Awesome presentation on capitalism and socialism

[surviva316]

I've gone a long time without responding to this post, even though the very first part of it did incite an immediate reaction from me. There is one particular part that made me loathe to get into it for a long time.

Your bit on coercion is based on a linguistic technicality.

No, it's not linguistic technicality at all. I never said dick about coercing non-coercion. Jails exist in capitalist societies, and they're filled to the brim with people who didn't regard property exactly as the society demands it be regarded.

The popular (somewhat antiquated) example is eating a loaf of bread when you don't have the means to by a loaf of bread, then you'll go to jail. More relevant here, though, is that if I don't follow one of the dozens of Terms in my mortgage contract, and I continue to sleep in my bedroom, then I can expect to be cuffed and hauled away. If I type the word Kellogg's on a piece of paper without accompanying it with a “T” with a circle around it, and then trade that piece of paper for a doughnut, then I will be at the mercy of our court system. If someone is accused of a felony, and they don't have the means to pay bail, then they're going to be forced to live in a cement box for a while. Anyone who comes to a rolling stop at a stop sign and doesn't have the means to pay a ticket and the proceeding probationary fees will be sent to jail.

I'm not saying that any of these laws are bad, and I'm certainly not saying that I prefer socialism to it (I'm not a socialist, btw, so I'm not at all making perfect the enemy of good), but to say that coercion doesn't exist in capitalism is madness. These uncited “pragmatic” definitions you have for “coercion” are almost certainly begging the question. In order to apply your self-defense analogy to property, you have to assume that someone is "defending" their "right" to a "property" they already "owned," which is assuming the very thing you're out to prove.

So it's you who's performing a semantical two-step by finding a way that the term applies to socialism and only socialism; not me. A socialist could play this very same game: “Everyone has the right to a certain baseline of means, so distributing from surplus to dearth is only coercion insofar as it's coercing the exercise of a right we all have.” But it's just that: a word game. The fairest interpretation of this speaker's point on “coercion” in economies (I think restriction would be more accurate, by the way, as the coercion is second order) is to say that they both are extremely coercive (or, rather, are both extremely restrictive, and are coercive in getting you to follow those restrictions).

SURVIVA: I think everyone who lives in a capitalist society will easily relate to the idea that there are the things you do to make money so that you can eat and live in a safe neighborhood, and then there is everything else you do with your life. The things people do at work is just about always of SOME value (and sometimes even very important), but the vast majority of the things that the vast majority of people can do with their lives that is of any value is done, literally, pro-bono, and thus doing things for the greater good is more-often-than-not discouraged by capitalism. Time is money and so people are very-close-to-directly-punished by wasting time stopping to help someone change a tire, spending time with their children, cooking homemade dinners, expressing non-sponsor friendly opinions on, creating things of niche interest, etc.


WUFWUGY: I disagree in some ways, but it's not really a relevant issue with respects to the capitalism/socialism thing. If socialism was a useful paradigm, what you wrote would still be something you could say.

The passage you quoted and dismissed was wholly relevant to my point. I'm not entirely sure if socialism fulfills those examples I gave any more or less than capitalism does, but leaving it at that is making imperfection the enemy of evil. The point here is that capitalism doesn't do what he says it does. The man in the video spends a lot of time on this unfounded arrogance of capitalism that it rewards things that are good for society and punishes things that aren't (and this is a prevailing faith in society), and that is complete bullshit, so I found it worthwhile to debunk it.


I live in America, and I receive a check from neither corporation nor country when I make someone laugh, teach someone an important fact about the world, help an elderly neighbor with lawn work, work on my novel, etc. To be sure, it'd be a cool world to live in where this were the case, and everyone would just go around acting on the greatest good for the greatest number all day and call it a job and a lifestyle wrapped in one, but this doesn't exist. All of these things actions, in fact, keep me from doing activities that helps make my company's name show up before its competitors on web searches, which is about the only way I'm rewarded by capitalism.

I, of course, have no idea how much socialism does or doesn't reward me for everything everyone does that is of good or use to society, but capitalism decidedly doesn't do it. Stop saying it. It's not true. It's not an exaggeration of any smaller truth. It is simple bullshit.


So if you disagree with what I wrote, by all means, spend time arguing it because it is relevant to this discussion.


But I'm skipping around a bit. I can go back to the middle part of your post, but my own is probably better off without it, and this is really what's kept me from "getting into it" for so long:

The only (not one of the only, but exactly only) thing in agricultural civilization that has increased living standards is innovation driven by markets and property. List something from your life, virtually anything, and you'll find that you have it because it and its antecedents have been monetized.

There seems to be an insistence on centering this conversation around property and only property. My fiance, my favorite jokes I ever heard and not having polio don't have all that much to do with anything monetized. I realize you said think of anything I “have”, but this only contributes to my point that you seem to have some sort of tunnel vision when talking about economics to only talk about our ability to gain relics of exclusive ownership, and in so doing, it's not all that profound that you keep finding capitalism as a great way to live up to that measure.


But that's an aside as much as anything. The more fundamental problem is that—even if I allow this conversation to be balanced on the stasis of value based on things that I own—I'm still skeptical of your point that everything that's good about my life is a credit to free market. But if I go any further, I'm 90%+ sure the response will be that it would take years of studying economics to get to your level of understanding at which point it would be plainly obvious that what you're saying here is correct, which makes this particular part of the conversation doomed to stall. I realize this is the very opposite of being as generous to the other side as possible, but whatever, that's the truth behind why I loathed to come up with a response to this part of the post for so long, so if that makes me a bad person, best to admit it.


EDIT: Wow, it seems to have handled my copy+paste from Word quite well. HURRAY!!!!