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The Marxists and communists have tried doing that thing many times and have failed spectacularly. Business based market economy is the only (till now) successfu
by tmptmp 11y ago
The Marxists and communists have tried doing that thing many times and have failed spectacularly. Business based market economy is the only (till now) successful and socially most beneficial type of society that has ever existed. I upvoted the OP because he/she/it (it may be a bot) has put this thing in clear words.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoUp until now, the possibility of having a group of people who lead a leisure life without an undercaste of slaves hasn't existed. Automation is a new thing under the sun.
- hjhgjtyhdf 11y agoThat's funny because the "slaves" in America right now enjoy a higher standard of living than virtually every king and queen before our generation.
- astazangasta 11y agoKings and queens didn't have to work 70 hour weeks to feed themselves last I checked.
- hjhgyhgd 11y agoA person on welfare today has more access to a vast number of food options than Kings and Queens of yesteryear. Grapes and wine are extremely cheap and affordable to anyone who has $5 in their pocket. A full meal of chicken and rice can also be had for $3.
- astazangasta 11y agoMy word, their cups floweth over.
- pharke 11y agoHow is this not patently false? If you take someone living below the poverty line, earning minimum wage, renting their meager apartment, eating highly processed carbs and pseudo-meat, in debt to their bank and payday loan sharks, and under constant threat of homelessness brought on by unexpected illness or economic downturn, how is this situation in any way superior to a king or queen as they existed before "our generation" which I take to mean the modern era rather than literally our generation. A monarch of the past would have obviously better access to food, more of it, higher quality, they might have slightly less variety available (dependent on the era and location) but they certainly weren't eating the prepackaged garbage that passes for low budget food today. By law they owned not only their own vast properties, houses, palaces, etc. but also that of all of their subjects and nobility allowing them to give and take as they wished from anyone under their dominion. Even after reforms almost all royal families were still left with vast holdings that produce more than enough wealth to live absurdly opulent lifestyles. There have been many cases of indebted rulers but that is debt in the sense of illiquidity, they were still asset rich and able to melt the plate down to pay off the debts, so to speak. This notion that everyone was universally worse off in the past and therefore even the lowest of the modern low are somehow better off in their current state and should be thankful for it is the crudest of fallacies. The trite example of modern healthcare being a shining example of why it's better to be poor today than wealthy 200 years ago is equally absurd considering that such care is often avoided by the poorest due to its cost right up until it's too late to do anything about it. You wind up with a situation where a person's only choice is to hope not to get sick since they can't afford the treatment or the missed work either of which could put them even further under water or on the street.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoI think that image of monarchs comes from the movies? The famous inventory of Charlemagne's estate includes 2 cups, one chair and a towel. Their food back then was bad meat and oatmeal, no matter who you were. Indeed, just the existence of cheap antibiotics are likely to make the most humble of today's citizens live decades longer than anyone from the past.
- dinkumthinkum 11y ago
- gech 11y agoPeople should be happy with big screen tvs
- astazangasta 11y agoNo, no it is not, for fuck's sake. Automation is not new. The spinning Jenny was invented in 1764. Robot labor has been here since industrialization started and there is NOTHING new in the last twenty years. Automation is only the replacement of manual labor with machine labor, a.k.a productivity growth. If you've noticed, economies have been growing for centuries. In fact, growth is slower now than in the past. Automation is happening less now. Stop believing all this 'robots are coming for our jobs' crap. The robots have always been here.
- kruczek 11y agoNew or not, there are more and more jobs which are becoming automated and it is a valid question to ask how society should be organized when all jobs would be automated.
- astazangasta 11y agoNo, this is the wrong question to ask. First of all, the rate of automation has not so far resulted in the disappearance of new work - we all survived the contraction of agriculture from employing some 50% of the population to less than 3%. There is plenty of work. An astonishing amount of work is available for people to do that isn't being done, and it's not because people are obsolete. What is lacking is capital directed at hiring people for that work. You can argue about why this is, but the basic reason to me is the general lack of demand because, more or less, the rich have all the money. Here is Krugman on the subject: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/robert-reich-challenging-oligarchy/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/robert-reich-chal...
- superuser2 11y agoThe Soviet Union depended on an enormous laboring class to meet its production needs; the whole point is that we no longer do.
- johndevor 11y agoWe are not there yet. I agree it will happen, the question is when.
- danjayh 11y agoOh, we still do, they're just in second and third world countries. The author of this article focused on service industries that require a physical presence in the local area ... and did not address outsourcing. I think that one likely outcome of this law will be that people will find creative new ways to move work to lower cost locales.
- tim333 11y agoMaybe it we is the US its true but if you look at Germany they are a net exporter of manufactured goods and probably have an agricultural surplus so it's quite possible to get by in a modern economy.
- rtpg 11y agoMarxists and communists have tried this without also sticking to democracy... The well known failings could just as well be due to the massize amount of corruption that came from the strong bases of power. We also had "real" market economies (no trust busting or the like) in the early 20th and it was shitty for a huge part of the population History is the biggest argument against all economic systems
- turar 11y agoNot to mention capitalist countries working very hard to undermine marxists and communists by pretty much any means possible.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoThat's rich, considering the number of 'marxist' rebel groups murdering nuns and social leaders and bombing schools.
- knughit 11y agoHow does that compare to a capitalist killing a 1000people in one day by collapsing a building on them? (Rana Plaza)
- hjhgyhgd 11y agoYes, because surely millions of lives weren't viciously murdered during Mao's and Stalin's reigns. Let's just point to a building with structural failures and imply capitalists murderers.
- tmptmp 11y agoHow does that compare to a Marxist/communist like Mao/Stalin killing and maiming hundreds of thousands just because they didn't exactly speak the way he approved?
- turar 11y agoWhat's that number? Not even out of single digits? That's rich indeed, considering the entire history of the 20th century is that of successful foreign capitalist intervention, starting all the way with the Russian revolution. No matter how bloody the communists were, my original point was that it was never done in an environment without active foreign involvement of undermining, destabilization, and outright warfare.
- pasquinelli 11y agocapitalism hasn't been the only way. capitalism was an improvement over feudalism. hopefully, there'll be more improvements.
- zurn 11y agoEuropean social democracies have made it work by continuously re-constructing it. Employees and citizens of the welfare state are at the table when negotiating how to set rules for the managed capitalism. Check out Sweden for example.
- jsf666 11y agoSweden and the rest of European economies built their wealth on typical capitalism. And I've checked out Sweden, after you've gone into its current situation it ain't so great as communists like Sanders make it to be
- theseoafs 11y ago*Socialists like Sanders
- jsf666 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl-BV8vrLDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl-BV8vrLDU I'm actually from Poland, a country that had actual communism created by another rich jew that wanted to help "the opressed masses". You think at the beginning any of the commies said straight what they plan to do how it will look like after they're done? And what they will do with the evil burgois (or "the 1%" as Sanders and his cultists name it). You're playing with fire, just be wary.
- tim333 11y agoI watched a bit of that and he just says basically that you had to admit Cuba had built a lot of medical clinics. Which I agree is true. Doesn't make either of us communists.
- jqm 11y agoThere have been successful (meaning what exactly?) societies that were not market economy based. People tend to think communism vs capitalism but for most of human history it's been something else. Like hunter/gather or some form of feudalism. I don't disagree that market societies work for distributing goods. But they do have external costs. Are there more efficient ways? Probably. Will market economies go the way of hunter/gather economies at some point? Almost certainly.
- hjhgjtyhdf 11y agoCan you name one society with a higher standard of living than one based on a market economy? Hint: You can't.
- bhickey 11y agoHigher for who and compared to what? If a television is a requisite for a high standard of living, great, we're beating Ptolemy. It's disingenuous to pretend that you can do an apples-to-apples comparison across thousands of years and attribute it to market economics. Given the tremendous natural wealth in the United States, we'd probably have a higher standard of living most countries even if we adopted mercantilist economic policies. This isn't to claim that market economies aren't a great idea, just that I don't think your reasoning holds water.
- hjhgyhgd 11y agoSurely there are no advanced economies without rich natural resources. Oh wait. There's South Korea and Singapore who are some the most capitalist countries on Earth. I'm also questioning your belief that being protectionist wouldn't hurt our standard of living. Do you know the T-shirt you're wearing cost a lot more if it was made in the USA?
- bhickey 11y agoNo. I'm saying that the United States is so stupidly resource rich that we could get a lot of things wrong and still be fabulously wealthy. I don't think you're wrong by any stretch--market economics are a great idea--but you've got to present better reasoning for anyone to care.