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maybe it's because cash is just one asset.. at least if goods exist, you can barter for them, if the cash isn't any good if the necessities just aren't there b

maybe it's because cash is just one asset.. at least if goods exist, you can barter for them, if the cash isn't any good if the necessities just aren't there because, oh I don't know, you took the farms from the farmers because they owned land and owning property was deemed evil, and then the crops failed[1], then they just aren't available and it doesn't matter how much money or gold or any other commodity you might have to exchange for them 1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

paulmd 2y ago
it's always odd when people latch onto that as an example, because the west has definitely had politically-induced holodomors caused by over-export of staple crops as well. classically, the irish potato famine comes to mind. you can probably objectively calculate the relative importance of pre-capitalism serfs and post-capitalism serfs by volume of political discourse and online discussion and citations - the peasants are precious right up until we get them to adopt capitalism, and then they can starve to death after getting their hand ripped off in a mill while we ship all their potatoes off to india. it's sort of like the abortion thing, where fetuses are the most precious thing in the universe until they're yeeted through a cervix and then they can starve to death on the street corner. Anyway, it's just a weird argument in general. Authoritarian systems are bad, of course, but authoritarianism cuts across planned-vs-market economies, and the hallowed corporate boardroom is the epitome of central planning. What matters is not markets vs state charter, but being allowed to fail, and without it (say) Boeing is no different than the stuffiest soviet OKB, despite the fact boeing is a "free market" company. And when these arguments eventually devolve into people citing the dead nazis who died attempting to annex other countries as "victims of socialism", well... and again, you can say "tu quoque" all you want, but if a practice is so widely accepted as to be unremarkable then it's unremarkable. And the victims of capitalism are never brought up quite as readily - there's no PR machine spinning for the dead irish peasants, or someone who dies of a treatable chronic illness, or who spends their life in an american gulag for a trivial offense, etc. We got plenty of authoritarianism here too, and it sucks here too, but that's not the angle people bring it up in... literally ever. It's just our elites winding us up against whatever elites our elites are opposed to this week. The fact of the matter is that as automation displaces not just physical but also intellectual labor to greater and greater degrees, we are going to have to move away from the idea that people's intrinsic value is only what they contribute to the economy (market or state). Non-authoritarian socialism is pretty great and yes, I'll happily take the ticket to Norway and leave you alone.
- emmelaich 2y ago
  Such a patina of reasonableness to your comment but your comparison of the Irish famine to the Holomodor is way overwrought. Holomodor was deliberate and largely not caused by bad harvests. Irish had the potato blight; and in the beginning they were given a large amount of charity. WRT authoritarianism, govt have a monopoly on violence that individual companies will never have.
  - adolph 2y ago
    Not to disagree with you but to add context, the monopoly on violence has not always been as straightforward as one might imagine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain The British East India company’s operations are another example.
    - emmelaich 2y ago
      I completely agree with you but my point stands as is. I'd only change 'never have' to 'almost never have' and most probably won't again.
      - adolph 2y ago
        Not to pat ourselves on the back to hard, but the reasonable state of today comes in part as a reaction to previous tragedy. The expansion of government sponsored enterprises with organic police forces is concerning however. Examples in my mind are school districts, transit and other agencies without law enforcement as a core component or competency. To the extent that those forces are bound to the proprietary interests of the enterprise, the bounds of the monopoly are blurred.
  - Aexian 2y ago
    In defence of the comparison - it is not at all a consensus that the Holodomor was deliberate from the beginning, that’s an active debate with prominent experts on both sides. In both famines, there was a refusal to intervene to alleviate the famine once it had begun, and in both cases that was unequivocally a deliberate choice of the British/Soviet leadership. Further - there are many cases through history of companies steering the state violence, from Colonial India to Blair Mountain to Aaron Swartz. The broad point here is that the Soviet Union is constantly used in our Western discourse for our own brand of whataboutism. Our systems fail people constantly and brutally. Our supermarket shelves are stocked, but most of the Anglosphere is in the grips of an unprecedented housing crisis. There’s absolutely lessons we can learn from the Soviets in housing policy, but we won’t if any mention of them ends up reduced back to their worst failures. They didn’t get their shelves stocked by talking about MKUltra or smallpox blankets all day. You can argue that the grass is greener overall, but there’s still dead patches all over our lawn. That’s the broader point.

paulmd 2y ago

it's always odd when people latch onto that as an example, because the west has definitely had politically-induced holodomors caused by over-export of staple crops as well. classically, the irish potato famine comes to mind. you can probably objectively calculate the relative importance of pre-capitalism serfs and post-capitalism serfs by volume of political discourse and online discussion and citations - the peasants are precious right up until we get them to adopt capitalism, and then they can starve to death after getting their hand ripped off in a mill while we ship all their potatoes off to india. it's sort of like the abortion thing, where fetuses are the most precious thing in the universe until they're yeeted through a cervix and then they can starve to death on the street corner. Anyway, it's just a weird argument in general. Authoritarian systems are bad, of course, but authoritarianism cuts across planned-vs-market economies, and the hallowed corporate boardroom is the epitome of central planning. What matters is not markets vs state charter, but being allowed to fail, and without it (say) Boeing is no different than the stuffiest soviet OKB, despite the fact boeing is a "free market" company. And when these arguments eventually devolve into people citing the dead nazis who died attempting to annex other countries as "victims of socialism", well... and again, you can say "tu quoque" all you want, but if a practice is so widely accepted as to be unremarkable then it's unremarkable. And the victims of capitalism are never brought up quite as readily - there's no PR machine spinning for the dead irish peasants, or someone who dies of a treatable chronic illness, or who spends their life in an american gulag for a trivial offense, etc. We got plenty of authoritarianism here too, and it sucks here too, but that's not the angle people bring it up in... literally ever. It's just our elites winding us up against whatever elites our elites are opposed to this week. The fact of the matter is that as automation displaces not just physical but also intellectual labor to greater and greater degrees, we are going to have to move away from the idea that people's intrinsic value is only what they contribute to the economy (market or state). Non-authoritarian socialism is pretty great and yes, I'll happily take the ticket to Norway and leave you alone.

emmelaich 2y ago
Such a patina of reasonableness to your comment but your comparison of the Irish famine to the Holomodor is way overwrought. Holomodor was deliberate and largely not caused by bad harvests. Irish had the potato blight; and in the beginning they were given a large amount of charity. WRT authoritarianism, govt have a monopoly on violence that individual companies will never have.
- adolph 2y ago
  Not to disagree with you but to add context, the monopoly on violence has not always been as straightforward as one might imagine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain The British East India company’s operations are another example.
  - emmelaich 2y ago
    I completely agree with you but my point stands as is. I'd only change 'never have' to 'almost never have' and most probably won't again.
    - adolph 2y ago
      Not to pat ourselves on the back to hard, but the reasonable state of today comes in part as a reaction to previous tragedy. The expansion of government sponsored enterprises with organic police forces is concerning however. Examples in my mind are school districts, transit and other agencies without law enforcement as a core component or competency. To the extent that those forces are bound to the proprietary interests of the enterprise, the bounds of the monopoly are blurred.
- Aexian 2y ago
  In defence of the comparison - it is not at all a consensus that the Holodomor was deliberate from the beginning, that’s an active debate with prominent experts on both sides. In both famines, there was a refusal to intervene to alleviate the famine once it had begun, and in both cases that was unequivocally a deliberate choice of the British/Soviet leadership. Further - there are many cases through history of companies steering the state violence, from Colonial India to Blair Mountain to Aaron Swartz. The broad point here is that the Soviet Union is constantly used in our Western discourse for our own brand of whataboutism. Our systems fail people constantly and brutally. Our supermarket shelves are stocked, but most of the Anglosphere is in the grips of an unprecedented housing crisis. There’s absolutely lessons we can learn from the Soviets in housing policy, but we won’t if any mention of them ends up reduced back to their worst failures. They didn’t get their shelves stocked by talking about MKUltra or smallpox blankets all day. You can argue that the grass is greener overall, but there’s still dead patches all over our lawn. That’s the broader point.