Re: Union Board Elections 2006 - UPDATED 26/4
withoutaface said:
Mixed economy. Putting the failures of mixed economies down to failures in laissez faire philisophy is just as fallacious as putting them down to socialism.
I agree with you to an extent. However, I am criticising actually existing capitalism. Laissez faire, if it did exist, where everyone has agency, everyone is equal, may indeed be a better system than we have now. But the fact that it doesn't. My critique is directed at the world we live in NOW.
Or they could, like, you know, not trade at all? Nobody forces countries to trade, and if they can generate enough food to feed themselves and are losing out under free trade (doubtful, but let's go with it), then they should stop trading. If they can't grow enough crops to feed themselves, then it's not the other countries' faults that they are dying of starvation.
No one forces them to trade. Try telling that to governments who have been forced to open there economies up by structual adjustment packages etc.
If people are dying from starvation, it is a global responsibility to do something, not a national responsibility. No one should be living in luxury (ie. western conspicuous consumption), while people are dying because they cannot eat. I believe there is an extra 2/3 food production in the world than what is needed to feed the entire world. Much of this can also be blamed towards export dumping of primary commodities, meaning huge amounts of produce sits in fields to rot, rather than been given to feed those who are staving.
This isn't a simple opt-in or opt-out system. You ignore that countries are forced into these situations through the actions of various actors across time (ie. European colonialism etc.).
More breakthroughs have occurred in the last 100 years in more liberal countries than less liberal ones.
Look at Scandanavia or Japan. Those breakthroughs have occured via statist and activist interventionist policies.
You made the first claim, being that patents rob Africans of AIDS drugs. Now I ask you to back that assertion up with evidence showing that these drugs would have been developed without copyright.
I say that they have robbed them.
Maybe they wouldn't have developed without patents, I cannot say they can or can't. But this isn't the burden for me to prove. You are the one suggesting that under socialism they wouldn't be able to deveop. You prove it. Don't shift the blame onto me, just because you know such things are not falsifiable.
I could just as easily call these economies socialism, because a large proportion of their production is controlled by the states. Stop constructing strawmen.
1. There is a difference between socialism and communism.
2. Communism has no requirement for the state. In face, Marx says the state are an instrument of the Capitalist class. While I don't agree completly with that (as you can see, I mentioned above that there is room for statist policies), it is evident that communism isn't about state control over the means of production, but rather the peoples control.
Why then, has the general trend been as countries become less liberal economically, people have more and more freedoms stripped from them, and earn significantly lower real wages?
Evidence please? Please prove your assertation.
Look at Scandanvia and welfare statist policies. Higher wages. Look at the destruction of the welfare state in the United States since Johnson's 'great society', lower wages.
In the developing world, you are looking very simplistically. Subsistence production and production within the family are not measured. Yet these contribute greatly to the quality of life. Liberal regimes have destroyed these. While wages may in some (keyword: some) circumstances may be higher, the destruction of other sources of quality of life (ie. production outside the market) are not taken into account. However, the evidence does suggest liberal regimes have lowered wages and not only lowered wages, but made employment increasingly insecure as capitle becomes increasingly mobile countries must accept low wages and poor regulation.
And pseudo-capitalist states have not provided the freedom necessary for maximum quality of life. What's your point?
As I said. I am criticising actually existing capitalism, not the neoclassical idal of lassez faire capitalism. While I could easily criticise it, in this conversation I have never criticised the neoclassical ideal.
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Supposably I am contradictory. Very rich coming from you. Stop avoiding backing your assertations up, stop shifting the blame and respond directly to critisms in your arguement (rather than avoiding them).
