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Well? So does a "distributed" economy. Goods are manufactured, shipped across the planet, to be dumped in a landfill. A significant portion of food goes to wast

Well? So does a "distributed" economy. Goods are manufactured, shipped across the planet, to be dumped in a landfill. A significant portion of food goes to waste, all the while some other people starve (incidentally, being forced to plant cash crops e.g. cocoa rather than grow food for themselves). We have given trillions to help pay for the losses of the bankers, who are the people who truly rule us. We are currently in the process of giving trillions in subsidies to industries which have either already doomed us to extinction or soon will. The list goes on.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
The trillion dollar bailouts are central planning. The fact that consumer goods are manufactured in countries by people who can't afford to buy them and sold to people in other countries who throw them away is a symptom of the vast disparity in cost of doing business in the respective countries. Subsidies are always and everywhere the product of a central planner. In order to criticize a distributed system properly it is necessary to identify those things that are the product of the distributed system, rather than those things that are the product of centralized planning.
- rualca 6y ago
  > The trillion dollar bailouts are central planning. There's a difference between an measurement that's imposed by a dominant economic actor and having a centrally planned economy. Bailouts were arguably applied centrally by a central bank, but they are distributed throughout all economic actors that apply for bailouts and meet requirements.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    I agree there is a difference. Also “meet requirements” is intended to portray the process as somewhat objective but its not. They write those requirements with an eye towards who they want to get the bailout.
- quietbritishjim 6y ago
  The trillion dollar bailouts are indeed central planning, but they are a reaction to a failure in distributed planners as recognised by the most firm believers in distributed planning. As in, "Oh crap, this free market is in the process of unravelling, the only way to stop it is to throw a bailout at it." So it's still a product of decentralised planning (to use your term). The reaction following a bailout is usually, "whoops, we didn't do enough central planning beforehand" i.e. the new banking regulations such as tighter loan-to-deposit ratios. So, overall, this supports the parent comment's point of the inefficiencies of decentralised planning.
  - drran 6y ago
    USSR, as the country, failed because of central planning. Bailout is not a good solution too, because capital flow from competitive players to incompetent, which is bad for evolution. US banking system is far behind other banking systems because of that.
    - quietbritishjim 6y ago
      I absolutely was not expressing an opinion either way. All I was saying is that the parent comment was raising a point that supported the opposite argument than they thought, not that I agreed or disagreed with it.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > they are a reaction to a failure in distributed planners as recognised by the most firm believers in distributed planning. No, they are a reaction to the perceived failures of “distributed planning” as perceived by advocates of central planning. Free marketers have always said that those banks need to be allowed to fail because they made bad decisions and bankruptcy sells their assets so the creditors can get paid and new management can operate them. With bailout you have this bizarre system where profits are privatized and losses are socialized, which is not a distributed system or a free market.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  Bailouts are a necessary resort when the market fails to self regulate. Which spoiler alert, it has always done cyclically since capitalism is a thing. The question is not if there will be another crisis, is when it will be. Under a free market, economical crisis are a certainty.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    Nothing makes them necessary, and the free market regulates by allowing those businesses to fail. Since we don’t have a free market, but a regulated one, those crises you refer to are symptoms of a regulated market. Cyclic failures are also a result of the banking system and their use of scrip as opposed to specie.
- andrepd 6y ago
  > The trillion dollar bailouts are central planning. > In order to criticize a distributed system properly it is necessary to identify those things that are the product of the distributed system, rather than those things that are the product of centralized planning. What you call "central planning" is merely the emergent behaviour of the "distributed" capitalist system. A certain bearded German economist warned that in such an economy, the state is just another apparatus of the bourgeoisie. Turning the old cliché on its head, pure capitalism only works in theory, never in practice. In the real world, disparities in money are disparities in power, which ensure things such as bailouts and more fundamentally, banking laws that are effectively a license (for some) to print free money for themselves.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > A certain bearded German economist warned that in such an economy, the state is just another apparatus of the bourgeoisie. That bearded economist was on to something. Alas nowadays policy advocates in his tradition seem to want the bourgeoisie state to write and enforce more rules, forgetting that those rules are unlikely to benefit anyone other than an oligarch. > pure capitalism only works in theory, never in practice. Thats dogma and unlikely to be true. > In the real world, disparities in money are disparities in power, which ensure things such as bailouts and more fundamentally, banking laws that are effectively a license (for some) to print free money for themselves. Its more accurate to say that "disparities in power lead to disparities in money." Certainly there are other forms of power, like the ones people use to expropriate money and assets from those who have money and assets but less power.
rualca 6y ago
> Goods are manufactured, shipped across the planet, to be dumped in a landfill. Goods are shipped because someone bought them with their hard-earned money to fulfill a need they personally have. Whatever they do with it afterwards is up to them. I fail to see how central planning comes into play in this scenario, unless you're trying to claim that you personally know best than anyone else what to do with other people's money or needs. > A significant portion of food goes to waste I fail to see the relevance of your comment. Demand is not predicted or specified by a crisp value, and even supply is subjected to stochastic variations. Thus you either underprovision, which causes scarsity, or you over provision, which increases the odds all needs are fulfilled at the risk of increasing losses. So the problem boils down to either food shortages or "waste". So, with this in mind, again what's the problem with "waste"? > all the while some other people starve I fail to see the rational basis and relevance of your argument. It reads like apuerile appeal to emotion, in fact. I mean, if I forget some leftovers in the back of the fridge and later I decide to just throw it out to avoid any risk of suffering through a bout of food poisoning, am I contributing to a famine somewhere in the world? Would those fictional and hypothetical starved people benefit in any way if I didn't threw out my leftovers? Or would I be contributing to end world hunger if I ate all my food and left no leftovers at the end of a meal? And does the driver of a truck transporting food supplies be found guilty of causing famines if he has an accident which ends up destroying his cargo? > We have given trillions to help pay for the losses of the bankers (...) And here comes the rest of the anticapitalist bingo. It's as if centrally planned economies weren't forced to shift resources around during economic crises to avoid collapsing. I mean, al those shipments from the URSS to Cuba were never bailouts, right?
- andrepd 6y ago
  > Goods are shipped because someone bought them with their hard-earned money to fulfill a need they personally have. Whatever they do with it afterwards is up to them. This sets the tone for any further conversation we might have. You are simply a fundamentalist, a dogmatist. People earn money because they work hard, then they buy stuff with that money, then they do things with that stuff. And that's how our economy works! I don't even know how to reply to such an absurd statement. It's like someone saying the sky is pink. What are you even supposed to argue other than... just look out your window? > points two and three Glad you decided to split my sentence in two in order to argue against something that I didn't say. A significant portion of food goes to waste while there are shortages in other places, this is what I said. You can argue all you wan't but you cannot change the basic reality that your system for allocating resources isn't doing a good job at allocating resources. > We have given trillions to help pay for the losses of the bankers Bankers (class I people) are given free money that they then lend out, with interest, to the rest of us (class II people) who pay tithe to them for the economy to work at all. Not content with this, if they ever make a serious fuck-up and tank the whole economy, we will be there to compensate them for their losses and make sure that they still get their due profit. This is not right, full stop.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

The trillion dollar bailouts are central planning. The fact that consumer goods are manufactured in countries by people who can't afford to buy them and sold to people in other countries who throw them away is a symptom of the vast disparity in cost of doing business in the respective countries. Subsidies are always and everywhere the product of a central planner. In order to criticize a distributed system properly it is necessary to identify those things that are the product of the distributed system, rather than those things that are the product of centralized planning.

rualca 6y ago
> The trillion dollar bailouts are central planning. There's a difference between an measurement that's imposed by a dominant economic actor and having a centrally planned economy. Bailouts were arguably applied centrally by a central bank, but they are distributed throughout all economic actors that apply for bailouts and meet requirements.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  I agree there is a difference. Also “meet requirements” is intended to portray the process as somewhat objective but its not. They write those requirements with an eye towards who they want to get the bailout.
quietbritishjim 6y ago
The trillion dollar bailouts are indeed central planning, but they are a reaction to a failure in distributed planners as recognised by the most firm believers in distributed planning. As in, "Oh crap, this free market is in the process of unravelling, the only way to stop it is to throw a bailout at it." So it's still a product of decentralised planning (to use your term). The reaction following a bailout is usually, "whoops, we didn't do enough central planning beforehand" i.e. the new banking regulations such as tighter loan-to-deposit ratios. So, overall, this supports the parent comment's point of the inefficiencies of decentralised planning.
- drran 6y ago
  USSR, as the country, failed because of central planning. Bailout is not a good solution too, because capital flow from competitive players to incompetent, which is bad for evolution. US banking system is far behind other banking systems because of that.
  - quietbritishjim 6y ago
    I absolutely was not expressing an opinion either way. All I was saying is that the parent comment was raising a point that supported the opposite argument than they thought, not that I agreed or disagreed with it.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > they are a reaction to a failure in distributed planners as recognised by the most firm believers in distributed planning. No, they are a reaction to the perceived failures of “distributed planning” as perceived by advocates of central planning. Free marketers have always said that those banks need to be allowed to fail because they made bad decisions and bankruptcy sells their assets so the creditors can get paid and new management can operate them. With bailout you have this bizarre system where profits are privatized and losses are socialized, which is not a distributed system or a free market.
pietrovismara 6y ago
Bailouts are a necessary resort when the market fails to self regulate. Which spoiler alert, it has always done cyclically since capitalism is a thing. The question is not if there will be another crisis, is when it will be. Under a free market, economical crisis are a certainty.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  Nothing makes them necessary, and the free market regulates by allowing those businesses to fail. Since we don’t have a free market, but a regulated one, those crises you refer to are symptoms of a regulated market. Cyclic failures are also a result of the banking system and their use of scrip as opposed to specie.
andrepd 6y ago
> The trillion dollar bailouts are central planning. > In order to criticize a distributed system properly it is necessary to identify those things that are the product of the distributed system, rather than those things that are the product of centralized planning. What you call "central planning" is merely the emergent behaviour of the "distributed" capitalist system. A certain bearded German economist warned that in such an economy, the state is just another apparatus of the bourgeoisie. Turning the old cliché on its head, pure capitalism only works in theory, never in practice. In the real world, disparities in money are disparities in power, which ensure things such as bailouts and more fundamentally, banking laws that are effectively a license (for some) to print free money for themselves.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > A certain bearded German economist warned that in such an economy, the state is just another apparatus of the bourgeoisie. That bearded economist was on to something. Alas nowadays policy advocates in his tradition seem to want the bourgeoisie state to write and enforce more rules, forgetting that those rules are unlikely to benefit anyone other than an oligarch. > pure capitalism only works in theory, never in practice. Thats dogma and unlikely to be true. > In the real world, disparities in money are disparities in power, which ensure things such as bailouts and more fundamentally, banking laws that are effectively a license (for some) to print free money for themselves. Its more accurate to say that "disparities in power lead to disparities in money." Certainly there are other forms of power, like the ones people use to expropriate money and assets from those who have money and assets but less power.

rualca 6y ago

> Goods are manufactured, shipped across the planet, to be dumped in a landfill. Goods are shipped because someone bought them with their hard-earned money to fulfill a need they personally have. Whatever they do with it afterwards is up to them. I fail to see how central planning comes into play in this scenario, unless you're trying to claim that you personally know best than anyone else what to do with other people's money or needs. > A significant portion of food goes to waste I fail to see the relevance of your comment. Demand is not predicted or specified by a crisp value, and even supply is subjected to stochastic variations. Thus you either underprovision, which causes scarsity, or you over provision, which increases the odds all needs are fulfilled at the risk of increasing losses. So the problem boils down to either food shortages or "waste". So, with this in mind, again what's the problem with "waste"? > all the while some other people starve I fail to see the rational basis and relevance of your argument. It reads like apuerile appeal to emotion, in fact. I mean, if I forget some leftovers in the back of the fridge and later I decide to just throw it out to avoid any risk of suffering through a bout of food poisoning, am I contributing to a famine somewhere in the world? Would those fictional and hypothetical starved people benefit in any way if I didn't threw out my leftovers? Or would I be contributing to end world hunger if I ate all my food and left no leftovers at the end of a meal? And does the driver of a truck transporting food supplies be found guilty of causing famines if he has an accident which ends up destroying his cargo? > We have given trillions to help pay for the losses of the bankers (...) And here comes the rest of the anticapitalist bingo. It's as if centrally planned economies weren't forced to shift resources around during economic crises to avoid collapsing. I mean, al those shipments from the URSS to Cuba were never bailouts, right?

andrepd 6y ago
> Goods are shipped because someone bought them with their hard-earned money to fulfill a need they personally have. Whatever they do with it afterwards is up to them. This sets the tone for any further conversation we might have. You are simply a fundamentalist, a dogmatist. People earn money because they work hard, then they buy stuff with that money, then they do things with that stuff. And that's how our economy works! I don't even know how to reply to such an absurd statement. It's like someone saying the sky is pink. What are you even supposed to argue other than... just look out your window? > points two and three Glad you decided to split my sentence in two in order to argue against something that I didn't say. A significant portion of food goes to waste while there are shortages in other places, this is what I said. You can argue all you wan't but you cannot change the basic reality that your system for allocating resources isn't doing a good job at allocating resources. > We have given trillions to help pay for the losses of the bankers Bankers (class I people) are given free money that they then lend out, with interest, to the rest of us (class II people) who pay tithe to them for the economy to work at all. Not content with this, if they ever make a serious fuck-up and tank the whole economy, we will be there to compensate them for their losses and make sure that they still get their due profit. This is not right, full stop.