On Mar 30, 5:03=A0pm, Les Cargill <lcarg...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Jerry Kraus wrote:
> > On Mar 29, 11:47 pm, Les Cargill <lcarg...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> <snip>
>
> > Capitalist propagandists are consistently reduced to defining all
> > other systems out of existence.
>
> Mmmm. Not so much. See below.
>
> > You, my friend, are no exception.
>
> Capitalism is the heuristic that private control of production will
> cause more production than other systems. It understands that
> any other arrangement acts as a subsidy and is less
> economically efficient ( cost of transfer of goods and services
> are higher. ) This being said, no pure Capitalist systems exist.
>
> Food production in the US is highly subsidized, in order to
> remove the sensitivity to hoarding from something
> so im****tant as bulk food. This is, SFAIK, empirically
> defensible - people enjoy a state of affairs where, year by year,
> less labor goes into obtaining food. Short term fluctuations may see
> increases in price, but the long term trend is downward. Pure
> market capitalism might cause negative externalities in excess of the
> cost of subsidies.
>
> The larger question of people not having to think about the food
> supply outweighs any pure-Capitalist efficiency. And as oil prices
> ****ft, it may well be that this won't work anymore.
>
> I'm not a Capitalist so much as I am an Empiricist. Whatever
> works, works. Capitalism tends to be the choice of Empiricists,
> but the counterexamples are fun, too.
>
> --
> Les Cargill
The problem with the definition "Capitalism is the system in which the
means of production are privately owned" is that both the terms "means
of production" and "privately owned" are extremely difficult, if not
impossible, to define. If they were meaningful terms, we wouldn't
talk about "Capitalism", but "Privatism". We don't. Because we don't
know what it means. Capitalism is based on the pursuit of Capital, as
an end in itself, as Adam Smith observed repeatedly in the Wealth of
Nations. Capitalism is a Greed based economic system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations
There is deliberate obscurantism in both the definitions of Capitalism
and Communism used by modern economists.
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