On Mar 31, 7:24=A0am, Jerry Kraus <jkraus_1...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 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. =A0 If they were meaningful terms, we wouldn't
> talk about "Capitalism", but "Privatism". =A0We don't. =A0Because we
don't=
> know what it means. =A0Capitalism is based on the pursuit of Capital, as
> an end in itself, as Adam Smith observed repeatedly in the Wealth of
> Nations. =A0Capitalism is a Greed based economic system.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations
Did you even scan the article for the word "greed". Here are the
references:
On another level, though, the "invisible hand" refers
to the ability of the market to correct for seemingly
disastrous situations with no intervention on the part
of government or other organizations (although Smith
did not, himself, use the term with this meaning in
mind). For example, Smith says, if a product shortage
were to occur, that product's price in the market would
rise, creating incentive for its production and a
reduction in its consumption, eventually curing the
shortage. The increased competition among manufacturers
and increased supply would also lower the price of the
product to its production cost plus a small profit, the
"natural price." Smith believed that while human motives
are often selfish and greedy, the competition in the
free market would tend to benefit society as a whole
anyway. This was later adopted as a universal principle
by the laissez-faire economists of the 19th century.
Laissez-Faire economists are wrong headed but Smith wasn't
a Laissez-Faire economist as can be seen from this second
reference:
Smith often harshly criticised those who act purely
out of self-interest and greed, and warns that, "[a]ll
for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in
every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of
the masters of mankind." (Book 3, Chapter 4)
This statement "of the masters of mankind" shows the need
for deomcratically control regulation of the masters.
> There is deliberate obscurantism in both the definitions of Capitalism
> and Communism used by modern economists.
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