to end all the communistic crap talk

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

Or why capitalism is the only way there is.

I am writing this because the obvious ignorance and half witted, half digested, make-you-feel-special-and-caring sophisticated-cosmopolitan-woman pick up lines that pass for discussion of economical, social and political matters related to socialism and communism peddled on this forum have managed to rattle me enough. Considering the audience, i will steer clear of two possible pitfalls. Firstly, i will not use quotes, even to books/texts considered very well known, so well known in fact that you are likely to flunk high school if you didn’t get them. Instead i will try an all-in-one packaging method, putting everything that is needed in here, and fatally cutting out a lot of the very interesting, but sadly an iota too sophisticated sub discussions in the literature. Secondly, i will construct, or attempt to construct this text so that the would be linguistic relativists aren’t easily dragged off track by some unlikely approach to my words. Whether that will succeed, or whether it can ever in fact succeed to any measure is entirely a matter open to discussion.

Preliminaries (where we define our terms. Please do not skip this part. If you do and later on try to build an argument showing you to have skipped, you will be ridiculed, insulted, at the very best ignored. Not worth the risk.)

Money is a shorthand. Money represents work. That is not however to mean, as the more muscularly inclined of you will automatically imply, the work to make something. It means the work to get something. Entirely different matter. The 10$ you pay for a hamburger does not represent the work that went into making the bread and mixing the toxic poisons they conventionally call “ham”, then frying it all in indigestible natural-identical fats that are more plastic identic than natural identic. The 10$ represents the work one would have to do to get a hamburger, starting at your current position. Hence, if you are in Brooklyn, its a decent deal. If you are in Manhattan its an excellent deal, considering you will probably be hard pressed to find one for that cheap there, and if you are in Sudan it is probably a very very good deal considering they are Muslims and don’t eat pork. Do not be fooled by thinking a hamburger is a hamburger. There is no such thing. Water in the desert is not just water. Getting this simple difference clear will hopefully help you understand some of the everyday dilemmas that no doubt plague your waking hours.
While a hamburger is not a hamburger, money is always money. That is the purpose we have them for, and thats why they are a shorthand. It would be practically impossible to keep mental track of what is each single object worth to each single guy there is and always factor it in. For instance consider there are 2 bottles of coke, and 3 glasses of milk, 3 hamburgers, 1 cheeseburger and 2 sushi servings. This is all the economy there is, nothing else. Consider the population is joe, koe, loe, poe and doe. These five fellows are hungry. Who gets what ? Maybe koe likes coke more than loe. By how much ? Maybe joe is a vegetarian, maybe doe is japanese, maybe loe doesn’t really like milk, but doe really really hates milk. As opposed to joe who really really absolutely and forever hates milk. How do you split all that ?
Some idiots also known as pragmatists thought hey, if there are a bunch of people desiring a bunch of resources, and there is not enough to get around you should split everything so that the total amount of suffering is minimal, or the total happiness is maximal. But who has a right to decide on happiness ? If koe and loe both want a hamburger, and there is only one, who gets it ? Check out the silly shit they came up with : let the people decide for themselves ! Is this idiotic or what ? Actually trust loe and koe to duke it out for themselves ? Not make them apply to a committee to split their food for them ? Not depend on the state ? Horrible ! Keep this up they might even be able to resolve most of their problems by themselves, and not need our help. What good would we be then ? Might as well go fry hamburgers for a living.
The more perceptive of you might have spotted the snicker and sarcasm in this last paragraph. What you might not know however is how precisely what i say relates to what happens. Unbelievably, it does.
So lets see, we got 2 cokes and 3 milks, 3 hamburgers, 1 cheeseburger, 2 sushi. Now lets ask our blokes, who wants what ?
J : i am very hungry, so i want 2 cokes and 3 hamburgers please
k: i am not only hungry but also very very smart, so i want 2 milk and 2 sushi, and should get it before anyone else.
L: i am a loving and compassionate fellow, and i been doing so much good to the world that giving me 1 hamburger and 1 cheeseburger and 1 or 2 cokes would only be fair
p: im gonna beat the living shit out of the lot of you if i don’t get my protein. 3 hamburgers and 3 milks, lets go.
D: i am on a diet, so 1 sushi and 1 cheeseburger, and a couple milk will do me fine. Got chocolate fudge anywhere ?
Which puts us in the unpleasant position that not only we ate the chocolate fudge before we started writing this, but also we just found out we need 3 or 4 cokes, 7 milks, 7 hamburgers, 2 cheeseburgers and no less than 3 sushi servings. Excellent. Thats roughly twice the stock, so obviously somebody is definitely going to diet some. Who and how much ? While smarties like future man would have us debate whether loe should get an enforced diet, or wether the smart or the caring should get the food first, or maybe they should all draw lots, or better yet we eat it all and they can go sweat their own, the aforementioned part time idiots part time very smart utilitarianists found what is in fact a mathematical solution for our problem. Which is to say it is not open to debate, it is correct and proven correct. Lets see.
Okay, each of you put prices on the stuff we got, lets see what happens.
J: to me the stuff is worth 5$ the 1st coke, 3$ each subsequent, 10$ the 1st hamburger, 7$ the next and 5$ the last, and the rest of the stuff i wouldn’t touch if you paid me.
K: i would pay 15 for the 1st milk because i am very thirsty, and 3 for the 2nd, and 12$ the 1st serving of sushi. I don’t know about the 2nd, i am not all that hungry… maybe 5$ ?
l: i would pay 15 for the hamburger, 12 for the cheeseburger and 15 for the 1st coke. Maybe 3$ for the 2nd.
P: meh im not all that rich, so 5$ each hamburger and 4$ each milk.
D : i want the sushi bad man, 15$ for it, and the cheeseburger too, 12.5$. each milk 3$.
Now we are getting somewhere. Lets order this :
cokes: 15$ loe, 5$ joe, 3$ joe, 3$ loe. Since we only have 2, both joe and loe get 1.
milks: 15$ koe, 4$ poe, 3$ doe, 3$ koe. Since we only have 3, koe gets 1, poe 1 and doe 1.
hamburgers : 15$ loe, 10$ joe, 7$ joe, 5$ x3 poe. Since we only have 3, loe gets one, joe gets 2.
cheeseburgers : 12$ loe, 12.5$ doe. So doe gets it.
Sushis : 15$ koe, 15$ doe, 12$ koe. Since we only have 2, koe and doe get it.
So this is how we split things then :
joe gets 1 coke of 2 he asked originally and 2 hamburgers of the 3 he asked. His own valuing of this would be 22$.
koe gets 1 milk and 1 sushi of the 2 each he asked. His own valuing of this would be 30$.
loe gets 1 coke of the two he wanted and 1 hamburger, but no cheeseburger. His own valuing of this would be 30$.
koe gets 1 milk of 2, and 1 sushi of 2. he valued this at 27$.
poe gets a glass of milk of the 3 hamburgers 3 milks he wanted. His valuing of this would be 4$.
doe gets the cheeseburger and the sushi, but no milk. According to himself, what he got is worth 27.5$.
Regardless of what we actually sell all the shit for, the total value of this particular way of splitting it, according to the only people who should have a say is 150.5$. Any other way of splitting things would result in a total value of the things eaten that is less. Hence it would produce less happiness and more misery. I can not insist enough on the following points :
The above is nothing else, and nothing less than a mathematical description of the problem of dividing things to people. It is not conjecture, it is not arbitrary, it is not conventional or a convention. It is, just as the line being the shortest distance between two points in euclidean space, or the circle the geometric place of all points at equal distance from a center, a matter of necessity. Mathematical necessity and logical necessity. You are not at your leisure to accept it or not, or maybe just look for something else that would better fit with your “identity” or “personal preferences”, one that would suit your mood and rock your boat. To all this you do not matter, to the point we could say you do not exist. It is here before you, it will be here after you finally surrendered your miserable black soul, it is universal and unchanging as all math and all logic. It can never be later proven to have been mistaken. It can not be amended or improved upon. To disregard it makes you an idiot, just as disregarding math or logic makes you an idiot.

Which brings us to the second concept we are defining today, ie the market. When we say market we refer to the above example. That is what a market economy is all about. You are free to say anything you want, but if you want your opinions to be respected and me to stop calling you an idiot you have to firstly understand and secondly offer good criticism to the above market model.

Historically there have been a few lines of criticism, that we shall briefly look at now.

  1. The people have no clue what they should be spending their money on. I perfectly agree, they do not. However, this leaves us with the impossible problem of who better than the people themselves knows what money should be spent on ? The burden of proof is so huge on convincing us that any other agency than the people involved should decide how to split resources that an exceptionally sound argument needs to be presented. Simply stating that sometimes the market economy apparently fails to make the best of a situation, and backing or attempting to back that with more or less extensive historical data misses the point in two important ways. Firstly, any other system of dividing resources ever used to date in any extensive form also apparently failed to make the best of situations, arguably in much more obvious and painful ways. Secondly our conclusions are a matter of deduction not induction. Arguing inductively against deductions is at least naïve. It does not matter how many times and how utterly wrong the implementation of the above failed or appeared to fail. It still stands correct, and fault is to be found elsewhere. This is essentially the argument various flavours of communists/socialists present when saying that Stalin does not invalidate their theoretical model because Stalin is a reality not a theory.
    2a. the above is a theoretical model, and as such can only be applied to theoretical people, but in practice the model has to be supplemented with mechanisms to compensate for the fact that real examples are always a lot more complicated than what we have studied, and while people have limits on their ability to effectively judge situations, especially when time is a factor, naturally occurring situations have no limit on their complexity. Hence it might be a good idea to limit the possible complexities of natural situations by adding a few extra principles to the above system. This is perfectly valid and understood criticism, and it is in fact applied widely by that which is called a market economy. It is the reason why, when you go to a fastfood and ask for a hamburger, you aren’t asked back whats it worth to you. They have fixed prices to simplify your life, because if you had to ponder how much is a hamburger worth to you every five minutes there would be precious little time for anybody to get anything done. Instead of doing it the hard way, always keeping real time track of all the people’s current valuation of a hamburger, and all the ham and burger stocks worldwide and always factoring things to get prices that fluctuate a millionth of a cent every minute they do it a simplified way, using fixed prices and trying to compete each other, selling cheaper or better hamburgers for the same prices as the competition (note that better for same price is, in fact, also cheaper, just another way of saying it)
    2b. the above is a theoretical model that presumes a sort of equality between economic agents (the puffy academic name for the likes of joe and poe) that might or might not happen in reality. Consider the million dollar poker game. If i have a million dollars in a bag and you have a crisp hundred bill, and we play poker, no cheating no marked cards no anything on those lines and play together until one man gets all i will win. Because i can afford to loose a lot more than you, i need a lot less luck than you to take all your money. It is in fact what casinos do to make money. They don’t cheat, they don’t steal. They simply keep you from cheating them and then crush you with their respectively larger budgets. Arguably 100 dollars means to you a lot more to you than it means to me, because it is all the money you got to your name, and i might not even bother pick a bill up. Arguably clever economical agents can use to their advantage such bottlenecks, of capital, of time, or resources, of knowledge etc. This too is perfectly valid and understood criticism, and it is in fact applied by what we call market economies. It is the reason stock exchange trading is so heavily regulated, to prevent insider trading for instance. It’s the reason there exist trust laws, not permitting companies to merge as to take up entire markets.

Notice that point 2 deals with obvious sufferances of what is known as competition, ie when economical agents don’t have the meta-resources (2a, by meta resources we simply mean the brainpower, or computer power. It is mistaken to assume truth is self obvious. Data has to be processed and data processing is a relatively expensive endeavour) or the resources (2b) to keep balance. While further points and discussions along the lines of point 2 are perfectly valid, welcome and likely to get you respected and influential, they are not outside capitalism. They are capitalism at its finest, and arguing them does not invalidate the system, quite the contrary might be argued.

One would suspect we are now reasonably equipped to proceed to the next stage, looking at what capitalism is and how it works. Capitalism is based on a few assumptions.

  1. People have a fundamental and inalienable right to property.
  2. The purpose of any political or economical system is to create the most possible happiness and the least possible unhappiness for the people.
  3. The only judges for happiness and unhappiness are the people themselves, and only to the extent of their respective happiness or unhappiness. Whether they are self consistent or not, whether they say they know or say they know not, whether we know better or not, there is no other judge, and can not be no other judge.
    4.(in response to detrop) All the resources that compose the economy are at least sometimes in less supply than the total demand for them. For those resources that are always in more supply than the total demand, [for instance but not limiting, words of a language, or spaces in the list of abstract concepts] this does not apply.

These are fundamental assumptions capitalism is based on. If they are invalidated, capitalism ceases to exist. However, if these premises are met, the system arising is capitalism. You are wrong in supposing capitalism is something that happens in the proximity of the wall street, a sort of mystic fluid oozing out of the banks and credit cards, some sort of economical ether. Capitalism is simply that form of social organization that is based on the 3 above assumptions. In as much as what you regard as an ideal system would meet and require the above 3 assumptions, you are in fact talking about a form of capitalism. Considering that, it might be beneficial for you to analyze what are the differences between capitalism as you see it (whether you call it panseism, socialism or pseudokreutzfeldism) and how it actually is implemented in various countries, and consider the possible reasons for those differences. It might even come to pass that you realize you have been wrong on some minute count or other.

That said, we can proceed to see what capitalism is not, or does not necessarily imply.

Firstly, is wrong to suspect there is any necessary connection between capitalism and greed. One can be a capitalist and greedy, one can be a capitalist and generous. One can be a communist and greedy, one can be a communist and generous. The concept that it is greed that makes things move in capitalism, as opposed to love, or altruism in some vaguely defined flavour of communism is laughable. The desire for objects moves any economy. If you don’t want a car, you wont buy or otherwise acquire a car. If nobody wants a car, cars wont be produced. If cars aren’t produced, there is no need for cheaper oil, better steel, better brakes, better leather chairs. If there is no need for any of those, there is little need for advanced math or experimental physics or chemistry. Pretty soon there is no need for anything at all, and we just sit around and bask in the greatness of the oneness or whatever the meditation fad is those days.
However, regardless of our meditation skills, we still breathe, and if we do we will need to eat, and if we don’t want to starve we need to get food produced. And since we make food, might as well make it good, and since we are eating might as well watch tv, or drink a beer, or get laid using contraception so as to not be pushed out of the house by all the offspring resulting (because then we would need a bigger house). Its not greed that moves the economy, its need. People need to eat, and people need cars. Sure, they don’t need cars all that much, but being asked hey, what do you need more, a car or 20 grand, many people each month answer “gimme the car”. Obviously they need a car at least some. Why would we call this greed ? Nobody thinks they will buy all the Cadillacs so there will be none left for anyone else. Nobody tries to get all the money so there wont be any left for anyone else. What people are after is comfort, and satisfying their perceived needs, and from here to greed is a long long way.

Of course, as with any demagogical approach, a detractor will never say it is the people that are anything negative, such as greedy, or ugly, or lazy. They will just try and single a group out and attempt the age old “lets kill these guys and get their property and then we can just sit around doing nothing for a while”. That doesn’t work, for a few reasons, that we will look into bellow.

Firstly, you probably know that inflation is bad. I bet however that you can not explain why is inflation bad. Okay, smartiepants, you asked for it. Now take five minutes and come up with a single good reason why inflation is bad, open notepad and note it down. Before you read on !

Remember what money is ? Money is a shorthand as i have said, and it represents the work that would go into finding an object or other. Now we can look into detail at that feeling of unease you had when you read that explanation above. Hang on… this cant be right, you mean to tell me there is no necessary link between money and objects ? That is precisely what i am telling you. Money is not a shorthand for objects, or production, or value. It is a shorthand for work, as i defined it. Well then, who is to say that if i have money i can actually buy anything for it ?
Nobody.
That is the long and the short of it. You can have all the money in the world and it might not buy you a drink of water. After the first world war, that they lost as their have a habit to, the Germans saw that first hand. Their mark, that used to be relatively as strong as the British pound lost its value at such a rate that people needed a bag of money to buy bread that didn’t fill the bag. Prices would sometimes increase five fold in 24 hours. Eventually they had billions of marks that were not enough to buy a tin of milk. That can always happen. It is called inflation, and it is the sign of a broken balance. The balance between money in circulation, as a shorthand for the work people are willing to put into acquiring goods and goods effectively on the market. If there aren’t enough goods, obviously money becomes meaningless. However, it doesn’t simply die out. It becomes gradually meaningless.
It is the job of intelligent people known as central bank governors (federal reserve chairman in the us) to keep that balance. Together with the respective governments they make policies so as to try and keep things balanced. Now you suddenly realize why the fed uses an interest rate as its primary ways to do that, just as the European bce uses an interest to control the European economy, don’t you ? If you don’t lets explain. An interest represents money paid for the use of money. It also represents what is the natural increase of property value. Hence, if there are relatively too little goods on the market, and too much money floating around, rising the interest will make people spend less money on goods, and save more, which then constitutes capital for various entrepreneurs to make more goods with. If however there are too many goods, and not enough money, lowering the interest will make people spend more, and save less, thus forcing entrepreneurs to be more efficient with their capital expenses. It is this two state engine that generates economical efficiency, and is ultimately responsible for your relatively high standard of life.
Now lets imagine somehow we get 500 millions extra. Suppose the aliens land in future man’s back yard and hand him 250 suitcases at 2 millions each, in crisp new bills.What does that add to the economy ?
Nothing.
Alan Greenspan will have a fit seeing the M3 (a symbol for the money in circulation) just peaked for absolutely no good reason, probably precisely when he kinda needed it not to, because thats the way these things happen. Then the poor guy will have to take countermeasures, which will probably again fuck over most of the policies he was trying to implement to get unemployment under control and the financial discipline of the corporations somewhat more manageable. At the end of the day, everything will cost 1/10,000 th more, so what in fact happens is each and every American will pay on average 2 dollars over a quarter or two so the lump of money future man got for no good reason can be happily ignored. Because future man got the money the wrong way. Nobody gave it to him. Sure you can imagine the aliens are somebody, but since they are not part of the economy, they are economically nobody. Money cant just be created out of nothingness. The workings of a successful economy produce money, and for anyone to have money in a market economy, somebody has to give it to them. Not Santa Claus, not the aliens, but somebody who is somebody economically, integrated in the economy. Otherwise the situation is the equivalent of the government printing more money. It will not generate any value, it will generate inflation, distrust in the currency and a good many other ills.
And if we decide tomorrow to put a cap on all fortunes, and all excess currency be handed over to whatever entity, that is no different. You can not just get money like that. You have to work for it. Otherwise all you do is produce inflation and instability. It is a false impression that money is a value in itself, that can be used as a value in itself. It is not. It is a shorthand, a mere symbol, and as such it is meaningless and useless outside of the system that created it.
The only way you can get money meaningfully is to exchange something of value for it. Otherwise you are not getting money, you are just getting pieces of paper. And all the people that are very rich got their money that way. They sold something, and got paid. They didn’t rob in the streets. They didn’t embezzle it or steal it or whine to the aliens or the gods or the public. They are not beggars. They do not get money out of compassion or fear or faith or any other emotion. They get money because what they do is useful, at least in the estimation of the ones paying them. Which is, incidentally, the only meaningful way to get money. Now it is entirely possible that one or another or all of them in fact did steal and embezzle. But if they did, from a strictly economical point of view, they created nothing but problems. And the fact that the economy works, that there is food in the stores and cars for sale in the dealerships and whores on the streets and smart ass democrats churning away grants in their ivory towers, all chasing the green buck is or should be enough proof that the thieves and robbers are an exception.

If you have made it this far, i would like to thank you for your patience. I would further like to apologize for the rethorics of the entire text, that are liable to have seemed offensive. In the circumstances, i considered it vital that the otherwise banal information in this text be presented in such a way as to challenge and maybe even force an otherwise uninformed reader to reconsider his premises. Whether i have succeeded or not is of course doubtful, but i don’t see any other way it could have been meaningfully attempted. Being a very short summary of a truly vast field, this attempt is a very brave bid. As such, i can not claim it is definitive, at least not just yet. It will maybe get edited later on if i decide some thing or other got left out that was in fact very important. Do not take this to mean anything in it might be overturned, or is a matter of conjecture or opinion. It is not and it will not. Only way it can get modified is to either expand a point or add one, whats there is there to stay. In the unlikely event you manage to disprove anything in there, you should probably apply for a Nobel prize.

(should you want to quote this outside of the forum, you are asked to kindly supply a link to the entire text, as found here. ty)

2

zenofeller:

I don’t mind if you call me an idiot or disrespect my opinions, that doesn’t bother me. In fact, I like your fiery attitude. Your heart pumps kool-aid kid, but you gotta good head and a strong voice.

When you began crunching your numbers you failed to keep in mind that in reality an economic system isn’t closed or capable of stopping its growth. You set up your dilemma by assuming that at any given time there will always be two or more consumers competing for a limited surplus of goods, when in fact, if cheesburgers existed there would be cheeseburgers for everyone or else they wouldn’t be produced. There would never be a case where Joe and Flo were fighting to get the last double cheesburger on earth, while the others accepted the burgers from the $1 menu, excluding them from the competition. In a proper economic system (one I have been contemplating) a product such as a double cheesburger would have no existence unless it was accessible to all consumers. Creating a product that only certain people could have would necessarily cause a division in financial and social class, (which is what I am attempting to eliminate), but in the same sense this wouldn’t be possible in the first place if all product production was public and not a result of private franchise.

Your dilemma works only in a capitalistic state so you cannot use it as a defense for capitalism in a case where the dilemma wouldn’t exist in a noncapitalistic state.

I am mulling over the rest of your paper.

Thank you for your thoughts, you have helped me consider some issues.

3

Oh, and about the “free to have anything you want” bit.

Human economy functions through materialistic determination. Freedom is not to be mistaken as a privilege to exceed natural resource consumption because one can have anything they want from an unlimited source. You do not have the freedom to drink up all the water on earth because there is a limited supply, for example. Likewise, all consumerism must rest on the principle of conservation and not be mistaken as a privilege of freedom.

4

zenofeller:

I’m sorry, you didn’t say “free to have anything you want” verbatim. I apologize for the quotations. Let me know if it is safe to assume that the idea is the gist of your approach. If not, please explain to me how the idea can be avoided in a free market capitalism. I feel as if although you didn’t say this exactly you would have to eventually endorse the idea under the circumstances.

5

detrop

i am examining the very basiscs of a system. as i said myself, and as it is painfully obvious, what surrounds us is a much evolved, much complicated version. i insist however that it is the same thing, in nucet. you might not think your computer bothers with bytes anymore, that it does windows or procedures or anything else. but windows and procedures are all based on, and a development of the old byte churner. the computer still churns bytes, it still relies on 2 state variables and boolean logic, its just that there are that many layers between you, the user and it, the base of the system. but all layers depend on each other, and are an outgrowth of each other, and if the bottommost one went away, that’d be it.

im not very sure what you call “my dilemma”. the situation about people splitting limited resources is not a dilemma. but yes, i rely on the concept that resources will always be in less supply than the total demand. apparently i need to put this on my list, so there it goes, precondition 4. i originally thought nobody will seriously consider a system might exist where the supply always exceeds the demand, but it seems not so.

on your personal attempt, bear in mind that wether a product is the result of public or private agency has no bearing on wether the product is more desired than the supply or less desired than the supply. it is possible that either a privately or publicly produced item to be in excess or in shortage. we can agree that if all products ever desired are always in excess, there is no need to insist on private versus public, in fact the distinction would likely become meaningless. however, i propose that it is a characteristic of the physical universe (yes, all the way down to physics) that things desired are always in short supply.

i do not consider people are, or should ideally be free to have anything they want. however, they should be able to have all they can afford. refer back to my explanation of money and the market. if i buy a drink of water, what i do in fact is pay everyone else to not drink that drink, so i can have it. if there are a total of 5 billion drinks, the first few drinks will cost little. the cost per drinks slowly increases, according to an exponential curve, eventually arriving at the position of the last few costing alot more than i or anyone else can afford.

it is this mechanism of price formation that allows us currently to not destroy earth with rampant consumerism, while getting away with some consumerism. ofcourse individual people will insist that we are doing too much, while other individual people will insist we are doing too little. they will form agencies and sponsor research and lobby every authority in sight in an attempt to force their views on the world. point of fact is that is a misled approach, because it tries to substitute the most efficient way to split resources there is (the market) with the worst efficient there is (a comitee, or some other form of authority).

6

I don’t see your point with Boolean logic. Logic operators and gates have nothing to do with my argument. In fact, it is a logic that is indifferent and neutral and which only functions within specified parameters to query results from concept set triads (and,or, not). You can apply it to anything and it doesn’t bolster an argument, it only makes it logically sound.

Sure it is a dilemma. You just said Joe and Flo were ready to scrap over that last cheesburger, did you not? There is a big difference between ‘splitting’ resources congruently among workers who produce as much as they consume and disproportionate consumption among workers who do not produce equally but consume equal to more amounts. Resources only exceed their demands when consumers are not producing equally. The total demand should equal what is necessary to supply production efforts for further production, and nothing more. No excess. The process should be cyclic.

Let me give you an example: My aunt Jackie makes $70,000 a year to sit in a public drug rehab facility and babysit alcoholics. What skills does she have and what skills are required to perform the job successfully? Is she exerting more labor than a proletariat who makes $15,000 a year? Certainly not. But she is indeed privately consuming as much as the proletariate and probably more because she can purchase excessive goods. Who pays her wages? The taxes of the proletariate who WORKS MORE AND CONSUMES LESS WHILE AT THE SAME TIME PRODUCING THE GOODS SHE BUYS . You do the math.

That is a metaphysical blanket statement. I propose the opposite. Wanna argue about it?

As long as the products afforded are not created by workers who cannot afford the same, then yes, I agree.

There is no mechanism here. Money can be printed to represent goods or services that are not yet existing, which causes a debt. Look at our deficit. America says to Japan "hey, I ain’t got the money now to pay for last years TVs, but if you hang in there we’ll raise that money by shuffling the budgit, jacking up prices, and printing more currency. Inflation. Price formation should not come about this way. I say burn the money altogether, but again, I come from the future and have seen things work without it. You do not yet have the eyes to see this. Your children’s children’s children (say that three times fast) might see it, if things work out right.

And now for a blanket statement of my own: if you are in favor of capitalism it is because YOU HAVE MORE THAN YOU NEED AND YOU ARE TERRIBLY SICK.

7

detrop you have missed my point. please read AGAIN what money is. money can not be printed to represent goods or services, because thats not what money is.

the fact your aunt jackie has skills at what she is doing that a proletarian (hmm… are your marx quotes a bit rusty ?) does not is simply proven by the fact that it is your aunt jackie who does the babysitting for 70 grand, not the proletarian guy.

i do not see why there should be provisions made that anyone who ever comes into contact with something should also afford it. you suggest people opperating the hubble telescope are being exploited because they dont have one at home, and couldnt afford one at home ?

and yes, i do want to argue about it. the demand will always exceed supply, because it is easier to want than to produce. furthermore, the incentives for wanting are always internal, while the incentives to produce are always external. hence want grows faster than supply.

it is false that your aunt works less. work is to be judged by utility not effort involved. sisiphus does no work whatsoever, he just sweats.

you do not seem to understand hidden demand. just think that if one mercedes costs us$ 500,000, the market is x, while if it costs us$ 100,000 the market is more, arguably twice as big, and if it were to cost us 100 the market would be alot bigger, who knows how many times bigger. so there is not a fixed demand that you fulfill or not, demand floats with price, and this is ultimately the reason the ussr failed economically. they were not flexible enough tyo supply floating demand for goods.

8

An on going theme in this discussion I have noted is that somehow work is equated to sweat …
Just because somebody makes there job look easy does not mean it is, or that anybody can do it.
If someone pays you a lot for what you do, then someone thinks you are worth it …
I make about 15 hamburgers an hour … and I never sweat, nor do I or will I feel the least bit guilty about it.

I suggest those of you that dont like the capitalist system move to Cuba, or maybe North Korea (I heard they could use some farmers there).

9

firstly, [size=150]shutup[/size]. i am not stalin. heres my idea: lets make a place that looks nothing like the soviet union. and by the way, i dont consider capitalism succesfull when the wealthiest country in the world by very far is the worst rich-poor-divided developed country in the world by very far. i actually consider that pretty pathedic. at least the soviets had a larger amount of psychotic military splurging to explain their failures a little better.

the only response you can possibly have to the R-P separation in this country is “oh shit youre right, billionaires are evil. we should do something” if you dont say that, then you dont care about humanity at all and you should not be in a position to rule over them, seeing as how govt is supposed to be a public SERVICE. SERVice, as in SERVING the people. all of them.

fine the market works. so what! wealth capism contains the same annoyingly imperfect market. what is the problem with it? the same one ive argued against and havent been responded to?

“$50millionaires need motivation to continue helping humans” and i say they dont. i say they will contribute less inventions than they would have, but all of those inventions will be made ONLY to help humans. their motivation will cease to be money and will be charity.

they either play golf for decades, which i doubt, or they put their gifts to work for good, or they didnt have gifts to begin with and were just worthless lucky retards who i really dont want failing at a bunch of energy companies and then ruling my country.

you dont think if you and an objectively selected group of smart people got together and outlawed stupid things like botox or 4 kinds of boner medicines or ridiculous SUVs, you dont think anybody could do it?

communism HAS NEVER HAPPENED. there is NO evidence saying that it wont work. the evidence shows that if an asswipe gets in charge, then the country blows. our country is one example of this.

when lenin was alive, he told somebody to make damn sure that stalin does not get a hold of the place because he is a bastard. stalin was too ruthless to be avoided and now you have a reason to hate commies. a completely wrong reason, but you still use it. stop refering to communism like it ever happened, because it HAS NOT.

what?? ill tell you exactly why MTV, botox and SUVs suck ass and i think youll have a hard time disagreeing. what is this mumbo jumbo your saying?

you should say “infinite” property. thats a right. to have infinite property. thats a great harmonious thing to assume. what a utopia, where everybody can infinite money. oh wait no they cant.

i think that a system that did this would have a tiny little clause that says if you are receving money for any reason and its not at all making you more happy, you should give it to people whos head will explode with happiness if they got it. if they dont, they dont follow this rule #2 IMO.

“and brainwashing through the media is totally allowed. ie if you want to make money off the peons, you are allowed to change what they think makes them happy.”

obviously, because how else could you get filthy rich selling something if people already have it? ie why dont we use the hemp fueled car built by henry ford decades ago? because weed is too dangerous?! LOL!

so obviously the discussion has moved away from the evils of billionaires and on to how the average citizen in a capitalist country isnt an evil billionaire? yes you are correct.

wait wait wait. what if billionaires spent the money themselves? would that be ok? if not, how did the system give it to them? the system gives people money and then breaks down when it gets it back? this system actually REQUIRES that billionaires hoard the money? are you sure??

i can understand exactly why printing more money for no reason causes inflation, but isnt the billionaires money considered a part of the system? if not, how did it get there, and how can they spend any money without messing up the system. i dont get it. how can anybody spend any money if billionaires cant give up theirs?

what if the money was given to the gov in order to research and produce new, fully good and useful products? would that be better than what it is currently used for?

i know that capitalism almost works. i know that competition almost forces people to make the best products and communism does not. i dont actually think pure state controlled communism is the way to go. i really just think we need some serious major revolutionary govt regulation. i mean this system was an amazing piece of work 200 yrs ago, and today its old news that has finally been taken advantage of by the greedy ones.

that was the problem back in the day, the greedy ones. it required a revolution and change back in the day. how hard would it be to overhaul the gov interaction with big business? how great would the world be? would it really fully suck if we regulated the black holes who take money from people (even if its of those peoples own free will, it doesnt matter billionaires dont need money!!!).

i think its disgusting and pathedic when some of the capitalists here scoff at charity work. i mean really, are you a real human being? do you have a soul? because i dont think you do ASEI.

zeno i mainly agree with you except that i would say taking billionaires money to make real useful products for cheap would be the best thing to happen to the world in a long long time.

detrop- exactly. especially the terribly sick part. i dont get it, are they really human? do they really have souls? how can you hoard billions? i really dont think billionaires have souls.

10

who gave you the right to “own” your machines? god? your parents? the contract that they signed?

ok so they signed the contract of their own ‘free will’. imagine they are mexicans who were born in a village surrounded by three farms. one farm pays $5, one pays $4, and one pays $.05 a day. in order to live and feed your family, you need $.05 per person.

they all take 20 employees and there are 60 people in your village. you woke up late on recruitment day of your own ‘free will’ and you are stuck forcing all the people in your family to work with you on the cheap paying farm.

you could of course take the 20 mile journey on foot to the nearest town and hope to god that you can find money for your family before they die. but only if your an idiot.

this is what you call free will? you seriously need to re-evaluate the authority that your position comes from. you talk about these rights like they are dictated by god.

i wrote this in eat this crapitalists and it is mainly aimed at the assertion that billionaires have rights too.

it took me about twenty seconds to think of a situation that would be insurmountably unfair in this country. thats a problem.

11

Zenofeller:

Quit fucking with my spelling. You can’t spell Sisyphus right, but I don’t fuck with you.

I am not going to be the dog chasing your tail. You chase your own tail. I’ll watch.

I suppose I could take the time to disassemble your argument, but frankly it is beginning to give me a head-ache. You hang in there. Do your job and do it right. Life’s a ball. TV tonight.

And now a word from Frank Zappa:

You are hopeless
Your hopelessness is rising around you
You think of the future and secretly you piddle your pants.
The puddle of piddle, which used to be little
Is rising around you
Rising around you

You like it
It gives you something to do

12

i might as well post the other thing i say that goes ignored, increase my odds of having it answered.

i see only two sides of this issue:

  1. wealth cap=no. poor people have a compeltely equal chance at happiness as the son of a billionaire. the only reason the poor guy doesnt make it is because he is intrinsically a failure. his will to succeed is not big enough. in this case, poor people should be lobotomized. that way, they are more suggestive and wont try to ruin the lives of billionaires. also, since black people make up a large portion of the poor, they are intrinsically dumbasses who should be wiped from the earth.

  2. wc= yes. people are equal, their will to succeed is equal. circumstances made them the way they are. there is only one way to change the circumstances: share.

is there a middle ground here? if so, please explain exactly what it is.

13

hey whoa wait a minute there. are you telling me that communism has been tried before and it failed? no, no way. i dont beleive it. it cant be.

just because you were born with a brain that can do amazing things (which im sure you were not) and somebody else was not does not mean that you deserve to live like a billionaire. nothing means that you deserve that.

imagine being stuck working in a factory because your condom broke and you have the decency to support your family. wait no obviously you people dont have souls, so you cant imagine that. just forget it, and put a sign on your head that says “i love billionaires. kill me.”

14

future man (dont worry detrop, i also answer to you, about five miles down… what can i do, this guy speaks alot)

forget the shooting, killing, bullets et caetera, for your own good. if anybody is getting in trouble, it is, was and always will be the anti capitalist. the other side kinda owns all the guns, gun factories etc.

on the billionaires spending their own money, there is no problem with that. they can, if they want. if they feel like building a candy town in the middle of the mexican desert, they can and will. if they feel like building schools for the poor, they can and they will. you however cant build yourself a candy palace, or a school for the poor. because you arent rich enough. its their money and their call. they have a right to shoot you if you mess with your money, but that doesnt mean they cant or wont or shouldnt do charity or sponsor education or anything else. in fact many do. who does how much is not really your business, it being their money and all.

we can easily agree the systyem has serious shortcomings. we can, maybe, agree on feasible, desirable ways to reform the system and hopefully fix said shortcomings. what we can not now or ever is agree there is an alternative to the system, which is why you seemed to be proposing in your own, incoherent, superficial and uninformed manner of proposing things. since you said yourself that you agree with most of what i said anyway, maybe the best course would be for you to state and further ignore the points you agree with and focus your criticism on points you do not agree with (one would hope in a coherent manner)

your reading of the history of the soviet union and the russian revolution is very fragmentary. as i sidepoint, although i am not interested to teach you history in this particular thread, i will state that lenin can easily be viewed (by people who have in fact read more than two paragraphs on russian history in the past century) as an adventurer who took no interest in any particular doctrine as long as it had some shot at promoting him politically, just like hitler or stalin didnt. for instance, do you know how the bolsheviks got to be called that (it means people of the majority, im sure you dont understand russian) in spite of being defeated at the vote ?

your position is essentially this, you propose a new and revolutionary spine section surgery to treat epilepsy. most of the respected practitioners of medicine, (you know, people that are most sought after if you are sick, who in this case would be the ones practicing economy and getting rich at it, on the stock market, in advisory firms, in financial departments of corporations, teaching and discussing it in various colleges) frown at your idea and call it hogwash, but you kick and scream and accuse censorship and your right to do whatever you please and other such, and they finally end up by ignoring you. this in spite that you have never yet healed anybody in any measurable way, although you do put on an excellent light show about souls and whatnot.
then some idiots come to you and ask alright, lets see what you can do for us then. they all die, with one exception. only one big fat guy (china) manages to survive, but only because it changed its mind after you hacked half its throat, luckily before getting to the spine tho. he runs as fast as his bleeded body can take him, and what do you tell the police ?

well you tell them that your truely revolutionary system never actually got applied. you know what ? methinks you gonna fry for that one. soulfull or not.

detrop, do you want to talk to me or listen to music with me ? not that i mind zappa. i suppose its my turn to pick now, pass that bong, here goes

women;s liberation came sweeping all across the nation
i tell you people, i was not ready
when i met this hike by the name of freddie
she hold a little speech then,
i guess she tried to make me say when
she got my balls in a vice but she left the dick
i guess its still hooked on, but now it shoots too quick…

memory quote, so i might have a few misspellings :slight_smile:

15

no…no it cant be… please tell me you are not saying “stalinism doesnt work” for the googolplexth time. FOR FUCKS SAKE SHIT ASS DAMMIT!!!

ohhh now i get it. the law says that its not my business, and therefore i have absolutely no reason why i could ever possibly want billionaires to relinquish slightly more.

since a piece of paper decreed that money will be distributed this exact way, it must be distributed this exact way forever. constitution=bible.

now it makes perfect sense to me. you have no desire to argue with me because you just want to defend your own hoarding and deep down you know thats a shitty thing to do. admitting it will verify your evil, and therefore make it much more evil. you are lying to yourself.

uh apparently not since you seem to think that a wealth cap is the stupidest most ridiculous idea youve ever heard in your entire life. and you cant actually say why.

i dont agree that billionaires have a natural right to infinite luxuries. remember me ever saying that? do you have a response?

i dont care. i am not communist. i am wealth capist. i think for myself and i have an idea. how about, instead of continuing to bash something i never mentioned, you respond to my idea. dont list which adjectives you think i am, respond to the idea.

tell me EXACTLY what bad things will happen when billionaires are forced to relinquish a decent portion of their unimaginable hoardes.
[/quote]

16

imagine that all the people who are billionaires still work in their same job, they just have $50mil and they cant make more than that. theyll still want to make money so that they can continue to have $50m even though they spend some. seriously what is the problem?

would the benevolent owner of walmart just give up? or would he perhaps change some policies to be slightly less megalomaniacal? i mean surely he is confronted with plans that will help more humans but make him less money and he decides to go the way of capitalism. if not him, then definetely plenty of others.

and what if corporations were allowed to have all the money they want? once you own something so huge you privately have $50m, you have to sell some of it to stock holders who can then each make up to $50m. or maybe when the thing gets this big, there will just be an arbitrary rule that lets them keep it all. the only cap will be on private wealth for individuals, what then? any bad of any kind at all? no. of course not. you know as well as i do.

17

future man, you do what you accuse me of doing, which, sadly, i do not do myself.

re-read my rebuttal. explanation is ample why your capism shouldnt exist. i said there is no reason, in practice, in justice or in law. a law is not a piece of paper. the constitution is not the bible. as an exercice, try and deconstruct my argument. why did i say “in practice, in justice or in law”. why did i not say in the bible, in the constitution, in my underwear. do the three i picked constitute a whole ? what whole could i, in my insane deluded evil self lieing ways could have possibly imagined they constitute ? is it maybe a refference to some classical bit somewhere ? is it a hint ? you will never find any a) answers b) effective ways to refute and argument c) effective ways to get laid if you dont manage to make that step, from what you say to understanding what could possibly have lead other people to differ. why do they say things the way they say them ? why didnt they use different words ? is it just random you think ? stop being a shallow hyperactive kiddie already, you will end up hating yourself.

i was not saying stalinism does not work. i said leninism didnt work. stalinism didnt work. trotskysm sucked so bad it never even got applied. hrusciovism does not work. perestroika (gorbacevism) does not work. the romanian flavour of comunism did not work. the german flavour of communism did not work. the polish version of communism did not work. the czech version of communism did not work. the yugoslavian version of communism did not work. the vietnamese version of communism did not work. maotzedungism (dungism, woot, might be how i call them theories from now on) version of communism did not work. this list contains about 30 or 40 attempts at getting a non capitalist, no private property system off the ground. it always failed. the 40th time i try to put gasoline in a diesel engine and it explodes i will eventually decided i will never again try that.

and you can want bilionaires to do whatever. its called whining. but you cant tell them do to anything, nor should you. remember the quote you used for a bit there ? to make future man wise, you should not give him more money, you should reduce his appetites.

my response to the billionaires luxuries question is simply that they do not have infinite luxuries. they just have billions of them. just like you, for your five dollars get a hamburger, they get one for each five dollar they got. what is wrong with that ? you want to donate some ?

the bad things that will happen are these, not necesarily in order of importance :

  1. you will have to change the laws to allow for it. since the law makes no quantitative differences, just qualitative (it doesnt matter if you raped three young boys, one or a hundred, you are going to jail. it doesnt matter if you damaged alot or a little, you are paying it back etc) there will be no more provisions in place to protect any property whatsoever. you will lose your house to a biker. you will lose your bycicle in the park to a gang of roller blades. you will die of starvations because all the shops lost their stock and cant be bothered to replenish it
  2. the rich will leave. leaving you cold and shivering
  3. the newb rich will also leave, leaving you with no hope of ever improving

hence you will have to import everything you need, and you will not have anything to trade for it other than good intentions (or so you claim) and bullets… ofcourse you cant afford bullets, so you rely on others falling on their swords essentially.

which would be an excellent way to turn a nice place into a less nice place. which is why nobody will follow you, regardless what guilt trips you try to land on them. fact of the matter is you probably havent made a tenth of all the stuff you consumed to get to your present blisfull state of arguing how people should not be allowed their honestly earned dollars. so if you are looking for a guilt trip, ponder that. after you have repaid your parents who wasted tons of money to get you bracers and food and milk and clothing, and the government that put you through school, obviously mostly against your will, and provided you with such interesting valuables as drinking water w/o typhos and maybe even a bus to take you to school, and everybody else who along the line pumped otherwise hard to get by dollars into your so far entirely useless ass, maybe, just maybe you have a prayer of a hope of being more than laughed at when you call people minding their business evil. aite ?

18

Originally I wanted to talk to you but after a few posts into this argument I changed my mind. If the ultimate postion I see demonstrated here is capitalism, and if these are its arguments and how it functions, then I must admit I have wasted my time.

What started as a simple and quick reply to our ongoing debate has become an improvisation of ideas for me. Read the following and keep in mind that I am not attempting to make as much sense as I am trying to create a new idea.

Any standing political system will influence its adherents within the specific context it sets, and any individual within that system will have a view from a capitalistic state which in turn determines their evaluation of it. When you interview an individual who stands as a representation of an average class: you gotta upperclass politician with a pension plan, and you gotta a homeless man with a bottle of Jack: you are expecting an interpretation of capitalism from each individual to be quite different. Ironically, it is neither the homeless man’s opinion that life in a capitalism sucks that supports the argument that capitalism shouldn’t exist, or the rich man’s opinion that life is great that supports its defense. Both sides are slippery slopes.

At any given time a political argument that is attempting to defend its current state from a revolution in government, as well as claim that it is impossible for such a new state to emerge, will commit this slippery slope fallacy. Along with that comes also the fact that judgements which were made both in favor for and against the current system (capitalism in this case)were contextually bound to an evaluation from within that system.

This is why a view from a capitalistic system will most likely cause the dangers which it mistakes as inherent problems for all possible civil systems, or, mistake the current problems as something that would exist in all possible governments, and then see them as real dangers. Capitalism will then proceed throughout the argument defending itself from itself. It takes a keen eye to see this. But even this is not the more important problem, even for the capitalist should he plunder on with his argument.

The problem from the beginning is the failure to stay consistent with the basic philosophical and logical principles required to merely conduct an argument on a platform of philosophy. But can that ever be done?

Probably the same for any government, even the ones that haven’t existed, or might exist, or exist right now. This is no argument in favor of another, just yet.

But the burden of proof for successfully pushing an argument against a political theory lies in the objections of the current one. Though the new theory in question is entitled to no advatage because of this…(it doesn’t even exist for one thing, and if it did, it would be in the same position as the capitalism in question: asking average examples to give their testimony and how they feel about the government, and be in the same position as the old which it destroyed), it does not have to promise results from its revolution to make a case. Even if these new political theories in question have not yet been tried out, one cannot say that everyone will be happy. The concern should be pragmatic and promote the happiness of the most, but it must also protect the invividual from bourgeois mediocrity and the loss of individual freedom and creativity. This is a fine line and has been walked for centuries, zeno.

Some thoughts about health, happiness, and the love of life, while I am it.

What has unfortunately become acceptable is the thought that men have different sources from which they consume and evolve. And this has gone far beyond the fact that a heavy man requires more food to live, or a large family requires more space to live. It has become an issue of moral integrity, rightousness and virtue, the “right” man. It is in the loss for an objective agreement between all men of what “right” is in its failure to comply with a simple rule, that what is necessary to live simply is not enough to portray the “right” man. That he evolves and earns more rights as he goes could be reckless if politics emerge out of a balance between man, what he takes, and his wastes. Many men don’t care and do not look back.

I imagine a society where every individual is racing to be the first to consume the least. They have even placed bets among the nations to see who produces the least wastes per capita, has the lowest poverty level, the lowest crime rate, and the highest morale, and they celebrate world holidays even and share customs and traditions. I do not see such fantasies as so impossible. I do not feel that it is nihilistic or ascetic, or a place for weakness and mediocrity to breed. I do not think it stops growth. I think that somehow man became to aggressive and moved too fast across the world. The man I imagine is a perfect design and of such a societies that I see in the future.

As I look into the future, and after some amount of trimming, I establish just one basic principle. That through the fast pace and quest for the best life, only some things are needed while many things can be had. I start with an approach that examines only the setting and placement of the human being in his context, evaluate his life according to the happiness he has claimed, the efforts he has made, and the effects of his actions after he is gone. This is alot to examine, yes, and things are moving quickly in the world. But what would be the best way to get an average that did not become bland, that perhaps ever individual could partake in and get some happiness from? Is there a universal effort or principle taken by all men no matter what they do? Sure there is. It is in the evaluation of what he has used, how much it has cost him, and what is left over when he’s gone. The failure in the world has been in the fact that this principle has been missed. Political systems are built without this in mind, while conservation should be its universal rule.

I would never advocate a political system that couldn’t first be conservative. At the same time I believe that what is deserved by the human race is far less than what is taken. But do I blame a being for evolving to desire cheesburgers and condense into cities of thousands? It depends. Also, how am I to know what it will take to keep a man happy and alive for as long as possible. Does he even want to live long, does he keep those things in mind.

If I forget about everything else and just leave a simple furmula on the table I could at least determine what a political system shouldn’t be, perhaps. If I took it no further than a simple hypothetical desired result such as, say:

Person X requires Y amount of P(energy) to exist on average C(years) with S amount of J(wastes) and E amount of K(production) in context G with F amount of P left over…

I might go mad.

But what if all I had to do in a capitalistic setting was refuse and deny a few things. Maybe just do a little less in the world, not have four or five kids, a big house and three cars. What if everyone just stopped at two kids, a small house and one car. On a grand scale of things imagine what that might do. Would it quickly fall apart and cause problems? I don’t think so if this process moved slowly and people were educated to understand their ultimate and absolutely necessary rule for achieving the only moral state that is possible between individuals in a national setting. Conservation, caution and enduring rational thought. Man is not a beast.

There are more ways then one to advance an argument for or against a political system so we see that it is never completely concluded that one form is better than another. It is the excess or residue of a current government’s failings that produce the contextual scales upon which the values are weighed, and as an uncertain future unfolds governments panic as they are challenged by new ones, which, in turn, are founded upon the same errors in the current ones defense . What should always be considered, however, is that ‘what is left over’ is what makes the future and reveals the historical development and its efficiency as a complete organism and political structure. While battles are fought over political policies there is one thing that endures and remains. Its wastes.

The human race just might perish by its own hand too soon for having not complied with the logical and metaethical laws of human civilization, those which are necessary for its species existence for as long as possible.

Yeah, but who’s to say what that is, or how that works? Surely we weren’t destined, or supposed to, stay alive for at least 4.6 billion years. This would be like saying evolution was packed with ingredients that were ‘cooking’ all the while, that every precise detail was meant to happen. That a cake had to be baked.

One way to approach this is to examine dualism as an ontological philosophy and the impact that religion, freewill ideologies, and spirituality in general has somehow inspired mankind to feel as if ‘everything is under control’ in the universe and that this existence isn’t so crucial. The emphasis on spirituality itself is a safe indication that man has placed much of his stock in a faith for greater realities beyond this one, one which God has anchored and is waiting.

Now watch a strange paradox emerge. If, indeed, man was a soul and mortality was an illusion, it would be odd that he would be in that setting. We would begin to wonder why we put ourselves there, or why the hand of a God set aside as the script writer made the stage, why it would be this strange life which we live.

In an awkward moment something happens, reminding me of Socrates thought. That either one was immortal and their essence was divine, or they were not, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. This to me is the epitome of the grandest mistake and the cause of dualistic theocracies destruction and disintergration of monistic spirituality: the final consolation of man as a moral creature. Socrates was agnostic to the degree that he himself could argue either side and not commit to either one. He made it possible for the worst of all confusions to occur in man.

Now I shall take apart this error and enlighten you.

With a separation of mind from the world in this agnostic fashion, mankind becomes reckless in an evolution which will occur with or without such beliefs, but also hold him responsible for what he has intended for his future. That man can exist for ever is a possibility that does not require that man believes this, but he thinks that belief in God is necessary for that, and that if he could imagine immortality it would have to be through the medium of a God. Several things happen here.

The responsibility of man is not noticed because suddenly man is engaged in an existence which is often not to his liking, but one of which has to be reconciled with his Gods existence if he is to believe in a just God and his own immortality. He traps himself in an absurdity because he commits Socrates initial mistake: holding that both the possibility that one is immortal and the fact that if he wasn’t it wouldn’t matter what he did in life, is the origin of all dualism, nihilism and fatalism.

How?

With the religious we get an appeal to God: one whom is responsible for the world and who rewards of punishes for actions. Because of this extremely complicated expectation , man creates dilemmas and absurdities which put him at an eternal battle with God: he is caught between praising and interogating his God, asking why he allows so many deaths, world famine, destruction. Without an answer he takes it upon himself; he feels ashamed of his actions, or he feels proud, according to his intimate personal relationship with his God and what he feels he understands. He gets a little nervous and loses himself. He separates himself from the world, claims to be not of it, not responsible for his actions and not to be blamed. He does the best he can to live a moral life in a world where he is confused and uncertain if he is intelligent, bored and resigned if he’s merely stupid and waiting to die. Every individual in a frantic pace to understand the universe and his place in it.

With the atheist we get an appeal to personal power. He finds himself in a world where he believes that after he is dead nothing will have mattered, and he proceeds as if he doesn’t answer to any morality, or another man, or the damands laid upon him by his very existence among his fellow men. That he exist equally and take no more than he needs has never crossed his mind. He believes that if he should ever hurt someone that he need not regret it in the end, “everyone dies” he says to himself. But there is the lurking secret which he has that watches him. The atheist only believes that God does not exist, he does not know, and so he is no better off than the religious man struggling to get an interpretation of life and what he should do.

But none of this needed to happen had Socrates not opened his mouth. I have beat him, I have exposed him, and I will solve him.

There are two alternatives for the fate of man in the mind of the religious thinker who has commited the agnostic error while involved in his religion. He separated himself from God because he had no proof and despaired, while at the same time remaining in the religious sphere and accepting Socrates’s formula that if he was not immortal, nothing would matter anyway, and he was devorced from his responsibility and spirituality. By agnosticism religion is allowed to exist but it is cloaked in errors which bring forth problems that needed not to happen in religion. While indeed it is obvious that if all men die nothing would ultimately matter, and that our beliefs in God do not change this even should he exist, it is the panic in between that creates the problem.

Man does not need to be justified if he can live life as if God did not exist, but enjoy it as if he did. This is his only alternative. The only true monistic spirituality that leaves man completely reponsible, free, and happy while at the same time in a postion to justify his own actions according to a God’s plan, or his own destiny that he has set for himself should he be immortal and free, is one that paradoxically and ironically cancels out the agnostic mistake: that mortality allows irresponsibility and that man is separate from God.

Kierkegaard didn’t have to make that leap. He was already standing there.

It isn’t so hard to understand. In a world swirling between God and nihilism a man must do two things. Take only what he needs and consider himself equal to all men. He must live compassionately and not be affraid of death. He must split his rations with all men, and be strong enough to not need so much.

What I feel is present in the world today is a lack of strength and courage. I see no more happiness in an atheists life as I see in the religious. The two have converged and created a great politcal disaster in the world. The hardest step, the supreme measure of strength, is to want no more than your neighbor and enjoy your life as if God did not exist, while leaving the possibility open that he does.

There is no other way to resolve this than a devolution and re-assessment of human civilization in its very own setting. The world has become anxious and is on a dangerous course. Real human existence has yet to happen and moral truth must be found to save it.

I don’t think this is possible in a capitalism.

19

Ahh…so that’s why Zeno has that “Oh Yeah!” attitude about him…

20

by now, i really shouldnt be surprised when you bring them up again even though ive said shutup every time you do. but i am surprised. again: shutup. im not a commie. capitalism is great. private wealth exceeding $1bil is not a neccesary outcome of capitalism. what if the cap was at $1bil instead of $50mil? would everything break down then? would all the people who want more than $1bil leave the country to rot?

if you think they do, then your argument is “the people who own this country are ridiculous, retarded bitches who dont understand their own happiness” and i guess that is a valid argument. if i were you though, i wouldnt be embracing those idiots, id be trying to think of a way to fix them.

this is the full summary of your argument? wtf? no reason? poor people are sad, the constitution said “all men are created equal”. what the fuck do you call justice when mike eisner makes 61k times as much as an employee who works just as hard? what does this statement of yours mean? i guess im too stupid to understand your reasoning.

when i say that i havent been proven wrong, im not asking you to refer me back to your previous posts. i know where they are, i already read them and they are really long im not going to read them again. i came to the conclusion that you said nothing about the cap except that if a bunch of money left the bank accounts of the rich, something would ambiguously get messed up.

i asked you to clarify this and you said that its ok if billionaires spend it themselves. i said what if the gov used their money to make and sell perfectly efficient products, or some kind of organized spending plan that is different from the plan to lock the money up forever. you didnt respond. your not responding at all. your last post was compeltely free of content. there was nothing.

i dont get it. i dont want money, i want rich people to give their money to other people. i want to give money to people also. and my appetites are pretty reduced, i dont just write crap in my profile for no reason. what do you mean? im too stupid.

oh ok, right. the law. the infallible system that is in place must remain in place forever. that is your unspoken argument here and its not an argument.

what is wrong with that!?!? do you know what the words ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ mean? nobody needs billions of hamburgers. everybody needs a few. lots of people dont have a few. and some people have billions. thats whats wrong. am i wrong with this little logic statement here? oh right i forgot, the infallible system that must remain in place forever says its not wrong. therefore its not wrong.

oh ok, NOW i finally see your argument. the biggest most ridiculous slippery slope fallacy i have ever heard in my life. capping the wealth of the unimaginably rich will lead to police officers not caring when my bike gets stolen. come on, at least try.

the materialistic dumb fucks who dont understand that having more than $50mil has nothing to do with happiness? good. more resources for decent people who care about humanity. thank god.

maybe i am the only person who wants to go into business and is non-materialistic who has ever existed. in that case, you are correct.

i dont remember claiming that.

oh whoops yeah im a hipocrite since i didnt reject my parents blessings when im 20 years old. youre right.

ok so im a billionaire, minding my own business. i “lobby” the gov to lower the minimum wage to $2 an hour because according to capitalism, thats the best thing for me to do. i buy 300 expensive cars because cars is good i like to have cars yay. i spit on bums because they are lazy. i hate black people because, since they make up an uneven portion of the poor, they are intrinsically failures. i also hate those lazy mexicans because they also make up a good portion of the poor. when i see them working hard as hell, thats only because im the boss and they are trying to impress me, as soon as i leave im sure they go on a siesta, so i spit on their dirty faces too.

my son is a stupid cokehead draft dodger and hes failed at runnig like 3 energy companies. i pay for his presidential campaign and half the country hates him. the only reason he got there is because im rich. i burn down 6 of my weekend houses because i just learned that im a pyro. i buy 10 more mansions and burn them down as well.

and zenofeller just minds his own business and can never tell me im wrong because i am a capitalist. capitalism is this way, therefore it can never change ever no matter what.