There is No Free Market Without "Socialism"

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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Sorry I edited this too much and it took way too long. I give up. there is no structure, only vague sarcasm. brainstorm!:

I am a welfare loser who can not possibly exist without the help of the government. My life is nothing more than a caveman’s without them. I kowtow desperately and pathetically before my master Obama, who promises me a utopian future of everything being perfect within the next 6 months.

I currently sell my manual labor to a company that requires me to keep track of small computers at restaurants that are used to read the ID cards of college students with meal plans.

This business can not exist unless somebody built roads. I don’t actually use roads in my daily walking and typing between a few cubicles, but let’s just say, some parts of the business wouldn’t exist unless roads were there. Also we need the internet i think.

We need the roads for students to drive to restaurants in order to spend money at them. If our small company had to build the roads ourselves in order to get commuting students to those restaurants… well… that just wouldn’t make any sense.

Who built those roads? Good ol’ Uncle Fascist Communist Hitler Freedom-Hating Tax Man.

He sent police to your forefather’s house, beat the crap out of him, took a portion of his money, imprisoned him for a short period. They then used that money to mine small rocks, refine them into an asphalt-like substance, dig very large amounts of dirt, dispose of that dirt (onto your forefather’s front patio), place the road substance into that ditch using large, rented machines, smash the distantly mined rocks into a flat surface using other expensive objects, also the paint must have cost dozens of dollars.

The internet was also a government program, founded and created from scratch by Al Gore, or probably some other excellent government employee. ARPAnet it might have been called. The Mark-number something was also an excellently over priced piece of machinery that probably wasn’t needed to calculate artillery trajectories during ww2.

That ‘computer’ cost one quadrillion dollars before calculating inflation. What private company would spend this?

The only full size highway that I have heard proposed (I guess there’s some I haven’t heard of) was a big one from central texas to somewhere into mexico. This highway would obviously be used primarily by the local texas merchants to import goods from desperate, injured, polluted, exploited mexican workers for sale to careless american consumers at super great profits! The local college restaurants that i work with would need a very different fund raising campaign for the millions of dollars required to build a road to a college so that I can work at my business. 1% interest is less attractive after only two googleplex years.

Also someone needs to build roads that allow the existence of the other sorts of professions that exist. The roads for mine probably cost a few hundred million. I bet there are at least two dozen other reasons for building a road. And they are just not cheap.

Where is the balance between government programs that are wasteful and those that aren’t? Should we decide the placement of individual government contracts on this balance scale based on how many people besides those directly employed by the contract benefit? In other words, a contract sent by the government to a road building firm is good because it benefits many besides the actual road builders (like tech support warehouse data entry economics majors). Illegally, inexpensively (by american standards) manufactured mexican products: less so.

Free market investors want short run returns. A local neighborhood program can get away with costly long term goals because neighbors trust eachother. I don’t trust war or taking advantage of trade with countries with less expensive labor safety and environmental laws, but I do trust that many other government programs are focused more on intangible benefits that don’t show up on the profit line than Any Publicly Traded And Scrutinized Company Can Be. A company that has good goals is either small, has a PR department, or is rare.

My company isn’t charity and I don’t really want to work for one. I want to bring a service that people are willing to pay for. To make such an opportunity, we need to steal from hard working americans at gun point to build roads.

Pay your taxes, we need roads. You can not fundamentally be opposed to taxes unless you hate roads.

Only taxes can bring about as much non profit activity as we Already need. Welcome to socialism.

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Sorry you couldn’t edit it so you could at least get it a little right…er correct…um right.

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I understand what you’re saying. That big long term investments cannot be undertaken by corporations. Especially if little or no profit is to be made i.e. NASA style research into the atmosphere of planets etc…

But surely a free market can exist but it wouldn’t have all the cool stuff to sell us; has it does now. In addition, drugs aimed at diseases in which only a few people get, are bankrolled through socialism. Socialism definitely has its place within a free market. I would say that both can exist without the other. However, don’t have a rare disease :wink:

As for roads, couldn’t they operate based on tolls?

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Roads can be privately owned. Which would make them superior along with everything else.

Keep bowing to Obama.

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i would have edited this more if i thought anyone cared more. maybe the caring people are waiting for me to respond a second time. i have attempted to do so. i hope to receive a better response, i can try harder. i apologize for flipping out about roads but it would just take too long to edit it out of there. how the fuck did you focus on roads? trolls really?

a free market can exist exactly at the same time as government, tax funded programs. You can actually have private, profit based health care, AT THE SAME TIME as government subsidized health care. i have actually not heard of any proposal to ban and outlaw all doctors who work for profit in the free market. I am actually extremely certain that any such proposal would result in the immediate dismissal of whoever wrote it.

it would have all of the cool stuff like boob implants (which are not cool but actually the opposite, and that is ok with me and any proposed government) because nobody who has received a vote has ever proposed the ending of the free market in the health care industry. price controls on drugs may stifle research, but tax funded grants will stimulate that same research by an equal amount [ideally](can taxes be aimed at the right targets, or should risk assessment analysis directors who are biased against sick and poor people decide? think harder. which is better for the majority? is the government in charge of forcing things to be better for the majority? {yes})

it would surprise me very, extremely much if anyone could provide anything like any severely wrong and biased right wing data showing anything like this. i am really very certain that there is not even a ridiculously incorrect “study” against which actual economists can argue. there is absolutely no data whatsoever that could possibly lead anyone to think that a road to ANYWHERE (outside of privately constructed neighborhoods… and they sure do consistently take way too long to cover up the construction errors… in multiple privately constructed neighborhoods i’ve watched construct) can exist without government taxation.

actual demonstrative data would turn the economics community on its head. there is no way all roads can be paid for by tolls unless Maybe you want some incredible robot development for the tolls and construction? maybe in a hundred years. then maybe use those robots for public schools. or should children of people who don’t have money for private school be forced to build those roads? that works out great! wait no i mean badly. it works out badly.

i thought that it was obvious to everyone that your response to me, quoted here, is extremely false.

i mean specifically relating to roads. I was under the impression that there is absolutely nothing close to a privately created, owned, maintained, and loved road in all of america. interstate 95, a very useful road along the entire east coast, is not privately owned. is there anything that is comparable to 1% of this road?

is there a privately created, owned, maintained and loved road in america? besides someones driveway. sorry for the sarcasm if i am wrong, but i could have sworn i am so right about roads… i didn’t think it was a controversy (and really any example you give… you’ll have a hard time proving that you are not talking about a rare fluke… i did not expect my METAPHOR to be called into question… has this forum been overtaken by trolls? please everyone be on the look out for them; know what the word ‘troll’ means)

yeah i apologized in order to warn providers of proper responses that my post might be very slightly less than perfect. thank you for your participation.

if some of you guys troll me… just know i am here because i want readers to learn. i am not bragging about how great i am, i would talk about what i do at work if i wanted to do that. i have a degree in economics from a university with an exceptional marketing department, unlike possibly everyone here. i want to learn about how other disciplines will affect my economic-data oriented interpretation of the world.

i want to know how the predictable right wing responses actually line up with data. i do not want to hear the obviously enragingly incorrect responses that truly make me believe that i have only been trolled. i apologize if you guys arent trolls but if you arent, your lack of effort is rude. (the one guy who does not speak english, you are good; your response was the one that does not make me mad. you say words that make sense; your english is good. i am angry at the other people who did not try hard enough to actually say what their opinions are. all of your opinions are all wrong, though)

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Yeah, I know, the USA and UK for example. I am saying that a free market can exist without big government( state socialism ). Trouble is, who would want that, same goes for roads?

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No decent doctor would elect to work for government-funded programs when they can make shitloads more profit working independently/privately.

I don’t think you really understand what socialization actually entails.

time.com/time/magazine/artic … 88,00.html

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_road

took about 20 seconds to google

Of course not, America is a pseudo-socialist state. Many roads do have private investors, and you’ll see that number rise as privatization increases (won’t happen if Obama can help it). But asking if any major road is 100% private is a joke inquiry, big brother would never allow that.

Don’t throw your life away in futility, people will always believe what they want. When it comes down to it, in the end, although none of them’ll admit it. Just like your indoctrinated, government-nuthugging ,psuedoeconomic bullschitz picked up at your favorite university.

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Duality, I followed a link from the ‘Private Road’ article on Wikipedia, and read about one of the example communities they provide, Rossmoor, California. It is an interesting case study. The article points out that, “According to a June 2006 consultant’s report to the Rossmoor Planning Committee, the most cost effective solution for Rossmoor would be to be annexed by the city of Seal Beach.”

There are some things that private business can’t effectively do. Whether roads fall into that set is debatable, but basically any time there is a common good (such as a natural resource), private business is not incentivized properly to deal with it efficiently; externalities aren’t priced in.

Returning to roads, look at a private road owned by a community. Everyone who owns property along these roads is contractually obligated to chip in to maintain them. They have a treasurer, sometimes a board of governors, and in many ways behave as though they are a government. Rossmoor is a good example, where the residents vote on policy changes with in the community. They’re just local governments, which are well and good until you want to have a national highway system or fight wars around the world.

There’s really very little difference between big government and big corporate governance, in terms of the incentives that are set up anyway. Government just has more shareholders.

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Right ,but I think that’s referring to the community in general

Right, I never said I support privatization of natural resources… lol. That would just lead to a new-age serfdom.

Right, this wasn’t what I had in mind when stating i support privatization. In pure form, the road would be privately owned by a group with the sole focus on maintaining and improving it, with income coming solely from tolls. This would provide the necessary interest to ensure the road is superior in all facets and eliminate lazy and inefficient government involvement.

Take a look at this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism. The virtually perfect system of government; with the pitfalls of human corruption and inefficiency virtually eliminated.

Capitalist governments ARE corporate governments.

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Government is often a poor method of addressing social problems, and it is often lazy and inefficient. But tolls are absurdly inefficient. Picture the traffic that would exist in a city if every road had a toll! Collecting tolls is costly, both becuase you have to build and maintain tolls, and because they back up traffic for miles as people slow from travelling speed to stop one by one to throw in some change. In many cases, the price paid to a toll does not recoup the cost of lost productivity from placing an additional stop-sign on every road.

As technology improves, this is definitely changing, and it will get to a point where it is efficient enough to use passive tolls that don’t require stopping. But to make that happen, there would need to be a vast network of regulations ensuring that all cars have the mechanism to pay, and that those that don’t are caught. You’d also need to advertise the price, and regulate those charging it to make sure the advertising is accurate; if you don’t know that you’ve been charged $50 a mile for use of a road, there can’t be any market pressure.

That last sentence raises another issue: if I build a road that wraps around a building, anyone going to that building has to pay, no matter what I charge. Competition in roads is very difficult, because there are severe limitations on how many roads you can build that take you to the same place.

Anarcho-capitalism is an interesting thought experiment, and in a lot of situations it would produce a more efficient system than we currently have. But taken to its extreme, it goes too far. There are certain things that government does more efficiently than the free market does, like enforce laws. Government should be oriented to take advantage of what society will naturally produce if left alone, but it should also design its interventions to improve the market.

As an analogy, look at evolution: the anarcho-capitalistic version of evolution would say that we shouldn’t treat illnesses, because we should let the free market of our biology determine our success. But medical intervention is a good things; a lot of times, evolutionary processes are capricious and arbitrary, and medicine flatness those out. Does it dampen evolutionary progress? Yes, it must to some degree. But most seem to agree that that is a sacrifice worth making.

Similarly, government intervention will always stifle the market in some ways, but may improve the outcome, because a pure market won’t always produce the most efficient results. Market failures mean that the ideal market is not entirely free. As an evolutionary system, economies can benefit from the same type of top-down interventions.

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Roads could easily be expanded without inefficient gov’t involvement. Imagine having a babyback 8-laner instead of a lumpy 4-laned pile of shit with potholes every three feet. You think they wouldn’t haul ass if their livelihood/income depended on people using that road for travel? It would be like clockwork.

Collecting tolls, for example, is nothing compared to the waste corporate arms manufacturers (aka big busniess/Capitol Hill) lay on our tax money with bullshit like Iraq every few decades or so.

Roads connecting to building would be owned and maintained by the buildings themselves; and most likely free of charge since you are soliciting their business.

The government doesn’t enforce laws efficiently at all. The criminal justice system is centered around one thing… making a profit. Wanna know where most of it’s resources go? Thats right… traffic cops.

Why? Because writing chicken shit tickets is more important than cleaning up inner city neighborhoods and helping develop community cohesion. Police exist to serve and protect; not to harm the general populace and enforce caste systems… people forgot that long ago.

Medicine is a product of evolution. We evolved to possess ability to use medicine and are able to… don’t really get your point. Your saying government is the most efficient way to manipulate and adjust the environment for human nature… I’m saying it’s one of the worst.

That’s not what research indicates.

Market failures are the inevitable result of centralized economies as soon as good ole’ human nature kicks in.

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I agree, but that doesn’t change that it enforces them better than the free market does. If your only other option is a vehicle that runs on burning tires, a hummer is an efficient choice in a vehicle. The private market’s version of enforcing laws is to reduce laws to one: might makes right.

Which research?

Government itself can be seen as a market failure, although before it starts failing, it is an institution that the market selects for.

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The government’s role is to allow social inequalities to occur that they then attempt to stifle by enforcing caste systems. How is this not “might makes right”?

People need protection from to the prejudices they’re exposed to, from state-sponsored stratification. Paradoxically, people need to be protected from the infection of government in reality, as opposed to by it.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? … _id=636224
faculty-staff.ou.edu/M/William.L … papJLE.pdf
hoover.org/publications/digest/3532186.html

Everywhere privatization is applied, godly results ensue.

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Social inequalities occur in the absense of governments, and not all governments enforce caste systems. Many (though clearly not all) governments improve social inequality, e.g. by guaranteeing (or even attempting to guarantee) that everyone has the same rights. That is, they define right regardless of might, and (attempt to) enforce that right regardless of might.

The articles you provide offer examples of where privatization has brought improvements. None of them suggest privatizing such things as roads or the legal system, so they should not be taken as supporting that claim. Besides, privatization hasn’t always brought improvements. The partial privatization of Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac are examples of failures of privatization.

Either way, my point was that private companies cannot do certain things, at least not without becomming the government. How can a private company defend a country at war (that is, without being hired by the government)? How can a private company build an efficient highway system that doesn’t require a toll between every exit? How can a private legal system protect the rights of minorities from the tyranny of the majority? These are things that aren’t covered in those articles, and that privatization cannot improve.

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Enforcing social equality in the absence of actual social equality is simply protecting established caste systems.

“The wealthiest 1 percent of families owns roughly 34.3% of the nation’s net worth, the top 10% of families owns over 71%, and the bottom 40% of the population owns way less than 1%.”
faculty.fairfield.edu/facult … wealth.htm

And you’re telling this “right” needs to be enforced? The right for the majority to serve as dogs, for a small portion to profit?

“Such is the state of affairs which prevails among them. And often rulers and their subjects may come in one another’s way, whether on a journey or on some other occasion of meeting, on a pilgrimage or a march, as fellow-soldiers or fellow-sailors; aye and they may observe the behaviour of each other in the very moment of danger—for where danger is, there is no fear that the poor will be despised by the rich—and very likely the wiry sunburnt poor man may be placed in battle at the side of a wealthy one who has never spoilt his complexion and has plenty of superfluous flesh—when he sees such an one puffing and at his wits’-end, how can he avoid drawing the conclusion that men like him are only rich because no one has the courage to despoil them? And when they meet in private will not people be saying to one another ‘Our warriors are not good for much’?”

I’m not interested in what they support, only what is shown to be superior. For a scholarly article to profess a bias or opinion would be highly unprofessional; they must work off of fact.

No, they are example of the failure of government (particularly the capitalist socioeconomic system).

Easily

In anarcho-capitalism, there IS no minority. If you haven’t understood that yet, you haven’t understood anything.

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In a elementary school cafeteria, the bullies get most of the milk money and most of the cupcakes. How can you blame government for such inequality? The rights I’m talking about are the right to a fair trial, the right to free speech, the right to freedom of religion, none of which are protected in anarcho-capitalism. In an anarcho-capitalist system, religions practiced by only 10% of the population are still going to be minority religions. Viewpoints held by only 10% will be minority viewpoints. Physical characteristics that are only exhibited by 10% of the population will still make those people biological minorities.

There are minorities just the same in anarcho-capitalism as there are in constituional democracies, it’s just that in anarcho-capitalism there’s nothing to stop the 90% of the population that agrees about something from slaughtering the 10% that doesn’t. There are plenty of historical examples, and the US constitutional system was revolutionary for establishing laws protecting the rights of minorities (though admittedly, they often failed in practice). Still, destroying the institution of slavery in this country never would have happened in the absense of government, and in places where the government is weak it still exists.

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Easily. What the school basically requires you to do is to trade in a variety of personal liberties in exchange for reception of a variety of provisions: one of those being protection from physical harm.

What you’ve basically done is provided a straw man fallacy by equating conditions in a free state of existence to those of elementary school America.

Anarcho-capitalism is the epitome of freedom; person freedom. Your state-sponsored socialism works to rescind the self-evident rights of man in exchange for the prosperity of the the greater good (which, ironically, serves to achieve the exact converse).

Right. Anarcho-capitalism is not based on the whims of a misguided majority; that would be your socialism. Anarcho-capitalism is centered around the individual freedoms and prosperity of all mankind (which then proceed to fulfill the whole).

You must also understand another thing. Minorities continue to be minorities based on purpose. The issue was never with race, religion, gender or any other secular state of existence. In such as system, a significant group had to exist to be exploited by the few. Biological and religious differences only existed as the scapegoat for it’s rationalization. There never was a pure enmity within man.

Which 10%? The one you made up?

It also seems ironic you would state this, since it would appear to be the basic blueprint of a modern democracy. You think because it’s no longer based on physiology or religion it’s dissipated? Think harder.

I took a shit earlier, then wiped my ass. Do you think I really did it because I enjoy wiping my ass?

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So your claim is that, in the absense of government, there will never be a situation where a religious minority is persecuted by a majority of a different religion? If that’s the case, why do you believe this? Nothing in human history supports such a stance; it seems to be entirely based on faith.

In the absense of a government that protects certain rights for everyone, there will be nothing to stop groups of people from doing whatever they want to outgroup individuals. People form ‘tribes’ by nature; even without a national government, there will be gangs and coalitions that will compete for resources.

What would stop 100 young men from joining together to steal resources from individuals or smaller, less powerful groups? People have done this kind of thing, why believe that they would not do it again? Short of the general populace reaching an agreement to secure everyone’s rights to a minimum degree, and appointing certain people to protect those without the power to protect themselves, there is nothing to disincentivize tribal conflict.

But wait! An agreement that secures the rights of all and provides for the equal protection of all already exists! And it is the basis for our national government!

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As I understand it, capitalism and socialism are economic systems. Either one could exist in a society with or devoid of freedoms or rights. Rights like free speech/etc are guaranteed by the government and enforced by the legal and police systems. I can see nothing about either capitalism or socialism which either necessitates or precludes these sorts of rights.

Capitalism is usually defined by private ownership and a high degree of personal choice, regarding your own life and money/property. This usually means a minimal amount of taxes. Socialism is defined usually as a high amount of public ownership, and central control or distribution of money/property, and goods and services. Basically, they are economic. And of course capitalism and socialism are both extremes, neither of which could exist on their own in an extreme or “pure” form. People need freedom. They also need government. Therefore society will fall somewhere in the middle. You could call a society “capitalist” or “socialist” depending on which end it tends to lean toward more, but using these terms is always with the recognition that every society or economic system, in reality, will incorporate elements of its theoretical opposite.

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EVERYTHING in human history supports this stance. People don’t persecute one another without anything to gain from it.

No point in outgrouping individuals when power/influence gain becomes moot. The only power will come from effective provision of services.

An agreement is reached; it outspans from human nature. Human rights are universal and therefore do not require laws to be self-evidenced.

When power is balanced, more powerful groups can’t exist. In capitalist states, upper classes and concentration of wealth exist because corporations are able to manipulate governments into legislating their advantages. Legalization of guns, for example, actually reduces crime. This has been validated through research. People think twice about their actions when the scales are even.

I’ll pretend and hope this was a joke and try to refrain from lmao. Either way, big government will always need naive little boys and girls to ween on it’s suckling teet.

They are socio-economic systems. Capitalism, in its current state, is defined economically, socially and culturally thorugh the interplay of corporations and legislators.