Question for strident capitalists...

Yes, I do. And I challenge you to produce a source that says that GM directly destroyed half a dozen cities.

 

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So we'll take is as granted that the lead poisoning, oil war influences, and gutting of public transportation across the US, are known or obvious even to you.

You want a source that say what - exactly what I said, or just evidence amounting to the same thing? Since I write my own posts and come to my own conclusions, I"m going to assume reasonableness on your part and list sources that merely support - rather than parroting - the claim.

And the three sources I did list - Michael Moore, John DeLorean, and Ben Hamper - you of course recognized as sources, but felt were not adequate for some reason. OK.

For starters,here's a Wiki list of some of the Michigan municipalities in which GM closed major plants of its own (not suppliers):
flint / livonia/ grand rapids/ detroit/ lansing /delta township/ pontiac/ saginaw

That's 8. Detroit is famous, Flint is documented by Moore, so four to go

continued as time permits.

 

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Yes. And farmers poison the waters near their farms, often unintentionally. And truck drivers bring pollution into cities with their trucks. And air travelers bring pollution to every city in the US. And various civil rights groups have advocated for war when they feel it will stop injustices. None of these things directly destroy any cities. Nor did GM.

So again - provide a source that shows how GM directly destroyed half a dozen cities.

So your claim is that closing a factory equates to "direct destruction of a city?"

If you drop a big enough bomb on a city you directly destroy it. We've done that. If you start a coal fire under it, then mandate the evacuation and razing of a town, you directly destroy it. We've done that, too. If you have evidence that GM has done something like that, as you claim, then by all means present it.

Closing a Wal-Mart, or a factory, or a car dealership is not "direct destruction of a city." Polluting water or air is not "direct destruction of a city." Putting in light rail and putting buses out of business is not "direct destruction of a city." Tearing out light rail and adding buses is not "direct destruction of a city."

Here's what I think. You hate GM. And so you intentionally use hyperbole and say absurd things like "GM directly destroys cities" when what you mean is "GM makes decisions that negatively affect communities." But you feel that that's not emotional enough, so rather than coming up with rational arguments, you try to use angry language, hoping that people will react with their emotions - and hate them along with you - rather than think the issues through.

 

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Unintentionally? So?

All those factors are orders of magnitude smaller than GM - which was exactly the point at issue, btw, making the obliviousness a bit weird: there are penalties for overgrowth. When you point out that communal organization has an upper limit for its lowest base, that's true - but a corresponding warning about the base level of capitalist organization is also true. The problems of coordination among groups of people are not restricted to communal groups. The authoritarian threat and general inefficiency and ultimate failure from bloated growth is also a feature of capitalism.

And capital compounds. It's nature is to exponentially grow. Keeping it from going tyrannosaur on its society is a serious job.

That's unlikely to persuade the better informed.

What I meant was that when something gets to be the size of GM compared with its society, the negative effects of its decisions are very severe, very large, very costly, and in fact so big they cancel whatever benefits the increase in size might have brought. Flint, Detroit, Saginaw, Pontiac - they're hammered down for generations. Michigan itself. If "destroyed" is hyperbole, ok - but "negative effects" is what happens when the church secretary embezzles the Easter collection plate.

You sound very sure of that, while continuing to mix together widely disparate scales of operation when scale is the issue at hand. I wonder if you have actually thought it through, with information. Have you ever, for example, watched the whole cycle of a Walmart moving in, shutting down Main Street (ok, the local strip mall) - and then shutting down itself? The town does not just pop back up into being, with the big empty box on the outskirts and half the local equity siphoned off to China and Arkansas. It's gone.

So Flint and Detroit, here's Saginaw and Pontiac:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac,_Michigan Note the population drop in 1980.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2001/01/pont-j30.html
http://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1666&context=up_bookchapters

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saginaw,_Michigan

But things are not looking up that much - I went through the whole list of 8 major plant closing sites in Michigan, and those are the only two more I could add in front of this audience (Lansing and Delta Township are kind of one place, and GM wrecked the private side, but the taxpayer mattress cushioned the drop and the bruises are not nearly as visible). So from a "half dozen" we're down to a demonstrable 4. Woe is me.

 

Everything you've typed here is beside the point.

As has been demonstrated, a capitalistic monetary system is being favored by the state which helps to forcibly impose its land management system across the vast majority of the planet and its people. This must be addressed and you haven't done so.

Secondly, once this has been properly addressed by a moneyless land management system, that doesn't mean any capitalist won't be free to engage in capitalistic exchanges with others within the confines and with the allotted free land they have been granted. So you will be able to survive. You will still be able to negotiate with others who prefer a capitalist form of exchange. For instance, you will be able to create products with others and sell them to still others who want to participate in a monetary consumerist relationship. And you will be able to pool the acreage of your allotted free land together (about 5 acres) with the allotted free land of other capitalists to create your business manufacturing enterprises for as long as you are all in possession of your allotted land and do not officially abandon it on record for land elsewhere. You just won't be able to force your monetary relationship upon others by trying to sell your land when you have finished with it and want to move elsewhere. You will have to freely abandon your land when you are ready to move elsewhere and that means earlier making allowances for moving your enterprise elsewhere. But as you are a capitalist, I would expect you to have the resources to move your enterprise if and when you are ready to do so. If you wish to have multiple businesses in multiple locations, you will have to negotiate with others sympathetic to capitalism and a monetary system for the use of their land in partnership or through some other exchange or deal between you and them.

But notice, the system I'm proposing (which I have modified greatly since the start of this thread to accommodate my Capitalist friends here) preserves much of your ability to be a capitalist and use money in your exchanges while ensuring everyone is granted a portion of free land to practice whatever kind of economy they want with others who share their socio-economic resource philosophy.

The various merits of either system which you, Billy T, billvon and even iceaura, who, like myself, opposes your arguments, have been using to attack each system are entirely beside the point. It doesn't matter whether one or the other economy will work or not according to our preferences. One, indeed, might be more conducive to quick growth than the other while producing a tremendous amount of waste and unnecessary excess and resource imbalance. While the other might be a slower paced, more technologically reserved system which preserves the environment and efficiently manages resources without waste or imbalanced distribution. None of the logistical specifics of each system really matters.

The real point is that everyone have an equal ability and chance to practice the resource management philosophy that they prefer. Now that may entail each side making some allowances for and to the other. Capitalism might not be able to claim the whole planet and its resources in its name, for instance. The Earth, after all, did not come with the giant word "Capitalism" or "Socialism" stamped across its surface. The Earth and its resources should always sit in neutral economic limbo and an economic system only applied to any part of it when, and for the duration, that someone is occupying that part. And once that person or group is finished with that part of the Earth it should return to its neutral economic state, allowing for multiple socio-economic philosophies to exist upon it in different places at different times with no one fully able to claim or dominate the Earth, its resources or its people in its name.

 

Capitalism is just an efficient way to manage resources. It is an extension of natural selection. In capitalism, supply, demand and competition, are applied to resources. The competition requires you cuts costs, with the supply and demand setting the price, allowing one to get the most out of the resources. As resources get scarce and/or costs go too high, demand falls; resource leak is sealed. Nature works this way.

With socialism a small group of people, at the top, try to figure out natural selection of everything, for everyone, with these leaders often better at rhetoric, than predicting the future. For example, say the socialist leadership bets on watermelons, this then will dominate farm land usage; big brother knows best. There is no checks and balance at any level of the supply chain from farming, distribution, to retail, so there waste and the system is not self sealing. If this is a ten year plan and people are sick of watermelon in two years, resources go to waste for eight more years.

The real concern so-called socialist have, is not with the efficiency of capitalism, per se. Rather it is with one aspect of capitalism; supply side capitalism. Supply side capitalism is where business or the supply side induces demand. This is similar to socialism, in that the suppliers tell/induce the people what to buy. Both work top to bottom. For example, if all the auto makers decided to manufacture large SUVs, this is like socialism. The difference is, in socialism one is forced to buy, while with supply side capitalism, they will court you; buy you drinks first, then get you to buy. Supply side is not always concerned with the best resource usage, since these large SUV's will need more materials and burn more gas.

There is another side to capitalism, that is not as well understood, and therefore not as widely practiced. This is demand side capitalism. This is where the buyer demands products, and the supply side delivers. This is different from both socialism and supply side capitalism, because it works from bottom up, and not top down. This is actually the vision "socialist" see, where all people get what they need. The "socialists" get deluded by socialist leadership promises, which, in practice, becomes an inefficient top down pseudo-capitalism.

Demand side capitalism is very intriguing, because it gives power to the people; trickle up capitalism. As one example, picture if a million people formed a buying group. As a buying group, they can pool all their buying power, to get wholesale prices for a range of useful products they all need and use; milk and bread.

The free market will see this block demand and there will be those who can cut costs and meet this demand. This is how you harness the efficiency of capitalism, without needing government to add waste via imposed top down red tape. All that red tape is manufactured in plants that pollute the planet. Demand side capitalism does not need government the same way, since the bottom up approach can demand their supplier recycle all their cardboard. To get your business, they will innovate.

Currently we have supply side capitalism with a top down government overlap, blaming each other with the pot calling the kettle black. We don't need either, if we do bottom to top capitalism. This would also work with government if the people demanded they get the job done right, at an efficient cost.

 

They sure will. For example in China, where government has much less regulation of a much freer market place, some milk suppliers innovated by adding a mildly toxic chemical to their watered down milk. It killed about a dozen babies, then the Chinese version of regulation ("post regulation" not US's "pre-regulation") kicked in and in less than a year the 8 top leaders of that milk company were executed. You seem to think this type of more profit making "innovation" will never occur, so we don't need either form (Pre or Post) of government regulation.

With pre-regulation, there is much greater cost to opening a new business - all sorts of approvals needed at up to three different levels of government. In China if you think your grand mother's noodle soup is great - will be popular, you just open your soup restaurant. If reason her soup tasted so good, was it small arsenic content and some of your most regular customers start getting ill, the public health service will eventually discover why. Then as you did not kill any one, you get to go to jail for a decade or so, and of course you assets are sold, to pay for your food / medical care while in jail. - That is the way "Post regulation" works.

I certainly would not want to live as you suggest - no government regulation of either type.

Also "buyer groups" form to get lower prices - they don't want higher prices that extra care of the environment adds, like supplier must used only recycled materials. If that is important to individual buyers, they can willing pay higher prices, and some do, for various reasons already. For example refuse to buy GM food.

 

Now that's much better. It is both accurate and lacking in dishonest hyperbole.

Uh - no. I've seen that happen in several towns, and the town is not "gone" afterwards. It is different than before, of course. Hearne, Texas is an example here; Google it. A tiny town of 4500 people saw a Wal-Mart close in 1990. There were predictions that the town would disappear, with jobs and shopping gone and a loss of a huge taxpayer. It, of course, did not disappear - and 25 years later is still there, just slightly smaller than it used to be.

Change is part of life.

 

The change in Hearne was to lose (apparently permanently) 12% of its population and most of its businesses, see its median household income drop under 20k per year, have close to half its children being raised below the official "poverty line", and end up with a downtown that looks like this after 25 years of "recovery": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearne,_Texas#/media/File:Hearne_TX_-_downtown_with_water_tower.jpg

Towns flattened by tornados do better than that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesston,_Kansas

And among the facilitators of Hearne's - what - how about "degradation"? - in addition to Walmart, was our old buddy General Motors, with their substantial and effective contribution to the long term and largely successful efforts to gut the US passenger rail system. The change in the US was to lose its passenger rail system, and become completely dependent on the private car and the internal combustion engine as manufactured by General Motors.

Occasional destruction is part of life. Pontiac, Michigan will still "be there", in a sense, 25 years from now, as well. But the tendency of sufficiently bloated capitalist corporations to visit that kind of harm on entire societies is a good reason to curb their growth - take a lesson from the Hutterites, or the WL Gore Corporation and its many imitators.

 

I think this video presents the conflict between one view of land management encroaching upon another:



It seems to me a proper land management philosophy would not impose the restrictions of one philosophy over another. And this is why I think the land should always be recirculated back into its neutral state of non-economic preference once when we are done using it.

 

Yes. Nothing like "destroyed."

Businesses open all the time. Often they help communities by bringing jobs, tax income and services.
Businesses close all the time. Often that damages communities since they lose jobs, tax income and services.

It would be foolish to conclude "therefore companies should never open in new places." (Also foolish to conclude that "therefore companies should never close their doors.")

So protect Hearne by never letting new stores open there?

 

There needs to be regulation, but it needs to be rational and not based on politics and/or corny capitalism. For example, second hand smoke, after many years of studies, was found not to be as harmful as originally assumed. There is no difference between that and breathing city air. Yet, this is still regulated in open areas like parks like the original misrepresentation. Many regulations are subjective and are there to appease the needs of the neurotic and busy bodies. There are objective regulations but not all regulation is grounded in science.

Too many regulations is a hidden form of crony capitalism, that benefits larger companies, who have either the scale needed to afford the specialists, who can deal with the regulations, or they can afford to lobby for exemptions via campaign contribution. The smaller business may not be able to afford a full time lawyer or buy a vote. Even during the Kennedy years, he set up regulations as a way to black mail certain businesses. President Obama has always hated big oil, so regulation is set up, for reasons connected to crony capitalism. Objective regulation is good for optimization, while subjective regulation is wasteful.

The difference with China and America, is America was founded on Judeo-Christian ethics. This resulted in more self policing; do no harm that one is aware of. With the rise of atheism, relative morality and lack of character, now there is more need to protect people from each other.

 

One subjective regulation that moved the market away from free market optimization, was the quota system. The free market is based on the natural selection model. The quota system is based on artificial selection. You can't go into the woods and say we need to have X chip monks, Y, squirrels, Z birds, A bugs, etc., This is not how nature works. If left alone these numbers would shift to a natural balance. To maintain this unnatural and subjective balance, you will need to make a lot of new accommodations which wastes resources, not required by nature. There are a lot of government regulation connected to the accommodation needed to maintain artificial selection. All arguments for artificial selection is based on emotion and sentiment, but not on free market and natural selection.

Because of the added cost and waste, needed to accommodate artificial selection, businesses needed to look for new ways to trim cost, with government not allowing its layer of waste to be trimmed. The quality of the product may have to suffer since this is one of the only places one can trim. Lifetime jobs, which used to be common in most business. This has become part of the trim needed to pay for the accommodations of artificial selection. GM, before the accommodation fat was added, was a healthy and generous employer, with lifetime jobs and good retirement. This is now trimmed tight because artificial waste is not on the cutting board via the free market.

Say you have a restaurant, composed of a small work force, that has good quality food. The mafia comes in and says you have to hire two of its goons. You don't need these goons. You also know they will change the dynamics of the workplace since they will not want or have to work. However, you have no choice but to hire, pay and accommodate them.

Now your margin is tight, so have to find other ways to cut costs, so you can earn a living and meet payroll. You can;t trim the goon fat. The food products might suffer since now you may have to bleach the older meat you used to throw away. The free market does not have to have any mafia goons on the payroll, who need special diets and who require ll type of behavior changes in your staff to accommodate them. Government created this monster and now it says it is the expert who needs to come in and fix the problem, that it created, with more regulatory fat you can't trim. Now you need to buy meat from Shady Lou. Your competitors overseas have a more free market situation and gain your business.

 

Interesting video. Yes, living off the land, what it naturally provides, (no agriculture) is possible but as you note there is conflict with those who want a more material life style which is only possible with agriculture*, and now most want much more than that: Educated doctors, telecommunications, cheap food, (i.e. small fraction of your awake hours used to get it, not all of your day - nothing to do with money), cameras & computers, not to mention things like toilets and warm water showers inside a house. etc.

To return to the style life of the Hadza (shown in the video), 99% of people now living need to die. That "hunter /gather" life style requires a very low population density. Less than one person per dozen acres, I would guess.

The American Indians had a similar view about land owner ship. - Not possible. They thought they pulled a fast one on some Dutch white men - Got a basket full of beads, etc. for "selling Manhattan" land that neither they nor anyone could own. But it turn out to be possible to own land, if your weapons were superior to others trying to claim it as their own. - A principle still true today.

Are you volunteering to be in the 99% that must cease to exist?

* BTW, the mid west of US is so productive that except for few crops that will not grow there like coffee & cocoa beans, it is exported and sold in African markets (or just given in aid programs) with the result that local people buy it in the market place as it is cheaper than the local production can match. African agriculture is by and large, subsistence farming to feed you own family. This system, keeps Africans poor. If all imports of food were phased out over a decade, Africans would begin to prosper more. Effectively many are slaves, who for example work deep in the hot earth digging out gold, etc. Their pay, is just enough for them to buy the cheaper food from the US mid west (or Brazil).

 

double post

 

he he. I did not post that video to introduce a qualitative comparison of differing resource management approaches. I posted it to show how one, Capitalism is not as free or as non-violent as it claims to be. It has and will continue to try to impose itself upon other resource management ideas to the exclusion of all other approaches it does not approve of.

You have already so much admitted that with this:

They thought they pulled a fast one? Where did you get that? My understanding is that, because the Native Americas who "sold" Manhattan to the Dutch had no previous experience with buying and selling land, they thought they were just selling the Dutch the right to share the use of the land with them and were surprised to discover they were now required to cease using the island themselves.

Also, again notice, money in exchange for land is only used as screen to hide the violence that sits right behind the exchange. But it achieves the same relationship result we would see if a silverback male gorilla had chased off his inferior competition from an attractive banana grove: "I get to use the land and you don't", instead of the move evolved approach that would ask: "How can we manage this land and these resources in a way that recognizes both our dependence upon it?" The difference between the silverback and the capitalist is that the silverback pays with possibly some of his blood and the capitalist pays with money, the modern stand-in for blood.

Tell me, what do you think is the approach of a more intelligent and evolved species?:

1.) To wrestle resources and the environment from all other species in competition with us and deny those species what they require for their existence?

or

2.) To recognize our interdependence upon the environment and other species and act to recognize and promote the continued existence of those interdependent species?

Every conservationist knows that it's the second choice. If the environment and other species we are dependent on are going to continue to be around and usable, we must overcome our proclivity to compete fully with those other species. When we wanted to conserve lions as a species, our old competitive paradigm had to be dropped. Otherwise, lions would be long gone by now.

And so if we know enough to recognize and actively promote the environmental needs of other species in order to preserve them, why do we employ force to deny intelligent members of our own species access to resources they need to preserve themselves?

 

If you say so. How about "blighted"? More long term damage than a direct hit from an F5 tornado?

I'm sorry, despite repeating myself several times I seem to have failed to make myself clear: The scale is the issue. The scale. The size.

Not whether businesses open and close, not whether their are harms attendant on that. The matter being considered in my posts is the fact that capitalism also afflicts its society with the problems of scale that communism inflicts - that when you point out that expanding a given commune past a certain size will cause dysfunction and failure, the same point holds for capitalist organizations. When they get too big, they malfunction and do serious harm to the society they inhabit.

 

Intelligence (some what biasedly defined by you as taking care of other species and the environment instead of, to flip the bias, as taking care of "number 1" / behaving to fulfill his wishes and desires) is rarely exhibited the way you wish it were, but more in the "silver back" mode. I. e. Humans tend to make sure many of the species they eat with ease, like cows, sheep, chickens, and pigs, mainly have large populations.

There is also some Darwinian element to this when the resource is limited.

 

And we do that by recognizing those species have to have access to resources pretty much on their own terms. Even with animals that do not directly add to the resources we consume, we are intelligent enough to realize that their access to resources too must be preserved. We don't require them to engage in capitalism in order to recognize their need of the Earth's resources. We understand that the Earth is politically and economically neutral. It doesn't apply a political or economic philosophy to itself.

Furthermore, if monetary exchange were natural all or most species would already have been engaging in it instead of force, long before humans showed up on the scene.
In fact, when the natural world does exhibit displays of different species living in non-aggressive equilibrium, it tends to look more like my conception of a proper economy. There's no monetary exchange and when land and resources are not being used, they fall back into natural circulation for use and consumption by others should there be a need of it.

 

I don't have to, because my claim is that land property is likely to appear and preferable even without the state.

Means, I'm not the owner.

Some negative consequences: In such a system it makes sense to get land for a short time, exploit it maximally, and then leave it as wasteland. This would be stupid for an owner - he would be unable to sell the wasteland for something comparable to the price for buying it, thus, he would have a large loss. But once one gets the land for free, and cannot sell it anyway, this becomes a much more rational way to use the land.

Own land as a community, and you are free to do inside the community whatever you want. If your resource management system is better, more people will want to participate, each can buy a little piece of land and add it to your community, so your land ownership will also grow, moreover you become richer as a community and, thus, can buy more land.

So, capitalism makes you a simple offer to replace it by something better. Feel free to use it. Instead, socialism has usually explicitly forbidden to create capitalist communities on its territory.