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I hear Somalia is looking like a lovely Libertarian paradise these days, if that's what you're after.

eternalban 9y ago
Disingenuous. There are ample examples of robust, thriving, civilizations that had alternative monetary systems before the Private Finance Oligarchy ate the world.
- dsacco 9y ago
  I'll entertain this. Let's start off with this: can you provide any specific examples of these civilizations? To give you some prep, the next question I'm going to ask is what the quality of life was like for the average individual in those civilizations, including the usual metrics: healthcare, access to food, access to running water, etc. One step further, if you provide answers for these questions, I'm going to happily show you why it's extremely difficult to extract the incentives for developing these quality of life improvements from capitalism without designing an economic system that looks like it. Then I suppose you and I will debate whether or not capitalism is perfect, which will be a red herring, because that was never really the point. Deal?
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Without a duplicate Earth to utilize as a control in any experimental setup, it is very difficult to determine whether any given technology improvement came about because of a specific historic factor, or in spite of that factor. I think you are making a reasonable assumption that theoretical systems that allow for concentration of capital result in greater technological advancement than theoretical systems that tend to diffuse capital. But the real world is complex and messy. Living people sometimes behave in ways that are surprising to the economist. It is very difficult to "design an economic system". You either have to devise an incremental path to it from the old system, or march people to it under the threat of death. If you're really going to ask someone to compare historic civilizations with the modern global civilization we have now, you're probably going to need to make some adjustments in order for that to be a fair comparison, instead of one implicitly biased to your own point of view. I'm not certain it is even possible to do that for a comparison between a pre-industrial civilization and a post-industrial civilization. What we can say for sure is that it hasn't always been this way and therefore it doesn't always need to be as it is now.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  And yet the tally sticks were still burned.

Disingenuous. There are ample examples of robust, thriving, civilizations that had alternative monetary systems before the Private Finance Oligarchy ate the world.

dsacco 9y ago
I'll entertain this. Let's start off with this: can you provide any specific examples of these civilizations? To give you some prep, the next question I'm going to ask is what the quality of life was like for the average individual in those civilizations, including the usual metrics: healthcare, access to food, access to running water, etc. One step further, if you provide answers for these questions, I'm going to happily show you why it's extremely difficult to extract the incentives for developing these quality of life improvements from capitalism without designing an economic system that looks like it. Then I suppose you and I will debate whether or not capitalism is perfect, which will be a red herring, because that was never really the point. Deal?
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Without a duplicate Earth to utilize as a control in any experimental setup, it is very difficult to determine whether any given technology improvement came about because of a specific historic factor, or in spite of that factor. I think you are making a reasonable assumption that theoretical systems that allow for concentration of capital result in greater technological advancement than theoretical systems that tend to diffuse capital. But the real world is complex and messy. Living people sometimes behave in ways that are surprising to the economist. It is very difficult to "design an economic system". You either have to devise an incremental path to it from the old system, or march people to it under the threat of death. If you're really going to ask someone to compare historic civilizations with the modern global civilization we have now, you're probably going to need to make some adjustments in order for that to be a fair comparison, instead of one implicitly biased to your own point of view. I'm not certain it is even possible to do that for a comparison between a pre-industrial civilization and a post-industrial civilization. What we can say for sure is that it hasn't always been this way and therefore it doesn't always need to be as it is now.
logfromblammo 9y ago
And yet the tally sticks were still burned.