The E wrote:n7axw wrote:There is much to what you say, but I think you are over simplifying. So here are a few thoughts.
I am writing a post on forums.davidweber.net, not an economics doctoral thesis.
Upward mobility is still possible here. The key to that is education. Skip out on education and upward mobility vanishes. Even a couple of years in a tech school can help a lot. But all too many young people skip out on education for low paying jobs and then end up stuck. And education is expensive. Mitigating this situation somewhat is the growth of online education making it possible to obtain a degree by working at home and supporting a family at the same time.
Upward mobility is real, yes. Education is a path to it, yes.
But it's not an equal-opportunity path. How successful you are is largely determined by how sucessful your parents were; It takes an extraordinary amount of drive and talent to compensate for a lack of money.
Online education, as great as it can be, lacks things that an in-person education can provide: namely, an environment where you interact with others and develop ideas and connections, so even if you have attained a degree from totallynotascamuniversity.com, you won't have the connections someone else may have.
I disagree that public ownership of the means of production is a good goal. You incentivize capable people by encouraging them to get ahead by doing that to which their hand turns and allowing them to enjoy the fruit of their labor.
And this is where you misunderstand what the phrase means.
Let's define some terms. "Means of production" means anything that a worker needs to turn his capacity for work into something useful to others. In the classic industrial sense, that's stuff like a workbench, tools, access to raw materials, anything that allows a person to practice their trade.
Looking further, it also includes things like access to health care, access to housing, access to food, access to education; a worker that can't stay healthy and can't stay up to date will not be able to perform as well as one who can.
In other words, "public ownership of the means of production" does not mean that you can't own a house, or tools, or a car, or have a good meal: It just means that the tools are available to you out of a public fund if you need them. It doesn't mean that you can't sell what you produce to others, you absolutely can.
What public ownership seeks to avoid is create a situation where people are required to sell their labour to someone who holds access to the means of production over them. It seeks to discourage rent-seeking and middle-men, people whose main business model consists of finding a road to put a toll booth on. This is in direct opposition to neoliberal capitalism, which encourages rent-seeking.
There has been no successful society that has not honored that basic law of human nature. Socialist societies place too much attention to how the pie is divided and not enough to growing the pie. And, the only way for socialist societies to do capital formation is through totalitarian forms of control.
And this is why I describe myself as a social democrat, but do continue.
Marx refers to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The old Soviet Union tried that and eventually it collapsed. China eventually had to introduce a private sector to avoid collapse.
No, the Soviet Union did
not try that, neither did China. Both of those societies were built around a revolution led by a vanguard party; the idea was that this group of enlightened people would lead the populace through the various stages of the marxist revolution into actual communism, but guess what? They never did. Instead, they turned into oligarchies organized along lines of assumed ideological purity (which, come to think of it, is oddly similar to a theocracy....)
Sooo, what about us? Capitalism does have its flaws. For one thing, It's predicated on pure greed which can devolve into a nasty form of social Darwinism. Capital formation is all very well, but when it progresses to the point where a tiny group of people control roughly half the country's wealth, things have gone too far. And matters get worse when Washington is unwilling to enforce laws put in place to deal with this. Capitalism really works best when it operates in a regulated environment where the laws on trusts and monopoly are enforced and our markets are regulated to keep the high rollers from rolling over everybody else.
I would add to that that it also requires that workers are empowered and confident in their ability to have their demands and requirements taken seriously.
So to conclude, consider the following about a cow. The Capitalist says, "Stay away from my cow!" The Communist and Socialist say, "Let's shoot the Capitalist, butcher the cow and divide up the meat!" The Liberal says, "Let's milk the cow and skim the top enough to share, but leaving enough for the Capitalist to prosper, thus encouraging capital formation and investment." I am a liberal.
See, I think your little simile isn't very well-constructed, mostly because it misrepresents almost everyone in it.
The capitalist would actually say something along the lines of "This is my cow. I am the only one who has any right to its body, its labour or the milk it produces, but I will sell you a limited-time license to look at it standing on the field for a buck. You want a liter of milk? Well, that'll be a tenner."
The communist would (after shooting the capitalist) say "Right then, this is our cow now. Everyone can look at it for free, but we'll have to work out how to divide up the milk amongst us and set up some sort of feeding schedule; so if everyone who needs milk could form an orderly queue over there and everyone who has hay could form up over there, that'll be great".
I, as a social democrat, would say to the Capitalist "Okay, nice offer, but we both know that your prices are ridiculous. So why don't we agree to something where anyone can still afford the milk but you can still make a bit of profit and we do not shoot you."
And as I read your post so are you. We both want enough wealth held back to care for the folks who for whatever reason can't compete, knocking the rougher edges off of Capitalism's heedless ways.
The part where we seemingly differ is that I believe that this is something that, ultimately, needs to be backed by a threat of force. We can't rely on capitalists being reasonable or non-greedy, so we need to make the cost of greed high enough that people who can make rational decisions are discouraged from engaging in it too much.
Perhaps socialism is a term that is ok in Europe. But on this side of the pond it is a poison pill, most wisely avoided,
The stigma that word has in american political discussions is something I consider silly and will poke at whenever I can. After all, it has such a nice triggering effect on people, you can get people like TFLY and Imaginos to make such magnificent fools of themselves, it's quite a sight to see.
