The Occupation of Wall Street Spreads

[Lord Zentei]

Re-read the above. I'm not sure how one can read "investment in that sector" as "the investment sector". Besides, if you're saying that this mechanism "measures the relative benefit" in a rational fashion, you simply cannot explain market bubbles that are as large as the economy of certain nations. The recent 2008 crisis which destroyed Lehman Brothers that was supposedly worth a multibillion sum is a prime example. Either you admit that irrationality in the system can reach levels that imply enormous amount of value is determined irrationally, or you are faced with a supposedly rational system in theory which generates irrational outcomes in practice.

I mangled that post, obviously. But the point remains: what do you mean by saying that investment in that sector is counter-beneficial? Not according to the people who spend their money on bottled water, apparently. Does your opinion outweigh theirs? And I'm not sure how often it needs be said, but I'll try one more time: the current system in America is one of corporatism. I do not advocate corporatism. Using corporatism as an example of why free market capitalism is bad is nonsense.

Oh, for fuck's sake. A agrarian society does NOT have zero GDP, nether is anyone claiming that they have zero life standard.

A subsistence society (subsistence != agrarian, although all subsistence societies are agrarian) would have a GDP of zero, because none of the product is commodified. The GDP of that society would be only estimated, not calculated, in a backwards fashion, by trying to determine how much they produce in natural amount of grain, rice, etc. and then apply certain prices to their produce. If you ever read any World Bank papers on estimating the GDP of African nations, e.g. Kenya, where subsistence farming consistutes a large share of activity, you would note that they specifically say non-market activities cannot be measured as part of GDP, and their value is estimated via various approximations. In a direct calculation, any non-market activity is excluded from the GDP explicitly. That's fucking economics 101.

Yes, I know. But backwards-calculated GDP isn't impossible. Besides which, what is your point? That GDP isn't useful as a measure of the total value in an economy because subsistence activities aren't included in the standard formulation?

Is this meant to refute the point? If you don't have an alternative, there is nothing to discuss. End of story. Claiming that the other side has "rigid thinking" and "requires a market to exist" is a bullshit dodge.

I already said that alternatives actually exist. Command economies, imperfect as they are, actually work. Claiming that they're "non-functional" while at the same time spending every bit of effort to make sure they never arise in practice and even if they do, they should be destroyed, is a very nice position. And yes, "rigid system of thinking" is one that excludes alternatives even before considering them. That is not a dodge. Unless people think and develop alternatives in theory, they will never exist in practice. That is obvious as day.

Yeah, they actually work... very poorly.

So? How does this refute the point I made? I said: "You may then assume in addition to this, that people are entitled to such and such additional benefits, but these must be gauged against the property of the people who are being taxed to pay for said benefits, otherwise, there's no way of adequately determining whether you are indeed improving things." Saying that a starving person is worse off than a taxed person does nothing to refute that.

"There's no way to determine" if I'm improving things by taxing one person to make sure another person is not malnourished? You must have been aiming for a Misantropy Ph.D. when you wrote that, right? Once again: anything that results in decreasing extreme, biological suffering is a net gain. A system with zero malnourishment and a heavily taxed rich clas is preferrable to one where the rich aren't taxed, but malnourishment is rampant. In fact, a poor, but non-malnourished command economy is preferrable to a market economy where malnourishment remains. End of story. Anything which removes extremities of suffering (preferrably forever) is good.

What I'm doing is requiring you to present some kind of methodology to determine which objectives have priority, not to state the obvious. And you can lose the accusations of misanthropy - I believe that I have said on multiple occasions that I'm pro-welfare. What I don't see is how this has anything to do with rejecting the market system outright, nor how your vague allusions to more humanitarian allocation can allow the formulation of a viable format for a command economy, much less how it's less bad than a market economy. Moreover, the crux of our discussion was whether rights-based systems somehow "throw out morality", which I hold to be an asinine claim on its face. By what standard do you assert that moral objectives have not been achieved unless you assert that people have a moral right to such-and-such before you make the moral evaluation? Why do you think that I keep saying that GDP is an important measure, but if you want to add additional criteria... etc? You need to formulate your moral system in terms of imperatives if it is to be binding on society, and this requires that the recipients of social deference be defined to have such-and-such rights.

In other words, basic survival. Here's wondering what mechanisms are most effective at realizing that potential in a society.... presumably ones that maximize production. Rejecting markets outright is not going to help.

So why is Cuba the only nation with zero child malnourishment in Latin America, despite being hellishly poor?
<snip>
I'll choose that over sweatshops that make "necessary goods" and "maximize production" for the White Mister while people remain malnourished, thank you.

What I mean to say is: with adequate distribution mechanisms, malnourishment can be eliminated even in a very poor nation. Therefore, the idea that you need to tolerate malnourishment is absolutely preposterous. If a small and poor nation in a complete economic embargo can eliminate malnourishment, then sure as hell nations that are under no embargo have no excuse. But they still have malnourished children.

"White Mister". Wow.

Notwithstanding the exodus of people from Cuba gives reason to doubt its prosperity. Incidentally, Chile also has very low rates of malnutrition. AFAIK, much of the malnutrition in Latin America is in central America and the Caribbean

You said Somalia is crap because children are malnourished. Now that is an acceptable price for "maximization of production"? I see, I see.

WTF?

It utilizes self-interest to achieve the desired result of the system, instead of having to work against it at every turn. It's not so much an ethos as fuel. The notion that the market is an amoral construct is a questionable one too, as its objective is to optimize people's individual desires. And if you mean to judge a system to the point of wanting to throw it out, then OBVIOUSLY it's relevant to point out the lack of adequate alternatives. Also, you didn't answer the question - what concession are you referring to.

So do people outside of Cuba desire to be malnourished? Or their desire not to be malnourished is simply of a lower priority than the desires of the rich, and since the market gives priority to effective demand, there will be a distribution that is unfavorable towards the lower classes?

Right, because everyone outside Cuba is malnourished, and that's the only problem society faces. Notwithstanding, the fact remains that self-interest is what fuels the market, and that it utilizes it, while not needing to fight against it at every turn.

As for the concession:

If you fire your workers according to rules of the contracts made with the workers and sell your factory that doesn't change the nature of the act. Property creates no obligations. ... Even if your act is clearly malevolent but you don't break any laws and infringe on property rights of others, from a pure "property rights" ground one may not and will not be able to criticize the act.

Of course. But why should anyone have the power to dictate how you shall use your property within what is allowed by law? The ability of others to dictate how you use your property can just as easily be abused as your non-use of your property. Moreover, contracts can be expanded if they are found wanting. As an aside though, your hypothetical capitalist doesn't exactly strike me as a typical profit maximizer.

So you admit that malevolent actions which do not directly break any laws and infringe on people's property rights cannot be criticized. That is all.

You completely missed the rest of that post, didn't you? Try looking at it in context, and you'll see that I'm not "conceding" as much as pointing out that it's kind of an incomplete observation.

Self-damaging behaviour? Sure it happens. All systems have it, but what's that supposed to prove? That capitalism is somehow inferior to alternatives? Or that it happens principally in capitalism and that this somehow invalidates it?

Once again - the capitalist did not damage his own life. In fact he may have improved it and his personal satisfaction is greater than it was. He did damage society, though, but from an egoistic point of view if he broke no contracts and did not infringe on property rights of others you cannot criticize him. He was acting with his own interest in mind and he valued his own preferences higher than those of the body corporate he had. That happens quite often. The recent saga of "golden parachute"-CEOs is just another sad chapter in the tale. And no, it does not happen principally in capitalism. However, in capitalism you have no grounds to criticize such behaviour if no contracts were broken and no property rights infringed. In essence, no matter how cruel and senseless the act, if the law is silent and nobody's property is damaged, there's no grounds to criticizes. A destructive price war to annihilate your competitor? So as long as you only use prices and your own size, there's no grounds to criticize. Destroy factory to buy a yacht and a villa? No grounds to criticize so as long as you paid out the wages to the last dime - irrelevant what happens to workers thereafter. Speculation? As long as you speculate within what is allowed by the law, no grounds to criticize, even if that speculation can be disruptive even to non-speculative economic activity.

If he damaged the lives of others without transgressing against their rights, then perhaps that's because their rights aren't adequately defined and enforced?

And why is it that you keep using corporatism as an example of why free-market capitalism is bad vis-a-vis the golden parachute CEOs? On some of the other points, you're quite right. Sometimes it is in actual point of fact beneficial overall to eliminate poor performers, and protecting them out of misguided morality hampers the progress of society overall.

The market doesn't "glorify" personal self interest in the way you're insinuating - it utilizes personal self interest AND transactions made with mutually voluntary and informed consent. That's a pretty huge difference there.

The market does not itself glorify self-interest and individualism. The market is the mode of operation; the corresponding ideology of laissez-faire and individualism glorifies the market and exists to justify the market. You have to be blind to ignore the fact that the market has an ideological apparatus to support itself and a horde of ideologues tirelessly extolling its basic principles, self-interest being one of them. The market lashes out agressively against its enemies. Market economies work wonders to annihilate non-market ones, they spend so much effort on destroying every vestige of non-market mechanisms, be it feudalist remnants in the colonies or former colonies, or former "real socialism" from the Warsaw Pact and its dying remnants. Capitalistic nations annihilated any competition by applying violence whenever they met any resistance. To say that capitalism lacks an ideology is to deny the reality. Capitalism has an ideology, it has a huge ideological apparatus dedicated to the support and preservation of both capitalism itself as a system and its ideology. Capitalism has everything from theory to practice to ideology that supports the practice. It is not some sort of apolitical machine; the market violently works to destroy any barriers that politicians may erect out of populism or ideological dedication to non-market systems. Capitalists will organize economic warfare and blockades against non-market economies, they will tirelessly work to destroy any non-market economies, they would attempt to grab anything that is operating in the state sector and force privatization. They will not do so in person, perhaps, but they will do it through myriads of think-tanks which are funded by their corporations, they will do so through their loyal media and the entire apparatus devoted to the propaganda of capitalist ideology with core principles: market, individualism, economic freedom. Capitalism is not neutral. As any system it fights for survival tooth and nail, and doomed is the foe of capitalism who comes lightly armed to the battle.

That's actually quite poetic. And I wonder what property rights were respected in the nations colonized by the European powers. In any case, when I speak of the market not "glorifying self interest", I'm obviously talking about the mechanisms and theory that describe it, not the political machines that seek to further their own ends in its name.

Of course there's a way to put the capitalist out of power. It's called "competition". WTF do you mean by "shitting on the workers is considered good", since when is that the case?

Since Union Carbide. *laughs* And "competition"? Please. Only inefficiency will be punished by competition. Not evil or utilitarian harm.

Who put Coca Cola out of power because of their shenanigans in India? Nobody. Are you seriously suggesting that a company is going to be outcompeted for evil acts? You're crazy. IBM's complicity in the Holocaust and BAYER's Nazi doctor chief, blood money in the closets of a whole plethora of uberpowerful corporations suggests that, in fact, evil pays. And indeed, why would competitors punish a company which commited an evil act and went unpunished by the consumer, if that means they can get away with the same? Absolutely zero incentive.

Again, corporatism, not capitalism. What mechanisms were in place in India to protect the property rights of people there against Coca Cola's shenanigans? Incidentally, ask Stalin how well he fared in eliminating the fact that evil pays in his command economy.

A bureaucrat does NOT answer to the people below him. He answers to the people above him. Neither are democratic mechanisms necessarily more effective, and it seems pretty slanted to judge system A because it doesn't use the methods of system B.

Non-elected bureaucrat does not answer to people below him. That means you have to create a system that wouldn't have too many levels of control. Non-elected bureaucrats should be replaced by elected ones wherever possible. And yes, of course dictatorial methods can be more effective - it mostly hinges on the exact persons in power. I'm not sure, though, how this refutes my point that capitalism by default rejects democratic control of the administration; politics at least envisions a possibility of such.

I added that "neither are democratic mechanisms necessarily more effective" and "it seems pretty slanted to judge a system A because it doesn't use the methods of system B". In this case, system A is the market, and system B is democracy. Why should the market be criticized for not using the methods of democracy, since democracy is ultimately just another mechanism? Moreover, the problem with too many levels of control is exactly the source of a major problem with command economies, i.e. the issues of scaling.

Making provisions for something which is detrimental to the existence of a non-market system can lead to destruction. I agree that this requires thinking on how to make such systems more resilient. I'm spending quite a bit of my time thinking about that thing exactly. *laughs*

Well, that's fair enough. Not that I am hopeful of a practical solution to the problem, but whatever.

I've already pointed out how corporate bodies are responsible for their own internal regulation. The person at the top of the corporation is essentially a hireling, and his employers are responsible for maintaining scrutiny. These employers are the owners of the capital.

The owner of the capital can be also the person at the top. The CEO may not always be a hireling, although sufficiently large and developed corporations tend to use hirelings. It is never a given, though. Jobs isn't a hireling.

Indeed he can. And in that case, since the company is the CEO's personal property, then how is his personal benefit in conflict with the benefit of said company's performance?

[Lord Zentei]

No. Just... no. Monetization is not prone to the same ad hoc and arbitrary judgements as non-monetized sectors, and it's frankly bizzare to say that they are. And what do you mean by saying that the investment sector is counter-beneficial? As if your opinion counted as fact.

The judgements aren't arbitrary in the sense that someone can pull them out of a hat and change them at will, but they're routinely made with no reference to second-order effects, externalities, or long term consequences.

As far as I can tell, Stas has a point about things like bottled water sales. Or the monetized value of luxury commodities- the fact that someone else's Mercedes costs five times more than my Ford does not automatically mean that they get five times as much benefit from owning a Mercedes as I do from owning a Ford. Not in any measurable sense except the recursive one of "A Mercedes costs five times more, therefore it is worth five times more." It certainly doesn't mean a Mercedes would be five times as valuable to me as my Ford is.

What do you base your assessment on? Why should there be a point about bottled water sales? I certainly see little benefit in pop musicians and professional athletes making large amounts of money, because I don't value their services. However, apparently other people do, and that's their call. My opinion does not trump theirs with respect to their spending.

But if the benefit to the customer of having a car which costs five times as much money to produce is not five times as large, how can we trust the relative monetized value of the cars?

If the auto industry shifted from producing X cars for everyone to producing X/2 cars that individually sell for twice as many dollars, is the industry's contribution to GDP the same? Or am I just confused here?

It is, assuming that they sell as many cars, which isn't guaranteed.

Beyond that, there's the point that GDP does not reflect people's desires; it reflects the things they pay money for. If there exists anything that your society does not model as a commodity that you get money for, then providing or not providing that commodity has (in theory) zero impact on GDP. Parents who stay home to raise children have zero impact on GDP, not because raising children is worthless, but because they don't get paid to do it. Does that mean society "does not desire" that parents raise children?

I'm just going to ask you a quick question here: are you actually planning on raising new points, or are you acting as Stas' second?

The people raising their children desire that they raise children. That's why they sacrificed their additional income in order to do so, as is their perogative. Measuring what society wants in that regard is rather more difficult, but you can assess it based on the price of childcare and similar services.

And there's the problem Stas points to of self-cancelling activities. Plainly, if you make a useful physical object and sell it to someone, that adds to the overall value of goods in the economy. The same goes for many services. But there are certain areas where the work of two people cancels each other out- we wind up spending vast sums to advertise Coke and Pepsi, and neither really gains any market share at the other's expense for it, and about all that really happens is that cola products start displacing tap water as "what people drink." Does the advertising budget for the ongoing Cola Wars contribute to GDP? If it does, is this increase in GDP profitable for the people who are getting all that advertising?

Naturally advertising costs are counted as a part of GDP. Naturally it's beneficial to them, since otherwise they lose marketshare.

Market economies walk a fine line between using self-interest as fuel and using it as an ethos. The US has long presented itself as one of the great champions of the market; now it finds itself besieged by corporatists who do seem to regard self-interest as an ethos, or at least as an absolute right that no other national interest or collective need of the public can override.

I'd say "self-interest" isn't a problem with markets, but it's a problem when the love of the market becomes a political philosophy. Because then you wind up with people who say, in all seriousness, that the right of financiers to indirectly destroy the livelihood of millions of people is something which should not be taken away from them, nor should society move to help those millions of people, since if they really valued their livelihood they'd be able to rebuild it.

Markets are quite all right if you don't make a fetish out of them. If you do, you can't do anything about them when they go off the rails.

In other words, markets are good, corporatism is bad, right? Moving on...

Someone claiming to speak for Dow Chemical said that Dow was going to reimburse the survivors of the Union Carbide disaster. Dow's stock plummeted, then rebounded when it became clear that the whole thing was a prank and that Dow had no intention of giving the survivors a dime if it could help it. That's what he was getting at.

When corporations' stock goes up if they screw over workers (layoffs, refusing to reimburse people injured by industrial accidents) and goes down if they don't, it's obvious that the incentive structure favors not punishing evils committed by a corporation. The corporation itself needs a huge outside impetus to make it accept punishment, and consumers alone can't really supply that without going outside the market system.

Sure, you can outcompete the company, but you can't feasibly do that just by being more moral than the company, because so many people make their price decisions divorced from morality.

That's where independent courts and adequately defined property rights come in. The shareholders are looking out for themselves, obviously. But shareholder actions alone are not the sum of a free market system.

Thought experiment: if I'm being paid a market value for my labor under which I struggle to make ends meet (i.e. food on the table and medicine for chronic conditions and shelter for myself are in my budget, but not much else), and if I do not have disposable income to spare trying to shop around for 'ethical' products, what does this imply about my buying decisions? Does it mean I'm indifferent to ethical concerns, or does it just mean that I can't influence ethical concerns with my purchasing decisions?

Both. More of the former, unless you're starving.

[Lord Zentei]

This is why. If the entire world would be running an non-market economy, its GDP would lower down to zero, as you wouldn't be able to (a) impute any values from costs, since costs could not be monetized (b) no market would exist anywhere and therefore you could not input a price from a market existing elsewhere.

This applies both to subsistence farming, i.e. primitive economies, and hyper-advanced economies that could operate on non-market mechanisms alone.

If the entire world would operate a system of collectivist production and rationing without any prices, markets, sales and the like - GDP would be absolutely impossible to compute. It would lose all meaning.

People would probably shift to some sort of energy accounting or direct by-unit natural resource accounting systems and Human Development indices for life standard, if such a system were created, instead of the GDP that now is used to approximate both economic activity and life standard.

And all of this bullshit does nothing to refute the contention the usefulness of monetizing goods and services that are outside the market, nor does it imply that such monetization is impossible. From your own source:

Nonmarket outputs that are included within the boundary are listed below. Since, by definition, they do not have a market price, the compilers of GDP must impute a value to them, usually either the cost of the goods and services used to produce them, or the value of a similar item that is sold on the market.

[Simon_Jester]

Zentei, I'll get back to you, and will try to keep my post more concise this time. Sorry.

I'm not sure the numbers support him, though.

What numbers, Simon? A direct calculation of the GDP relies only on commodities. If you knit a sweater and wear it, that won't be in the GDP. If you grow your own food entirely, that won't be in the GDP. If the entire nation trades nothing but only lives on subsistence farming, the GDP won't be just "nigh zero", it will be zero par se.

Stas:

I edited that post, not out of any desire to misrepresent what I had said, but because I had honestly changed my mind about what arguments I wished to advance, shortly after hitting "submit."

You are, so far as I know, correct that in an economy where all goods are made for one's own consumption will have zero GDP and nonzero standard of living. I do not dispute this... although in practice, even subsistence-farming economies don't work quite like that, since there are still specialists who sell the products of their labor for a share of the subsistence farmers' product.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm just going to ask you a quick question here: are you actually planning on raising new points, or are you acting as Stas' second?

Many of my points run in parallel with Stas's, I know- I'm trying to lay out some issues that are distinct here, maybe without much luck. If you really feel that your answers to Stas adequately address what I'm saying, I'm not going to insist that you keep responding to me.

Naturally advertising costs are counted as a part of GDP. Naturally it's beneficial to them, since otherwise they lose marketshare.

It's beneficial to the people making the advertisements; is it beneficial to the people who receive them, which was my original question? Arguably not- which doesn't mean the companies shouldn't be doing it, mind. They'd be fools not to. But if advertising spending contributes to GDP, despite being of little benefit to Joe Sixpack, does this not weaken the link between Joe Sixpack's well-being and the GDP of Sixpackistan?

That's where independent courts and adequately defined property rights come in. The shareholders are looking out for themselves, obviously. But shareholder actions alone are not the sum of a free market system.

They define the incentive structure for corporations.

Defining property rights such that Union Carbide winds up forced to adequately compensate the victims of its industrial accident because it violated property rights strikes me as an enormous unsolved challenge. How far do you have to go to construct a definition of property rights extended enough that it blocks all the negative externalities and troubles caused by the knock-on effects of corporate actions?

Is this any less pie-in-the-sky a proposal than a functioning command economy? With corporatism, we may not like it but at least we know how it's supposed to work: the entities who own the most money get to write the rules in their favor, and grudgingly agree to accept a bare minimum of penalties that to keep the proles from rioting. But how is a market-based system supposed to see to it that corporations are restrained by the "adequately defined property rights" of the average citizen? How do we put a price on our extended property rights, in an intellectually honest way that contains at least moderate security against corruption?

If all this is going to be done through the independent courts, the courts will need to commission one hell of a statistical branch, because they'll be responsible for analysis currently done by several federal agencies.

Thought experiment: if I'm being paid a market value for my labor under which I struggle to make ends meet (i.e. food on the table and medicine for chronic conditions and shelter for myself are in my budget, but not much else), and if I do not have disposable income to spare trying to shop around for 'ethical' products, what does this imply about my buying decisions? Does it mean I'm indifferent to ethical concerns, or does it just mean that I can't influence ethical concerns with my purchasing decisions?

Both. More of the former, unless you're starving.

This is going to be a very difficult environment to get anything done on ethical grounds, then.

Practical barriers will always make it difficult for the average consumer to make fully informed decisions about the products they're dealing with- especially when the product is 'second order,' produced and consumed at one or more removes from the end user; if a fertilizer company acts unethically it would be rather difficult for me to boycott food grown using that fertilizer.

If this mechanism is supposed to be the main way to prevent abuses of corporate power, the abuses aren't going to be prevented at all- we already know this. Boycotts don't self-organize reliably, companies don't self-police until it's too late, and there will always be a large market of people who will buy whatever's cheapest because they lack the time and energy to know or care how the product got to their shelves at that price.

Is it a positive trait of a market-run economy, that moral decisions binding on corporations will wind up decided by pitting "desire to prevent X" against "apathy regarding X," rather than against "support for X?"

[K. A. Pital]

I mangled that post, obviously. But the point remains: what do you mean by saying that investment in that sector is counter-beneficial? Not according to the people who spend their money on bottled water, apparently. Does your opinion outweigh theirs? And I'm not sure how often it needs be said, but I'll try one more time: the current system in America is one of corporatism. I do not advocate corporatism. Using corporatism as an example of why free market capitalism is bad is nonsense.

Um... on the "corporatism" point, tied to the earlier rationality of pricing point: what sort of special preferences did Lehman Brothers get from the government? Did the government set the value of Lehman Brothers at a multibillion sum, or did the market agents, blindly and foolishly perhaps, but nonetheless of their own will set this value? To simply claim that corporatism (that is, an environment with preferences for bodies corporate, and nothing more!) is something alltogether different from the market is silly.

On the bottled water point: "does my opinion outweigh theirs". No. However, there are people whose bare biological needs are not satisfied. Their buying power is too low to get access to clean water at all. And yet instead of providing for their needs, humanity caters to the needs of those who can buy bottled water. Is that reasonable or rational? I am not sure.

Yes, I know. But backwards-calculated GDP isn't impossible. Besides which, what is your point? That GDP isn't useful as a measure of the total value in an economy because subsistence activities aren't included in the standard formulation?

No. My point was quite precise: GDP is useful in a market economy and is progressively less useful the more non-market activities you have. Once there is no market, regardless of whether we're talking about subsistence or a pure command economy with direct rationing - the GDP ceases to be of any use, its calculation becomes nigh impossible.

Yeah, they actually work... very poorly.

I wouldn't say "very poorly", just poorly. And the point was that any attempt to perfect and improve an alternative model would be met with gunfire at worst, economic blockades and attempts to destroy your non-market experiment at best. Since capitalism desires expansion into new markets, it never takes lightly when some territory or field becomes a less accessible or unaccessible market. The desire to expand would lead the non-market and market systems to an inevitable confrontation, where the non-market system will be destroyed and the new market quickly re-invaded by striving companies.

What I'm doing is requiring you to present some kind of methodology to determine which objectives have priority, not to state the obvious. And you can lose the accusations of misanthropy - I believe that I have said on multiple occasions that I'm pro-welfare. What I don't see is how this has anything to do with rejecting the market system outright, nor how your vague allusions to more humanitarian allocation can allow the formulation of a viable format for a command economy, much less how it's less bad than a market economy. Moreover, the crux of our discussion was whether rights-based systems somehow "throw out morality", which I hold to be an asinine claim on its face. By what standard do you assert that moral objectives have not been achieved unless you assert that people have a moral right to such-and-such before you make the moral evaluation? Why do you think that I keep saying that GDP is an important measure, but if you want to add additional criteria... etc? You need to formulate your moral system in terms of imperatives if it is to be binding on society, and this requires that the recipients of social deference be defined to have such-and-such rights.

You said that ensuring a minimal life standard for all requires markets. However, in Latin America only the embargoed command economy eliminated malnourishment. By your logic, if markets were essential to satisfaction of bare biological survival needs, it should have been the other way around: all market economies of Latin America should have had zero malnourishment while Cuba should have been malnourished to hell and back. And yes, people have a desire to minimize their suffering. They have it by default as sentient beings. That desire exists and in a utilitarian framework must be acted upon. I don't subscribe to the "weightened utilitarianism" idea where the suffering of one person is not equal to the suffering of another person. If the elimination of suffering is a moral imperative, then rights are just a means to an end, not something that exists apriori. If the right to water (food, clothes, shelter) serves the elimination of suffering, this right is justified. If a right does not serve the elimination of suffering, this right may be justified or may be not. If a right increases the volume of suffering (e.g. a property right that cannot be violated keeps a bunch of people starving outside a house full of food), this right can and shall be violated if not outright repealed. That is my core and essential view on the subject of "rights" as such.

I can define my system in terms of rights, but that would lead to peculiar redefinitions along the way - at some point one set of rights will need to be replaced by another set of rights and so on and so forth. That's simply not worth it. It is better to state the goals and then pick necessary rights as means to achieve them.

"White Mister". Wow. Notwithstanding the exodus of people from Cuba gives reason to doubt its prosperity. Incidentally, Chile also has very low rates of malnutrition. AFAIK, much of the malnutrition in Latin America is in central America and the Caribbean.

Way to skip the point. Yeah, sometimes I like to take puns at the White Mister, and in my view these puns are justified. Moreover, they don't impact the argument at all. Why is the situation not reversed - Cuba having malnourished people and the rest of Latin America not having any malnourishment? It is highly doubtful that Cuba is richer than those nations, and that its command economy allows it to produce more and achieve productive efficiency. Most likely Cuban non-market economy is below the efficiency threshold (in a productive efficiency framework). So my argument is that in fact, you don't need productive efficiency and markets (although both can be used and efficiency is desireable) to achieve a utilitarian goal of elimination of suffering. I never denied that Cuba is poor and never called it "prosperous". In fact, the whole argument was that you don't need prosperity to start fulfilling utilitarian goals to reduce suffering.

Right, because everyone outside Cuba is malnourished, and that's the only problem society faces. Notwithstanding, the fact remains that self-interest is what fuels the market, and that it utilizes it, while not needing to fight against it at every turn.

Well, apparently if UNICEF data is to be trusted, no Latin American nation other than Cuba has achieved zero child malnourishment. A pretty damning piece of evidence if you ask me. And that's considering many of these nations are richer than Cuba. As for self-interest driving the market, I agree, of course. I may disagree in the direction it drives the market, but...

You completely missed the rest of that post, didn't you? Try looking at it in context, and you'll see that I'm not "conceding" as much as pointing out that it's kind of an incomplete observation.

Your point was that it is easily possible to abuse a right to use the private property of another person. I agree. That is due to the nature of private property as such. However, it does not impact my point that you can act without infringing the rights of others and still deal utilitarian harm. That is pretty trivious. Hence why my preferred system is not a rights system, which brings us to the point above where I explained just why defining everything in terms of rights-by-default does not appeal to me. Today the conditions allow, say, the right to water. Tomorrow that should be expanded for a right to food. Next: a right to shelter. Should I rewrite the rights all the time or should I just accept a utilitarian goal of suffering reduction and dance from there, discarding or expanding rights as it is necessary to achieve the goal in fullest with the resources I have? Indeed, that is the very question.

If he damaged the lives of others without transgressing against their rights, then perhaps that's because their rights aren't adequately defined and enforced?

Perhaps. But what if they don't have the bargaining power to "enforce" their rights or "define" them? See Simon's point about a person who has a certain income. His buying preferences are driven by income and he cannot afford ethical choices. Same applies here - if the worker wants to extend the contract or greater compensation, but he cannot afford a lawsuit that would allow him to do so? Is that because he doesn't want to extend, redefine or enforce his rights, or because he can't? This also impacts the very issue of rights enforcement. What if someone's rights are not enforced not because these rights are not defined, but because he lacks the buying power (or in case of noncommercial organizations, political power) to enforce them? Maybe there's a 8-hour work day right, but that right is infringed - and not because it is poorly defined or enforcement mechanisms are not working, but because the worker is too poor to afford a lawsuit that would judge in his favor? That's the thing.

And why is it that you keep using corporatism as an example of why free-market capitalism is bad vis-a-vis the golden parachute CEOs? On some of the other points, you're quite right. Sometimes it is in actual point of fact beneficial overall to eliminate poor performers, and protecting them out of misguided morality hampers the progress of society overall.

Because, um... what's so non-market about golden parachutes? These are contractual obligations that a body corporate agreed to. In essence, the government did not require corporations to write out huge compensations to CEOs. They did it themselves. Those are the so lauded mutually beneficial deals people entered to. To remain competitive re: hiring of CEOs, other companies behaved in the same fashion. The golden parachute is not a government invention, it has nothing to do with regulatory capture or the like. It is a matter of a contract between an individual and a body corporate in an open labour market, nes pa? As for "eliminating poor performers" being beneficial and "protecting them out of misguided morality concerns" hampering progress, I hope to god you don't follow this line of thougt to the very end, where it would be possible to solve poverty by killing the poor. *laughs*

That's actually quite poetic. And I wonder what property rights were respected in the nations colonized by the European powers. In any case, when I speak of the market not "glorifying self interest", I'm obviously talking about the mechanisms and theory that describe it, not the political machines that seek to further their own ends in its name.

Thanks I'm getting more adept at using the language to express my feelings. As for the question. Um... private property rights of bodies corporate and those of the white colonists, of course, were introduced to the colonies first and foremost. Common property rights that stemmed from feudal, pre-capitalist organization were not respected and were, in fact, destroyed. Later on European powers extended the capitalist private property rights to domestic colonial industries and individuals as well. It was a gradual process through which pre-capitalist communes were abolished and rights and privileges that were alien to the free market system were abolished as well.

Again, corporatism, not capitalism. What mechanisms were in place in India to protect the property rights of people there against Coca Cola's shenanigans? Incidentally, ask Stalin how well he fared in eliminating the fact that evil pays in his command economy.

The question was whether competition prevents bodies corporate from dealing utilitarian harm. It does not. Ergo, the point is well proven. Since when corporations are not an inherent part of capitalism? Coca Cola does not enjoy special government protection in the USA or elsewhere, last time I heard. It does not use regulatory capture or the like. As for the pun on Stalin, yes, he behaved like if he were running a typical body corporate in a Third World nation, acting in a fashion that dealt lots and lots of utilitarian harm. I never denied that you can't make evil pay in a command economy. After all, a command economy is nothing but the ultimate, nation-spanning body corporate. If it is undemocratic like real body corporates are, the results will not be much different. If it lacks utilitarian moral imperatives and has different imperatives, the command economy is not helping to achieve utilitarian goals. That was noted by Einstein.

I added that "neither are democratic mechanisms necessarily more effective" and "it seems pretty slanted to judge a system A because it doesn't use the methods of system B". In this case, system A is the market, and system B is democracy. Why should the market be criticized for not using the methods of democracy, since democracy is ultimately just another mechanism? Moreover, the problem with too many levels of control is exactly the source of a major problem with command economies, i.e. the issues of scaling.

Um... democracy is a method of control of any activity. You cannot separate the market from political activity and declare that it is therefore unsuitable for democracy - that is putting the cart before the horse. Instead, one should observe that private property makes companies undemocratic by default, and this is why democracy in market structures is impossible. In essence, a democratic economic body is not going to survive long in a market (although there are some examples, Mondragon, etc.), it is either private property on capital or democracy in the economy. Having democracy in politics but utter and sacred authoritarian control in economic matters is the peculiar consequence of politics being a field that has no private property, only common national property, which requires and calls for democratic control. And yes, of course command economies like any corporation experience the problem of too many levels of control. They should be reduced. Democracy is a mechanism, and one can discard it at will, I'm not denying it. My point was that private property itself forces market agents to be undemocratic regardless of whether it is justified or not, since internal democracy and private property are incompatible because democratic control inside the organization would infringe on property rights of the owner.

Well, that's fair enough. Not that I am hopeful of a practical solution to the problem, but whatever.

I simply note that unlike many naive communists, I understand that the problem of self-interest diverging from the interest of the organization one works for, or one that is under a person's control, is much more dire and pressing for any non-market economy, no matter how advanced. And the problem of driving these interests together is paramount and extremely important. You can't just handwave behavioural issues and say that abolition of private property will automatically make things right - no. You will have to make corresponding impact through advanced psychological techniques, education, et cetera to make sure the interests of individuals converge with the interests of organizations and, in the end, those of the entire society. In essence, you can't just nationalize factories and declare your worker's republic and do nothing else.

Indeed he can. And in that case, since the company is the CEO's personal property, then how is his personal benefit in conflict with the benefit of said company's performance?

Because he cannot use that property directly, duh. Jobs cannot consume an iPhone production plant in China. So perhaps his personal desire is a castle Gormenghast, but his corporation is another thing alltogether. Can he sell it to get Gormenghast? Let's imagine that yes, he can. And let us even follow your example and say that as a caring and smart person he does not ruin the company in the process, does not liquidate it and sell production fund. Instead he sells it as a whole to some other person. But then, let us assume (and not unlike reality) that the other person who bought the company is not as smart, and he actually brings it to ruin. So here we have it: Jobs sold the company because he was tired and wanted Gormenghast. The other person ruined it because he was too stupid (or malicious, maybe he was a plant from the competitors). Would it be beneficial for body corporate if Jobs stayed? Yes. But Jobs' interests and those of the body corporate diverged, despite the body corporate being his property. Peculiar, I know. But that is a rather common occurence.

And all of this bullshit does nothing to refute the contention the usefulness of monetizing goods and services that are outside the market

I noted specifically that you may only include them in the GDP in an ass-backwards fashion and inevitably lots of non-market activities which are necessary for the achieved life standard will be left out. You countered it with... saying it is useful to include non-market activities in the GDP. Captain Obvious much? It was the deficiency of GDP that prompted the complicated bunch of attempts to include non-market activity into the GDP in the first place. It was once again a deficiency even with all inclusions provided that spawned HDI, HPI, GINI, BLI, PQLI, et cetera. Finally, this observation does nothing to refute my point, which is that a system which progressively abolishes markets and gets rid of its elements would see its GDP fall to zero even if it provides the same amount of goods and services as a market system does. So sticking to the GDP means sticking to the market period. Isn't it fucking obvious?

[LaCroix]

Sorry to derail that thread , but as far as I heard, the occupation of wall street continues.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/163535/wa ... -continues

Seems as if Moore and Barr have joined the fray to get cheap publicity support the protester's cause.

[Samuel]

Naturally advertising costs are counted as a part of GDP. Naturally it's beneficial to them, since otherwise they lose marketshare.

It's beneficial to the people making the advertisements; is it beneficial to the people who receive them, which was my original question? Arguably not- which doesn't mean the companies shouldn't be doing it, mind. They'd be fools not to. But if advertising spending contributes to GDP, despite being of little benefit to Joe Sixpack, does this not weaken the link between Joe Sixpack's well-being and the GDP of Sixpackistan?

Unless you believe that advertising forces people to buy products, it is obvious why it is of benefit- it informs the public of what goods are available, reducing transaction costs.

It is possible to be of zero benefit though if advertising merely causes customers to change brands, in which case society would be better off less advertising (the reasons the tobacco industry backed a TV ad ban). Of course, than this would make it harder for new products to get known.

Defining property rights such that Union Carbide winds up forced to adequately compensate the victims of its industrial accident because it violated property rights strikes me as an enormous unsolved challenge. How far do you have to go to construct a definition of property rights extended enough that it blocks all the negative externalities and troubles caused by the knock-on effects of corporate actions?

I believe the traditional method is lifetime income paid to their relatives and community as well as paying the medical costs of the injured. This leaves out pain and suffering, but I don't believe anyone has figured out how to quantify that.

[Simon_Jester]

Unless you believe that advertising forces people to buy products, it is obvious why it is of benefit- it informs the public of what goods are available, reducing transaction costs.

It is possible to be of zero benefit though if advertising merely causes customers to change brands, in which case society would be better off less advertising (the reasons the tobacco industry backed a TV ad ban). Of course, than this would make it harder for new products to get known.

The number of people who buy (for example) cars or soda is pretty close to market saturation, I'd think. Likewise for fast-food restaurants, and so on.

Defining property rights such that Union Carbide winds up forced to adequately compensate the victims of its industrial accident because it violated property rights strikes me as an enormous unsolved challenge. How far do you have to go to construct a definition of property rights extended enough that it blocks all the negative externalities and troubles caused by the knock-on effects of corporate actions?

I believe the traditional method is lifetime income paid to their relatives and community as well as paying the medical costs of the injured. This leaves out pain and suffering, but I don't believe anyone has figured out how to quantify that.

Right-o. The problem, now, is to create an independent judiciary capable of enforcing such rulings, because:

1) It needs a statistical branch which is competent to judge how much harm such a disaster has caused, one which is impartial and objective.

2) It needs a way to enlist among its ranks only judges who actually will deliver judgments against large corporations- i.e. who are not corporatists and who are immune to any appeal or bribe the corporation might offer, directly or indirectly.*

3) It needs streamlined procedures for class-action lawsuits, since the class-action lawsuit is now the main means of punishing corporate malfeasance of all types.

4) It needs a legal infrastructure that doesn't allow the corporation to spend ten million dollars on lawyers and bought-and-paid-for 'expert testimony' in exchange for a 50% chance of avoiding a hundred million dollar judgment* that would rightfully go against them. As long as that can be done, the company has a huge advantage, because it can spend ten million dollars per case, every case, and thus reduce the effective price of its mistakes from 100 million to 60 million. Which means the only way to preserve the corporation's fear of being punished for causing 100 million worth of damages is to increase the amount of money they have to pay for doing so, up to around 200 million, just so that they wind up paying the same on average.

[Note that these are just sample numbers, but you see the problem- corporations are quite capable of accepting epic legal fees as part of the price of doing business, and if having a good team of lawyers dramatically reduces the chances of being punished for something your company did wrong, they will always do so, and thus avoid a lot of punishment]
____________________

(1) is expensive and expensive things are hard to do under libertarian government. (2) is at least possible, though I'm cynical about the feasibility of making it happen in a society which avows libertarian principles, because of how many secret corporatists I keep finding in libertarian ranks, which is probably unfair of me. (3) is problematic for libertarians who consider the class-action lawsuit to be a drag on business, as well they might if they're for "tort reform." (4), as far as I can tell, is absolute anathema to libertarians, and it disturbs me too.

At least with regulations we attack the problem from the opposite end: inspect your activities, and fine you more or less automatically if you're being negligent before anyone gets hurt. Thus, there is no need to worry about calculating damages to the people harmed by the negligence, and you can't use a sharp team of lawyers to argue your way out of paying the medical bills of the people you just crippled, which itself would raise ethical issues in my opinion.
____________________

*A hundred million dollar judgment would not be out of line for a major industrial accident; for something like BP's Gulf oil spill it would be far too small, even...

[Samuel]

The number of people who buy (for example) cars or soda is pretty close to market saturation, I'd think. Likewise for fast-food restaurants, and so on.

Yes, but with this level of marketing. Demand might fall off if they stopped advertising. I don't know how to check if this is incresing the pie, or the red queen's race.

(1) is expensive and expensive things are hard to do under libertarian government.

Libertarian refers to state power, not state size. A modern libertarian government would be vastly larger than most ancient governments, but it would have significantly less intrusive power.

(2) is at least possible, though I'm cynical about the feasibility of making it happen in a society which avows libertarian principles, because of how many secret corporatists I keep finding in libertarian ranks, which is probably unfair of me.

Having honest judges who can rule fairly is a problem with any conception of the legal system.

(4), as far as I can tell, is absolute anathema to libertarians, and it disturbs me too.

What are you talking about? Libertarians hate the idea that lawsuits are costly. After all, costly lawsuits are the reason patent trolls can exist.

At least with regulations we attack the problem from the opposite end: inspect your activities, and fine you more or less automatically if you're being negligent before anyone gets hurt. Thus, there is no need to worry about calculating damages to the people harmed by the negligence, and you can't use a sharp team of lawyers to argue your way out of paying the medical bills of the people you just crippled, which itself would raise ethical issues in my opinion.

Don't forget cost/benefit calculations. It is possible you can cause higher costs to society by having overly stringent safety requirements. We see this when it comes to exotic chemicals or radioactive substances. Spending 10s of million to save a life isn't cost effective as long as their are cheaper ways to save other people's lives.

[Simon_Jester]

The number of people who buy (for example) cars or soda is pretty close to market saturation, I'd think. Likewise for fast-food restaurants, and so on.

Yes, but with this level of marketing. Demand might fall off if they stopped advertising. I don't know how to check if this is incresing the pie, or the red queen's race.

The mere fact that there is no way to tell strikes me as philosophically troubling. I'm not saying "ban it," I'm saying "it's questionable whether this is productive activity, which in turn undermines the significance of a GDP includes it."

(1) is expensive and expensive things are hard to do under libertarian government.

Libertarian refers to state power, not state size. A modern libertarian government would be vastly larger than most ancient governments, but it would have significantly less intrusive power.

In practice, one of the most mass-appealing arguments in favor of libertarian government is lower taxes. My argument is taht once the government adopts libertarian mores, it will be hard to keep up the taxes to perform any function of 'questionable necessity.'

If you don't think that maintaining a statistical branch capable of analyzing the damage caused by corporate malfeasance in an impartial way is going to get called 'questionable necessity,' take a good long look at the kinds of people who run for office on libertarian or quasi-libertarian platforms.

(2) is at least possible, though I'm cynical about the feasibility of making it happen in a society which avows libertarian principles, because of how many secret corporatists I keep finding in libertarian ranks, which is probably unfair of me.

Having honest judges who can rule fairly is a problem with any conception of the legal system.

Yes. It's an extra-big problem under an ideal libertarian government, where judges are doing most of the job that is now entrusted to legislation. They don't just have to interpret law, they have to decide who has harmed whom and by how much... and these judgments will happen a lot more often than they do in real life, because regulations have been removed.

Sure, fear of the judgments may make corporations behave just as if they were regulated... but to make that happen, you have to increase either the damage that each judgment causes (a lot) or the frequency with which they take place (a lot).

And God pity the judge who has to take on the case "People of America v. All Fuel-Burning Industries" over global warming...

(4), as far as I can tell, is absolute anathema to libertarians, and it disturbs me too.

What are you talking about? Libertarians hate the idea that lawsuits are costly. After all, costly lawsuits are the reason patent trolls can exist.

Making lawsuits cheap doesn't help. What helps is making it hard for the guy who hires a better lawyer to win. Or the guy who hires a platoon of lawyers.

As long as that's practical, the guy who has really deep pockets and can keep a small army of lawyers on retainer to establish covering paper trails and dream up defenses against charges in advance will always have the advantage, and will be able to deflect a large fraction of all punishments levied against them. Which means that to make the lawsuits bite on the people they're intended to deter, you either need to enormously ramp up the penalties for losing a lawsuit, or you need to neuter the ability of high-powered legal teams to limit the damages the defendant pays.

Only how do you do either of those without undermining due process constraints which, if they aren't totally enshrined in libertarian principles, really ought to be?

At least with regulations we attack the problem from the opposite end: inspect your activities, and fine you more or less automatically if you're being negligent before anyone gets hurt. Thus, there is no need to worry about calculating damages to the people harmed by the negligence, and you can't use a sharp team of lawyers to argue your way out of paying the medical bills of the people you just crippled, which itself would raise ethical issues in my opinion.

Don't forget cost/benefit calculations. It is possible you can cause higher costs to society by having overly stringent safety requirements. We see this when it comes to exotic chemicals or radioactive substances. Spending 10s of million to save a life isn't cost effective as long as their are cheaper ways to save other people's lives.

All too often, the regulations which are relaxed don't limit themselves to the ones that cost a lot of money to save lives. Certainly not in real-life societies with scanty regulatory regimes.

[Samuel]

The mere fact that there is no way to tell strikes me as philosophically troubling. I'm not saying "ban it," I'm saying "it's questionable whether this is productive activity, which in turn undermines the significance of a GDP includes it."

No, it is possible to tell. It just requires being able to decide what consumption would have been in the absence of advertising.

Plus I think paying for advertising slots (which finances TV and radio) is the main cost and of social benefit.

In practice, one of the most mass-appealing arguments in favor of libertarian government is lower taxes. My argument is that once the government adopts libertarian mores, it will be hard to keep up the taxes to perform any function of 'questionable necessity.'

If it is essential for the judicial system to function effectively, that it isn't of questionable necesity. The setup is a problem, but it is the same problem any wide ranging government program has when it is being created.

Smacks of single point failure though. Still biased judges would wreak the system as much as cause an under or overvaluing of damages. The magnitude of that depends on how many people who would be protected aren't.

If you don't think that maintaining a statistical branch capable of analyzing the damage caused by corporate malfeasance in an impartial way is going to get called 'questionable necessity,' take a good long look at the kinds of people who run for office on libertarian or quasi-libertarian platforms.

People who want to revert to the gold standard? Yeah, we are assuming non-crazy libertarians, although that doesn't preclude corrupt or self-serving ones.

And God pity the judge who has to take on the case "People of America v. All Fuel-Burning Industries" over global warming...

I have a feeling the case would be thrown out on the grounds the plantiffs and defendents are almost the same group- after all most Americans own cars.

As long as that's practical, the guy who has really deep pockets and can keep a small army of lawyers on retainer to establish covering paper trails and dream up defenses against charges in advance will always have the advantage, and will be able to deflect a large fraction of all punishments levied against them.

Yeah, this seems to cry out for a large number of public defenders. Given it is a libertarian state, they will be paid a percentage of winnings. I'm not the expert on libertarianism so if you seem a gaping flaw, ask Lord Zentei.

All too often, the regulations which are relaxed don't limit themselves to the ones that cost a lot of money to save lives. Certainly not in real-life societies with scanty regulatory regimes.

Of course not. It is the same reason there are agricultural subsidies. A small group benefits alot and everyone else loses a little- too small to be roused.

Hmm... I think I just described a government were instead of the legislature, "laws" are essentially pounded out by statistical analysis. I don't know where, but I suspect that most libertarians ideal are different than what I described a less resembles a technocracy.

[Simon_Jester]

If it is essential for the judicial system to function effectively, that it isn't of questionable necesity. The setup is a problem, but it is the same problem any wide ranging government program has when it is being created.

Smacks of single point failure though. Still biased judges would wreak the system as much as cause an under or overvaluing of damages. The magnitude of that depends on how many people who would be protected aren't.

The problem here is that the courts represent a single point failure that doesn't normally happen. In real governments, the state can pass a law against doing things that make accidents likely, and then you can still be sued after the fact for causing an accident that the law didn't specifically prevent you from causing.

Here, all my incentive to avoid dumping externalities on my neighbors (or endangering their lives) comes from the fear of being sued. A quick glance at our existing legal system shows that to make this work, we'd need one hell of a lot more lawsuits, we'd need to make it much easier to sue powerful people and companies, and we'd need to make it much harder for those people and companies to defend themselves.

I don't think it's a very practical system, myself.

If you don't think that maintaining a statistical branch capable of analyzing the damage caused by corporate malfeasance in an impartial way is going to get called 'questionable necessity,' take a good long look at the kinds of people who run for office on libertarian or quasi-libertarian platforms.

People who want to revert to the gold standard? Yeah, we are assuming non-crazy libertarians, although that doesn't preclude corrupt or self-serving ones.

Even non-crazy libertarians may question the utility of government agencies that almost everyone else seems to consider important. And you can't assume that only non-crazy libertarians will have power (social, political, etc.) in such a society. Corporatists infiltrate libertarian parties and movements all the time, as do crazies.

And God pity the judge who has to take on the case "People of America v. All Fuel-Burning Industries" over global warming...

I have a feeling the case would be thrown out on the grounds the plantiffs and defendents are almost the same group- after all most Americans own cars.

I could equally well say "People of America v. All Dioxin-Producing Industries" or "People of America vs Entire Tobacco Industry," with the lawsuit being over the industry's attempt to hire experts to convince people the product was safe when this is not true, thus ensuring that thousands if not millions would die of lung cancer before the issue finally came clear.

And if you say that your libertarian state doesn't let people place such suits, then how in the hell do you create an incentive not to do such things? Ideally, you'd like there to be some process by which people's exposure to poison is reduced. But doing this within the framework of lawsuits, when the set of all people harmed is "everyone" and the set of defendants is vast and the issue is murky... it's such a colossal mess, at least potentially, that these suits would surely become monstrously complex and nearly impossible to work out in any rational sense.

Again, this is why I just don't think the system could work this way. We've already got a huge, litigous society with very large numbers of lawyers dedicated to suits, countersuits, and writing contracts that don't allow people to sue. Indeed, many businesses insist on making people waive their right to sue over anything they do, as part of the price of doing business- simply because they don't want to have to defend against lawsuits.

How do we make the system work if we're piling even more burdens onto it, by making practically all social policy questions of the form "should X be allowed to do Y if Y harms Z?" go to the courts?

As long as that's practical, the guy who has really deep pockets and can keep a small army of lawyers on retainer to establish covering paper trails and dream up defenses against charges in advance will always have the advantage, and will be able to deflect a large fraction of all punishments levied against them.

Yeah, this seems to cry out for a large number of public defenders. Given it is a libertarian state, they will be paid a percentage of winnings. I'm not the expert on libertarianism so if you seem a gaping flaw, ask Lord Zentei.

That raises more questions: how many lawyers can society support? Will it be enough? Is this not part of the intrinsic cost of the system? If 5% of the population, significantly more than 5% of the educated population, becomes lawyers so that the other 95% can sue each other whenever anything goes wrong... we wind up spending a big chunk of our collective resources (GDP, or however you count it) on suits and countersuits. I am far from convinced that this will save money compared to regulations, even when opportunity costs of regulation are factored in.

All too often, the regulations which are relaxed don't limit themselves to the ones that cost a lot of money to save lives. Certainly not in real-life societies with scanty regulatory regimes.

Of course not. It is the same reason there are agricultural subsidies. A small group benefits alot and everyone else loses a little- too small to be roused.

Hmm... I think I just described a government were instead of the legislature, "laws" are essentially pounded out by statistical analysis. I don't know where, but I suspect that most libertarians ideal are different than what I described a less resembles a technocracy.

Heh. Yeah, because ultimately you're still trusting government- it's just that you've replaced the traditional model of elected government with a judiciary which resolves all disputes. I'm reminded of something like the Muslim world's system of qadis, only with a bit more mathematical rigor.

Certainly, if such a judiciary were to evolve from what we have now, and were to keep its impartiality, it would become something very much like a self-perpetuating elite of professional adjudicators, and we'd be entrusting a big chunk of social policy and national decision-making to them, like it or not.

[Slacker]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1ZInwvzqQ


Airline pilots join the protests due to a stalled merger/union contract process.

[Lord Zentei]

Sorry about the tardiness, there's been a lot of stuff that's come up. Therefore, just a quick reply, not one that's been mulled over during the past three days, alas.

I mangled that post, obviously. But the point remains: what do you mean by saying that investment in that sector is counter-beneficial? Not according to the people who spend their money on bottled water, apparently. Does your opinion outweigh theirs? And I'm not sure how often it needs be said, but I'll try one more time: the current system in America is one of corporatism. I do not advocate corporatism. Using corporatism as an example of why free market capitalism is bad is nonsense.

Um... on the "corporatism" point, tied to the earlier rationality of pricing point: what sort of special preferences did Lehman Brothers get from the government? Did the government set the value of Lehman Brothers at a multibillion sum, or did the market agents, blindly and foolishly perhaps, but nonetheless of their own will set this value? To simply claim that corporatism (that is, an environment with preferences for bodies corporate, and nothing more!) is something alltogether different from the market is silly.

On the bottled water point: "does my opinion outweigh theirs". No. However, there are people whose bare biological needs are not satisfied. Their buying power is too low to get access to clean water at all. And yet instead of providing for their needs, humanity caters to the needs of those who can buy bottled water. Is that reasonable or rational? I am not sure.

Did you miss the part where they and their buddies got hundreds of billions of dollars in handouts? Or did you miss the part where a government sanctioned monopoly - the federal reserve - can give out an unknowable quantity of free money to their well-connected buddies? Or how government regulation is subverted to their interests? These sources of cash are NOT free-market. It is NOT "silly" to reject them as being anti-market.

Yes, I know. But backwards-calculated GDP isn't impossible. Besides which, what is your point? That GDP isn't useful as a measure of the total value in an economy because subsistence activities aren't included in the standard formulation?

No. My point was quite precise: GDP is useful in a market economy and is progressively less useful the more non-market activities you have. Once there is no market, regardless of whether we're talking about subsistence or a pure command economy with direct rationing - the GDP ceases to be of any use, its calculation becomes nigh impossible.

Very difficult, certainly. But not useless, and not impossible. I'm not really sure what this has to do with my earlier point, either. GDP - or measures like GDP - are more flexible. They don't assign value assessments to the capabilities measured. And regardless of what you hope to achieve you need production capability to achieve it. All this rant about difficulties of measurement have nothing to do with any of that.

Yeah, they actually work... very poorly.

I wouldn't say "very poorly", just poorly. And the point was that any attempt to perfect and improve an alternative model would be met with gunfire at worst, economic blockades and attempts to destroy your non-market experiment at best. Since capitalism desires expansion into new markets, it never takes lightly when some territory or field becomes a less accessible or unaccessible market. The desire to expand would lead the non-market and market systems to an inevitable confrontation, where the non-market system will be destroyed and the new market quickly re-invaded by striving companies.

So all the failures of command economies are the fault of the evil capitalists screwing things up? That strikes me as being rather underwhelming as far as excuses go.

What I'm doing is requiring you to present some kind of methodology to determine which objectives have priority, not to state the obvious. And you can lose the accusations of misanthropy - I believe that I have said on multiple occasions that I'm pro-welfare. What I don't see is how this has anything to do with rejecting the market system outright, nor how your vague allusions to more humanitarian allocation can allow the formulation of a viable format for a command economy, much less how it's less bad than a market economy. Moreover, the crux of our discussion was whether rights-based systems somehow "throw out morality", which I hold to be an asinine claim on its face. By what standard do you assert that moral objectives have not been achieved unless you assert that people have a moral right to such-and-such before you make the moral evaluation? Why do you think that I keep saying that GDP is an important measure, but if you want to add additional criteria... etc? You need to formulate your moral system in terms of imperatives if it is to be binding on society, and this requires that the recipients of social deference be defined to have such-and-such rights.

You said that ensuring a minimal life standard for all requires markets. However, in Latin America only the embargoed command economy eliminated malnourishment. By your logic, if markets were essential to satisfaction of bare biological survival needs, it should have been the other way around: all market economies of Latin America should have had zero malnourishment while Cuba should have been malnourished to hell and back. And yes, people have a desire to minimize their suffering. They have it by default as sentient beings. That desire exists and in a utilitarian framework must be acted upon. I don't subscribe to the "weightened utilitarianism" idea where the suffering of one person is not equal to the suffering of another person. If the elimination of suffering is a moral imperative, then rights are just a means to an end, not something that exists apriori. If the right to water (food, clothes, shelter) serves the elimination of suffering, this right is justified. If a right does not serve the elimination of suffering, this right may be justified or may be not. If a right increases the volume of suffering (e.g. a property right that cannot be violated keeps a bunch of people starving outside a house full of food), this right can and shall be violated if not outright repealed. That is my core and essential view on the subject of "rights" as such.

I can define my system in terms of rights, but that would lead to peculiar redefinitions along the way - at some point one set of rights will need to be replaced by another set of rights and so on and so forth. That's simply not worth it. It is better to state the goals and then pick necessary rights as means to achieve them.

Not so. I said that in order to minimize suffering, you're better off maximizing production (other things being equal). That does not mean that minimizing suffering requires a market, merely that a market is a very powerful mechanism to achieve a vital prerequisite for that goal. Moreover, it is meaningless to speak of morality mandating a system to achieve such and such an outcome without first specifying what people are entitled to. You claim that all people want to minimize suffering - well and good. So what? That doesn't mean that they can make demands of anyone unless you assert that they have a right to do so. In other words, you're not bridging the is-ought gap merely by saying "all people are sentient" and "all people want to minimize suffering". Moreover, who can decide what causes a person to endure suffering but they themselves? How are you going to achieve this general goal without allowing each person to define for themselves what they want? In particular, how are you going to achieve the elimination of coercion (which seems to be an issue of some importance to you - good for you on that point, BTW) if people themselves cannot decide what they want?

"White Mister". Wow. Notwithstanding the exodus of people from Cuba gives reason to doubt its prosperity. Incidentally, Chile also has very low rates of malnutrition. AFAIK, much of the malnutrition in Latin America is in central America and the Caribbean.

Way to skip the point. Yeah, sometimes I like to take puns at the White Mister, and in my view these puns are justified. Moreover, they don't impact the argument at all. Why is the situation not reversed - Cuba having malnourished people and the rest of Latin America not having any malnourishment? It is highly doubtful that Cuba is richer than those nations, and that its command economy allows it to produce more and achieve productive efficiency. Most likely Cuban non-market economy is below the efficiency threshold (in a productive efficiency framework). So my argument is that in fact, you don't need productive efficiency and markets (although both can be used and efficiency is desireable) to achieve a utilitarian goal of elimination of suffering. I never denied that Cuba is poor and never called it "prosperous". In fact, the whole argument was that you don't need prosperity to start fulfilling utilitarian goals to reduce suffering.

And my point was that Cuba has not eliminated suffering. It has only spread it out evenly. And I find it perplexing that you don't associate prosperity with reducing suffering.

Right, because everyone outside Cuba is malnourished, and that's the only problem society faces. Notwithstanding, the fact remains that self-interest is what fuels the market, and that it utilizes it, while not needing to fight against it at every turn.

Well, apparently if UNICEF data is to be trusted, no Latin American nation other than Cuba has achieved zero child malnourishment. A pretty damning piece of evidence if you ask me. And that's considering many of these nations are richer than Cuba. As for self-interest driving the market, I agree, of course. I may disagree in the direction it drives the market, but...

Achieving zero child malnourishment is a fine achievement, but not the only achievement that a society can make. Notwithstanding the fact that Cuba is a place people are eagerly trying to escape from not to, and that other Latin American countries have a greater prosperity overall, even though they haven't focused on several very specific socio-economic objectives that they can point to and crow at their more prosperous neighbors.

You completely missed the rest of that post, didn't you? Try looking at it in context, and you'll see that I'm not "conceding" as much as pointing out that it's kind of an incomplete observation.

Your point was that it is easily possible to abuse a right to use the private property of another person. I agree. That is due to the nature of private property as such. However, it does not impact my point that you can act without infringing the rights of others and still deal utilitarian harm. That is pretty trivious. Hence why my preferred system is not a rights system, which brings us to the point above where I explained just why defining everything in terms of rights-by-default does not appeal to me. Today the conditions allow, say, the right to water. Tomorrow that should be expanded for a right to food. Next: a right to shelter. Should I rewrite the rights all the time or should I just accept a utilitarian goal of suffering reduction and dance from there, discarding or expanding rights as it is necessary to achieve the goal in fullest with the resources I have? Indeed, that is the very question.

You mean it's trivial? How is it so?

But you need to define "suffering reduction" too - seems to me that you can't exactly avoid adding to that concept as time goes by. Meanwhile, the underlying premise of "enlightened self-interest" and the basic goal of "pursuit of happiness" as long as you don't transgress against other people's pursuit of same is rather more flexible, especially since different people value different things.

If he damaged the lives of others without transgressing against their rights, then perhaps that's because their rights aren't adequately defined and enforced?

Perhaps. But what if they don't have the bargaining power to "enforce" their rights or "define" them? See Simon's point about a person who has a certain income. His buying preferences are driven by income and he cannot afford ethical choices. Same applies here - if the worker wants to extend the contract or greater compensation, but he cannot afford a lawsuit that would allow him to do so? Is that because he doesn't want to extend, redefine or enforce his rights, or because he can't? This also impacts the very issue of rights enforcement. What if someone's rights are not enforced not because these rights are not defined, but because he lacks the buying power (or in case of noncommercial organizations, political power) to enforce them? Maybe there's a 8-hour work day right, but that right is infringed - and not because it is poorly defined or enforcement mechanisms are not working, but because the worker is too poor to afford a lawsuit that would judge in his favor? That's the thing.

You don't arbitrarily define your own rights, they are part of the model and are supposed to be reflected in the constitution of the country you live in. You define your desires, which is what the market is for, and you assert your rights, which is what the courts system is for. But having the right to a fair trial and representation in it is among the first rights anyone possesses. It's one of the foundational rights, in fact (i.e. one that makes the others possible).

And why is it that you keep using corporatism as an example of why free-market capitalism is bad vis-a-vis the golden parachute CEOs? On some of the other points, you're quite right. Sometimes it is in actual point of fact beneficial overall to eliminate poor performers, and protecting them out of misguided morality hampers the progress of society overall.

Because, um... what's so non-market about golden parachutes? These are contractual obligations that a body corporate agreed to. In essence, the government did not require corporations to write out huge compensations to CEOs. They did it themselves. Those are the so lauded mutually beneficial deals people entered to. To remain competitive re: hiring of CEOs, other companies behaved in the same fashion. The golden parachute is not a government invention, it has nothing to do with regulatory capture or the like. It is a matter of a contract between an individual and a body corporate in an open labour market, nes pa? As for "eliminating poor performers" being beneficial and "protecting them out of misguided morality concerns" hampering progress, I hope to god you don't follow this line of thougt to the very end, where it would be possible to solve poverty by killing the poor. *laughs*

Are you talking about the CEOs of the companies that were bailed out by the government, or companies in general? In any case, when I'm talking about "eliminating poor performers" that certainly doesn't entail killing the poor (obviously). It means that companies that perform poorly are put out of business.

Again, corporatism, not capitalism. What mechanisms were in place in India to protect the property rights of people there against Coca Cola's shenanigans? Incidentally, ask Stalin how well he fared in eliminating the fact that evil pays in his command economy.

The question was whether competition prevents bodies corporate from dealing utilitarian harm. It does not. Ergo, the point is well proven. Since when corporations are not an inherent part of capitalism? Coca Cola does not enjoy special government protection in the USA or elsewhere, last time I heard. It does not use regulatory capture or the like. As for the pun on Stalin, yes, he behaved like if he were running a typical body corporate in a Third World nation, acting in a fashion that dealt lots and lots of utilitarian harm. I never denied that you can't make evil pay in a command economy. After all, a command economy is nothing but the ultimate, nation-spanning body corporate. If it is undemocratic like real body corporates are, the results will not be much different. If it lacks utilitarian moral imperatives and has different imperatives, the command economy is not helping to achieve utilitarian goals. That was noted by Einstein.

No, the question is whether rights based systems can do so, and whether basing your worldview on rights "throws morality out the window" at the outset, as you contended. Rights are ensured by independent courts and rule of law. Competition is meant to weed out inefficient service providers, and reduce the cost of production. Regardless, competition does reduce utilitarian harm between partners in a trade, since the harmed party can end the deal and move to the competitors. What you're pointing to are examples of externalities, not refutations of the market model.

I added that "neither are democratic mechanisms necessarily more effective" and "it seems pretty slanted to judge a system A because it doesn't use the methods of system B". In this case, system A is the market, and system B is democracy. Why should the market be criticized for not using the methods of democracy, since democracy is ultimately just another mechanism? Moreover, the problem with too many levels of control is exactly the source of a major problem with command economies, i.e. the issues of scaling.

Um... democracy is a method of control of any activity. You cannot separate the market from political activity and declare that it is therefore unsuitable for democracy - that is putting the cart before the horse. Instead, one should observe that private property makes companies undemocratic by default, and this is why democracy in market structures is impossible. In essence, a democratic economic body is not going to survive long in a market (although there are some examples, Mondragon, etc.), it is either private property on capital or democracy in the economy. Having democracy in politics but utter and sacred authoritarian control in economic matters is the peculiar consequence of politics being a field that has no private property, only common national property, which requires and calls for democratic control. And yes, of course command economies like any corporation experience the problem of too many levels of control. They should be reduced. Democracy is a mechanism, and one can discard it at will, I'm not denying it. My point was that private property itself forces market agents to be undemocratic regardless of whether it is justified or not, since internal democracy and private property are incompatible because democratic control inside the organization would infringe on property rights of the owner.

What are you talking about? What authoritarian is in control of economic matters? With regards to your point, of course it is possible to point out that democratic methods are ineffective at making certain types of decisions. Neither is it warranted or reasonable to demand democratic decisions in all things - obviously you can have democracy without everything being decided on in a democratic way. If you permit private property on any level, then that follows naturally. Besides which, democratic systems are a method of organizing interaction of individuals, not a mechanism for creating a collective intelligence (<- hyperbole). It strikes me that this kind of thinking shows that those who use "pro-democracy" arguments are no less hidebound than the people they criticize for thinking in terms of markets all the time. Perhaps more-so, since at least marketeers generally are pro-democracy in some things.

Indeed he can. And in that case, since the company is the CEO's personal property, then how is his personal benefit in conflict with the benefit of said company's performance?

Because he cannot use that property directly, duh. Jobs cannot consume an iPhone production plant in China. So perhaps his personal desire is a castle Gormenghast, but his corporation is another thing alltogether. Can he sell it to get Gormenghast? Let's imagine that yes, he can. And let us even follow your example and say that as a caring and smart person he does not ruin the company in the process, does not liquidate it and sell production fund. Instead he sells it as a whole to some other person. But then, let us assume (and not unlike reality) that the other person who bought the company is not as smart, and he actually brings it to ruin. So here we have it: Jobs sold the company because he was tired and wanted Gormenghast. The other person ruined it because he was too stupid (or malicious, maybe he was a plant from the competitors). Would it be beneficial for body corporate if Jobs stayed? Yes. But Jobs' interests and those of the body corporate diverged, despite the body corporate being his property. Peculiar, I know. But that is a rather common occurence.

Oh, wow. So what happens if the person who buys the company is incompetent and brings it to ruin? That's your counterargument? What happens then is that the company is ruined. Same thing that happens whenever some incompetent buffoon takes over any management in any system.

And all of this bullshit does nothing to refute the contention the usefulness of monetizing goods and services that are outside the market

I noted specifically that you may only include them in the GDP in an ass-backwards fashion and inevitably lots of non-market activities which are necessary for the achieved life standard will be left out. You countered it with... saying it is useful to include non-market activities in the GDP. Captain Obvious much? It was the deficiency of GDP that prompted the complicated bunch of attempts to include non-market activity into the GDP in the first place. It was once again a deficiency even with all inclusions provided that spawned HDI, HPI, GINI, BLI, PQLI, et cetera. Finally, this observation does nothing to refute my point, which is that a system which progressively abolishes markets and gets rid of its elements would see its GDP fall to zero even if it provides the same amount of goods and services as a market system does. So sticking to the GDP means sticking to the market period. Isn't it fucking obvious?

Insofar as you ignore the means to calculate the GDP equivalent of these non-market services, then sure it is. Besides which, all of this ranting about how a command economy has no defined GDP does little to address the reason this was brought up in the first place - the importance of an effective measure of total production, and overall production efficiency.

[Lord Zentei]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1ZInwvzqQ


Airline pilots join the protests due to a stalled merger/union contract process.

Not that I begrudge the pilots the right to voice their concerns, but this seems a rather opportunistic way of getting their point across - hijacking a protest against the general social order. I wonder whether this will simply devolve into a generic venue for every Jack and Jill's pet protests about whatever (if it's not done so already).

[Slacker]

Honestly, they could use the manpower at the protests, and to be perfectly blunt the NYPD is a lot less likely to pepper spray a bunch of airline pilots in uniform than they are a bunch of unemployed college kids.

Incidentally, having spoken to a few friends who are on the NYPD, they're not exactly thrilled with how the protests are being handled either. That pepper spray LT has given them a real bad name and for the most part the NYPD has been pretty good in terms of publicity and dealing with the community post-9/11. Obviously they're also a bit uneasy about randomly pepper spraying out-of-work college students, as well. Should make that clear.

[Flagg]

It's too bad no one had the balls to arrest Tony Boloney on the spot for battery.

[Flagg]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1ZInwvzqQ


Airline pilots join the protests due to a stalled merger/union contract process.

Not that I begrudge the pilots the right to voice their concerns, but this seems a rather opportunistic way of getting their point across - hijacking a protest against the general social order. I wonder whether this will simply devolve into a generic venue for every Jack and Jill's pet protests about whatever (if it's not done so already).

Let it. The more the merrier.

[K. A. Pital]

Did you miss the part where they and their buddies got hundreds of billions of dollars in handouts? Or did you miss the part where a government sanctioned monopoly - the federal reserve - can give out an unknowable quantity of free money to their well-connected buddies?

That's true and undeniably the worst case of hypocrisy However, I was more referring to the pre-crisis situation where certain companies were expected to have a certain value by market players and then this value just vanished overnight. Yes, after that the government stepped in with the bailouts and demonstrated their true allegiance to the ruling class, but... before that - the government did not set the stock prices for either of those banks and companies.

Or how government regulation is subverted to their interests? These sources of cash are NOT free-market. It is NOT "silly" to reject them as being anti-market.

I asked about the market evaluation of their value, though, not the sources of their cash after the bailouts, which is pretty much clear as day is nothing but a massive transfer of public funds to the failed mega-instititutions.

Very difficult, certainly. But not useless, and not impossible. I'm not really sure what this has to do with my earlier point, either. GDP - or measures like GDP - are more flexible. They don't assign value assessments to the capabilities measured. And regardless of what you hope to achieve you need production capability to achieve it. All this rant about difficulties of measurement have nothing to do with any of that.

Oh, I understand your point better now. Sorry about railing Yeah, of course you need to measure production (though a non-market structure would probably have to rely on something else than GDP for that).

So all the failures of command economies are the fault of the evil capitalists screwing things up?

No, their failure is entirely the fault of the first wave of communists and command economy practics and theorists alike. If they had succeeded, capitalism would have no greater chance to destroy command economies than the Zulus had of destroying British capitalism. That is, none. When us communists actually design a system that would raise productivity more massively than any capitalist one and grant such technical means that would make capitalists quickly outcompeted, outgunned and destroyed in the end, and capitalist attempts to destroy the new system laughable and a failure doomed from the start - then, and only then, can we fully rest and conclude that we have completed our task. No excuses and no pardons for a single failure.

Not so. I said that in order to minimize suffering, you're better off maximizing production (other things being equal). That does not mean that minimizing suffering requires a market, merely that a market is a very powerful mechanism to achieve a vital prerequisite for that goal. Moreover, it is meaningless to speak of morality mandating a system to achieve such and such an outcome without first specifying what people are entitled to. You claim that all people want to minimize suffering - well and good. So what? That doesn't mean that they can make demands of anyone unless you assert that they have a right to do so.

Oh, okay, that is more well-explained. And of course people have "a right" to demand to lower suffering from their rulers, who are supposed by the very virtue of the democratic system to be accountable to them and execute a utilitarian policy ))).

Moreover, who can decide what causes a person to endure suffering but they themselves?

Seriously, that is an argument from stupidity. For example, a person who cannot read and write, but is very pious, concludes that the bad harvest was due to a witch and then tortures and burns to death a girl in the neighbor house. An educated and literate person understands that the bad harvest was due to a pest that the uneducated inquisitor did not notice, and in fact, could not notice or even comprehend this bug. Who is more qualified to decide what caused the person to endure suffering - the person himself or the other person? *laughs* Yes, my arguments from technocracy are cruel. But no less are the arguments for a complete and utter submission to the popular will, which might be influenced by stupidity and lack of education more than anything. Needless to say that Nigeria ranked good on some "happiness indexes", but I doubt malnourished people deserve to be malnourished even if they're stupid enough to classify themselves as "happy" or perhaps do so as a psychological defensive reaction from teh abyss of suffering that surrounds their every step.

How are you going to achieve this general goal without allowing each person to define for themselves what they want? In particular, how are you going to achieve the elimination of coercion (which seems to be an issue of some importance to you - good for you on that point, BTW) if people themselves cannot decide what they want?

That is a long story which can't be told short. I have two conflicting positions, one being technocracy and the other radical democracy. They are not very well combined, except, unless, I would espouse some sort of theory that the "scientists" should take over and introduce a technocratic system that would raise the educational and material level of the people's existence and thereby destroy the very grounds for its own existence. It is really a hard question, because progress triumphs through coercion and existing power classes never give up their power willingly (which posits a natural problem for any putative revolution or evolution...). It is a crappy point where my theory is a bit deficient. I prefer to think that my future PhD might help me to develop one.

And my point was that Cuba has not eliminated suffering. It has only spread it out evenly. And I find it perplexing that you don't associate prosperity with reducing suffering.

Cuba has eliminated the extremes of suffering. When everyone has water, you can start making sure everyone is fed. When everyone is fed, make sure everyone is clothed. And so on and so forth. Elimination of suffering is a gradual step which starts from eliminating the most extreme forms of suffering - radically! - and then building up from there. Prosperity can be conducive to the elimination of extreme forms of suffering only if there is such a goal and distributive systems achieve them. Otherwise a generic total "prosperity" of a society with a handful of well-fed oligarchs and millions of malnourished citizens is an absolutely vainglorious thing. I did not glorify poverty - in fact, it is the worst thing on earth - but noted that poverty cannot be an excuse for maintaining extremes of suffering. Even a poor and struggling state can eliminate the extremes of suffering. Richer states have no excuse.

Achieving zero child malnourishment is a fine achievement, but not the only achievement that a society can make. Notwithstanding the fact that Cuba is a place people are eagerly trying to escape from not to, and that other Latin American countries have a greater prosperity overall, even though they haven't focused on several very specific socio-economic objectives that they can point to and crow at their more prosperous neighbors.

See, this betrays a perception. For example, a certain person grows up non-malnourished in Cuba. But he cannot become rich. And so he decides that now, after using up the resources Cuban society spent, he can go off to elsewhere and try himself there. Be richer, live better. That does not detract from the Cuban achievement, it underscores their failure to ensure the next stage: universally high life standard for all. Given their embargo, I can't really say their failure is a fully internal thing, but I tend to err on the side of caution and always demand impossible of the communists. The communists should be able to turn a small island locked by enemies into an economic hyperpower that will crush all enemies, into a communist version of the British Empire's all-conquering metropole in the Albion.

And it is certainly not the only achivement to make, but it is an achievement which should be made AHEAD of other achievements. No wealth of the oligarchs excuses extreme suffering such as malnourishment.

A last point to make - escaping from somewhere only signifies relative levels of poverty. A lot of people escape from countries that are not Cuba to the USA, too. Mexicans, but also Bolivians, etc. try to breach the visa barriers and escape their nations. Unlike Cuba, they don't have a command economy, so it seems that their "greater prosperity" is also very, very questionable in and of itself.

You mean it's trivial? How is it so?

Because property itself becomes a source of power in a market society, and as we know without power you cannot coerce. You don't necessarily coerce with power as well, but power is a pre-requisite for coercion. I cannot coerce my employer, but he can coerce me if he so desires.

But you need to define "suffering reduction" too - seems to me that you can't exactly avoid adding to that concept as time goes by.

The reduction of suffering is progressive by itself. Elimination of the worst forms of suffering is just the beginning. You progress until everything that can be described as suffering (at least in a biological sense) is eliminated. After that, yes there'll be a massive huge redefinition which will require it to change to "pursuie of happiness", and at that stage universality most likely will fly out of the window. But that will be in another society, much more developed and much more enlightened. I dread to say but I fear I will not see it.

Meanwhile, the underlying premise of "enlightened self-interest" and the basic goal of "pursuit of happiness" as long as you don't transgress against other people's pursuit of same is rather more flexible, especially since different people value different things.

It is "more flexible" only in one sense - it is easier to apply to existing primitive systems of social organizations, it does not require radical change, it does not require fundamentally different super-efficient productive systems and corresponding relations of property, it does not require much change aside from purely political and institutional change. It is closer to what we have now and it is more easily achievable.

My dream is higher. As for "people valuing what's best for themselves", that is not something I entirely agree with. As any communist, I understand the necessity of both democracy and technocracy and why those arise. The example of the illiterate peasant killing the witch is more than apt.

You don't arbitrarily define your own rights, they are part of the model and are supposed to be reflected in the constitution of the country you live in. You define your desires, which is what the market is for, and you assert your rights, which is what the courts system is for. But having the right to a fair trial and representation in it is among the first rights anyone possesses. It's one of the foundational rights, in fact (i.e. one that makes the others possible).

Um... isn't the constitution subject to amends by plebiscite or even far more simply by government action in legislative branch? You don't just "assert" existing rights - you demand new rights and create new rights. It is preposterous to view rights as external to the person, that is bullshit. By that logic the slaves wouldn't have any rights, and the blacks too, since they would only be able to define their desires that would never materialize into rights.

That's not so. People create and define new rights constantly. The right to a fair trial doesn't make other rights possible. You can have a right to a fair trial and yet be a slave. Formally there's no contradiction. You can technically have an independent courts system and combine that with slavery. Or apartheid, for example.

Court trial rights are not automatically creating other rights. And the opposite is also possible - there can be no right to a fair trial, but you can get new rights for your nationality in a non-fair system where courts are not fair as well. A revolution of natives against colonizers to gain new rights might not immediately produce a workable system of fair court representation, but the natives will get new rights.

Are you talking about the CEOs of the companies that were bailed out by the government, or companies in general?

The parachutes were agreed on before the bailouts even came into play. Yes, it is stupid that they weren't redefined, but I think we all agree that the initial problem was the very creation of the parachutes? And that did not require bailouts. It was a sector-endemic plague.

In any case, when I'm talking about "eliminating poor performers" that certainly doesn't entail killing the poor (obviously). It means that companies that perform poorly are put out of business.

Well, that is good. At least bodies corporate differ in "rights" from individuals - the individual has an absolute right to life, whereas a body corporate does not. That's something I could agree with.

No, the question is whether rights based systems can do so, and whether basing your worldview on rights "throws morality out the window" at the outset, as you contended. Rights are ensured by independent courts and rule of law. Competition is meant to weed out inefficient service providers, and reduce the cost of production. Regardless, competition does reduce utilitarian harm between partners in a trade, since the harmed party can end the deal and move to the competitors. What you're pointing to are examples of externalities, not refutations of the market model.

Rights are a dynamically evolving body. Someone would not consider women fit to vote a century ago. That right came into being because people (a) first theoretically envisioned it (b) desired it (c) acted to create it and then enshrine in corresponding documents. As one can note, rights are not primordial and they come into being of people's desires. My position is that by picking a "primal rights" view one ignores the transient nature of rights. A husband's right to spousal rape, by the way, was extinguished by modern law. Replaced with the right of the wife to file for rape in case of the above. So one person lost a right, the other got a right. Rights change fast and sometimes chaotically. I do not think today's rights are a good framework; as any set of static rights, they will be subject to mass changes, and a lot faster than suffering will cease to exist on Earth.

What are you talking about? What authoritarian is in control of economic matters?

The owner of the private property is in full control of said property and economic decisions related to the same. Owners of private property, collectively, control the entirety of productive property in society - personal consumption excluded, although there are nice examples of personal consumption items and means of production blurring together, like computers.

With regards to your point, of course it is possible to point out that democratic methods are ineffective at making certain types of decisions. Neither is it warranted or reasonable to demand democratic decisions in all things - obviously you can have democracy without everything being decided on in a democratic way. If you permit private property on any level, then that follows naturally. Besides which, democratic systems are a method of organizing interaction of individuals, not a mechanism for creating a collective intelligence (<- hyperbole). It strikes me that this kind of thinking shows that those who use "pro-democracy" arguments are no less hidebound than the people they criticize for thinking in terms of markets all the time. Perhaps more-so, since at least marketeers generally are pro-democracy in some things.

*laughs* See a few paragraphs above. I have two tendencies: radical-democratic and technocratic. But you chose to ask me why I feel that "I know better than the person" and then you explained it: democracy is not replacing intelligence.

Oh, wow. So what happens if the person who buys the company is incompetent and brings it to ruin? That's your counterargument? What happens then is that the company is ruined. Same thing that happens whenever some incompetent buffoon takes over any management in any system.

That is an example of how the interests of a person and a body corporate can diverge even if the person owns the body corporate. And of course, the interests of an idiot or of a competitor's plant who has to sabotage and destroy the body corporate will significantly diverge from the interests of the body corporate. The plant would be hostile, while the idiot would simply have too primitive interests to adequately manage the company. And Jobs? His interests diverged, so he just sold the company. )

Insofar as you ignore the means to calculate the GDP equivalent of these non-market services, then sure it is.

The only way to calculate them is to (a) impute costs of resources used to produce them, providing there is a MARKET for said resources (b) impute costs from a similar product, sold as a commodity in a different market somewhere else. As you can see, if there's no market left at all, both means of doing so also lose usefulness. But I agree that so as long as markets continue to exist even outside of some experimental nation, GDP remains useful.

Besides which, all of this ranting about how a command economy has no defined GDP does little to address the reason this was brought up in the first place - the importance of an effective measure of total production, and overall production efficiency.

I said that the criteria were often deficient because they relied on just one indicator (GDP), which is a market-specific type of criteria and it evaluates very good the relative performance of market economies. I don't disagree these measures are important for the world as it is now, although I already noted that the creation of HDI, PQLI and other complex indicators is the result of a demand for a more wide indicator that would measure other components of human development. By the way, I like the term "human development". It appeals to me as a neo-Marxist, and it appeals to me on a deeper sense than just "efficiency" or "production". ))

[The Yosemite Bear]

so they maced young ladies for watching the protest, what would they have done if some one had given RATM a bull horn?

[Thinktank]

Sorry to interupt another engaging and entertaining argument...

More than 700 arrested in Wall Street protest
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/ ... BL20111002

Excerpt:

(Reuters) - Police reopened the Brooklyn Bridge Saturday evening after more than 700 anti-Wall Street protesters were arrested for blocking traffic lanes and attempting an unauthorized march across the span.

The arrests took place when a large group of marchers, participating in a second week of protests by the Occupy Wall Street movement, broke off from others on the bridge's pedestrian walkway and headed across the Brooklyn-bound lanes.

[Slacker]

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/10/01 ... ll-street/

The thousands of indefatigable protestors, who have been risking their eyes and recording equipment against Wall Street’s personal jack-booted thugs in the NYPD at the Occupation of Wall Street, recently garnered even more support– the US Marines. That’s the type of support that might make an NYPD cop think twice before he decides to go all Tiananmen Square on a group of teenage girls armed with chalk and cardboard signs.

The Occupy Wall Street movement may have thought it broke new ground when the NYC Transit Union joined their movement, but that ground just tipped the Richter Scale with news that United States Army and Marine troops are reportedly on their way to various protest locations to support the movement and to protect the protesters.

Here’s the message Ward Reilly relayed from another Marine, on his facebook page:

“I’m heading up there tonight in my dress blues. So far, 15 of my fellow marine buddies are meeting me there, also in Uniform. I want to send the following message to Wall St and Congress:I didn’t fight for Wall St. I fought for America. Now it’s Congress’ turn.

My true hope, though, is that we Veterans can act as first line of defense between the police and the protester. If they want to get to some protesters so they can mace them, they will have to get through the Fucking Marine Corps first. Let’s see a cop mace a bunch of decorated war vets.I apologize now for typos and errors.

Typing this on iPhone whilst heading to NYC. We can organize once we’re there. That’s what we do best.If you see someone in uniform, gather together.

A formation will be held tonight at 10PM.

We all took an oath to uphold, protect and defend the constitution of this country. That’s what we will be doing.


Hope to see you there!!”

Kudos to Mr. Reilly! Thank You for having the courage and foresight to see right past the transparently false and empty patriotism that’s perpetually touted by the defense skanks and petro whores in Congress in order to keep their campaign coffers filled to the brim, while your brothers and sisters suffer massive cuts and are forced to live with PTSD with little if any help from the very government and country you gave your life to thank you for recognizing that this movement is not about a bunch of screaming white liberal kids with Henna tattoos, but a universal and profound rejection of the unchecked and undue influence the plutocrats on Wall Street have had on the decision-making in Washington. Thank You for your service and thank you for seeing through all the mountains of bullsh#t being shoveled around the clock by the Koch. Bros puppets in Washington via their lapdogs in the media.

It’s safe to say to if Mr. Reilly and his fellow marines lend their voices, it could be a defining moment that gives the Occupation of Wall Street movement the just right amount of fuel it needs to catch fire. After all, it would be interesting to see the media ignore NYPD cops pepper spraying decorated war veterans, assuming the donut marchers dared to even consider the notion of trying

The inherent bias of the article aside, if true, again another step in the direction of 'this isn't going to go away'.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Sorry to interupt another engaging and entertaining argument...

More than 700 arrested in Wall Street protest
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/ ... BL20111002

Excerpt:

(Reuters) - Police reopened the Brooklyn Bridge Saturday evening after more than 700 anti-Wall Street protesters were arrested for blocking traffic lanes and attempting an unauthorized march across the span.

The arrests took place when a large group of marchers, participating in a second week of protests by the Occupy Wall Street movement, broke off from others on the bridge's pedestrian walkway and headed across the Brooklyn-bound lanes.

Actually there seems to be a lot more to this story:

Don't know of the source's validity, so take with a grain of salt...

New York Times Blatantly Edits Article About Occupy Wall Street To Protect Police (IMAGE)

Today police in New York City allowed protesters from the Occupy Wall Street rallies to march onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Shortly after they arrested hundreds of protesters for blocking traffic on the bridge, even though they’d allowed them to enter it.

Here you can clearly see NYPD officers leading protesters onto the bridge:



The New York times published an article on their website, explaining the true nature of what had happened. 20 minutes later they had changed it, to make it seem like the police had no blame in this incident.

The man who edited the article has strong ties to the New York Police Department. You can read his bio here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/busin ... times.html

Below are screenshots of the same article, side by side. Clearly the New York Times would rather protect the police than report the truth.

[K. A. Pital]

What, people discovered swift internet self-censorship by the "free" media? I've already said that this shit is downright fucking ubiqutous in Russia (in fact, one of the articles titled "Russia leads by the number of billionaires in Europe" was changed during a timeframe of 15 minutes into "The richest Russian man has been determined" and "Russian pension age to be raised, says Minister of Finance" was changed to "Russian pension reform progress debated" in ca. 20 minutes).

Free media, my ass.