn’t read like a monologue from a pseudo utopia-land play. Here are some highlights:
There would be no poverty or middle class or homeless or uneducated.
And there would be little crime.
If income was allocated equally, everyone would get paid $127,000 per year. Or if you wanted to pay the people who did the difficult jobs that required greater mental or physical effort twice as much as the rest of the jobs, everyone would get paid $115,000 per year and everyone who worked in science, computers, engineering, medicine, construction, mining, or farming would get paid $230,000 per year.
When every citizen has access to a job with those incomes as a right, there would be no social problems.
Bold claims; charming ideals. Utterly, utterly no fairer and unworkable.
Are you implying that a world where everyone wants to help others is not a good place to be? Are you indicating that this principle has no place in the world you are striving to create? Do you even understand what this principle means at all? I’ll let you think about that, and if you’ll admit I’m right about this one too (just like with effectiveness), kudos.
"Now you are starting to see that effectiveness, not effort, is the way to measure work"
I'm not sure how anyone can think from any of my posts that I advocated, at any point, paying people to do unproductive work.
To be clear, the amount of money you get paid is not dependent on effectiveness. It is dependent on effort. But in order to qualify for getting a job, you have to obviously be effective and do productive work. No manager, who is responsible for the profitability of the company they manage, is going to hire you to sit around and do nothing.
"your original post has an entire plan of how people should run their lives AND run their money"
There is nothing in any of my posts that says how people should run their lives or how they should spend their money or how they should manage their money. You can live any way you want and spend your money any way you want.
"A system where proportionally the laziest get the most benefit and the hardest working get the least benefit is no fairer"
That is not what I advocate. If you are lazy and I work twice the hours and work a harder job, I will get paid 4 times as much as you.
"You are going to punish the current rich, and reward the current poor. In other words, you are going to punish the more effective people in society, and reward the less effective"
That is incredibly cruel, elitist and misinformed. You have no understanding of the world if you think every rich person is effective and every poor person is not.
"The rich scare you socialists"
I am not against rich people. I am against an unfair system.
"You are going to punish them by taking away what they have worked to achieve"
You think every rich person got their wealth from working? lol
Everyone is entitled to the same reward the rich get when they work just as hard as the rich and they are doing work that is just as productive. Otherwise, the system is not fair.
"Bold claims; charming ideals. Utterly, utterly no fairer and unworkable. "
It is based on indisputable, real world numbers and real world math.
"Are you implying that a world where everyone wants to help others is not a good place to be?"
No I am not. I am for helping others, like the 46 million in poverty, 16% underemployed, 1 in every 5 kids in poverty, 25% of all blacks in poverty, 97% of all workers earning a below average income, 52 million without health insurance, and 55% of all workers doing pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology.
"you’ll admit I’m right about this one too (just like with effectiveness)"
It is bizarre and irrational that you think I advocated paying people to do nothing.
Lol oh yeah, I forgot the rich got money from trees. LOL
I don’t like how you misquote me. Consistently. And place them in the wrong context. Constantly. And miss my more important points. Over and over again. Such is the lot of those who attempt to talk with extremists. It is why you are forced into the woodwork of society. It is why you will not succeed. Big point that you don’t understand: In your system, the laziest AND least effective get PROPORTIONALLY the most benefit, and the hardest working and most effective get the least benefit, versus their benefit in the current system. The stats that you keep showing me are indeed frightening. Let’s fix them with real solutions, not fanciful revolutions. "That is incredibly cruel, elitist and misinformed. You have no understanding of the world if you think every rich person is effective and every poor person is not." I wasn’t implying every single person in each class is homogenous. Elitist, eh? For advocating the foundations of a system where anyone can anyone can rise from nothing to anything? If a poor person is truly effective, why are they poor? If a truly rich person maintains their wealth, why are they not effective? Do you still not understand what effectiveness means?
I’m pretty sure you do now. “It is bizarre and irrational that you think I advocated paying people to do nothing.” Umm… yeah. I was talking about all the nonsense earlier where you were insisting on effort being the measurement of rewarding for work, instead of effectiveness. When I insisted you would admit I was right, I was talking about this concept, which you seem to have adapted amiably: “I obviously do not mean you should get paid merely for effort alone. You can't just dig holes and fill them back up all day and expect to get a paycheck. If your effort is not effective, you will get fired.” You remember the example where I kept saying you shouldn’t reward someone who is a more effective helper the same as someone who is a less effective helper? You made your own version just now. I like it. And like I said, after your original post and after 8 of my own posts, you now understand what I meant by being effective. This time, it IS obvious. And if you have the time, you should check out the book Stephen Covey’s book about the 7 habits.
Cheers, RastaMasta
"you should check out the book Stephen Covey’s book about the 7 habits"
Are you then going to suggest that the solution to poverty, inequality and unemployment is an MLM, get-rich-quick business opportunity?
"When I insisted you would admit I was right [about paying people based on effectiveness] which you seem to have adapted amiably"
Do you really think that I am just making this up as we go along?
Do you really think that you just made me figure out that we should only pay people who are effective?
Like I said, this system has been developed for the past 250+ years by some of the brightest people to walk this planet. I can assure you, never did they advocate or suggest that the system will pay everyone merely for working alone, even if it is ineffective work that nobody is willing to pay for.
"If a truly rich person maintains their wealth, why are they not effective? Do you still not understand what effectiveness means?"
As a worker, you are hired to perform some job. If you do the work you are hired to do, then you are being effective and should get paid top dollar for your work.
That is how I define effectiveness. And all effective people should be wealthy.
If you do not do the job you were hired to perform because of incompetency or laziness, you are not effective and will be fired.
If people do not buy the good or service you are working on, it will stop being produced and you will stop being paid. You will then be forced to find a new job working on something people are buying.
That is the only rational, fair system of compensation.
"Elitist, eh? For advocating the foundations of a system where anyone can anyone can rise from nothing to anything?"
Your claim that anyone can make it in this system is just not true.
97% cannot make an above average income. 50% cannot make more than $33k. 25% of an entire race of people this system used to enslave cannot even make it out of poverty.
That is not because everyone in society is a loser.
This system is designed to only work for a very, very small percentage of the hard-working, responsible, effective workers.
And this system is designed to work 100% of the time for all the people born into one of the families of those elite few, regardless of how hard-working, responsible or effective they are.
So yes it is an elitist system. But more importantly, it is an incredibly unfair system.
"If a poor person is truly effective, why are they poor?"
If you got off your high horse, you would find that the reason why 97% of the entire workforce is making a below average income is not because 97% of all workers are losers.
The reason why this system only works for a very, very, very, very small percentage of people is because THIS SYSTEM IS NOT FAIR.
The vast, overwhelming majority of people are hard working, responsible, capable people. The reason why they are all not making a 6-figure income is because this system does not make enough of those jobs available. All of the income needed to pay those incomes is concentrated in the hands of a very small few.
"In your system, the laziest AND least effective get PROPORTIONALLY the most benefit, and the hardest working and most effective get the least benefit, versus their benefit in the current system"
That is just not true.
The people who make $40k in our current system will get proportionally more benefit than the people who make $60k.
But you have no idea who out of those groups of people are lazy or ineffective. If you are assuming that the people who make $40k are all lazier and less effective than the people who make $60k, you are wrong.
"Let’s fix them with real solutions, not fanciful revolutions"
97% of all workers make a below average income. Tens of millions are in poverty.
Your proposed solution is for people to embrace helping others and to rearrange everyone's priorities.
I don't even know what that means. But I do know it is not going to raise anyone's income, so it is not going to fix anything.
The only way to fix inequality and poverty is better allocate income. That is what I propose. That is the only thing that will work.
A lack of centralization is not a weakness, ask the Mujahideen.
Pure democracy is great until it is boiled down to three rapists and a youth woman voting on weather rape should be legal or not.
That is a common misconception. Democracy is a Greek word for people power. It means power rests with everyone equally. It does not mean mob rule.
Since democracy is a system of equality, everyone gets equal treatment under the law, therefore you cannot vote to violate another person's rights.
Wait, so are you saying that all people are equal (equal strength, equal brilliance, equal ideas, and do equal work) and they're FORCED into an unequal system of capitalism???
No, I'm saying people are not equal and a capitalist system exploits that. It is uncivilized and barbaric. We don't have to live like animals in nature on the African Plains. We can be civilized, humane and treat people equally so that society works well for everyone regardless of genetics or heritage.
Ok, so explain to me how the voluntary exchange of goods and services between two individuals for their mutual benefit is exploitative?
Paying some kid in China 1/10th of what the average worker in America gets is exploiting their poor country's status and earning millions or billions in profits from it. They are just as human as Americans and deserve the same dignity and standard of living and quality of life as the humans in America.
Paying the average American worker $33k which is 75% less than the $127k average American income is exploiting the disadvantage in negotiating power and enabling some to earn millions or billions in profits from it.
Yes, but then there is no incentive to excel! We would just be lazy and uninovative.
Don't buy into the lie of "laziness"... They have used this to convince you that there is no other way but their own, as DemandTheGoodLife.Com illustrates so well.
People who are paid $230k per year to innovate won't be lazy. If they refuse to perform, they would be fired, just like they would today.
We have decades of research on what motivates people, and specifically on what are the right incentives to get people to produce innovation.
The best way to compensate innovators is to pay them well and to pay them a flat salary. It is backed by tons of studies including research done by the Federal Reserve.
The most visible example of this is with NASA and the NSF where there is no profit to be made but yet they produce the most cutting edge technology and science on the planet.
View this quick TED Talk on compensation incentives which provides the evidence that the compensation model in my post will not only work, it will work better than our current system:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
stability in life allows the mind to wonder on other things
that would be dependable income not prospecting
I did not understand your post.
The best way to compensate innovators is to pay them well and to pay them a flat salary
stability in life allows the mind to wonder on other things
that would be dependable income not prospecting
a flat fee would be good for an innovator to have a clear mind unworried by profit
Yes, so we agree. Research shows that the best way to compensate innovators is with a high, flat salary.
What happens when I take my peaches, make peach preserves, and sell it to my community? I'm making more than a flat salary right? Then I expand and sell to the whole city.
If you wanted to sell your peach preserves, you would go to a bank with your proposal and if they thought it was viable, they would provide you with the capital to get it started.
You would get paid the same income as everyone else as you build your peach preserve business. But the business would need to be profitable in order to stay in business. And you would continue to earn a salary. You would not pocket whatever profits were generated.
No, I mean do that on the side, with my own money from my peach trees in my yard. This would be my second job on top of my flat salary.
Let's assume that the compensation plan adopted was the $115k/$230k plan.
That means the most you can earn is $110 per hour. You would not be able to pay yourself more than that amount. So you can sell as much preserves as you want, but you would never be able to pay yourself any more than $110 per hour. You would get the same pay as everyone else who was running a business.
If your company managed to grow into a billion dollar enterprise, that doesn't mean you would be doing more work, so you wouldn't be getting more pay. Everyone is constrained by the same 24 hours. You would obviously be getting help from thousands of additional workers.
Lets say my job is an accountant. I get paid what you just described. With that capital I earned, I come home from work and start making peach preserves. I sell it to my neighbors. I'm making more money because I make it on the side.
Yes, you are making more money because you are working more hours.
And when I expand that business cause my jelly is awesome I become a millionaire!
Essentially everyone in the democratic society I propose would be a millionaire. You don't need to resort to making jelly in your basement in order to become a millionaire.
It doesn't take long for just a regular working family that makes from $230k to $460k per year income (assuming both adults work full time) to generate $1 million in assets.
You would have to control asset prices for this to work, otherwise the increase in income would drive prices up. How would asset prices be controlled?
The price of everything would be the total labor it took to produce.
So the only way to get efficiency is to get real efficiency: you have to lower the amount of labor needed by reducing the materials you use or using automation to eliminate jobs. You can no longer pay people less and say you increased efficiency when you haven't, when all you did was decrease your expenses.
The average price of things would not change since we are not increasing total income. Although most workers would get an increase in income, this is not from increasing the total income available, it is from just more evenly spreading out that income.
It takes me 1 hour to make a widget, but my neighbor, who is not as fast or smart as I am takes 1 1/2 hours. Both widgets are of equal quality. What is the price of a widget?
Assuming you incurred no other expenses (like material, energy, machines, tools, etc. which would also be priced the same based on their labor) and your work was considered "easy" at the $115k level, the price of your widget would be $55.28 (that is the hourly wage of someone who earns $115k) and the price of your neighbor's widget would be $82.93.
Everyone will then buy my widgets, and my neighbor will go out of business. At that point, I can either continue to work really hard to produce my widgets in 1 hour, or I can stop busting my ass, work really slowly, and take 2 hours to make a widget. Everyone now has to pay $110.56 for a widget.
Until a new ambitious widget maker comes along and starts producing widget in 1 hour. At which point, I can explain to him that if he would just slow down and not work as hard, life would be easier for the both of us.
That is how the market system works. It is the best system we got.
But your overly simplified example won't matter in the real world. Because there will be virtually no 1 man manufacturers of any significance. So a single person won't be able to control an entire market and how hard everyone works.
Yes, that is how the market system works. In a free market, I have an incentive to continue to make better widgets, faster, at a lower price because I reap rewards from my efforts. This only becomes problematic when corruption and exploitation is allowed to creep in.
In your system, there is still plenty of room for corruption and exploitation, and no incentive for me to figure out how to make better widgets faster and at a lower price. You are correct--my example is simple as a means of illustrating the problem. So let's take it to the next step.
You say this would never happen in the real world because there wouldn't be a single widget maker. This is true. In the real world, the new ambitious widget maker in my example colludes with me to work less and and still reap the same reward. If he doesn't, he has an 'unfortunate accident'. When my little widget cartel has grown so that 80% of all widget makers are colluding to fix prices, the honest 20% of widget makers will either comply or have unfortunate accidents.
This is not conjecture--this is what happens in real life. Look around you. Study history. I'm not making this shit up. Any system you propose must have in place a means of curtailing corruption, and those efforts must be never-ending, because the corrupt will never stop trying to find ways to exploit it.
A democracy will still have a legal system. If you murder the people who don't want to be as lazy as you, you will go to jail.
indeed
Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit, usually in competitive markets.
Adam Smith said NOTHING of a concentration of power. It is NOT a system of Greed and Inequality. You should read more on the subject before broadcasting false facts.
You are flawed. Critically. Because you say "you" as a blanket statement. We need to unify under a banner of Democratic Capitalism. I for one am NO socialist.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/708507790/protest-to-prosperity-occupy-wall-street-pamphlet
Do you have the cliff notes version of what you propose?
That was Cliff Notes version. An economic model and the reason for implementing it cannot be summarized into a page or two. It's a complex thing.
I can summarize the complexity of capitalism in a single paragraph. I do the same for describing a democratic economic system. I'm sure you can do that with what you propose as well.
Democratic capitalism is the economic-political system based on the worth and potential of each in an environment of trust and cooperation. Performance improves because profit sharing and ownership opportunities motivate wage earners, while leadership harmonizes individual development and the cooperative work culture. By contrast, finance capitalism concentrates wealth and slows growth, and collectivism redistributes wealth through government and impedes growth.
That sounds exactly like the capitalism we have now. How specifically would it be different? What you wrote was an intro to a long discussion, not a summary of what you are proposing.
capitalism is a theory. just another way we, as humans, try to describe our world. capitalism has been around since caveman days when one dude had fire and another dude had food and they traded.
you can't do away with capitalism, as it doesn't really exist. a black market in a socialist or communist economic system? just a privately regulated economic system that has been defined as 'capitalism.'
Capitalism is not a theory. It is an economic system where the means of production are owned privately for a profit.
I agree it is an anachronistic system. It has no place in our modern society. We have the resources and technology to give everyone the good life. But our capitalist system of privilege stands in the way.
And since it does really exist and companies are actually privately owned, it can be done away with and replaced with something that is guaranteed to work well for everyone.
you are not understanding. socialism is an economic system as it is designed to be controlled by a central power. communism (re:Marx's Utopia) would devolve into capitalistic black markets as existed in USSR and now exist in China. There is no communism.
capitalism was marx's definition of the way things are; communism they way things he wanted to be.
as exhibited by the USSR and China's failings to reach Communism, perpetually stuck in a quasi-capitalistic socialism, the way things are are permanent and built into the fabric of our being.
the best we can hope for is regulation; however, it should be independent with its own checks and balances to prevent fraud and bribery.
Communism doesn't exist because we do not have the technology and resources to eliminate all scarcity. Also, Marx was against utopia. He wanted a society based on science and evidence, not based on unfounded proclamations of paradise. He wrote against utopian socialism.
But I don't advocate communism. And communism is not the only alternative to capitalism. I advocate democracy with money, markets for goods and services, companies that must remain profitable and a government that regulates business.
Black markets happen in closed societies with command economies where unelected dictators decided what you can and cannot have. There would be no black markets in a democracy because nothing is banned, it is not a command economy, you decide what is produced by how you spend your money, and the system is completely transparent and accountable to its citizens.
you don't quite understand the meaning of the words: "Socialism" "Communism" or "Democracy." so i will stop trying to point out your unreasonableness. you have definitions, but they are not what everybody else defines them as.
Socialism is public ownership of the means of production. It was the intermediate phase before reaching communism.
Communism is a society with no classes, no property, no money, and no government. Technology enables you to reach such an abundance that you no longer need goods and services to be rationed with money, people can take all they want, and automation is so advanced, all the jobs nobody wants to do is done by machines so you don't need to pay people to work.
Democracy is a system where power rests with the people. It is based on the principles of freedom, equality and reason.
How does that not coincide with the accepted definitions of those terms?
Greed, dishonesty, hatred, malice etc have existed as part of humanity since the dawn of time. Those who care not for the welfare of their fellow humans, such as the 'evil' people in our society today, are not going to "see the light" and suddenly become peaceful lambs. How will you deal with this element of society?
They represent a small minority. Most people are good and want the best for others. But if you break the law, you would face the same punishment as if you broke the law today. That wouldn't change.
That's working out really well today.
No system in the history of humanity has been free of corruption, and no system can be devised that is immune to corruption. All systems can sound good on paper, but they fall apart in practice. It's less about identifying the 'right' system, and more about figuring out how to curtail the opportunity for corruption. This is not a one-time find the right system deal. It requires constant vigilance.
So choose a system that promotes the most individual freedom, choice and liberty because all people want to be free. Then work on closing opportunities for corruption and never stop.
Of all the problems that people face, corruption has got to be close to the bottom of their list.
People need good jobs that pay well so they have access to the best of what society offers.
People are concerned about the happiness at their job, getting a new job, not losing their current job, their income, their bills, their school district, their neighborhood, crime, healthcare, education. They are not concerned about corruption because it has so little impact on their lives.
What do you think has allowed Wall Street and the big corporations to gain control of our politicians and enact polices that enrich themselves? What do you think allows fat cats to exist in governments that were supposed to be 'for the people"?
If corruption is at the bottom of people's list, then they will forever be the victims of it.
What has allowed that to happen is capitalism: an economic system whose goal is to maximize your own individual wealth. That isn't corruption.
And ending business influence over government is not going to end poverty or unemployment or inequality which are the real problems people care about.
Without any corruption in the system, how do my efforts to maximize my wealth lead to someone else's poverty and unemployment?
There is only so much income an economy can produce in a year. The US produces $15 trillion yearly. For every dollar you collect as income, that is 1 less dollar that someone else can collect.
The more income you have, the easier it is for you to increase your income. So income continues to concentrate in the hands of people who are already wealthy. As the wealthy increase their income, that leaves everyone else with less and less and less and less income.
And there is nothing to justify you making any more than someone else. When I buy Microsoft Office, I do it because I think the software is worth the price, I don't do it because I think I should make less income and Bill Gates should make billions in income.
The buying and selling of goods and services says nothing about how income should be allocated.
Wealth creation is not a zero sum game, as you suggest. There is not a static amount of wealth in the world with everyone fighting to increase their share of the pie. If this were true, then no one on the planet would be living better than they did 5,000 years ago.
Money is not wealth, it is only a representation of wealth, created to facilitate trade. Wealth is real goods produced. It is obvious that we have more real goods than we had in the past. New wealth is always being created. We find better, more efficient means of production so that we can, say, grow more food. We discover new sources of energy, we invent new things. This is wealth creation.
If economies were static as you suggest, then as the population of the world increased, each person would necessarily have less and less of the pie. But this is not what has happened. Yes, you can cite examples where the growth has not been even, but it is not the case that "every dollar you collect as income, that is 1 less dollar that someone else can collect".
Sometimes it helps to think of this in terms of the poor. People living at the poverty level in America today have a much higher standard of living than people at the poverty line in America had 50 years ago. Today, 80% of the poor in America have air conditioning; they have more living space than the average European; 97% own a color television (stats courtesy US Census Bureau). Please don't misunderstand me---I do not begrudge the poor these things. The point is that as we have increased wealth in our society, the standard of living for the poor has increased. How is this possible if the rich are also getting richer? It is possible because new wealth has been created. The economy is not a zero sum game where one person's gain necessitates another's loss.
Huge gaps in wealth between rich and poor are another issue, and we can talk about that if you like. Our conversation will not be fruitful though if we start with a false premise.
Wealth is not static. I never said it was. It is constantly growing. But in any given time, there is only so much wealth available to go around. That wealth can be allocated equally or unequally.
For the past 30 years, the economy has grown significantly. But 100% of it went to the rich. The entire middle class has not seen a dime of it. Their income has remained stagnant for 30 years.
If the economy grows by 3%, my "$1 increase in your income is $1 less in income for me" is true for 97% of the income available.
I think you are equating money with wealth. You say that over the past 30 years, the economy has grown significantly, but 100% of it went to the rich. You support this by saying that income has remained stagnant. Income has remained stagnant, but income is a measure of money, not wealth. The two are not the same, as I think we agree.
Let's take one example--living space. In the 1980's the average American had about 15% less living space than they do today. That is an increase in wealth. American's today have more, bigger TVs than they had 30 years ago (not that that is a good thing). The average American eats more calories per day than the did 30 years ago. These are increases in wealth. This has all occurred while wages (money) have remained stagnant.
Please don't misunderstand---I don't think this is a good thing. It is true that more and more wealth (not just money) is being concentrated in the top 1%. But it is not because there is a limited pie and the rich are getting more of it.
Income, adjusted for inflation, is the measure of your ability to acquire wealth. So long as you have some income (even if your income is declining) and you spend that income on assets that will last, your wealth will always increase.
Wealth can be an accumulation of your income.
But income has been stagnant and it is a fraction of what it should be. So your ability to acquire wealth has been stagnant and it is a fraction of what it should be. And that is because the rich have an unfair ability to take most of the income.
Yeah let's replace it with something that's a proven failure. Your society exist because of capitalism. Don't be daft
Where has democracy failed?
Capitalism has failed. It has been riding the coat tails of science for centuries. Even in the US, with all its wealth, 45 million still live in poverty, 1 in every 5 kids live in poverty, 17% are unemployed or underemployed.
And it would be far, far, far worse if elements of democracy did not force the capitalist system to make products and work safe, provide health care, make the work week 40 hours, provide education, etc.
Capitalism doesn't work.
The only thing that has worked is science and democracy. Science is where all our wealth, progress, quality of life and standard of living come from. And the limited democracy we have makes sure at least some of the benefits of science are shared by everyone.
Fiddlesticks. Younremovedmcapitalisnmin 1913 when you disposed of capital and replaced it with debt. It didn't fail, your democratically elected leaders wanted to control the "free" markets. Economics is a science and it has been screaming "WTF" and predicting this day for 100 years. Wealth has never come from science. Science needs to be innovated into products or services for the benefit of the market.
Stop blaming capitalism, you wouldn't know it if it bitch slapped you.
Go start a country with all capitalism and no science and I'll start one with all the science and no capitalism and we will see who is living in the stone age.
Sounds reasonable. How do we begin? Each buy an island somewhere. I could probably do that with the money I have from capitalism. It's no good having a better mousetrap if you don't have a market to offer it too. Although your island might have less mice....
No, you can move to Afghanistan since they have no science or technology and are effectively living in the stone age. And I will stay right here in the US with all the most advanced science and technology.
They have no capitalism. Plenty of science though, all those excellent weapons the us gave them in the 90s to defeat the Russians, now used on the us soldiers themselves. A good use of taxpayer dollars?
A lack of ideas would beat yours
democracy is NOT the opposite of capitalism, just so we're clear. they can exist side by side because democracy is a form of government while capitalism is a form of market. the problem that we're trying to solve is that the 1% are using their money to tilt the government in their favor so that they can make even more money. I have no problem with people being richer than me. I have a problem with people who are richer than me tell my government that if they ignore our demands the rich will donate to reelection campaigns and such.
Democracy is a system where power is held by everyone equally. You can use democracy to run your government or your economy or a single business or a family or the decision process on what your family will eat for dinner.
And yes they are opposites. Capitalism is a system of inequality and democracy is a system of equality.
The rich will always have more power than you, even if you ban donations. They own the media and have the money to advertise whatever message they want. You will never have the same amount of say as the owner of Fox news or CNN or MSNBC or the Times or Wall Street Journal or a billionaire.
When people come together organically it takes time to organize. We're so used to seeing phony groups like the T-baggers which pop up with slogans, signs, buses and tons of money to push then along.
Everything good in life takes time. Nothing that is rushed works out. Grown-ups realize this.
There is nothing phony about tea baggers. They have a goal: eliminate government from the economy. And they have a plan: protest against people in wheelchairs who want healthcare.
And they accomplished a lot. They got people elected and controlled the agenda of Congress.
Everything good in life takes goals, plans and leadership. It is how the entire world operates. Grow-ups realize this.
Nothing without this will ever work out.
Now the mainstream media is moving in advocating raising taxes to build bridges. What the heck will that accomplish!?! We should raise taxes, send that money directly to people as a dividend so they can build nicer houses.
And that should be a temporary measure until we replace capitalism with democracy.
Seriously?
Nobody here is demanding equality, so lets clear people's confusion. We want fairness, which means a lot of people make money by just gambling with other people's money. They don't really work hard to make that money. They actually create artificial demand for resources like Oil, and other commodities and jack up the prices for all. We want them to pay a fair share of the speculative money they make as taxes. We want them to control their greed.
I don't know how anything but equality can be fair. How is it fair for a kid to be born in a ghetto with nothing and a kid to be born a Trump and have access to everything?
How is it fair for someone to make 100,000 times more income than another person?
The only fair system is equal pay for equal effort.
My friend, nature's own law is unfair. Believe me, I understand your sentiment but there is no way to compare efforts of one person to efforts of another person, because nature inherently is unfair (it provides higher IQ to some guys and comparatively lower to some others, some people are physically more strong than others and so on). What we want is a system where basic needs of a human being are taken care of by the society/community as a whole (free healthcare, free education, some social security benefits atleast for poor and middle class). All this provides an opportunity for every individual to grow and realize their full potential. Who knows a kid born in the poorest family might be the next Nobel laureate who can change the world. We shouldn't deny him the opportunity to realize his full potential. He still needs to work hard by himself. This is all the fairness that we should strive for. So given this nature's own unfair rule, should we tolerate a little bit of inequality in terms of access to money. Yes. Just a little, not too much like now. It's a fine balance just like anything else in life. God bless!
I tend to agree with DTGLDotCom. I just don't think it will happen soon enough.
What is fair about paying people based on their strength or IQ!?!? Your IQ and strength is mostly genetic. You don't work for it. But even if you did, why would you want to pay people based on that?
If you and I both work the same 40 hours and put in the same effort, we should get the same pay. That is fair.
Of course nature is unfair and barbaric. But being civilized is rising above that. We don't accept murder even though murder is a regular part of nature.
Yes, a poor kid can go on to become a nobel prize winner. But he or she is far less likely than a rich kid simply because he or she is poor. And that is UNFAIR.
Scientists and Celebrities enjoy high wages because they are less in supply and their service is in high demand. It's the demand that pays them a high wage. You may be right in demanding equal pay, but even in a democracy unfortunately it won't get support from 50% people. Put it on ballot, if this policy can gather 50% vote, I'm all for it. I am just being practical.
Scientists do not get high wages. Their median income is $56k. Physicists are the highest paid scientists. But their pay would double to $230,000 in a democratic economy that I outlined above.
If income was allocated equally, 97% of workers would get a pay raise. 50% of workers would see their income TRIPLE.
I think it is practical on those grounds alone to think that a super majority of people would endorse a democratic economy.
That's not what you are describing. It does not work like that
As I said before, let's work hard to bring it to ballot. I will vote yes for equal pay. It's my gut feeling that people will not vote yes, I could be totally wrong.
Capitalism is a system of inequality.
So was slavery. So was Jim Crow. And if we had listened to air heads like you, black people would still be riding in the back of the bus.
Who are you responding to? My post is advocating that we replace capitalism and its inequality with democracy and equality. There are no Jim Crow laws or slavery in a democracy.
Capitalism is what free, honest people do to survive in the absence of coercion. It requires freedom to exist.
The statists assume power, start regulating, and price fixing, and picking winners and losers and protecting some while driving others out of business, then shit all over it and say, 'See? This is capitalism!"
Then you come along and say, "See how shitty this capitalism is? We need to destroy ANY freedom to fix it".
Fuckin tool. They played you.
Freedom comes from income which is only guaranteed in democracy, not capitalism.
A poor girl in a capitalist country who cannot afford tuition has the same freedom to education as a girl in a Taliban ruled Afghanistan village where education for girls is banned.
You are only as a free as your income allows you. And in capitalism most of the income goes into the hands of a very, very small minority.
Democracy gives you true freedom because not only does it guarantee you equal votes, it guarantees you equal income.
And with that income, you pick the winners and losers by how you spend your income. They aren't picked by statist boogeymen. Stop watching so much fox news.
If you are like the average worker, you are getting paid 75% less than the $127,000 average income. So you are the one getting played.
"And with that income, you pick the winners and losers by how you spend your income. They aren't picked by statist boogeymen." The first sentence is capitalsim, the next reveals our current state of crony capitalism in this country. Please learn more about democracy and capitalism before discussing them further, as they are not mutually exclusive, and for the last time we are not a democracy.
Your definitions are not correct.
Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. You don't need capitalism to have a market.
Democracy is a system where power is held by everyone equally. You can use democracy to run your government or your economy or a single business or a family or the decision process on what your family will eat for dinner.
And yes they are mutually exclusive. Capitalism is a system of inequality and democracy is a system of equality. You can't have both.
In a democratic economic system, income (the source of your economic power) would be allocated equally. But companies would continue to compete for your business and you would decide which ones fail and succeed by where you spend your money.
So the allocation of goods and services would still use the market process. However, it would not be capitalism because the companies would not be privately owned. They would be democratically owned and controlled.
I agree we do not have a democracy currently. Most government and economic power is concentrated in the hands of an elite few.
Let's say I'm a lazy jerk. I have a widget company under your system. I don't really give a rats ass if anyone buys my widgets, because I am guaranteed my income based on the hours I work. Consequently, my widgets suck and no one buys them. My business is not even remotely profitable, but I don't care because my income is guaranteed.
Your system administrators suspect that I am gaming the system, but I claim that I really am trying my best. Perhaps I just don't have the education and experience needed to run the business properly. If I had those things, I could succeed, etc., etc.
Who decides if I am a lying sack of shit, a complete moron who will never have the ability to run a profitable business, or someone who just needs help acquiring the necessary skills for success?
If your business is unprofitable, it would be shut down and you would not have an income. You would have to find a new job. You are not guaranteed an income in an unprofitable business.
The accounting of the entire economy is digital, transparent and visible to everyone in real time. It doesn't rely on the honesty of anyone. You won't be able to lie about your finances.
If you want to manage a business, you would be properly trained. The economy is a technical enterprise that requires the skills of trained experts. You would get paid to go to school to learn whatever you want.
I could create another example, but I'll state the question broadly to hopefully get to the heart of the issue. Who decides if a worker is efficient enough/productive enough/ suited to the position they are in? How do you prevent this body of judgement from becoming corrupted and letting it's friends slide?
HR Managers would hire the right people just like they do now. Sure, friends and family of decision makers might get preferential treatment, but that happens today. It is not a perfect society, it is just a better one.
Ultimately, if the company is not managed well, it will become unprofitable and shut down and everyone will be out of a job. So the market is the ultimate arbiter.
This sounds more and more like the system we have today. The only difference I can see is that you are attempting to equalize and cap pay. While this theoretically closes the wealth inequity gap, it also results in a cap on hard work and innovation.
Whenever you say, "This is the maximum reward you can receive", the vast majority of people will work only as hard as necessary to reap the maximum reward. There is nothing to incent them to work harder, faster, or more efficiently. They will put in the minimum effort required to reap the maximum reward and spend the rest of their time doing something else they enjoy. This is human nature, and unless you have a way of changing that, you will have to address this problem in your system.
It is exactly like the system we have today. The only difference is that investment is publicly owned (it doesn't come from savings, a portion of GDP is allocated to banks for them to invest) and income is democratically controlled (we decide on a national labor plan that is fair and that works well for everyone).
We have decades of research on what motivates people, and specifically on what are the right incentives to get people to produce innovation.
The best way to compensate people is to pay them well and to pay them a flat salary so that the issue of money is off the table and they can just focus on doing the best job they can. Then you need to provide intrinsic motivation through autonomy, mastery and purpose. See the video below.
It is backed by tons of studies including research done by the Federal Reserve.
The overwhelming majority of people get paid a flat salary in today's system with little opportunity for advancement. Nearly every union job tops out after 4 years.
The most visible example of success with this kind of compensation system is with NASA and the NSF where there is no profit to be made but yet they produce the most cutting edge technology and science on the planet.
View this quick TED Talk on compensation incentives which provides the evidence that the compensation model in my post will not only work, it will work better than our current system:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
Thanks for the TED Talk link. Those are great and this one was no exception.
People who engage in cerebral engaging work tend to be intrinsically motivated. Scientists, for example, care more about the science than the money. Good thing, because most of them don't make shit.
As Mr. Pink says in his talk, the desire for autonomy, mastery and purpose, are the most effective rewards for cognitive based tasks. The stick and carrot approach remains the most effective for left-brain type problems. If you depend on intrinsic motivation for all tasks, you will succeed with workers engaged in right-brain work, and fail with those engaged in more left-brain, goal focused tasks.
Mr. Pink (makes me think of Reservoir Dogs every time I type that) does not suggest basing an entire society on these findings. He's talking about how businesses should incent certain types of workers. We should use this research and change the way we incent certain types of jobs, but it isn't a cure-all for every situation.
You also still have the problem of corruption.
I don't know what Pink's politics are. But he certainly is suggesting this for every company. And the right-brain work is most of the work we do.
For the few jobs that are not, we should automate. They are ideally suited for automation. We can already automate 50% of the jobs we do with existing automation technology.
In the meantime, the jobs we haven't automated can be pay for performance if that is what is necessary. You can earn up to the $230k (or whatever the cap is) depending on your output.
Democracy is not a system of equality, it is a system of VOTING equality. The 51% majority can oppress the 49% minority legally through voting.
There will always be inequality in any system and no system is perfect. We have a great one now that has been perverted by our leaders. You want it to change, vote some new people into congress that aren't money whores.
You are advocating a system where the economy is democratically controlled? That is socialism except you still want income to be evenly distributed like communism.
We could change from a republic to a democracy today and suddenly we would have a capitalistic democracy. Not mutually exclusive. Care to try again?
Oh I get it now! You're an idiot! It all makes sense now.
What are you 6 years old?
I must be, cause I couldn't have come up with your theory on my own. I would have needed a grown up and maybe some LSD.
LMAO
Keep up the good work hank
Democracy and Capitalism are like two persons bound in a tempestuous marriage that is riven by conflict and yet endures because neither partner wishes to separate from the other. But ultimately, it should be stressed, Capitalism and Democracy are ultimately quite incompatible.
Agreed... Isn't that one reason that the workplace is not democratic?
Democracy is the exact opposite of capitalism.
Democracy is based on freedom, capitalism is based on privilege.
Democracy is based on equality, capitalism is based on classes.
Democracy is based on science, capitalism is based on propaganda.
really?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalsim
Stop spewing your nonsense, democracy is a form of government and capitalism is a economic structure. We are not a democracy and we have shady corrupt crony capitalism.
As I mentioned in another post, your definitions are not correct. You might want to read those wiki entries again.
Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. You don't need capitalism to have a market.
Democracy is a system where power is held by everyone equally. You can use democracy to run your government or your economy or a single business or a family or the decision process on what your family will eat for dinner.
And yes they are mutually exclusive. Capitalism is a system of inequality and democracy is a system of equality. You can't have both.
In a democratic economic system, income (the source of your economic power) would be allocated equally. But companies would continue to compete for your business and you would decide which ones fail and succeed by where you spend your money.
So the allocation of goods and services would still use the market process. However, it would not be capitalism because the companies would not be privately owned. They would be democratically owned and controlled.
I agree we do not have a democracy currently. Most government and economic power is concentrated in the hands of an elite few.
As I mentioned in another post I am correct, you can have capitalism and democracy together. Democracy is voting equality only. Then the 51% can oppress the 49%, does that sound like equality?
I'm glad you at least agree we don't have a democracy, because we never have. Gov't and econ power being concentrated is true but that is because of the crony capitalism we have where some receive special treatment and are often above the law.
Again, the system is fine, but those in charge have found ways to pervert it. You want change, elect somebody that has the same ideas as you.
yep
Allocated equally? That is socialism (or communism). These systems failed for many reasons, however the main one is that it goes against human nature. A system that rewards failure and success equally provides motivation for noone.
Read my post again. I advocate democracy, not a brutal dictatorship or a command economy.
It doesn't reward failure and success the same. If you work, you will get paid. But if you cannot do your job, you will get fired just like what we do now.
If the company you work at cannot generate enough revenue to cover its costs, it will get shut down just like what we do now.
Science has a ton of evidence on what motivates people. It turns out the best way to motivate people is to pay them a FLAT salary and to pay them well, which is what I advocate.
view this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
But how would you enforce this "democracy" and "equality"?
You set a national labor standard and that standard applies to everyone. You enforce it like any other regulation.
Keep in mind this is no longer a capitalist economic system. Businesses are no longer owned privately for private profit where owners dictate what you can and cannot earn. Businesses would be owned and controlled democratically.
Total national income would be divided up among all workers. Your pay would not be dependent on how profitable the company was that you worked for. It would depend on GDP. But if your company was unprofitable, it would be shut down and you would get a new job at a company that was profitable.
I will have to spend some time reading, studying and contemplating this idea. I am aware of the Mondragon's in Spain who are building companies based on worker ownership and rule rather than CEO or stockholder or Board of Directors owned and they seem to be working extraordinarily well.
I'm concerned about whether you could actually enforce this system, however. I will contemplate it.
Income would be paid digitally to everyone. So paying out the correct income to everyone would be a simple and straightforward process. It would be no different than a bank making sure you don't withdraw more than what you have in savings.
Transactions in the economy would no longer be an exchange. Money won't move from one person to another. Your bank account would simply increase as you earn income. And when you make a purchase, your bank account would decrease.
You aren't transferring money from yourself to the store owner. It just becomes an accounting transaction. People working at a business cannot withdraw money from the sales that were generated from their store since there was no money that was transferred. All sales become mere accounting entries.
So if I'm a Business Owner and I have an employee who I really like and want to pay him more ... and I do. How do you stop me from doing so?
You have no authority or ability to determine how much someone gets paid. The exact compensation is decided nationally by direct vote and must not violate the worker's right to equal pay for equal effort. You also would not be the owner. You might manage a business and be responsible for its profitability, but your personal money would not be used to invest in that business. 15% of GDP (or whatever level of investment we decide on democratically) would be set aside each year as investment and allocated to banks for them to invest.
As manager you would have the power to hire and fire employees. But you won't be able to pay them differently. There will be no computer function that would give you that ability even if you wanted to.
How about trade? How would you control that?
If you had used things that you wanted to sell, you would be able to sell if for what you paid or less. You cannot earn an income from it.
If you wanted to start a business, you would go to banks and pitch them on your idea. If it was viable, they would provide you with the capital to get started.
Or if I hacked into the computer system?
If you break the law and get caught, you will be punished just like in our current system.
Well, I haven't noticed that that works very well when a large proportion of the people really want to break the law ... such as during Prohibition.
The law is not perfect. There will always be crime.
I think perhaps you should study Prohibition. It was way beyond imperfect.
I don't understand your point. What does prohibition have to do with anything?
You simply cannot enforce something that the large majority of the population wants to disobey. We proved that during prohibition. That's why we repealed it. I can guarantee you that the large majority of the population will not be interested in obeying your recommendations.
97% would get a pay raise. 50% would more than triple their income. You don't think people want to get paid more money for the work they do?
You think the desire to drink alcohol is the same as the desire to earn a low income?
After a generation, they wouldn't know that they're getting paid more than they used to. They would just want more and most would feel that they deserve more because most people feel that they're better than others.
Since all income is paid to workers, your income would grow at the same rate as the economy would grow, which could average 5% per year at full employment. After 5 years, your income would grow to $150,000 for the easy jobs and to $300,000 for the difficult jobs. And after 10 more years, your income would grow to $250,000 for the easy jobs and to $500,000 for the difficult jobs.
At those incomes, you are reaching the limits of consumption. You think people would demand a return to capitalism with its unemployment and rampant poverty because some think a guaranteed $500k income is not enough?
That claim seems suspect.
I don't know.
It's an interesting idea but you didn't answer my objection about people who feel that they deserve more than others because they feel like they're better.
If you are better at a job than me, not only do you get to live a very wealthy lifestyle in a society with virtually no crime because everyone else is also wealthy, but you will also get more than me. You will have the ability to work on any job you want because of your reputation of being great at what you do, the personal satisfaction of achieving mastery in your field, the respect of your peers and meaningful accolades from your industry (search for my "gamification" comment in this thread).
That is the only system that is fair.
If that is not enough, then they can move to a society like China where they love inequality. A democratic society is not perfect, it will not please everyone all the time, it is just infinitely better than what we have now.
"It doesn't reward failure and success the same. If you work, you will get paid."
"But if your company was unprofitable, it would be shut down and you would get a new job at a company that was profitable."
Seriously? Free rider problem all over this idea. If I work I get paid, but if my company tanks I get a new job, so if I work poorly and tank a company I get paid the same as the person who worked hard and had a successful business? As well setting a national labor standard for all is communism, not democracy, and America isn't a democracy anyway, it's a republic.
If you work poorly, you would get fired long before your actions would tank a company, so you would get paid nothing which is far less than the $115k or $230k the people who are working hard get paid.
And why would you do that? Why not just get a job you enjoy? You would get paid to go to school so you can get trained in anything you want.
You also are not clear on the definition of communism. Communism is a system that has no classes, no money, no government and everything is free to everyone regardless if you work or not because you developed the technology to eliminate scarcity. It has nothing to do with labor standards. America already has national labor standards and it is not communist.
Madison in particular was against democracy. He wanted to protect his wealth and power like a lot of the founding fathers. He wanted a republic because it allows for an oligarchy with him and his rich, white, slave-owning buddies to remain in power. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWvIWxh2yRs
Paying everybody the same rate based on gov't mandate, which you advocated, is communism. Everybody getting equal parts out, regardless of what they put it, which you advocate, is communism. Communism is not a system with no gov't it is a governmental system that controls the economy as well.
Not going to argue that many of the founders wanted a republic to protect themselves, it makes perfect sense. However, this does not change the fact that in a democracy 51% rule the 49%, which is no different than the cries people have now of 1% ruling the 99% except there are more people making decisions which adversely affect others.
I'm sorry, you are misinformed. Communism is not a governmental system that controls the economy.
Communism is a hypothetical stage society will reach once it develops the technology to eliminate scarcity. Once you eliminate scarcity, you don't need money or property or government.
And democracy is not mob rule or rule of the majority. It is equality of power. You don't need anyone's permission or have to take a vote on how you spend your money. You buy whatever you want to build whatever lifestyle you want to lead.
You don't vote on where to live or what your house looks like or what clothes to wear or what job to work or what you do in your free time. You have the equal power to freely do whatever you want.
In a democracy, where you are guaranteed an equal income as a right, you no longer need to sleep out in the street demanding a job or better pay or better benefits or healthcare or free education. Everyone has enough income to buy whatever they want as a birth right.
Oh my god... in a democracy the 51% can oppress the 49% so they can vote for more money for themselves. Setting an equal wage is communism. A Democracy is simply a voting tool where everybody has equal voting rights. What votes take place determine the equality of such a system, and it is not guaranteed to be equal.
And this doesn't even touch broader issues like the only reason we aren't back to prosperity is the bursting of the largest credit bubble ever. It's time for Americans to wake up and realize unlimited growth is a lie, and they must prepare for lower standards of living, or repeats of what we already have. We have overspent, we have overextended ourselves, it must come back to realistic levels and this has nothing to do with democracy. It has to do with our leaders pissing away our future for the benefit of themselves and their friends.
Your definition of terms is simply wrong.
And if you don't see how a guaranteed income of $115k or $230k, getting paid to go to school, zero interest loans, using existing automation to eliminate 50% of the jobs we do so we can make 30 hours or 20 hours the new full time, and all of the other benefits of democracy is a better deal than what you are getting now, I don't know what to tell you other than you are being suckered.
Furthermore after reviewing demandthegoodlife.com it is quite obvious you are looking for handouts. The site is a pyramid scheme that supports a new structure which sucks tax money from others to give it to you. And you claim you want equality? Go kill yourself you hypocritical troll.
But people who want compensation for use of the planet they partly own must commit suicide!?!? Dude, you have psychological issues.
That website is part of game you moron.
And you still have not addressed the issues. Please answer this directly: Democracy is equal voting rights, there is no guarantee for you against the results of the vote if you do not like the results. There is no guarantee a democracy will give you equal wages, rights, opportunities, etc.
I got tired of your skirting the issues and using ad hominem attacks against myself and others so I did the same back, now please counter my point and explain how a democracy guarantees equality.
I answered that question several times already.
Here is a copy of the last comment I posted answering this question:
Democracy is a Greek word that literally means people power. It does not mean equal voting rights. It means power rests with the people equally. It is based on freedom and equality.
You have the equal freedom to live however you want, without coercion or restraint, so long as it does not violate that same right in others.
In a democratic society, you cannot vote to enslave a race, you cannot vote to murder your neighbor, you cannot vote to rape the hot women.
A society where one race can enslave another is not an equal society. So it is not a democratic society.
Of course life is not fair. But what makes us civilized is that we make it fair.
What mandates equality is law. In a democratic society you have a right to equality. And anyone who violates that is breaking the law. Having laws that protect us against theft, murder, rape and being treated unequally is not fantasy. It is what modern society is based on.
And your logic that people getting treated equally will create mediocrity makes no sense. So should we bring back slavery in an effort to get people's best efforts!?! We should ditch the 40 hour work week and return to 15 hour days, 7 days per week?
According to decades of research, even research done by the Federal Reserve, the best way to incentivize work is to pay people well and pay them a flat salary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
That is what I advocate. And it is backed by science and evidence.
Saying you want equal opportunities for all but then saying you don't want that equality mandated by law and thinking somehow equality will magically rise up on its own is fantasy.
That does not address the topic at all. 51% can oppress the 49% in a democracy because 51% is more people power than 49%.
Fuck off already.
My definition of terms is not wrong, I have tried to be civil and you ignore the facts. Democracy is equal voting rights, there is no guarantee for you against the results of the vote if you do not like the results. You have yet to address this fact. There is no guarantee a democracy will give you equal wages, rights, opportunities, etc.
Who will guarantee this income? Who will pay me while I go to school and who will pay for the school to stay open. Use automation to eliminate jobs so we can all work 20-30 hours? Maybe I don't want to work only 20-30 hours. If I am guarantee some high paying job I enjoy I want to work it more and will in turn, demand more, if this personal need is not granted to me in your system I will in turn be extremely unproductive but not enough to get fired, collect my money and leech off the system
You are asking for a fairy tale land of equality, welcome to reality, shit isn't fair and not everybody is equal. Equal opportunities for all I am for, mandated equality, on the other hand, will guarantee mediocrity.
Democracy literally means people power. It is a Greek word. It does not mean equal voting rights. It means power rests with the people equally. It is based on freedom and equality.
You have the equal freedom to live however you want, without coercion or restraint, so long as it does not violate that same right in others.
In a democratic society, you cannot vote to enslave a race, you cannot vote to murder your neighbor, you cannot vote to rape the hot women.
A society where one race can enslave another is not an equal society. So it is not a democratic society.
Of course life is not fair. But what makes us civilized is that we make it fair.
What mandates equality is law. In a democratic society you have a right to equality. And anyone who violates that is breaking the law. Having laws that protect us against theft, murder, rape and being treated unequally is not fantasy. It is what modern society is based on.
And your logic that people getting treated equally will create mediocrity makes no sense. So should we bring back slavery in an effort to get people's best efforts!?! We should ditch the 40 hour work week and return to 15 hour days, 7 days per week?
According to decades of research, even research done by the Federal Reserve, the best way to incentivize work is to pay people well and pay them a flat salary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
That is what I advocate. And it is backed by science and evidence.
Saying you want equal opportunities for all but then saying you don't want that equality mandated by law and thinking somehow equality will magically rise up on its own is fantasy.
Wow, just wow.
Your second sentence describes personal liberty, not democracy.
You say what mandates equality is law so we can be protected against theft, murder, rape, etc, our republic already gives us that, and a democracy, again, does not guarantee you protection from those actions.
Throwing slavery in my face? Fuck off with your straw man tactics. You ignored the point about how if I was guaranteed a job I enjoy with great pay I may want to work MORE than what is mandated for equality.
I also don't give a shit about research that says the best way give people an incentive is a flat salary because I have worked numerous jobs where this was not the case, and especially when such research is from the fed since they calculate inflation without using food and energy prices and pretend it's accurate.
You completely ignore my points and misuse words. You are either a moron or a troll. Fuck off.
Democracy guarantees equal personal liberty to everyone.
Since democracy is based on equality, you have the same right to protection from murder as I do. So I cannot vote to kill you and you cannot vote to kill me, no matter how many votes you get.
You get equal pay for equal effort. If you work 40 hours, you will get twice the amount of someone who works 20 hours doing the same work.
You may not care about science and research, but the rest of the modern world does.
The BLS calculates inflation, not the FED. And they report both headline inflation which includes food and energy and core inflation which excludes them.
You are misinformed on a lot of subjects. And as a result, you are advocating a system that will keep you poorer and pay you a fraction of what you should be getting. It is the primary reason why people like you vote against their best interests.
Sad.
Again, democracy does not guarantee personal liberty to everyone.
Stop with the straw man arguments as well. I did not say I don't care about science and research I said there were specific ones that were blatantly false, and I apologize about mixing up the fed and bls for inflation calculations. But again you did not address the real issue about how the numbers are missing food and energy.
You are a fucking troll or a moron and I'm done with you.
Not only are you gullible, but you are angry and misinformed.
The headline inflation which includes food and energy is the inflation number the BLS posts on their front page and is the one that the media primarily cites.
And democracy, particularly the democracy I advocate, does guarantee personal liberty to everyone. You need to read my posts again.
Not misinformed, just misspoken. As you said, there is core and regular inflation. What you left our was the target the fed uses to assess acceptable inflation is the core rate which strips out food and energy, which is why I was referring to it. Yes, there is a total rate calculated as well and sometimes this one is shown, but core is referenced as well because hey, 2% YOY sounds better than 3.8% and it gets rid of those nasty volatile food/energy costs that show the full story.
And again, the democracy you advocate, guaranteeing personal liberty, is not a democracy unless everybody votes for this. Not saying people won't vote for this, but personal liberty is not guaranteed in a democracy.
You advocate democratically allocating wages and claim it would be equal (again equal wage for all is closest to communism, as myself and others have already pointed out). You advocate equal pay for equal effort, with no mention of results (again, close to communism). You claim liberty is guaranteed in your democracy. You said in a democratic society you cannot vote to enslave, rape or murder, but give no reason other than you can't. We can't do that now because it is against the law and/or the constitution, so until the people implemented something that provides those protections they would not exist.
Yet you won't address the simple fact that in a democracy the people get to vote, so nothing you advocate is guaranteed because there is no guarantee you can get a majority to agree on it. You cannot simply say there are certain things we don't vote on, or are given, without the people voting to allow/deny those ideas, as doing so would trample all over democracy. Again, not that they wouldn't go for those ideas, just that they are not guaranteed, which has been one of, if not your main, point.
Care to fail again?
"What you left our was the target the fed uses to assess acceptable inflation is the core rate which strips out food and energy"
That is because core is a better indicator of inflation from the money supply. Food and energy have volatile price changes that have nothing to do with money supply inflation. So if headline inflation increases because there was a spike in food prices and the spike in food prices had nothing to do with money supply, what good does that do for the FED who is concerned about inflation from money supply?
The FED is just as concerned about inflation as you are. And they know what they are doing. An increase in food prices because of a crop failure does not mean the FED should tighten the money supply.
"again equal wage for all is closest to communism, as myself and others have already pointed out"
There is no money in communism so there is no wages in communism. You and everyone else who say that there is are wrong.
"You advocate equal pay for equal effort, with no mention of results"
Results obviously play a very big part. If you work at a company and they do not generate enough revenue to cover their expenses, that company would be shut down and you would be out of a job, earning nothing. So results have a big impact on your pay.
"You said in a democratic society you cannot vote to enslave, rape or murder, but give no reason other than you can't"
The modern, liberal version of democracy is based on Freedom, Equality and Science.
Equality means you get equal votes, equal treatment under the law and equal pay for equal effort.
Equal treatment under the law means you have the same protections against rape as the hot, young women in the minority do.
"You cannot simply say there are certain things we don't vote on, or are given, without the people voting to allow/deny those ideas, as doing so would trample all over democracy"
For the umteenth time, democracy is not a system of voting!!!!! It is a greek word that means people power. It means power rests with everyone equally.
So you could never vote to rape someone because that would be violating their right to EQUAL treatment under the law. You can vote to have some job category pay less, but you cannot vote to have a single person earn less or a race of people to earn less because that would violate their right to EQUAL treatment under the law and EQUAL pay for equal effort.
If you worked the job whose pay was lowered, you can get a job doing something whose pay was not lowered. Or you can sue saying it violates your right to equal pay for equal effort. Then you would have to demonstrate how your job requires the same effort as others that get paid more. If you are successful, the ruling will be overturned and your income for that job category would be restored.
There is still separation of powers. You still have a separate government, separate justice system and separate economic system.
And the winner is.............samueladams, by technical knock out
Shouldn't you be at a tea party rally yelling at people in wheelchairs who want healthcare?
This isn't a tea party rally? If they already have a wheelchair why do they need more healthcare?
If you got yourself a better understanding of science, you would understand it is the source of all our wealth and progress. And you would also understand that wheelchairs do not cure all illnesses.
Or you can continue with your tea party rallies, bibles, inhumanity, and ignorant posts.
Stupid post begets stupid reply
this is an unbelievable amount of reading i will never do lol
wish i could read 1,000x faster
We need to place a Cap on Retail sales profit .
Why retail sales profit? That's odd.
Placing a cap on retail sales profit and wholesale profits, will turn this economic recession around. Plus narrow the gap between rich and poor.
The economic system is a mechanism operated by the flow of money. When that money is taken out of the system , the system than becomes inert. Over the course of many years money has been taken out of the system through sales profit. Currently many corporations are sitting on a ton of cash [sales profit] and the economy is enert. If there was a Cap on sales profit that money would have remained within the economic system.
During the recent boom, borrowed money was poured into the economy but not all that money stayed in circulation, a large portion was taken out at the retail sales profit point leaving the economy dry.
Also, placing a cap on sales profit will bring prices down, encouraging consumer shopping which inevitably creates jobs and .. gets the economy rolling once more.
thanks for asking !
Capitalism is asking permission for cash.
I still don't know what that means
You all are great! I feel the only way we can get back on safe financial footing again is to close the Enron Loophole for oil speculators and bring back The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which prevented the current banking and insurance scams/loopholes. After all, it worked great until late 90's when Congress threw it out. Since then, like prior to 1933, we are experiencing what our country went though then, total Wall Street greed with no penalties, its all legal now...Thanks to the architects of our new system in 1999, President Clinton and Senator Gramm. Cheers to all that are involved! Jim
Why we need Glass-Steagall to be reinstated:
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/071603.asp#axzz1aPEc3wXj http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/09/19/shattering-the-glass-steagall-act/
Why are oil prices high?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbdtTGYQBMU&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNp0y0SjOkY&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-kExdTgNZA&feature=channel
Yeah, and people also said the same thing about slavery, feudalism, and colonialism. And yet these systems of oppression were all overthrown. One day, this will happen to capitalism.
If we listened to people like you, human beings would still be living in caves.
Did you read my post? lol
I advocate democracy and equality. That is the opposite of slavery, feudalism and colonialism. And democracy encourages progress and wealth since this is what people want. It won't keep you in a cave.
We do not HAVE capitalism in the U.S. We have corporate cronyism almost the same as that thing called Communism - where the ELITE had everything because they managed to take it all from the people. A rose by any name is still as sweet or as STINKY ! !
"Give me control of a nations money and I care not who makes its laws"
End the Federal Reserve - It is a private bank that loans money at interest to the government.
This is the MOST MISUNDERSTOOD topic of our time!
We do NOT have Capitalism. WE have Corporatism.
Capitalism is when the markets respond to supply and demand and Capitalism requires sound money.
Today we have Corporatism, the merger of Big Corp/Bank with corrupt Govt backed by fiat money.
Do you know your incomes tax solely goes to pay the interest to the Fed on money they never had in the first place and merely ordered the Treasury to print off their press.They ( the Fed are an INDEPENDENT PRIVATE agency WITHIN our govt that reaps PRIVATE profits by merely guaranteeing the fiat money printed by our Treasury)
It is called COUNTERFITTING!!!!
WAKE UP AMERICA.........IF WE ONLY HAD CAPITALISM...WE WOULD NOT BE POSTING HERE TODAY AND DEMONSTRATING!
That's a lot of Ron Paul, conspiracy nonsense.
The Fed is not private; any profits it makes gets handed over to the Treasury; since inflation is low, money is sound; and our taxes pay for more than just interest.
And if we had your version of capitalism, with no help from government at all, our problems would be several multiples worse than it is today.
Its not?
watch!
Police Know The Federal Reserve is Private
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UqcY8lGUUE
Let Greenspan Tell You What Fed is!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIQTu7kOT_8&feature=related
According to our constitution...NOBODY is above the Constitution. Wake up my friend!
Your proof is a comment by a police officer on an Alex Jones video? lol
No, my proof came out of the mouth of Alan Greenspan when he says in the second vid...'The Federal Reserve is an Independent Agency and nobody in government can touch it !
If you understand your Constitituion and its principles which is the Law of the Land...you would have known...NOBODY IS ABOVE THE LAW!
Especially NOT a private institution like the Fed. people like yourself probably don't even know that your income tax SOLELY goes to pay interest to the (private and independent) Federal Reserve on money they NEVER had in the first place and ordered the Treasury to print off their press. SOLELY because they so called would ;GUARANTEE the fiat money printed by the Treasury.
Economic illiteray and Constitutional illitereacy is rampant!
Most Americans also don't understand the Bill of Rights APPLIES to the Federal Govt and is to RESTRAIN the Fed govt from infringing upon the peoples Individual Liberties.
We do law on this side here!
There is a difference between independent and private.
It is independent because it doesn't want the monetary supply to be politicized. But the government can touch it. Its chairman is appointed by the president and must be confirmed by the senate. It must report to congress and is audited regularly by the GAO.
And your income tax pays for the entire federal government and all its programs. Interest is just one expense. It is not the only expense.
You are not going to get credible information from Alex Jones.
There is indeed a difference between Independent and private and I said they are both. It is an appointed position and not an elected position.
Your income goes solely to pay the interest. Your property tax goes to public education,. your gasoline tax to roads and the fact you pay into your own SS from your payroll...
Alex Jones is merely one person....who got it right but you are indeed correct. I read 'The Creature from Jekyll Island' a second close look at the Federal Reserve which got raving reviews from numerous federal reserve bankers around the country.
The fact that the chairman is appointed by the president and confirmed by the congress makes it public, not private.
Do you think the president appoints the chairman of federal express?
If all income goes to interest, who pays for defense, homeland security, government salaries, nasa, nsf, cia, fbi, hhs, medicaid, etc.?
And why does the govt report tax revenues that are much greater than the amount of interest it pays? Shouldn't interest payments be equal to or greater than collected tax revenue if all the tax revenue is going to interest?
As Alan Greenspan stated...the Fed doesn't answer to anybody...That would be unconstitutional if it were a governmental agency because nobody in our govt is above the Constitution!
To pay for defense the US relies on other countries, like China, to fund its debt or in other words, to fund its defense.
Money for Medicaid comes from your paycheck, it is deducted just like SS...
President's Private Sector Survey On Cost Control A Report to The President (Reagan)
With two-thirds of everyone's personal income taxes wasted or not collected, 100% of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal Government contributions to transfer payments.
In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services which taxpayers expect from their government."
http://occupywallst.org/forum/a-rally-cry-to-occupy-join-in-once-voice/
In America today, we really don't have capitalism, but a kind of "corporatism". In a way, we are fighting the same battle that Teddy Roosevelt fought against the "Trusts" over 100 years ago. Capitalism is not so much an economic system as a system of "moral philosophy" it is about the person's right to succeed and the persons right to fail and to live with the benefits of success and bitterness of failure. There has never been true capitalist system without individual liberty. Along the way, "capitalism" has been distorted by "cronyism" (Wall Street - Washinton DC), by "rent seeking behaviour" (lobbyists) and by excessive "externalization of costs" (pollution). Capitalism is pretty harsh in its social consequences,-- even its most profound apostle (Friedrich Hayek), felt that there was a place for social insurance and a safety net. It is absurd to think that we are going to turn the clock back on child labor laws, fair trade and basic worker safety.
The point is that the current system is not working, it doesn't matter if you call it capitalism or if you call it something else. We will have to drastically change our way of thinking if we expect to have real change.
We don't have pure capitalism - we have capitalism/socialism mixed. Many people agree when I point out that it is NOT the distance between the wealthy and the poor that is the issue, it's the raw level of the poor. For example, if the "bottom" were a household making $40,000 per year, then NOBODY (or few) would care if there are a few $billionaires and many $millionaires.
Similar to your comments (which I agree), our political system is broken. For example, we do NOT give our Presidents the power to do what we think we've elected them to do, then we get disappointed when they don't do what we think we've elected them to do. Great video narrated by John Stossel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phs6CwnutoY
Be bold? http://www.JeffBlock2012.com is about as bold as I can be.
If people had a choice between a bottom of $40k or a bottom of $115k with no unemployment, with zero interest which cuts your mortgage in half, and with fully deploying our automation so we can eliminate 50% of all jobs and cut our work week in half, I think people will choose the latter.
LOL @ equal pay for equal effort... where is the incentive for the productive people to take care of the losers??
Government + corporations working together to perpetuate fraud against the people = fascism.
You clowns vote for Obama and now protest the very people who got him elected without asking yourselves who gave them the power to bend you over and keep you there.
we do not currently have capitalism because there is too much government intervention. The government has rigged the system so that the rich get richer with shortcuts and safety nets (bailouts).
In fact our economic system is closer to Mercantilism. Mercantilism (from wikipedia) is the economic doctrine that says government control of foreign trade is of paramount importance for ensuring the prosperity and security of a state.
That is ridiculous to say that somehow this system would work if we let it constantly fail at every bust in the business cycle. That is a logical fallacy.
It is not fair that the government bailed out wall street and nobody else. But if they didn't, unemployment would be double what it is now. It would be another great depression. It wouldn't have fixed the economy. It would have made it significantly worse.
those are the fear mongering words we were told by the media. I do not believe them.
What is a logical fallacy is to think that the economy will be in an ever increasing pattern of good times. Fluctuations in the economy are natural and to resist them with artificial stimulus is what creates bubbles that, when they burst, are worse than the natural dips would have been. Google "Austrian Economics" for more.
Take your crackpot austrian economics to a tea party rally where you can protest against people in wheelchairs looking for healthcare. You will feel more at home.
if you'd like to have an intellectual discussion I'm all ears but you can take your name calling and assumptive attacks elsewhere. You're only hurting the cause.
There is nothing intellectual about austrian economics. It rejects science. All the evidence refutes its economic theories. Its singular purpose is to eliminate government. It is promoted primarily by the mises institute, an organization filled with racists.
I reject everything about libertarianism because it is a cruel, barbaric way to run a society.
you do an awful lot of out right rejecting things. You should probably try being more open minded and listen to other ideas. Have you considered that you might not be all-knowing?
let people be free of governmental restriction and invasion is cruel and barbaric?
Yes, without government help society would be far worse than it already is. We would have far more than 46 million in poverty, 16% underemployed, 1 in every 5 kids in poverty, 25% of all blacks in poverty, 97% of all workers earning a below average income, and 52 million without health insurance.
I don't want to go to unregulated doctors or take unregulated medicine or eat unregulated food.
prove it
Poverty and inequality and labor conditions when there was little government intervention was worse. That is a historical fact.
Social security instantly eliminated 90% of poverty in seniors. Without it, poverty would be much higher.
Medicare instantly gave every senior guaranteed access to healthcare. Without it, the uninsured would be much higher.
Medicaid instantly gave every poor person guaranteed access to healthcare. Without it, the uninsured would be much higher.
Blacks were slaves before the government stepped in.
It is completely illogical to say that people who rely on government programs would be better off if those government programs did not exist.
but what affect has paying for social security, medicare, etc. had on our youthful workforce? And what happens when the number of seniors exceeds the number of workers?
I never said these programs need to be eliminated, I have just been criticizing your democratic economy idea. As one who has lived in shitty neighborhoods for over 5 years, as I establish my own life, I observe that giving these things to people, rather than them working for it on their own, decreases their personal drive to better themselves and their situations. If you give someone a living wage without them having to work at all then why would they ever wan to leave that situation?
I don't understand the logic of someone who has been forced to live in a shitty neighborhood for 5 years who thinks a system that gives them a 3% chance of getting out of that neighborhood is better than a system that gives them a 100% chance.
You think the workforce doesn't want to make sure the senior population is taken care of!?!?!?
And the senior population is not anywhere near exceeding the worker population.
Whatever their population, whatever the cost, workers will pay because no sane human being wants to see their senior family members die from lack of care.
"As one who has lived in shitty neighborhoods for over 5 years, as I establish my own life, I observe that giving these things to people, rather than them working for it on their own, decreases their personal drive to better themselves"
You think giving people the opportunity to work a job that pays them at least $115k per year will demotivate them!?!?!
There are shitty neighborhoods and unmotivated people because that opportunity is only currently open to 3% of the population!
also, replacing capitalism with democracy is not a smart thing to say. capitalism is an economic philosophy and democracy is a political philosophy. Sadly, we don't have a true democracy either, because individuals do not vote on individual issues. We have a Republic in which we are represented (supposedly in the way of how the constituents would have voted on the issues).
Democracy is a Greek word for people power. It is a system where power rests with everyone equally. It can be used to run a government, an economy, a single business, a family or it can be used in deciding what to cook for dinner.
only stakeholders have power in a company, not the entire populace of a country. Stakeholders do include consumers but it is still not 100% of the population. So to give every citizen a vote on what Bank of America does is not reasonable. To give every employee and stock holder a vote would be more reasonable.
In the economy, you could say we have a democracy in that power rests in every dollar equally. It is just when people have more of them do they accrue more power. But you can't take that away from them if they have earned it justly. Certainly you should if they have broken laws to acquire it, however.
In the economy, democracy means you have equal income for equal effort. It does not mean you can vote on what some bank does.
If you and I both work 40 hours and put in the same effort, we deserve the same pay. That is the only fair system. It is impossible for you or anyone else to earn 10,000 times more than I do. Income in our current system is not based on earning, it is based on market power.
Read through the comments below. It is all explained in detail.
What if you are better than me at my job? What if your job affects more people? This is truly ludicrous as you can not directly equate one 40 hour work week to another. And how are you going to monitor people to make sure they are exerting the same effort? This also discourages people from working harder and it has no built in system for independent entrepreneurs. It sounds more like socialism than democracy.
Thats also not to mention the business owners and the difference between their 40 hour work week and ours. What happens to their profits, why can they get more money just because they own the business when we work every bit as hard or maybe harder. Your proposed system does not reward hard work, innovation, progress, invention, resourcefulness, etc. it just gives inept workers the same compensation as good workers. Have you really thought this through?
"What happens to [business owner] profits, why can they get more money just because they own the business when we work every bit as hard or maybe harder."
You are absolutely right. That is not fair. That is why I advocate replacing the unfair system of capitalism with the fair system of democracy where you are treated the same as a business owner because you work just as hard as them.
"Your proposed system does not reward hard work...it just gives inept workers the same compensation as good workers."
If you work hard, you will earn either a $115k or $230k income. That is a far greater reward than what you are getting now. If you are inept, you will get fired and earn nothing.
See my comment below for a full explanation of motivation.
"Have you really thought this through?"
People far smarter than me have been thinking this through for the past 150 years.
"It sounds more like socialism than democracy."
If you define socialism simply as the public ownership of the means of production, then it is socialism. That version of socialism works.
NASA works, the National Science Foundation works, schools work, public universities work, Veterans Hospitals work, police departments work, fire departments work, the FBI works, the CIA works, the military works, the post office works, garbage collection works. And the Nordic countries, which have the most socialism of all the developed countries, have the highest standard of living in the world, the highest quality of life in the world and the citizens with the most happiness in the world directly because they have the most socialism in the developed world.
"it has no built in system for independent entrepreneurs"
15% of GDP will be allocated to banks for investment, just like we do now. Those banks will be responsible for investing that money in profitable ventures just like they do now.
If you have an idea for a new business, you will pitch it to banks just like entrepreneurs do now. If it is a viable idea, banks will invest in it just like they do now.
But unlike in capitalism, where the system is not responsible to society, democracy is responsible to society. So the system is responsible for providing full employment. You can only achieve full employment by constantly launching new businesses.
And to make sure there is a constant stream of unemployed people to work at the new businesses that are growing our economy, managers at existing companies will have a mandate to automate as much as possible.
This system will create a more dynamic economy than a capitalist economy because we are deliberately making it more dynamic.
"This also discourages people from working harder"
If you are a slacker and refuse to work as hard as everyone else, you would be fired just like you would today.
We have decades of research on what motivates people. The best way to compensate workers is to pay them well and to pay them a flat salary so that the issue of money is off the table and they can just focus on doing great work.
Then to get workers to take pride in their work and give their best effort, the job should give them autonomy which treats them like responsible adults, an opportunity to master the tasks they are performing and a transcendent purpose to work towards.
Trying to manipulate people with monetary rewards actually hurts performance in the majority of work we do.
This is backed by studies done in many different fields including research done by the Federal Reserve.
The overwhelming majority of people already get paid this way. Most get paid a flat salary in today's system with little opportunity for advancement. Nearly every union job,for example, tops out in pay after 4 years.
View this quick TED Talk on compensation incentives which provides the evidence that the compensation model based on equality will not only work, it will work better than our current system:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
Plus there are a ton of ways to motivate people other than monetary rewards. Google the emerging field of gamification which is applying game mechanics (such as completing set tasks for points to level up and acquire medals and outscore the competition and reachthe top of the leaderboard) to all real world activities like work, exercising, dieting, learning, etc.
It makes otherwise boring tasks fun. Advocates believe gamification will transform society and will be a part of everything we do. They think game designers will eventually be in charge of developing sophisticated systems that will turn everything we do in our lives into a fun and engaging experience.
Belts in karate or rank and medals in the military are crude examples of gamification.
View this video for gamification's potential: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NzFCfZMBkU
"What if you are better than me at my job?"
The only fair system is equal pay for equal effort. Your pay should be based on the amount of time you work and the difficulty of your job. If you and I both work hard for 40 hours doing a job of similar difficulty, we should get paid the same.
If you are better at the job than me, then you will have the ability to work on any job you want, the personal satisfaction of achieving mastery in your field and the respect of your peers. If I am merely incompetent, then I should be fired.
But I don't think that we should adopt a system that leaves 46 million in poverty, 16% underemployed, 1 in every 5 kids in poverty, 25% of all blacks in poverty, 97% of all workers earning a below average income, and 52 million without health insurance simply because not everyone's skill level is exactly equal.
"What if your job affects more people?"
Then the prices of the things I produce will be cheaper.
"This is truly ludicrous as you can not directly equate one 40 hour work week to another"
Yes I can. They are both 40 hours. And if the jobs were of similar difficulty, they required similar effort.
"And how are you going to monitor people to make sure they are exerting the same effort?"
Managers are responsible for the way their employees perform. If someone refuses to work, they will get fired. That is how business works. Democracy doesn't change that.
straight up
We must remember what allowed the banksters the ability to run roughshod over our economic system. The Graham-Leach-Bliley Act: "An Act To enhance competition in the financial services industry by providing a prudential framework for the affiliation of banks, securities firms, insurance companies, and other financial service providers, and for other purposes." allowed investment (casino) banking institutions, insurance companies, and commercial (retail) banking institutions to consolidate, co-mingle funds, to engage in risky investment activities, to take money from you and me to fund the injustice committed upon the citizens of, not only the United States but, in large part the world. The Commodities Futures Modernization Act allowed them to create the derivatives you hear so much about which were a major factor in the debacle which destroyed our economy. Both of these acts must be repealed within our system of government or the banks will continue to use our money to fund their gambling activities. Help me by signing the petition: http://signon.org/sign/repeal-graham-leach-bliley The Glass-Steagal act separates these two types of banking institutions to keep the gambling activities separate from commercial banking activities. (commercial banking activities are the services we, as bank customers, utilize. i.e. savings, checking, loans)
why is there a need for any banking institute to have "gambling" activities?